sometimes I wake up earlier, but my srs words for this day don’t show up as an option. I have to wait for a few hours for the option to be available. is it possible to change that?
I second that.
It’s half past seven in the evening now in Germany and still no sign of either a notification, an email or the set just being there on the vocabs page.
I do appreciate the fact that LingQ servers are located in a different time zone but if they come any later I’ll be too tired to bother and I was just beginning to get back into it.
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V good suggestion. Whenever I am in Flashcard mood, ie whenever I am subscribed, the cards arrive much too late for an early riser.
It sounds like a reasonable request. I never use the LingQ SRS system. I don’t really know how it works. I have created over 1000 LingQs in German in the last 7 days. How does the SRS system keep up with this sort of volume?
I know there is some discussion about that can be done to improve our LingQs of the day system. Any other suggestions?
I am also curious to know how people who use other SRS systems deal with the volume of vocabulary that we can be trying to learn. 1,000 LingQs a week is great, Colin, and I often hit that level, but if I had to review all these words as they accumulate I would have no time for reading and listening. Any comments?
I don’t use your system, but I just put an upper limit on reps (100) in my SRS.
I use Anki. As a beginner in German, I used it a lot, but then I gave it up when I started using LingQ. LingQ was much better for vocabulary learning. Recently, I have started using Anki for German more. I program each word into it intentionally. Basically when I am reading on LingQ, and I come across a yellow word that I want to learn using Anki, I give it the tag ‘anki’ and then about once a day, I go into the Vocabulary section, get the list of words with this tag, and add a bunch of them to my GermanVocab Anki deck. I also do a similar thing when reading on my Kindle since I have a German-English dictionary and the Kindle automatically saves a list of words that I have looked up. After a bit of reading, I will go into the list and pick out a few words to put into Anki. The main thing is that I am selecting words that I want to focus on after they have caught my eye and not just being bombarded with everything I have come accross.
I also keep Anki open when I read, and when I come accross some interesting phrase or idiom, I quickly flick over to Anki and program it in. There is no way I could deal with the 1000 new words in a week. My Anki deck is a few months old so far and only has 700 words. If I added 1000 words in a week, I would not be able to cope with it.
Maybe one possibility is that people could simply mark words that they want to learn using the SRS as ‘for review’ or something. This could be done intentionally instead of all LingQs being automatically fed into the SRS system. I don’t know if this would be better than the current system or not.
1000 LingQs in a week is pretty high for me. I rarely make it this high. I am currently reading a book about Hitler that I imported into LingQ, so the statistics are shooting up. The big advantage is the new import system where texts are automatically broken up into smaller lessons. This makes it so much easier to import stuff. Without this feature, I would simply have read the book on my Kindle.
I also put an upper limit in my SRS, 50 for Swedish, 25 for Spanish, although I don’t use Spanish actively now.
More importantly, I don’t collect a huge number of LingQs a week. Why should I? I don’t see any sense in creating LingQs I won’t ever remember, at whichever level I am. Collecting LingQs without any sort of review won’t teach me a language I don’t get into contact with casually. If I just wanted to collect LingQs I could do so very easily using Excel and not paying any monthly fees.
Before summer I usually chose a chunk of text (which I have to type in manually!), collect my LingQs, review them using SRS until I feel comfortable with them and then move on to the next chunk of text, again having to type that in manually. Now, I’m only just beginning to get back into learning as the hot days finally come to an end. More than ever I feel it’s important to review, not to collect. For me it’s the number of known words that counts - and by known I mean I won’t have to keep looking them up until they finally lodge in my head.
I strongly recommend that people create a lot of LingQs and expose themselves to a large amount of content (hopefully interesting content) through reading and listening. The attempt to deliberately learn or master the words that we encounter in a text as a “block” is less effective than forgetting them and relearning them in another context. This is counter intuitive but based on research. It has also been my experience. I can learn more words, gain more experience in the language, learn, forget and relearn more words, and progress faster by avoiding the temptation to “master” anything as I go.
To understand the greater effectiveness of interleaved learning as opposed to block learning you may want to google for “interleaved learning” or just read the following, which is only one of many papers on the subject.
http://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/pubs/Birnbaum_Kornell_EBjork_RBjork_inpress.pdf
or watch this video
I don’t think anybody on website ever just collects LingQs. People who make loads of LingQs do so by reading a huge amount of new content. I made 1000 LingQs in the last week because I was reading a very interesting and very long book. According to my statistics, I also set 500 LingQs to known and set an additional 1000 words that I had not seen before to known. To do this, I read 41,000 words.
The 500 LingQs that I set to known were mostly words that I saved a long time ago and most of them I have probably come across many times since saving them, each time seeing them in new contexts and becoming a little more familiar with their meanings. A lot of the 1000 words I saved in the last week I will never see again, a lot of them I will remember the meaning of next time I see them and will set them to known, and a lot them I will see over and over in texts that I will read until some time in the future, I know what they mean. I find this type of review to be a lot more meaningful than the review that I do with Anki.
I agree completely with what Steve wrote. I don’t think I will learn vocabulary as fast if I try to master each new word that I come across. Only a small number of the words that I try to learn with Anki can I genuinly learn with Anki. For the rest, I will probably just get a little more familiar with them, which will make learning them at a later date when I see them in context a lot easier.
We’ve never really considered sending out the daily LingQs according to the users time zone. We will see if this is something we can fit into our plan.