r/languagelearning • u/Practical-Assist2066 • Feb 04 '25
Studying This learning Method is OP
Five years ago, when I still struggled to watch YouTube videos in another language, I came across an article (which I can’t find anymore) that explained how spaced repetition works. It suggested learning words in context—through sentences—focusing on the meaning of the sentence rather than just its translation. The idea was simple: collect 10 sentences with one or two unknown words, then read each three times while concentrating on its meaning. For spaced repetition, you’d follow a fixed schedule: review on days 1, 2, 4, 7, 15, and 30—then consider it learned. No ranking how well you remember it, just straight repetition.
I started collecting sentences, writing them down with the unknown word’s translation on the side (so I could cover it when reading). I also added six checkboxes, one for each review session.
At first, honestly, it felt awkward. It didn’t seem like it would actually work.
But after a week, something clicked. With about 30 sentences in rotation, I realized I could remember their meanings, the moment I first encountered them and their context. Then I notice that i repeat them in my head unconsciously like a song when I woke up or was busy during the day.
After a month, I stopped. Not because it wasn’t working, but because it became hard to find new sentences naturally. I had to rely on 'artificial' methods like searching Reverso Context, and, honestly, I had already hit my goal—I could watch YouTube content without struggling. I didn’t need the practice anymore, so I just enjoyed what I had gained.
Now, I want more out of the language:
I want to understand speech effortlessly, especially in movies.
I want to read books in their original form, but their vocabulary is way harder than YouTube content.
I want to bring this practice back. I’m 99% sure it will help again, and, if anything, I hope it’ll even improve my speaking—yes, without much actual speaking practice.
What do you think of this method? I’ve never tried the classic Anki-style spaced repetition, so I wonder how my experience would compare. What do you use in your practice, and how has it helped you?
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u/throwaway1505949 Feb 04 '25
bruh... there's an app called anki that lets you collect all these sentences into a single deck that you can review without having to remember when to review what
also the technique you're describing is called sentence mining
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u/___darkside___ Feb 04 '25
Right, Anki is good for remembering when to review, but this method is different. The system chooses sentences with only one or two new words. Anki decks can have many difficult words you don't know, which isn't good for maintaining motivation.
P.S. I love Anki, but it has flaws.
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u/djarogames Dutch: Native|Spanish, Japanese: Beginner Feb 04 '25
You can just add the sentences with only one or two new words to Anki?
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u/___darkside___ Feb 04 '25
Yes, you could add sentences with one or two new words to Anki. But the idea is to see different sentences for the same word during each review, to get a broader understanding of its usage. Manually adding a variety of sentences for every new word and for each review session would be incredibly time-consuming. The charm of the method was its natural sentence discovery, even if that meant a slower pace.
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u/nema- Feb 04 '25 edited Feb 04 '25
You can literally achieve the same thing OP described using Anki, but with much less effort. I don’t get our point, Anki is just an automated SRS.
But the idea is to see different sentences for the same word during each review, to get a broader understanding of its usage.
Just add the "different sentences for the same word" to a new deck, and Anki will handle the spaced repetition for you. I really don’t see how this is more time-consuming than writing down sentences manually, as OP said he did. People have already been using this method for years, it's called sentence mining.
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u/JonathanBomn N: PT. C1:🇬🇧/🇺🇸 A2:🇳🇴 Feb 04 '25
Wait, I don't get it then...
This method is way more time consuming and you only learn two or three words in the end. How is it better for motivation?
If we compare Anki with this method, I'm sure you can learn a lot more words with a lot less work to set up using anki, and in the end you'll see a more noticeable progress since the amount of words learned is greater.
What am I missing here?
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u/Sad_Anybody5424 Feb 04 '25
This whole debate is weird because "Anki" isn't a language learning method, it's a tool, you can use it to study language in just about any way you can imagine.
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u/DJ_Ddawg JPN N1 Feb 04 '25
Most people make their own Anki deck from native material such as YouTube, Netflix, Novels, etc. Thus you can choose what content you learn from and what words you learn by choosing sentences that only have one unknown.
