Reviewing as Thinking- interesting article

[Monica_in_Switzerland]

I finally decided to buy a memory program (Classic Catholic Memory, probably similar to the protestant Classical Conversations).  We are also working on German as a foreign language, not to mention the "usual" memory work of our standard subjects- French verb conjugations, the periodic table... you name it.  Memory work is something I'd really like to emphasize this coming school year, and I'm spending the summer *thinking* about how to memorize.  

 

Anyway, as I was reading more about Anki and trying to decide how best to get back to our Anki German flashcard work, I stumbled across this article and found it to be a great read.  

http://howtoremember.biz/content/reviewing-thinking

 

I thought others might enjoy it, too.  I especially liked the idea for poetry of really doing a close reading with the kids before doing the memorization, as it gives more "hooks" to hang the actual verses of the poem on.  

[Tranquility7]

As an avid Anki devotee and evangelist, that was a fascinating read, thank you for sharing!

 

I can't imagine homeschooling without Anki, but I can totally see how Anki could become a nightmare for some, as it did for the guy in the article. I’m glad to see how his perspective changed and helped redeem the method of spaced repetition, because it really is such an effective way to learn. But ultimately it DOES need to be/become more than “spouting out the answerâ€. More on this in a subsequent reply…

 

Regarding poetry, I will say that we do not use Anki to memorize long texts or poems verbatim. I have tried this in the past, and honestly, we tend to not like Anki cards that require lengthy verbatim recitation. I totally identify with his comments on "efficiency" and wanting to get the reviews "done". Long verbatim texts are just not well-suited for Anki, IME… though I am always trying to figure out how to better use the system for this, because we DO memorize some lengthy text/poetry (though nothing as long as the entire book of Mark, as the guy in the article did!).

 

My latest plan is:

1. Read the poem regularly and really study it, as he said. Think about the meter, the patterns, the figurative language, etc.
2. Memorize little by little using a methodology like that on Simply Charlotte Mason
3. Have a deck in Anki that contains all the “really long verbatim†cards, whether they are text, poetry, whatever… The only things that go in that deck are things that are *already* learned, and which can be spaced out by at least a week already without forgetting. I like them being in a deck of their own, because it keeps them from popping up in the middle of a bunch of quick cards. That used to drive me crazy… we’d be chugging along and all of a sudden we would hit a card for Exodus 20, or for the Nicene Creed, and it would bring our reviewing to a screeching halt. Ugh!
4. Space out the adding of new cards to that deck so that you don’t have to review more than about one a day. Right now we have a poetry deck, but it only has about 20 poems in it (and they aren’t too terribly long) – but since we know them all, they end up widely spaced and the deck does not overwhelm us.
5. If a verbatim text starts getting hard to remember, it needs to go back into the Simply Charlotte Mason method, OR it needs to be accepted as “good enough†and move on.

 I’d love to know your thoughts about it and what you have found in your own research and/or experience. This is an area where I always feel like we are not where I want to be. Though honestly part of it is that I get BORED with learning things verbatim. I really wish I didn’t!!! But I do.

[Monica_in_Switzerland]

As an avid Anki devotee and evangelist, that was a fascinating read, thank you for sharing!

 

I can't imagine homeschooling without Anki, but I can totally see how Anki could become a nightmare for some, as it did for the guy in the article. I’m glad to see how his perspective changed and helped redeem the method of spaced repetition, because it really is such an effective way to learn. But ultimately it DOES need to be/become more than “spouting out the answerâ€. More on this in a subsequent reply…

 

.

 

I'd love to hear more about how you are using Anki.  We were using it for foreign language vocab drill, and got burn-out.  I think we tried to add too much, too fast.  I'm also tempted to mess around with settings a bit in terms of how often we see a card, but I'm afraid of messing with the all-powerful algorithm pre-sets.  :-)  

 

The other thing is... I'd really like to make a stream-lined system for ds to build the cards himself, but I am afraid I might be being overly optimistic.  I could probably train him to do it, but is it worth 40 minutes of his time to do what I could do in 10?  Not so sure...

