Memory Researcher Says Anki Won't Make You Fluent

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This week we get into a debate with medical doctor @JustinSung on the effectiveness of Anki and Spaced Repetition for high level Language Learning.
Outline:
0:00 Intro
0:40 Why Justin Believes Anki is NOT Helpful
4:50 Is Anki Useful for Language Learning?
12:15 Eric's Argument on Why Anki is Helpful for Language Learning
23:26 Justin's Anki Horror Stories and Helpful Advice
29:00 Justin's KoreKara Message + Outro
#Japanese #Anki

[@matrixfour6190]

I can only give my personal experience from 2 months into learning Japanese. Trying to learn Japanese when I was not using Anki was tough, I was not remembering much and was constantly forgetting. Once i started using Anki, I instantly noticed i started to remember words and phrases that I would constantly forget. That's all I got to give. I swear by Anki, I don't care what others say I'll continue to use it.

[@MarleneBohr]

On the last day of your life, you might regret all the hours spent on Anki. The true purpose of learning a language is communication. If you were to find a Japanese girlfriend and make many friends instead of isolating yourself with spaced repetition software, I bet your life would be much better.

[@explanatorium1207]

@@MarleneBohr what you said made no sense

[@_juliakp1_]

this is so true i got stuck in a 'cant learn anything' pit before anki, and damn did those flashcards help manadged to learn toki pona with it in 20 days with it too! i highly reccomend it

[@potatopotato-ch6pp]

@@MarleneBohr Err... What? this sounds like a logical fallacy that would be put into the false category.

[@smallego8068]

@@MarleneBohr Silly words coming out of a silly person's mouth. Learning Kanji means sitting down, isolating yourself and just study them. There is no other way. You can't study Kanji by speaking or listening to other people. I study Kanji this way but also met a lot of Japanese people on my trip to Japan in spring 2023. All people I can write and talk to on LINE now.

[@jpnpod8277]

I've noticed that pretty much every argument I've heard against the use of Anki/SRS isn't actually an argument against its use -- it's an argument for how it shouldn't be used. The fact is that all of the biggest problems that people often associate with SRS have a work-around. Lack of context? Add sentences from immersion. Trouble with pronunciation? Add audio files. Spending too much time making the cards? Use software like Yomichan to automate it. Spending hours on end doing reps? Stop adding so many damn cards a day. Those who say that Anki won't teach you a language completely misunderstand the whole point of using it. It's NOT the end-all-be-all of language learning. It's NOT there to actually "teach" you anything. It's there as a supplement to your immersion. It's there to pin words in place in your brain. It's there to *help* you remember them, not *get* you to remember them. The words that are important will come up again and again in your immersion and that's how you actually learn them. Spending any more than 1 hour a day on SRS is a complete waste of time and does nothing but stress you out in the long run. TLDR: SRS is a powerful resource that will make your path to fluency much faster. Just make sure you use it the right way and don't let the haters tell you otherwise. Immersion is the key, but SRS is the keyring that helps you hold on to it.

[@lastninjaitachi]

Agreed. Everyone who argues against it doesnt use it or talks about it out of context. Almost everyone who has passed N1 uses Anki so theres that.

[@7073cain]

Well said - this sums up my opinion on it too.

[@lude7771]

That's not even a good counter argument though. All the work arounds you suggest for Anki are just things you naturally get by reading and listening.

[@jpnpod8277]

@@lude7771 Except you can't always control the frequency of words you get by reading and listening. Words that you only see once every other month or a few times a year are not going to stick in your long-term memory through natural reading and listening alone. Without sufficient repetition, memories get lost -- that's just how the brain works. Something needs to help pin those words in place, and that's what Anki is for.

[@7073cain]

@@lude7771 Well, one advantage of the SRS is that it allows you to incorporate active recall, especially when you go L2 to L1. Reading and listening, while valuable, are passive experiences. Active recall is useful.

[@coolbrotherf127]

I think the main issue with Anki is that some people try to learn the entire language with it. It seems the best use for it in language learning is giving some structure to early vocabulary practice and common phrases. In the beginning of studying Japanese, immersion was completely useless. I couldn't even hear the separation between words in speech and I definitely couldn't read anything with kanji. My brain needed something to base even the smallest little understanding on. Anki was the perfect tool to help me practice my vocabulary to the point that I could actually learn through immersion effectively. Once that was the case, I stopped using it very much. There's no need or reason to use Anki to learn every pronunciation of every kanji and the exact pitch accent of every word and sentence in Japanese. If you just use what you know and learn a little bit more through immersion each day, you'll naturally make meaningful progress towards effective communication without wasting hundreds of hours studying things you'll never use. You'll get to a point where using the language is more important than learning it from a flashcard.

[@yuzan3607]

Exactly. You can't start Japanese with immersion right away (that was my mistake actually). I thought I can learn Japanese by immersion just like how I learned two other languages easily using immersion (I actually lived in Japan for a couple of years thinking the immersion of living there is enough, again because with other languages it worked that way). But Japanese is much much harder because it's a very different language. Not knowing enough kanji makes learning by immersion like climbing an endless mountain. That's where Anki shines, it gives you a BIG big push forward. I've been using Anki for only two weeks now and I can tell you that it's helping me way more than any immersion I've done before. My previous immersion experiences of course helped me progress through Anki but it's been so long since I notices some rapid improvements in my Japanese just using Anki. Yea once you can read most kanji you can move to just immersion, but for a complete beginners, immersion is pretty useless and Anki is a tremendous tool. I really regret not having used Anki from the beginning.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

His argument is totally flawed in that he ASSUMES you cam start learning a language HAVING A CONVERSATIN. That's nonsensical! To have ANY meaningful conversation you have to have TENS OF THOUSANDS of words in your active vocabulary and at least DOUBLE of it in your passive vocabulary. You should start with around 10 thousand words and to be BARELY FUNCTIONAL in a language know about 30 thousand words- in languages like Chinese, Japanese, Russian, and others MORE. It's absolutely not practical trying to "!have a conversation" even with someone who have a language in common with you and basically at a very second look up a word because there's still at least 10 THOUSAND basic, frequently words yo don't know. The only way to learn a language is to UNDERSTAND a language. But you can't understand jack S. of what you read and watch without at least this initial 10 thousand to 20 thousand words or so. So, way before even TRYING t speak you must read and watch something and understand MOST of it. And he doesn't rally address how to GET there. and NAKI does the job.

[@vovasensei]

@@JohnnyLynnLee The f**k? 2000 words in any language is what is taught and used in news articles and videos and more than enough for daily conversations on many topics.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

@@vovasensei NOTHER misconception people have is how MANY words there is in a page or in a 1 minutes worth of, say, a news anchor speaking. In just 1 MINUTE you can have 140 to 180 words for a news show. That means a word being "rare" or "non frequent" does not mean AT ALL that it will appear, as it's said in the video "twice a year." In a 30 minute news broadcast a somewhat "infrequent" word may appear five or six times and it may appear in almost ALL news broadcasts you'll watch. It's just that the other words appear MUCH MORE. You are talking a BARRAGE of words coming at you here! A "more or less frequent' word will still appear A LOT in any educated content. Like, say, "inflation". That's pretty rare compared to the most frequent words. But if you watch the news you'll hear it AT LEAST once in a day, most likely more.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

@@vovasensei If you get an average of 160 words PER MINUTE in a news broadcast, we are talking about 9600 in on hour! Of course most will be in the 2000 to 3000 most common. But in JUST one hour it's a LOT of "non frequent words" appearing all the way through. Good look to me understanding this vietnamese news broadcast with only 2 known words! kzbin.info/www/bejne/gWauhmt9oZpnlaM

[@pobreprofe]

Doing a Phd about vocabulary learning in second language and OMG I rolled my eyes so much here. Comparing learning L1 and L2, completely ingnoring the four strands, liying about how it only influences short-time memory and saying that "research shows that". WHERE???

[@gustavoteles5994]

What's your argument then? Elaborate, please.

[@AdanSensei]

Anki+mass sentences is the tool that automizes all of my language learning. It removes the need to think on what to study next, and it makes my sessions as easy as putting on a timer and starting. If it wasn't for this, I wouldn't be able to tackle so many languages at the same time as efficiently. But you definitely need other things as immersion, and practice with real people. Anki puts the material in your head, and the other things make it come alive.

[@MatthieuPiquemal]

I didn't expect to see you here! What card format do you use? Like what's your Anki setup/workflow? How do you manage your different language decks?

[@AdanSensei]

​@@MatthieuPiquemal Hey Matthieu! I like to use mass sentence format that has a 1T structure to them. For example on one side language a (portuguese) side b (chinese). I make sure they have audio in them as well. I have a full video in my channel explaining how I study this btw in detail if you are interested. For managing multiple decks, I make sure I time box my anki sessions in 25 mins. I'm also very non-caring of how well I do on a card or not. If I get bored with decks i experiment, I just add them to a "later" folder and keep them there, or eventually just delete them. When I train, I see the card, I pronounce it, if needed i do some quick encoding of the info in my head, and then I let go and go on. I have a rhythm on my sessions, and I suspend as much as I can. I'm not trying to MEMORIZE everything, I'm trying to get my brain used to it, so that when I immerse, my brain picks up the things I learn. I have been doing this for over 1.5 years, and it's working for me VERY well. It's not the best method for someone doing just 1 language, but for me that I'm doing like 8 languages, this is the only way I would do it. Again, this is not for everyone :)

[@M3STERL3G3ND]

You can explain more about mass sentences? i'm Brazilian guy trying to learn chinese

[@YogaBlissDance]

I FIND ANKI SO DULL, it deadens my brain. I tried like 5 times..it doesn't matter if it works if I HATE IT and can't sustain it.

[@CPUB0T]

I've used aki for 3+ years. What I've found, as an adult with a full time job, is that it takes away time from the actual things I want to do in that language. The whole reason I started learning the language was to enjoy doing things in that language. Anki was enjoyable for a while, but now I'd rather just read something in my target language, even if I don't comprehend without looking up words, its just more fun. If I could do it over - I used Anki for the most common 500 - 1000 words, then suspend any card that has a interval greater than 3 months. After finishing that deck I'd just start immersion in the language keeping words that don't stick well and throw them in Anki, rep them for a set time and delete. If I come across that word again and don't understand it, I'd add it back in a new context. This would keep focus on immersion rather than repping lists of words.

