Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "How To Use Anki For Language Learning (2 Biggest Mistakes)" video.

@loistalagrand They also tailored their learning to their specific needs in the moment. The one thing that really couldn't be easily addressed previously was the ability to hear all the sounds of a given language by using minimal pairs with audio recordings. That is some magic that is extremely hard to replace with older techniques.
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TBH, $199 for a deck is a lot. Personally, I use ChatGPT to read entire books for me and present me with a list of the most common words. I'll then choose the ones from that list that seem important and create flashcards based on that. It helps a lot in terms of the problem of not enough language materials that are at an appropriate level. The decks are probably good, but the likelihood of actually getting far enough with them to see much benefit is pretty small. At least with my approach of taking the vocab from specific books, TV, movies or other material helps shorten that a lot, so that I can see the progress I'm making and know if it is actually helping.
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It's better to make cards that are targeting things that you yourself are interested in. Ideally using entire sentences from books or movies that you're interested in with the word removed and a picture indicating the intended meaning. Arguably the most important part of language learning is to be getting your input in the form of things that you're actually interested in and at a level that's not too hard. ChatGPT can do that pretty easily if you feed it a sentence, the word to have the card for and an image to use along with the sentence on the front. But, Anki is really more for things like developing the ability to hear by having a pair of recordings that are off by just one sound. Or for words that you expect to need for something like a trip. And whatever other words you need in order to be able to more comfortably enjoy media in your target language. The words will pile up over time if it's your main way of learning grammar or vocab.
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@paulwalther5237 TBH, 10k is far too many for a single deck. When I'm setting up decks, I keep them a bit shorter as even a 1k word deck gets to be an extremely long study session over time as you get further into it. Not to mention, that it isn't very motivational to know that you're on word 2k and still have 8k left, with the 8k left being words that are less frequently encountered than the ones you've already seen.
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@paulwalther5237 IIRC, native speakers of English learn and average of 4 words a day from highschool to college. The issue is that it's hard to hit anything near that until you're fairly far along. Those students are doing a lot of reading, a bit of formal memorization of vocab and encountering far more words than most language learners are until they're pretty far along.
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It depends a bit on the language, but at least for English a Highschool student probably knows 14-20k words. 6-`0k can be more than enough if you don't care about being able to converse on every topic imaginable. And, by the time you've got that many words, you can probably learn most of the remaining by reading and watching movies.
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