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Comment by eatonphil | Hacker News Reader

Close to an idea I've had for a bit which is to force you to do a 5 word quiz from a fixed group of words at a frequency of your choosing. For me trying to learn Korean, I'd like to indefinitely receive at least two quizzes a day with five words each time among the most used 1000 words. It's the only hope I can think of to force myself to learn.

Currently I have a Python script that creates calendar notifications from a CSV so I get emailed each morning with a new vocab word, but I need more than one a day and I need it to be interactive.

Duolingo does have a daily quiz reminder but I don't find their content so useful. I'd rather just pick a few hundred words and just be forced to memorize them rather than the bits and pieces of words and grammar duolingo suggests.

If there is an app like this that sends you quizzes at a schedule from columns in a spreadsheet please save me the time of implementing this!

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Have you ever hear of Anki or Memrise ?

Yes, but I hadn't heard of any scheduling features. I just used the app on my laptop.

Looked into it a bit and you're right, I should try to figure it out first.

Although Anki is pretty useful, I found it's UX arcane and complex. Would prefer something simpler but if it means less work for me it could be good to stick with.

Yes, but I hadn't heard of any scheduling features. I just used the app on my laptop.

The main point of these programs are the scheduling algorithm.

Although Anki is pretty useful, I found it's UX arcane and complex. Would prefer something simpler but if it means less work for me it could be good to stick with.

Complex? You mean difficult? It's very easy to use basic features to add very basic cards.

Anki is endlessly customizable if you delve deeper.

When I was making my own deck for German, I had a pretty fancy pipeline for exporting things from a giant spreadsheet into anki [for me entering keywords in the app was super tricky - also because I want to double-check everything in a dictionary (and add information that may not be available on the fly, like gender/plural form/declensions) - the in-app note-adder/browser is IMO just not good enough for that kind of data manipulation/browsing. Assembling and maintaining the list of words was as much work as the revision (but also in its own way revision). It was amazing, but eventually the work-load got too much and I burned out (I had several lapses where I did complicated deck-manipulation to get things back under control) - though after probably more than a year of daily use I can still say it was very worth it.

Now I’m using someone else’s deck for Latin (that goes with a book), and to say “I just want to revise the material from Chapter X” using tags/keywords/whatever is kinda futsy (you have to create a new temporary deck that has a keyword filter). But if you’re using software every day you can get used to kinks. It’s pretty amazing software.

Anki is fantastic for its flexibility, but for language learning I've found I reach a point of diminishing returns after a certain point. From personal experience, I've been pretty much sold on Stephen Krashen's theory of second language acquisition[1][2], which in practice focuses on comprehensible input.

lingq.com is a pretty good way to learn a second language this way. I use it by uploading an ebook in my target language. The app keeps track of the words I've learned, and highlights the words and phrases I'm still learning or haven't encountered. I can click on the word/phrase as I'm reading to see a definition or translation in the sidebar, and then mark the level at which I've learned it just like in Anki.

It's pretty slow going at the start, and the texts you have to use are very basic, but pretty quickly I was reading entire YA novels with only a handful of unknown words on each page.

[1]https://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash-english.html [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUc_W3xE1w

Yes, I can mirror this experience for Anki! I still find it very useful though.

About the comprehensible input theory I have been using this method consistently for almost a year now to teach myself Russian.

It really really works. Initially I focused on learning grammar etc through online course etc but it didn't work for me. When I started focusing on consuming increasingly harder input in Russian (news articles, tweets, short stories etc) I saw a huuuge difference! Your grow your vocab tremendously fast and grammar rules are acquired naturally. I'm not saying it's easy I just say that that method really worked for me.

I tried LingQ to help me and even though is a very good resource the UX is incredibly bad and the free version is even more limiting. To the point that I decided to create my own tool talkabl.com. I decided to open it for free for any language learner.

It's an ongoing experiment on how much of the language learning can be automated :)

> talkabl.com

This is fantastic. The LingQ UX is truly horrible and it has way too many unnecessary features, but as far as I knew it was the only thing available with what it offers. I end up paying a monthly subscription, even though I use a very small subsets of its features, just so I can upload ebooks to it.

I've had the same experience with comprehensible input while learning Dutch. The grammar acquisition is what I've found most interesting. I still know next to nothing about formal Dutch grammar rules, but I was able to pass a few B2 practice exams with good scores regardless. I could pick out the correct answer on the grammar questions through process of elimination because all of the other answers just don't feel right. It's also been great for those words and phrases that don't translate well to English. Just by seeing them over and over in different contexts the meaning just slowly accumulates over time without ever seeing it translated or defined.

What really sold me on the method was that learning only through input actually produced equal levels of improvement in my ability to produce output. My speaking and writing skills seem to consistently lag just a bit behind my reading and listening skills. I think it just takes a bit longer to learn new words and phrases at a deep enough level that just come naturally when producing output.

Yeah this is more or less how I feel about the method too. Another big plus is unlike other methods studying with texts allows you to have unlimited lessons :) Your lessons are as limited as the corpus available for your target language online.

Keep it up my friend :)

Yous should check out languagetools.io. Like LingQ, but with a much better UI, way cheaper and chill with non-premium users, and they fund a school in Africa as well.

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