How to Use Anki to Learn Foreign Languages
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- Опубліковано 26 сер 2023
- In this video, I talk with Robbie, a student of mine who uses Anki more efficiently than anyone else I know as an integral part of his very effective language learning habits. He describes how he does this with the 8 different languages he studies, and we also discuss his experience in my academy learning Sanskrit and Arabic, reading Spanish literature, and participating in the Language Learning Support Group. Keep up-to-date with information like this by subscribing to my monthly newsletter here: www.alexanderarguelles.com/ne...
Here is the link to Robbie's presentation: • Foreign Language Vocab...
It is entitled, "Foreign Language Vocabulary Supercharged". You can also find it by clicking on Robbie's name in the comments to go over to his UA-cam channel to see it.
If you enjoy learning from my videos, then you might also enjoy learning by interacting with me in my virtual academy: www.alexanderarguelles.com/ac... You can join me next week to follow the Path of the Polyglot; read French, German, or Spanish literature; learn to read Medieval languages; practice spoken Latin at various levels; participate in Great Books seminars; study the comparative history of religion; or get support for guided self-study of languages including Latin, Arabic, and Sanskrit. And you can keep up-to-date by subscribing to my monthly newsletter: www.alexanderarguelles.com/ne...
If you are in a position to support my educational efforts, please consider making a contribution at: ko-fi.com/alexanderarguelles
If you enjoy learning from my videos, then you might also enjoy learning by interacting with me in my virtual academy: www.alexanderarguelles.com/academy/ You can join me next week to follow the Path of the Polyglot; read French, German, or Spanish literature; learn to read Medieval languages; practice spoken Latin at various levels; participate in Great Books seminars; study the comparative history of religion; or get support for guided self-study of languages including Latin, Arabic, and Sanskrit. And you can keep up-to-date by subscribing to my monthly newsletter: www.alexanderarguelles.com/newsletter/
Thanks for sharing your knowledge with us.
Thanks for having me on, Professor Arguelles!
Link to the power point?
@@alextrotman9317 ua-cam.com/video/nFQ3bFq3mJE/v-deo.html&ab_channel=RobbieKunz
Thank you so much for driving from Philadelphia to Brooklyn to meet me and for sharing your path up the mountain with others. Unfortunately, UA-cam does not like the link to your power point. It flagged it as potentially inappropriate, and even though I approved it, rather than showing up, it has just disappeared. What to do?
@@ProfASAr I would say possibly have him send you the link, then edit the description of the video with the link added. Hello Professor!
Philly language learners, assemble!
wow, just found your channel again after years, very happy to see you are still active and sharing your knowledge and advice. i remember 10+ years ago i would watch that recording in 2009 of your daily routine over and over because i found it so inspiring. i'm now 25, just recently moved to europe and still learning languages, and you are still a great help, thank you so much.
Thank your for your long term support. Are any of the offerings in my academy of interest to you?
Great discussion! I remember discussing Anki briefly in the discussion circle we had on this channel a year or so ago. What ultimately convinced me of the utility of spaced repetition were people like "Matt vs. Japan" and "Khatzumoto" who each reached near-native proficiency in Japanese in a mere handful of years, using SRS as a core component. For instance, after 5 years, Matt claimed to be able to read early 20th-century Japanese novels and follow audiobooks with near-total comprehension, while primarily living in his hometown in the United States. There are many, many other aspects that go into mastering a language like Japanese, but availing oneself of a tool that enables you to outsource much of the 'cognitive load' of reviewing, and which systematically reinforces the words, characters and sentences for such a complicated writing system undoubtedly reduced the amount of time it would have otherwise taken to achieve such a rare level of proficiency in such a distant language.
Writing characters out by hand is the only way to learn to write them as well as recognize them. You can develop chain-like sequences for doing this that also reduce cognitive load.
Very interesting to learn more about Robbie's successful approach to language learning!
Indeed it is, Steve, indeed it is!
Thank you, Steve :)
Unrelated: “The Parable of the Razor” is my favorite, most relaxing video to go to sleep too. You posted it about 14 years ago. In 18:22, I’ll be sleeping like a baby.
Thank you for letting me know. I am very glad to learn that the videos I made then still seem to be of lasting value.
