How I Memorize Everything I Learn in English | ​​How to Never Forget New Words in English Using Anki

- Hello, guys, and welcome to my new video.

Today, I wanted to do a little bit of a more informal video

and share with you how I actually learn new words

in English and Chinese,

and sometimes even in French.

So if you're interested, then keep watching.

On my channel I actually have another video

specifically dedicated to what I believe

and a lot of people think

is the best way to memorize new vocabulary.

It's using this repetition technique

during which you repeat certain phrases

and words at an interval.

Some people use Quizlet for that,

some people just create their own flashcards

like paper flashcards,

but a lot of people still believe

that the best app to do that is Anki.

Today I just wanted to

do this kind of like a step-by-step guide of how

I use Anki, show you like the whole

interface of my Anki app,

and some of the tips that I hope

will help you start your Anki journey.

This video is not sponsored by Anki.

I've been using Anki for more than a year now

and I absolutely love this app.

It's just a great tool to memorize as many words as possible

in the shortest amount of time possible.

Now let me just show you what my Anki app looks like.

First I recommend you

to download the app to your computer because

I believe that right now the app is not free,

if you wanna like download it on your phone, it's not free,

but if you wanna have it on your computer,

it's completely free.

So to try it out, to test it,

to see if you like it,

you should definitely first start with your computer.

So once you've downloaded the app,

you're gonna see that you don't have any decks at all,

and it's normal because it's a new app

and first what you should do is start creating decks.

To do that, at the bottom of the screen,

you have the option, Create a Deck,

you're just gonna press here and name your deck.

I'm not gonna do that because I already have

three different decks.

So when I first started using Anki,

I made this mistake of just like

having one deck for one specific language,

and maybe if you're not planning on

adding a bunch of cards to your Anki decks,

it's fine,

but for me what happened is look at my Chinese card,

I created it like more than a year ago,

and I've constantly added a ton of cards there.

And as you can see,

I currently have almost a thousand due cards.

Obviously, I'm not gonna be able to do all of them in one go

and it's gonna be just so boring and frustrating,

but it was all my mistake first of all,

and I'm gonna talk about it at the end of this video,

how many words you should have in one deck

to be able to successfully finish the deck

and not be in my position?

Now, let me just show you my English deck,

because this is the English learning channel

and I think you're most interested in this deck.

So when I open this deck,

I have 71 cards to review.

For you when you just download the app,

obviously you're gonna have zero everywhere.

So for you, you have to just open this deck

and then press Add,

is gonna mean that you're gonna add new cards.

And before I show you how I add new cards,

I think it's time to actually talk about

where I kinda like get all these new words from

because I don't like this idea of just Googling WordList,

you know, online, and just like memorizing all of them,

I don't think it's a very good strategy.

I have this e-reader, while I read I'm gonna highlight

certain awards that I don't know,

I'm just gonna press a word and highlight it,

so for example, I'm reading the book and I feel like, okay,

I don't know this word like for example,

I can see the word 'fixture' here,

for example, I feel like maybe I don't remember,

I don't understand what this word means in this sentence,

I'm gonna highlight it,

and then later, usually after I finish a book,

I'm gonna come back to the whole lists

of all the words that I don't know,

I'm gonna like look through all the words again,

because sometimes there is like this situation

that while I read a book,

I highlight the same word like twice or even three times,

and it tells me the end of the book that I probably

do need to memorize this word.

But sometimes after I finish the book,

I realize that some of the words are not really useful,

maybe they are outdated,

and I realize that, okay,

maybe I don't need to memorize this word,

so what I do next is I have this word 'fixture'

and then I Google the meaning in the dictionary

and then I added to my deck.

So when you add words to your Anki deck,

there are a couple of options you can choose from,

you can actually like completely customize your Anki

and it's gonna look so much different

from the basic version.

The only thing that I've really customize

is the type of my cards.

Don't only use basic,

basic means that you only create one card.

I usually go for the basic and reversed card option

because it creates two cards.

Sometimes people like to use cloze cards.

