20 Jan 2022
This is the fourth update on my German language learning journey!
Stats
Words that I had hoped to have learnt by now: 1210 (10 each day for 121 days)
Words that I have actually learnt by now: 856
Full Anki stats for this month here.
Quick update
It was a good month. I worked consistently on building vocab, tried out a few different methods to strengthening my grammar (and sought some advice), and had some breakthrus with my learning process. In this update I’ll touch upon a few different things:
- Speeding up my vocabulary revision
- Studying vocab like it’s jiu jitsu
- Reconsidering my daily new word goal
- Research and approach to grammar practice
Breakthru! Speeding up my vocabulary revision
The biggest breakthru that I had this month was simply realising that I could do my vocabulary reps in Anki much faster!
My primary goal in changing from 10 to 5 words per day was to reduce the total time on Anki. I was finding it overwhelming to be doing 100 reps a day, and spending up to an hour doing these at times! In my head, I felt that adding 5 new words per day would help me to stay at, or around 50 reps per day, which I felt would be manageable, and would keep me under 30 mins of Anki per day, which I feel is the upper limit.
Here’s the data on how my reps evolved after that change.
As can be seen, there’s a significant upwards trend. The slope of the line is 0.56, meaning that, on average, I had an additional word to study every two or so days. Not ideal, didn’t stay stable, but also didn’t get overwhelming for me.
However, the breakthrough that I did have is how my study time reduced over that same period (from Anki stats, I wasn’t collecting this data myself as diligently as I would have liked to at first.
As you can see, from about 18 days ago (approx. the start of Jan), I just systematically started spending less time each day reviewing cards.
I compared some data from my old Anki sessions to my new Anki sessions, here’s how it looked.
What this graph tells us is that, before I started focussing on studying quickly, I was spending an average of 33.6 additional seconds, per extra card studied. After I started to study faster, each additional card was taking me about 10.7 seconds to study.
Under the old approach, I was therefore able to study 53 cards in my 30 min time limit. Under my new approach, I should be able to study 176! (Assuming I can keep up the pace!)
How did I make this massive gain and cut down my per-card study time by 2/3? I studied vocabulary like it was Jiu Jitsu!
Studying vocab like it’s Jiu Jitsu
When I was 18, I took up Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ). I had been watching a box set of the original Ultimate Fight Championship battles, and had been watching the slender and nimble Royce Gracie submit intimidating muscle men like it was nothing. I wanted to be like him!
As early as my first session the trainer put me onto the mats with some much bigger guys, and got me to roll (what they call ‘sparring’ or ‘wrestling’ in BJJ) with them. The surprising thing wasn’t that they beat me without trying. The surprising thing was that it was so freaking tiring! After only 30 seconds of rolling, often even less, I felt like I was the most tired that I’d ever been, panting for breath and feeling every ounce of strength seem to evaporate from my body.
Why was I so tired?
After several weeks of lessons, I started to notice a shift. I wasn’t as tired when I rolled with another person in the class. But it was’t because I was fitter or stronger, I realised that I was just applying my effort differently.
When first rolling, I didn’t know what I was doing. I was disorientated. I didn’t know what I needed to defend against, or how I was supposed to attack. As a result, I kept my entire body flexed and rigid the whole time, resisting every move of my opponent as I feared that anything they did would land me in a choke, arm bar, or some other painful and demoralising position.
Once I started to get my bearings a bit, I realised that I could actually be relaxed a lot of the time whilst rolling. There were only select times that I needed to really apply pressure and force, when either escaping an impending submission, or trying to do a specific move on my opponent. I had learnt how to utilise targeted effort, rather than brute force effort.
I share this story because I feel like this month,I’ve started to learn the difference between targeted effort and brute force effort in vocabulary learning. Each flashcard that I revise only has one specific ‘move’ that I need to revise, one specific place where I need to apply my mental force and pressure. That key point is the link between my anchor, and the target word. (The anchor is the specific way that you remember a word, see more about anchors here)
For example, when rehearsing the sentence, ‘zwischen [[ bald ]] Bäumen hindurch’ (between bald trees), I don’t actually need to listen to, rehearse, and revise the whole sentence as a whole, nor do so multiple times. I simply have to, in a targeted way, revise the mnemonic that I’ve created to remember that the German word for ‘bald’ is ‘kahlen’. And by rapidly rehearsing this mnemonic, over and over, in a very short space of time (as well as trying to link significant emotion to it, or imagine myself in the specific situation), I can reinforce that key connection, and get the maximum memory benefit, for the minimum cognitive cost.
