10 Tips for Learning a Language with Anki

10 Tips for Learning a Language with Anki

October 19, 2016

Anki is a cross platform program for learning using spaced repetitions.

It uses a flash card
system with sophisticated scheduling
so you can learn each card the minimal number of
times that it takes to
memorize it. The basic principle is that it shows you the front of a
card. It can be a definition to a word (or the reverse), a picture, a question or all together.
After you decide on what you think the back of the card is, you click on a show answer
button. Then you tell Anki if you were right or not. You can use Anki to learn anything languages, math, science, music, etc.
Ive
known of Ankis existence for several years and always
wanted to try it, but felt I didnt have an appropriate subject.
About a year ago, I took a course in Palestinian Arabic (the
dialect that is spoken by Arab citizens of Israel, which is where I
live) and realized it was a perfect opportunity to give Anki a
chance. I can say without a doubt that it was the magic
ingredient that propelled me to the top my class.
In this post, Ill share some of the lessons Ive learned in the past
year about effectively learning a language with Anki.
Some terminology for those less familiar with Anki:
in Anki, a deck is a collection of cards. A card
is what you might
know as a flash card - with a front and
back (or question and
answer). Cards are not created directly, but via a
note. A note is
a bit of information that you need to know, and one note can
generate many cards. For example, if you had a note for state

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10 Tips for Learning a Language with Anki

capitals, that note might contain the information

State: New York

Capital: Albany

This note might generate two cards.

One would have a front that says What is the capital of New York? with the
back of Albany. The second cards front would say Albany is the capital of which state? with a back of New
York.

Tip #1: Read the manual

Tip #2: Say the answers out loud
Tip #3: Dont use a shared deck
Tip #4: Make your own note types
Tip #5: Mix use of context and pure grammar
Tip #6: Make it personal
Tip #7: Use the Cloze note type to learn secondary muscles
Tip #8: Suspend often
Tip #9: Realize the effects of breaks
Tip #10: Memorize longer texts

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10 Tips for Learning a Language with Anki

Tip #1: Read the manual

Anki is one of the most involved
programs I ever had to deal with. Thats not
bad, per se. Some programs should be easy and accessible because you go in
and out of them
quickly. But learning requires effort, and so does Anki.
The Anki manual is a treasure trove of useful information and tips. Once you
know how the system works, its a lot easier to operate and customize to your
needs.
Look,
I know - read the manual sounds like a lazy tip. I never read manuals. I
even assemble IKEA furniture without reading the instruction. I didnt choose the
thug life. The thug life chose me.
But if youre reading this article because you want to be more effective with Anki, this is the
best tip you should
adopt. In fact, some of the following tips are derivatives of best practices I learned from the Anki manual.

Tip #2: Say the answers out loud

Just thinking the answer and then checking it leaves too much wiggle room for your mind to rationalize that you
kind-of sort-of did get the answer right. I tried both, and the difference is noticeable. Saying the answers out loud
forces you to decide on the specific answer and leaves no room to think actually, in retrospect, I knew this was
answer.
This
is doubly so for learning a language - since I might remember how a word (or sentence) is roughly spelled,
but not the exact pronunciation. If you dont say it, its difficult to determine if you actually remembered it.
While
it is comfortable to use some free time on the bus to quietly ramp up on your Chinese, I suggest you do it
only when you can speak it out loud
(if you do this on the bus, it has the added advantage of giving you a lot of
breathing space as other passengers might move further away).

Tip #3: Dont use a shared deck

Want to learn Italian? Its tempting to just go and grab a random Italian shared deck and study from it. However, I
suggest you build your own deck instead. Why?

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10 Tips for Learning a Language with Anki

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.

Tip #4: Make your own note types

I suggest you not only create your own deck, but also your own note types. There are two reasons. The first is
convenient editing. Ill let the manual explain:

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

The second reason is customization for your specific language.

Let me explain with an example. In Arabic (as in
Hebrew), verbs are changed depending on the grammatical person, tense, plurality and sex. Consider the verb
open in past tense:

Person / Number

English

Arabic

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10 Tips for Learning a Language with Anki

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.