[@yuzan3607]

The problem is, you can't start Japanese with immersion right away (that was my mistake actually). I thought I can learn Japanese by immersion just like how I learned two other languages easily using immersion. Japanese is much much harder that way because it's a very different language. Not knowing enough kanji makes learning by immersion like climbing an endless mountain. That's where Anki shines, it gives you a BIG big push forward. I've been using Anki for only two weeks now and I can tell you that it's helping me way more than any immersion I've done before. My previous immersion experiences of course helped me but it's been so long since I notices some rapid improvement in my Japanese just using Anki. Yea once you can read most kanji you can move to just immersion, but for complete beginners, immersion is pretty useless and Anki is a tremendous tool.

[@CPUB0T]

​@@yuzan3607 Firstly, keep it up. Japanese is an awesome language. My definition of immersion isn't just watching anime and movies in the target language. Rather, it's using source material for study. For instance, when I watch an anime, I have specific goals during a day where I will look up all unknown words and save them for one or two episodes of some show. Depending on frequency, I may add them to Anki, or I might be somewhat familiar with the word or Kanji, where I feel I can pick it up intuitively. Granted, I'm intermediate/advanced at this point, so I don't rely on SRS (Spaced Repetition System) as much. I review for a while, and then delete. Immersion, for me, is a better natural SRS than Anki... but again, I've been at this for years, and I read and understand Japanese quite well. I used to be hard on Anki, to the point where I spent more time with the SRS than actual Japanese content. For the completely new beginner, Anki will be much more useful; however, for the intermediate to advanced learner, it becomes less needed. I guess my advice is to use Anki and take advantage of such an awesome tool, but don't 100% depend on it. Don't forget the goal is to enjoy the language. Anki will teach you to read really well but won't give you good listening skills for naturally spoken Japanese in context. Also, as already noted, I still use Anki. I use it for new words, words that just don't stick, and for sentences where I know all the words but couldn't comprehend when listening. You'd be amazed how much you can understand with just a couple of thousand words learned - there is a deck I've been recommending to new users. It goes over high-frequency vocabulary, plus grammar very well. It's called JLAB (Japanese Like a Breeze). Give it a look - ankiweb.net/shared/info/911122782 Good luck on your Japanese adventures!

[@yuzan3607]

@@CPUB0T Thank you. Do you suggest any anime/show for a beginner like myself? I tried to watch some anime without subtitles but unfortunately I don't understand half of what's being said which makes it unenjoyable. My current immersion method is reading kid's books. That's working so far, at least I can understand more than half, but it gets boring after awhile so I'm trying to shift to easy anime or easier shows.

[@omkimberly]

I love Justin’s videos on learning. Using Justin’s tip of mind mapping really helped. I like to draw so I draw pictures of words I’m learning and their associations and try to make a ‘scene’. I will then watch videos that have the words I’m learning and try my hardest to listen for them and repeat out loud. I found writing sentences for low frequency words works best for me and I keep these in a journal to review.

[@Takayama75]

Justin made a really good point about reading a book before making anki cards about it, I can't track the amount of times I have confronted many words or kanji without their meaning and when I eventually get the meaning it sticks a lot better than memorizing the word from scratch in anki without prior context other than sentence mining. I have a pretty lazy routine with anki, I add words when I feel like it or I have seen a words some times before and I always WR speedrun through 60~ cards a day for the sake of allowing my brain to know it exists (also pitch accent) and not really memorising and the ah hah moments really started to build up. All in all immersion is key and any way to make immersion easier and more comprehensive is always the way to go.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

To start reading even boring things you need about 10 thousand words. To read rally interesting things you need 30 thousand or more. You made the same mistake as he did. Assuming you can start having a conversation or reading. You can't do S, in a language with, say, 500 words. You can't understand ANYTHING you watch or read, LET ALONE rally interesting things if you are an educated adult. And takes a LOT of active time to get to know quite well your first 10 thousand words. And if you are inefficient, eve more time. And ANKI does the job in getting you to that point.. 9 out of 10 people who criticizes ANKI assumes you can get to s sufficient vocabulary to have and ADULT, MEANINGFUL conversation in WEEKS, when in fact it takes YEARS. It's not like you can read Crime and Punishment by the end of one year with, as he says, LESS than 4 words a day. It's a HELL lot of words in Crime and Punishment in any translation. We are talking about tens of thousands of unique, different words and they act as if one "can have a conversation" with a 100 words. You just CAN'T.

[@IreFang]

​@@JohnnyLynnLeeWho tries to read full adult novels when first learning a new language. You start with easy children's books.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

@@IreFang I DO. And I did that with English (pretty much in this case), Italian, and Japanese. I've been into Vietnamese for over 3 years and I just started Mandarin. OF COURSE you start with graded readers and stuff. But they are SUPER BORING. Almost as boring 3 hours a day of ANKI. The thing of immersion is that i must be, as Krashen puts it, COMPELLING. Children's books are not AT ALL compelling, at least not to me. Plus. I tried that with Japanese a bit and the truth is that between children's books and graded readers and watching the news, reading Crime and Punishment or Guns, Germs and Steel in Japanese it is NOT, as man seem to think, "just a little bit ore.' It's and abyss! You can read, say, The Little Prince in Japanese with easy. The economy section of the news is still pure gibberish t you. So you better doing some intensive readings of at leas A PARAGRAPH of REAL books and saving words into ANKI early on. It will save you time and pain.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

@@IreFang That's only true for languages CLSOE t each other. Say, I'm Brazilian. English and Italian. I never eve used NAKI for those. NAKI didn't even exist, I think, when I involuntarily learned English. Those languages have what I call 'free words" or "almost free words". Meaning you never saw the words. You see it for the first time and understand it. at least in the written form. "Conclusion" in Portugu3se is "ccnclusão" and in Italian "conclusione." Lots of those free words. When learning a language like Japanese, Vietnamese., Chinese, Thai, where nothing looks like anything you know? EAVRY AND EACH word must be earned untill you are at a pretty advanced level and guessing words by context become really a thing.

[@mrcv4]

@@JohnnyLynnLee From what I have observed, the guy is trying to sell his courses, so he is attacking every learning method with the premise that his way of teaching is the best optimal, revolutionary. I don't buy it, you have to prove it. Furthermore, I'm also started supplementing my learning process of English with Anki. Not only that, but I also tested myself before using Anki (using around 9k words for passive vocabulary). After a year, I'll test myself again to see how well I'm doing. But if you're doing it properly, it works. I began with the Harry Potter book series. The first book in the series (the easiest to read) had around three-seven words per page that I didn't understand. Now I'm reading the 4th book, and it's like 1 word/idiom per 3-5 pages. So I even started to wonder if the rest of the books is too easy for me.

[@andrewryan5251]

Just wanting to throw a touch of constructive criticism here: this was a good opportunity to hear a different perspective on the subject and I can't help but feel it was a little bit wasted. There are so many chances for the podcast to support and discuss using Anki in the ways that Eric was defending, but it felt a bit to me like it was mostly about Eric trying to find a way to describe his method so that he could get Justin to say it was alright. Whether or not you're inclined to agree with Justin, I think it's compelling to hear from someone about the research into SRS, and maybe we could've gotten more out of hearing Justin's *in-depth* answer to the question "what should you do instead?" instead of just hashing out a similar back and forth about Anki a few times. I can't speak for anyone else, perhaps that was fulfilling for most folks, I just would say that I was a bit bummed not to have the chance to hear much about that.

[@roku-toiletpapersquad8664]

Im gonna be honest. Im the type of person who struggled quite a bit with Anki and really like Justin's approach towards efficient learning techniques. Even if im biased, i gotta say that i agree with you on that point.

[@KoreKaraPodcast]

Actually I did ask about specific research/studies but he didn’t have an answer so it was cut from the podcast. Might upload that as a bonus if you’re interested

[@roku-toiletpapersquad8664]

@@KoreKaraPodcast this type of field sure is challenging. Would love to see that bonus!

[@Paul-yk7ds]

I agree that the "what should you do instead?" would have been good to hear more about. He mentioned "interleaving" and like creating/practicing dialogs where a word is used multiple times in different ways, but I'd be interested to hear more suggestions about how to actually do that effectively.

[@lewcreative]

I have tried listening to him and he doesn't really state his alterantive in a clear way...he is very vague.

[@justincain2702]

I think it's important to note that each rare word you need to learn, may come up less often, but collectively rarer words show up frequently. This means that you do need to know a good number of them, despite them appearing infrequently individually. The word "interplanetary" probably doesn't come up often, but every most native speakers would know it and words of a similar frequency may show up 5 or 6 times a day at least. Anki might make it easier to acquire these words in a reasonable timeframe. That said, I think Justin's argument would be that these words tend to be specialized vocabulary, and therefore it's better to focus on different topics to naturally increase the chance of seeing particular words. Then once you understand the topic well, you can move to another topic. This would make it easier to encode the words long term because you are exposed to related words and have greater context for how the word is used. I think a better argument for Anki might be that, while the natural frequency patterns of words allows for acquisition on it's own, for those who can't get enough input (either because they are a beginner or don't have time), Anki is a valid supplement for keeping words relevant until you can immerse more. For example, a word that should come up multiple times a week with total immersion, you may actually only be seeing every couple months because you have a full-time job in your native language. At the more extreme end, a word may come up 10 times a year for a native, but only once a year for you. With such long intervals between retrievals, it might be difficult to encode the information well enough to remember them efficiently without a tool like Anki.

[@joshz8140]

This seems to be more of a critique on how people incorrectly use Anki to obtain their goals rather than Anki being an unhelpful tool... It's as if all of his arguments assume that everyone is over-doing the amount of cards, or that they're not created with context or a form of interleaving (such as using Migaku to make multiple passes of cards from a single show) and so on. Of course you can't obtain fluency without context and immersion by using a single tool. It's a supplementary tool to maintain connections, just the same way you would use it for studying anatomy or various illnesses for the medical boards. Still, great video guys! Keep em coming!

[@joshz8140]

And one thing to add to Eric's concept of pre-loading, I had actually successfully done this with Dragon Quest 9. I had a large sentence bank with screenshots and all of that (cleaned up a bit with Migaku tools), where I used the complete script of DQ9 as my frequency list in Morphman to sort that sentence bank based on most common. I had passively done that in the background at about 5-8 new cards a day for about 8 months, while I focused on doing grammar cards and other studies for school, then did light immersion here and there when I had time. Much to my "surprise" I was able to play Dragon Quest 9 fairly casually without looking up many words at all when I finally had the time during summer break. Not only that, but I can now play pretty much any Dragon Quest game without many lookups because of the overlap, as by the 9th game, they had developed a pretty specific style. Food for thought.