[Tranquility7]

Hmmm, re: foreign language vocab - are you fluent in the language you are adding for DS, and is that part of why you are adding so quickly? I am not fluent in the languages we study (Latin, Chinese, and Spanish), so our learning probably progresses slower than yours, thus we add cards more slowly.

 

We have sometimes found ourselves overwhelmed with cards, but if that happens, I simply stop adding new cards for a while, and get the current cards pushed out farther. Then we start adding new cards again. I keep different decks for different subjects, and we are usually adding new cards for a couple of subjects at a time, while at the same time whittling down our other decks as we continue to review them. Then we switch around which decks I'm adding to. It produces a nice ebb and flow to our Anki reviews.

 

Another thing I have realized is that it is fine if our Anki deck lags behind our learning. I suppose *ideally* they would be completely coordinated, but that just isn't practical around here. Most often that is because I haven't had time to create the cards yet, but other times it is because I don't want to overload us with new cards too fast. Currently in our Latin studies, we are reading through chapter 21 of our book (Orberg's Lingua Latina, which has about 50 vocab words per chapter), but we are only through chapter 16 in our Anki cards. We do periodically reread the texts of chapters 17-20 to review the vocab and grammar introduced, and then by the time we have the chapter in Anki, the vocab is very easy to learn and so it gets pushed out the the future fairly quickly.

 

How were you doing your foreign language vocab drill when you got burned out? Presenting the word in the foreign language, and DC responds with English, or vice versa, or something else?  I've been playing around with how we do it and am always looking for new ideas. In the past I have mostly done the above - I give the word in the target language, he responds with English. But lately we've been making it more conversational, as well as more integrated between the languages we study (and hence more challenging, too). Here are some of the things we are trying lately. For these examples, Anki presents a word in our target language and then:

- DS has to use the word in a sentence in the target language (a good sentence showing that he knows what it means, not a lousy sentence, lol)

OR

- DS has to define the word in the target language

OR

- DS has to give me the meaning of the word using a different target language (e.g, I give him a Latin word, he tells me the Spanish or Chinese equivalent) (obviously this only works for words we know in both languages, but that list is growing!)

OR

- DS has to define the word in a different target language.

 

This sounds like it could become totally confusing, but honestly I have been pleasantly surprised that thus far it has not caused confusion between our languages. And a pleasant side-effect is that sometimes our Anki review session becomes a lesson in and of itself, you know? For us, reviewing in this way is more interesting and more effective (especially for learning conversational skills). We don't always do it (it is a bit slower, depending on how well we know the words), and we don't usually belabor individual cards - if it takes him too long to figure out a sentence or definition in a target language, I just let him give me the English and we keep moving. Or sometimes I will ask him a prompting question of my own in the target language, or even give him a sentence or definition (after all, I need the same practice he does, since I am learning alongside him). Then, even though he couldn't think of the sentence or definition himself, he is still getting listening and comprehension practice of a sentence, and hearing the word used in context.

 

All that being said, if your and your DC's language skills are such that you can add words really quickly to Anki and thus your daily review deck ends up enormous, maybe adjusting deck options might be a good idea. How many new words are you adding a day, and for how long will that continue? Are they from a textbook, and if so, how many vocab words are in the whole book? Could you just continue to add until you finish the textbook, then give your DS a month or so before starting the next textbook, and during that time he could keep doing Anki so that by the time the new textbook starts, his daily review deck is small again?

 

[Monica_in_Switzerland]

Hmmm, re: foreign language vocab - are you fluent in the language you are adding for DS, and is that part of why you are adding so quickly? I am not fluent in the languages we study (Latin, Chinese, and Spanish), so our learning probably progresses slower than yours, thus we add cards more slowly.

