80% recall for Young cards. It’s pretty bad for any card 1 day or less, but I guess I’m reasonably confident that 2-day or larger interval cards have very high chance of me recalling.

An hour is a bad day where I need lots and lots of reviews. But it happens sometimes.

Maybe I’m trying too hard to recall without failing myself.

I will say that I am aiming at perfect spelling, pronunciation and gender. So ‘Das Stadt’ is wrong (Die Stadt is the correct Gender). But German is a very precise language and I feel it necessary to drill at least to this level.

I’ve come to the realization that my “20 cards per day” in Anki is only 10 actual words per day, meaning I’m making half as much progress as I thought I was. I’m currently doing about 10 seconds per card, but I’m averaging 30 minutes to even 1-hour per session of ~100 cards these days (somewhere between 180 views to 300 views).

I’d like to increase this to 20 words per day, but honestly its already very grueling, and I don’t want to spend all my freetime each day on Anki. I still haven’t made much progress in Nico’s Weg, Basic German Grammar and Workbook, and Cafe in Berlin / Dino in Germany A1 series. If anything, I need to cut my Anki time down and focus on the other stuff. Maybe when I finish my textbook studies I can go back to increasing Anki to more cards/day.

I did watch Ghosts (German edition) here last night: https://www.ardmediathek.de/serie/ghosts/staffel-1/Y3JpZDovL3dkci5kZS9naG9zdHM/1 . Watching full-speed German comedy for the first time is mind-opening, it shows how “fast” real German can be. I fortunately found some English fansubs + OpenFansubs Firefox plugin that allowed me to watch that sitcom with English subtitles at least. I do plan on watching more German TV to “get used to real life German”.

“Peppa Pig” / Peppa Wutz in German is a commonly recommended Children’s TV Show to test your German. I’ve been trying to watch it each week to gauge my progress, often disheartened at how little I understand. However, various people online have told me that Peppa Wutz might be closer to “late A2” studies or even “early B1 studies”, so that makes me feel better. It does mean that my “schedule” is all out of whack due to lack of understanding. Peppa Pig/Wutz being late A2 means its something I “should” be trying maybe 4 or 5 months into my studies, not something in my 1st or 2nd month.

Still, I’ll keep trying Peppa Pig. “Real German” (even if its slow and for children) is more immersion than most other exercises. But I cannot and should not use it as “comprehensible input” (ie: learning material). The goal of comprehensible input is that you spend maybe 80% to 90% of the time doing something you know, and only learning on those 20% to 10% you don’t know. “Cafe in Berlin” reading material, Nicos Weg, and “Simple German Youtube” are the only stuff that really is “Comprehensible Input” right now.

The “simplest of kids songs” (ie: Backe Backe Kuchen) is comprehensible to me right now, but many kid songs (ie: “Im Walde von Toulouse”) are far, far too difficult for me right now.

My actual long term goal is to be able to watch Peppe Wurtz and comprehend the episode.

I’ve also got Deutsche Walle A2 News (news graded at the A2 level) that I’m trying to read and watch, but that’s still far above my skill level. I’m better with news than German, so I watch (American) news in English the. Watch the A2 graded news and kinda learn new words lol.

https://learngerman.dw.com/de/kurz-und-leicht/s-69137519

The book was basically the first thing I was able to do (and indeed, level A1 level). Everything else is more like high A2 or low B1 level…

I wouldn’t say that it’s a goal to read Cafe in Berlin, because I’m actively doing it! It’s more of a true and proper exercise.

We are on the 25th month?

Anki is far more grueling than beginners realize. And it’s very difficult to predict future work.

Adding new word isn’t just work today (maybe 5+ viewings to get Anki to make you think you’ve learned the word…), it’s also multiple showings over tomorrow, later this week and more.

You must change your words/day to something that is doable. Keep an eye on your Anki usage, if it’s longer than you want then cut down on your new words/day until you master your current review set.

And always be careful with the new words button. It’s more work to learn 20 words than you might realize, so don’t double or triple it to 40 or 60!!!

20 words/day is about 30 minutes of Anki for me, because 80 reviews + 20 new words == 100 cards. But I need around 300 flips to finish Anki.

That’s 30 minutes of Anki in practice (a card flip averaging 6 seconds, 10 cards per minute and yes 30 minutes/day).