[@IndiaHeathIRL]

The understanding that I have of Anki after listening to Justin explain how memory and learning works is that Anki will help keep this piece of information in your short term memory more easily so that when you naturally encounter it you're more likely to notice the word and then go on to start acquiring it. I think it's something that Matt has said before, Anki primes you for noticing words and is not for learning them. I've really been debating whether or not to continue with Anki recently because I'd felt it helped in the past but was unsure again after watching this. What is probably the best course of action is to be very particular about what words to add. Another really great time Justin said was to delete an Anki card if you get it easily right on the first three reviews. I'd also add to this that if you see it in the wild and recall what it means, that's also a good reason to delete the card, time is better spent on other words your less sure of. Guests like this are a fantastic idea for the podcast too, please do continue with it!

[@paulwalther5237]

Good interview. It’s hard to keep this comment short but I’ll try (I failed). I think Justin’s advice is really good. I often compare my language learning before smartphones (Anki) and post. I tried flash cards and rote memorization taking German in school (it didn’t work well but I didn’t expect to anyway). I got to go to Germany one summer and study there and got super motivated to learn German. I heard somewhere that reading was the best way to learn a language and everyone knows reading is good for you so I bought some bought The Hobbit in German and went to work with my paper dictionary. I also used flash cards and then a vocabulary notebook when that got expensive. I tried studying the words I write down etc. I also bought a vocabulary book grouping German words by frequency and subject (really nicely. Anyway, I noticed I always forgot what I tried to remember by rote all the time. All of it. I kept writing words down anyway but mostly to keep a record of how often I had to look up each word 😂. I had a lot of repeats. It was faster to look up these words in my vocabulary book than a dictionary also. And the weird thing is that no matter how I did my rote memorization, when I checked in my frequency vocabulary book, I remembered words by frequency only. Basically the rote studying was a complete waste. But I didn’t have SRS. So along come smartphones with SRS apps like Anki. I tried them a little and by this time I had hit a plateau with German at roughly 10,000 words maybe (recognition). I tried the SRS with German and Spanish but basically it was like before. I forgot everything. I also wasn’t super diligent with repping everyday. So I didn’t use it. But then I wanted to learn Japanese. The writing system was SO hard I couldn’t immerse by reading effectively. I tried Harry Potter and manga but not only are there kanji but no spaces - you need to know a good amount of Japanese to even begin reading it with a dictionary. So I ended up doing Anki. Lots and lots of Anki. Years and years of Anki. The forgetting curve is a joke. Anki would test me before I forgot something until it didn’t and I forgot it. And past the initially 300 or so words I forgot all of them and had to start over so many times. And of course I had all the problems of getting behind on my reviews and just starting the deck over. Somehow I stuck with it to where I could recognize maybe 5000 Japanese words. Then moved to Japan. Kept doing Anki. Finally got to where I could read books. So Anki works but it’s terribly inefficient. I saw an Italian KZbinr teaching Italian (I’m a total beginner trying it out) and he gave the recommendation that when you study the word to eat, don’t just study that word. Make a sentence. I eat pizza (for example). He didn’t recommend memorizing or using sentence flash cards but making your own sentences. When I was in Japan I surely did this and it’s not foolproof but I think it’s a big improvement over just checking if you can understand it or recall it. I’m going to try to apply this to Korean which is the current language I’m banging my head over (Italian is just a small distraction). I’ve been using SRS for words to frontload them for reading books also but I don’t think it works too well. Even using flash cards for words I see in a book doesn’t seem all that useful. I’m almost ready to throw in the towel with SRS for Korean after using it for so many years but I am thinking I might try making myself use stuff in a sentence when reviewing. This would slow down reviews a lot though 😅.

[@NickWeston]

Thank you guys for being cool enough to have someone on who doesn't share the same views as you and allowing your audience to choose for themselves after hearing both sides. It was a very helpful and mind-opening listen!

[@bingbong2257]

I use it as a supplement. I've learned 3 languages over the last year and so far have found that the returns are diminishing after the first 500 most common words or so. After that I have found that it's more efficient to learn through reading, listening, and new words through context. I do think though, that experiences can vary, some people are more, or less reliant on it. There are many, many ways of learning a language and WHAT'S MOST IMPORTANT, is consistency finding what works most efficiently for that specific person.

[@user-ky9qn4pg3w]

You sure you don't mean 5000? with 500 words you won't understand a thing apart from infantile conversations.

[@bingbong2257]

@@user-ky9qn4pg3w one thousand makes up 80% of everything everyone says, according to linguists. Generally that's the recommended amount most polyglots start with. But I've found 500 is enough to learn new words through context (starting at A2), which leads to a compounding effect of efficiency. Yes, you're roughly correct about 500 words, infantile level. But luckily, thanks to contextual learning and a number of other methods I use that number doesn't stay static for longer than the first month :).

[@bingbong2257]

that said, that doesn't mean I don't use it at all after that. It just means it moves from a primary method to a secondary method.

[@chris-rios]

@@bingbong2257how many languages do you speak now.

[@TragicGFuel]

No one is human history has learnt 3 languages in a year, unless you're saying you are barely conversational in all of them

[@knw-seeker6836]

just discovered your Podcast recently i´m looking forward for more of this High quality conversations Thanks a lot

[@KoreKaraPodcast]

Thanks for listening!

[@alexpiccy]

Just weighting in with my experience because people is saying that research doesn't translate into practice: I spent the first two months using anki and mnemonics to memorize 2300 unique words. That was 2h of anki and 2h of input. I got sick of it and I wanted to pause the anki work for a bit with the intention of restarting soon. For the following month I had just immersed on KZbin, animelon and lingq looking up words, but not putting them in any deck. I've done that for 4h a day for that month. Memorizing the first 1000 words gave me a huge boost in comprehension, going from 1000 to 2300 hasn't been a real step forward. In the month with only immersion in it I noticed a bigger improvement on comprehension than the one of the month before. I'm now immersing for an avarage of 5h a day and I'm at the end of the 5ft month (included the first two), so if I thought that anki was worth the time I would have absolutely gotten back to it by now. The thing is that if you just immerse you don't have a number that shows your progress. Other people that has had a lot of experience about the matter and that have touched the argument: Steve Kauffman Alexander Arguelles (Not just research, actual experience) Their advice has been a factor for me to take a break from anki in the first place

[@bidoof22]

So what you're saying is that Anki helped for roughly the first 1000~ words and after that it was just much better to continue immersing, since those 1000 words theoretically would mean you comprehend around 80-90% of a language. And then just looking up words that you don't get, like any other native speaker would when they see a word they don't understand. Is this what you're saying? Because I've been thinking of doing something similar.

[@Cole-te2rz]

@@bidoof22 You definitely do no comprehend around 80-90% of a language with only 1000 words, maybe with 3000 words you will know around 80% of words spoken. For Japanese at least.

[@Otome_chan311]

"anki until you can read, then read". So... Anki it is then.

[@MarioRossiAncora]

I have been organically reducing my Anki use after only a couple of months of learning Japanese. I do find more benefits from reading and listening. And honestly, if you think about it, rereading interesting content achieves the same goal of re-exposing yourself to words and sentences, with the added benefit of having more fun. I think I'll keep using Anki but only for a very limited time every day (literally less than 10 minutes) and focus on reading and listening, while also having very short exchanges on Hello Talk to apply the things I learn. For me, small early output helps a lot.

[@animetherapy2796]

The cope is so strong in the comments section from a certain crowd and it is both pathetic and laughable. Anki is not indisputable nor is it the be all or end all when it comes to language learning. It can be helpful to an extent but won't make you fluent.

[@sandwichbreath0]

This one arrived just at the right time: I've started falling behind on Anki and was starting to question whether I should just dump/replace the deck or double down on my reps/sessions. Now I'm seriously re-thinking how much time it should occupy in my language journey overall.

[@compositeur8455]

Just cut down on the words you learn every day

[@skullface215]

It's hereeee!!! Looking forward to listening to this

[@tebby24]

5:07 I find this very interesting and I'm surprised I never thought about it this way. Let's say your only study activity is just raw immersion. Every time you come across a word you can't recall, you look it up. Every word that you see during immersion, in a stupid and convoluted way, can be thought of as a flash card. If you comprehend that 'card', you move on, otherwise you 'fail' the card and look up its meaning. The algorithm that determines when you see each word is simply that word's frequency in the language. Assuming you learn the words based on the number of times you're forced to look up the meaning, the order in which you would learn words would be, by nature, based on their frequency. I know this is a kind of stupid way to put it but I just find it interesting to think about. I also like how this perfectly captures the idea of diminishing returns which so many advanced learners talk about. Let's say you're a robot learner beep boop and you you have to come across look up a word 5 times during you immersion before you can successfully recall it. In order to learn 10 words a day, your immersion time would have to increase at a rate which is inversely related to the frequency spectrum of words in your TL. In order to maintain a consistent learning rate, one would have to rapidly increase time spent immersing as they learned more words. tbr I think that labeling the frequency spectrum as a natural SRS algorithm is completely valid, but since we're people and not robots, the sort of scenarios described above maybe aren't very representative of one's true learning experience. To me, it makes sense that this frequency spectrum is the core which guides my learning, but there are many other strategies I can implement which manipulate this algorithm to compensate for my own inconsistencies.

[@danmcdougall4987]

If you are really interested in this stuff look up Paul Nations paper on language acquisition using only reading, there's a YT vid too but the paper shows the tables and explains it better. Based on different calculations he figures out how much reading you would need to do to learn the top 10k words in English and how each extra 1k word needs exponentially more reading but by doing that reading you are solifying those words anyway. Its really interesting stuff. As someone who completely quit anki a month ago and just reads, looks up, listens and watches for fun I have learned SUSTANTIALLY more words and Japanese than I ever did using anki because I was releasing the cognitive load needed to learn onto anki and not actually letting my brain work. Now I don't have the safety net I just learn the words and use reading as my SRS

[@Some_Guy_87]

Hard to argue against research, I can just personally say that I feel like I am not retaining all that much from immersion. I look up a word and forget it two sentences later. For some words I notice afterwards that I already looked them up multiple times, but always only after doing it. It's like my mind is just not in learning mode. With Anki, I actually sit down just focusing on the learning process for 40-50 minutes, and the app leaves me no choice but to learn things at least short-term wise to be done with it, which puts this pressure on, like it's is mentioned regarding output here. I feel like that is probably the most efficient use of my time during the day despite longer immersion times. Hard to believe I'd be better off without it honestly, and I don't dare to try.

