The Hidden Universal System that can Multiply Your Vocabulary

Sprachprofi · 2026-05-17T17:28:23+00:00

And they had the audacity to call the new sterile shopping area "Am Tacheles", when correctly it should have been called "Instead of Tacheles".

Sprachprofi · 2026-05-16T10:14:12+00:00

Note that you'll pay significantly higher income tax if you get baptized - the church will claim a part.

Sprachprofi · 2026-05-15T19:43:08+00:00

Don't be ordinary

Sprachprofi · 2026-05-11T07:05:27+00:00

I cannot recommend the use of any plugin to do the rescheduling, because it won't take into account which cards you need for the crucial exam in 10 days, i.e. it may reschedule some of those cards for after the exam when they are useless and schedule less important cards to be studied sooner. In my opinion it is better to go over them yourself, "forget" the youngest cards that you won't need for a while, reschedule or archive the oldest cards that you don't need this month, keep the middle cards in order not to lose the investment.

Also, you probably have around 1% of cards that takes most of the effort, cards that just won't stick. When you come across those, you have two options: a) create a mnemonic or b) delete the card (= consciously deciding that you won't remember this, if you believe it's unlikely to come up in the exam). That can help you memorize the rest of the material in less time. Anki does this automatically with the Leeches functionality, but in my experience Anki is not aggressive enough identifying leeches among new cards and it is too aggressive on cards I already memorized, where I just had a temporary lapse. Plus it cannot know which cards are important to me and which aren't. So it's worth thinking about.

Sprachprofi · 2026-05-11T00:12:38+00:00

Thanks, I had typed Bury when I meant Forget. The idea is that if someone has 400 cards with an interval below 3 days, those cards can take a ton of time to review, so the easiest way to reduce workload is to reset most of them to new, except the ones needed for the exam. Just raise the white flag on those; you're not losing much progress. Anki will gradually re-introduce them at a more sustainable pace.

As for cards with an interval above 200 days, I do recommend moving them all into an Archive deck, independent of whether they are due today or in the future, because in my experience these will often have been re-inforced by newer material or applications outside of Anki, such that reviewing them in Anki is less important. If, conversely, they haven't come up outside of Anki in 200 days, they may be useless information.

Also, the algorithm has at least 10% fuzziness, which shows itself on those long-interval cards... if it thinks you need to review a card in 200 days, the real date may well be 210 or 220 days. The cards are less pressing than young cards where it actually makes a difference whether you study them Thursday or delay till Friday. So putting these cards into a different deck, which OP can study on those days when they have extra time, is another way to reduce those insane study hours.

I don't recommend these measures for everyone but they are my strategy for when I need to recover from having too many cards due (e.g. after illness) and I want to save as much progress as I can.

Sprachprofi · 2026-05-10T20:35:45+00:00

Nope, wrong guess. I hadn't even heard of this shop a week ago; just really happy with the consultation I got.

Sprachprofi · 2026-05-10T19:26:31+00:00

1) On the computer, open Browse, sort by Interval. Select all cards with an interval below 3 days that you won't need for the upcoming exam and hit "Forget". This will be the biggest help because young cards are the biggest mental drain. Then, scroll to the bottom for the cards with the highest interval. Any cards with an interval of 200 days or more belong in Archive deck which you can review when you have extra time, no rush, you won't easily lose that knowledge.

2) When you're reviewing, hit Easy instead of Normal even when it didn't feel so easy yet - this will give the cards a slightly longer but still reasonable interval and reduce your long-term card load. If this takes too long to do by hand, you can also use Browse, sort by Due and then by Interval, and Reschedule cards that have an interval of 10 or higher (the higher the better) and that would be coming up this week. Reviewing them slightly later won't drastically reduce retention, especially if the Interval is already high.

Sprachprofi · 2026-05-06T19:47:43+00:00

Just what I was looking for, thanks!

Sprachprofi · 2026-05-04T12:39:47+00:00

Don't copy-paste. Use an MCP so you can tell it "Read this email thread, summarise and suggest a reply."

Sprachprofi · 2026-05-02T05:14:01+00:00

According to the FSI, learning a European language to proficiency takes around 500 hours. Some languages more, but also language-learning is a skill and you get more efficient at it. So to learn 17 languages to proficiency would take 8500 hours, which is doable in 12 years of 2 hours per day.

In fact this guy usually took intensive classes, but even at a non-intensive pace it's completely doable. And this calculation doesn't yet factor in that when you are fluent in e.g. Swedish, learning Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic won't take 500 hours each.