This realisation has been a game changer for me. I’ve stopped waiting for the whole audio of a flaschard to play, I’ve stopped trying for ages when I can’t remember a word, instead simply giving up much faster, reading the answer, then rehearsing my anchor. As a result, I’m spending a third of the time revising than I was before.
I wasn’t sure if this ‘faster’ approach would mean I was forgetting heaps of words or not. But at this point, it seems like the words are still sticking. My retention data is in the same range as last month (roughly 82% – 86%, with it up to 98% for new cards, which is a bit mind boggling!)
This new approach has opened back up the goal of more than five new words a day to me, so let’s turn our attention to where to next!
Reconsidering my daily new word goal
As discussed above, with my new approach to Anki card revision, I should theoretically now be able to study up to 176 cards in 30 minutes rather than 53. That being said, I don’t want to overdo things and burn myself out, so I’m not going to try to overshoot my previous baseline, at which I found myself a bit overwhelmed.
Thus, this month I’m going to try to go back to 10 new words per day, and see how that goes. I have an inkling I may get overloaded again, in which case I might drop back to 5 for a while, then try for 8 (my favourite number!) or something like that. But right now I’m feeling motivated and empowered, so I’m going to try to return to my original goal!
Research and approach to grammar practice
Last month I wrote the following:
Again, grammar is being left a bit by the wayside, but I have exchanged a few emails in German with one of my German language exchange partners recently, and have received some good feedback there. Ok, I’ve just scheduled in 2 hours over the next week to explicitly research Grammar learning processes.
So my goal was really to try to find some sustainable way to work on my Grammar.
I reached out to Andre Klein and he gave the following fantastic advice:
(Here’s that link to Toms Deutschsseite)
Following Andre’s advice, I tried a bit of email back and forth with a German friend/tutor, but found that without more of a structure, I was finding it hard to keep up with the daily practice.
I reflected on what it is that’s helped me to be so consistent with my vocabulary learning, and realised that there are a few factors which include the fact that include:
- I have an extremely concrete daily goal
- There are very few ‘search costs’ each day (i.e., I just start reading a book and pick out 10 new words, which is very easy for me to do and I know exactly what i need to do)
- I have a high level of confidence that what I’m doing is having a positive impact
- If I miss a day, it makes the next day harder (because I’ll have twice as many Anki cards to revise), so I really need to stay focussed and work hard each day or I’ll suffer later.
I needed some approach that fit as many of these criteria as possible.
I did a tonne of searching for, and checking out sites on ‘Best German Grammar Book’ and managed to find one that’s really focussed on exercises, Grammatik aktiv, got my hands on a digital copy, and had a good look. Here’s what the first page and exercise looks like:
Essentially, it’s a textbook that uses the minimum possible number of images to communicate a grammatic idea, then jumps straight exercises. Perfect! (and it’s got the name of the concept at the top of each exercise, so if I want to google it for a bit more info, I can do that too).
So my new grammar goal is to do Anki based upon Grammtik aktiv each day, whereby I simply make three new Anki cards, each of which has an exercise on the front, and the answer on the back, and do my Anki reps, but for grammar too! (I also email a German friend occasionally too with grammar questions I have about the exercises).
It’s only early days (today is my 4th day of this new approach), but I’m feeling like this new approach ticks a bunch of boxes: concrete goal, super low search cost, relatively high confidence it’s going to be beneficial, especially as I’m doing it on a spaced repetition schedule, and missing a day will add to my subsequent workload.
Let’s see how we go! Hopefully it’ll help my grammar practice consistency to catch up on my Anki consistency!
Next steps
It’s been a good month. Next month will just be about consolidating and trying to ramp things up and stick to the consistency .
I hope you enjoyed this update on my journey – From Beginner to Fluent German in One Year: the Challenge