Thank you, Professor Arguelles.
You are very welcome.
Thank you for sharing
You are very welcome.
What a fantastic teacher. I look forward to studying the Great Books course with you and possibly part of my childrens homeschooling experience will be to study a large variety of languages with you.
Thank you kindly.
Thank you for posting this informative video. In my own case, I am much more low tech. I write down words and expressions that I don't know on pieces of paper.
@@techtutorvideos Low tech is good!
With Anki I do two things that I think are helpful. If I can’t easily make a monolingual sentence card that contains the word I’m learning, then I use a diglot weave flashcard with English/target language. And regardless of whether I got the card correct or not, I also click “good,” indicating I got it correct. If I don’t learn that particular word then I’ll end up putting it into Anki again whenever I encounter it again in reading/watching/listening and hopefully that time I’ll get it. That prevents me from laboring on words that I’m just not ready to learn yet though.
Thanks for commenting on how you use this program.
Oh robbie is such an intelligent speaker! I am now curious about the pitfalls of Anki, since the train of thought was lost when he was trying to talk about it. Unfortunately, my wallet is tight, so i can't really get into the academy. However, I advise anyone to do it! Doing any activities with people that love the craft is such a synergistic endeavor! Even more in learning ancient languages, where you can see raw desire to learn for its own sake. I only lament the opportunity lost of robbie show off a little bit of his spanish. I can understand spanish a fair amount, so I would see how much of those 6000 words have influenced his speech patterns
Hello William, it is always good to hear from you.
Hi William, thank you for the comment. If you are curious about the second pitfall of Anki, you can go over to my channel and watch my presentation "Foreign Language Vocabulary Supercharged". The 6000 words have definitely influenced my speech patterns as I can now say "canalla" without hesitation!
One pitfall of anki that I noticed is that it gets a bit complicated once you start to learn synonyms. So a card shows up in my Anki and I know how to say it in French, then I check and it turns out I was supposed to use a different synonym :D so now I just combine synonyms on one card and indicate slight differences in meaning on that card.
موفق باشید . این علم شما سرمایه ی بزرگی هست امیدوارم به درستی استفاده شه❤
مرسی. امیدوارم یک روز فارسی هم یاد بگیرم
متشکرم!
Hello, professor. Do you know about books that explore the idea of working out the brain? And how about the relation of it with language learning and other intellectual activities like reading a book, analyzing it (doing Mortimer Adler's steps, for instance), reading a philosophical book, meditating deeply about a philosophical question (something like Hugo of Saint Victor's meditative method for studying), memory training, syntactic analysis, logical analysis, poetry analysis (which would involve metaphorical and symbolical analysis) and mathematical practice? I suppose each activity has different degrees of brain activity and would have a more or less intense potential of working the brain out.
Of course, what matters the most is the quality of the workout, not the quantity. I believe we can make an analogy with muscular hypertrophy.
One thing that also seems to hold true is that language learning has a lot to do with memory. Taking this into consideration, it seems that it would be much more similar to memory training than to understanding a philosophical concept or system. I would just guess that the latter is the most intense kind of mind workout. And when we analyse a complex poetry text to extract symbolical content and philosophical truths from it, I believe things get even more interesting.
What specific books are you referring to?
@@ProfASAr About how learning and different types of learning develop our intelligence.
I have a report a month or so after watching this video and trying Anki again.
I'm not sure why, but I never really took to flash cards or spaced repetition systems for language learning. I'm not sure if it's because my most intensely studied language is French, where the challenge is less memorizing completely foreign morphemes and more reanalyzing what is already familiar. I.e., learning that "la circulation" means traffic, that you don't say "les autorités" when you want to discuss governmental authorities but "les forces d'ordre" etc. These phrases are not challenging at all to memorize since they have cognates in English, the challenge is just seeing them in context over and over again.
Russian, however, is a different beast, and one that I've struggled a lot with for many years with noticeable but disappointingly slow progress. Though it seems obvious in retrospect, I never really considered that the first challenge in learning a Russian word is merely learning to recognize the form in the first place. I tried skipping to the good stuff and learning the words in context right away, like I would with French or Spanish. I always came disappointed because not only was I consistently unable to really grasp the color of the words, I couldn't even recall their forms when I tried.
