A couple of recentish thoughts on SRS:

[Guest realmayo]

A couple of recentish thoughts on SRS:

1. Testing almost everything as Q: pinyin (Question shows pinyin) is more important than I'd thought. Yes, assuming you care about reading, you've got to do Q: Hanzis too. But the problem with showing hanzis is at least one of them will give a massive hint about what the word means. Okay, so Q: pinyin won’t work for single-characters. But for multi-character words I think it’s necessary. Sometimes (but not very often actually) you get fully homophonic words but a programme like Anki lets you add that info to the answer field, which is helpful. The ABC Dictionary is good for showing clearly where there are multiple words for the same pronunciation.

The meanings embedded in characters have clearly become a crutch to my knowing certain words well.

I’ve come to think of Q: Hanzis as meaning you’re on no more than a nodding acquaintance with a word; Q: Pinyin means you’ll become friends; and Q: English of course is where the relationship gets much more intimate.


2. An alternative to deck Deletism: Deletism being the ideology of wiping a deck completely and then rebuilding it as you come across forgotten words again, before re-deleting a few weeks later. This is of course a vile perverted heresy and we should roundly criticise leading Deletists and their craven running dogs.

But once a deck hits 5000 or 10000 words then I admit Deletism can exert a powerful lure on the unwary.

As an alternative, I have – for words comprising two or more characters – experimented with the ‘leech’ settings on Anki: once I get a card wrong two or three times (this excludes the initial period of learning and if necessary re-learning) then it gets suspended automatically.

Every so often I pull up a list of all the new leeches. Any word that I feel is super-important gets tagged as an ‘immortal’ and gets reset, rewritten and sent back into the fray. Meantime those suspended leeches kept under house arrest are still available for me to send for re-education if I start coming across them more often ‘in the wild’.

This provides some of the benefits of Delitism, because you’re not wasting time constantly reviewing awkward and easily forgettable words you don’t normally come across. But for those remembered words where SRS is currently serving as a crutch or memory-bridge until the next time you come across them for real, well you still get that because you haven’t deleted them.

Yes, Deletists do get the thrill of the occasional mass deletion, but those will never feel as good as their first time, they’ll always be chasing that first high. But the low-leech alternative gives you that little joy of suspending a rubbish cards a much more regular basis!

[Johnny20270]

I use ANKI for grammar points too. For example: 
Q: what are the 4 uses of 的“
A
1) emphasis using 是... 的
2) Topic commented sentences using 是... 的
3) 要是 ... 的话 "if" sentences
4) Attributives
 
and then some important notes shown in the Answer field such as: Point 4) Not all attributives are adjectives
 
Essential its very similar to the grammar wiki  dumped into ANKI on my phone. So when I take a mind to, I can quickly review a category by just selecting the tag "Adverbs"

 

I find this very useful actually as I notice I start to see "sentence constructs" much more now and it increased my reading significantly. Mind you it becomes very subjective whether I answered it right or wrong as I am not bother if I forgot (3) but would be if I assume all 是 。。。的 are for emphasis, so it that case I'd mark the card as "Hard". Also periodically I reset all cards as the "time lapsed" between cards being shown is very much secondary.

 

In essence its kindof of bastardization of SRS I'd say

 

This is why I rate ANKi good as you have all the tools to do this. No idea what PLECO's ability is on this

[imron]

@realmayo, throw off the yoke of your oppression and embrace deletism - it's clear from your post you crave the freedom that deletism brings, but you still can't summon the strength to release yourself from the false promises and suffocating embrace of remembering-all-things-foreverism ;)

 

P.S. I agree you should have at least once set of cards that test pinyin only on the front.  When I do that, I also try to make sure that when possible I never include single character words, often finding a multi-character word containing that single character that has the same or similar meaning.

 

I would also add that I strive to remove English from my Chinese learning wherever possible.

 

 

Essential its very similar to the grammar wiki  dumped into ANKI on my phone.

If you have developed a system that is working for you then of course I would not want to discourage that, however it is worth noting that the guy who basically invented SRS has a number of very detailed articles on his website and he explicitly recommends against doing this sort of thing (for the reason you listed plus several more).  See for example his 20 rules of formulating knowledge, especially sections 4, 9, 10 and the examples he gives of ill-formulated vs well-formulated knowledge.

 

Not to say you shouldn't do that, because like I said if it's working for you, then more power to you because we each have our own ways of learning.  Still it's always worth stopping from time to time and assessing whether we are continuing with certain practices because they work well, or continuing with certain practices because of habit or because we didn't know any better way.

 

It might be worth thinking about whether you can restructure the way you formulate your cards to get the same benefit (spotting grammar patterns), without the drawbacks (difficulty in marking the card as correct/incorrect, with the reason for incorrectness possibly different each revision).

