litanylanguagelearning

[litanylanguagelearning]

The Importance Of Learning Phrases In A Language

When I was using Anki one of the problems was I kept on running into decks with single words and not the phrases that I wanted.

And I know why people make decks like this. It's because it's easy. All you have to do is find a frequency list and pick the first few thousand words.

But going through a list of words doesn't really tell you anything about a language.

You know it was really a deck called 'Spoon Fed Chinese' that opened my eyes to this. How powerful full phrases could be. They just threw in some basic phrases to learn in any language. And, yeah, sure, it works. But then when you go through a hundred, two hundred, a thousand of these phrases, it starts to break down.

Of course this is not to say phrases are bad. I talked just yesterday how they will naturally teach you the grammar and they give you a sense of how languages are used.

But they're also much harder to get right. Because it's hard to know what order you should see the phrases in. What we need is an algorithm to tell us in what order should you learn a language.

And that's what Litany does.

The whole point of Litany was to combine these two forces: single word translations and phrase translations. Taking the best of both worlds.

And originally I thought I couldn't do it. It would take too much time and effort. But then I started to think I could do it using algorithms. Now it would take a ton of time to load the phrases but it could be done. And that's what it does.

Now when you first start the app you will see single word translations. Because those are the translations that the app deems the easiest. But after a few days you will start to encounter more and more complicated phrases naturally.

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.

[litanylanguagelearning]

How Important Is Grammar Really?

So Litany, it doesn't do grammar that well. But that's OK, because the way I see it grammar doesn't matter and you can learn a language without grammar.

OK, OK, let me explain. So I think the best way to think of language learning is a video game. You start in the tutorial area and you work your way up to bigger enemies. Until finally you're in the 'end game' where the enemies have way more abilities and do a lot more damage.

If you brought an end game enemy into the beginner area it would be... well it would be bad.

That's sort of how I see grammar. Grammar is an end game enemy. Because you can still speak without grammar. You'll just sound a bit weird.

Of course this isn't to say grammar is completely useless. Sure, in the beginning you don't technically need grammar to learn a language. And if you don't want to be 'fluent' and just have a basic language ability you still don't need grammar.

But the importance of grammar in language learning is that it makes you sound natural. And I think we all want that.

So is grammar necessary to learn a language?

But I wanted to talk more about how you learn grammar here. And specifically about Litany. I've said before that 'learning by osmosis' doesn't really work. You can't just read a textbook 100 times and expect to learn anything.

But I think it does work a little bit for Litany and language learning. Let me explain.

When I go through my Litany cards I start to get an intuition for the grammar. Like a sixth sense. And I'll start seeing patterns in the phrases. It's sort of like the matrix to be honest.

I think this is because of Litany's powerful graph search algorithm and the fact that it uses full phrases.

Of course this whole learning by osmosis thing is a happy accident. We call these HACK's: helpful additions created klutzily. So I'm not sure if this is a good way to learn grammar. But one thing's for sure: it's a lot better than staring at a bunch of conjugation charts.

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.

[litanylanguagelearning]

It Gets Easier

So I just added French to my app. I don't know why, I guess I just wanted to. And I noticed something funny.

A lot of these words look like Spanish words. I mean not that similar. But if you already knew Spanish I think French would be a lot easier.

This is one of the things I wanted to add to my post yesterday about babies and language learning. In that post I mentioned that babies lack another language to attach their ideas to. And the more I think about this the more I think that having another language is really a powerful idea.

Like I come from a computer science background. And one of the things I'd occasionally hear is 'you should learn a second language because that changes how you think.' and I never really understood what they meant. And to be honest I still don't. Programming languages and normal languages are completely different.

But now that I'm starting to learn a few languages I sort of understand what that means. Learning a language changes how you think. Like why do so many languages have the adjective after the noun instead of before? And why do so many languages use the same word for morning and tomorrow?

But the more you learn a language the more you start to see the parallels between languages. And it's really interesting to attach ideas from one language to another.

So that's all I wanted to say today. When you learn one language it gets easier to learn another. Assuming the languages are related, of course. Chinese and Spanish are not going to help each other much. But Chinese and Japanese will.

