Many apologies if there are easily available answers to this query. My clumsy attempts to search for one haven’t been successful.
In the past I’ve found Anki perfect for learning facts which only required a few repetitions in order to ‘stick’. I’m now trying to learn a little bit of Mandarin vocabulary and find it almost impossible to retain. In other words I need many dozens of repetitions for nearly every card - perhaps even hundreds of repetitions. But a few weeks in and currently the hard, good and easy buttons are offering me around 20d, 28d and 1.3mo respectively. And that’s with the Interval Modifier turned down to 0.50 (which I think is as low as it goes). I’m not confident enough to adjust any of the other settings, so my question is: what’s the best way (please) to have hard cards repeated, say, every day and easy cards repeated, say, every 3 or 4 days?
Thanks! (And apologies again if the answer to this question is easily available and I’ve missed it.)
I’m not actually answering your question but :
Mandarin is harder to learn than European languages so your problem is perfectly normal. it is harder because the sounds are so different from your native language (I presume your native language is not Asian) that finding out, even subconsciously, the root of the word you’re learning or some mnemonic is very difficult.
the tones make it difficult too.
Most of my cards are basic-and-reversed and I made them myself. But I’m not very knowledgeable about Anki so perhaps I haven’t configured things appropriately for the way I want to learn. Also, I’m not trying to learn Mandarin in general (or rather I don’t think I’m capable of it); I just want to learn a couple of hundred phrases common in old Daoist works, so I doubt there are pre-made decks I can use.
Ha ha. Yes, I’m sure you’re right. I’m not much of a linguist (though I’ve studied my own language, English, quite a bit). But as you say, I hadn’t realised quite how much I lean on similarities or common roots between European languages both old and new. And, as you suggest, English doesn’t even have equivalents for some of the sounds I’m trying to make. And then there are the tones. And I haven’t even started on trying to learn the Hanzi characters yet.
I’m in a similar situation. My solution has been to have a large number of closely spaced learning steps (1 sec, 2s, 10s, 30s, 1 min, etc., up to one day before the card becomes a review card).
It works for the most part but Anki is not a great tool for this method because cards are randomly delayed, which wastes time and causes me to forget and have to start the learning steps again from 1 second.
The V3 scheduler also gave me lots of problems with Mandarin because the review intervals were always too large.
You can try it but be prepared for delays, setbacks, and annoyances. Personally I’m thinking of using a different flashcard system, and that’s what I recommend if you aren’t too invested in Anki.
Edit: At first I didn’t notice that you are learning a small set of phrases. Your cards have audio added to them? Since you aren’t learning characters, I’m not sure what you are doing.
I’ve found repetitive listening to be extremely important to retention. If you haven’t done so, I’d suggest putting the sayings on some kind of audio player and listening to them daily, during walks, commutes, bath time, whatever, in addition to using SRS.
Send me a message if you want help learning Mandarin. I’ve tried a lot and my progress is good so far.
Thanks linux-user for all the thoughts and suggestions. Yes, I’ve added audio clips for pronunciation. I started learning the PinYin for each phrase, which was paired with its English translation, and now I’m learning pronunciation. I’m not averse to using something other than Anki for this, but it would be a pain if I can’t carry over my cards somehow - especially if I have to find all the audio clips again. The audio is just captured from Google Translate and I haven’t stored any of those clips outside of Anki (though I suppose they might all still be in my Mac’s trash).
And maybe if I undelete all those clips I can also follow your suggestion of making them into one long audio lesson. The only thing is that I’m short of time and this isn’t a top priority project, so it will be tricky to do much more ‘development’ on it. But if you find an SRS system which works better for this kind of thing I’d really appreciate it if you shared that with me. And thanks also for the very generous offer of help with my Mandarin! As I mentioned, I just can’t imagine being able to do more than learn a couple of hundred phrases, but even then I can still get stuck, and having someone to ask could be a big help. Thanks in advance if that happens!
If you created actual audio clips (as opposed to using TTS voice reading when the card is shown), all of your audio clips are in your collection.media folder – Managing Files - Anki Manual .
Thanks, Danika_Dakika. That’s a great tip! Because I’m on a Mac it took quite a while to find those files. For anyone else doing this, you have to unhide hidden files (type Cmd-shift-period in Finder) and then look under your username in:
~/Library/Application Support/Anki2/User 1/collection.media
and sure enough my MP3s are there, mixed in with hundreds of other files. But hopefully if I sort them I can bunch all of mine together and copy them, if needs be.
Was it different from the directions at the link? If so, we should update the manual.
You can use Tools > Check Media to help winnow the contents of your media folder. Or ytou can also export just the deck/notes you’re concerned with – as APKG with media – and import them into a new (temporary) profile. That will give a collection.media folder of just those audio clips.
The difficulty I had in finding the media files was my fault not yours or the manual’s. I don’t know why, but for some reason I thought you were telling me what the manual said rather than providing the link so that I could get detailed instructions.
The manual’s instructions look pretty good to me, although I imagine there are users who don’t know what the “~” signifies in a file path. I also had problems with the following instruction: “The Library folder is hidden by default, but can be revealed in Finder by holding down the option key while clicking on the Go menu.” I couldn’t make that work, but perhaps I was misunderstanding what I was supposed to do. Personally I tend to press Cmd-shift-period to reveal and later re-hide hidden files. Oh, and finally, the manual gives the path: ~/Library/Application Support/Anki2
but that leaves a little more searching to do. I found my media files at: ~/Library/Application Support/Anki2/User 1/collection.media
Anyway, thanks a lot for your help. If I need to extract those files for use elsewhere then the task will be quite straightforward thanks to your suggestions.