Anki… What I would do differently

Prioritize Anki - When learning my TL, I realize now the importance of Anki. There are studies that show that the amount of times you need to see a word before you can acquire it it up to 16 times. (Look into the work of vocab specialist Paul Nation) Anki solves this for you. You can argue that different contexts can affect this but over a period of months the amount of times you encounter a certain word will likely hit that threshold and you will acquire the word.

Don’t be afraid of premade decks of most common 2000 words - I feel like had I took time to work through an anki deck of this size, I would achieve a higher comprehension faster. This is because my input + lookups are fine for acquiring words but there is no way to know if the word that I’m sentence mining is truly frequent or not. I likely was mining words outside of that frequency list. I’m still a bit skeptical, but I’m willing to give it a try.

Never add sentences with more than one unknown word - sure there may be the rare exception here or there, but I used to add sentences to my anki deck with 2-4 unknown words in them with the rationale that I’ll get more bang for my buck in the long term. However, my anki deck became an absolute slog as it was not only difficult to remember the 3 unknown words within the card, but it was also very hard to parse the sentence at all. This lead to me giving up on more than one anki deck.

Don’t be afraid to do a smaller amount of new cards a day - I’ve found that my sweet spot right now is 5 new cards a day. It’s enough that I feel like I’m doing something substantial, but I’m not waking up in the morning with 200 plus reviews. I used to try to do 10 a day and got overwhelmed after a few weeks. To be honest I still want to understand how people are spending more than 25 mins a day in their anki decks.

How about you all… any realizations or things you would do differently with your Anki?

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