Latin (Henle) and Anki - how do you tag your words?

[Noreen Claire]

DS11 and I have started Henle Latin, First Year. I found a complete Anki shared deck for Henle online, but it doesn't have any tags (declensions, parts of speech, etc). If you use Anki with your Henle (or any other Latin, really), how do you tag or organize your vocabulary words in Anki to help you study?

 

Thanks!

[Matt Layman]

I don't quite fit the Latin + Anki niche that you're asking about, but I do use Anki daily and I'm learning Chinese so hopefully the Language + Anki niche translates well enough.

For my learning, I find it most valuable to build my own deck so that the material is right at my level of learning. By doing that, I avoid almost all tagging (aside to separate basic subjects like Chinese vs guitar vs programming stuff). Also, I use a single desk for all of my material. In my experience, it greatly simplifies my learning flow with Anki. I've been using Anki solidly for two years now and that's been my experience with it. I hope that helps provide another Anki user's perspective.

Edited March 14, 2021 by Matt Layman
fix typo

[Miss Tick]

We started using Anki with Latin (Big Book of) years ago. As I made the deck i tagged everything like you have mentioned and after a year or so I realized I never have call to use the tags so I quit. The spaced review is really the key part and Anki does that in its own.

In your case I would "suspend" the entire deck and then "unsuspend" as you reach new vocabulary. If you want to mess with the deck I would skip tags and add pronunciation, pictures, or additional helpful-to-you cards, like verb tables, idioms, "cloze" cards, etc. It is a superstar way to learn vocabulary!

[wendyroo]

We use Anki extensively for Spanish.

We use the Fluent Forever approach, so we make most of our own cards with the Spanish word on one side and pictures or Spanish definitions on the other. We also use cloze cards to study conjugations and other grammar.

I have downloaded some pre-made decks with attractive features (native speakers reading sentences, etc). With those I suspend all the cards and then unsuspend as the child is ready.

I don't tag anything. In fact, my kids each have thousands of cards and they are all in one big deck arranged into subdecks.

[Noreen Claire]

13 hours ago, wendyroo said:

We use the Fluent Forever approach, so we make most of our own cards with the Spanish word on one side and pictures or Spanish definitions on the other. We also use cloze cards to study conjugations and other grammar.

 

We really should do it this way; I have their model cards already. I thought I would be lazy and do use a pre-made deck, but this makes more sense!

 

Do your kids make their own cards, do you make them together, or do you make them for your kids?

[wendyroo]

35 minutes ago, Noreen Claire said:

Do your kids make their own cards, do you make them together, or do you make them for your kids?

Some of each.

I did download a pre-made Spanish to picture with pronunciation deck with about 1000 card. I threw it into each kids' Anki deck and suspended everything to start. I would periodically unsuspend some that I thought they were ready for. But also, if something came up in a book or conversation, we would search the deck to see if they had that word to unsuspend. And if one of the provided pictures wasn't clicking with one of the kids, I would help them search for one to replace it.

As necessary we add cards to the picture deck (and add pronunciations from forvo.com). My 11 year old can do this by himself...not of his own volition, but I can assign him to create cards for three new vocab words that he came across in his reading. (He also is assigned to make new history cards from his reading each week. He uses cloze cards and can make them independently.)

But obviously, as they advance, more and more words aren't concrete enough for pictures. I have found true "definition" cards to be very hard to make and learn from. It is pretty hard to succinctly define a word like "anticipated" without using language that is even less comprehensible than the word we are trying to learn. My kids tend to glaze over when faced with definitions.

Instead, I made a card type that includes up to five example sentences. On the front it shows one example sentence with the target word bolded. On the back it pronounces the target word, shows the example sentence again, translates the sentence, and shows a memory-jogging picture. My 11 year old isn't quite ready to make these types of cards on his own. He can help search for the example sentences online, but if left to his own devices, he often chooses sentences that give no clues about what the target word means. I look for sentences like, "It's the most anticipated movie of the year—we'll have to buy tickets in advance."

I would say right now, the split is 70% of the cards I make, 25% we "work together" on (where work together could just mean they suggest the vocab word or choose the picture) and 5% my 11 year old is making on his own.