Website Wednesday

Every Wednesday I will introduce you to a site or tool that I think will be helpful to your English learning.
Today I have two related sites.
The first one is

 
This is a site that explains how many words you have to learn to speak a language properly.
The guide is a pdf file and comes in 76, 10 and 1 page versions, as well as MP3 files.

Here is a link to the one page PDF, give it a quick read:

So the big message on that site is that you need to learn 15,000 words to speak English properly.
That will be very scary for some people.
Learning a word a day, or even 5 words a day will take a long time to reach 15,000.



So?  How you can you learn more words faster?
The answer is ANKI. http://ankisrs.net/

ANKI is a spaced-repitition-software program.  It is a free - computer flashcard program that allows you to learn and review a large amount of vocabulary.

With Anki when you study a flashcard you don't study it everyday, you study it when the computer thinks you need to. You study a word just before you forget it.  This means you spend less time studying words you don't need to, and study hard words at the exact right time.

With Anki it is quite possible to review 20-30 words a day, which will get you to 15,000 words much quicker than other study methods.

Install the program and see what you think.  If you can't understand the installation instructions, look for them online in your own language.  ANKI is a popular program and many people use it for many different things.

To get you started here is a 500 word TOEIC deck.  After you install Anki just import this file:
  http://dl.dropbox.com/u/5130903/TOEIC%20DECK.media.zip
It has 500 common TOIEC words with audio, sample sentences with audio, synonyms, antonyms and definitions in Korean.  I'm sorry if you don't speak Korean, but that's the audience I made this for.

With each word just tell the computer if the question was Very Easy, Easy, Hard or that you want to see the card Again.  The computer will take care of everything else.

When you get comfortable using my TOIEC deck, try making your own decks.  Add words from your classes, my website, newspapers, books, or anywhere you want.

ANKI can be a little complicated at first, so please ask questions in the comments if you need help!