You know it's funny, Chinese and Japanese use the same characters for some words. It's almost as if they started off as the same language and broke apart hundreds of years ago. It would not surprise me.

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.

[litanylanguagelearning]

Why Is It Easier For A Child To Learn A Second Language

How does a child learn a second language? Or any language? Do they memorize a bunch of words? Look at a bunch of flash cards? Memorize conjugation?

No, no, and no. What babies do can best be summed up in one word: immersion. They immerse themselves in a language. They are forced to speak it, to listen to it, and this is why it is easier to learn a language as a child. Or so it would seem.

In Gabriel Wyner's TEDx talk, and his book Fluent Forever, he claims babies learning languages better than adults is a myth.

Now I wouldn't say it as forcefully as him. There is a lot of research on how babies develop language and they appear to do it quite fast. Plus there's some stories of humans being raised by animals never being able to develop language. Although it's unknown if this is because the humans in these studies actually couldn't learn or they were unable to immerse themselves like a baby would.

But I do agree with Gabriel Wyner's sentiment. All my life I kept hearing stories like, "Oh, you shouldn't learn a language after the age of 18" and "learning a language as an adult is too much work." And I believed it. Because I had a language class in school and it was really hard.

But these are all, as they say: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

So what do I think? Do babies learn languages faster than adults? It's complicated, but I think babies don't. Yes, they have a huge advantage. But they also lack a lot. They lack another language to attach their ideas to. They lack motivation and discipline to learn a new language.

But we can take from babies some key insights. I think we can all agree how adults learn a second language is pretty ineffective on average. To succeed we need to emulate the immersion that babies have. Just in a much more concentrated way. And that's with spaced repetition.

Because if you think about it it takes years for a baby to be able to make words in their native language.

Let's compare this to Litany. The default number of words you learn each day is 10. So in a year you reviewed 3650 words. 3650! That's enough to be conversational in a language. Barely conversational but conversational nonetheless.

So we are already way ahead of babies. Then let's assume another 3 years. Over 10,000 words! 10,000 is considered to be a magic number. Now, admittedly, Litany does not consider conjugation so you may have to learn a few more than 10,000 words to actually know 10,000 words, but it's still incredibly impressive.

Personally I think the myth of babies learning a new language is from the deep desire to have already done something. "I wish I had learned a language before." Because then you don't have to work for it. But just because you missed an opportunity before doesn't mean you need to avoid it for all time.

As they say: the best time to start anything is 20 years ago, and the second best is today.

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.

[litanylanguagelearning]

Learning On The Go

My language learning journey really began when I read this book Fluent Forever. And in the book there was this story of the author who had very little experience in some language, I think French. But in their morning commute they reviewed the language. Only in their morning commute.

And after a few months they were speaking the language at an intermediate to advanced level. This was just completely mind blowing. You could just study a little every day in your free time and learn a language that way? I always thought learning languages was this really intensive thing. After all it's how I was taught in school.

To think you could learn a language in just little daily review sessions... it sort of reminds me of this quote from Bill Gates, “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

This was one of the goals I had with Litany. I wanted an app that you could take out anywhere and just review.

And in a way it's even better than Anki because it allows you to spread out a review session on multiple days.

The way I see it there's really two ways of learning. The old clunky way that we were taught in school. And this smaller more nimble way that we're seeing in all the new language apps.

Now I'm not going to say the old way is completely useless. In fact I think you need both. Now this is a bit of a bold statement for someone who makes one of these more nimble tools but I think it's true.

All these nimble tools will teach you to use a language, but they won't give you personalized language tips that you might expect from a full on course.

But where the nimble tools excel is just starting. That 'learning on the go' magic that gets you from 0 to able to maybe A2 fluency. Then you might want to transition to learning from a full on course.

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.

[litanylanguagelearning]

There's A Limit To How Fast You Can Learn A Language

So I said yesterday that I like to review about 100 words a day and some people can go even further reviewing hundreds of words a day. But how fast can you go? How fast can you learn a language.

First of all I'd like to stress that I don't learn very fast. I'm very lazy. So the limits here are not to discourage you from going faster. They're just a fun thought exercise. I think the risk of you actually hitting this limit is very low.

