This is where Anki comes in. Anki is a flashcard program that incorporates spaced repetition. With Anki, Every time you answer a flashcard correctly you also notify the program whether you thought the question was hard, somewhat easy or very easy to answer. The program will then schedule that card for a later date.
Spaced repetition makes time management very efficient. You can adjust the number of new cards a day, so for a low-priority language like Portuguese I can learn five new words a day whereas with Chinese I will do maybe fifty new words. And even with only five new words a day, if those stick I will have a vocabulary of 2000 words by the end of the year. Not bad.
With Anki, I now learn new vocabulary at ten times the speed I used to do. I can even upload cards to my iPhone and do repetitions on the bus. An absolutely fantastic program.
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Seconded. I used Anki full-on for a period of about 3 or 4 months and found it really helped with 'cementing' the words I was already picking up in real-life contexts. That being said, I don't think it's a good idea to just use Anki by itself to learn new vocab - it must be used in conjunction with other learning resources to be most effective. In this way, it's more a consolidating learning resource than anything else. I found that if I put new words in without any context and just hoping that repetition alone would suffice, I would either be unable to recognise the word readily in a new context, or forget the word altogether. Another problem was I found once I had entered more than say 5,000 words in the flash card database the program would be a little laggy (but perhaps that's just my computer hehe). Have you had the same problems Lars?
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