The Cunning Linguist

Readers with good memories will recall that a few weeks ago I promised you all a review of Anki, a free flashcard application that uses “spaced repetition”. If you don’t remember, don’t worry; this post may be even more relevant for you!

• Spaced repetition
• Customisability
• Using Anki
• Summary

Spaced repetition

Fellow bloggers report that there has been a buzz about Anki for some time, though I only ran across it recently. It’s essentially a flashcard system, but two things set it apart. Firstly, it uses a “spaced repetition” algorithm to determine the optimum interval for reviewing any given flashcard. When presented with the card, you have the chance to figure out the answer. Then you click the button and the (correct!) answer appears. Now the clever bit; you tell Anki how well you remembered the answer (a choice of buttons from “completely forgot” to “easy”). If you forgot, Anki shows you the card again really soon. If you remembered, Anki lengthens the interval before you next review that card (there’s no point going over and over material you already know).

This is the crux of “spaced repetition”. The brain determines whether information is worth remembering based on how often it is recalled. Its like maintaining a bookshelf of limited size; you might choose to always put books you’ve removed back at the top, so books that never get read gradually move down to the bottom. When you decide to buy a new book, sooner or later an old one will have to go. It makes sense to pull an infrequently thumbed tome from that bottom shelf - its sad, but that “2002 What Tax Guide” has to go. There might be something down there you can’t bear to part with, because you know you’re likely to use it even if you haven’t for a while. The illustrated encyclopaedia is useful to have around, and it saved your butt when your last essay was due.

Your brain can be described in a similar way. Information you use once and never retrieve will gradually be considered less relevant. Eventually it will be cleared away to make space for something else; something newer and possibly far more useful. Wait too long to pull out that information and it will have already gone. You’ll need to start again from scratch. Equally, useful information doesn’t need to be covered excessively. Having revisited it several times or attached a particularly strong memory to it, you will naturally remember it for longer. If there’s a lot of information to review, covering things you’re not likely to forget is a waste of time that just increases your workload.

In the past our ability to use spaced repetition with paper tools like flashcards was fairly limited. James Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji” is a particularly clever system to achieve a SRS with paper cards, its success born out by the popularity of his method. Computers, however, were born to do these kinds of calculations, so its here that they can provide a massive boost to any kind of revision activity. Anki capitalizes on this, and adds a powerful dose of customisability into the mix.

Customisability

This is the second really neat feature in Anki: you can pretty much program it to quiz you any way you need. Core to the application are “Facts” and “Cards”; if you’re going to enter your own data, it’s important to understand the difference between these two. A Fact is a set of information about a single concept. For example, a single kanji combined with its meaning might be a Fact. This Fact could contain an ON or KUN reading, or possibly both. The kanji symbol itself may not be unique amongst Facts – there could be another reading, which has a different meaning. But the combination of kanji and meaning are unique.

Cards consist of a question and an answer, and are generated from Facts according to the “Model”. A Model specifies how you use the information in a Fact to turn it into a question and answer pair. So for a given kanji Fact, you might want to have one Card that quizzes you on the meaning of the kanji. But you might also want to have another Card that asks you what the ON reading is, or the KUN reading. Because kanji symbols may have multiple meanings, you might want to see the symbol and the reading in the question. These things are all defined in the Model. Anki mixes up Cards related to the same Fact so you develop false-confidence in recall having answered a similar question just moments before.

You probably only need to delve into these details if you would like to write your own Anki ‘Deck’ (the data file Anki uses to store Facts, Cards, Models). If you’re using an existing Deck, all you need to do is click the buttons to answer the questions. But it’s reassuring to know that what you have in front of you is a very powerful tool. If you do want to learn something specific, with interrelated sets of information, the chances are you can. Its possible to add graphics and even sound files into your Decks. Even when only using text, I would recommend reading the questions and answers out loud as you work with Anki if you can.

The simplest, default Anki Deck is configured to test your recall in two directions – guessing the answer from the question, and also guessing the question from the answer. Testing recall in both directions is a very good idea for language and one you’ll want to build into your own study wherever possible. After all, when you figure out how to ask a question in a foreign language, you’ll invariably need to decipher the response into a language you understand!