So what am I talking about? Sleep. It has been known for quite some time that sleep is incredibly important for learning anything. First, and perhaps more obviously, you can't concentrate when you're tired. This is perhaps why learning in the morning is better than at night. When I'm tired I'm more likely to press that 'again' button.

But arguably the most important part of sleep is that it aids in consolidating memories. It has been shown in experiments that animals that have restricted sleep learn less effectively.

This is a big issue. It's why in Litany each session is on a different day. So you can sleep between sessions and consolidate the information you learn.

And because of this I recommend that if you want to learn a language fast you get at least 8 hours of sleep a day.

So sleep is the limit to learning. Now I don't think you will ever hit this limit but I wanted to post this because I keep on seeing posts that are like, "if you spend every moment of every day studying you'll get 10x the results." Maybe. Maybe not.

If you study too much you're going to get tired. And that will make your learning less effective. And if you cut into your sleep you won't be able to consolidate what you've learned. So I am very skeptical of these claims.

You know there is another reason why too much studying may hurt you. But it's really anecdotal. It's that what you really want is for the information to be stored in your long term memory. Not in your short term memory.

That's why if you press 'again' on a card you won't see that card right away. Because if you did you would use your short term memory to translate the card. Taking breaks is really important to flush out your short term memory. Of course this is just anecdotal, but I think it seems be true for me.

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.

[litanylanguagelearning]

How Much Should I Study A Language Each Day

The free version of Litany tries to show you about 10 new words a day. But is this too much? Or too little? How much should I study a language each day?

So this 10 word figure was based on my experiences with Anki. Actually this 10 word figure is a bit misleading because you're seeing each card twice. One for your native language to the foreign language and one for the foreign language to your native language.

And a card can contain multiple new words so the number of cards you'll see will usually be between 5 and 10. So this means the number of new card sides you'll see will usually be between 10 and twenty.

So in Anki the default is 20 card sides a day. My app is roughly equivalent depending on how many new words you see.

So first before delving into if this is a good amount to study a language each day I'd like to cover a key observation that I made.

It's that the number of words I learn each day is roughly dependent on how many cards I saw. I assumed I'd have some sort of limit to how many cards I could learn a day. So for example if I saw 20 cards a day and was only able to memorize 8 a day then turning down the number of cards a day to 10 wouldn't change things.

But surprisingly it did. It appears as though the amount of cards you learn a day is not fixed. It's percentage based. This just blew my mind.

A corollary of this is the question to 'how many hours a day should I study a language?' is as many as possible. It really doesn't matter. Of course a more important question is probably 'how many hours am I willing to spend learning a language'.

Now there may be some sort of upper limit to this. Like after 50 words a day you'd see decreasing results. But anecdotal evidence seems to say this is not the case. There are people that see like 70 new cards on Anki a day which means the number of cards to review would be over 400. This is quite crazy to me but people do it.

So now the question of the post: 'how many hours a day should I study a foreign language'. Personally I like to keep this under an hour per language per day. Preferably a lot under an hour. So I like to only review 100 cards max per day.

But this depends entirely on you. And don't forget, Litany offers the ability to spread out a single review session over multiple days without penalty. Unlike some other apps.

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.

[litanylanguagelearning]

Why Memorization Is A Necessary Evil In Language Learning

I talked before about scaffold learning. Well, I'd like to bring up another topic: memorization. People often ask: how to memorize vocabulary in another language. Or how to memorize sentences in a different language. Or god forbid how to memorize a foreign language essay.

So I'm here to say you don't want to memorize a language. Memorization is a necessary evil but it's not an end goal. Think about your native language. How do you remember the words? Do you memorize them? No, they just pop out of your head. This is the goal you should have when you learn a new language. You learn it, like really learn it. Not memorize it.

This is why in my app there are multiple phrases for each word. Because when I was using Anki I always wondered if I was truly learning the vocabulary or just memorizing.

OK, this is great and all, but you might be wondering how to actually learn the vocabulary in a foreign language. This is where the necessary evil part comes in. You're going to have to use some foreign language memorization techniques.