I find them really useful when I wanna like

memorize certain expressions,

not just words, for example,

if you wanna memorize certain idioms in English,

if there was like an expression 'to turn heads'

you can choose the cloze type,

and this way you'll be forced to,

like construct this whole expression one more time

because one of the words is gonna be cloze.

I also sometimes use the recording option

where you can just record your audio

if you wanna like record the correct pronunciation,

I sometimes do that,

and I also sometimes use like different colors

to make it prettier,

to remember everything faster,

but this is practically everything I use.

If you're wondering about the last thing I have,

it's called pinyin, it's for Chinese,

pinyin just means like pronunciation of a word in Chinese,

but I have it in English

and for me it's like pronunciation of a word in English.

Now I feel like it's time to actually show you how I

do my Anki cards and to start studying your Anki deck,

you should just press on the deck and then press Study Now.

As you can see here I have my word 'slovenly,'

usually when I do my Anki cards I try to read aloud because

reading out loud can help me improve my pronunciation

and kind of like it forces my brain to connect

this word that I see in the screen with the pronunciation,

but I also understand that some of the words,

almost all of them that I have in my app are very formal,

so I'll probably never gonna use the word slovenly

in my daily life,

it's only for reading,

when I read something or when I watch some movies,

it's just a nice word to know.

Then I check if I still remember this word.

So when I read it, I'm like, okay,

I think it means like untidy and dirty,

and I also have the meaning of this word in Russian.

I know a lot of people say

you shouldn't use your native language,

you should only stick to English if you wanna like

think in English,

and I sometimes believe that it is true,

but for me it does help

to have the translation into Russian,

not because it has me remember the word in English,

but because it helps me improve my Russian as well,

because sometimes I wanna know

like Russian words that are more beautiful, more formal,

and it helps improve my Russian vocabulary as well.

And then I have four options, I have the option to go easy,

it means that for me, this word was so easy,

it was so, so easy, as you can see, the app is gonna

show me this word in almost four months,

I can press the Good option,

the app is gonna show me the word in two months or Hard,

if it was hard, I was like,

I'm not sure what it means or Again.

I usually press Again when I just

don't remember the word at all,

I'm like staring at it,

and even after looking all of these examples, I'm like,

I have no idea what it means and then I press Again.

So yeah, guys, this is practically how I use my Anki deck,

I read or I watch some TV shows,

when I watch something,

I usually like open my Notes app

and I type in the words that I don't know,

but this is what my Anki app looks like.

I hope it was useful,

it was like a little bit of a tutorial for you

how to use Anki.

But the last thing I actually wanted to talk about is

how to use Anki to be able to finish all the decks?

I once watched a video by the guy from

Days of French 'n' Swedish,

and he said that to learn

all the words successfully in your Anki app,

you need to have 390 cards in one deck.

So once you successfully have 390 cards in one deck,

you should start another deck.

If we go back to my Chinese deck,

we see that I don't really

have 390 cards there,

I have way, way more, almost 4,500 cards,

it's a lot of cards guys,

don't repeat my mistakes,

If you wanna successfully use this app,

you should stick to around 390 cards per deck.

As you can see in my English deck, I have 384 cards,

it's almost perfect,

which means that I'll be able to finish it successfully.

The reason why I have 72 cards here

is because I haven't done my Anki in a long, long while,

and obviously this is what happens

when you don't do your Anki cards for a long time.

So yeah, guys, I think it's gonna be it for today's video.

In this video, I just showed you that in-depth

process of how I use my Anki cards

and I hope it's gonna help you to become more productive

when you try to memorize new words in English.

Make sure to check out my other video about Anki,

why I chose Anki and why it's so, so good.

And also if you're interested in how to read in English,

to actually be able to learn English,

I also have another video on my channel

about reading in English.

If you like this video make sure to give it a thumbs up

and subscribe to my channel.

You can also follow me on Instagram

to get even more updates from me.

If you wanna get even more resources to learn English

and have a chance to kind of like participate in polls,

to choose what videos I'm gonna make in the future,

make sure to check out my Patreon page as well,

and see you next time, bye.

(soft music)