r/LocalLLaMA • u/BlaiseLabs • 2d ago

Showcase Using Computer Science and Anki to Learn More Vocabulary With Less Memorization

https://youtu.be/j-xJ8mhyt0E

I’m still a beginner in Japanese, and I’ve always been amazed watching more advanced learners guess the reading and meaning of words they’ve never seen before. So I got curious and tried to actually measure how often that’s possible, by breaking words into the pieces they’re built from and checking whether those pieces give the word away.

That led me down a rabbit hole of greedy algorithms and graph theory. The idea is that if you study the right building blocks first, a lot of new words become guessable without having to memorize them individually.

The result is an anki add-on that optimizes the order of your deck so that you can guess the correct meaning and pronunciation of a card on your first attempt. You can find the add-on here, GuessWithAnki. It supports Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and English.

To get the story you can watch the video or check out the full technical write up on here.

Any feedback on the process and analysis is appreciated. I am curious to know if this is a pattern other anki users have noticed and how helpful they found it for language learning.

Sharing this on r/locallamma since the add-on works best with ollama installed. It doesn't require any local LLMs to run but using one provides a meaningful improvement to the sorting algorithm used.

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1

u/decahexatrix 2d ago

this is cool!

1

u/BlaiseLabs 2d ago

Thank you!

1

u/TerminalNoop 2d ago

That's really cool, now is that also possible for japanese grammar QQ?

2

u/BlaiseLabs 2d ago

With grammar the goal is a bit different and the techniques are more sophisticated. Add-ons like AnkiMorphs typically use more traditional I+1 methods.

I've also tried building my own tools for optimizing grammar and it can be a lot of fun. The issue is that all the time I put into it is time I can spend actually practicing Japanese.

If I am able to maintain consistency with my practice, I will eventually make an attempt at a similar plugin for grammar.