Vocabulary & Anki

Why I stopped learning word lists#

I used to keep a notebook of new words. One word per line, with the Vietnamese meaning beside it.

The problem showed up when I met those same words in real sentences. I knew concern meant "mối quan tâm". Then I hit "To whom it may concern" and was lost.

A word carries several meanings depending on context, attaches to particular prepositions, and holds nuance that a short translation cannot express.

So I switched: learn whole sentences, not isolated words.

Later I took it one step further: for each word, I also collect three to five phrases it habitually appears in. That has its own piece: Collocations.

How I make cards#

The process is simple. While listening or reading, I hit a sentence where exactly one thing is unknown to me. I take that whole sentence as a card.

What one of my cards contains#

• Front: the whole sentence, with the target word in bold.
• Back: the meaning of that word. In English if possible. Plus audio if available.
• Never several words crammed into one card.

I use Ddict to look things up on the page, then copy the sentence and meaning into Anki. Ddict cannot push cards into Anki, so I do this by hand. It sounds tedious, but retyping the sentence is itself one more repetition.

The Anki settings I use#

Three rules I got from nearly quitting#

1. Review every day, including lazy days. I skipped three days and the due count doubled. Seeing that number killed my motivation outright. On a genuinely busy day, five minutes is fine — as long as I open it.

2. Delete cards without mercy. A card I have failed three times in a row is a broken card, not proof that I am slow. Usually the sentence is too long, or it has two unknowns. I delete it or rewrite it.

3. Anki serves listening and reading; it does not replace them. If a week goes by where I spent more time on cards than on listening and reading, I know I am heading the wrong way.