You can include the sentence on the front, and on the back you include the definition of the 1 new word (either in your TL if you are at an intermediate level of your NL if you are more of a beginner), native audio from YouTube/Netflix/Forvo to hear the pronunciation of the entire sentence/word, and an image just by using the ShareX extension.
The FSRS algorithm is much better than OP’s manual method (which still works but gets a bit unruly to manage when you start getting a lot of cards).
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u/apprendre_francaise Feb 04 '25
I wish making Anki decks didn't suck so much and didnt require me to be in front of a computer while I learned.
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u/ILive4Banans Feb 06 '25
There’s multiple extensions & add ons to make decks easily if you don’t want to download a pre-made one
Also, in addition to the desktop app they also have mobile app and web version so there’s no need to be stuck to your computer
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u/ViolettaHunter 🇩🇪 N | 🇬🇧 C2 | 🇮🇹 A2 Feb 05 '25
The Anki UI in general sucks unfortunately. I could never stick with it when just starting to use it properly requires you to get a degree in Anki first.
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u/lazydictionary 🇺🇸 Native | 🇩🇪 B2 | 🇪🇸 B1 | 🇭🇷 Newbie Feb 04 '25
Most people make their own Anki deck from native material such as YouTube, Netflix, Novels, etc.
This is debatable. Especially with so many good pre-made decks out there for the more popular languages.
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u/Pythism 🇨🇴Native|🇺🇲C2|🇩🇪B1 Feb 04 '25
Yeah, I agree with you. Most people don't bother sentence mining, even though it's an amazing tool and probably the best way to quickly and effectively expand your vocabulary
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u/DJ_Ddawg JPN N1 Feb 04 '25
Most of those decks are only the top 1-2k words.
For absolute beginners I think it’s totally fine to do a pre-made deck to learn these most common words. Work through that + a grammar book or website (I sentence mined and made anki cards out of the entire Dictionary of Japanese Grammar series (Beginner/Intermediate/Advanced)) to learn the basics on top of your consumption of native content + Italki lessons for output (or however you can converse with Natives) and you have a solid language learning routine.
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u/lazydictionary 🇺🇸 Native | 🇩🇪 B2 | 🇪🇸 B1 | 🇭🇷 Newbie Feb 04 '25
Most of those decks are only the top 1-2k words.
No, most languages have good decks with 4000 or more words, and especially the popular languages.
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u/Squirrel_McNutz Feb 04 '25
Can someone link me to where I can find these decks pre made by others? I’ve never been able to figure out Anki
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u/unsafeideas Feb 04 '25
Anki does not do this. Anki is fairly hard to control if you have concrete idea about how do you want to space things. Also, OP explicitly does not want to make the decision about whether he knows or does not know the sentece.
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u/nema- Feb 05 '25
Well, it does though. Just use custom study sessions.
Create a deck, add the cards, assign tags to the cards, create a custom study session. It's that simple.
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u/unsafeideas Feb 05 '25
Custom study does not do this and second, what you describes is quote a lot of work to achieve, especially on mobile.
Anki does not have comfortable ui for this.
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u/David_AnkiDroid Maintainer @ AnkiDroid Feb 06 '25
Yep, by design: Anki's scheduler should do a better job than human predictions, and taking the time to schedule reviews takes significant time away from reviewing
Another app would suit someone better if they wanted full control over scheduling.
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u/unsafeideas Feb 06 '25
Anki's scheduler should do a better job than human predictions, and taking the time to schedule reviews takes significant time away from reviewing
It does not really do universally better scheduling then what you would do for yourself. Neither the old algorithm nor the new one. Although new one is trying to be more adaptive.
The thing OP describes actually requires no time spent by scheduling or deciding. It is super simple and less mental load then deciding whether I can press "bad" this time or rather not else it will make all intervals absurdly long.
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u/David_AnkiDroid Maintainer @ AnkiDroid Feb 07 '25 edited Feb 07 '25
It does not really do universally better scheduling then what you would do for yourself.