 

Anyway, just some food for thought (for the curious, many of the other articles on the site I linked to above also provide lots of food for thought).

[Johnny20270]

It might be worth thinking about whether you can restructure the way you formulate your cards to get the same benefit (spotting grammar patterns), without the drawbacks (difficulty in marking the card as correct/incorrect, with the reason for incorrectness possibly different each revision).

 

 

 

You're right, Anki and SRS is not really the right platform for this. It is just easy way of revising a grammar book and haven't really found a better one yet so I am basically bashing something into a software not designed for that purpose. My problem in Chinese seems to be I forget the basics, (e.g. I constantly mix up 不 and 没 ) and focus on detail. I see to ask "how to use it ", never "why do I use it?"

 

With a grammar book like Yip Po Chings and indeed many others there is a lot of information. Hence I wanted some method of presenting information in a timely way and just noting a the fundamental aspect of that grammar point, and ignore all the nuances of that grammar point for the time being. e.g. why use 地 as apposed to 得, The "why" is the crucial aspect that I miss out on frequently 

 

Of course you could probably do this with a yellow highlighter manually in the book but often I like grammar points to pop up randomly as that's the way they appear in a dialogue, reading text etc. One of the problems I find using a grammar book and associated exercises is that, because the scene has been set so to speak (for example: reading a chapter on modal verbs) you are well on your way to having a good guess at the answer as you know it will invariable involve something like 会，能， 应该 etc However if a question is taken at random you might go with something like 做不了rather than 不会做  or 不能做. Hence, you required you to think a little more or more globally as to the differences not just between modal verbs but where they differ from using Potential Complements

 

But in essence I'd agree that one thread-carefully before adopting my approach in a designed SRS 

[Johnny20270]

and to add, no better feeling that wiping a deck, restarting and thinking your a hero because you got 300 reviews correct in a row

.... until a week later you are faced with 1000 reviews as all cards are designated as "new"

[imron]

You're right, Anki and SRS is not really the right platform for this

I think it depends entirely on how you structure your cards.  The link I provided above gives examples of how to split up a single card into multiple ones that embody the same information.  It'll take more work, and will result in more cards, but each card should be easier to remember and will reinforce a single fact, hopefully without negative interference from other cards.

 

I see to ask "how to use it ", never "why do I use it?"

Personally, I'm of the opinion that asking the former is more important than the latter.

[Johnny20270]

Thanks Imron, I'll have a look. Always open to ideas! 

[vellocet]

The biggest problem I have with Anki is that you have to become an expert in how the software works in order to get the most out of it.  I tried recommending it to non-technical friends and they gave up in frustration.  You also have to know HTML and CSS.

 

I also have a big issue with Anki's utter ruthlessness.  You have to review EVERY DAY otherwise your cards stack up.  Go on vacation?  Nope.  Lose interest in studying Chinese for a while?  BIG nope, there will be thousands of cards waiting for you when you return, and all the dates will be screwed up.  Here's a word you sort-of remember, you can either click 10 minutes and throw it back on the pile to be reviewed as a new card or you can click and not see it again for 3 months, which is really too long.  There's no middle ground, nor any "I'm taking a break now, freeze my deck" button.  It was explained to me that that's not how SRS works, but I think differently.

[Johnny20270]

I also have a big issue with Anki's utter ruthlessness. 

 

 

 

I know what you mean vellocet and I hate that too but as i see it .... ANKI is just stating the facts whether I like them or not  (i.e. I am forgetting cards so I need to review)  I think there is no alternative as otherwise we are burying our heads in the sand to the facts. 

 

In these cases (which happen once a month for me) I go on a mass suspension of cards and start unsuspending them when the queue shrinks

 

The issue I have is the new of "failed cards" builds up and it becomes counter productive as you end up with a list of 100 "reds" which you just keep iterating around and around. Thus it becomes a mess of failures. ANKI doesn't limit the number failed cards. I think it would be more productive to be able to limit the number of failed cards to 30 or so, with ANKI adding no more until you get these right

[Lu]

@Vellocet, I disagree. Anki has a lot of very technical bells & whistles, but it's also possible to ignore those as you see fit and just make basic front-back cards. This is what I'm doing. No doubt you can get even more out of it if you know all the background, but the very basic stuff works just fine.

 

Anki certainly is ruthless, but it's also smart in its ruthlessness. It never gives you more than 99 'reds' (or is that just something in my settings? In that case, you can change those settings too), and it gives you the most recent missed cards first, so the delays don't add up (or add up less). Or if you're going to not study for a while, you can not add any new cards in the weeks leading up to that, which lightens the load.

 

There are other ways of studying, but it's working well for me.

[pross]

 

 

1. Testing almost everything as Q: pinyin (Question shows pinyin) is more important than I'd thought. 

 

Wouldn't audio pronunciations of the words/sentences have the same effect?