Tip #5: Mix use of context and pure grammar

Reading
the previous tip, you might think that my Anki deck is filled with verb
tables and word-definition pairs.
But thats only part of the story. The problem with these pure grammar notes is that they are more difficult to
recall during an actual conversation. The reason is that neurons that fire together, wire together. This means that
its best to add context to your studies.
Instead
of having 3 cards for blackboard, chalk and
write, consider having one note of the sentence Dan
writes on the blackboard with chalk. Its both easier to remember and it helps your brain think of chalk when

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10 Tips for Learning a Language with Anki

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 #6: Make it personal

Its
noticeably easier to study cards you can relate to. Lets say you
want to learn the English word for Lawyer.
Acting in accordance with the previous tip, you might conjure up a sentence like Dan is a lawyer. Thats great,
but the best way to do this is to think of a sentence that relates to you. I have a card that (in Arabic) says My
wife is a lawyer because she is.
Personal
doesnt just mean facts. It can be a joke or something from a book you like. If you dont know a
lawyer, you can use a sentence like never trust a lawyer or Denny Crane is the best lawyer. Whatever you
can relate to.
Other than being easy to relate to, personal context can just be plain useful. I have a card that says How do you
like your coffee? No sugar please. It can come in handy when you actually want your coffee without sugar.

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 [...].

Anki Manual, Cloze Deletion

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10 Tips for Learning a Language with Anki

I often use Cloze by having cards with small conversations, like so:

- What do you for work?

- I work as a programmer

Then, I use Cloze deletion

to make several cards from this one note. In one card, Ill delete both words for
work. In another, the word for programmer. The nice thing about Cloze deletion is that you get to practice
words that you dont even delete. For example,
in each card Ill say What do you do, which is not the intended
purpose of this specific note, but still lets you practice another aspect of the language.

Tip #8: Suspend often

In
Anki, theres a leech mechanism that automatically suspends cards
when they are a leech on your study
time:

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

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10 Tips for Learning a Language with Anki

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.

Tip #9: Realize the effects of breaks

This
tip has less to do with language and more to do with your psychology. I
try to study with Anki on a daily
basis, but some days are just hectic and I never get around to doing this. If this happens to you, dont be
bummed out. The Anki scheduler actually deals with this in a pretty cool manner:

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.

Tip #10: Memorize longer texts

For
the last lesson in my Arabic course, we had to memorize a short story -
about 250 words. At first, this
exercise seemed like a waste of time - what good can come out of just memorizing text? In retrospect, it was one
of the best exercises I did. Learning from one-off sentences or two-three sentence conversation is fine for
learning new vocabulary or grammar. But learning a whole text - with everything thrown in - teaches you a lot
more about how to actually speak that language.
Learning
a longer text in Anki is not so difficult (I was one of only two people
in my class who actually memorized
the whole story), but its easy to make some wrong choices.
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10 Tips for Learning a Language with Anki

To learn how to use Anki

for learning long texts, I picked this tip up from a SuperMemo article (SuperMemo is the
program Ankis algorithm is based on):

A poem split into easy items

Q: The credit belongs ... (Teddy Roosevelt)
A: to the man who's actually in the arena
Q: The credit belongs to the man who's actually in the arena ...
A: whose face is marred by dust and sweat (a man who knows the great enthusiasm)
Q: whose face is marred by dust and sweat ... (The credit belongs)
A: a man who knows the great enthusiasm and the great devotions (who spends himself in a
worthy cause)
Q: a man who knows the great enthusiasm and the great devotions ... (The credit belongs)
A: who spends himself in a worthy cause (who in the end knows the triumph of high achievement)
Q: who spends himself in a worthy cause ... (The credit belongs)
A: who in the end knows the triumph of high achievement (so that his place shall never be),
etc. etc.

Effective Learning: Twenty Rules of Formulating Knowledge

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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10 Tips for Learning a Language with Anki

Discuss this post at the comment section below.

Follow me on Twitter , Facebook or Google+
Thanks to Ram Rachum and Hannan Aharonov for reading drafts of this.

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