[dothereading]

So I definitely agree that this is 100% the best way to use Anki, that's why I wrote the line about "Writing cards that trigger memories of experiences I had in the real world always produced better cards."

I couldn't give you a percentage, but I made most of my own cards, including all of those 2000+ kanji cards. There's lots of debate in the language learning community about vocab cards or sentence cards, and generally the ideal is the sentence cards, as it provides the context that helps you use is naturally (as opposed to literal translations from your native language).

> I still need to work out different variations of the concept to understand it, and that's not something that Anki can help with.

But imagine if it could!

[jbstack]

I agree that sentences are generally superior to vocab. Vocab cards are extremely problematic once you go beyond beginner level, because words can (and often do) have multiple translations in both directions. This could be because there are multiple words meaning the same thing, or because a word has multiple meanings.

For example if the English prompt is "watermelon" - are you supposed to recall the Italian word cocomero, anguria, or melone d'aqua (all of which mean watermelon)? If the English prompt is "bank" - is that a place you deposit money, a river bank, to bank (turn) a plane, or to bank (count) on something happening? You end up having to build in messy hacks like giving clues in the prompt as to which translation is intended (which means you memorise the clue instead of the word) or having cards for bank(1), bank(2), bank(3), and bank(4) which becomes very tedious for recall. Sentences mitigate these problems somewhat.

I now only use vocab cards for object nouns where there's only one important translation, and mainly because I can put pictures on these cards so that I'm learning from e.g. the concept of an orange instead of the English word for orange (which saves you the step of mentally translating when you aren't yet fluent with the word).

[erikw]

I'm so tempted to try improving my language skills with Anki, both for my native language and my daily use language. But the commitment feels so daunting- I've barely missed a day in my reviews for the last two years, and only have 28,000 reviews total. I'm very impressed by your 98,000!

I guess the best way to start is just to create a new deck in it with one card and then go from there. I already have a daily review habit, which is the most important part.

[dothereading]

Yeah I was definitely doing too many for it to be fun.

I think that when you have a really high level, Anki is actually even better than when you are at a lower level, because you already have the intuition for the language in general and you are just adding one small component. At lower levels you are making more assumptions about how the word will be used and that can lead you astray.

So I'd say try it!