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It depends what you're doing. I mainly use it for learning vocabulary.

I'm learning German and Anki is nothing short of amazing. I'm easily able to learn ~20 words a day primarily just practicing on my phone during bathroom breaks.

On the other hand I'm also learning Russian and Anki just doesn't work. Words won't stick in my head the way they do with German.

I've heard very numerous accounts of it being great for Japanese.




>On the other hand I'm also learning Russian and Anki just doesn't work. Words won't stick in my head the way they do with German.

Because (for English speakers) Russian is harder than German. You need to reduce the number of words learned per day. Japanese is even harder to learn, but you have to be persistent. I spent more than an hour every single day for several years straight to learn the vocabulary.

Also there's a unique challenge with Russian is that nouns, verbs and adjectives are all conjugated, and the rules are quite complex. The noun cases would be completely foreign to non-Slavic language speaker. Even if you learn the vocabulary, using it in sentences is not trivial at all.


That's a good idea, I'll give it a try with fewer words. I did notice that I'd just come back to a word I'd seen 30 seconds ago and not recognize it, maybe I need to reduce the number of switches in between so it has more opportunity to stick.

> The noun cases would be completely foreign to non-Slavic language speaker.

Picking those up was actually fairly straightforward. Cases may be completely foreign but the grammatical concepts behind them aren't. For example Russian has nominative, accusative and dative but English has subjects, direct objects and indirect objects and I learned all those in school.

I think somewhat ironically, the biggest grammatical problem I had with Russian was the tenses. English has 12 and Russian has ~5 so it was hard to figure out how to express a given English sentence in Russian.

But I think the biggest problem is phoenetics. On the surface it looks simple (unstressed o -> a) but there are so many extra rules if you want to speak properly (e.g. voiced consonant before a voiceless consonant becomes voiceless).


Just going to be a bit nitpicky here. Noun declension is a feature of various non-slavic languages, including Latin which English speakers have a decent chance of having been exposed to.

Modern Russian has 6 cases (with a couple more that pop up very rarely) with 3 genders and singular/plural endings. It's a total of 36 possible combinations, which is not that bad. Masculine and neuter also share most endings so there aren't actually 36 unique ones

Probably the most difficult thing about cases when I was learning Russian was remembering which verbs took a different case than I would expect, e.g. dative instead of accusative for what seems like a direct object.


Right: but one difference (which you sort of hint at) is that German is consistent in why something takes a particular case compared to Slavic languages (e.g. direction vs location), and at least the preposition is consistent. Is it "nad morze" or "nad morzem"? No way to know without the entire sentence. And "morzem" is the "tool case" -- the form you usually use to describe that something happens with the help of a tool even though the sea (morze) is not at all a tool in that sentence. Oh, and you only use "nad" with bodies of water by the way. Sorry!

Another incredibly tricky one for Slavic languages is imperfective vs perfective aspects. In most other languages, perfect vs imperfect is just a standard construction. In Polish (and Russian, though my examples here are Polish), you change the verb itself. How? Well, sometimes you put "po" in front of it, like rozmawiać / porozmawiać. Sometimes it's "z" (jeść / zjeść), sometimes "u", "na" or "wy". And sometimes you just give up, like oglądać (but obejrzeć in the perfective), widzieć (zobaczyć), mowić (powiedzieć).

(For this reason I have found it very hard to progress in Polish without conversation with native speakers who aren't too polite to correct me.)


Yes, perfective and imperfective aspects are very tricky, particularly how they interact with various other linguistic features: imperatives (and the negative imperative), the subjunctive, and verbs of motion come to mind, each of which modifies the use of the aspects in it's own way.


> Modern Russian has 6 cases (with a couple more that pop up very rarely) with 3 genders and singular/plural endings. It's a total of 36 possible combinations, which is not that bad.

36 isn't that bad but Russian also has 253 irregular verbs [0], each of which adds another set of combinations. A lot of them are just small tweaks and there are some that follow a set of patterns (e.g. идти with its various prefixes) but it still adds a lot of overhead.

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Russian_irregular_ve...


Irregular verbs are a conjugation problem, which is different from noun declension.


>I've heard very numerous accounts of it being great for Japanese.

There's at least great pre-made Japanese vocab decks. I'm about two months into one. Maybe less so for kanji (I at least don't have one), so that's probably something you need to do outside.




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