Progress Report: Learning German with Anki

By Greg Turnquist

Greg is a member of the Spring team, an author of several books on Spring Boot, conference speaker, and the lead for Spring Data JPA.

November 1, 2014

After reading numerous articles on Hacking Chinese, I decided to dive into Anki. Anki is space repetition software. It lets you create any set of flashcards that you want, and then helps you review your deck daily in a more efficient manner.

Thanks to the iPhone app, it has become very easy to stick to a daily routine over the past two months. Looking at the current stats, I have done 13 hours of reviews. I recently ran out of “new words”. Now everything in my deck is either “Young+Learn” or “Mature”. Reviews that used to take me 10-20 minutes now take 5-8 minutes.

This is exciting! My deck has just under 900 flash cards in it. And I have realized that I am only getting started. It’s time to start adding new words to the mix. I have started to add new cards, in part thanks to German is easy!. That author has the funniest yet well written articles on the roots of German and English.

Am I fluent yet? Hardly. 900 words isn’t enough to hang your hat on. I read tweets from my German friends and feel like I keep getting closer to understanding it before hitting “Translate” on Tweetbot.

Nonetheless, I feel like I am better grounded to learn German than ever. But it’s important that I keep loading up my deck with new words and expressions. And getting them from a native German author is the best way to capture contextual sentences to build up my deck. If I can make a habit of extracting new content from every blog article and also creating reverse cards (where the front and back are swapped), who knows where I could be a year from now!

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