How To Use Anki For Language Learning (2 Biggest Mistakes)

[@yuritadeusouza]

why is nobody talking about how fluent he is in english? You're speaking skills are simply amazing!

[@mitchcohen4870]

I was going to buy the Spanish one but then saw that it is 200 dollars. these decks look awesome and I like your videos Loïs but that's way out of my budget for a digital file of flashcards.

[@JCpeer]

I wanted the german and the spanish decks until I saw the ridiculously high price tag.

[@misscamay]

In my experience Anki is the most boring aspect of language learning but one of the most helpful and most impressive aspect of language learning. I got so many jobs because I was asked/ dared/ challenged by interviewers about languages I speak and they were wowed. I am not fluent in all but my anki and pimsleur sentences are ingrained in my brain.

[@parisbreakfast]

Thank you! Very helpful info.

[@MazelTov1981]

Why do you use pimsleur? How is it?

[@daviddebter2984]

I was thinking about getting one of these decks so I went to the website and WOW $199 for an anki deck? I understand some work goes into creating something like this but this seems rather extreme considering you can get similar decks online for free. I'll keep watching your videos though.

[@literalmenteolucas]

Yes, I was super curious about but for me it was a surprise. For me, exchanging, it's 1000 reais, the minimum wage here it's 1400 so you can see how much expensive are. I also understand the effort but if you know code, the effort should be converted into maximum 50 dollars or something. It's a lot of people downloading, this is not a course. But I'll keep watching and wait for good people sharing for people like us in another places

[@learnerlearner1839]

I have no idea if the price is 200 dollars. I'm just subscribe my email and waiting for the reply. I think if the price is around 50 dollars is still reasonable.

[@literalmenteolucas]

@@learnerlearner1839 You can see the price on the website itself

[@Adam42416]

Thanks, very interesting and valuable. I agree that preparing cards is too time-consuming and it is better to focus on ready-made ones. I also have my own deck, but I don't feel like adding to it. This confirms that readymades are better. Especially those made by professionals. I use, for example, 4000 essential English words

[@Adam42416]

in the case of English, it is worth adding idioms. This is in front of me

[@loistalagrand]

I agree that premade decks are hugely valuable. With that being said, you can always add to premade decks depending on your needs.

[@jeepers.creeker]

Wouldn't you retain more if you personally build your cards from the bottom up? That is, making them from scratch is your first review of your cards. Not to mention we humans tend to get attached to the things we personally create as we view them as "more" ours, if that makes sense, and I imagine that results to better retention as well. I guess it depends on whether the person values their time more or their retention in the long run?

[@loistalagrand]

@@jeepers.creeker I used to build my own cards from scratch. Yes, building the card makes you remember it better. I think it is a valid approach, but it's much more time-consuming. Pre-made decks are more of a shotgun approach, where retention may not be as good, but you're going through more flashcards (and the retention is still great).

[@DiverseSpanish]

I really like anki for teaching a Spanish. It's easier to make progress when I create flashcards based on the mistakes my students make during our lessons.

[@stephendanks1790]

Nice video Loïs. I purchased your Spanish anki deck and it is really great although still in the early stages of using it (changing a few of the mnemonics but that is all). I think it is difficult to state how much time it takes to create a good deck especially considering you are putting sound on there and things to help memorisation. Personally I have experience in creating a 14'000 French deck and recently a similar one to your core decks for mandarin but only a thousand words which was hard work. Created mnemonics, pictures and a spoken example sentence. Would say in the free Anki store the decks tend to be less high quality in my opinion, I am talking in a general sense as there are some good one's. I would love to see example cards for your Japanese and Korean decks. By the way, I also like to mix things up in the decks and use cloze so you are guessing and seeing the word in it's sentence structure. Mnemonics help enormously in the memorisation process.

[@loistalagrand]

Thanks for your comment, Stephen! If you want to preview the other decks, you can go to ankicoredecks.com/, I have added video previews.

[@jonelvila4948]

Thanks, good video. Although there is one advantage in making your own deck with ”sentence mining”. You get used to the grammar. Especially with languages that have cases you need a ton of repetitions where the words are not in the basic form.

[@loistalagrand]

True, I guess you're getting lots of input while mining.

[@aSnailCyclopsNamedSteve]

What video do you recommend for learning how to customise which words from the core appear in my feed, set up the cards so that progression is manual and so I can see the question and answer simultaneously or just the question, as I prefer at that second? My problems with Anki is 1. the card decks do not appear to be organised by word families, 2. I want to learn the words in the text I am reading, not the frequency dictionary, and I want a chance to memorise each word before I move on to the next word. When I do not know a word, I might spend 5 minutes memorising it at a time; when I have learned it, I can do it instantly. Where do I find those instructions? I also want to control the content so that principal parts are given in the target language, but sometimes I want them in the question and sometimes in the answer. The frequency dictionary does not have word families and does not specify topics. Frequency drops off quickly. Thus, words on topics I do use like sports, for me, are a waste of time. If imply, implicit, and implicate are listed separately in that 10,000 word deck, that is a waste of time as they should be learned as a single word family in English. Doing that would increase the number of valuable words in that 10,000 word deck.