[@boshlevison9341]

This is totally my experience too. While I do like 5-10x more immersion then Anki, I feel like my Anki time is very valuable and it's where I clear up misunderstandings like confusing different words or learning new grammar. Stuff really sticks after "studying" something in Anki and then seeing it in immersion a bunch. I will say though that when I was doing premade decks this effect was way less profound

[@johnvienna3422]

I expect your Anki time is valuable precisely because you spend proportionally so much more time immersing. When I spend most of my "learning Japanese" time on Anki, its value drops, and I make little progress. It's counter-intuitive, but observably true.

[@Some_Guy_87]

@@johnvienna3422 That's kind of a strawman argument against Anki though because absolutely no learning approach suggests spending more than maybe 20% of your learning time using Anki at most. I'm already on the higher end with my time and that's basically just because I'm stupid and need that long for 10 new words. It's like saying weightlifting is bad for your muscles because people got rhabdomyloysis from working out hours upon hours every day.

[@johnvienna3422]

@@Some_Guy_87 Yeah, absolutely right. I never actually intend to spend that much of my time on Anki, but it too often just works out like that. Might be a good idea to consciously make it just 20%... after years of grinding... 🤷🤦

[@Cosmicgardening]

Justin asking about looking up the word at that time vs precramming it around the 15 minute mark is fundamentally misunderstanding the flow of information. People aren't just downloading a list of the top 20,000 words and praying. They're making flash cards for the words they DID just look up in context in the moment.

[@PapperLapper]

Yes, for the enlightened actually mining. I know people who are doing pre-made decks up to 6,000 or even 10,000 words, which is ridiculous. But yea I think all the guys in the podcast would largely agree on the process of mining

[@emisnikki-polygloddess8149]

I think there were some general misunderstandings in this interview. Technically they're both right, in the right context. But of course we can't expect someone outside the immersion language learning community to know about all the methodology that people are using to learn in this community. There are a lot of people that'll just see that statistic of 2000 most common words being 90%+ of the language and they'll literally go and find a 2k deck to rep until someone comes to rescue them or they give up.

[@jamietaylor2607]

Putting aside that there are definitely people doing that or a lesser version of that. If he's worked with tens of thousands of students from over 100 countries. I'm sure he's aware how people are using Anki. Honestly, I think the real issue was how all-over-the-place and extreme Eric's examples were. A hypothetical word you see 5 times a year when you're otherwise fluent, or reading a book where dont you know every other word are both terrible examples for Anki/sentence mining. It's not comprehensible if every other/third word in the sentence you mine is unknown. In those scenarios, it would absolutely, be better to use Justin's methods.

[@gogomaximoff4554]

We have to think from the perspective that most of us have other things in our daily lives. Work, family, training, other hobbies. So if most of us have an h every day to learn languages that’s amazing! Also there is a huge difference between intensive and extensive learning, whether reading or listening. We can’t do both at the same time, at least not for a longer period of time.

[@hackptui]

I've used Anki for about 18 months now. I made a new deck a few months ago and added 600 new Japanese words discovered through immersion reading/listening. I stopped adding to the deck after it got too tedious. I've been repping that deck for 7 months straight now, every day but one that I missed. This deck still has 95 "young/learn" cards, and 25 suspended. I really don't think it's helped me learn any of the words to the degree of effort and time I've put into it. I think Justin has convinced me to walk away from Anki forever now.

[@user-gk2ns1zk8e]

This video is pure gold. I've studied Japanese for several years. I've had times where I've used Anki and times where I didn't. Times when I did 3 cards per day, and times when I did 20 cards per day. Times when Anki was 5% of my study time (the rest being immersion), and times when it was 50%. I've used recognition cards, production cards, cloze delete, audio cards, the whole works. Pre-made decks and handcrafted sentence mining decks. And yet, outside of the beginner stage, I found that Anki never seemed to feel like it made a meaningful difference over other activities. Justin's assertions totally line up with my own personal experience. Comprehensible input and comprehensible output are the only things that I find have worked well for me at an intermediate and advanced level.

[@nisbahmumtaz909]

A web version/offshoot of Anki, notably Memrise, is basically what catapulted my learning motivation from being a chore to feeling like I could actually understand something. Heavily disagree with the context of this take, and I'm very happy to see many others in the comment section sharing this sentiment.

[@mukimuki123]

I'm gonna summarize the entire gist of what Justin's trying to say for 30mins "Context is KING"

[@skritterjake]

This needs more likes.

[@Kanjicafe]

A+++. Best video on topic I've seen in a year.

[@eggcluck]

Anki was never intended to learn anything, it was meant to help you remember what you have already learned. 'There are no studies showing' is not the same as 'studies show that is not the case', an important difference.

[@fransmith3255]

I discovered independently exactly what Justin is saying. I used Anki to start learning Korean. I put in not only words, but sentences containing those words and the grammar I learned all into Anki. It worked, kind of, at the beginning. I learned those grammars and words, but down the track I realised I was learning them totally wrongly. I was learning them academically, not acquiring them. There's a massive difference between learning words academically and acquiring them. A MASSIVE difference. I basically had to totally unlearn and ACQUIRE (actually ACQUIRE - acquire means attaching that word to my LIFE, my EMOTIONS, the things I can see around me - THAT is acquiring) almost every word I had academically learned - and it took a LONG time to do that. Now, I acquire the word first and put the word into Anki AFTER I have acquired it. I ONLY use Anki basically as a backup dictionary to ensure I don't completely lose a word from my vocabulary. Anki is NOT a learning tool that will help you acquire a language AT ALL. It does NOT help you understand or speak a language!! I now learn (or acquire, actually) my words elsewhere. And knowing a word should be INSTANT, not like sitting on Anki, thinking, "Oh, I know it...what is it...?" If you don't instantly recall the word and how it fits into the language you have NOT ACQUIRED the word, regardless of how long you have known it. If I forget a word, it goes back into my other system where I re-acquire it properly, reconnect it with my life, where and how I can picture myself using it, and my emotions. This has been my experience. I don't hink Anki is bad, just very badly used. Use Anki for words AFTER you initially acquire them, as a don't-forget dictionary, the acquisition happens in your listening practice, your speaking practice. In my opinion, Anki is ONLY a dictionary to ensure that a word doesn't totally disappear from your vocabulary, it's not not a learning tool. This has been my experience. I lost more than 2 years of language learning using Anki the wrong way, and learning the language the wrong way: 1 year of learning it wrongly, and more than 1 year of RE-ACQUIRING those same words correctly - the latter actually takes longer because you have to UNLEARN then acquire. The way I learn words now, is...effortless - a couple days and most words I learn are instant recall - the meaning and usage and situation just pops into my head without effort. Much better than academically learning the meaning which ONLY connects the English translation to the word, which is virtually useless!!

[@Heoka1510]

without using anki , how do you learn to remember new words

[@fransmith3255]

@@Heoka1510 I do use Anki, but I don't use it as a learning tool. I put words into Anki AFTER I've actually learned them to ensure that I don't forget them. Learning a language is about acquisition, not academic learning. In fact, language learning is more of a set of skills (that work together), not a set of knowledge facts. Academic learning has very little to do with learning a language beyond understanding grammar. Words take time to acquire and you have to hear them a lot, in many sentences and situations and voices, which is not really time based at all in my opinion. It's exposure based (which does take time, but the time is for exposure, not some arbitrary gradually spreading time distance between hearings). Yes, the words have to hit your long term memory, but it's more important to learn them the RIGHT WAY. This is probably the best advice you'll ever get for learning a language: Don't just connect your learned words to an English word - don't connect them to an English word at all if possible! Connect your new language words to emotions and pictures and things you know, situations you've been in, things you've seen, things you've experienced - connect them to your life - NOT English words. If you're familiar with acting, an acting teacher will tell you to 'become' the character, not 'act' the character. You need to do the same with your words - word sounds, need to 'become' what they mean in your head, not just a translation of your mother tongue. If you connect your new language words to English words (or your mother tongue), you'll never develop fluency in this way, because you'll always be translating back to your native language which is very slow - however, if you're in a conversation, you need to listen fast. If you let the new language words have meaning away from your mother tongue, you'll remember them instantly, intuitively and for MUCH longer. This is why Anki is NOT a learning tool. It's ONLY a 'don't forget AFTER you've learned' tool. I wrote my own learning app to learn my words properly. 🙂 This is why academically smart people give up learning languages. It doesn't require smart at all - it requires determination and perseverance. Learning to listen to a language can't be learned academically any more than learning to play golf can be learned academically.

[@Heoka1510]

@@fransmith3255 thanks 😍😍😘

[@TragicGFuel]

@@fransmith3255 you literally described sentence mining lmao. You legit didn't do any research before you started? No one really recommended anki after you have learnt enough to start understanding media.

[@fransmith3255]

@@TragicGFuel I did do research before I started, and all the research about Anki I found pointed towards the way I started - space repetition, which is why I started badly, and why MOST people start badly it seems, often giving up. The space repetition thing is garbage, research or not. It's not space repetition that helps you acquire a language. It's understanding the word, then length and breadth of hearing the word in context and various ways and usages over TIME. Isolated space repetition is not the same thing. The sentences actually helped me more than the isolated words. The thing that helps much more than that is hearing those words in stories, and everything to do with HOW you listen and HOW you adopt that word into your brain with meaning with your own life, so that the word sound had meaning with you hear it. The space repetition research is very faulty. The Krashen research is correct, not the space repetition research. Anki is useful as a dictionary just to check that you haven't forgotten the odd word with your other learning. That's ALL it's useful for. It's not remotely useful as a teaching tool to help you learn a word, even if it appears that way at the very beginning.

[@alanguages]

Anki is not going to make a person fluent in speech, but what it will do is increase recognition. Just like there is a difference between active and passive vocabulary. Anki helps in augmenting passive vocabulary. Active, well that is dependent on the particular individual to use it in speech or writing.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

It helps with both, as long as you're using the cards from both directions. But, it's mostly a tool for the early stages of learning and gets less useful as you get further into it. That's just how such programs work.

