Efficient German Language Learning: Is Anki the Answer?

It's confession time: after nearly eight years living in Germany, I still haven't learned the language. At this point it feels somewhat embarrassing and it's something I'd like to change.

Learning a new language as an adult is not easy. On top of that, when you don't come into contact with German naturally in your work environment, at home, or through friends it becomes even more difficult to learn the language. Not to mention, in a situation like that I find myself often lacking the motivation to do the work.

Picking up vocabulary can easily be quite time-consuming, and really, in some ways I don't want to spend too much time on this. Most engineers are lazy, me included, therefore I try to find efficient ways of accomplishing my goals which can sometimes be to my detriment. Spaced repetition is a technique that maximize retention while minimizing the effort; as such it's a method that aligns well with this lazy mindset.

As Anki is using spaced repetition I'm now committing to try it once again. In the past, I've found it pretty crushing, and from what I've read, I'm not alone. Lately I've been learning kanji through the app Kanji Study. The experience has been pretty delightful. I figured that is a good reason to give Anki one more try.

I think it's easy to overcommit. To try to learn to many words each day. This time around I'm only going to try 10 new words every day. That's still a respectable 3600 words in a year, which should roughly be equal to the vocabulary of C1 which is rather impressive! After all, almost 8 years have gone by, what is yet another year. Being able to stick to a routine is far more important.

So what Anki deck to choose...? Why, of course a deck that contains words ordered by frequency! This Anki deck, which is a shared deck on AnkiWeb. It contains 5000 entries ordered by frequency. Most importantly, each entry has example sentences and audio.

I added the audio myself using text-to-speech. After all, engineers love to build the tools rather than using them, don't they? Even this blog falls somewhat into that category. I've certainly spent more time coding it than writing blog posts.

I'm sure you are curious how the audio was generated, if you are, you can have a peek in the following repo. There are also some useful bits on how to edit an Anki collection programmatically in there.

If you've read this far, I would love to hear from you if you've used Anki to learn German, or perhaps if you've failed learning German using Anki.

Perhaps you have any other tips or suggestions or things you'd want to share. I'd love to hear about it.