Since going to graduate school and making the resolution to put my head to the grindstone wrt Russian, I've been using Anki having gotten the idea from this video. I figured it couldn't hurt to try. Sometimes when I already know a word but see it in a new or interesting context, I will put the whole chunk into a card to review later. However, commonly what I end up doing is putting completely knew words in that I'm totally unfamiliar with along with their most common definitions. No extra context, no 2nd or 3rd tertiary meanings, just the raw lexeme and a shoe-string English definition to tie it to. Since I've done this, I've noticed major improvements in my oral and written comprehension in the past 5-6 weeks. Do I see the words in weird contexts that I don't understand a lot? For sure, but at least I'm recognizing the form where I couldn't even do that before, and that's the foundation for learning how to use the word in different contexts. It's very early to draw any serious conclusions, but it feels as though the spaced repetition system, when used with the right mindset as a supplement for memorizing raw word forms, is increadibly useful for me.
Thank you for the update on how this is working for you - I am glad that it is useful!
Hi, professor. What's your favorite color?
It's to color categories of an excel sheet for youtube videos, several of them are yours ;)
Dark red.
Something I strugle a lot with in the SRS sytem is really just my lackluster short term memory. Even after I see the same word 5-10 times in the same sitting, write it down, write down the translation, write down a example sentence AND the translation of the example sentence, I quite often find myself missremembering or even outright forgeting the words. Most of the time the only way I do manage to remember it is by closing my eyes, listening to the example sentence and finding/remembering the meaning from the example sentence, and even then it feels like I am "cheating" because while I do add it to my passive vocabulary and have no issues when inputing the language, my output falls behind so much. What would you suggest I do?
If learning vocabulary is not something that comes to you naturally by just repeating the words, I recommend trying mnemonics to help you get over the first hump in learning them. If you go to my channel, you can watch the video "How I Learned 500 Arabic Words in 5 Days" where I cover the basics of using mnemonics to learn foreign language vocabulary.
Thanks, Robbie.
Totally agree. Mnemonics have helped me IMMENSELY. I'm so lucky I discovered them early in my life and was able to use them at school to remember complicated scientific words ;)
hi, professor. I have a question.
is listening and reading at the same time enough to develop high listening comprehension?
for instance, watching shows with subtitles, listening and reading to audiobooks and so on…
If you do sufficient amounts of these things, yes; they are not silver bullets, but just good ways of practicing.
Listening and reading a text at the same time helps a bit. But if you want to develop a high level of proficiency in listening, you need to listen without reading at the same time. Unless you're referring to f.e reading first without audio then listening while reading, then listening without reading, I think that could help quite a bit. But then again you need novelty and listening to the same material 10 times in a row yields worse results than listening to f.e 5 new material only 2 times each. This is at least what I've noticed from learning a few languages.
@@ProfASAr so pure listening isn’t needed ?
@@endouerick7519 What is pure listening? Listening without reading at the same time? Of course you need to work up to that as well!
I am curious professor if you have thoughts on using AI for language learning? Have you tried it?
No.
I can see the value in Anki, but I mostly align with the prof here. Personally, I'd much rather spend 15 or 20 minutes reading a book in a foreign language or going through a textbook than reviewing and making flashcards.
Reading is all I have ever needed to do to expand my vocabulary.
I agree with you. I don't recommend flashcards with just one-word to one-word translations. All my flashcards are passages from the books I am reading so I am effectively reading the material again with an SRS algorithm behind it to boost retention rate.
@@RobbieKunzdo you add short or long sentences? What do you think it's most effective?
@@RobbieKunz Also am interested in netel's question.
Small suggestion: when filming in a room like this, please consider using lav mics. Cheers
Thanks for the suggestion, but what is "a room like this?"
Philly baby!
Thanks for commenting.
Please explore Tamil language. Thanks.
Tamil is indeed very interesting.
💤💤💤💤😴😴😴😴😴💤💤💤💤 I don't like numbers ... much less to count words I learn... 🤭🤭🤭🤭 if I ount from 1 to 10 I'll fall asleep 🤭🤭🤭🤭 counting sheeps 🐑 😴
Thanks for commenting.