 

We have sometimes found ourselves overwhelmed with cards, but if that happens, I simply stop adding new cards for a while, and get the current cards pushed out farther. Then we start adding new cards again. I keep different decks for different subjects, and we are usually adding new cards for a couple of subjects at a time, while at the same time whittling down our other decks as we continue to review them. Then we switch around which decks I'm adding to. It produces a nice ebb and flow to our Anki reviews.

 

Another thing I have realized is that it is fine if our Anki deck lags behind our learning. I suppose *ideally* they would be completely coordinated, but that just isn't practical around here. Most often that is because I haven't had time to create the cards yet, but other times it is because I don't want to overload us with new cards too fast. Currently in our Latin studies, we are reading through chapter 21 of our book (Orberg's Lingua Latina, which has about 50 vocab words per chapter), but we are only through chapter 16 in our Anki cards. We do periodically reread the texts of chapters 17-20 to review the vocab and grammar introduced, and then by the time we have the chapter in Anki, the vocab is very easy to learn and so it gets pushed out the the future fairly quickly.

 

How were you doing your foreign language vocab drill when you got burned out? Presenting the word in the foreign language, and DC responds with English, or vice versa, or something else?  I've been playing around with how we do it and am always looking for new ideas. In the past I have mostly done the above - I give the word in the target language, he responds with English. But lately we've been making it more conversational, as well as more integrated between the languages we study (and hence more challenging, too). Here are some of the things we are trying lately. For these examples, Anki presents a word in our target language and then:

- DS has to use the word in a sentence in the target language (a good sentence showing that he knows what it means, not a lousy sentence, lol)

OR

- DS has to define the word in the target language

OR

- DS has to give me the meaning of the word using a different target language (e.g, I give him a Latin word, he tells me the Spanish or Chinese equivalent) (obviously this only works for words we know in both languages, but that list is growing!)

OR

- DS has to define the word in a different target language.

 

This sounds like it could become totally confusing, but honestly I have been pleasantly surprised that thus far it has not caused confusion between our languages. And a pleasant side-effect is that sometimes our Anki review session becomes a lesson in and of itself, you know? For us, reviewing in this way is more interesting and more effective (especially for learning conversational skills). We don't always do it (it is a bit slower, depending on how well we know the words), and we don't usually belabor individual cards - if it takes him too long to figure out a sentence or definition in a target language, I just let him give me the English and we keep moving. Or sometimes I will ask him a prompting question of my own in the target language, or even give him a sentence or definition (after all, I need the same practice he does, since I am learning alongside him). Then, even though he couldn't think of the sentence or definition himself, he is still getting listening and comprehension practice of a sentence, and hearing the word used in context.

 

All that being said, if your and your DC's language skills are such that you can add words really quickly to Anki and thus your daily review deck ends up enormous, maybe adjusting deck options might be a good idea. How many new words are you adding a day, and for how long will that continue? Are they from a textbook, and if so, how many vocab words are in the whole book? Could you just continue to add until you finish the textbook, then give your DS a month or so before starting the next textbook, and during that time he could keep doing Anki so that by the time the new textbook starts, his daily review deck is small again?

 

The language we were using Anki for is German, which is a foreign language for all of us.  The kids and I are bilingual English-French.  

 

We used flashcards that were an image on one side, with the German word and an audio clip of pronunciation on the other.  The cards were automatically reversed, so every new word actually generated two cards- one where we saw the image and supplied the word, another where we saw/heard the word and had to remember the image.  I got this method from the book Fluent Forever, which is a great read, BTW.  

 

I think the problem comes in that I was trying to really use the Fluent Forever approach, which is a pretty hard-core approach to learning massive amounts of vocab in a short period of time.  I think I was adding 10 new words (20 cards) a day to our stack.  I went totally crazy.  :-)  

 

I think we will try again, adding maybe five words a day.  I plan on only using Anki for German, no other subjects, at least for the time being.  

[Tranquility7]

The language we were using Anki for is German, which is a foreign language for all of us.  The kids and I are bilingual English-French.  

