SRS is best used to reinforce things you learned outside the flashcard environment. So put things into Anki that you have some real-world context to anchor that memory to, and use Anki to reinforce that memory, not to create new memories that lack any vivid context in your mind outside of the drab flashcard app window where you first discovered the term in isolation. Ideally you're consuming native media, talking with natives, etc. and drawing from that to create your flashcards, since you'll come across a lot of terms that you learn once and then have otherwise forgotten by the time you see them again in the wild; this is where SRS helps.
I make software to help language learners generate flashcards for SRS while reading or watching videos: http://readlang.com
It works as a browser extension for reading web-pages or you can upload texts and whole novels to read via the web-app. You can then click-to-translate words and phrases that you don't understand, and it generates cloze flashcards for use in it's own flashcards, or for export to apps like Anki.
Would love to hear feedback from anyone who tries it!
I glanced over the site, and was really taken by the simplicity of the approach! I've used Aki in the past, but resorted to scraping the sites I was learning from to create flash cards. This looks like it really takes the pain out of putting material in.
As a memory researcher, I'd love to see a good example of how you (or someone else) implemented readlang to learn a language. The site seems good at conveying how readlang can get flashcards cooking, but it would be interesting to hear how it was used as part of someone's language learning process (the big picture). I saw on the about page that you used it to learn Spanish, and there are a bunch of posts on the site, so it may be there and I missed it.
I'll definitely look more into it later this evening, but a few questions/thoughts I had were..
1. is there a good way to programmatically pull out flash card information (as say a JSON object)? Is the export to Anki as a csv/tsv?
2. How fleshed out is support for Chinese? What should I expect from it being in beta?
3. I was intrigued by the video player functionality, clicked the "Find something to watch now" on the features page. Clicked blindly. Arrived on a page of text in Spanish. Backed up. Realized that it was a mix of text articles and video articles. Scrolled down to a video article. Was very impressed with the player, but thought with a little less patience I may have missed it. This seems like an incredible feature (similar to fluentU's approach), and one that the link should take people to with as little friction as possible!
Sorry if any of this should have been clear from a more thorough read. I didn't have a lot of time to look, and was really impressed, so thought I would fire off my impressions before giving it a more thorough look :).
I agree it would be nice to include examples of how Readlang fits into a different people's language learning process. Here are a couple of articles I found online:
| 1. is there a good way to programmatically pull out flash card information (as say a JSON object)? Is the export to Anki as a csv/tsv?
Export is by CSV (or you can specify your chosen delimiter) and you can choose from a number of different fields. You can't export data from the spaced repetition algorithm since I felt it would make the UI confusing. But you can access this data via the API: https://github.com/SteveRidout/readlang-api
| 2. How fleshed out is support for Chinese? What should I expect from it being in beta?
Chinese, Japanese, and Thai aren't that well supported at the moment. The main omissions are:
- Lack of "word" boundary detection (these languages don't use spaces to separate words)
- Lack of Pinyin translations
- Lack of word frequency lists to prioritize flashcards by usefulness.
| 3. I was intrigued by the video player functionality, clicked the "Find something to watch now" on the features page. Clicked blindly. Arrived on a page of text in Spanish. Backed up. Realized that it was a mix of text articles and video articles. Scrolled down to a video article. Was very impressed with the player, but thought with a little less patience I may have missed it. This seems like an incredible feature (similar to fluentU's approach), and one that the link should take people to with as little friction as possible!
Thanks, glad you like it! I agree these should be more discoverable. BTW: These videos are all added, sync'd, and shared by Readlang users using the web-app, here's a short guide: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szcvArpfxWI
Word boundary detection in Thai is indeed a thorny problem.
With Chinese, though, it should be simple. Just allow users to make flashcards of any number of contiguous characters. Unbound morphemes aren't something you need to worry about and even a single character part of a larger word could reasonably be a vocabulary item.
That is exactly how it works now - users drag to select a sequence of contiguous characters. I haven't tried learning Chinese myself so I don't have a good handle on how pleasant this is to use.
Chinese traditionally had no bound morphemes and even now tends not to. I think dragging a sequence of contiguous characters should be good. Most words are two characters, but some are one, three or four. Many four word characters contain words within them.
I love it! I was looking for something exactly like this a while ago but I didn't find your site.
I'm especially impressed by the accuracy of contextual translations. I've just done a few simple texts, but it always provided the correct translation in context even for words with several meanings. How does this work?
It's simpler than you think. It uses Google Translate to translate the word or phrase you select and the context isn't used. This works surprisingly well most of the time. Of course it does fall down, and can be confusing beginners who don't have a good grasp of the basic grammar. For intermediate and advanced users who just need the occasional gap filled it it's great, and they can usually tell when the translation isn't correct and either expand the phrase to add more context, or make use of the additional sidebar dictionary: https://readlang.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/279539...
True, this can appear very quickly for users who translate a lot of phrases.
You get unlimited single word translations and flashcards for free, so the free plan is actually very usable. But if you want to translate more than 10 multi-word phrases / day, you need to upgrade to premium.
I think you're absolutely right there: constant immersion is needed to provide the context for learning. My mistake was that I wasn't reading enough Japanese to make use of the memorised characters from Anki, so they were quickly forgotten.
There still remains the problem of review card creep, though. After adding about 5 new cards a day for a year and reviewing them every day, I ended up having to review hundreds of cards a day. Your suggestion might fix this too, though, now I think about it. If I'm using the memorised information outside of Anki (by reading Japanese articles, etc), I'll remember them better, leading to less reviews of those cards in the future.
For me SRS worked splendid inside the flashcard environment so far. I'm pretty solid on 500 japanese characters now, but I also learn related words of the characters simultaneously.