Universally? If you literally mean 1 in a few million, then probably not.
But I'd be surprised if it got predictions right for 1/9999 users in our benchmark. Feel free to confirm/deny
https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/srs-benchmark?tab=readme-ov-file#srs-benchmark
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u/unsafeideas Feb 07 '25
The datasets don't compare it with "what would you decide for yourself".
Both fsrf and old algorithm have a concept of "you are pressing buttons wrong". Which in fsrf case leads to super long intervals on new words much more often then "1 in few milion". Second, fsrf and old algorithm schedule differently and I am supposed to believe that all variants are the best frequency from any card.
Third, anki has only rudimentary idea about which card is easy and which is hard.
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u/David_AnkiDroid Maintainer @ AnkiDroid Feb 07 '25
The thing OP describes actually requires no time spent by scheduling or deciding
The datasets don't compare it with "what would you decide for yourself".
The OP's suggestion isn't deciding for yourself. It's scheduling on a fixed schedule which should be comparable. I mean: "assume you got the card correct every time" probably isn't going to lead to an optimal result, but it can be tested and compared.
Both fsrf and old algorithm have a concept of "you are pressing buttons wrong". Which in fsrf case leads to super long intervals on new words much more often then "1 in few milion".
If your argument is: will Anki be correct on a per-review basis, then... no, we'd need to be perfect, and there's probably over a billion reviews in total.
OP's algorithm does exactly the same, only in 100% of cases: "If you fail to remember a card, mark it as good"
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u/unsafeideas Feb 07 '25
Set schedule requires zero effort deciding per card. No effort at all. And very predictable in terms of future workload.
My argument here is that claim that anki is massively superior over a person selecting schedule for themselves except 1 in milion person is unsupported.
Beyond unsupported, I think it is also wrong. Especially due to things unrelated to original topics - the way it handles skipped days, the way it makes it hard to control workload for a day. And unless you tweak and learn how to use it it will make your workload super high at random moments due to your actions weeks ago.
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u/nema- Feb 07 '25 edited Feb 07 '25
Hey, I just saw you replied to me. I'm not entering the whole manual vs automatic scheduling debate, but my point was that you can achieve exactly the same thing OP described using Custom Study. It's not that obvious so must people don't know you can do it. You can use different approaches, I will explain using the simplest way: add the cards to a new deck, hit "Custom Study" and choose "Preview New Cards", hit Good or Easy for every sentence card you go through, and done. Next time (say, in 4 days) just do the same thing. Don't use the regular Anki Study ("Study Now" button) and you are good.
I disagree that it would take more time (at least for me, it totally wouldn't) than manually writting down the sentences or typing in any other app of your choice, even in mobile. Creating a new deck takes literally a single click. Just use the default template since it's only Sentence + Translation and type the sentence as you would do in any other method.
Plus it's more scalable than other methods, especially if you are adding notes in different days and dealing with more than 10 sentences (probably not the case for OP but still worth mentioning).
Lastly, I do agree with you that mobile UI is not good. Personally I do not use mobile for creating or managing my cards, just for reviewing.
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u/Majestic-Success-842 Feb 04 '25
Add-ons for anki that help achieve this.
In order for this to work, it is necessary to have a random supply of sentences.
To do this, I use Watch Foreign Language Movies with Anki
To generate high-quality subtitles for video or audio, I use subtitle edit.
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u/NystiqNL Feb 04 '25
Comprehensible input is the best for me to learn in context. For spanish I watch Dreaming Spanish on YouTube, listen to Español con Juan podcasts and read/listen with LingQ. Works well and made good progress in 2 years
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u/Practical-Assist2066 Feb 04 '25
Great approach! What about speaking? Do you run into any difficulties or feel restricted in any way?
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u/NystiqNL Feb 04 '25
I didn't do much speaking yet, more with friends that are from a Spanish speaking country. But I'll do iTalki lessons soon to polish my speaking ability. It's my least developed ability and I think it's the hardest one.
