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Well that didn’t work well, let’s try that again:
I have changed much around in Anki, and I feel that the default settings fit my needs.
A few things I have change are as follows:
-Increase leech limit to 99. I don’t want to get my cards leeched, the ultimate decks are the 300 or whatever most used words, I surely want to know them all-Set infinite new cards/day on new decks, and then insted of going through a set amount of cards a day, I will use a set amount of time.
-The decks I make myself(from lang-8 comments) include both Japanese-> English, and English-> Japanese, though English->Japanese is the best on to go for, if you only want one :)
A final note:
Do ALL reviews every day!
reviews>learning new stuff
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5223862/1h%2015.PNGI increase the leech limit and only use English –> Japanese, I also make use of the syncing stuff for multiple devices, that’s one of my favourite features.
I love the sync. I always have a lot of downtime at work and its perfect for reviewing. Just like Mark, I use a time limit instead of a card limit, sometimes for 30-30 :d.
Wrong way: Go from item to item, once you recognise it think to yourself: ‘yep, I know this’.
Right way:
Kanji/Radicals: Next item, write it down. Get its meaning. Once it quizzes you and you know the answer, don’t just think it, write it down. Even if you don’t know the stroke order. This significantly reduces the time taken to memorize.
Words: If there’s no crazy Koichi story with them then you’re gonna have to invent one. I went through half a year of smart.fm (I had no other work at the time) and really didn’t learn much even though I drilled a LOT. Without a story (or better yet, using them in context of speaking your own made up sentence) “kono doubutsu ha neko desu” they just don’t stick. It was really bad when I was trying to talk for the first time, and couldn’t remember the hundreds of words I’d learned.
Some (all?) of you may think ‘well DUH’ but I’m not that bright. : p And if I’d known this to begin with I’d have saved myself a lot of time.
Inventing stories for words is a no-go… You are to learn around 10k words, and there is no way to learn them other than straight up memorization. It makes sense to do it with kanji, seeing as you only need to learn 2000, but having stories for all words just doesn’t work. With time you will learn train your memory, and you will start to see patterns, which will increase your learning speed.
When doing a story for a word, how are you going to know which word it is you need, when all other words in the sentence could also be the one you are looking for? Just learn them straight up using SRS, and everything will be fine.I don’t like inventing stories for anything, I stopped doing it for kanji and really it has made no difference for me. Funny how that kind of stuff can differ so much person to person.
and I don’t really write kanji down either, because it’s just irritating to do with a ballpoint pen. I should really find a pencil.
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This reply was modified 13 years ago by
Luke.
Using Anki effectively = Using Anki every day. That’s about it.
If you hear/read a word once each day, in ten days or so you will remember it, like it or not, inventing stories or not. So, when you’re faced with Anki for the first time and you input ten words each day, having 100 cards (both sides) in five days and knowing nothing sure feels like “this stupid thing is not working, let’s tweak its settings” XD Just give it some time. If on, let’s say, the 10th day you start recalling the cards you inputted the first day, then on 11th you will recall the cards from the second day and so on. That actually is 10 words/day, which was your initial goal? :)
Don’t increase the leech limit to 99: change it to 0. I doubt you’re going to fail a card 99 times, but still, changing it to 0 is like turning leeches off.
Also, go Japanese to English, not English to Japanese: the majority of your time will be spent *taking in* Japanese input, so it’s more useful to be able to recognise a Japanese word and know what it means. Plus, how do you know which Japanese word corresponds to your English one? There are many.
Any good tips for sorting all the decks properly? I’m doing something very wrong, or my Anki likes to put imported decks wherever it feels like it belongs.. got no order what so ever. It’d be awesome with one complete deck per season too, but that’s just the lazy part of me speaking :P
“When doing a story for a word, how are you going to know which word it is you need, when all other words in the sentence could also be the one you are looking for?”
That would only be a problem if a sentence was created out of multiple unknown words which would defeat the purpose of the technique. The idea is to create multiple connections leading to the same thing. A ‘hook’. If you’re half-fluent in a language, seeing patterns in similar words is the easiest hook, but if there’s no pattern or a weak pattern then the strongest hook is image memory I think.
I’m going to do one I don’t know right now as an example.
みのがす minogasu – to overlook, let pass.ME overlook the gas. there’s …NO GASU here.
The main thing is to then picture it as an image too. It’s a stupid thing to OVERLOOK deadly toxic gas, MEの speech has gone funny from being poisoned by the がす.
Wow that’s awful, filling my brain with that stupid story for one word. But there’s mutliple linked pathways to that memory now. What’s been created is scaffolding, every time the word’s successfully recalled, the story is less needed until it’s eventually forgotten (scaffolding removed) and only the word remains.
http://www.memory-improvement-tips.com/memory-systems.html
^ very usefulDisagree with Mark W; totally agree with huw.
“How do you know which word [is significant]” – you made the story, so you’re GOING to know! :D Also, it’s probably going to be obvious (if it’s not obvious, you’ve failed at making a story): in the sentence… oh, let’s see… “Usually when the circus is in town, I see parades of elephants riding on bicycles” – the “obvious/significant” words in there are most probably going to be “circus”, “elephants” and “bicycles” (and, obviously, you’ll know which (if not all) of them are the ones relating to the thing you’re trying to remember, since you made the story up). So, the word you want can’t really be ANY other word in the sentence – “usually/when/the/in/I/see/of/on” seem in no way significant, so you’d be a fool to think it was one of them :P
I generally don’t think of stories for vocab though: I use little personal memory aides or experiences that probably wouldn’t seem like much in an explanation. Or I just straight-up remember it as it is, which is more desirable but less frequent :P
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This reply was modified 13 years ago by
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