 

We used flashcards that were an image on one side, with the German word and an audio clip of pronunciation on the other.  The cards were automatically reversed, so every new word actually generated two cards- one where we saw the image and supplied the word, another where we saw/heard the word and had to remember the image.  I got this method from the book Fluent Forever, which is a great read, BTW.  

 

I think the problem comes in that I was trying to really use the Fluent Forever approach, which is a pretty hard-core approach to learning massive amounts of vocab in a short period of time.  I think I was adding 10 new words (20 cards) a day to our stack.  I went totally crazy.  :-)  

 

I think we will try again, adding maybe five words a day.  I plan on only using Anki for German, no other subjects, at least for the time being.  

 

Ooh, always love a book recommendation, thanks - I'll definitely look that one up!

 

I love the *idea* of images on flashcards, but I have yet to make them that way myself. I grabbed a shared deck for Spanish, though, and a lot of the concrete nouns and verbs it contains have images. I totally agree with the idea behind it - that you don't want to be "translating" your vocab; you really want it to become an "idea" in your head (and actually, that same idea is behind our doing the "use the word in a sentence in the target language" and "define the word in the target language" methods).

 

Ten words a day over the long term (especially if it includes reverse cards) seems aggressive to me for a spaced repetition system. I can see doing that at the beginning to ramp up a bit, but over the long term that could lead to huge review stacks. We have about 1000 Latin vocab cards currently (only Latin ->English, the reverse cards are currently suspended), but because we added them gradually, they are very spaced out we only get about 20 reviews per day, and we get those done in under 5 min easily. When I add a new chapter, I will add about 5-10 words a day (I suspend the reverse cards for now, so it will be 5-10 cards). It will take us less than two weeks for all the chapter's vocab to be added by Anki (assuming 50 words in a chapter, and we review about 5x per week). The review stack grows quickly during that time, but then we will have a couple of weeks off where no new Latin vocab is added, and the stack will get whittled down again.

 

I also love the idea of adding audio clips. Our Chinese cards do have those (they are added automatically when I create the card - it is so impressive!!!)  I don't add them to our Latin or Spanish, but I am considering adding phrases to our decks (especially things we would need in regular conversation), and would love audio clips for that. Unfortunately I might be the one recording them, which is obviously less than ideal, LOL!

[Monica_in_Switzerland]

Ooh, always love a book recommendation, thanks - I'll definitely look that one up!

 

I love the *idea* of images on flashcards, but I have yet to make them that way myself. I grabbed a shared deck for Spanish, though, and a lot of the concrete nouns and verbs it contains have images. I totally agree with the idea behind it - that you don't want to be "translating" your vocab; you really want it to become an "idea" in your head (and actually, that same idea is behind our doing the "use the word in a sentence in the target language" and "define the word in the target language" methods).

 

Ten words a day over the long term (especially if it includes reverse cards) seems aggressive to me for a spaced repetition system. I can see doing that at the beginning to ramp up a bit, but over the long term that could lead to huge review stacks. We have about 1000 Latin vocab cards currently (only Latin ->English, the reverse cards are currently suspended), but because we added them gradually, they are very spaced out we only get about 20 reviews per day, and we get those done in under 5 min easily. When I add a new chapter, I will add about 5-10 words a day (I suspend the reverse cards for now, so it will be 5-10 cards). It will take us less than two weeks for all the chapter's vocab to be added by Anki (assuming 50 words in a chapter, and we review about 5x per week). The review stack grows quickly during that time, but then we will have a couple of weeks off where no new Latin vocab is added, and the stack will get whittled down again.

 

I also love the idea of adding audio clips. Our Chinese cards do have those (they are added automatically when I create the card - it is so impressive!!!)  I don't add them to our Latin or Spanish, but I am considering adding phrases to our decks (especially things we would need in regular conversation), and would love audio clips for that. Unfortunately I might be the one recording them, which is obviously less than ideal, LOL!

 

Thanks for the suggestions, this does sound like a more reasonable approach!  

 

Have you seen the website Forvo?  It's a database of audio clips from various languages.  