If I drop down to 0 new words/day, I still have the 80 reviews per day (at least until those old words are mastered). Eventually I get quicker and Anki believes I’ve learned the words but it can take literally days before your workload decreases.

You must also remember that Anki / Flashcards is rote memorization. Its your “brute force cudgel”. You can never truly reach mastery with Anki alone. Anki is great for spelling practice, pronunciation practice (if you have included real-world audio .mp3 with your flashcards)… and if necessary is a forced German -> English vocabulary memorization tool.

Useful skills yes, but language mastery can only happen with reading, writing, listening and speaking. Aka: “Immersion”. Anki is great because it helps minimize the time spent on flashcards. If you aren’t saving time but instead feel like you’re wasting time, then you need to change Anki settings to something more useful.

Anki has been used to master Jeopardy, and is also becoming a popular tool in the medical community.

Anki may have been invented for language, but its useful for almost any studying.

Another small note on FSRS settings - adjusting the desired retention a little bit can be helpful. Defaults at 90%, turning it down makes review intervals longer, up makes them shorter. For large decks (vocab lists), I prefer it down at mid-high 80s. You want familiarity, not perfection, so less overwhelming reviews can be better.

Depends really. If you are drilling der/das/die genders and spelling, you might want perfection.

But yes, drop the FSRS setting to 80 or even lower for familiarity. If you are focusing on reading/consuming, it’s better to focus on familiarity instead.

But if you are studying writing/speaking, you need to set that retention back up to 90 and also aim for perfection on each card.

In general, 90% is closer to perfection and the highest you typically should go. However, medical students have been known to aim for 95% or higher (!!!) because they want to pass an exam and then forget about it later, lol.

So even going above 90% makes sense for some communities out there.

Medical students are willing to drill 4-hours per day on their subjects and want near 100% memorization in time for their exam. It’s a different kind of learning, but Anki does support that.

I’m about 1.5 months into my German studies, and I was able to just read the entire first Chapter of “Cafe in Berlin” (beginner story for German-learners, graded A1 and A2).

I think the biggest “leap forward” was multiple weeks of study in Anki, allowing me to reach a vocabulary of roughly 300+ words at the moment. Its not much, but its enough to get started reading these simplest of stories.

Feel free to ask me questions here too! Thanks to Lemmy, I can see posts here as well as in the original topic.

I wish Anki existed during my SAT days.

Do you know hard it was to learn 1000+ SAT words without Anki back then? I had to use like, a book. And index cards written by hand. My hand cramped up just writing all those words down.

You’ve got equities, debt and derivatives.

Equities are ownership into shares. These are the simplest to understand. You own a share of a company and thus are entitled to a % of the profits (though most companies today choose 0% as their decision).

Debt means funding… debt. SLABs (student loan backed securities), MBS (mortgage backed securities), bonds (government debt), bank loans etc. etc. These are surprisingly complex in practice but perhaps easiest to understand. There’s lots of different details to debt (callable, puttable, tax free, convertible, coupons, notes, bills, bonds, I-bonds, EBonds, 10Y, 3M, overnight repos). But in all cases, you lend money to someone, and later they try to return it to you + a little extra.

Derivatives (usually options but there are many kinds) are new inventions that are more complex. Ignore these as they are very very complex.

That’s about it.

The general recommendation is to buy an ETF for equities and an ETF for Bonds. ETF is just a combination of simpler investments that you pay 0.04% to 2% a year for convenience.

VOO takes the 500 biggest companies in the USA (aka the S&P 500) and buys mostly the biggest company and a very little bit of #500.

BND is a similar idea except it’s a whole bunch of different debts from across the entire economy.

So buy some equities (mostly equities), some bonds, and leave some cash in a high yield savings account. Done.

Stocks (aka VOO) make the most money on the average, but also loses money the most often.

Bonds (aka BND) makes middle amount of money but rarely loses money.

Cash / savings accounts never lose money (except inflation). But makes very very little. It’s still worthwhile to keep necessarily amounts as cash and this you should always be considering how much cash to keep.

To the protesters yesterday, do you see that the protests had exactly zero impact?

The protests right now are a glorified meet and greet. Most of these folks have never protested before.

But all the pamphlets and people I met proved that we are organizing and spreading ideas. This is how it starts.

