I "finished" the 1000 words Anki Deck

Over the past couple of months I've been working through a deck of the 1000 most frequently used Russian words and today I 'finished'. By that I mean, I was shown my last set of new words. Of course I will continue to work to get more of those words into my long term memory. In a couple of weeks I might start adding back a couple of suspended cards per day but I'm conscious that there's a reason I struggled with those words in the first place and that they are probably better acquired within context.

This Anki deck is very simple, the Russian word with audio on one side and the English translation on the other. No pictures, not context. The aim is recognition only (see the Russian word and know what it means) but not recall (see the English word and translate it to Russian). That is fine for this stage of acquiring vocabulary but in the long term I need to acquire words within the context of sentences, conversations and writing.

Anki Stats

New: 0
Young: 189
Mature: 373 
Suspended: 438
Total: 1000

Young: In the process of entering my long term memory.
Mature: In my long term memory.
Suspended: Words that I was struggling to remember or were too easy.

Although there are additional frequency decks available I'm not going to start on those just yet, if ever. The goal of this Anki exercise, following the Refold method, is to load my memory with a basic vocabulary that aids my ability to understand Russian content. That goal is being achieved not only in the native content I consume but also when I use Glossika and Speakly.

I've started to look at the Fluent Forever list of 625 words again and I'm finding I already know many of them. It makes sense that there is a lot of overlap. Perhaps I'll spend some time practicing recall / prompted output; looking at the pictures in the book and saying the correct Russian words that describe them.

The Speakly app aims to teach the user the 4000 most useful words for conversations and that will be happening within the context of sentences, conversations and stories. Currently I'm at 406, many of which I've already come across through other sources.

As you can see I'm not worried about covering the same ground multiple times. I think it's good to build those connections in multiple ways. 

As I mentioned before with hindsight I should have started working on a deck like this right from the start. In stead I was practicing output / recall early on which slowed me down. 

According to the Refold method it's now time to start sentence mining content and using Anki to acquire the meaning of words within context.

Do you use Anki? How do you use it? 



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