I’ve experimented with Anki over the years and currently have a somewhat custom setup that I do every day / nearly every day. I’ll explain below for anyone that might find it useful.
At one point I realized that my capacity for learning new items for a particular topic is limited to a few items per day. Any more than 2 or 3 and I struggle to retain the information. So, for example, trying to learn 20 words in Chinese per day is impossible without spending multiple hours on it.
The trick, however, is that I get around this by having many items from multiple topics, instead of many items from a single topic. Instead of 20 words in Chinese, I learn 1 word each in 20 different languages. Surprisingly, I have a much easier time with this and don’t need to spend much time on it in order to retain the information. I don’t know why this psychologically works, but it does. And while learning 2 or 3 words a day won’t make you fluent anytime soon, it does add up over time, especially for topics that you aren’t in a hurry to learn but would like to know on a slow timeline, in a year or two. For example, learning the Japanese hiragana/katakana or the numbers of all the US presidents.
However, this proved to be somewhat unwieldy logistically as I had to open 20 different PDFs, download audio for each word, then stitch it all together daily. So I created a little web app (stitched together from some WordPress plugins, actually) that allows me to import learning materials and then display 2-3 of them per topic on a single page, each time the page is loaded. I just visit the page once a day and add the items to Anki.
This was all a bit complex to set up, but if you enjoy learning new things and want an efficient system for adding stuff into your brain, I recommend making something similar.
Yes I am currently learning one word/phrase (it depends on the language) daily in about twenty different languages. Again, I wouldn’t claim it to be equivalent to serious study and conversational practice, but I have absolutely learned various phrases in all of the languages.
I think most people make “language learning” a heavy task that seems insurmountable. In reality, once you understand the basic sounds of a language, it can be as simple as learning a new phrase everyday. Just think of it as learning the names of capital cities or elements on the periodic table: a lot of information that is organized into patterns.
No, you won’t be fluent quickly, but it is absolutely beneficial to know “hello”, “thank you”, “where is?” and 100 other phrases in a language. Or in the case of Russian or Hebrew or Greek, it’s awesome to just be able to read the alphabet, even if you don’t know many of the words.
At one point I realized that my capacity for learning new items for a particular topic is limited to a few items per day. Any more than 2 or 3 and I struggle to retain the information. So, for example, trying to learn 20 words in Chinese per day is impossible without spending multiple hours on it.
The trick, however, is that I get around this by having many items from multiple topics, instead of many items from a single topic. Instead of 20 words in Chinese, I learn 1 word each in 20 different languages. Surprisingly, I have a much easier time with this and don’t need to spend much time on it in order to retain the information. I don’t know why this psychologically works, but it does. And while learning 2 or 3 words a day won’t make you fluent anytime soon, it does add up over time, especially for topics that you aren’t in a hurry to learn but would like to know on a slow timeline, in a year or two. For example, learning the Japanese hiragana/katakana or the numbers of all the US presidents.
However, this proved to be somewhat unwieldy logistically as I had to open 20 different PDFs, download audio for each word, then stitch it all together daily. So I created a little web app (stitched together from some WordPress plugins, actually) that allows me to import learning materials and then display 2-3 of them per topic on a single page, each time the page is loaded. I just visit the page once a day and add the items to Anki.
This was all a bit complex to set up, but if you enjoy learning new things and want an efficient system for adding stuff into your brain, I recommend making something similar.