27:39 Question Asker: So my approach is that I speak with a native speaker over Skype.
Presenter: Yes.
And, uh, I write down everything I don't know, and afterwards I create Anki cards. And now comes the problem to create audio files. I would like to do that, but, um, rather not record myself, because I might pronounce it wrong by the time I'm creating the cards. Um, so one way to do it is to meet up with a native speaker, and then just use the record function in Anki. That's more or less convenient. Um, but uh, it would be actually cool if I could do that with my teacher. Just, see, she's on the other part of the Earth...
Presenter: Yes
Question Asker:...and while I could use screen sharing to enter the text cards, that would be kind of difficult to do with audio. So, is there any good pattern how to, how to solve that.
28:28 Presenter: Yeah, just with screen sharing I don't think there's a good way to do that. Uh...you could just have her record to an mp3, and, or maybe individual mp3s. Or there are sites online.
28:40 Question Asker: It's a lot of repetitive work after a while to sort these files into the cards, so that's something I was trying to..
Presenter: Yes, you're absolutely right. It is...that's...those are problems that need to be solved.
28:49 The Real Hero: I, I know how to do that.
Presenter: Yes. Let's hear it.
The Real Hero: Right, there's a program called oTransla..uh..Transcribe.
Question Asker: oTranscribe?
The Real Hero: Yeah, it works in a web browser. It'll do time stamps, and it outputs srt files, subtitle files. Then you put the video and the subtitle file into something like subs2srs, and it will chop up, it'll chop up, but based on the time stamps of the...of the audio...to the subtitle. We use it for movies, to put movies into Anki.
29:21 Question Asker: I'm not sure I fully understand that, but I'll have a look at it.
The Real Hero: Talk to me later, I'll...
Question Asker: oTranscribe?
Presenter: oTranslate.
The Real Hero: oTranscribe.
Presenter: oTranscribe.
29:29 The Real Hero: People use it for their podcasts to transcribe their podcasts.
Presenter: Ok.
The Real Hero: So use can write, but you can...it has a, like, hit F2 or something and it timestamps the video or the audio that you're watching in the file you're transcribing. So basically you're creating a subtitle file. Once you've got the subtitle file you can use subs2srs.
Presenter: Ok, that's a new tool to me. So I'll have to check it out. oTranscribe.
For those of you that don't know what Anki is... It's a spaced repetition system. It's software that you use. As a desktop version, you can use Windows or Mac, and also there are mobile versions for Android and iPhone. If none of those work for you, there's a web browser version. It can sync between all of those.
What Anki does and what space repetition does is it tries to keep things in your head. So when you learn something new, your going to start on right here. It is fresh, you will remember no problem, but as time goes on your going to forget. But if you see it again it comes back here its new and it takes a little longer to forget. And this is ... I am trying not to read the slides to you guys, most of you can read I assume. So this is quite useful for language learning uhh because there is in fact a lot numerization. There is a lot of vocabulary, there is thousands of words you need to know in order to speak. And so using the process of space repetition, your trying to keep from forgetting.
Presenter: You want to keep the language in your head as long as you can, um, kind of with the least amount of effort. So what the, what Anki and other SRS software does is it tries to give it, give these facts to you just before you would forget them. So, I guess research has shown that, I don't know what research, I can't quote it, I've read Wikipedia, but, when you remember something just before the point you're about to forget, it's going to make it stronger in your mind. Uh, but you don't have to use software to do SRS, you could do it manually with flashcards. There are things such as the Leitner system, where you have these boxes and you say, "Okay, all my cards start out in the first box, the first box I'm going to review everyday. And every one that I get right moves to the second box. The second box, I review that every three days, and those I get right, I move them to the next box, and that's maybe a week" and so on and so forth until you get to the point where you're just not going to forget your card. But if you do forget your card, back to the beginning, start all over. And Anki works in a very similar way.
For those of you who've never used Anki, this is what it looks like. You have...you see a word or it could be a sentence, and then there's an answer, and then you decide, was that easy? was that hard? do you need to see it again?
But there are things that Anki does not do. It's not meant to be your primary source of language learning. You're not supposed to, you know, download a deck of cards and then just learn the words from that. It's not going to stick in your memory, you'll find these cards hard. You're gonna...you're gonna hate it. It's not meant to teach you new material, rather it's really meant to review what you've already learned. It is also not effortless, it does not magically help you remember. You have to put in time every day, review your cards, kind of go through them, spend some time, actually think about do I remember this? or am I just kind of flipping through really quickly to get it over with?
I have a lot of slides to get through.
Alright, so now we actually are here for what I think most of you are here for, using Anki effectively.
So number one: the cards themselves make a difference. If you have boring flashcards, you will quit using them. And this is bad because the good flashcards are in there, too, and you will stop using them, too, because the boring flashcards get in the way. So the big question is, how do you keep from losing them? So number one is you use sentences, not just words. Here you see an example. Okay, you have the word "correr" okay, what is the word "correr"? I'm learning Spanish, uhh, oh I think it's "to run." Okay, I did okay. But individual words on their own do not tell you a whole lot about the word or how to use it in a sentence. It doesn't really give you much to trigger your memory. You just see some letters and you think they look familiar. You're not quite sure.
And here we have a sentence: "El niño estaba corriendo por el parque." Okay, well I remember el niño, that's the boy. Estaba...I think that's was. Corriendo, I'm not so sure, but por el parque, well that's easy. He's doing something to the park. What is the boy doing? Well, I think he's running. Corriendo is running. Let's see, the boy was running to the park. See, you have much more context to help yourself remember, and this actually builds stronger memories in your mind because you also see how the word is used uh, in the language.