[@cryan9137]

I don't know why anybody would limit their language learning approach to what is currently supported by research. The field is not going to stop producing new insights; 20 years of more research will bring stronger and better insights from the SLA research field. Unverified learning methods of course bring the risk of wasting time, but you shouldn't learn a language with the concept that anything unverified should be avoided. In addition, the current application of SLA theory by this community is sort of misguided. Acquisition is not the only thing that matters as a learner. It's not the end of the world if something doesn't directly lead to acquisition. For example, in English, many native speakers don't acquire the distinctions between "its" and "it's." But they get around just fine by applying the conscious knowledge of the rule. When you put acquisition on a pedestal, you lose sight of the value of other forms of competency. The end goal of learners is not actually acquisition itself, but a more holistic notion of ability and competency. What acquisition in SLA refers to is simply the brain's building of an implicit model of the target language; the sort of model that allows you to understand a sentence without needing to think about its linguistic components, and which largely supports the intuitive and flexible application of grammar and vocab through a vast, interconnected network of language (the way in which language resides in the brain). What is up in the air is the connection between explicit knowledge (conscious knowledge) and implicit knowledge (acquisition). There is an open debate in SLA on whether explicit knowledge can directly transform into implicit knowledge or whether it aids in the development of implicit knowledge or neither. My hypothesis is that if explicit knowledge aids in comprehension, then it should aid in acquisition (when accompanied with ample input) because that is the way in which acquisition is thought to currently occur. Despite acquisition being important, we know some aspects of language (particularly logographic languages like Chinese or Japanese) are not open to acquisition. You cannot learn to write Japanese or Chinese characters by just comprehending written material and being able to recognize them. Writing them is a skill that needs to be developed on its own. Unfortunately, if you try to answer questions you may have about implications of logographic writing systems on acquisition and efficient learning procedures, you will find an absolute lack of useful research in the SLA field. What Justin is totally right about here is that not everything should be or needs to be SRS'ed; you should try to learn a word without SRS first or just very light SRS usage. Some words just stick very easily, either due to inherent ease or due to a strongly impactful encounter with the word. Examples: (I was watching a Japanese youtuber play this game called Vampire Survivors. There were powerups in the game for your character, literally 'garlic' and 'spinach.' I found it incredibly funny, so I very easily learned these words). (I had a friend who loved the phrase 'nani mono da' and would say it all the time. It's a very 'anime' and old-fashioned phrase. I will never forget its meaning). But, regarding Anki usage, Justin appears to misunderstand what goes on in the mind of an advanced Japanese/Chinese learner using Anki, and to some degree our interviewers do as well. Advanced learners are NOT bruteforcing their cards; advanced learners do not have solely an advanced level of acquisition, but also well-developed learning strategies (on average, I am hoping). They're applying their knowledge of kanji and vocabulary (processing the link between the meaning of a word and its kanji), thinking about the connections between words, processing retrieval mistakes in the learning stage, and making observations to distinguish the appearance of one word from another. An advanced learner isn't going to keep failing a card over and over mindlessly; they're going to at some point investigate further a word in order to make it more memorable, or apply some sort of strategy to resolve the issue. Somehow, Justin thinks 10 new words a day is a large undertaking for an advanced learner. I'm not really sure where he's basing this on. The more advanced of a learner you are, the more straightforward vocabulary becomes; it's the difference between learning the meaning of 'take' (beginner vocab, with dozens of use cases and meanings) vs 'politician' (advanced vocab, essentially one meaning). I'm guessing there's a closely matching term for politician in every modern language. There is no level of processing that needs to occur here for an adult beyond storing a mapping between the sound and written form. Not only are words more likely to be straightforward for the advanced learner, they're bringing better kanji skills and a more developed intuition for how words sound to the process. Anyways, I like Justin's idea that learning more common words is actually a more direct path to learning more advanced words (by allowing you to graduate to more technical/advanced conversations). If you don't have the common vocabulary, then more advanced conversations are going to be highly incomprehensible. Something Justin reminded me of is that we may forget that word frequency is going to be highly tied to your own personal usage of the language. So this concept of which words are 5 times per year or whatever is sort of missing the point. What matters is the words that YOU see frequently. As an artist, I watch a lot of Art videos; tons of the vocabulary never appears outside of Art videos, but for me personally, they're virtually common words. I may try out that idea of tracking the frequency of words myself and then learning the most common ones. All in all, I think this was an interesting discussion, albeit fairly tricky and seems like both sides were sort of unwilling to really let go of their side and accept a bit of uncertainty to their viewpoints.

[@roku-toiletpapersquad8664]

You should make a video about this! After discussing the arguements from both sides, in your opinion, what should others do in terms of learning a language?

[@bidoof22]

Great write up, thanks for sharing your thoughts.

[@Nickname863]

10 words a day in Anki is mental torture, i have no idea how people pull through that. For me it just becomes an increasingly big mass of symbols without meaning that i have to put serious levels of willpower into not to distract myself. And i think i break at about 7 days in with that. Sentence crads don't really help when i can't read the sentence.

[@coolbrotherf127]

I'm assuming you're talking about Japanese. When I was studying kanji a lot, I had to create some kind of mental link that I could usually recall to help the meanings sink in. The main thing that helped me learn many words a day was just really focusing on staying calm and patient with myself. In the beginning I couldn't even learn the hiragana without getting mad and frustrated at myself, but after putting in the effort to take a breath and relax for a moment, I learned not to let failure dictate my emotions. Also taking an extra second to really stop and just study the kanji design for a few minutes will help it stick much better. Many people will rush to get it all done as quickly as possible, but taking some time to study the kanji itself, even writing it out by hand a few times will allow your brain to notice and remember the difference between them more often. Studying radicals is also very important, seeing familiar radials is usually a helpful hint. Lastly, I wouldn't even worry about sentence cards, unless they are just common phrases, until you know a couple hundred kanji and pretty well. That way you can focus on the meaning of the overall sentence and not the vocabulary.

[@Nickname863]

@@coolbrotherf127 I decided to slow down more for now. I picked up a textbook i had lying around and just do a lesson or two in it a day. I think I mainly just stepped into the trap of being too motivated when starting out again, and wanting to do too much at once, then running against the reality of learning a new language being hard work. Kanji are quite important (especially since i want to read too) but i think i just took too much on my plate in that regard. But yeah i really need to learn to be patient with myself, and accept that new things are hard, and that its ok to be "bad" as long as i don't give up. Thank you for your comment.

[@AleksandarRadlovacki]

A quote came to mind when I watched this video. As is the case of Anki being a necessity, we question all our beliefs except those we truly believe, and those we never think to question. Interesting insights.

[@kirschmackey_official]

I’m more interested in hearing the speaker’s position and any tips than hearing a debate on the viewpoints.

[@mishaivanov205]

Great video man keep it up

[@troybonner91]

The only reason I use Anki is because I normally go for a 2 hour walk every day, and spaced-repetition flashcards is about the only thing I can do during that. It may not be the best way to learn, but I am learning words, so I feel it's better than nothing. Sure, I could listen to podcasts, but my experience has been that the only thing I get from listening to podcasts is being able to hear words I learned through Anki. Otherwise, I can't hear words I haven't flashcarded yet. There is a degree of competency in a word. I'm not necessarily concerned with absolutely knowing the ends and outs of a word immediately, even after not reviewing it for 5 months JUST by seeing it in Anki. I'm just trying to familiarize myself with words. So my repetitions are more spaced out than others. So when I see the word in content I'm reading, I may have to think about the word for a bit to remember it. But to me, that's the point of Anki. Not to be the end-all, but to supplement.

[@ganqqwerty]

You can do podcasts during this time! I follow nihongo con teppei podcasts where he occasionally drops a word or two in English for comprehensibility

[@pastelshoal]

Don't super agree with this, and I think the answer lies in making better cards and supplementing your learning. Is talking with others and getting an intuitive understanding of the grammar and vocabulary perhaps superiour ? Yes, but we don't have time to learn everything that way. I can personally testify that Anki was one of the most instrumental tools in me learning French, as it quickly got me from a very small vocabulary to a few thousand words. Not only that, but given my current level of French, Anki is a seamless way of learning new words. I simply create a quick card for a word I don't know in a book and 50 pages later it comes up and I'm able to access that knowledge. I personally recommend monolingual sentence cards with definitions and a photo (for character based languages). Of course, I did speak a lot, read a lot, watch a lot, but if Anki weren't there, my level would not be where it is now.

[@copingforever6093]

I really dont care about size my boyfriend just happens to be 6 feet 4

[@moyga]

Has this guy actually learned Japanese, or any language far away from his native language to a high level and tried living in a foreign country? His assertion that you can understand 99 percent of everyday speech with 2000 words makes it seem to me like the answer is probably no. I know well over 10000 words and constantly see tons of words I dont know all the time. The kind of words Eric is talking about are not a tiny amount of advanced words as this guy seems to think. I feel this is especially the case in Japanese where there are big gaps between written and spoken, polite and casual and so on. It's so easy to step into a different context and have your comprehension drop dramatically. From the way this guy talks I just get the sense that he hasn't really experienced what it's like. Native speakers literally spent their whole lives immersing in the language in so many different contexts, like highschool biology class, watching children's cartoons, at a dentist, at a mechanic, whatever. The amount of knowledge a native speaker has about their language is so much larger than what a medicine student needs to know about medicine.

[@jimzooter4239]

Well, guys-and Justin in particular-I have to say that that was a very informative discussion. I’m 71 and have been trying to learn Spanish for the past 4 or so months (with limited success) simply because-well, for no good reason, really. I don’t have much else to do. I don’t use Anki because it seemed awkward, but I do use Flashcards Deluxe because it allows me to import Words in Excel spreadsheet directly. After hearing your discussion, I think I’m going to start using iTalki to see if perhaps I’ll be able to learn more quickly that way. Trying to memorize a million conjugations of million different verbs in a million different tenses doesn’t seem to be going so well, so it’s time to try to advance my learning of this rather complex language in a different way. And, yes, I know Spanish is supposed to be one of the easier languages for English speakers, so I definitely won’t be trying to learn Farsi or Mandarin.

[@BritVsJapan]

The advice given at 22:17 is exactly how I've used Anki over the years and is definitely the right way of going about it. Deleting easy and hard cards is essential to keep reviews low and making the process quicker and easier, but it seems like not many people realise this. Also totally agree with the immersion over Anki, immersion is the key to fluency while Anki is simply a tool to help speed up the process. It's a shame to see people over using it too, I used to do 2 hours of reviews a day and that alone messed up my social life in uni lol can't imagine 5 hours a day 💀

[@lastninjaitachi]

Man dude said some people did 7 hours. Like who has that much time thats crazy. You could have read entire novel series with that amount of time.