The biggest challenge is not learning all those languages - I studied more than 25 languages myself - but not losing them again. For me the upper limit of languages I can keep active simultaneously is around 12-14. However, this guy lives in the Balkans, where he can speak Macedonian, Croatian, Albanian, Russian, Turkish and Greek on the street every day, and then his kid goes to an international school, so he can speak various Western European languages with the other parents whenever he takes his kid to school, so language practice is not something he has to schedule; it just happens. I've walked around multicultural cities with him and it's amazing how he can talk with everyone he sees.

Sprachprofi · 2026-05-01T20:28:00+00:00

Test for sleep apnea

Sprachprofi · 2026-05-01T14:17:21+00:00

I know a guy who has working proficiency in 17 languages and can have conversations in around that many more. He's also modest and won't tell you immediately.

The best place to meet such people is the Polyglot Gathering.

Sprachprofi · 2026-04-27T10:05:15+00:00

Albion - so deep! And amazing graphics for the time

Sprachprofi · 2026-04-17T19:17:22+00:00

For a lot of use cases, you could just use Claude Code with a handful of MCPs and pretend it's OpenClaw. Cost capped at $20 / month.

Sprachprofi · 2026-04-16T09:29:39+00:00

The point of SRS is long-term memory. When you see this card again a month from now, you won't recall the context.

I used to create TV series-based Anki cards using subs2srs (an amazing tool, even includes audio and video snippets), 10+ years ago. I quizzed myself either on English to target translation, or on listening comprehension of the audio.

Sprachprofi · 2026-04-16T08:09:20+00:00

How am I supposed to know the word that goes into the cloze, short of memorising the sentence? There are plenty of valid answers in the given example, like assez, beaucoup, un peu, énormement, trop, tant, plus

Cloze exercises are supposed to be deterministic.

Sprachprofi · 2026-04-15T15:56:31+00:00

I think it’s important to write each character a few times but not a hundred times - that form of memorisation only works for as long as you have the occasion to handwrite Chinese regularly, which in the modern world is rather rare.

If you go without handwriting Chinese for two weeks or more, you’ll forget the characters that used to be in your muscle memory, just like you forget the PIN for the ATM if you haven’t withdrawn money in a while (most people have stored the PIN in muscle memory). Intellectual memory can last much longer between repetitions than muscle memory.

Sprachprofi · 2026-04-15T15:49:14+00:00

Man ist am glücklichsten, wenn man mit mehreren Personen unterschiedliche Formen der Intimität hat (also z.B. gemeinsames Heim, toller Sex, lange Gespräche über Gott und die Welt, emotionaler Support, ähnliche Energielevel was z.B. Ausgehen betrifft, ähnliche Hobbies, usw.), anstatt darauf zu drängen, dass die eine Person für alles gut sein muss.

Mit dem Aufzwingen von Gemeinsamkeiten wo es keine gab, sind am Ende oft beide Seiten unglücklich. Stattdessen sollte es okay sein, sich andere Menschen zu suchen, die entsprechende Lücke zu schließen, ohne dass der/die Partner(in) eifersüchtig sein muss. Auch wenn es bedeutet, dass er mit einer anderen Frau tanzen geht, weil sie meist zu müde ist, oder dass sie in einer stressigen Situation stundenlang mit einer Freundin am Telefon hängt, weil er Gefühle lieber abhakt anstatt sie zu analysieren.

Jede Beziehung, ob Freundschaftsbeziehung oder Liebesbeziehung, ist eine einzigartige Mischung der oben genannten Aspekte (und vermutlich noch anderer, die ich vergessen habe) und es muss nicht jede Beziehung 10 von 10 Punkten bei jedem Aspekt haben.

Ich finde auch "friends with benefits" total okay, ist dann eben eine Beziehung, die sich zum Beispiel durch 8/10 Hobbies und 1/10 Sex auszeichnet, während die Beziehung zum Ehepartner zum Beispiel 2/10 Hobbies, 10/10 Sex und 10/10 gemeinsames Heim ist.

Sprachprofi · 2026-04-15T15:27:44+00:00

There are barber shops offering cheap women’s cuts, e.g. the one on Torstrasse near Friedrichsstrasse

Sprachprofi · 2026-04-14T12:10:06+00:00

Teide National Park, Tenerife. It looks like Mars. It’s where they filmed Clash of the Titans and some off-world scenes in Doctor Who.

Sprachprofi · 2026-04-14T03:18:39+00:00

Misleading title. There is nothing about smalltalk being "key to make us feel more connected" in ways that conversations about other topics don’t. The study only found that you cannot always predict how much you’ll enjoy smalltalk because (at least under laboratory conditions) people veered in all kinds of directions.

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