[Guest realmayo]

Wouldn't audio pronunciations of the words/sentences have the same effect?

 

Definitely, actually it would be a lot better than pinyin! I tried doing something like this a long time ago but it was too time-consuming to arrange. However if I could get hold of decent audio for almost all the pinyin I'd have another go. Just not sure how practical it would be.

[davoosh]

I agree with you about the pinyin for 2-or-more character words - I was trying to say something similar on another thread recently. I agree with 'deleteism' and I've found that it also helps to have different decks for different material.

 

For example, if I read a novel, I'll create a separate deck just for vocab from that (which usually means a max of 500 words per deck) and I also find it helps me recall the words better as I associate it with an actual event or time. It also means less of the 5000000 card backlog if you don't keep up, and you can pick and choose based on which topic/novel/article/whatever you think needs reviewing more urgently.

[imron]

However if I could get hold of decent audio for almost all the pinyin I'd have another go. Just not sure how practical it would be.

If you have the Pleco audio bundles, it's literally 2 taps to switch all your cards from 'pinyin only' to 'audio only' on the front (and 2 taps to switch back whenever you like).

 

It's not only practical, it's so trivial that the time saving you get from it are what makes Pleco stand out far and above Anki, despite the lack of some flexibility in the types of cards you are creating.

[Shelley]

I am in the Pleco camp. I don't delete groups, I make a new group for each lesson and choose to review/test with that group till I start the next lesson. that way I don't have huge decks demanding my attention and making the whole thing miserable and stressful to do.

 

I can review/test any of my previous groups any time and I have one group that is for characters/words that I come across that are not in my lesson vocab. list.

 

Yes Anki is powerful but Pleco is so easy to use. The ease of use of Pleco outweighs the pros of Anki. I am learning Chinese, not how to use Anki.

And as I don't actually make the cards myself in Pleco, I can be confident they are correct.

[Yang Chuanzhang]

it's clear from your post you crave the freedom that deletism brings, but you still can't summon the strength to release yourself from the false promises and suffocating embrace of remembering-all-things-foreverism ;)

 

I've had a few decks that were beyond salvageable but I've also found that even my most successful decks need regular pruning. I always try to save decks that start to bore me by going on a deletion spree, often successfully.

 

Is no one here using more complex card formats like sentences or cloze deletion? I've always used single word cards for cramming only. 

[imron]

Is no one here using more complex card formats like sentences or cloze deletion? I've always used single word cards for cramming only.

When learning vocabulary I use flashcards to drill words in to short-term memory, and then regular reading to get reinforcement of the useful words and get them in to long-term memory.

 

I agree that cloze deletion is great, however creating cloze cards increases card maintenance by a significant amount and for me it's not worth the trade off of losing reading time to create flashcards.

 

Chinese Text Analyser has the ability to do automatic cloze card creation, and that can bring the time down dramatically, but then there's still the whole fiddling with importing and exporting and it's still far more time consuming than just pressing '+' in Pleco.

[Guest realmayo]

If you have the Pleco audio bundles, it's literally 2 taps to switch all your cards from 'pinyin only' to 'audio only' on the front

 

 

I just had a listen to Pleco. I don't know why, but computer-generated audio seems worse for me than just reading the pinyin myself. People don't speak like computers, I guess, so you'd be training yourself to recognise sounds that you'd never hear in real life. Plus half of the third tones would always be wrong.

[Guest realmayo]

Is no one here using more complex card formats like sentences or cloze deletion?

 

I've never done this. I have example sentences in the 'answer' field for lots of words, ideally from where I first came across the word. And now that I've restarted doing English-Chinese for certain words, I'll often include such a sentence, clozed, in the question.

[Guest realmayo]

it's clear from your post you crave the freedom that deletism brings, but you still can't summon the strength to release yourself from the false promises and suffocating embrace of remembering-all-things-foreverism ;)

 

I've had a few decks that were beyond salvageable but I've also found that even my most successful decks need regular pruning. I always try to save decks that start to bore me by going on a deletion spree, often successfully.

 

 

Imron I can't deny I'm fearful that this might all just be a step closer to the evil cult of Delitism!

 

But actually, by ensuring that any words I get wrong twice get automatically suspended, I am in effect deleting parts of my deck regularly. Or pruning. Kind of a "permanent revolution". But I don't delete everything. That would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater....

 

Another thing the very low leech setting is helpful with is deciding whether or not to add a word to a deck. Sometimes I worry that -- especially for English-Chinese -- a word is neither important nor easy enough to remember months and months down the line. But now, I add it to the deck anyway. If I'm right and I end up forgetting it twice, it's suspended, perhaps after 3-4 weeks. So it's not like it will be weighing me down forever. Meanwhile those 3-4 weeks when the card was in the deck may well have helped me learn the word well enough to recognise it in real life, with plenty of context.