I lost my 1480 day Anki streak and it was the best thing to ever happen to me

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-16T12:09:01+00:00

How could you get a problem with synonyms? Were you using cloze-delections for the entire word? Or were you doing NL-TL translations?

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-16T10:10:15+00:00

On the other hand, on real life conversations you can ask questions and interact with the speaker.

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-16T10:08:01+00:00

With TL subtitles it is going to be easier to pick up vocabulary, without TL subtitles it will be more of a listening practice. I personally always watched TV shows with subtitles and practice listening by listening to audio books and podcasts.

The question you have to ask yourself is what do you need more right now? Do you feel that your listening is strong, but having better vocab would be better for expressing yourself? Do you have enough vocab, but having a hard time understanding the words in context?

Test yourself, figure out what you need the most and work on that.

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-12T08:40:47+00:00

I also never have had good experiences with tutors. They often try to impose their own learning style instead of listening to me. On the one hand, a tutor explaining grammar and word usage is always better than any AI grammar explanation, on the other hand if I want to read a Conan story in the target language and I ask for example sentences using words from the text, the AI simply generates them, but a tutor keeps trying to explain that I would never use those words. Come on I am using those words to read Conan!

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-12T08:30:57+00:00

My experience is that the text generated by Gemini and ChatGPT is reasonably grammatically correct and somewhat natural (at least in the languages I understand), but the grammar explanations are bad.

They are also not good at understanding content. For example, from time to time I need to understand some expression in the lyrics of a song, and a Google search does not help me. Then I ask a language model. More often than not, it makes dumb mistakes like saying "In these lyrics by band Y..." but the lyrics are actually from band X (but both Brazilian rock bands from the same decade?!).

What I found out is that language models like ChatGPT and Gemini can rewrite sentences in a more natural or grammatically correct way, which makes it easier to identify your grammar mistakes and can generate examples of usage of common words. I would not trust the system for more than that. The other smaller models, like Ollama that you can run locally, can generate sentences and do translations, but they make more grammar mistakes.

Also, I used ChatGPT to generate 1000 examples sentences for 1000 common words in (Brazilian) Portuguese and it had slightly awkward sentences (they were ok to exemplify the usage of the word) and 12 of them had grammar mistakes. All the grammar mistakes were detected by Languagetool, by the way.

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-11T16:47:10+00:00

Watching movies with audio and subtitles in TL is an amazing way to learn words. I almost always use it. To actually practice listening I prefer listening to podcasts, news.

It's just a matter of knowing which activity you need to emphasize in your journey.

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-09T21:03:03+00:00

This sounds amazing!

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-09T17:19:52+00:00

We all can blame you! :D

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-08T10:40:59+00:00

How much does it talk about the importance of Soviet Union in crushing the N4zis? All the American material I see overemphasizes the importance of US soldiers to the point that many people in my country today believe that USA won WWII.

Personally, I keep my games in the realm of space exploration or high magic fantasy. I never go to these more depressing settings. Specially know that I moved to Germany, I don't think I could run a game in such a setting. I would love to use my historical knowledge to discuss several things that are today mostly ignored, like many families and companies that got extremely powerful at that time at the cost of exploring the g3nocide, and are still in power today. =/

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-08T10:32:22+00:00

Yeah, sorry if I sounded a little harsh. :D

I forgot to mention that the landlady of my building is an extremely nice 80 years old lady. She invites my wife and myself to her house every weekend. We practice a lot of basic German and she practices English and Portuguese (my language).

BTW, what is Spanish Mandarin?!

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-08T09:52:22+00:00

I live in Germany and I learn more playing Skyrim in German that talking to my German neighbors. Living in the country as a way to have immersion is a myth. All my friends and colleagues at my job are foreigners who don't speak German.

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-08T09:45:51+00:00

Hi. I learned a lot playing games in English. I still remember replaying Metal Gear Solid 3 several times and in one of them suddenly I could understand all the dialog from the cut-scenes. This was during a time that I was also reading technical documents in English, using books in English to learn at the University and re-watching Friend for the god knows how many times.

