Daily Dose of English 72
Anki
Daily Dose of English 72
Intermediate
Hey, everyone. My name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this English, in this episode, we're going to be talking about Anki. I should get my English checked. Okay, enough of that silliness. We're talking about Anki today. Anki is a very interesting topic in my opinion, even though most people have never heard of it. It's a very specific tool that is used primarily by language learners and medical students. So students that are studying to be a doctor or a nurse, somebody that works in the healthcare field. might use Anki to study. Because Anki is a tool for studying flashcards and memorizing a lot of stuff. And it is a program that you can get on your computer, on a phone, really on anything that is like a computer-like system. And it is just a simple, I call it a framework, which is a bit of a big word that doesn't mean much. but it just helps you to study flashcards. Anki itself doesn't have any flashcards built in. It is just a system for studying more flashcards. So a sort of another example of like a framework type thing is kind of YouTube in a lot of ways. YouTube, the company, doesn't make videos, right? When you're watching YouTube videos or listening to this podcast on YouTube, you're not necessarily using YouTube's content. Like this is the content that I made. However, I used their system to upload it and to publish it and to stream the video, right? All these parts that are necessary to watch a video are from YouTube. So Anki is sort of similar where it doesn't provide you with any flashcards or material. It just provides you with a good system for studying and reviewing flashcards. Um, the name Anki is not an English word. It's A-N-K-I. And I believe it comes from the Japanese term for like memorization or memorize, something like that. And so it's essentially saying memorize or, or learn cards and learn stuff. And like I said, it's primarily used by people that are studying to be doctors because they have to remember a ton of information about the human body or about science. And then it's also used by language learners to learn new words, because it's very, very useful for memorizing new things. Anki is built off of what's called an SRS, a Spaced Repetition System, which is a way of studying flashcards where they become more spaced apart. So in that name, S is spaced, there's a space between things. Repetition is that you're seeing something over and over again where you're repeating it, and then the system is just how it updates. And so you don't always see the card every single day, for example. At the beginning, you see a card on day one, then you maybe see it on day two, but then it skips a couple days and you see it on day five. Then maybe you see it on day 10, then day 30, right? The spacing between gets higher and higher the better you know a card. And we do this because it's been shown that that's kind of how the human memory works, right? We learn information better and we put it into our long-term memory when we see it in this spaced way. Part of that is just because of how we interact with information around us, but it's also makes a logical sense, right? If you see something often enough, your brain should remember it. Right? Something like your phone number. You probably know really, really well because you've seen it so many times and it's useful and you have to do it again. Right? Your email address as well. It's a, that's a long string of numbers or letters, but you can say it instantly. It's really easy. However, the email address of your friend, maybe, you don't have memorized, or their own phone number, or their phone number, rather. You probably don't know that well because you don't see it that often. You see it maybe once every couple months or something like that. And so, if you see information more regularly, your brain goes, oh, that's probably important, I should remember that. And so language learners use Anki to remember vocabulary primarily because you have to learn a lot of vocabulary. Native English speakers tend to know around 15 to 30,000 words, somewhere in there. Native speakers of most languages know about that many words depending on how much they've read or what different things they talk about. their specific interests and so in your native language you probably know at least 15,000 words and maybe if you're younger you still haven't learned that many words yet just because it takes time to learn that many words because that's a lot of words. 15,000 is a lot of things to learn but a lot of Adults that have read a lot and gone to school and work with words in some capacity, and they work with words in some way, will typically know between 20,000, 25,000, something like that. However, we don't really use that many words, but we do use around maybe 10,000 words in daily speech, or it's even closer to like 5,000, depending on what you're talking about. Anyways, I'm kind of going off on a tangent here, but my point is that you have to learn a lot of words, right? Even in English, you're going to have to learn a lot of words in order to understand, right? I've already used a bunch of words in this episode that you might not have known. Capacity, framework, tangents, and these are all words that are kind of important if you want to be able to easily understand any native speaker. And so sometimes putting them into a system like Anki and reviewing them is a really helpful way to remember words that are a little bit more difficult to learn. It's also great for starting a language, right? If you know zero words, it's harder to learn more words. And so you can start with Anki to memorize the first couple hundred or thousand words so that you have a base to work off of. However, memorizing words is not knowing them. There is a difference between memorizing the word capacity and the definition versus being able to understand it easily. Because I use it in a way that is not as common, right? In a capacity of da-da-da is different than like the capacity of a backpack. And this is just how human language works. We use words in lots of different ways. Every language does this. There is no language where there is one word for each different idea. That would be way too many words. The human brain just can't use that many words because we talk about a lot of different things. Like I said, we only use around five, six, 7,000 words per day to talk about what's in our lives. And we reuse a lot of words because we don't necessarily need a different word for every single different thing. Sometimes the same word used in slightly different ways is just way easier because we almost always have context of what we're talking about. So if you use Anki, that's great, I use it as well. However, you have to know that that is not the end of the story. You also have to find those words and understand those words in the real world. I actually have a, like an example of that is there was a word that I'd have been studying in Anki for maybe even a year, so quite a long time, but I never really seen it in the real world. And so whenever I saw it in Anki, I'd be like, what does this mean? I saw this word like five months ago in my Anki cards, but I still don't remember what it means. However, I distinctly remember when I heard it in the real world. I heard it in a YouTube video and it finally made sense. We often say that something clicks, right? It clicked in my mind what that word meant and how it was used. And so if you're struggling to remember words in your Anki or in whatever system you use to memorize words, your problem probably isn't that you need to do more memorization, but that you need to do less and you need to find those words and understand those words in real contexts. So that's my tip to you. Another thing that you can do is to save new words, right? If you haven't used Anki before, I'm now I'm kind of jumping around, but If you haven't used Anki before, a useful thing that you can do with it is when you hear a new word in maybe a podcast or a video or something, you can save that word into your Anki and then study it later. And that can be useful if you really want to remind yourself of something. And that's part of the reason why I use it. I did that a lot with Czech. I'm not doing it as much anymore. I'm mostly just reviewing things, but it can be really useful for that sort of thing. Or if you're really struggling, for example, with counting in the language or the months, the days of the week, something like that, having a memory system can be really helpful. Anyways, that has been my episode on Anki. I hope that you enjoyed this and maybe learned a little something. And I'll see you again tomorrow for another episode. Have a good one. Bye.
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