The most powerful are mnemonics. In fact that's the only type I know about. I've talked about them before. They're incredibly powerful. This is how you learn and memorize vocabulary of any language.

So in the beginning this is how you're going to memorize lines in a foreign language. But as you become more and more skilled with these mnemonics, these 'scaffolds', you'll rely on them less and less. And that, in short, is how you 'memorize' a foreign language.

One last thing. We often talk about memorizing a foreign language but how about how to memorize a foreign language's speech? This may seem easy for a Latin based alphabet but what about for a character based language like Chinese?

This is why my app actually allows you to speak individual words out loud. It is an incredibly powerful tool.

But to be honest this is actually a current area of research. I want eventually there to be a tool in Litany dedicated solely on knowing how to say the various characters.

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.

[litanylanguagelearning]

6 Places To To Encounter A Foreign Language In The Wild

Say you've studied for a few months and you're good. Really good. Now you want to take the next step: actually read or listen to natives.

Here are a few ways to do this:

Books/Audio Books

This is probably the easiest way to do this. You can get books from Amazon in any language. I've heard the Harry Potter books in other languages recommended before.

I'd recommend the physical book as you don't want to keep on rewinding. But once you get skilled enough you can use the audio book too. You can even use both at the same time because why not. Listen to the audio and follow along in the book.

And if you don't want to spend money don't forget there are a bunch of books in the public domain. Go take a look at Project Gutenberg. As these are in the public domain they can be quite... niche. But some are still very good.

News sites

News sites are also a very good way to immerse yourself in a language. And they can be a pretty interesting read too. And as news is written for a wider audience they may be easier to digest than a full on book.

Podcasts

Now, I know. Audio isn't really good for new language learners. But if you're experienced you can give them a try. And some can be quite entertaining.

Also some podcasts have a written portion that you can learn.

Wikipedia

Now I would not recommend this for a new learner because the sentences on Wikipedia are... well they're not designed for normal readers.

I only put this here because it's very easy to find articles in most languages on wikipedia.

You probably use english wikipedia: en.wikipedia.org. But there's also french wikipedia: fr.wikipedia.org, german wikipedia: de.wikipedia.org, spanish wikipedia: es.wikipedia.org, as well as many others. The full list is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wikipedias

I just noticed the title of that wikipedia article is pretty meta.

Tutoring services

Now this isn't for everyone but you can get tutoring from a service like italki.com. The teachers here charge an hourly rate but if you are willing to spend you can get some very high quality interactions.

Go To Another Country

This maybe should be higher. It's why I wanted to learn a language in the first place. No, wait, it was actually the COVID pandemic. But second would be going to a new country.

So why not just go? Immersing yourself in another language is arguably the best way to learn a new language. And you don't have to be fluent to start. Just start talking and you'll naturally improve.

In fact the worst thing that'll happen to you is your foreign language skills are so bad the natives will start talking to you in english, especially in the EU countries where everyone speaks english.

But even if this happens you still get a vacation so why not start?

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.

[litanylanguagelearning]

Scaffold Learning

When I started using Litany I noticed something interesting about how I learn.

It's sort of like a scaffold. So first you learn like the big name words like 'you' and 'go' and 'home' but then you start to learn the smaller function words like 'the' and 'are'.

It's really interesting because I always thought this was possible, but I never really believed it was possible.

Because I came from using Anki and those Anki phrases are all over the place. Yeah, they get harder as you go along but they don't really progress naturally.

In Litany it is just crazy effective how it works. For example I saw this word 'glaub' in my german review. So? Big deal. But then I saw it again. And again.

This is really interesting. It is just so fulfilling to see because I always wanted something like this to happen. I built a complex algorithm to break down sentences into their words and rank them based on easiness to achieve just this.

But to actually see it happen is... it's just surreal.

Because I think this is how we naturally learn. We learn the big concepts, the 'scaffold' and then drill down into the details.

And to see my app able to do this. It's just something else.

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.

[litanylanguagelearning]

2 Ways For How To Find Time To Learn A Language

When I made Litany one of my goals was that it didn't take a lot of time to review. Because I used Anki and Anki... well the review sessions are vary long.

