I met Aaron through his website, The Everyday Language Learner. He had written an interesting article about paper flash cards, and of course, I had to chime in about Anki!
So, in revenge, he asked me to write a guest post about Anki as a follow up. I was really excited to write it and thought a lot about what I wanted to say. I tried to figure out what is REALLY SPECIAL about Anki and why I am so crazy about it.
So, this post, Anki: Bringing Flashcards out of the Stone Age is my attempt to distill the importance of Anki and what I want to shout at people who refuse to use it. Sorry if that sounds a little strong, but I didn't want to write just another warm, comforting, encouraging entreaty for people to study. I wanted to cut away all the crap and look at the cold, hard reality of learning and how Anki can help.
Let me know what you think!
Using SRS is great but in the long run. That’s why you should not use it for hours – as you mentioned, it is boring and even counter-productive.
ReplyDeleteCurrently apart from using my own decks in Anki, I study commercial SuperMemo on-line course (English-Polish „Angielski. No problem”). These both takes up about 1 hour of work. Anki itself takes up ~15 minutes (two decks).
I’ve been using Anki for 16 months and I thought that If I learned 8 new words a day, it would give me 3000 new words/phrases a year. Because it is the long run that matters, I’m sure that even though it is quite small number, it will pay off.
Of course, SRS is only one part of my learning process. :)
Thanks for the great guest post Rich! It generated a lot of good discussion and was well recieved. A great introduction to Anki for those who had not yet heard.
ReplyDeleteThere's not that much to say, but it was a good article.
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