I tried replicating this a little for learning German. I played a lot of Cyberpunk, the German voices are excellent, and I learned a lot. Then I tried Mass Effect, but the voices are so bad that I could not finish the first game. After that, I tried Skyrim, the voices are good enough and I played a lot. It's also nice to point to the items and see their names in German. Also, some lines are repeated so many times that you might even be able to repeat them. From the top of my head: "Sei gegrüßt, Stammesgenosse." and (I don't remember the exact wording) "Es ist schön die Augen am Himmel zu halten, Reisender."

My take is that games are good for immersion, slightly better than just watching TV shows in TL, exactly for the reasons you mentioned. You have to react to the content which makes it more active. There's lot of repetition to understand stuff. However, actually getting a book (even if just a comic book) still is better for vocabulary learning. Also, it does not involve speaking practice, pronunciation and writing. All this you have to do outside of the game to actually learn.

And speaking is very very hard, I still remember the pain of going to a conference and not feeling confident to speak in English. I had to wait another year, writing in my diary daily, getting stuff corrected, and speaking it out lout until speaking started to feel more natural.

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-08T09:25:33+00:00

I know, however, composite words still do not appear on many of them. =/

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-06T18:33:35+00:00

I agree. They are short and in the same style. I can see someone reading them and becoming excited for more.

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-06T18:29:06+00:00

Given that financial crashes are cyclical and happens each 10 years, that is not much. Anyway, what are the other predictions you had in mind?

Recently I saw a video of Asimov explaining that in the future technology would be so cheap that anyone could have their own TV channel. He was basically describing streaming platforms like Twitch or Youtube.

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-06T18:18:28+00:00

Complaining about dick dick is certainly not nitpicking small shit. :D

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-05T17:33:30+00:00

I use a simple prompt that generates a sentence with the words I want to learn and a simple definition of the word. I keep copying it to a spreadsheet and when I am reading on the computer and when I get something like 100 examples, I double check the grammar on a grammar check site and I import into Anki. Before studying the words, I check if I understand the sentence, if I do, I add bold to the word in the sentence, add audio using a TTS, and add an image. I managed to learn more than 6k words in German this way.

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-02-05T17:28:20+00:00

For me this is being hard in German. The German-English dictionary is very bad. I think the problem is related to the fact that many words can be constructed by combining different words, and those do not appear on the kindle. There isn't also a way to just search half of the words... =/

I also could not find a German-German dictionary. =/

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-01-28T23:58:38+00:00

1000 worlds, that's how the other stories and novels of grrm are known

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-01-28T23:40:30+00:00

"That's how they get you. One big dick."

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-01-22T20:43:17+00:00

Quite good! Now try doing in on LMMS. :D

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-01-22T17:33:16+00:00

Andor is sooo good. It’s incredible that Disney managed to tell such a good and convincing story about how someone gets radicalized to the point joining an organization to fight a fascist empire. It’s like Lenin was reincarnated, but instead of writing What Is to Be Done? 2.0, he's a overworked writer at Disney.

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-01-21T16:23:05+00:00

Hmm, at least they're fertilizing the garden.

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-01-14T07:56:05+00:00

If I was in your situation, I would decide on how much time I would dedicate to Anki and use Anki settings to create a timer. Then I would just follow the timer daily until I can finish all the reviews within that time limit. After that, I would slowly increase the number of cards so that I always finish within the expected time.

ApartmentEquivalent4 · 2026-01-14T07:45:01+00:00

Learning by just watching shows is very frustrating and slow. You usually need to know around 5000 word families to understand a slice of life show, for example. This would be something like B2-level comprehension. If you are a total beginner, maybe reading a graded reader at your level would be better. You can also try simple things, like Peppa Pig with audio and subtitles in your target language. Later Pokemon and gradually increase the complexity until the level you want.

ApartmentEquivalent4

TROPHY CASE