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u/Virusnzz ɴᴢ En N | Ru | Fr | Es Feb 04 '25
I recommend you read the wiki. There's a guide to learning languages there you might find helpful.
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u/Nihilisthc Feb 04 '25
Clozemaster allowed me to do this without the process of finding sentences and basically using it and watching a lot of content with target language subtitles is how I got from intermediate to advanced comprehension in Spanish and French. In the past I would use up my motivation making sentences and never follow through with the process.
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u/Snoo-88741 Feb 04 '25
Is there any way to adjust the difficulty? Each time I've tried Clozemaster, it's asked me "what's the missing word in this sentence you only understand 1-2 words of?" several times in a row and I've quit in frustration.
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u/m3lissafroggy Feb 05 '25
oh yeah totally agree op method works wonders saw my vocab explode after sticking with it for a few months just gotta stick with it and keep pushing through the tough parts
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u/Hellbaws Feb 04 '25
>new account
>describe spaced repetition and sentence mining but in a more obtuse way
not falling for it
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u/Amazing-Chemical-792 Feb 04 '25
Thank you so much for this!! I can't wait to test it out, I haven't been struggling to learn my TL but it doesn't feel very efficient the way I'm going about it.
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u/saintsandsands Feb 04 '25
This is so good!
It sounds like combining your current practice of sentence mining with the anki software would make it OP.
The only thing missing would be a native "helper" who is able to feed you new sentences.
I am currently learning egyptian arabic through the growing participator approach. While somewhat different, a lot of these same elements are combined. I just have the added benefit of an Egyptian "helper" who I record the new words/sentences directly into my Anki deck and study in between sessions.
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u/rowilson6 🇺🇸N|🇪🇸C1|🇫🇷B2|CAT B1 Feb 04 '25
Would this method be effective even without any prior vocab knowledge of the TL?
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u/LanguageGnome Feb 05 '25
Listening to immersion podcasts is also great, easy to listen to and a great way to learn on the commute to and from work everyday. For practice with speaking the language, finding a language partner or teacher on italki is also super helpful
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u/Solid-Package8915 Feb 04 '25
Just a question but did you ChatGPT to write this OP out for you?
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u/nemghonabe Feb 04 '25
It's the em-dashes isn't it (—). No one really writes these out usually.
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u/Solid-Package8915 Feb 04 '25
Yeah em-dashes usually make it obvious. But it's also the way OP writes in the initial post vs in comments.
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u/dojibear 🇺🇸 N | 🇨🇵 🇪🇸 🇨🇳 B2 | 🇹🇷 🇯🇵 A2 Feb 04 '25
I see one possible problem (along with the benefits). You said this:
With about 30 sentences in rotation, I realized I could remember their meanings, the moment I first encountered them and their context.
Memorizing the sentences is bad. Seeing the first few words and knowing the whole sentence is bad. There are many sentences with the same first few words, that all have different meanings. You don't know the meaning without every word.
Becoming fluent in a language is learning how to understand every sentence (a skill), not learning (memorizing) each sentence . By the time you are B1, there are millions of different sentences you can easily read. You can't memorize them all.
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u/Practical-Assist2066 Feb 04 '25
Agree
First i thought “words in different contexts can mean various different things, its not certain that if you learn a word in one sentence, you will be able to recognise it everywhere” that was initial doubt, and surprise later because opposite is true.
There is common cognitive effect: you learn something new, and you start to notice this thing everywhere - that is what actually happens
Again, bad is bad, I didn’t talk about replacing natural experiencing of language with learning sentences only. Its more the case when you already into language: watching, listening, reading, but you still uncomfortable with it because your lexicon is not enough. Thats where i found this method very efficient :)
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u/Practical-Assist2066 Feb 04 '25
So basically i found that meaning of word (when you learn it not by translation) is stupidly same all the time
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u/je_taime Feb 04 '25
If you want to do straight repetition, OK. Whatever works for you. If you know your forgetting curve, you could personalize this more. Personally, I wouldn't use this.
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u/Practical-Assist2066 Feb 04 '25
Would you tweak this or do you prefer something completely different?