The ‘protest’ part of the protest is just marketing. The actual work is when you meet the local unions and shake hands with the local powers. And no better time to meet them than a ‘protest’

Everyone who actually went to the protest knows what I’m talking about. The speakers and such are whatever and just preaching to the choir, but important to draw crowds. The actual work gets done at the tables and booths on the side.

Go to the next protest. Organize. We have 3 years before the next Presidential election, we have 1 year before the next congressional election. The time is ticking and we need to get the grassroots process started. It takes a long time.

Thanks for the clarification.

It could be 10+ years of me misremembering the explanation. The person who told me this was Korean, so it seems more likely that I misremembered than them explaining it wrong.

Someone told me that Oppa means ‘Uncle’, but in the particular district of Gangnam the word Oppa/Uncle also means Pimp.

So it’s basically a song based on a pretty bad pun. I’ll protect you like an uncle, and by Uncle I mean Pimp.

EDIT: English speakers likely would do better with the translation as 'Ill be like a Father to you, a real Las Vegas Pimp Daddy (where Daddy is a word that means Father but has more Pimp connotations, and Las Vegas being famous for legalized prostitution).

It’s definitely debauchery. But we likely have memorials to Austin Powers and other such pop culture icons, so it’s understandable.

The German guy in Django Unchained is making more sense to me now.

Someone needs to tag this with git blame and it’d be the perfect programmer joke.

For the non programmers: git blame is a tool to figure out who on your team wrote a specific line of code. Inevitably, the answer tends to be ‘me’. Waaayyyyyyy too often.

They aren’t gonna tell you this unless you pretend to be Republican and say things in Republican coded ways to them.

The fact is: they all know that Trump isn’t a classic conservative and they all know that voting for him is a large betrayal of long standing values. They choose to vote for him anyway.

The fact is: Republicans have been working for power and see themselves as the oppressed minority who needs to resort to these tactics to hold onto whatever power they get. Meanwhile, you Democrats don’t even bring a knife to the political gunfight and are losing as the most basic levels.

I’m hoping that the Republicans have overplayed their hands. But if y’all can’t really behind a flawed candidate like Biden (when Republicans obviously can rally behind a felon for the greater good of their party), good fucking luck. Or do you think that Republicans can’t follow the news or some shit?

Trump has almost a 90% approval rating among Republican voters.

Yeah. Because he’s better than Harris to Republicans.

But go talk to Republicans about Tariffs. They kinda disagree with him on that. That’s a “hold your nose and accept it” deal. Many Republicans aren’t racists, but they’ll hold their nose and vote for racism for the good of the party. (See Latinos for Trump and so forth).

You can’t even figure out the basics of politics so you’re gonna lose again at this rate. So lets be clear: no one likes their party that much in American politics. But we all know that “the other side is worse”. Republicans truly don’t agree with much, they just believe Trump is better than the alternative.

If you can’t give that level of support to your side (be it Biden or Harris, or whoever else comes up), you’re gonna lose to the next guy again. Whoever it is after Trump. With any luck Trumpism can be defeated, but Republicans will remember this win from Trump for the rest of their lives. You’re stuck with Trumpism as a philosophy for the next 15+ years at least. I kid you not, because Republicans see and think that its working.

It’s not Republican voters, here in 2025, who have to hold their nose to vote

If you think every Republican believes and agrees with all or even most of Trump, then you are in a bubble.

Republicans outplayed you at the ground level. Part of that is religion and organization, belief and faith in greater purposes even if you vote and support something you don’t necessarily like.

You guys

Oh you’ve read me incorrectly. I’m not a Democrat. Go complain to someone else about that.

Nobody deserves more contempt for Joe Biden’s loss than Joe Biden himself.

I know you’re pissed at losing but wtf is this shit?

This is how you’re going to lose the next election again. If you can’t even rally yourside then wtf are you even doing? We’re almost one year into the second Trump admin and you still haven’t figured out the basics of politics.

The Republicans can hold their nose and vote for a candidate exactly opposite their values. And yet you can’t even support Harris as a valid alternative even as Trump wrecks our country for a year. And you expect me to stand by you and rally with you in the next election?

In any case: Harris (or Biden) would have broken up Google. Period. Quit complaining about things if you can’t even fucking rally or do the basics of politicking. You ain’t helping now.