Learning Persian with Anki, ChatGPT and YouTube

It works, but it also makes me hate my life. It’s just so incredibly mind numbing boring to do.

I don't. I let leeches get suspended. Also, some of those autogenerated cards (surprisingly few) won't make sense and I just suspend those, too. They're all disposable. New cards will eventually come up that are just like the too difficult leech, and one will come up when you're ready to learn it.

Also, one of the many parts of the spaced repetition lore that I do agree with is that if you keep getting the same card wrong in the same way over and over again, you're building up a weird habit that is going to be tough to break. Better to trash it. [edit: you can't do this with the conjugation cards, though. If you keep failing a particular conjugation card, you need to stop, write it down, and spend time with it individually. All of those are important, except maybe the unique conjugations of europeizar.]

> if you're still in the earlier stages it's much more fun to learn a variety of words and focus on the most common ones.

I believe of course in the have fun rule above all others, because this is an ultramarathon, not a sprint. You're going to have to get enjoyment from the process if you're going to stick to it at all. I get a "dopamine hit" every time I get a card right.

If you wanted to sprint, the best way is probably doing the full old-school* Glossika method where you go over the day's sentences, you listen and repeat, you listen and transcribe, then you repeat on your own and record. The next day you start by listening to your recordings and figuring out how to improve them, rerecord, go over your new sentences, rinse and repeat for 3-4 hours a day. You can certainly hammer a language into your head that way, but you probably need a tiger mom threatening to withhold food or something to keep you doing that for 6 months.

About creating your own cards - I've done thousands (not language related), and I've learned and remembered things with them, but there's no science behind writing a good card. Everybody is on their own and flailing, and asking themselves "what would Woźniak do?" rather than coming up with formal rules and testing them. I've got ideas, and there are a few datasets (of people doing spaced repetition sessions over time) available, but I think that treating cards as a black box, discovering the relationships between them over time (through finding which cards are passed and failed together), and creating some sort of internal market of cards between adversarial LLMs could generate good decks, and generate mappings that would allow failing or passing one card to affect many other cards rather than the single card alone.

The best thing about FSRS to me is the decision to stop asking the user about process, and just ask them about goals. Some of the Anki community seem on the verge of giving up on the self-grading, too, and just moving to pass/fail, which I couldn't support more. I never used anything but pass/fail, with the settings from refold (https://refold.la/simplified/) which have been obsoleted by FSRS, which works better with pass/fail only. As I said before, a lot of how these things were designed from the beginning was simply cargo-culting Woźniak.

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[*] I haven't tried the new school online version, but I'm sure they have varieties in the same mode.

Anki is great for building one's vocabulary. It is not meant to be the only tool used for learning a language. But actually learning a language is much easier and goes much faster when one has adequate vocabulary.

If you know English danish/swedish/Norwegian is absolutely one of the easiest languages to learn.

People do underestimate how much a good teacher and putting in the work can make a difference. Money well invested if you actually NEED to use the language and will have opportunity to.

My observation is that in language learning there are always people that will come to correct or improve your method, say they have something better and tell you why you are wrong.

It’s important to be a bit strong willed against this type of comment in the internet and stick to your instincts. Not to say good things cannot be learned out from others, but finding out what works for your particular needs through self experiment is really important, and on the long run time exposure to the target language trumps over methods.

Some examples:

- Learn grammar from a good book vs. absorb it naturally from material.

- The [tool I’m using] is better than [tool I’ve never tried].

- The [method I used for a month] is better than [old method I used for years].

- The [tool I’m selling] is better than [my competitor’s].

It’s easy to get discouraged if you don’t see the patterns and think you are doing something wrong, it’s better to keep vigilant.