Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

I'm sorry, I didn't read the article but I thought my experience would be a good anecdote.

I've used Anki for multiple years and learned around 18'000 Japanese words. It's difficult to say but I'd say I've learned how to read around 5'000 kanji. When I studied in Japan, my kanji reading—don't mix that up with comprehension!—was way above everyone else's. And most of my classmates were either Korean or Chinese.

That's what 10 minutes of free time—I did that during my daily train rides—can get you! Keep practicing. Being ignorant is the first step towards becoming more knowledgeable.

There's a surprising gulf between word recognition and overall sentence comprehension. I'm learning Farsi with a combination of Anki and Youtube videos and sometimes I find myself in the weird state where I recognize every word in a sentence, but yet cannot assemble its overall meaning.

Not buying at all that you learned 18000 words and 5000 kanji in ten minutes per day. Thats 60 hours a year for say five year, or 300 hours. Thats leaves you with about 70 words and/or kanji per hour or less than a minute per word/kanji. A rate which far surpasses native speakers.

Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.

I made a tool based on this principle!

We spend hours a day browsing the web, so I made a browser extension[0] that translates sentences at your knowledge level into the language you're learning, so that you're always learning a little through immersion.

I also used the same "10 minutes a day on Anki" strategy with my A levels, and it made the revision process so so much nicer because stuff I'd learnt two years ago was as fresh as if I'd learnt it a couple of months ago, rather than years.

[0] https://nuenki.app

Sure, but I didn't read it as 10 minutes a day. The comment says ten minutes of free time. So could be 4 train rides, 10 mins after you finish your sandwich at lunch, 10 mins with your coffee in the morning, etc etc.

> ten minutes per day

...Maybe the poster meant "«10 minutes» per ride"? («That's what 10 minutes of free time - I did that during my daily train rides»)

I completely get what you mean and I had the same trouble. But keep at it, it will click.

That isn't terribly far off. I used Anki throughout my A levels, spending about 250 hours on it in total according to its statistics, and had something like 10k cards that I reviewed 50k times.

Now, those cards weren't alone - they were reinforcing content that I'd learnt in lessons. But if they were doing it for 10 minutes a day a few times a day, it seems quite plausible to me.

Whoops, sorry if that was confusing.

Actually, it took me 20 minutes of time per day to do my reviews + new words. I had, on average, 200 cards to go through daily (180 review + 20 new cards).[1] Going through 18'000 words took me around 5 years. 5×365×20=36'500

> A rate which far surpasses native speakers.

Are you comparing me to babies? It took me 2 weekends to learn all kana, but it takes years for a toddler to learn just hiragana. It's not a fair comparison.

> Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.

I wonder why you think it's unrealistic. It's not like I'm a genius or anything.[2]

[1] Two cards is one word; one for English -> Japanese, one for Japanese -> English.

[2] Some teachers definitely thought I was a genius because of my memory, but it was all thanks to Anki. And proof is that I was absolutely bad at text comprehension. Anki doesn't make you practice that.

Looks not bad but a) billing/prices should imho be prominent and not hidden behind trial or get started. And b) not sure if 5/12/20 per month is not too much? The About section is nice. (I use two other paid language services, thus no need/interest in another)

I learned 17.5k words comprised of ~3k kanji in around 2 years at about an hour a day of review time. That's reviews + new cards, not including time immersing in order to find the daily quota of new vocab which itself was 2 to 3 hours of study.

So, by my calculations for just the Anki time alone it's about 17.5k words split across 730 hours, which comes out to about 23 words and hour or one word every 2.5 minutes.

I've seen a pretty wide variety of people do Anki, and I can say there's a distribution in length of time per card for basically the exact same types of cards among people. The slowest people average around 3x slower than the fastest.

I've tried to get into anki a bunch of times but never stick with it. It's an on-and-off thing for me that I end up looking into again every few years, which I've gone through about 5 times now. Here's how it usually goes:

* Get interested in memorizing something / multiple things

* Find that the decks available to me are actually not so great

* Get reading online, people say that the real way to benefit from it is to make your own deck (which ups the time commitment significantly)

* Read online about how to get the most out of anki, find out that everyone universally agrees that the default settings are terrible but nobody quite agrees on how to set it for best results

* Try to hit a happy medium, but find that the overhead of 'rating' the difficulty of recall for cards (and how it interacts with the complex settings that I still don't have complete confidence in) adds an incredibly (to me) distracting amount of overhead and never get used to it

* Miss a few days, get overwhelmed with the amount of cards stacked up, don't feel good about my settings (which have implications for what cards show up like, a year + down the line)

* Ultimately fizzle out

I'm probably going to start the cycle over again soon. I really do want it to work out for me. Any tips to avoid this issue? I'm planning to actually pay for some decks this time to see if that gets me to the quality I want, and going to skip the whole 'trying to make my own deck' thing for now

Given what you've said:

* Make your own cards (unless there's an automated workflow [Japanese, sentence mining], really good shared decks, or you're studying for a standardized exam [USMLE])

* Deck Settings (scheduling): Enable FSRS. Press 'Optimize', then press optimize once per month.

* Deck Settings (workload): Wait 2 weeks before gradually increasing new cards per day (if you want to study for longer). Decrease it immediately if you feel you're getting overwhelmed.

* Deck Settings (backlog): Set max reviews/day to 9999

* App Settings: Disable 'Show next review time above answer buttons'

* Addons: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/876946123 (you seem to have a problem with answer button selection)

* Recommended: Press 'sync', and create an AnkiWeb account. In app settings, set Anki to auto-sync on open/close. This is a free backup.

* Optional: Use a mobile client (AnkiDroid is free on Android, AnkiWeb is free on iOS)

You'll feel like you completed the first day far too quickly, and will want to do more. Avoid overstudying until you build intuition for how it impacts your daily workload.

Use Anki every day

Thank you, the pass / fail addon will help a lot I think, in addition to the FSRS features included in the article. I'll come back to this comment for setting up my settings before starting up again with Anki.

If I'm planning to learn several topics at once (I'm never preparing for anything I will be tested on or hit a deadline for, this is not for a school, work, or travel program), is it better to treat the decks as one big combined review do you think?

Yeah there’s a few different levels. 1) not knowing the words 2) knowing all the words but not what they mean together 3) not being able to keep up with the speed at which the sentence is spoken…

Your call.

Ideally one deck, but add a tag when creating the note, so you can separate things out later if you want to pause learning something/split them out.

> Use Anki every day

I think this is great advice. I have some friends that used Anki that told me "oh yeah I just study once per week" and I just had PTSD of when I forgot to do one day. Sometimes I would miss a day due to traveling and timezone difference and I would instantly panic when I would see 400+ cards to review.

If you don't do it daily, Anki doesn't make any sense to me. My recommendation—to that friend and everyone else—is to study a little bit every day. It's much better for building a strong foundation, especially for languages.

Yeah, ignore the "defaults are terrible" people. Turn on FSRS, if it isn't on by default (I think it is), and forget about it.

I have seen this opinion offered hundreds of times and each and every time I reflect upon the irony that not one of these commenters having trouble navigating the UI, etc to their liking doesn't just ... Make Anki cards about Anki.

If that sounds silly, it shouldn't. I've made flashcards out of all kinds of other programs, from vim to shell shortcuts to Photoshop. Nobody ever expects an interface built for professionals to be something they can just waltz in on and understand perfectly on day 1.

Fascinating, great app. I wish it automatically adjusted the difficulty based on whether I understood the sentence.