Last year I wanted to take my language learning a little bit more seriously
so I downloaded the program called Anki and everyone was praising it back then because it
was basically a space repetition-based flashcard program that allowed you to
learn almost anything at a really really great efficiency so since everyone was praising it,
I too thought it was pretty much the holy grail of learning anything and even though I did make
a lot of progress using it I was still pretty much a slave to it for 12 entire months and
I would have done stuff a lot differently if i had learned what I will talk about in this video First
let's talk about the quality of cards. So it's better to spend a little bit more time crafting a
card and spending more time immediately creating a card than to just make a card in two seconds
so for example if you have this card right here you have the spanish definition on the front and
then the english definition on the back and even though I do have two definitions I can't learn
what this word means but it's still not going to be as easy enough getting it into my head.
But compared to this card for example. So I have three entire definitions I have, sorry the
Spanish definition on the front and then on the back I have three English definitions so that's
more ways I know how to use a card on top of that I can read example sentences so
even if I don't get what the card means here then I have example sentences to help me out
and this helps a lot in terms of really grasping what the card means
at the moment i'm happy to go through thousands of cards that were badly made with
the English definition on the front and then the foreign language definition on the back and it's
so time consuming so trust me you want to make your cards right the first time and then you won't
have to suspend or delete them later and because i didn't really understand the algorithm completely
i got in this really bad habit of pressing the hard button instead of the again button and what
this does is that the hard button decreases the ease level and you're not really seeing
the card in the same day and it's a lot better to use the again button watching matt versus
panzer video really helped me on determining what I was doing wrong and it really opened my eyes on
that I was doing it wrong this entire time so if you want a complete crash course on what
on how the algorithm works you should watch that video. So as compared to what I did differently
from then compared to now, this number which is the new interval I changed this from 0% to 50%
so let's say you had a 6 month old card which is you know the next the next time you're gonna
see it is in 6 months. So if you press again or you know fail on that card then the interval on
that is gonna get sent from 6 months all the way down to just 0 days* and I didn't want to
lose that entire 6 months just because I messed up one time and that's why I overused the hard
button. So using the 50% now instead of zero percent means that instead of going from 6 months
to 1 day or I guess 0 days technically, it went from 6 months to 3 months then failed again, it
went from from 3 months 1.5 months and so on so it was just a gradual going down if you kept failing
it instead of just filling it one time then having it sent down to one day. Another feature
that you should use as compared to what I did is actually use the suspend card feature so if you
if you fail a card a certain number of times which is going to be with this number of times
then it's going to automatically suspend the card which will mean that you won't see it
anymore and then you have to go to your list and then you can delete it there or edit it
but it's just a way to get it out of out of your list so that you can edit it later and you should
definitely do that as compared to what I did which was trying to brute force memorize everything.
The program is simply just a reinforcement measure to make sure that you didn't forget anything that
you've already learned and it's good to understand it first and then memorize it later you should not
overdo it when it comes to this program, so my style of of keeping of maintaining my Spanish
and improving my Mandarin a lot was that I would basically develop a backlog of cards and this
would be like 1000s of cards big i think right now in mandarin it's 3000 cards and in spanish it's a
1000 cards so even if i didn't do any immersion then new cards would come from there and I just
feel proud of myself every day that I've learned something from as compared to yesterday even if I
didn't really study for that day because i would always do my Anki wraps every day. The thing that
was really terrible was that I was spending more time looking things up in the dictionary
I was spending more time making cards and studying Anki than actually immersing in the language
and this is something that i totally would have done differently compared to now.
Immerse first and watch shows and read and whatever and then Anki comes second. You should
spend most of your time immersing and actually rawly interacting with language as compared to
doing flash cards. Flash cards should be less and then immersing should be more.
A lot of times I would stress out over having a perfect streak like I wouldn't be able to take
naps because i would have like nightmares of what happens if I if I mess up my streak
and I have this this whole long streak going on and on top of that sometimes just wouldn't even
spend time with my family or I wouldn't watch a movie, because oh no, I gotta complete my
reps I gotta do that before I go to bed it was just starting to take over my life and it was
really bad for my mental health. Also, not getting good enough sleep also hurt a lot with it too so
over the past couple months I've been getting the bad habit of doing my reps right before
I go to bed, and I would always stay up a little bit later completing my reps than just
probably doing them earlier in the day and this was a bad habit as well. Moderation is really key
when it comes to this program so don't be afraid to drop the new amount of cards that are coming
in every single day so by default the new amount of cards is 20 but I've dropped this down to 10
to give myself a little bit more breathing room and if this feels too much you can drop down to
any number you want. You can tailor it to compared to how much time that you have. You shouldn't let
Anki determine how much time you have. So time for some including thoughts so first of all is
to understand the concept first and then try to memorize it later so if you're trying to memorize
a new vocabulary word in a foreign language, you should understand what the card means beforehand
and try to really understand how it's used within a sentence and then you put that into your Anki
deck because the time you're sending reviewing Anki shouldn't be the time that you're actually
learning it that should be beforehand. Press the again button instead of the heard button.
It's really going to help you in the long run if you use the again instead of hard.
And finally, don't be afraid to drop the amount of new cards coming in and even though you should
be completing all of your reps every single day, it's okay to drop the number of new cards that
are coming in every day. Yeah thanks for watching that's all i wanted to talk about in this video.
If you like the video like it. If you dislike it then tell me why you dislike it in the comments.
If you didn't either then i don't know, like it [laughs]. And I might do more more of these
types of videos in the future but it's just it's a matter of finding the time and also finding
the topics in order to do it so yeah thanks for watching. See you later. the foreign language um
answer and it's what am i talking about first let's talk about the quality of cards you make
so it's better to make make what the thing that really sucked is that i was spending more time
so you should you should be spending more whoops moderation is really key when it comes to this
program so don't be afraid to decrease the amount of new cars that are coming
that are coming into you every day why'd i say like that next talk about time management um how
do i forget what i'm about to see next let's talk about time management so anki is a supplement um
i just blanked out at the moment right now i'm having to go through probably thousands of
yes definitely thousands of cards yeah thousands yeah thanks for watching um
if you enjoyed feel free to drop a sound so cringe what i've been recording for 22 minutes