My Biggest Language Learning Mistake
When I was first planning out this publication, I thought to myself that I might create and sell Anki decks made up of passages from Dream of the Red Chamber.
In my defense, I know that other language focused content creators have done similar things in the past. Some offer really good Anki decks that feature native speaker audio. Others offer decks that are a bit less helpful - and I know this because I’ve spent more money than I care to admit on products that don’t help out all that much.
However, the truth is that you really shouldn’t buy somebody else’s deck, no matter how good it seems.
The truth, as uncomfortable as it may be, is that there’s no real shortcut to learning a language. You’ve got to put in the time and effort to learn it yourself, and programs like Anki are really designed to reinforce things you have already learned, not to teach you something new.
I’ve tried a few tricks here and there over the years, thinking that they would help me get a special edge on learning this language or that language.
For example, as I mentioned in a previous video, I once used the sub2srs program to automatically convert a number of television shows with subtitles into Anki cards.
That plan worked in the sense that the program chose the right audio clips and created presentable cards. I did find myself frustrated at first by all the cards that weren’t actually sentences, but I was able to delete those on my own.
However, what I learned is that I had absolutely no connection to the content, since I didn’t bother to watch the television shows beforehand. All I had were clips taken completely out of context from a show that sounded somewhat interesting, but that was utterly confusing.
You see, effective language learning requires at least some sort of context. And when you try to take the context out of language learning and turn it into a simple memorization problem, the whole thing loses its flavor.
This is why you should stay away from downloading precreated Anki decks. The problem isn’t just that the decks are likely inaccurate. The real problem, rather, is that you didn’t go through the learning process required to actually create them.
You see, when you take the time to look up something you don’t know, or to focus for long enough to at least attempt to learn a difficult grammatical concept from a textbook, your brain has to work at actually making sense of the language.
When you strain your ears to figure out what somebody just said in your target language, your brain is working to try to understand just what is going on.
However, if everything is completely spoonfed for you, or if you just mine a ton of sentences without context and throw them into your deck, you’ll find the process boring and ultimately not very useful.
I have thousands of notes in my Anki deck that I honestly should clean out. It’s not a great position to be in, to be honest. I keep committing the sunk cost fallacy, convincing myself that the fact that I spent time copying a bunch of sentences from a grammar book a few years ago means that there’s got to be some value there somewhere.
Don’t be like me. Take your time, learn the language the right way, and keep your deck clean.