I've used Anki over the past 8 years or so very successfully. I strongly recommend it to anyone learning a language. Here are some tips to get the most out of it:
* Only put things you know into Anki. An individual Anki card should feel a little too easy when you make it.
* Put in words with a good amount of context. Avoid single words as much as possible. The quickest way to do this is to just input the sentence from the book/TV where you learned the word. You'll learn collocations and grammar structures by doing this.
* Delete cards when they give you trouble. Language learning is a marathon, if the word is important you'll see it again. If you keep getting a card wrong then you probably didn't actually learn it in the first place, or the card is written in a confusing way.
* Avoid the temptation to input huge lists of words automatically. Lots of beginners download "3000 Most Common Words", put them all into Anki and then give up within a few weeks. A language is much more than just a list of words.
Sounds like the way you use Anki is more of a learning supplementary rather than a singular tool? Like you are learning of words elsewhere and entering them into Anki for memorization once you have learned about them?
I’m just curious. I’d like to use Anki to get better at reading and playing chords (on keyboard / piano) from symbol notation but I haven’t started yet. Would you recommend learning each chord one by one and entering them into Anki as I learn them?
I think that's a very fair assessment of how I use Anki. I think if you spend all your time using Anki and no time interacting with the actual language you're learning you won't get very far. Basically every sentence I put into Anki comes from a book, movie, TV show or conversation.
The question about piano chords is really interesting. I often compare learning a language to learning to play the piano. Both are real time skills that require practice, to just learning. I meet someone who loves reading grammar books I say "You can read a book on piano construction 100 times and you won't learn to play the piano.
As for your case, what is the skill you want to learn? Playing the chords right? Then that has to form the main focus of your practice. By all means, use Anki to help memorise chord names and chord patterns but be careful: You might just get really good at seeing a chord and saying it's name rather than seeing a chord and playing it!
Also, sight-reading is a very real-time skill. You have to read those chords and then play them on the right beat. If you practice chords with Anki you might get good at seeing them in Anki and then playing them a few seconds later, but it's not the same as doing it in real time.
So true. My goal with learning to play chords from symbols is to look at a chord progression and be able to play it without too much trouble. Not really for performance or anything, but to help with composition.
So perhaps a good approach would be to do the Anki spaced learning sessions in front of the keyboard and actually play the chord as the answer. I may not become a great real time sight reader, but being able to see a chord like C+9 / C95 and be able to play it a second or two later should be good enough.
Anki is king of med schools, and was huge among my classmates back then. The first thing you learn after failing to use it right for a while:
Anki is for retention, not learning. If you haven’t internalized what you’re flashcarding, it’s not going to stick just because you’re using spaced repetition.
I've tried using Anki for music and I don't think it works very well. You want to drill chords so your fingers don't forget them. If you get the flash card right you will only see it once. Flash cards may help with learning chords, but spaced repetition flash cards will not.
I would recommend putting in chord progressions (like in a normal song) rather than single chords. Also make sure to actually form the chords, either on the piano (definitely much better), or on the table (in a pinch). This will allow you to learn the chords in context and give your hands muscle memory, especially with common transitions.
>Delete cards when they give you trouble. Language learning is a marathon, if the word is important you'll see it again. If you keep getting a card wrong then you probably didn't actually learn it in the first place, or the card is written in a confusing way.
Anki has that feature built in actually, they're called leeches. By default I believe it's set to 7 mistakes. The idea is that if it happens, you need to either remake the card or do as you said, and wait for it to come up later.
* When learning languages, create your cards in a way that you must type the answers in Anki. It's way easier to acknowledge how confident you are with them.
* Your Anki cards/decks shouldn't be static: edit and tree-shake them often. It means that you got a deeper understanding of the subject.
I love Anki, but when it comes to language learning imo it is only great for bootstrapping a language and getting the first 250 - 500 words under your belt.
Beyond that it is like trying to learn how to ride a bike by putting facts about balance and motion into your Anki deck.
Take example sentences from your grammar book in Anki. Quiz from your native language to target language only. You'll be surprised at how useful it is.
Vocab is a grind no matter how you do it, but the best place to be is being able to read books. This will allow you to have a natural repetition in context and get you will easily and enjoyably acquire the vocabulary. However, once you're past the most common 3000 words or so, new vocabulary often shows up at pretty rare frequencies. So if you're free reading and you encounter a rare piece of vocab it's quite useful to jam it into SRS software like Anki and review it until you are up to about 1 month frequency -- which will probably be when you encounter the word naturally.
Those are awesome tips. Could you give a bit more detail into the actual process you follow, beyond those tips? What is your process / do you have a specific routine you follow with the cards?
4. If the meaning of the word or phrase "clicks" for you, put it into Anki. If not, look it up in a dictionary. For words you have to look up, think very carefully about putting them into a dictionary. There are no hard and fast rules but err on the side of leaving them out.
Review the cards whenever you have time. If you have so many cards that "Review anki cards" is something you have to schedule time for then imo you have too many.
Let's imagine I'm learning English and I read a BBC article and I see this sentence:
> They often have to get creative when "cashing out" or laundering the money they have stolen, according to a security expert.
Hmmm. I don't know what "cashing out" or "laundering" means. Let's keep reading.
> "They can try to sell the card, which is not big money because they only get a few dollars for each one," he said.
Aha! "Cashing out" must mean getting money from what they did. Now that I've learnt "cashing out" I'll put the original sentence into Anki. The back of the card will be an explanation of "cashing out". When you start you can use a translation into your native language. Then when you get better you can use a dictionary definition in English or even write your own definition. Anything that helps you remember the phrase that you already learnt.
After I finish reading the article maybe I check "laundering" in a dictionary or maybe I just leave it. Don't worry that you'll "miss" a word. If it's common you'll see it again. If it's extremely rare then you won't see it again and won't need to know it.
Learning a language is like walking through an orchard. Pick the ripe fruit and leave the rest. If you try to grab everything you won't be able to carry them.
> Learning a language is like walking through an orchard. Pick the ripe fruit and leave the rest. If you try to grab everything you won't be able to carry them.
Great analogy, it really resonates with my experience. Your Anki language learning tactics also.
Before Anki, I tried to learn Polish with Memrise and it didn't work. With public decks you will waste time on irrelevant words for your usecase and soon you'll get bored. You MUST do your decks. My tactic is to digest everyday one or two headlines from a Polish newspaper and create 2-3 cards with relevant words/expressions (3 x 365 = 1k+ cards/year!).
I used to agree with the traditional SRS criticism: learning is not memorising stuff. But after trying it I reshaped my beliefs: learning is understanding and memorising.
* Only put things you know into Anki. An individual Anki card should feel a little too easy when you make it.
* Put in words with a good amount of context. Avoid single words as much as possible. The quickest way to do this is to just input the sentence from the book/TV where you learned the word. You'll learn collocations and grammar structures by doing this.
* Delete cards when they give you trouble. Language learning is a marathon, if the word is important you'll see it again. If you keep getting a card wrong then you probably didn't actually learn it in the first place, or the card is written in a confusing way.
* Avoid the temptation to input huge lists of words automatically. Lots of beginners download "3000 Most Common Words", put them all into Anki and then give up within a few weeks. A language is much more than just a list of words.