[@jaredprice5823]

Hey man, I know you’re an OG in the community and I wanted to ask you a question. So I finished traditional RTK about 2 months ago and have still been doing reviews for it since. This currently takes up like 30-40 minutes a day on top of other decks I’m using. Should I continue reviewing rtk or suspend the deck and focus more on other things? When is a good time to stop reviewing RTK, if ever?

[@lastninjaitachi]

@@jaredprice5823 imo start reading as soon as possible. Its hard at first but you figure it out quickly. Its the closet thing you can get for native input. RTK will take you only so far but probably never to complete reading fluency, this is why some people just start reading instead.

[@BritVsJapan]

@@jaredprice5823 It's up to you when you want to really but there's no need to keep doing them if they are mature cards. As you read you'll encounter them so you should be fine to stop reviewing. If some of them aren't mature yet, then you can suspend or delete the easy ones, or perhaps move any non-mature cards to a separate deck and do them there while suspending the mature cards. I think I kept doing rtk reviews for a while after as I believed that if I didn't I would forget them all, but honestly if you do enough reading then this won't happen, if they are mature cards. Hope that helps :)

[@jaredprice5823]

@@BritVsJapan Thank you so much for the detailed response. What you suggest makes sense, and I think that it’s the right decision. I was just a little worried about forgetting some of them down the road but I suppose if I’m not encountering them during my immersion then they’re not worth remembering. :) thanks again

[@letusplay2296]

Doing multiple hours of anki a day is insane. I add 10 cards a day for both of my languages and spend like 45 minutes tops including making the new cards

[@BrianPhilipDN]

I'll take a dig at a explanation. Our brains are great at creativity and abstract thinking where we fail compared to computers is memory and memory recall, where and how much we remember can greatly impact our output where Anki is a way of fine tuning and improve that element of the mind. As the knowledge goes in (input/study/practice) less of it goes out(output/forgetting/slow recall).

[@emisnikki-polygloddess8149]

Hey! Interesting insights, it's nice to see someone from a slightly different but related field provide input. I don't think frontloading cards *specifically for the purpose of reading* is a good use of your time at all, if you've already reached a certain level of proficiency and are now only missing very specific words. With the help of modern technology (e-texts and pop-up dictionaries) reading anything really has becomes super easy. I'd imagine you'd learn faster if you just jumped right into the material and kept reading, instead of spending a few days or weeks repping potentially useful cards. The beginning of course would be tougher, but the level should catch up super fast & you didn't have to waste time on Anki before actually getting started.

[@uchuuseijin]

Yeah, I feel like, if anything, cards should be made *from* a text, not before

[@bidoof22]

@@uchuuseijin Isn't that what most people do already? Like you're reading a book or watching a show, and if you come across a word you don't understand a few times, you start adding it to Anki. At least this is what I often hear from people describing their experience with Refold.

[@uchuuseijin]

@@bidoof22 well first of all, most people don't do Refold But secondly, yeah most people who are immersing indeed do that, because it's the smart way about it. But I was specifically agreeing to a post about how people should not do the opposite.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

@@bidoof22 It depends on the situation. As somebody who used to live in the country that he was learning the language for, I often didn't have that luxury. I was learning the language I needed right before I went to the shop or office where I needed it. But, in general, it's more useful to get the sentences and vocab from the TV, movies and books that you're reading. Tools like LWT are great because you can slurp up the entire book and see what words are most important and honestly, I tend to focus on verbs and nouns first as I go as those are the ones that are most important in terms of following the story. Then, I'll focus on the various other words there. It's not perfect, but it does help.

[@danketsu-seyo]

I watched this video like a year ago for the first time. Now, a year later, I think this was the most important video I've watched for my Japanese learning. This video made me stop using anki altogether. Thank you so much for this podcast episode!

[@danketsu-seyo]

@@barret_wallace I only focus on input, so my output is still pretty bad. Easier content, like anime, I am able to watch and understand without many problems. Reading more complex books about politics and stuff is still not easy, but I am able to finish them in a reasonable speed now, so it doesn't really feel like language learning anymore.

[@TheDrunkMunk]

Based. My language skills exploded when I stopped using Anki

[@Otome_chan311]

​@@TheDrunkMunkwhat do you do instead of flash cards in order to aquire language?

[@TheDrunkMunk]

@@Otome_chan311 Funny that I get this question now - I just spent a month writing a program that takes a person's notes and automatically makes anki cards for them by pulling definitions from Wiktionary. Lemme know if you'd like to try it. But regarding your question: I've stopped being such an Anki hater, I use it for about 5-10 minutes a day now. But I still stand by the philosophy I had when I made this comment which was input is by far the most important thing in language learning, I'm just not such an Anki hater these days. I acquire languages by reading, writing and practicing speaking (when I'm a beginner I practice with friends). I'm learning French atm and my daily routine is: one lesson of reading on Lingq (graded readers), one third of an Extra French Episode or an Easy Fench vid, then if I have time I practice on discord with my mate.

[@Otome_chan311]

@@TheDrunkMunk "reading". How do you read without understanding anything and just looking up every word? Looking up every sing word is just more painful flash cards... No matter how much people hate on anki and flash cards, every person that's actually learned language seems to boil it down into flash cards until you can read, then read. Can't read or listen in a comprehendable way until you drill flashcards yeah?

[@puccarts]

I agree a lot with Justin, and what he says really resonates with me. We need to make more connections with the words that we encounter for more effective long-term retention. +1 for interleaving type learning :D

[@AzureViking]

I've tried so many times to stick with Anki and get some use out of it, but every time it ends up being a shit ton of work and effort for very little reward. I find it interesting how hard Eric tried to justify it with super niche scenarios. Even in those scenarios Anki wouldn't be the best scenario. If you wanted to learn a rare word having to do with some niche topic, it would be far more useful to just read about that topic and be exposed to that word and other related words over and over in context while learning about the subject as a whole. Mine as well just use regular flash cards. I think it would be best to just drill a few dozen cards with words specific to a topic or movie or TV show then just watch that show. This way you just prime your brain with the flash cards then actually lock it in within the context of they immersion.

[@reynir775]

Anki might work for shut-ins who can cram every day while diversifying their learning in other ways, for others with a life, in context learning is far more efficient, linking vocab to their daily life situations. Anki is a supplement not the apex learning device.

[@johnvienna3422]

Nice that Mr Sung gives a shout out to us, the "normal" language learners, who can't (or choose not to) devote every waking moment to mastering a language. It can be depressing, following expert language learners on KZbin (like Matt, Dogen, and that German dude) . I very much admire them, but as a person in his fifties, with a job, family, and other interests, I shouldn't be trying to measure my progress against those guys' achievements. So the mental health aspect of this interview was extremely welcome. Thanks, doc!

[@blackmartini7684]

Argument at 7:20 is null because you can use sentences with context and mine them from conversations in the media you enjoy. No one says you are limited to single words

[@Rorotf]

This was a great interview, I've been following refolds methodology quite closely since it was released, but the one thing I've never followed Refold's advise on is Anki. A lot of people say they feel like they learn words quicker once they've put them into Anki, and it might be true for the specific words you have actually put into Anki, but I think the main thing is Anki increases you're awareness of words, so it make's you aware of learning those words in immersion, whereas other words you might not even notice that you're learning them because you don't have Anki to remind you that you have been learning that word recently. I'm yet to be convinced that Anki actually increases speed in learning vocabulary long term

[@Otome_chan311]

What do you do to aquire language if not flashcards?

[@roku-toiletpapersquad8664]

KZbin algorithm once again blessed me with what i wanted to know. For that, i thank you.

[@loito0263]

I think both approaches are okay and you can choose whatever you feel is right

[@GeorgiosMichalopoulos]

I wish we had more of Justin.

[@54eopifkg3ehfkj43]

I'm currently in an icanstudy cohort, started just a few weeks ago. Imagine my surprise seeing Justin on here

[@DianaT-ph6iz]

Look, the whole 30 minute conversation can be reduced to the following single sentence: "using the words in a context retains them better than dictionary/flashcard learning where they appear randomly and without meaning to the person." But that is simply because we, as human beings, developed to retain information better where there is context that is of interest to us or emotion aroused. A conversation about food in Japanese would enable the retention of food words better than blindly memorising them in a dictionary, unless of course you imagine some story in your brain connected with these words that you read out blindly from a dictionary. We remember best through emotion and interest. Of course, you always remember words you repeat 100+ times per day, but so can any being with a brain - BUT the context learning makes this learning effortless and more meaningful and enables deeper comprehension of words by the brain.

[@maletu]

Spaced repetition and flash cards are different concepts, either can be used without the other.

[@Jeremy_Fisher]

Obviously people don't do Anki in a vacuum and expect to be fluent. It's always been Anki+Immersion. It's been done countless times by people who've actually learned other languages. "You didn't do flashcards for your native language". People always say this, but I actually did do flashcards for my native language starting from when I was five years old and I always had a greater vocabulary in school compared to my peers. So, that kind of statement always makes me roll my eyes.

[@Otome_chan311]

I remember as a kid I'd do phonics flash cards, flash cards for weekly vocab, and once able to read I read a lot. Looking at language materials for babies it's a lot of just basic rote flash card type stuff. The word "apple" next to a Pic of an apple. Toys that show a picture of something and repeat the word when you push the button. This is flash cards. Just fancied up.

[@max_ishere]

I wish there was a learning skip button to skip to a level where you can learn by just watching videos and stuff.