Using Anki

I’ve been using Anki now in my own study since February, and have found it to be highly effective for studying kanji and vocabulary, as well as brushing up on hiragana and katakana. One of the really nice things about the tool is that you can enter the data yourself, learn exactly what you want, and structure the questions exactly as you’d prefer.

You can also enter data at a pace that suits you. One of minor down-points of Anki is that if you add a couple of thousand Facts (by loading a pre-existing Deck, or importing data from a vocabulary list) it really will give you the opportunity to spend a few hours clicking the “completely forgot” button for the new data. Or, as one blogger found when he stopped studying for a few weeks following the birth of his child, overdue Cards will just keep stacking up.

This can be demoralising, and it would be nice to have the option of time-boxing built into the software. I say option, though, because the ideal is to review all the cards Anki prompts you with as and when you are prompted. After all, if Anki calculates you’re going to forget a Fact tomorrow, but you don’t get around to reviewing it until next week, it’s likely you’ll have completely forgotten it!

Fortunately Anki always presents Cards due for “review” before new Cards you’ve never seen before (classed as “learning”). You can check which mode you’re in at the bottom right-hand-side of the screen, so if you’ve reached the end of study-time and have got through “review” mode you can feel comfortable putting it down until tomorrow. I would recommend setting a time-limit on your Anki session, to stop you feeling demoralised by lots of unfamiliar cards. It can also help indicate when you’re ready to add new information, if there aren’t enough Cards due to keep you busy for your usual study time!

Another really nice thing about Anki is that it isn’t multiple-choice. Multiple-choice questions can be short-cut by process of elimination, or by recognizing the answer instead of producing it by memory alone. I would highly recommend sitting down with a blank notepad when you’re going to do your Anki practice, so you can write your answer down on the sheet of paper before revealing it on screen. There is a big difference between thinking you know what a kanji looks like and actually being able to produce it with a pen and paper.

Telling yourself you know something when you don’t is only kidding yourself. Which takes me onto another fab thing about Anki; when you become confident with the tool, it gets a lot easier to click the “I completely forgot” button. People don’t like to admit they don’t know things, and I was reluctant at first to admit just how much I didn’t know. But once you realise that the whole point of Anki is that you will know, and you have confidence that the method will help you succeed, it gets a whole lot easier to say “I don’t know right now”. The more honest you are, the better Anki will work for you.

Last but not least, you can hook up your desktop Anki install to a free, web-based version. You can configure automatic synchronisation of your progress as well as any newly entered Facts or Cards. This way, if you’re stuck late at the office or want to do something productive with your tea break, you can just log on and do your Anki revision online. All the data you have on your home PC will be there waiting for you – no troublesome data file copying or USB pen-drive plugging-in required. There is also a similar mobile-phone feature, but I’ve not managed to get the encoding of Asian characters to work well with my handset yet; it does look like this will be solved in a later version.

Summary

Overall I would strongly recommend Anki to anyone who needs a reliable system to memorise a lot of information. The tool is free, and support is on a reasonable-endeavours basis from the developer, but its been through quite a lot of releases by now and is fairly bug free. The client automatically updates itself when new bug-fixes are available, and install files can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

In a few weeks Anki has gone from being an intriguing tool I’d like to try, to being at the centre of my study program for the JLPT this year – because I can see that it is really working. It would be unwise to study solely with any one method, especially a computer based one when few exams involve using a computer. But Anki is a great tool for tackling the hard graft of remembering vast quantities of information in a time-effective and reliable way. This frees up time you might have spent fruitlessly tackling paper flashcards to practice past exam questions, or read out-loud with all those new ON and KUN readings you now remember.

I am making my own Anki Decks available for anyone who would like to get stuck in to some spaced-repetition study. You can download them here. There’s only a couple at the moment, but as new Decks are built I will add them. Whether you use a pre-existing Deck or write your own, you will find Anki to be a tool you can rely on to improve your recall of language facts. And don’t forget to share your progress here on Cunning Linguist!

You can read more about Anki here, or find more resources for studying Japanese writing systems on the book guide pages for Hiragana & Katakana, and Kanji. Visit the official Anki website to download Anki for free!