With LingQ, and a bit of experience on how my brain learn languages, I have completely abandoned ANKI and SRS.
LingQ is already a natural SRS per se.
Today, I would probably use ANKI only if I would like speed up the acquisition of a new language, at the beginning, drilling beginner words. Or if I would have the necessity to perfect the language when already advanced, for some categories, and reinforce some other specific things. Only if there is a real necessity to do so, matching the goals for that specific language.
The more I combine LingQ with à la carte ChatGPT, even less there is a need for ANKI or similar. With ChatGPT you can have conversations on things you struggle to remember, creating a much better interaction, and can subsequently import those conversations on LingQ to be repeated as lessons. Eventually adding TTS to it.
You can also ask to create stories with a bunch of words that you struggle; AI would integrate them together giving you even more associations for your brain.
If after having used all these new alternatives we have today, combined with LingQ, there is still something missing that have a sense of urgency, than I would probably use ANKI again. Otherwise, sooner or later, you will get those words by natural exposure on things you really want to learn and read/listen to it consistently.
I have changed my mind about this in the mean time, and this is exactly what I did: I found schools where French people were struggling to learn English. There were several in my city.
It was a very strange feeling when I knew more French than the person I was talking to knew English, so we had to talk mainly in French!
And now that my French is much better, it is easier to have better, longer conversations. It’s a virtuous circle, as they say.
But it’s been a very long road to get to this place.
Absolutely. I’m glad you have found your way through it. Once you get to the conversational level that you don’t have headaches anymore, and you can have longer conversations, being in the target country becomes a very engaging experience.
I did some flashcards with basic sentences in Anki and that felt as a good way in getting started in speaking.
As a swedish speaker I find it hard to find the right angle of attack in constructing french sentences, I often think quite backwards relative to latin languages. I think I need to swallow the hard pill and use spaced repetition to learn a couple of 100 patterns to find the right entry point a bit faster. Not fun but 10 a day times 30 days will probably make a huge improvement in finding the right start pattern quickly.
