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1. Creating
notes for your deck is a huge part of the learning process. After each lesson in my Arabic
course I went over my notebook to select the most useful words and phrases I should memorize. I
also went over exercises we did and tried to incorporate them into Anki. In effect, I did a review of
the material, which is amazing, because throughout my actual degree in Software Engineering I
havent done that even once.
2. Language
is a tricky subject. Your teacher might tell you that to greet someone hello in Arabic, you
should say Markhaba, but another teacher might instead teach you to say Ahalan Wasahalan.
Both are correct and are used daily by native speakers, but you would usually study just a handful
of choices for education purposes. This means that using someone elses deck might confuse you.
Instead, your deck should grow with you, together with your understanding of the language.
While
basic note types are sufficient for simple cards with only a word or phrase on each side, as soon
as you find yourself wanting to include more than one piece of information on the front or back, its
better to split that information up into more fields.
You may find
yourself thinking but I only want one card, so why cant I
just include the audio, a picture,
a hint and the translation in the Front field? If youd prefer to do that, thats fine.
But the disadvantage
of that approach is that all the information is stuck together. If you wanted to sort your cards by the hint,
you wouldnt be able to do that as its mixed in with the other content. You also wouldnt be able to do
things like move the audio from the front to the back, except by laboriously copying and pasting it for
every note. By keeping content in separate fields, you make it much easier to adjust the layout of your
cards in the future.
Anki Manual, Adding a Note Type
Person / Number
English
Arabic
opened
fatakht
You (masculine)
opened
fatakht
You (feminine)
opened
fatakhti
You (plural)
opened
fatakhtu
He
opened
fatakh
She
opened
fatkhat
They
opened
fatakhu
If youre learning Arabic, you need to know how the different suffixes, prefixes and diacritics for each
verb.
Fortunately, verbs can be sorted into groups where these are similar. In this way, I have created a note type for
each verb group (that I learned so far) that automatically creates many cards for each person, number, tense,
etc.
Notice that I only had to enter the Hebrew definition of the verb (in this case, started) and only three letters of
the Arabic translation (in Hebrew phonetic transliteration). This note type creates 19 different cards in my deck
by combining the root letters with the correct suffixes, prefixes and diacritics.
Now,
my method is specific to the Arabic (and similar, Semitic) languages. The point is for you to explore the
language youre learning and try to find small parts of the language that can benefit from a shared note type.
This is doubly effective. First, it does the obvious of
saving me work when learning a lot of different verbs. But
the most important benefit is that by trying to come up with good note types, I have also learned a lot about the
language Im studying.
you think of blackboard, because you trained it to know these words are connected.
This is especially useful for learning prepositions. Learning the words under, next to, in is harder in isolation
than in sentence like the chair is next to the table.
Tip #7: Use the Cloze note type to learn secondary muscles
If
you already use context and personalization to recall words, there is yet another technique I suggest for more
effective learning - the Cloze note type. If you havent used it before, Cloze gives you a sentence completion
card that is impossible to generate with any other note type:
Cloze deletion is the process of hiding one or more words in a sentence. For example, if you have the
sentence:
Canberra was founded in 1913.
and you create a cloze deletion on 1913, then the sentence would become:
Canberra was founded in [...].
I often use Cloze by having cards with small conversations, like so:
Leeches
are cards that you keep on forgetting. Because they require so many reviews, they take up a
lot more of your time than other cards.
Anki
can help you identify leeches. Each time a review card lapses, a counter is increased. When that
counter reaches 8, the note is tagged as
a leech, and the card is suspended.
Anki Manual, Leeches
There
is another category of cards that I recommend you suspend - cards that are not very useful. Sometimes Ill
see a card several times and realize I dont really need the information its providing me. For example, I had a
card with the Arabic word for necktie that I kept forgetting (but not so much that Anki marked it a leech). I
realized that its very unlikely that Ill be in a situation where Ill have to use the word necktie in Arabic and that
its a poor use of my time to memorize it. So I just suspended it.
I do, however, suggest that you be more inclined to suspend a note than to not create it in the first place - it takes
a while to figure out what is useful (or not so useful, but easy to remember) and what is not. So I suggest you
take an easy come, easy go approach to notes - dump whatever you can into your deck, but feel free to
suspend it on a whim.
This allows you both to learn the most useful material and to enjoy it more.
When you answer cards that have been waiting for a while, Anki factors in that delay when determining
the next time a card should be shown.
Anki Manual, Falling Behind
Lets say you had a card that had a learning delay of 7 days. If you fall off the wagon
for 3 days after that delay
and only then learn the card, Anki will realize that you had actually managed to remember the cards with a 10
day delay and will factor this in when calculating the next interval. This means that missing some days here and
there doesnt have a big negative impact on your deck scheduling.
To me, knowing about how Anki treats my days off keeps me more motivated when Im ready to come back
and study.
This
is useful because it helps you associate one sentence with the next one. So you dont have to remember
the entire text at once, but every little bit reminds you of the next one, and the next one, until you can recall the
whole thing from memory.
I suggest you select a
long text (a story, poem, song or even a joke) of a difficulty that is just a little above what
you currently know. It will allow you to learn some words from context and to get better, faster. Learning a long
text also gives you more confidence when speaking, and will provide you with a
proper response to the (very
frequent) question Youre learning a new language? What have you learned by now?
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