[@FranciscoZapata-s2f]

Isn't it more effective to make your own decks? Everyone's got their own way of talking and writing, and when it comes to output, it's all about your personal perspective and experiences. For example, I've noticed I express myself differently from my dad, brothers, and friends, so it's hard for me to memorize their exact phrases when speaking or writing.

[@not_kayky]

Hey, talking about the FSRS do you guys use the option to optimize the deck or just let the parameters by default? When I changed it I was kinda scared because it changed the time of when a card would be showed to me by a lot of time, like from 20 days to 3 months or something like that, is it okay to optimize?

[@Reflekt0r]

The "Now" in "Get Your Deck Now" is rather misleading. Also, I'm hoping for a sensible price. After all, it's a consumer product.

[@paulwalther5237]

I took a look at the link for your decks and it seemed like they're available but then I just signed up to be notified so I guess not. I was really interested in your mnemonics for each word. I used to LOVE studying on Memrise for that reason. I couldn't believe when they took the mems out of Memrise. Not all of the Mems actually helped me but it made studying more fun for sure and sometimes they really did help. But they crowd sourced that. I'd be shocked if you had the patience to sit down and make 10k mems especially for languages you don't personally study.

[@loistalagrand]

All the mnemonics I'm including in the cards are AI-generated. Overall, I'm pretty impressed with what the AI has produced so far. Which languages are you looking for?

[@paulwalther5237]

@@loistalagrand I just thought of Chat GPT about an hour after I commented and was using them to add mnemonics to my flash cards now. I'm super impressed by them but I have no idea how much it will help me really remember yet. But I am legit excited lol. I didn't intend to be but I've turned into a polyglot wannabe. I'm interested in Korean, Spanish, and maybe later Mandarin.

[@loistalagrand]

@@paulwalther5237 It really depends on what type of mnemonics you use. I use mnemonics that follow the "keyword technique", which is a proven way to enhance retention (I talked about this with Paul Nation in a recent interview). The Spanish deck is probably going to be out soon. I'll do Asian languages a bit later, because the alphabet requires some extra work in terms of code adaptation.

[@homersimpson297]

Do you have such a deck for the Russian natives learning English?

[@henzoarruda4582]

Have you produced English flashcards to sell? I'm Brazilian and I want to study and improve my English

[@romanliapkin5174]

I know a lot of words, but when I start to build a statement, it gets clunky and often wrong. I don't understand what people say on-air, or it takes a lot of time, which disappoints me. Now I create Anki flashcards with whole statements. I don't know if this strategy is right or if it's ineffective. I would also like advice about how many decks of flashcards I can learn at the same time

[@loistalagrand]

What I have read on the research regarding single-word VS sentence flashcards is not very conclusive. You just need to train your listening comprehension. I'll publish a video on language immersion tomorrow, take a look at it.

[@romanliapkin5174]

@@loistalagrand I think I have something like language dyslexia, but it's not about reading; it's about listening. I have seen people who practiced less but had bigger gains.

[@loistalagrand]

@@romanliapkin5174 It may be the case, but I've met tons of people who were terrible at learning languages and who got insane results once they started using the right approach.

[@loistalagrand]

I flunked high school Spanish, and I'm a French speaker.

[@drtimal]

What is the eta for your decks ? I registered to be notified.

[@loistalagrand]

Thanks for registering! Which language are you waiting for?

[@drtimal]

@@loistalagrand Mandarin

[@thejohnnytapia123]

what about Italian?

[@Spanish-cr3tf]

Will you do this for Thai? I will buy it Also will you reduce price on Black friday?

[@loistalagrand]

I may do a deck for Thai, depending on the demand for this language.

[@solenarkun5442]

Thanks Loïs , do you have any plan for pre made greek deck

[@loistalagrand]

Not for now, but I'll see how many people request Greek.

[@IamJohnKelly]

can you do Russian please

[@Reflekt0r]

You've convinced me now that I need your decks 😊

[@loistalagrand]

You don't need them, but I think they are very useful.

[@CaptainWumbo]

Paul says something really interesting a lot of people don't want to hear: you learn about 1000 words a year. If he had to learn a language in a year, he wouldn't bother.

[@loistalagrand]

I can't remember exactly, but I think he said in our interview that native speakers acquire 1,000 words a year in their youth. However, this doesn't mean that 1,000 is a limit set in stone. In fact, FSI students learn much more than that.

[@paulwalther5237]

Of course it varies per person but if you ignore freebies like cognates I'd be very happy with 1000 words per year. I don't think I'm learning that many at all with Korean.