I'm not really sure if I succeeded. Not yet anyways. It uses an advanced graph search algorithm which should accelerate language learning but I think I don't have enough words for it to truly be effective just yet.

But I recognize there are some people that think they may not have time to learn a new language. So: how to find time to learn a language? Well, I have two tips.

Tip 1: Reframe The Problem

The first tip is instead of saying "I don't have time to learn a new language." instead say to yourself "Learning a new language is not a priority right now." This is a huge mindset change which alone will almost guarantee you make time for a new language.

And I do this for any new task I'm doing. Instead of saying "I don't have time to make a course." I say, "Making a course isn't a priority right now." And that just gives me a kick in the... something to get started.

Now I recognize there are a few people that genuinely have no time. So maybe this won't work for those people but for 99% of people I think this will work.

Tip 2: Have A Language Learning Schedule

Having a schedule is incredibly important. There is an exercise some people do. They have a bunch of sand and a bunch of rocks and they're tasked with getting the rocks and the sand in a jar. If you pour the sand in first then the rocks it won't fit.

But if you put the rocks in first and then the sand it magically fits because the sand just flows into the gaps between the rocks.

This is the secret to how you learn a language when you're busy. It's the secret to doing anything when you're busy. Schedule the important things and the other stuff will just flow around your main tasks like sand.

Because if you say: "I'll just do it when I get around to it." You'll never have time. You'll spend all your time goofing off on Reddit and YouTube. I know I do.

So your schedule doesn't have to be so strict. For example my daily routine to learn a language is this: I review German in the afternoon and at night I review Chinese and Spanish in that order.

Just have a rough outline of how you're going to learn a new language.

Other Notes

One other thing i'd like to point out is don't worry about over-optimizing things. Because over-optimizing leads to analysis paralysis and then you'll never get anything done. So you might ask yourself what's the best time of day to learn a language, for instance.

And yeah, the science appears to say learning earlier is better. But the important thing is if you do the work at all. It's as they say: slow and steady wins the race.

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.

[litanylanguagelearning]

Another Reason For The 'I'm Doing So Badly' Fallacy

So I just thought of another reason for the 'I'm doing so badly' fallacy. Just a recap: The 'I'm doing so badly' fallacy is when you're using a spaced repetition app like my app or Anki and you feel like you're doing terribly even though you aren't.

So the new reason I thought of is that the words that you're good at don't appear as often. Shocking, I know. Like this is the whole point of a spaced repetition system.

But I don't think we realize just how powerful of an idea this is. So I added a database page not that long ago and it lists every single word and how well you're doing in it.

And there are a lot of words there. The entire system is insanely complicated if you really step back and think about it.

Oh, yeah. And if you're wondering why some words are negative it's because in earlier versions of the app there were phrases with those words but not anymore. Or there are phrases with those words but the algorithm is choosing not to see them.

So the database just shows how much heavy lifting the spaced repetition system is doing. We think we're much worse than we actually are.

Like one of these words is 1244 sessions away. OK, that was in the early days where it would increment a word's session if you saw the word in any card. Now I'm much more choosy for which words I increment.

But still, a word like 'copa' won't appear for 138 days. 138! That's... over 4 months. Four and a half. That's amazing. The words that we see every day... those are the ones we're bad at.

The good words we never see. And that's the power of space repetition.

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.

[litanylanguagelearning]

The Surprising Benefits Of Word By Word Translations

Litany offers a way to tap on words to have them spoken out loud. It didn't always offer this feature. The reason it was added was because I was having trouble determining which single word translation corresponded to which word in the full translation.

So I added the feature that if you tapped on a word in the word-by-word translation it highlights and speaks the word in the full translation.

It looks like this.

And you know what? I really like it. A lot.

The main reason is that it slows down the text. When you press play on a phrase it'll speak out the text out loud and it says it very fast. Especially for a new speaker.

The old version of an app allowed you to play back the text at half speed to try to get over this problem. And it worked, but it was pretty hacky.

But you'll notice in the new design there is no longer an option to play the text back at half speed. Because the word for word translations obviates the need for it.

And it does a fantastic job of it. You can even use it without the word for word translations. Just tap a word to say it out loud. Even languages that don't have spaces.

