Yeah, FSRS is much better. For me it was the difference between learning 10 new words of Mandarin a day and learning 20, with the same time commitment.
Yeah, FSRS is much better. For me it was the difference between learning 10 new words of Mandarin a day and learning 20, with the same time commitment.
To me it sounds like an incredible speed to learn even 10 Mandarin words per day, let alone 20. So extreme, that I must wonder, what definition of "Mandarin words" and what definition of "learned" you are using, when you are writing that, or, that you are an extreme outlier in terms of memorizing visual information.
For me really learning a word means:
Do you really learn 20 words properly under those definitions? If so, then respect. I consider myself to have quite a good memory for visual information, but if I don't try to memorize 20 words as a full-time activity on that day, and write them hundreds of times, I am fairly sure they won't stick for long, maybe not even until the next day. Some obviously will, and some have good explanations why the characters look as they do, but others don't, and feel arbitrarily constructed.You've just admitted that the way you use "learn" is different. It's you who is using it differently from the commonly agreed upon way. (3) is arbitrary, ideally you would want to remember the words for your entire lifetime. A lot of people don't care about (2), you'd only care if you want to live in the country and are presented with a lot of paperwork.
You learn the words for a day (you're able to match the sounds and meaning to it). You will forget a lot of them tomorrow, so now you have to re-learn them. This is just how Anki works. You keep learning and re-learning until they stick for a prolonged period of time. It's common for Japanese learners to add between 20 or 30 words to their learning queue.
If you understand how Anki works, you will also understand how the word learning is used in relation to its flashcard mechanism.
With all due respect, your comment doesn't add much to the discussion. I explicitly mentioned different definitions of learning, and then proceeded to give mine.
And with all due respect, someone claiming they learn 20 words per day, in Mandarin, is an almost outrageous claim. If you think that "learning" is commonly agreed upon to mean "memorize for a couple of hours", then please show me the research into the meaning of the word, that proves your claim. While I have explicitly stated, what _my personal_ definition is, you are claiming to be knowledgeable about a "commonly agreed upon" definition. That is an impressive claim in itself. Let us all hear that definition, that is so commonly agreed upon, so that we can gain from that.
What you call learning, I call "training" or "practicing" or "revising". Now the onus is on you to prove to me, that indeed as you claim there is some commonly agreed upon definition, specifically in the area of learning Mandarin, that proves, that my definition is off.
And I will have you know, that I am learning Mandarin for some 10+ years, and have a lot of experience in that area. I know what counts and what is important.
> with all due respect, someone claiming they learn 20 words per day, in Mandarin, is an almost outrageous claim
Why do you keep harping on Mandarin in particular? Do you think it's harder than other languages to learn new words? It's not like you have to learn new hanzi for every word. Most are compounds. It's like being surprised someone easily learned how to spell "lighthouse" because it's got a silent "gh" and a silent "e" and the "ou" is not pronounced the way you'd expect, and the "th" in the middle isn't pronounced like "th" should be.
The learner already knew how to spell "light" and "house" so it was effortless to learn "lighthouse."
My experience with Japanese is that you hit around 800 or so kanji and new vocab comes very easily. Even new kanji come extremely easily because they're all made up of the same parts ("radicals").
EdIT: One hour a day devoted to language study will yield 20 new vocab words a day that, over time, you'll have around 85% recall, which translates to over 6,000 new words per year (over 7,000 but then you adjust downward because of the 85% factor).
The issue is that people want to learn a language in five minutes a day, but they don't bat an eye at playing a video game an hour a day to be able to beat some level. I remember playing for hours to be able to get good at 1942 on the NES back in the early 90s.
> Why do you keep harping on Mandarin in particular?
The original claim was about 20 Mandarin words.
> The learner already knew how to spell "light" and "house" so it was effortless to learn "lighthouse."
This kind of comparison doesn't work properly for learning Chinese characters. Simply combining characters like that only works ~half of the time or less.
> EdIT: One hour a day devoted to language study will yield 20 new vocab words a day that, over time, you'll have around 85% recall, which translates to over 6,000 new words per year (over 7,000 but then you adjust downward because of the 85% factor).
Delusional for Mandarin, unless you have some kind of special brain putting you in some 0.001% of the population. Not even natives learn that many words in a year. That many characters they might know when reaching university, and then later forget many again. Most native adults don't know that many.
> The issue is that people want to learn a language in five minutes a day, but they don't bat an eye at playing a video game an hour a day to be able to beat some level. I remember playing for hours to be able to get good at 1942 on the NES back in the early 90s.
Well, at least on that we agree. If one doesn't put in the time and effort, then the results will reflect that.
I am referring to the standard metric used in SRS communities.
When people in the language learning community say they "learn 20 words a day", they are referring to New Cards Added. It is a metric of input and initial encoding, not guaranteed permanent storage.
In Anki, "Learning" is literally a specific phase (the red cards). You introduce the card, you pass the initial threshold, and then the algorithm handles the retention over the subsequent weeks. You are conflating the process of learning (adding new information) with the result of mastery (long-term active recall).
> (2) Knowing how to write it, meaning the Chinese characters, of course.
