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Wellness Wednesday for March 1, 2023

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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Has anyone got opinions on the optimal amount of new words one should learn each day on Anki when learning a new language? I'm trying to learn French.

I initially tried quite high numbers but that made me start to dread my reviews and I ended up not doing them very often.

In the end I whittled it down to ten words per day. Pathetically low, I know, but it guaranteed that I'll actually do it. That and setting a Google calendar alert to remind me.

I would suggest starting low and increasing the number once the habit is ingrained.

Are you using a premade deck or adding your own words?

I initially tried quite high numbers but that made me start to dread my reviews and I ended up not doing them very often.

I've found that doing it on the laptop makes it seem like a far smaller task as opposed to doing it on the phone, not sure why. I've found about 20 a day to be the most I can do sustainably, but I'm wondering if I'm actually hitting a limit of learning or if I could do a lot more with some effort?

I would suggest starting low and increasing the number once the habit is ingrained.

The habit is well ingrained as I've used it for learning Spanish in my own time, but with French I actually do need to get good quickly as I'm moving there in a few weeks.

Are you using a premade deck or adding your own words?

Both, I've got a premade deck with a few thousand cards with audio, and another one where I add what I've picked up from general reading and listening.