Anki

I use Anki to study foreign language vocabulary. It’s the de facto spaced repetition software for memorization.^[Yes, I’m aware that others exist. I’ve tried many but always have come back to Anki.] When making flashcards for language learnings, I try to use imagery as much as possible. So a card may have a Russian word on one side and just an image on the opposite side. (Since I already know the English word that the image represents, why not try to engage a different part of the brain to help with memorization?)

Speaking of Anki, here’s a Swiss Army knife of database utilities that provides searching, moving and renaming functions from the command line.

On GitHub.

You can do things like this to rename and collect tags:

$ anki_tool mv_tags '(dinosaur|mammal)' animal

Looks cool.

[N.B. 2016-03-26 Nathan Ifill pointed out that it is possible to use Anki’s built-in conditional replacement feature to do what I’m illustrating. I’ll have to work on another example!]

Anki is a widely-used flashcard application. If you’re learning a foreign language and you’re not using Anki, you should be.

If you are using Anki and are picky about the appearance of the cards, you should know that JavaScript can be used in the card template. This opens up a number of possibilities for dynamic cards. I’m just touching on the technique here.

Learning the vocabulary of a non-native language is a daunting task. The Russian vocabulary encompasses an estimated 200,000 words. Facing the task of learning this massive vocabulary for a foreign speaker is a Herculean task.^[Fortunately, many words are rare or obsolete and my experience with other languages is that you can make yourself understood with far less than the complete vocabulary.] The average adult English speaker is said to use about 20,000 words. Presumably Russian speakers can get by with about number too. Nonetheless, it remains an enormous task, one that can’t be conquered solely by brute force.