We all know the four language skills: reading, writing, speaking, and listening. But I believe there is a fifth one, and it’s forgetting. When I stop forcing myself to remember words and simply keep exposing myself to the language in a relaxed way, my brain builds the connections on its own. I’ve let go of my Korean and Greek while I focus on Arabic and Persian, and I don’t worry, because those languages are still there waiting for me. Do you get frustrated when you forget words, or have you learned to let them go?
Forgetting is powerful, even ANKI take advantage of forgetting, Specifically the moment before full forgetting. The Ebbinghaus forgetting curve.
“The Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler (FSRS) in Anki is designed to pinpoint exactly when you are at the edge of forgetting.”
ANKI also has another forgetting system, the leech system which auto suspend a phrases/word that fails after X numbers of reviews. It tags those cards as leeches and suspends them. Basically encouraging you to let them go or forget about them. You can set it to a low number so you can forget about them sooner.
Strangely, I do notice after months or weeks later of not looking at those (leech) card, I know the meaning of some of those leech cards, even though I have yet to encounter them again anywhere else.
For other leeches, I notice I don’t have to look up their meaning during the first time I see them while reading in LingQ but for some reason I couldn’t get the meaning during card review. Context helps. So I mark them as Known during first encounter reading in LingQ.
