Followup to: Spaced Repetition Database for Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions
I've updated my Anki database for the Less Wrong Sequences to include cards from A Human's Guide to Words. I've been trying to put less information on each card, and I relied on cloze deletion more for the newer ones. Feedback is much appreciated. You can download them by opening up Anki, going to Download > Shared Deck and searching for Less Wrong Sequences.
I probably erred on the side of making way too many cards, but it seemed really important to me to internalize this stuff, since I think it has quite a lot of practical value. I can tell learning this deck has improved the quality of my thinking and my conversations with people because I'm better at noticing when I'm making one of the 37 mistakes and changing my course. I hope other people find it useful too!
I've tried to learn Esperanto and French using Anki. I'd recommend that you don't actually explicitly learn the grammar of your target language. For fluency, you need to be able to use correct grammar without conscious thought. Using grammar SRS cards, eg. 'conjugate this verb', will enable you to know correct grammar, but not at the intuitive, subconscious level you need for real fluency.
The best way around this, it seems, is to train RECOGNITION of the meanings of many example sentences. This can be done two ways.
Firstly, through lots of exposure to media in the target language, eg. audiobooks. You don't need to understand what's being said, so long as you familiarize youself with the pronunciation, tone and stress patterns of the language. You will gradually start to understand what's being said, both from your SRS (see below) and just through osmosis, the way small children learn their home languages.
Secondly, by training understanding of many sentences in the language through SRS. You should not try to translate English sentences to sentences in your target language, you should only try to understand whatever the sentence in the target language means. In an SRS, you can add the sentence (in your target language) to the question field. Leave the answer field blank. If you fail to understand the sentence, look up all the words, idioms, etc. that you don't understand and add them to the answer field.
More on this technique: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/all-japanese-all-the-time-ajatt-how-to-learn-japanese-on-your-own-having-fun-and-to-fluency http://www.antimoon.com/how/howtolearn.htm