[Miss Tick]

We have Anki decks for Latin which I'm learning with my two offers, and for German which I'm learning with all three children. When I add cards to our decks i easily add a 100 at a time because we have then go both directions. We also don't do every language every day, so the stacks can build up. But, I also set a time limit, usually 10 minutes. All of us continue to be amazed at how much we can get done in that time.

 

I couldn't find a super-easy way to add pictures? I see the process, but having the correct pictures available seemed like it was going to be more work than i wanted.

 

Usually I go through the cards along with my 7yo (and the older two are often within hearing). This gives me a chance to help her with memory aids. "You know how in English we say 'to trip and fall'? In German "to trip" sounds like just the last part, hinfallen" or whatever.

 

 

Off to read the article! Thanks.

[Miss Tick]

I feel like with language-learning there is a struggle, especially upfront, between the thinking that the author is talking about and trying to learn as many words and rules as quickly as possible. I have difficulty asking leading questions or giving hints in German because I know so, so little myself at this point. On the other hand in Spanish I can generally do this. In fact I guess I sometimes use Tranquility7's approach as I find myself creating sentences in Spanish and inserting the German - which does get us all to think! But still, I feel like I am rushing vocabulary acquisition in order to give us the tools for thinking.

[Monica_in_Switzerland]

I feel like with language-learning there is a struggle, especially upfront, between the thinking that the author is talking about and trying to learn as many words and rules as quickly as possible. I have difficulty asking leading questions or giving hints in German because I know so, so little myself at this point. On the other hand in Spanish I can generally do this. In fact I guess I sometimes use Tranquility7's approach as I find myself creating sentences in Spanish and inserting the German - which does get us all to think! But still, I feel like I am rushing vocabulary acquisition in order to give us the tools for thinking.

 

Yes, there is a constant tug-of-war between adequate vocab to put grammar to use and adequate grammar to put vocab to use.  It's amazing human babies learn to speak at all!    :-)  It's funny to think back and realize I once didn't know French and learned it in the bizarre way that we all learn foreign languages... and it actually worked.  So there is hope... somewhere...

[Monica_in_Switzerland]

We have Anki decks for Latin which I'm learning with my two offers, and for German which I'm learning with all three children. When I add cards to our decks i easily add a 100 at a time because we have then go both directions. We also don't do every language every day, so the stacks can build up. But, I also set a time limit, usually 10 minutes. All of us continue to be amazed at how much we can get done in that time.

 

I couldn't find a super-easy way to add pictures? I see the process, but having the correct pictures available seemed like it was going to be more work than i wanted.

 

Usually I go through the cards along with my 7yo (and the older two are often within hearing). This gives me a chance to help her with memory aids. "You know how in English we say 'to trip and fall'? In German "to trip" sounds like just the last part, hinfallen" or whatever.

 

 

Off to read the article! Thanks.

 

I don't know if there exists a "super easy" way to add pictures and audio... I just learned to use Anki from these tutorials and that's how I do it... It definitely consumes a bit of time!

https://fluent-forever.com/chapter2/

[Tranquility7]

I couldn't find a super-easy way to add pictures? I see the process, but having the correct pictures available seemed like it was going to be more work than i wanted.

 

I think the method Monica gave you in the link is the easiest - and it really is quick and easy once you have done it a few times. You are right that having the correct pics is the complication. For this, though, I just use Google images - Google the word, click on images, pick the image I want, right click and select Copy, then go back into Anki and Paste it into the field where I want it. It's pretty quick for concrete nouns, locations, etc.

 

Finding audio clips is trickier, but I'm going to check out the database Monica mentioned.

 

For my Chinese deck, I use an add-on I downloaded that was created by some other Anki user. Somehow he has managed to make a card type that is tied in to a language database that exists online, and when I type in the character I want, it autopopulates the entire rest of the card - including definition, tones, pinyin, and some other stuff, **including** and audio clip!  It is seriously impressive. Wish I could find something similar for Latin and Spanish :-)