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Comment by yellowcherry | Hacker News Reader

I'm using DroidAnki on my phone as part of my efforts to learn Mandarin. It took a bit of time to figure out how best to configure it, but now that I have it tuned to my liking, it's a great tool. It's not the only tool I've been using, but it's one of the most helpful.

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Yeah I've got the iPhone version of the Anki app. There's a good Mandarin deck called Spoonfed that gives you sentences instead of just words. Much better. But, by far the most effective way to learn the language is to practice with natives. Which I have been doing for a few weeks and the results are amazing.

I've been learning Mandarin for about 3 years now. In April 2017 I released my own program to add spaces between words: https://pingtype.github.io

The best spaced repetition method for me is listening to music. If I watch a film 5x or see a flashcard 5x or read a comic 5x, I'm bored. But I can listen to the same song 20x and still like it.

Can you link to the iOS app? I see several in the App Store and I'm not sure which one to try.

Download links for all versions of Anki can be found on https://apps.ankiweb.net/ (And yes, Anki for iOS costs money.)

Thanks!

Any tips on how you configured it?

I'm about to take another stab at Spanish and vocabulary is one of my perennial weak points. I've played with Anki before, but it didn't seem as useful as I have been told.

Is it possible to get DroidAnki to have notices telling me that it's time to study something?

I highly recommend the book "Fluent Forever" by Gabriel Wyner. He lays out a spaced repetition centered approach to language learning, and specifically around using Anki for learning language.

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