This question is specifically aimed at those learners who are using them for their vocabulary review. I’m curious to know how many words/items have you created in your collection during a month. I have come across a couple of users who have added like 5000 items just during a month. Aren’t they too many to review? or do you guys think there is no limit as long as one’s brain is in healthy and active state they can handle as many as possible. On the other hand, do you guys think if one tries to add too many words at one time, efficient learning is going to suffer quite considerably. What’s your take on this, please let me know?
5000 items in a month is too much, since the standard setting in Anki is to show 20 new cards each day (meaning it will take 250 days just go through all of them). If your memory is good and you know each card pretty well, they won’t show up as often, but I still think that a constant stream of new cards each day is too much, especially if Anki is the main vocabulary activity. I wonder if those who add 5000 words during the first month just add random words or premade lists or from context.
Adding words from context would be best - “Hmm, this word means… Aha!.. It seems useful, I’d better make sure it eventually sticks, so I’ll add it to Anki” - and then it’s merely a question of reviewing words rather than using Anki as a LEARNING tool.
Thanks Jeff, Your explanation is quite a logical one and makes a lot of sense. Those guys used Supermemo as their main learning tool and 200 items were secheduled daily or something like that. For my liking, they were too many for a review per day. If you peruse Supermemo official website, there were some record holders who had reviewed thousands of items within a span of months. It can be possible. However, too much, too fast , you are going to end up on the losing side and to give up the whole thing altogether. I fully agreed with you on your last part.
I’ll give a quick response to this as I don’t have long.
I spent 20 days learning 1000 Yiddish words, a few months ago. This was after knowing Dutch at a solid intermediate level (but no German - which is is certainly much closer to). I absolutely used it as a learning tool and not a reviewing tool. How many of those words stuck? I’m guessing at least 950 of them. The rest will likely quickly be (re-)learned from context anyway.
5000 would be way too many, unless it’s a very specific situation. If I was high advanced with Dutch and Yiddish, then tried to learn German…I think that I’d certainly be able to do it. I would need to do perhaps 3 sessions of 30m of reviewing for the first couple of weeks, but totally possible. I’d listen at the same time, naturally.
Would I need to do this? Definitely not.
(Because reading and listening would be far more effective.)
@imyir…True, because creating items is also a time consuming activity…
That sounds a bit crazy to me, at the most I can handle 20 a day, but even that’s pushing it. If you were able to add that many items, you would simply be a walking dictionary, I doubt you could actually use the words you have learnt with any speed or fluency.
I use Anki as a secondary tool for words or phrases that I think will be useful to me. e.g. When I’m writing a review on sites such as Lang-8, I add the words and phrases that people suggest and sentences that I got wrong.
On LingQ, A very small amount of items I LingQ are turned into flashcards in Anki. If a LingQ shows up several times then I add it into Anki, and I found I’m adding around 10 a day. I gave up adding words I would never use a while ago, as once the review period passes about the 1st month stage in Anki, I’m unlikely to remember it when it crops up again.
Woa, woa, woa! You are using supermemo? For which language? I have only polish-english and polish-spanish and I would really enjoy if somebody could give me somehow Supermemo for italian. It could be english-italian or other combinations. I’ve been using supermemo for 6 years. Two years ago I used to repeat 200 words per day, but since I started to learn spanish I don’t have so many time now so I had to slow down. I know a lot of words thanks to that software so I can understand almost everything when I’m reading but I can’t use these words in speaking because Supermemo is not a tool to practise sentence building abilities. Unless you try to prepare your flashcards in a special way.
If you make flashcards in such softwares as above you should make series of similar sentences with gaps to fill in. Instead of making flashcards with:
to like,
playing,
football,
watching TV
etc,
you should make ones with:
I like playing football,
I like watching TV;
so you are repeating that, when you want to express you like something you say: “I like …-ing”.
Then there is no such a thing during conversation like: I… (thinking) like… (thinking) playing… (thinking).