I have started and failed to continue using Anki around 4 or 5 times in my life, and it wasn’t until I started using it about a year ago that it finally stuck.
While I was in school, I had the dream of using it consistently throughout a semester to learn the material as the courses went on, and be able to retain all of the information from the beginning of the semester to the final exam and beyond. Typically what would actually end up happening is I would make flashcards for a couple weeks, and then proceed to fall off reviewing them and become disenchanted with the whole process, only to try and fail again a year or two later.
The biggest difference with this latest attempt is that I didn’t try to use Anki for school. One of my goals in my life it to have kids and teach them Spanish the same way my mother did to me, by speaking it to them and teaching them myself. In order to do this however, I need to be much better at Spanish than I currently am. So last year I decided to use Anki with the only goal being to improve my vocabulary, in the hopes that doing so would make it easier to integrate other aspects of study into my life, like more reading and writing.
I started by adding a couple hundred words, some of which I already knew and some I didn’t, just to make sure I had something to review every day so I could build the habit. From then on, whenever I would encounter a new word I didn’t know the meaning of, I would add a card for it.
This new approach is the one that has finally stuck. It took a couple months, but since the first time I noticed myself use a word in conversation that I remembered because of Anki it has been very easy to motivate myself to complete my Anki reviews each day, and to keep adding cards into it. This has given me buy-in to the system, something I think was sorely lacking every other time I tried, since I would stop using it before the fruits of the effort were truly visible.
I’ve also slowly expanded the scope of the knowledge I’m putting into Anki now that the habit has been solidified. The first thing I did was start to use it to expand my English vocabulary, particularly after I read the book Eager, which confronted me with a couple dozen words I hadn’t seen before. My typical workflow for pulling new words from a book is to highlight them in my kindle, extract the highlights once I’m done the book with the Obsidian Kindle Plugin, and turn each of those words into cards. I also do this for books I read in Spanish.
When I make cards, I always try to make them reversible if possible. This ensures I can both recall the meaning of the word when I see it, but also that I can recall the word when I’m searching for a word with a given meaning. For translations and definitions this is really easy, just phrase them like so:
- What is the meaning of the word mordant?
- What word means bitingly sarcastic?
For translations:
- How do you say apple in Spanish?
- Como se dice manzana en inglés?
One crucial thing to note is that I’m not trying to make any of these cards perfect. My goal is to know more than I did before, and if I encounter some problem with the cards as I’m learning them, I fix the issue when I find it. For example, for definitions, I’m not trying to learn every possible use of the word in every context. Just searching the dictionary for the mordant example from above gives eight separate definitions for the word. Since I’m not shooting for perfection, I just picked the first one and left the rest. But if at some point I encounter the word again in a new context with a different meaning, I can add a card and disambiguate as needed.
I do often also find that disambiguation is needed with a lot of cards after you make them. Many things seem to be implied when you look at the card and its answer, and out of context of other cards, but as soon as you’re reviewing certain cards next to each other things can get confusing. I’ve often found I need to clarify words with a (noun) or (adjective), just to make sure I’m thinking of the right definition.
As an aside, I debated as to whether I should make the cards for my Spanish learning translation based or definition based. For the word “manzana”, should the other side of the card be “apple” or “una fruta roja”? I currently go the translation route, but I still go back and forth on this. I suspect at some point I’ll want to change over to storing definitions instead, both to give me more practice at reading Spanish as I do the cards, but also to more closely learn the meaning of words that don’t quite have an exact match in English.
Using Anki in this way has been a huge success for me, and I think the key is that I didn’t go in too hard at first, or at all, and that I chose to use it for something important to me. I’ve tried a couple times to increase the number of cards I create or to download decks, but I’ve often found that this is more likely to make me quit and so I stop. The important thing is that I’m improving at all, not the scale of the improvement, and so as long as I keep using it and keep benefitting at all I consider it a success.
As an addendum, I would like to be able to leverage Anki for learning in one more area, and that’s programming. Because I often find myself bouncing between languages and frameworks, I will very often have some piece of knowledge on the tip of my tongue that I learned the last time I used the stack and I have to look it up. It feels like the perfect application of Anki, but I just haven’t been able to figure out what sort of knowledge should go into Anki, and also how to best phrase the cards in a way that makes them easy enough to retrieve. What I’ve learned from using it now is that the cards being easy is really important; if it takes too much effort in the moment to retrieve it, and that keeps happening, the card is too hard. This is a tough balance to strike with more complicated concepts than just words, and is a large reason why I haven’t spent a great deal of effort trying to get this to work.