[@Tighris]

He says use anki as a supplement to learn important/frequent words. Dont overdo it. Dont spend time on "useless" words that you probably dont need at your level right now. Spend the most of your time immersing. I can only agree. BUT it depends (like he also mentioned) on the time you are willing to spend. If you have only 20 minutes a day to learn a language then dont do 20 minutes of anki but rather immerse with comprehensible input. But if you have 5 hours a day you could probably afford to spend 30 minutes learning new words through anki that you can then recognize in our immersion. Edit: It also depends on the kind of level you are trying to reach. If you only want to be able to have a casual conversiation and dont care about accent and that kind of stuff then you can probably afford to not use anki. If you trying to reach a very high (native-like) level, things look different in my opinion (but you will never reach that with 20 mins a day). It also depends on the language. For a german for example its rather easy to learn dutch, an italien would learn french rahter easy etc. Now try to learn mandarin with pure immersion as an native english speaker (good luck)

[@IriaChannel]

Great discussion. I'm conversationally fluent and passed JLPT N2 exclusively through 80% immersion/20% output. I did this in 2012 or so, before Japanese learning methods were so systematized or curated via AJATT or Matt's stuff. I tried taking a hands on approach in order to pass N1, so I began using Anki via Khatz's recommendation. It was probably the biggest waste of time I've ever committed in my life. I went back to chillin' out and learning stuff naturally. Not sure if I'd pass N1 today, since I didn't even have a reason to take the N2 (other than satisfying sheer curiosity) but I've learned way more bsing with words in context, than I ever retained dickin' around with flashcards. I think people learn differently. There's people who might benefit from Anki, but there's people like me where that shit is utterly useless. Anki always makes me feel like I've learned temporary information and it's gone a few weeks after it's learned. Meanwhile if I see a word ONCE in real life, with a real context, in a scenario which is relevant to me.. it's almost like an emotional response-- I learn it for life. I feel LIFE experience itself, is the best mnemonic. Btw, the way this guy outlined the whole memorizing 2-3 responses to questions/dialogue tree stuff, is exactly how I got conversational myself lol I kept creating a larger and larger web and eventually I could jump to any section in that web and have free flowing conversations. Never heard anyone really talk about that, I gotta look more into this guys videos.

[@copingforever6093]

n1 is just 3000 more words, look up 3000 essential vocabulary for N1/ 初めての日本語能力試験N1単語3000 , there are also examplesenteces and audiofiles. Let me know if you are interested and I will later reply again with a link for the anki deck (I am still working on N2 but I use the book of the same series)

[@TragicGFuel]

Anki is like the thing you do to get to a stage where you can rely on immersion

[@Otome_chan311]

How do you remember the conversation tree without flash cards or constant reviewing?

[@beck7326]

This was so interesting, thanks for inviting Justin on. Found myself agreeing a bit with everyone tbh.

[@user-qf4tb4yf7g]

I don't think he realizes how hard it is for a beginner in a language that uses Kanji, to remember the reading and meaning of a word. How much gains you can make from just immersing is highly dependant on the language you're learning: e.g. I can understand individual words in Italian KZbin videos without having ever learned them because English and Italian have such a high amount of shared vocab. But if I try to understand one of my favourite anime in Chinese I even struggle to recognize words that I learned from Taiwanese KZbin.

[@jamietaylor2607]

Idk, that's kind of a weird assumption to make. Dude's got a PHD and has "worked with tens of thousands of students aged 10 to 70, from 100+ countries..." and you think he doesn't realize Kanji is hard? As a native English speaker who learned Spanish growing up and is now learning Japanese, I agree that the similarities in Spanish/English, and not having to learn an entire new system of writing made it a lot easier. But I think his point here is that "brute forcing" hundreds of words isn't an effective way to learn a language. And I agree, I've got about 2k learned words right now and I still struggled to recall and even hear them in conversation until I did fewer new words, more immersion, and applied additional context. Japanese children aren't using 6k Anki decks. They're learning new words in the context of their daily lives. Just as you and I did with our native language. We just don't have the benefit of someone following us around explaining everything to us as we go anymore. But that method of learning is probably still the best.

[@lastninjaitachi]

Taiwanese youtube sounds intresting just thinking about it

[@rimenahi]

Well, I've never used Anki, and I successfully learned English and Japanese to a pretty good level. アンキと言うアプリを使った事がないのに日本語を学んで身につくことができたんです。三年間ほど経ったが今の日本語レベルには自信満々でからアンキを使った事がないからこんなに経ったという後悔もないんです。

[@georgeallen7487]

I use anki but I never fail cards. I review them when I miss them and push them to the next day. If I have an interval longer than a month I retire the card completely . I also only use audio cards because I know from experience that listening is the hardest material to immerse in initially. During this beginner period, I enjoy anki more than my other learning.

[@Andylearnsjapanese]

I come here for because no one is more passionate about asking people to smash the like button. Also, great content. :) thanks!

[@Learninglotsoflanguages]

Great video. Gives a lot of things to think about. I deleted my Korean anki deck two months ago and don't really regret it. Though I do have one for Japanese now with just like the most frequent words. Now I'll have to think about what I want to do. Now after a month I can start to identify some Japanese words and I understand them much better than the words in isolation. But I don't feel like I can make any sentences even though I might have a bunch of words, so I should do more immersion :)

[@N0rmad]

Without some tool that helps you quickly learn those words and their meanings, you're going to be stopping or get lost when hearing one or more words per sentence that you don't understand. Everything will trip you up and you'll find your self constantly stopping to ask what something means or looking it up in a dictionary. That sucks and is discouraging. Now if you've studied say 300-500 words (just an hypothetical example) regularly with Anki and you made sure to choose them wisely (from a frequency dictionary or relative to the domain you are focusing on), then when these words come up you are going to have a better sense of what it means, and what the overall gist of the sentence is. You'll use LESS brain power wondering what the word means at all, and MORE on thinking about how it relates to the sentence and the conversation. You can keep talking/listening/reading with less instances of having to hit the breaks because so many words are just completely out of reach. This will only be better if you study and learn more words. This is how I used Anki and I thought it was great. I'd call it a linguistic lubricant. Makes your exposure to input flow easily with less moments of stopping or getting lost.

[@corgiman101]

I can see how using anki alone wont get you very far. But its really good for repeated exposure to lots of new words when starting out. I wasnt doing much vocab prwctice at first and even if i understood grammar i couldnt read anything. Anki has helped in that sense

[@dmp7252]

First, this guest is amazing. I also understand Eric’s point of view. We think very much alike. I’d say, trust the process. Yes, we want to know all those words “just in case,” you never know. But unfortunately, we have to prioritize and hedge our bets. Justin brilliantly stated: work on your fluency so that you can eventually put yourself in a conversation where you will be exposed to more complex words. When I was in France, there was group of Marxist students who had meetings every Wednesday. I’m not a Marxist, but I was interested in political trends and thought in France. Thanks to the fact that I was fluent in French, I was able to engage and have conversations with them about unions, the working class, revolutions (I mean that sort of vocab is their bread and butter), so they used it well, and it was literally like talking to walking BOOKS. YES, they used the vocabulary that everyone claims: “oh, no one talks like that.” That’s bull! Educated people talk like that. But you need to put yourself into situations where you’re exposed to that type of language. Having conversations with people who discuss these topics. Even if you have conversations with someone on iTalki you can easily push your speaking to amazing heights. Here’s a link to a page I use. It’s 1,000 conversation starters. They give you TONS of ideas for conversations. In fact, this list was literally created to FORCE you into conversations where you will, without a doubt, encounter low-frequency words. In fact the list was create because the author of the list was trying to find ways to meaningfully learn and retain low-frequency vocab. relearnalanguage.com/language-exchange-topics-vocabulary-builders/ Enjoy.

[@matheusbc22]

My personal experience with Anki to learn chinese starts good, i could remember words even listen to words in C-dramas and recognize it, but after this i start thinking that i need more words, then i started to add new decks, but then i realize that i couldn't stop reviewing the old decks because if i stopped i would forget, so there was a time that i was doing like 1 hour of Anki then i was messing up and mixing words and turned out sometimes i was taking 1h30 to review Anki's decks, then it got like very boring to use Anki and i started to dislike Anki and lose interest, if you use Anki you will probably get a dependency of Anki, because the words won't have that much of emotional attachment i guess, so i think Anki might be good for learn words at the very beginning when you know nothing about, but after this, it's better to actually speak the language or if you could, make both at the very beginning

[@PapperLapper]

Great episode guys! I got to a bit less than 4000 sentence/vocab cards in total, and have since been adding an average of 2 cards per day. I've been watching way more youtube, and have been feeling bigger gains than ever before. Everyone, just immerse more.

[@humanbean3]

Yeah, I say immerse more too, but only after you have 2-4k sentence/vocab cards lol. Watching media aka immersion is really good AFTER you have a good 2-3k words and some grammar under your belt IMO. I've been studying for a year with anki+immersion the entire time and just recently has the immersion really started getting my brain firing and giving me gains. In my first 6 months the Anki was crucial. Immersing during that time I was only randomly catching words here and there and they were words I had drilled in Anki lol. Without it, would've been all gibberish!

[@hotrodjones74]

I'm multilingual and I've never used Anki. I tried it briefly, but just didn't find it useful or enjoyable. I got more from reading, music and film. I've watched loads of Russian, French and Norwegian cinema, which helped me greatly with these languages.

[@paintmarker44]

Were you watching with subs or learning by listening an watching context of the show?

[@s0lanav]

Great video! just today I was watching Justin's video-essay about anki. I think people are too quick to judge him because anki has been so useful to the language learning community. He means well and acknowledges that it has its place in the learning process. I personally love anki and use it for ~20 mins a day (6 new words) and it's been very useful to do my homework and read text but Justin's recommendations are very interesting, I will try them out asap.

[@copingforever6093]

if you make good cards you actually look forward for them but if you just copy paste a dictionary definition without any example sentence or any audio it is very bad a word can have 10 different meanings, also if you are not a native english speaker and you make your cards in english (ie english is your "native language" and some other language is your target language) also look up the english definitions of the words from time to time online on oxford dictionary

[@trollingisasport]

What's better than anki, is to use cards and put them into three piles in order of how fast you recall the answer until you've memorized everything for a session. And repeating.

[@user-hl5ne1kh6s]

i love the amount of passion Raza puts in the final message.

[@dmp7252]

I had no idea people thought Anki would make them fluent. This take me back to the crowd of people who think just knowing a bunch of words will make you fluent in a language. Yes, you need words, but that's only part of the equation. Kind of reminds me of figure skating. Yes, you need triple and quadruple jumps to WIN a championship, but you also need to blend the elements seamlessly while skating to music for 4 minutes. Well, as you can imagine, some skaters ignore the choreography and the musical aspect and just focus on the jumping in a race to get as many points so they can win. They are really trying to game the system, they are not trying to become competent world-class figure skaters. The same can be said for language learning. People are trying to game the system, looking for shortcuts through Anki, DuoLingo, whatever the latest app is. But if they would simply have conversations with people, and diversify HOW they expose themselves to language, they will kill MANY birds with one stone, learn more words than they ever imagined, and they will be pleasant to listen to in the language they're learning. They will finally be that world-class figure skater that everyone loves watching. And not the figure skater that people can't stand to watch because he has no feel for the music, has no musicality and only does one jump after the next.

