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0 pointspessimizer8mo ago0 comments

I used only pre-"built" decks and got to C1 in Spanish. One was actually prebuilt, the other was literally algorithmically generated disposable clozes. That, one graded reader and comic books got me to being comfortable in an L1->L1 dictionary, and then it's over. You don't need language learning material any more, just material.

People are just repeating this advice about making your own decks, and it's based in nothing but having had it repeated to them. Spaced repetition is boiling in pseudoscience and ancient studies that don't say much other than that there's a forgetting curve.

Most people are just parroting stuff they read on the Supermemo wiki (or somebody read off the Supermemo wiki and repeated to them like they came up with it), and all of that is just thoughts off the top of one guy's head. His innovation is that he wrote a program to do Leitner boxes before he had ever heard of a Leitner box, but people treat every word like gospel.

The only five things I can say for language learning is to go really hard on systems in a new language that are completely unknown to you (like Romance conjugations for an English speaker); only drill sentences, not individual words; always say your Anki answers out loud, and read out loud as much as you can; comic books have pictures, too; and once you get comfortable in an L2->L2 dictionary, you're a more comfortable reader than a lot of natives.

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* Random Anki decks for a few European languages: https://sookocheff.com/post/language/cloze-deletions/

(Edit: the lovely thing about 10K algorithmically generated clozes is that they're utterly disposable, unlike cards that you make yourself. If one is a leech, forget about it. You'll see another one just like it when you get to the point that it won't be a leech for you.)

* Instructions on how to generate your own in other languages, for developers: https://sookocheff.com/post/language/bulk-generating-cloze-d...

(You could probably point out the above URL to an LLM and it would generate the code for you.)

* Anki to learn Romance conjugations first: https://www.asiteaboutnothing.net/w_ultimate_spanish_conjuga...

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mtalantikite8mo ago

Did you get through the entire KOFI deck for Spanish? I started the French one, but didn't make it past a month or two before I fell off. I'm thinking of going through the French -> Spanish Assimil course soon and might give the KOFI deck another go, this time in Spanish.

pessimizerOP8mo ago

I very much did, and sticking with it was the best choice I made. You will get very very fast at it after a while, and the first verbs are the hardest and most irregular (and you should spend the most time on them.) Throwing in the messy clozes after doing your conjugations is relaxing, and you can do as many of those as you're in the mood for, whereas the conjugations are systematically introduced and you shouldn't speed it up too much. Took me 7 months, but complete mastery. But literally some of the conjugations from the first hard couple months will bother you until the end.

I feel even better than natives sometimes because they learn conjugations in order at school, and when asked to recall them out of order (or hop from form to form) get confused. Once you have conjugations, you can read anything with a dictionary (and the online dle is the best dictionary I've ever used.)

I'm about to start again with KOFI French, but I had to do a lot of work to get my mouth and ears adjusted to hearing French as anything other then murmurs, and to be able to read (luckily for me, French is the opposite of perl and read-only instead of write-only.) There's a lot of stuff in French I want to read; reading all of the stuff translated into Spanish from French (but never into English) has got my beak wet.

Also, Spanish-language comic books will make you forget about English-language comic books. And they are very online, examples: http://columberos.blogspot.com/ and https://comicsmexicanosdejediskater.blogspot.com/

Also lots of other good material for vos: https://ahira.com.ar/ including https://ahira.com.ar/revistas/skorpio/ and https://ahira.com.ar/revistas/hora-cero-suplemento-semanal/ which is a landmark of literature that is too good for us (El Eternauta spans the entire length of the series.)

mtalantikite8mo ago

Thanks for the thoughtful response and links! I actually think you've convinced me to go back and try to complete the whole French KOFI deck, as there are certainly gaps in my verb conjugations.

For hearing French, I went through the old FSI French phonology course at the beginning, as well as all the grouped (A1/A2/etc) comprehensible input from this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@FrenchComprehensibleInput/playlists. Oh, and I did a bunch of the French listening comprehension on Yabla for a few months: https://french.yabla.com/.

pessimizerOP8mo ago

> FSI French phonology course

I did the same. Got me interested in the old programmatic methods and how they could be adapted to LLMs.

