Hi. I just picked up Anki this last weekend as a replacement to another flashcard software I use. I’m a little nervous about how to launch into it.
I have been using this other flashcard app for New Testament Greek for about a year, and it doesn’t do spaced repetition. It organizes words by the frequency that they occur in the NT, and starting at a high frequency I have pushed it down to words that occur 13 times. My weekly rhythm has been: Learn the next frequency over a 1 day of reviewing Greek->English, 1 day of reviewing English->Greek, then over the next 2 days, repeat that frequency level, and the previous frequencies, until I’ve reviewed the new words and the last 1-3 frequencies several times. Then the last 3 or so days of the week, I would review all of the higher frequencies that I hadn’t covered in the first 4 days.
As I step into Anki, I would like to keep new words down to once a week for the time being. I have disabled new words across all decks to make that happen, and I’ve been testing out the software with filtered decks that do not “Reschedule cards based on my answers to this deck”.
Now that I’m a little more familiar with the basics and that I’ve gotten my NT word data set all loaded into a deck, I’m ready to start reviewing the 900 or so words I already know (1800 cards Gr->En + En->Gr) and get them into the regular ANKI rhythms. I think what I need to do is create a filtered deck including all the frequencies I know, and then just slam through it, and let the regular deck’s natural review cadence take over from there (200 a day or something).
I’m worried that if I don’t slam through the review of all the new cards fast enough that I’ll end up getting behind on the review cards right away. I’m wondering what experienced ANKI users’s would say is the right way to go about getting into the software with a set of known cards.
Thanks for your help.
Hello, and welcome to the forum,
I also am a user of Anki for the purpose of NT Greek as well as other things.
If I need to manage the addition of new cards some way other than allowing the algorithm to introduce them, then I either add them as I need them, or I add them in advance but suspend them until I need them.
I also transitioned from another memory system not too long ago, albeit in this case it was not Greek, but memorized verses. In that case, the approach I took was to transition over a couple of months, moving cards out of the previous platform gradually, so as not to have all of my mature cards (or its equivalent) from the other system suddenly become a huge influx of new cards in Anki and overwhelm me. Any cards that I missed in the other system were prime candidates for transitioning right away, since those would be starting fresh (relearning) in either system. Then, I would also choose a few unmissed, mature cards to transition at a time. I kept working in both systems until the transition period was complete.
I hope this helps. Let me know if you would like other advice or even shared templates for study of Greek. Over the last couple years I have been slowly reviewing my Greek that I originally studied 20 years ago, going through my same grammar (Machen) and vocabulary list (Metzger). But I am also teaching through the Gospel of John, and as I do that, I have been adding every single word I do not know. That makes for a fair bit of hapax legomena, but the Anki platform is so effective, and the New Testament corpus is not so large, that it seems a perfectly achievable goal to eventually become comfortable with the entire NT vocabulary.
As for working through Metzger, I too have been working through it by frequency, but I am starting with the least frequent. Sounds a bit odd, but as this is review, it is the least frequent words that trip me up the most frequently when I am reading the text, as I am more likely to remember the more frequent words from my studies years ago. In this way I am chipping away at the barriers to confidently reading the Greek New Testament.
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