[@dycedargselderbrother5353]

I wonder if it's true or if it's a strawman. I've never heard anyone say this and it's not a part of any of the major learning philosophies such as AJATT, MIA/Refold, The Moe Way, DJT guide, or posts on /r/LearnJapanese or WaniKani, etc. If someone has this opinion, they're either coming up with it themselves or are getting advice from somewhere obscure and are not checking alternative sources.

[@danmcdougall4987]

Man, this feels timely for me because I do wake up at 5am and do reviews because I am a husband, father, uni student, worker, doing blogging and youtube on the side. My (Australian) wife's family live in Japan and I love Japan so we are moving there next year so I feel this time pressure to know the language to an okay level so anki felt the the option according to the community. Im busy so it feels like I am getting a lot in a short amount of time, but I am just always counting down until I know a certain number of words and finish the N5 deck or the N4 deck or add a certain number to my deck. It's just not enjoyable. I literally woke up this morning and was just like 'I do not want to review cards anymore'. I have been learning Japanese for like 5 months now so my opinions aren't as valid as many, but the anki stuff is starting to kill me. I just want to consume the language and enjoy consuming the language. I am not saying Anki is not good, because it is, but I really feel like I have wasted so much time reviewing when I could have been immersing or talking with someone on Italki or reading or writing or doing literally anything else that has to do with Japanese that isn't this weird container of information that happens to be in Japanese. Im going to keep my Kanji deck that I use with Kodansha's course, but I think I am just going to chill on the rest of my decks right now and just spend all my time immersing, looking stuff up, having conversations and actually doing Japanese. Many people who are seriously fluent did it this way and I think for my personality this is how it will have to be. UPDATE: I just read now. I learn words and kanji as I go and I just keep reading to encounter those words again as naturally spaced repetitions. Japanese is better after 2 months of reading than 7 months of study, watching, and listening. READ MORE. It works.

[@danmcdougall4987]

@Trevor F Hey, thanks for the response. I tried the graded reader course early on in the kanji journey and I just didn't like it that much, but to honest I was very impatient and just "want to know them as fast as possible". Silly, I know. I can recognise over thousand kanji now, but reading them is still an issue. Maybe its time to revisit them because I am able to have simple conversations in Japanese for 30 minutes plus with italki teachers, but my reading is letting me down a little. Might check back in at the end of the year and let you know how it goes.

[@LukeAvedon]

I feel like SuperMemo Incremental Reading solved and addressed a lot of these points.

[@Raifu__]

1 year and a half of Anki, got to a point I understand most japanese conversations thanks to it, I wouldn’t change anything. No kanji isolated study, just vocab and sentences. What I would change is using sentence cards from the start.

[@manuelgutierrez6546]

My problem with Anki or any srs is that I find it boring to death, so they would make me give up lol Different strokes for different folks I guess 😂

[@GoogleUser-pf7wb]

another BANGER

[@Cosmicgardening]

The leading questions he asks about the quantity and rarity of words after this is also misleading. By nature of the repetition spaces growing exponentially you simply don't see cards for common words. My initial deck (N4/N5) 10-13 months later gives me like 3 words a day and they're trivial to recall. Deleting the deck or not is irrelevant because the amount of review is trivial.

[@TheDrunkMunk]

Quitting Anki greatly improved my life. I spend much more time reading now and my skills have grown much faster since I quit

[@jackherbic6048]

I think there is a real danger with anki that you will feel like it is the only way to learn a new word. And because of this you don't try to learn anything that you haven't made an anki card out of. Even just having it as a supplement can cause this.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

People tend to misuse Anki, and fail to get results. It's a good program as a part of a more comprehensive strategy, but simply using it isn't going to make a person fluent. Ideally, you'd be using it with phrases and entire sentences with one word that's blocked out and a picture on the other side. You'd train the card from both directions. Early on, you'd likely also want cards where one side is the written word or phrase and the other side is a recording. Ideally, these sentences would be coming directly out of reading materials that you're interested in or things you need to learn for school. Over time, you'd probably find fewer and fewer words in your reading that need to be learned and you'd add fewer and fewer new words. Eventually, you'd get all the repetition that you need from reading and generally using the language and can completely stop Anki as it's completely pointless at that point.

[@Dinnasiha]

what about using anki in med school ?

[@Joao-um2fc]

well my opinion about anki is that it's not useless but I think there are more efficient ways of learning a new language, English is not my first language and that' how I learned it, I started learning it 1 year and a half ago, what made me get fluent was, constant exposure everytime, my daily routine while learning was, start reading manga, see a word, look it up, and if it appears again and I don't remember I look it up again, till it stick in my mind, I did the same thing with shows, but re-listening till I get my brain used to understand, I think this is way more efficient than anki, I could learn something about 25 words a day, of course in the begging they weren't strongly sticked in my mind, but as long as I keep reading the media I was reading the words end up coming up over and over again, and I got used to them by seeing them a frequently, and they've gotten unforgettable, that's the most efficient way in my opinion ,I'm tryna do the same with japanese, and from my point of view, it's working pretty well, with japanese we have to be a little bit more cautious because of kanji, but if we expose ourselves the right way it works, my advice is, spend more time getting exposed than doing anki flash cards, choose the right media, with the right level, and fly, you are not gonna get fluent just by anki the human brain is a machine of recognizing patterns, of it only gets used to recognize some isolated phrases you are not gonna get too far, or you might do it, but 10x slower

[@copingforever6093]

also dont literally add every word you encounter in your deck, I only use anki for the JLPT words to work through the textbooks but if I read manga I just bookmark them and whenever I encounter them again I can see from the bookmarks where else I have encountered the word

[@uchuuseijin]

I just had a word come up in my anki reps that I had forgotten in conversation. I recognized the word because I forgot it and had to ask. I thought at the time that I had never encountered it before (I was trying to say 養子).

[@heisenberg76511]

I have a pretty clear opinion about learning languages using Anki. I would say that to learn a language you need a lot of listening, reading and speaking, and the vocabulary starts to settle in your memory over time. But I would say Anki is great for learning other alphabets like Katakana or Hangul.

[@Otome_chan311]

How do you listen, read, or speak a language with no knowledge of the language?

[@mrcv4]

I think he is making an argument from the standpoint of someone who has never used anki. I wouldn't recommend for anyone to use anki as a main tool for learning language, but for me, it just works. It is not the best way, it is just helping with harder words. Anyone can definitely use Anki in wrong way, but you can just experiment if is not your thing then you'll just leave it. Is spaced repetition not working? I think, if I'm not mistaken, one of the best way for memorization that we know. The level of 30-40k words (average passive vocabulary size college graduated person) can't be reached by just comprehensive learning. How will one be able to bridge the gap of language acquisition an average adult speaking who learn his language for a period of 20-30 years and 24 hours (yes, including dreaming in different languages) if they are already 30 or 40 years old? Anki is just a way of getting there because, in normal ways, you will be learning the words in your adolescence like crazy (when your brain is developing at a rate that it will never be repeated after that).

[@TheMisfit]

I think looking up every word you don't know might be too tedious if you are a beginner and probably takes away from the immersion so maybe using Anki to get that initial foundation of words might be more beneficial.

[@SmallSpoonBrigade]

You are correct. Ideally, you should be using a graded reader when you first start out. At least for languages that have them. One of the reasons why reading Chinese has been so problematic is that up until recently, there were so few graded readers available outside of Chinese-speaking areas. These days, there are options that "only" require a couple hundred characters to read. You should never have to look up more than 5 words on a typical page in what you're reading, if you do, then it's too hard and it's unlikely to result in much learning. And better is if it's only 2 or 3. Sure, you have to do a lot of reading like that, but you'll probably actually do that reading.

[@gotnoname3956]

I have my problems with such titles. Of course you will not get fluent by only focusing on Anki and getting a living dictionary. However, Anki is great for learning vocabulary explicitly and repeat known vocabulary. Especially in the beginning where you know nearly no vocabulary it is very helpful for getting on good basis. You always should get comprehensive input as early as possible. But Anki represents a good addition to all ither ressources you can and should use.

[@GAOMaster]

I think Anki is great when you are an HikiNeet . Having this daily thing to do is good for my mental health. It forced me to learn to organize my day.

[@imbritish]

Paraphrasing 'Just add the words you struggle to retain to anki as a last resort' - But isn't this a self-correcting problem? If it's an easy word then you just breeze past it in 3 seconds and very quickly it's only appearing once every 5 months...... Also, I'm not really seeing anyone of relevance out there saying 'Anki is KING. Immersion is just supplementary' Obviously, most agree that it's the opposite. So I don't know who this guy is really arguing with. Meh maybe I haven't looked hard enough.

[@mar2ck_]

11:50 For my Anki I do 8 new words a day and I have 1777 total seen cards, today I have 97 reviews due which will take 19 minutes. Idk if this guy has ever used Anki seriously before but it seems like he's way overestimating how much time reviews take. I usually take about half an hour a day which is nothing, it doesn't take hours unless you do a ton of new cards a day or your retention is bad.

[@DirtyDan666]

"5 new cards a day is so easy, let's make it 10" "Dude 10 cards are easy too, I don't have many reviews, I can do 20 cards ez" 2 weeks later: *Died from 300+ daily reviews* ⚰️

[@Rhythm162.]

@@DirtyDan666 it depends on the person, I used to be overwhelmed with 170 words a day but I've now accustomed to doing 350 a day, even then it's a little over an hour, it depends on how much time you have and are willing to do

[@DirtyDan666]

@@Rhythm162. Words are fine, but over 200 sentence cards will get rough

[@suzubee9602]

Really depends on the person. I can't do 10 because overtime I just spend over an hour on anki and it's hell. Moved it to 5 and it's easier and gives me time to immerse. I'm able to have to higher on sentence cards and those mined but getting through the beginning stages with those premade 2k decks sucks for a lot of ppl . It's hard to retain new info

[@meomeoow]

@@DirtyDan666 Personally I don't even look at how many reviews I need to do per day. I just do however many I feel like. Anki records it all the same. (fyi: I only ever do Anki decks that come with sentences)

[@stretch8390]

This was a bit of a tough listen truthfully. Take Justin's advice around the 22 minute mark, he's appearing as a critical expert and suggests a rule of three. Ok, why three? Why not two or five? Is this based on anything? He has clients that have grossly misused and misunderstood the point of spaced repetition but how does that equate to the method of spaced repetition being ineffective?