Also, pssst... https://seulementbd.blogspot.com/

codyb8mo ago

Just seconding all of this and how useful (and annoying) the conjugation deck has been for me in Spanish. Not sure if it was the KOFI one, but it runs through from irregular through to the mostly regular. And yea, total pain in the ass, and some still get me lol and I don't regret it in the slightest cause everything else is a ton easier to pick up and everything becomes much more accessible.

hitarpetar8mo ago

the advantage of building your own decks is choosing words you will actually use. this matters if you're practicing conversation, if your goal is just to read general material then using preselected word lists makes sense

pessimizerOP8mo ago

You should be using all the words. If you want to learn words about cooking, buy cookbooks. I want to read all material. I want to read extremely esoteric subjects from UNAM's press, I want to read Cervantes, I want to read cookbooks, I want to read Mexican street fotonovelas from the 70s.

> using preselected word lists makes sense

I have never used Anki for word to word translation, because there is no Spanish word that means any English word. You've restricted yourself to a particular paradigm from the beginning. I mean, do whatever you need to do to get a foothold, but you want to get away from L1 as much as possible as soon as you can.

__float8mo ago

That makes sense as a long-term goal, but if you're still in the earlier stages it's much more fun to learn a variety of words and focus on the most common ones. Get depth at first, and later you can fill in the holes with e.g. a cookbook.

I know you consider it pseudoscience to force creating your own cards, but I do find premade decks result in a lot more leeches. How do you avoid them when relying on these thousands of auto-generated cards?

pessimizerOP8mo ago

I don't. I let leeches get suspended. Also, some of those autogenerated cards (surprisingly few) won't make sense and I just suspend those, too. They're all disposable. New cards will eventually come up that are just like the too difficult leech, and one will come up when you're ready to learn it.

Also, one of the many parts of the spaced repetition lore that I do agree with is that if you keep getting the same card wrong in the same way over and over again, you're building up a weird habit that is going to be tough to break. Better to trash it. [edit: you can't do this with the conjugation cards, though. If you keep failing a particular conjugation card, you need to stop, write it down, and spend time with it individually. All of those are important, except maybe the unique conjugations of europeizar.]

> if you're still in the earlier stages it's much more fun to learn a variety of words and focus on the most common ones.

I believe of course in the have fun rule above all others, because this is an ultramarathon, not a sprint. You're going to have to get enjoyment from the process if you're going to stick to it at all. I get a "dopamine hit" every time I get a card right.

If you wanted to sprint, the best way is probably doing the full old-school* Glossika method where you go over the day's sentences, you listen and repeat, you listen and transcribe, then you repeat on your own and record. The next day you start by listening to your recordings and figuring out how to improve them, rerecord, go over your new sentences, rinse and repeat for 3-4 hours a day. You can certainly hammer a language into your head that way, but you probably need a tiger mom threatening to withhold food or something to keep you doing that for 6 months.

About creating your own cards - I've done thousands (not language related), and I've learned and remembered things with them, but there's no science behind writing a good card. Everybody is on their own and flailing, and asking themselves "what would Woźniak do?" rather than coming up with formal rules and testing them. I've got ideas, and there are a few datasets (of people doing spaced repetition sessions over time) available, but I think that treating cards as a black box, discovering the relationships between them over time (through finding which cards are passed and failed together), and creating some sort of internal market of cards between adversarial LLMs could generate good decks, and generate mappings that would allow failing or passing one card to affect many other cards rather than the single card alone.

The best thing about FSRS to me is the decision to stop asking the user about process, and just ask them about goals. Some of the Anki community seem on the verge of giving up on the self-grading, too, and just moving to pass/fail, which I couldn't support more. I never used anything but pass/fail, with the settings from refold (https://refold.la/simplified/) which have been obsoleted by FSRS, which works better with pass/fail only. As I said before, a lot of how these things were designed from the beginning was simply cargo-culting Woźniak.

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[*] I haven't tried the new school online version, but I'm sure they have varieties in the same mode.

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mtalantikite8mo ago

pessimizerOP8mo ago

mtalantikite8mo ago

Thanks for the thoughtful response and links! I actually think you've convinced me to go back and try to complete the whole French KOFI deck, as there are certainly gaps in my verb conjugations.

pessimizerOP8mo ago

> FSI French phonology course

I did the same. Got me interested in the old programmatic methods and how they could be adapted to LLMs.

Also, pssst... https://seulementbd.blogspot.com/

codyb8mo ago

hitarpetar8mo ago

pessimizerOP8mo ago

> using preselected word lists makes sense

__float8mo ago

pessimizerOP8mo ago

> if you're still in the earlier stages it's much more fun to learn a variety of words and focus on the most common ones.

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[*] I haven't tried the new school online version, but I'm sure they have varieties in the same mode.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse