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Sometimes I see people online say they have an e.g. 15000-word vocabulary on Anki. It sounds impressive, but it's not clear to me that such a student can utilize that vocabulary for actual reading. It seems plausible that the student is instead skilled at flashcard recognition. (And there's a plethora of distinct ways of using Anki.)

Question: How does Anki vocabulary relate to reading vocabulary?

In other words, I'm wondering if there is an approximate formula relating:

  • I have a X-word vocabulary on Anki, and
  • I have a Y-word reading vocabulary.

This question was motivated by this Reddit post (7 Sep 2022) where user FallenXcrosS writes:

Then, I've seen it's better to actually use sentences, so I used sentences. Yeah, it gets a lot easier, most of the time, I get a pass. Point is it's easy to get a pass as the amount of sentences is quite limited and I will remember all of them eventually. Will I be able to recognize the individual word I'm supposed to learn in any other context than this exact sentence ? Absolutely not. It's exactly the same as remembering the dialogs from my textbook by heart, I can recite "我的生日快到了" with no problem, doesn't mean I will know what 快 and 到 actually mean or that I can recognize them individually (quite a problem when those are the words I'm supposed to learn) and the more I see this sentence, the less I actually need to read to know which one it is

Rebecca J. Stones
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  • If you spend all your time on Anki, then you won't have any time left to actually read, so your practical reading vocabulary would be limited by that. When I think about the people I know with large vocabulary, I asked them about that, and they always said it's because they spent more time reading. Not a one of them told me they primarily used flashcards or Anki. Still, it doesn't mean Anki is bad or to be avoided. If you like it, use it, but more is not necessarily better. – Brandin Sep 07 '22 at 07:20
  • I'd imagine the relationship varies considerably depending on what you're actually doing with Anki and how you've plugged that activity into your larger method of learning the language. The trio that is usually mentioned for lexical memorization is spaced repetition, varied repetition and production. The way some students use Anki, they only get the spaced repetition. Others use it more holistically and cover all three pillars. I'd expect the latter group to have less of a disconnect (if any) between Anki vocab and reading vocab. –  Sep 26 '22 at 19:13

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