Another very useful thing is to create your own decks. Anki does have shared decks available, which you can download, and they can take things that other people put together, but they may not be the things you're interested in learning. [?] That's a list of 1000 words in Japanese, or what have you, but, do you really need to know the word for hovercraft?
Another very useful thing you can do with Anki is to use media such as audio, pictures, and video. Uh, it's actually fairly simple to add these things to Anki. In the desktop version you can get a 3, you load up a new file that you have on your computer, uh, be it an image, a sound, or a video. Uh, with video I found, it does not work well with mobile. Or really at all. And it's kind of odd in that it opens up kind of a separate window. It's not like, you know how you see a YouTube video in a web page, you kind of expect it embedded within, it's not like that at all. So I actually don't recommend using the video. But uh, excuse me, for audio and for images, it works quite well, and, those help, those give your mind uh, additional senses to help remember. So when your memory's just, you know, words on a page, that's just one thing. But when if it's also words on a page, plus a picture of the thing, plus the, you know, the sound of somebody saying the word, that's much more for your brain to associate with the word, it creates a stronger memory.
Using mnemonics. This is a large topic and I'm not getting into it. This is something Memrise is actually famous for. Yeah, you want to create kind of a, some kind of memory, some kind of associated sounds or rhymes, or something silly to the idea of a word. (I keep turning away from the microphone, is it bad? No? Okay.) You want to associate these things to something else to help it stick in your memory just a little better. And of course I had to use the one with Beavis and Butthead.
Another technique you can use is cloze deletion. And if you're not familiar with this term, what cloze deletion is is taking a piece of the sentence out. It's like a fill in the blank. Here we have an example of building a cloze deletion card. You change the type of the card when you add it to cloze, you type in your sentence, and then you highlight the word you want to remove because that's the word you want to test yourself on. There's a cloze deletion button right here and it puts this funny little mark up around it and then you give yourself a hint for memory later. And what that card actually looks like when you are using it, you see these three little dots in between brackets instead of the word. Again, you remember el perro blank en la casa...perro esta en la casa.
Another important technique is just deleting the cards that suck. Many cards become boring, or they're difficult and therefore boring, uh, and you just find yourself constantly blocked just having to deal with these same cards. Not this one again, I don't remember, I don't care anymore. Just delete it, you don't need it. You can always, you can add it back later. Or you know, if you have hoarder tendencies, you really don't want to delete it, you can suspend it. It keeps it in Anki, you can find it again later and unsuspend it.
This is a topic that comes up a lot when using Anki, is dealing with overwhelm, dealing with burnout, I'm so sick of these cards, I don't want to do any reviews today, please, don't make me. It seems to me inevitable. It happens to me all the time and I love Anki. But it can be managed. But it's important to realize what causes it. If you miss a few days in a row, of review, you know, you miss one day, it's not too bad, your cards build up a little bit, but if you miss a whole week, like I'm doing right now, you're going to find that when you come back to Anki, you're going to have a thousand reviews, two hundred, you know, however many, and you're going to look at that number and go, "I can't do all those, no way, it's just not worth it, it's gonna take me two hours at least."
Another thing that causes problems, and I do this all the time as well, is adding too many new cards at once. And, you know, maybe the day you added them, you can handle it. Okay, you know, fifty cards today, no problem. But that means a week from now, you're gonna get those same fifty cards back, and you may not feel like it in a week. So you kinda want to pace yourself a little bit.
And also, adding too many difficult cards. (Excuse me.) If you generally are adding, let's say you're adding sentences, you want to add, uh, you know, just one new word in that sentence, one new variant concept. You don't want too much new at once because it's hard for you to remember, it's hard for you, and you just kind of want to incrementally improve. So adding the right cards definitely helps.
0:14:30 Um, in this cut-off sentence at the bottom, it says, "Delete or suspend difficult or uninteresting cards." We mentioned that already.
So ways to prevent burnout:
It's okay to add a lot of new cards as long as you have a manageable limit for new cards per day in your deck.
Keep your cards interesting using some of the techniques I mentioned earlier.
Separating cards into decks.
Uh, do not create cards from material you haven't learned already. This is a big no-no. I find that this is a huge cause of pain.
And don't use Anki as your only source of language learning. Please.
I'm actually moving quite quickly through these. So, here's the more technical stuff. It's not... should be easy to follow for everybody, um, and we'll go over it at the end if you have questions. So this is stuff you probably knew about. Anki can sync your flashcards between different devices, including the media--the audio, pictures, etc. So, if you're using it on the desktop and you had a bunch of cards, and you sync it, you can sync it with your mobile device and view, um, you know, on your commute, wherever.
Um, Anki does have shared decks, which were made by other users, and there are times where those shared decks are appropriate to use. You know, for instance, if there... let's say you're learning from Duolingo, and there's a shared deck, you know, Duolingo and Spanish, then that's perfect. It's the same material you care about. But most of the time, you don't, you don't usually want those.
Anki has many add-ons which have a lot of functionality, this is especially true if you are learning Chinese or Japanese and I honestly don't know what most of those do. I have actually written an Anki add-on, it was called Esperanto support for Anki, all it does is if you type in, like cx it will change it to c with the little hat. Another product type you can use, that's this one up here when you are adding your cards, is basic in reverse, so if you are the type of person who likes to review both ways,