Would you say a native English speaker doesn't know the word "they're" if they keep spelling it "their" even if they use it correctly 100% of the time?
How does this opinion hold up if you consider that spelling wasn't standardized three centuries ago. Did no one know any English words until spelling got standardized in the 1800s? Do illiterate native speakers not truly know any words? Do children not know words?
How would your opinion change if you knew that plenty of native Japanese and Chinese speakers can't write the characters they can read anymore? If you don't have to physically write anymore, you lose the ability to write the characters. This is true of even educated adults in Japan and China. When I was a university student (I'm not Japanese), I could write kanji that my 30+yo Japanese friends had forgotten, but no one would say I knew how to use the words better than they could.
EDIT: And in any case, 10 new vocabulary words per day is extremely easy. In my experience having studied two foreign languages at the university level, that's pretty much the bare minimum expected to get an B in class.
> Would you say a native English speaker doesn't know the word "they're" if they keep spelling it "their" even if they use it correctly 100% of the time?
Bad example, but to roll with it: In that case I would say they don't know it properly, since it is apparent, that in their mind there is no difference between "their" and "they're" or even "they are".
> How does this opinion hold up if you consider that spelling wasn't standardized three centuries ago. Did no one know any English words until spelling got standardized in the 1800s? Do illiterate native speakers not truly know any words? Do children not know words?
I am basing my personal definition of when I consider a word "learned" on reality, not on some "what if". If I had to map that idea of no spelling standardization to Chinese characters, then it would mean, that characters don't have standardized lines/components/parts. If there was no standard, then I guess I would consider this kind of making up how to write it on the fly sufficient for having learned a word. Thankfully there is standardization, so that is not a reality we live in.
Since I strive to not be an illiterate, I do not count being illiterate as having learned a word.
> EDIT: And in any case, 10 new vocabulary words per day is extremely easy. In my experience having studied two foreign languages at the university level, that's pretty much the bare minimum expected to get an B in class.
That depends very much on the language and course, but if it is your major, then sure, such a time commitment seems reasonable, since it is the thing you are doing. If your major is anything else and you just take an additional language course, where I come from you have once or twice a week that course. Then maybe 1 or 2 weeks you finish one chapter of a course book, which might have 20 new words, so that makes 20 words in 1-2 weeks, not in 2 days.
Typically for Mandarin the speed will also be slower than other easier to learn languages. For example at school I almost never had to learn vocabulary in English or Spanish. I just saw the words and memorized them somehow. Usage in class and often their sound and structure was sufficient , and always had good grades, often very good grades in those languages and always had good grades, often very good grades in those languages.
It doesn't work like that with Chinese characters. You are not gonna learn them (including writing them) by just looking at them a few times, unless you got an extraordinary visual, almost photographic memory. I consider myself already to have a pretty good visual memory, but still I need to put in the time and effort, and 20 words a day is way out of my league. But then again it was already cleared up in another comment, that the OP cuts out writing entirely. That's definitely a choice one can make and explains how 20 newly added words (I would still debate that that's "learned") make any sense.
I should have clarified. My goal in learning Mandarin is only conversational fluency, not literacy.
I don't bother with the Hanzi past being able to recognize them. I want to be able to talk to people and, if I have to, use a pinyin keyboard to write basic sentences.
So only 1 & 4 are really relevant, 2 is what Anki is designed to do.
Literacy shouldn't matter for the definition of knowing a language anyway. Orthography isn't language. It's a symbolic notation that represents a language. Blind people don't speak a different language from non-blind people. Illiterate people can still speak language. Children still speak language. Humans in societies where writing systems do not exist still can speak language.
Writing a language makes you more skilled at living in the modern world. It's not a threshold past which you must travel to count as a speaker of that language.
Yeah, that's pretty much my thinking also.
By cutting out the memorization of Hanzi, I am able to accelerate my actual goal of having conversations with people.
In Silicon Valley speak, I think the term would be "ruthless prioritization" .
Also you can probably still write. Just not by hand. Which is a vanishingly useful skill.
Unless you're applying for something in China, you don't need to know how to write hanzi ever, except for very one-off instances like "I can write happy new year in Chinese"
You know how many times I've written "real" Japanese by hand since 2005? Zero. I've written my name and stuff, sometimes I'll write 愛 to show my daughters. Nothing else. Because it's a worthless skill unless you live in Japan. Not even visiting. You live there.
Of course I type all the time. But typing is speaking + reading. It's not writing. You type phonetically (i.e., you know how to say the word), and then you hit spacebar until the correct kanji comes up (i.e., you can read kanji).
Thanks for clarifying, that sounds reasonable then.
Does using FSRS result in less retention, due to scheduling less reviews than other systems? Or is it actually more efficient in a meaningful way by cutting out unnecessary reviews?
The goal of the scheduling algorithm is to predict the optimal time for when you need to review your card again. FSRS has a bunch of parameters tja you can customize based on previous learning attempts, usually a few 100 cards is enough to adapt to your own learning abilities, but in current Anki versions you need to manually update the parameters to optimize your learning.
The goal is of course the latter.