In fact it helps the most with the languages without spaces because it can be difficult to know where one word ends and the next begins.

Sometimes I have no clue what a phrase is and when I begin going word for word I occasionally start to get a sense for its meaning. It's really neat.

And of course there's the obvious benefit the feature was originally meant to solve. When you first start a language you sound super robotic and cut out all the function words entirely. This feature allows you to fix that.

Sometimes I'm like, "Oh, I said 'I went car', what I meant to say is 'I went to the car'".

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.

[litanylanguagelearning]

The 'Feels Familiar' Feeling

You know the super memo formula says you should have 7 options for if you remembered a word or not. The original version of Litany had 5 options for if you remembered a word.

But when I redesigned the app I decided to drop one of the options partly because I never used it and partly because there was no room for it in the new design.

So now the failure case is represented by a single button: 'again'. In the original version it used to be two buttons: 'again' and 'almost'.

And that really conveys what I want to talk about, 'almost'. You 'almost' remembered the word. That tip of the tongue feeling.

I'm glad I removed the 'almost' option. Because I don't want to give people an out. When you see a word there's a few possible ways you could know it:

When you instantly know it. That's the 'easy' option. When you have to think a bit. Maybe translate the words one by one. That's the 'good' option. When you draw a complete blank. That's the 'again' option. And when you 'almost' know it.

What should you do here? Well, if you almost know you try to remember it and then there's two options. You can remember it again or you can't. When you can't it's an 'again' and when you can it's a 'hard'.

So what do I mean 'try to remember it'. What I mean is you take a few seconds actively trying to remember it. And I've been able to remember cards here before. It is an amazing feeling that you could pull a word from the brink.

This is the power of spaced repetition. When you just almost forgot a word but was able to pull it back. It's like a workout for your brain and is why I always say if you can't remember a word take a few seconds to try to remember it. It'll help you a lot.

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.

[litanylanguagelearning]

The Agony And The Ecstasy Of Punctuation (And Other Language Formatting)

I've added a few languages to Litany and I noticed something. Languages are so weird.

Like the punctuation and formatting and stuff. So I don't often see this talked about so I'd like to talk about it here.

So the one obvious way some languages are weird is they don't have spaces. Chinese, Japanese, Thai, they all don't have spaces. But what you may not know is that Chinese and Japanese both have their own punctuation characters.

They look exactly like the normal punctuation characters just a little larger. So in English it's '.' and in Chinese it's '。'. In English it's '?' and in Chinese it's '？'. In English it's '!' but in Chinese it's '！". And they have more characters too.

I never really understood why Chinese has these characters. The rationale I found online is so that the punctuation can be the same size as a character. A 'Hànzì'. But, like, we have fonts to do that. Monospace fonts. Every character is the same width. It's commonly used in programming. You don't have to define a completely separate Unicode character to do that. Arg.

And if you wonder why I didn't include Thai it's because Thai actually has no punctuation. None. At all. Japanese also originally had none but they're slowly adopting more punctuation. They still have not adopted the exclamation mark although it is used frequently in informal writing.

So other eccentricities: German capitalizes every noun. Now you're supposed to capitalize every proper noun in English but we sometimes forget. German takes this one step further. It looks a bit clunky but to each their own.

One thing French does, and I never realized this in all my French classes (goes to show how useless traditional education is), is they have spaces before their punctuation characters. It's technically a non-breaking space but I just call it a space.

One thing this brings up is that in Litany where it's not actually possible to have a non-breaking space. So sometimes you'll see text written like this:

Word word word word

.

The period is pushed to the next line when you'd expect it to be something more like:

Word word word

word.

I should have included this in the post on Litany complaints. Oh well.

So anyways the reason for this is because the app allows you to tap on words to speak them out loud. So the text isn't one string like how you'd expect but rather a list of strings. Each string has its own touch target and I don't know how to prevent it from going to the next line.

It's less than ideal but if given the opportunity of not having the list functionality and having this strange behaviour I'd go with the strange behaviour any day.

So finally Spanish. Spanish is just the goody-two-shoes of languages. It doesn't deviate that much from English. So obviously there's the upside down question mark and exclamation mark: ¿ and ¡. But honestly I don't find them that weird.

