Hi guys, I hate the concept of anki and spaced reptation and doing review for each words you learned and made lingq for it with yellow. My question is can i just mark word with yellow and make lingq and keep reading without any review this words? i heard that you need to see the words alot of time to memorize it, so if i did this approch that mark it just yellow and move on can i realy acquire the words?
Of course you can. I never review anything either because I dislike spaced repetition systems too. I just keep reading and listening as much as I can.
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Yes, you can. That’s what I did on lingQ, didn’t use the srs. It is often said that you need to see a word at least 20 times in context in order to acquire it, so basically if you just keep on reading, you’ll eventually acquire them.
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I don’t do SRS. Many don’t. Definitely not a requirement for improving.
Reading itself is a natural SRS mechanism anyway–you’ll see the words over and over in different contexts.
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I agree with the others. Yes! You’ll end up memorizing most words by just reading, so flashcarding them is a waste of time IMO.
I do use the flashcards for very few specific things, only if I have trouble producing them in speech:
- words I am just having trouble remembering (active recall training)
- to help me not confuse similar words or phrases (disambiguation)
e.g. El caballero de la cebolla monta su caballo (any GOT fans here?) - to memorize how words are used in phrases (collocations i.e. use with prepositions, common phrases, word order, etc)
I keep that deck small and focused.
I have started doing the flashcard with Lingq. After some time, you spend a lot of time reviewing and time is better spent on stydying or reviewing a lesson. I still used it when I begin a langague and my vocabulary is limited. My personal opinion is you acquire word much more easily in a context.
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I agree. The load of review gets too big. I have tens of thousands of lingqs and I’m not going to prioritize them all the same. I don’t need to learn all those. That’s why I do only a very limited set for targeted review.
There are a few ways you can do this, but I reserve status 3 and 4 exclusively for my cards to review (I filter when reviewing with LingQs flash cards). All my other unlearned linqed words are status 1 or 2. If I feel I’ve learned a word through reading without flash cards, I set it straight to 5.
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I used to use Anki for words. The problem is that without context, most are meaningless. I now use Anki with phrases, which works well. But many prefer to just read and listen a lot.
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Steve Kaufmann doesn’t care for SRS either for the reasons others have listed. However, he does amend the point that if one enjoys Anki and SRS, that’s fine.
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BTW, One thing I’ve done in the past, and really would like to do more is to do a different sort of review on the lesson. Simply go back through the lesson, but instead of re-reading the whole thing, just jump to the yellow words. Read the sentence with the yellow words (maybe a sentence or two before too if necessary) to see if you understand the word in context. If you still don’t understand, leave it. If you understand it, mark it known. Then jump to the next yellow word. This gives some targeted practice on the words you’re still learning and gives an additional review of something you’ve just read, without needing to re-read the rest of the lesson that you already know.
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Leave a text for a few days, then go back and review it. Keep doing this, and you are achieving a similar aim to Anki. Basically just keep exposing yourself to the content you wish to learn. I can’t see any point in creating LingQs, but some enjoy it.
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I learned a lot of Spanish/German/French fine without flash cards. I got hooked on SRS when I studied Japanese because I simply couldn’t read Japanese. I’m unwilling to give up on it while I study Korean now. It started a huge love hate thing. But some YouTuber has a method that seems to hold promise to me. He does his reviews like normal but instead of failing a card when he can’t remember he marks it right UNLESS if the future interval will be 2 months or more. Then he marks it wrong if he can’t remember it. He says this keeps his reviews low and lets him have a lot of active Anki cards without getting overwhelmed. And he doesn’t just forget all the words so that he fails them all at 2 months either.
I’ve been trying this for a couple weeks now and I’m liking it a lot so far. I have found that even if I can’t remember a card and mark it right anyway I still sometimes remember it when it comes up again. Proving that failing cards and drilling them to death is overkill. If you like the idea of spaced repetition but found the reviews were killing you maybe give this a try.
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Everyone learns in different ways. I have hate memorization, so ANKI/SRS isn’t for me. Besides, ANKI/SRS isn’t actually a teaching method. It is only for remembering things you already know. Being tested doesn’t teach me.
When I do LingQ mini-stories, I go through and mark every word yellow. That means I’ve seen the word, and it goes into my word count. Then I forget about it.
That’s interesting. I will consider using flashcards (or their LingQ equivalent) for learning the Japanese Kanji. But there is a problem: each Japanese Kanji has up to 5 different pronunciations (for different meanings), and each meaning uses 1 or 2 Kanji plus 0, 1 or 2 Hiragana. So it isn’t possible to create a single flashcard for a Kanji, with one pronunciation and one meaning. Well, it is possible, but it might not help, since the next times you see that, it might have a different meaning or pronunciation.
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If you study Japanese and decide to use flash cards for kanji it’s really best to just do vocabulary cards but with kanji on side one not hiragana. That’s how I learned most of the kanji. Of course I tried just learning kanji separately using flash cards with just a kanji on side one. If you go this route you want to focus on the most common on yomi (Chinese reading) and just ignore the other readings really. Although I learned a few kanji readings this way I will say it’s not something I stuck with - but I did learn some this way and I don’t think it’s a waste of time necessarily but you’ll probably feel like I did that studying real words is just more efficient.
But I didn’t use LingQ for Japanese. This was years and years ago - LingQ is a lot better now and I just wasn’t sold on LingQ at the time. You might be able to just read your way to fluency in Japanese using romaji furigana and then switching to regular furigana etc. LingQ can add spaces between the words. The only problem is that it makes a lot of mistakes and you won’t catch those until you’ve gotten a lot better at Japanese. I’ve heard good things about Satori reader too although I haven’t used it.
Japanese people don’t learn kanji using flash cards so most people that learn Japanese don’t use flash cards. Of course, they can already speak Japanese - they just need to learn to read it which is a bit different.
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