[@CaptainWumbo]

​@@loistalagrandthe limiting factor is long term memory. It just only has so much throughput. You can get stuff into short term memory at a much faster rate, but you lose it just as fast. 1000 words a year is a great rate of progress and not too demanding, although you have to be diligent. Certainly if you have nothing else demanding you to learn things you can squeeze a few more words in, just not many. Long term memory requires deeper processing that memorization tricks just don't have. For most people I think 1000 words a year and learning 10000 or so before you feel bilingual is pretty good expectation setting. There are hugely diminishing returns to time investment to try to shorten that window.

[@ZainepMonde]

Who had payed the deck ?

[@davinchocamaron646]

so, 6k or 10k words is the optimal?

[@loistalagrand]

According to Paul Nation's book, 6,000 to understand 98% of a movie, 9,000 for understanding 98% of movies + written text. 10,000 is just for good measure, and it's a nice round number.

[@ivanrevkov843]

​@@loistalagrand hi Lois, I really respect you, you've don a great job, however i'd like to add some correction. Paul Nation was talking about 9000 word families should be multimedia by 3.8 if you want to know the vocabulary size that you need. P.s Paul Nation is my hero

[@MakusensuTV]

De quel façon as-tu appris les points de grammaire en japonais?

[@loistalagrand]

J'ai commencé avec Assimil. Par la suite, j'ai appris pas mal de grammaire via l'immersion et via mes flashcards.

[@MakusensuTV]

@@loistalagrandDonc tu avais aussi un deck pour la grammaire ?? Ça fais des mois voir des années que je boucle sur ça et je songe à me faire un deck grammaire sur Anki étant donné que j'ai du mal avec l'immersion, devoir faire des vas et viens à chaque point de grammaire que tu croises (très souvent sur des sites anglais), c'est énergivore. Je ne sais pas si j'ai la bonne approche mais je me dis qu'il faudrait les prendres comme des exercices de mathématique et essayer de pratiquer chaque point de grammaire de façon sérieuse.

[@loistalagrand]

@@MakusensuTV Pardon, j'ai mal expliqué. Non, je n'avais pas de deck de grammaire. J'ai fait plusieurs decks avec des phrases. Bien que les règles de grammaires ne soient pas explicitement écrites sur les cartes, j'ai constaté que j'ai réussi à assimiler pas mal de grammaire (sans m'en rendre compte) en étudiant les phrases.

[@MakusensuTV]

@@loistalagrand ah d'accord je comprends mieux ! Est-ce que tu penses que c'est mieux de reprendre l'apprentisage via l'immersion malgrès tout. Ou alors forcer à apprendre de manière individuel la grammaire ?

[@loistalagrand]

@@MakusensuTV Les deux sont nécessaires. Tu verras que tu auras vite (1 - 2 ans) potassé toute la grammaire à apprendre via les livres.

[@Raymond-d2l7n]

How did people manage to become fluent in languages before all of this algorithmic wizardry?

[@loistalagrand]

It took longer

[@aniketthorat3045]

Hi sir, I can understand English very well, but I can't speak it as well as I understand it. Can you make a video on this problem, please?"

[@johnmclean6380]

Need timestamps if you expect anyone to actually watch this :/

[@marcvanpoucke5560]

This won't get a price: 21 minutes with only a talking head. Can't you really show not one image of the future product???, an animation?

[@alexartamonov2010]

10000 most frequent words is just overkill. Why so many? It should be 10 times less. Then it should mostly be acquiring vocabulary through a natural input - reading/listening.

[@loistalagrand]

According to Paul Nation, you need 6,000 words to understand 98% of spoken text. 10,000 / 10 is 1,000 words, which is largely insufficient. As far as input, it is a big part of acquiring vocabulary, but research has clearly shown the value of deliberate practice. Take a look at "The Routledge handbook of vocabulary studies" (edited by Dr. Stuart Webb). We should not think of flashcards and input as being in competition with each other, but rather as complements to each other.

[@alexartamonov2010]

@@loistalagrand thanks for the reply. I totally agree that the input and flash cards should complement each other - which I in fact do. But I just can't imagine the deck of 10K of words. When I was studying English, flash cards only existed in "hard copies". So it was obviously unmanageable. Now I'm learning Spanish. I'm making my own deck, it's just over a 1500 cards - but it's not individual words but sentences. Well, about 99%. When I noticed a side effect of Anki - which is I could easily retrieve the "answer" while doing Anki but struggled to do it in the natural environment - I started making several cards for the same word - in different sentences. It seem to have solved the issue. So it's hard to say how many lexical units I have in my deck. I've finished B1 level and read unadapted books. So I use Anki to drill my active vocabulary.

[@paulwalther5237]

I personally would be interested in a 10k deck that takes several years to complete. I might reach a point where I stop doing the flash cards and just rely on input but until you feel like you're that good you really don't know when that will be. It depends on your goals of course and how long you stay motivated to study the language.