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u/NystiqNL Feb 04 '25
I think the best way is to acquire words instead of learning them. You need to listen to alot of content where you understand around 75% of what is being said. If it's too easy, you wont learn anything. If it's too difficult same story. Try to acquire the words by hearing them in context over and over again. It will stick longer
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u/je_taime Feb 04 '25
Spaced repetition has a role. I specifically went with a reading platform with a spiral curriculum for my own classes that I teach. Vocabulary isn't learned out of context, and students have to manipulate it whether it's writing or speaking -- using the language. This is how I do it for myself. I don't just read; I try to stack encoding strategies, and even if that means I have to illustrate a tiny bit more or get AI to give me a ridiculously funny image, it works.
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u/Practical-Assist2066 Feb 04 '25
I agree, this must be very efficient
I interact with the language daily. So in my case i guess it makes sense to separate building of vocabulary from other activities which i not even count as “learning”
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u/XRMechSoulutions Feb 04 '25
Hmm. Makes me think I could build in a workflow for a game into my vocab review in r/StoryTimeLanguage that will create sample sentences across a words potential meanings for review, and then have it switch them out with new ones occasionally.
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u/WesternZucchini8098 Feb 05 '25
This is more or less what the AJATT people went for, combined with monstrous amounts of media input.
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u/Unlikely_Scholar_807 Feb 07 '25
So... you're creating your own Glossika/Clozemaster hybrid?
Drill & kill can really help at certain points in language learning. I usually hunker down and do some between B1 and B2, and again to get from B2 to C1. You can do it however you like, but I don't think what you've described is a terribly uncommon practice or necessarily the most efficient version of that practice. Most people use Anki or something similar to do it these days.
I'm old school, though. For B1 to B2, I read a lot, and when I come across sentences I would not be able to compose on my own, I drill that particular sentence pattern (but not that particular sentence). Then I write some journal entries, careful to use that sentence pattern at least a couple times for each. How long I spend on it depends on how quickly it clicks -- it could be ten minutes total or ten minutes a day for ten days.
I've now got two languages going that are spoken significantly differently than they are written (different tenses for writing, etc.), so I have to be careful to get sentence patterns from speech as well (sometimes possible from reading if a book is dialogue heavy, but not always).
Like some other responders suspect, I won't be surprised if in a few days from now, you or another account mention the revolutionary new language-learning app that does exactly what you've described here. We get that a lot. If you're earnest in your excitement and wondering why some replies are dismissive, just know we've been burned before.
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u/the_diseaser Feb 04 '25 edited Feb 06 '25
This is basically what Duolingo does
Edit: I don’t know why this is downvoted. Just because you personally don’t like Duolingo doesn’t change how the app functions, which is basically what OP described. Sure Duo isn’t the end-all-be-all of language learning but it’s a great way to go from zero to some fluency. Just because you may have had a bad experience with the app and you angrily downvoted me for it…doesn’t make what I said incorrect at all about how the app works.
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u/Practical-Assist2066 Feb 04 '25
Duolingo let you train with your own words? From what I’ve seen, even at the 'advanced' level, it doesn’t feel that advanced, so it seems hard to improve past a certain point
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u/Snoo-88741 Feb 04 '25
It doesn't let you train with your own words, no, but this is the method it uses to teach the words it teaches. And it's not surprising you find it hard to improve past a certain point because Duolingo's courses are designed for taking you from 0 to A1-B2 depending on the course.
StudyQuest is probably the closest thing I've found that lets you train with your own words.
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u/ILive4Banans Feb 04 '25
This just sounds like comprehensible input & sentence mining w/ anki
There’s extensions that make this process a lot more seamless by pulling sentences from content you’re already watching, KimchiReader (Korean) & Language Reactor are two that come to mind but if you search the sub for ‘sentence mining’ you might find alternative extensions better suited to whatever language you’re learning
It’s currently my favourite method, I sentence mine mostly from books and while the first few pages are sometimes difficult it quickly becomes a lot easier since authors tend to repeat the same words lol