In some of my notes I've actually started writing question marks at the beginning of a sentence in addition to the end. Because otherwise you have to read until the end of the sentence to figure out if it's a question or not. Nobody got time for that.

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.

[litanylanguagelearning]

The Number One Indicator You're Learning A Language

So I talked about the 'I'm doing so badly fallacy' a few days ago. Now I'd like to talk about the flipside of that. How do you know when you're doing well?

There is actually one indicator above all others I use: when you come up with alternate translations for flashcards.

Because that's the sign that you're actually learning a language isn't it. When you can sit back and go, "Hey, why'd they use Auto instead of Coche here?" That is when you know you've made it.

And there are really two phases of this. I call them AT-1 and AT-2 (alternate translation phase 1 and 2). AT-1 will have you finding alternate translations but they're mostly synonyms. Oh synonyms my old friend.

AT-2 is about full on alternate phrases. Most of the time you will come up with a translation that is more literal than what is written.

And let me tell you when you get to either of these stages (although more so AT-2) it is immensely gratifying. It's like realizing that you aren't just memorizing a bunch of random cards. You're actually learning something.

So then you may wonder, "How long does it take to get to these stages?" How long until you've truly learned a new language? Well, here's the uncomfortable bit.

AT-1 is pretty easy to get to. Litany uses a frequency table. This means you'll see commonly used words first. And this means you'll see a lot of basic words first: have, go, already, like, those sort of things. And some of these words have some synonyms.

So to get to AT-1 all you really need is to see the words a few times. I'd say 2-5 times each or less if they both happen to appear right next to each other in the deck. This means only a few weeks. You'll definitely get to AT-1 in a month.

Now AT-2 on the other hand... it'll take a lot longer. Over a month definitely. It wouldn't surprise me if it took 4 months. Because a lot of the translations are already pretty literal (minus conjugations). So it's pretty rare that you find a card that has an easier translation that what is already given.

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.

[litanylanguagelearning]

The Problems With Litany

So if you read this blog for any amount of time you may be getting the impression that Litany is the next best thing since sliced bread. And it kind of is. At least I think it's the best language learning app on the market.

But that's not to say it's perfect. There are a few complaints I've had with the app and I'd like to share them with you here.

Statistics

Anki has statistics. And I don't really care about them. But the lack of statistics has really been gnawing at me. And because of this there's no 'auto suspend' feature like in Anki.

There are two reasons Litany doesn't have this feature yet. First of all it's not really that high of a priority for me. I mean you can manually suspend your cards, isn't that enough? And I always felt Anki's autosuspend feature to be a little intrusive.

And second I don't know how I'd store the data. There are thousands of words you've seen and if we store like a few kilobytes for each of them that could really start to add up. Now that I say it out loud it's probably not a big deal. But then I'm going to need some sort of schema that's flexible to store infinite words and ininfinite session info for each word, fast enough to quickly retrieve the data, and compact enough to not take up tons of storage space.

Synonyms

Synonyms are the worst. Right now I have a text file with a list of synonyms. Ideally I'd want to move this database of known synonyms in the app and give people the opportunity to contribute to it.

I actually have big plans for user contributions. Because keeping up with all the translations is a lot of work.

Conjugation

Conjugation is another big problem. Right now when you use the app you can see many words with only small changes between them.

This isn't ideal, but I don't really see it as too big of a problem. It sort of provides a buffer to slow down the rate at which you see new words.

But it would be worth looking at how to make the amount of conjugations you see more predictable.

The First Few Days

So I talked about this in the last post too. Basically the sessions go day 1, day 2, and then day 8. So for the first 7 days you will never see a word that you saw more than 1 day ago. It feels a bit artificial.

But this isn't that big of a problem either because it only lasts for 7 days. In the future I could consider changing it so the first 7 days is artificially boosted but I worry that might make things too quick.

I want to stick as close as possible to the super memo formula.

For the past year I've been trying to learn a language using Anki. And although it's a very nice tool it always felt like it was missing something.

So I made my own app and it fixes all the problems I've had with Anki and then some. I am incredibly happy with how it turned out and you can try it out for free here.