Asking advices from language learners

Hello, I started mastering most commonly used words from American Oxford 3000. This is my template:


Now I have a few questions:

  1. Should I really know what part of speech the word is or it’s an absolutely useless information?

  2. Do you think rephrasing (simplifying) the description of words to better understanding is worth it? Or the descriptions in learner’s dictionaries (e.g. Oxford) are good enough by default so there’s no need to waste your time? (I select the Good button if I could explain at least the main point of the word as well as was able to construct my own example sentence by using this word, or Again if I couldn’t).

  3. Is it a good practice to making multiple flashcards (and marking them as “word_1”, “word_1.1” or “word_2” if it’s a different part of speech) if the word has multiple meanings? Or could you recommend me other more effective ways of dealing with such things?

Your template look nice and clean - you’re off to a good start!

Also perhaps you’ll reach more people with your questions over on the r/languagelearning reddit. This should be up their alley.

No, and no, really. It doesn’t really hurt to have the info, especially since you’ve faded it a bit. But you’ll gloss over it most of the time. Maybe make it a bit smaller and move to the bottom.

I suggest using the Oxford definition and rephrase it only in cases where it doesn’t make sense to you.

Generally yes, absolutely. chair and chair, bark and bark, crane and crane are distinct words, don’t learn them together. At least not in the direction you are using - if you have a “define this word” card as well then you can and should have all meanings on there.

You could do this with a custom note type:

Field 1: English-word
Field 2: PoS
Field 3: Definition-1
Field 4: Context-1
Field 5: Definition-2
Field 6: Context-2

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Thank you a lot for your reply, I appreciate it!

I thought of this. It could make the process of creating cards less painful because I’d no longer have to create a hundred cards just to deal with one word. Though I should probably at least separate different parts of speech not to complicate the template. However, what if I forget a specific context’s definition? Pressing Again for the whole card would be irrational, wouldn’t it?

You don’t have to. Please read up on the fundamentals of Anki, most importantly the difference between Notes and Cards. What I described above is an idea for a note type. This could create a few cards in your case - and each would have separate scheduling.

Wow, this is incredible! I feel like I discovered the US for myself xD
Please accept my gratitude!

I have years of experience of preparing language questions in Supermemo and Anki. I like that your question template is based on a sentence example, because the example gives context.

Regarding different meanings, I recommend each meaning should have one or more example sentences and each example sentence should be in a separate card. You should not be afraid to have hundreds of simple cards. Having many simple cards is much more effective than having few complicated huge cards. I recommend your googling an article about Minimum Information Principle by Pyotr Woznyak.

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