I decided to try iKnow! out for two months. I'm now about 6 weeks in and am closing in on finishing Core 1000 course (the first 1000 core 6k words). I like to use it for learning new words as it seems to drill them in to your head effectively. But the reviews seem to take too much time. It looks like it is taking me 6 hrs each section to master it so far. If I spend so much time for reviews, there is little time for new words and it can become overwhelming. In addition, after you master a whole course, I don't think there is an effective method to review it properly. I think there is a facility to do it but I bet it is time consuming.
I'd like to hear any techniques people use out there to learn with iKnow! effectively. Do you drop the words into an Anki deck once you have mastered them? I like Nukemarine's new deck and am tempted to use it exclusively but I like using iKnow! for learning the words initially. Would like to hear some comments from current and past iKnow! users.

I feel exactly the same. I like learning new words in iKnow but the reviews are killer. I haven't tired this but what you might consider is getting the anki deck you mentioned and un-suspending cards once they are up to 50% or so in iKnow. Anki allows you to manually change the interval of cards, so you could try setting it to 4-7 days or something like that from the get go since you have already gone over those words a few times in iKnow.

thisiskyle Wrote:I feel exactly the same. I like learning new words in iKnow but the reviews are killer. I haven't tired this but what you might consider is getting the anki deck you mentioned and un-suspending cards once they are up to 50% or so in iKnow. Anki allows you to manually change the interval of cards, so you could try setting it to 4-7 days or something like that from the get go since you have already gone over those words a few times in iKnow.

How far have you gotten with core at the iKnow! site? Once you master a course do you review it through the methods the site provides?

[Zgarbas]

It actually takes much less time to master a course than it did on the old platform... I get less than 2h to master each step. A few hours per week is enough to go from core 1000 to finishing core 6000 in a year, which sounds decent enough imho =/ (then again I am pretty slow). As time goes by you will find it easier to review/add everything and you'll see that you won't need more than 15 min/day. Just give yourself a bit of time to adjust.

I don't hate the review system there, but it does get overwhelming due to all the synonims that stack up towards the end. I'm not using the reviews as much since I'm switching to anki (no reason to pay for iknow once you finish core6k).

Oh, also. New cards > old ones. Start by adding the new cards, and then move on to reviews within the other courses, and only then the completed courses reviews if you still have the time. I find it much more efficient to add new cards when my mind is fresh .

Zgarbas Wrote:New cards > old ones. Start by adding the new cards, and then move on to reviews within the other courses, and only then the completed courses reviews if you still have the time. I find it much more efficient to add new cards when my mind is fresh .

I may be misunderstanding what iKnow is, but isn't it just a web interface to an SRS?

As far as I can tell, when using an SRS (Anki), doing the reviews is much more important than adding new cards. You never want your reviews to pile up (but not adding new cards for a couple days is perfectly okay).

Am I misunderstanding something about iKnow?

[Zgarbas]

I guess each person does it differently? I value new cards over reviewing familiar ones. So say, I'd rather learn 10 new cards and not review cards that are at 80% mastery than learn none and review them. Imho once they're at 80% a day or two lateness in reviews doesn't matter as much, with me at least. Unless my reviews are crazy piled up (like after a 2-day vacation) I never skip new cards =/.

Zgarbas Wrote:It actually takes much less time to master a course than it did on the old platform... I get less than 2h to master each step. A few hours per week is enough to go from core 1000 to finishing core 6000 in a year, which sounds decent enough imho =/ (then again I am pretty slow). As time goes by you will find it easier to review/add everything and you'll see that you won't need more than 15 min/day. Just give yourself a bit of time to adjust.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong cause it took me nearly triple that time for the first 8 steps of Core 1000. When learning new words, doing 20 at a time, it takes me about 25 minutes for each rwenty. I listen to the sentences for a few times and don't do any skipping ahead. So 25 x 5 = 125 minutes right there! Am I concentrating on the sentences too much? And when you perform reviews do you skip or do you listen to each sentence carefully (and maybe repeat?) I'm less worried about new words than I am about the reviews. They're taking way to long. Will things get easier?

[Zgarbas]

You're a beginner. Things are slow in the beginning . The pace will pick up in time, I'm sure. It's much easier to pick up new words and all that once you're used to them. I guess I'm a bit biased since I started core 1000 once I already sort-of knew about half of them, skipping over the taking ages part. (I remember having mini-races with myself to finish a study session within 4 minutes, this during the time when the system was slightly different. reviewing 10 items took over 4 minutes, these days I rarely need that much when learning 20 new ones. Familiarity and all that. Maybe you can try doing only 10 items at once? It sounds counter-intuitive since you get less done within a session, but it will make it a bit easier for you and probably reduce total study time)

I usually listen to the sentences (some are so easy that you can guess the content, and I don't bother listening to those outside the checkpoints), but I rarely, if ever, repeat them. maybe, if I didn't instantly get the meaning, I will read it again and/or look up the translation, but there are rarely more than 3 sentences per step for which i have to do that.

Also, the reviews are important. That's why they take up most of the time .

Thank you for the encouragement. Though I don't think I can get as fast as you with it. Finally, a few of my lessons went into mastered/completed status and I did a review of the first lesson which is pretty simple. I did 20 reviews in one shot without rushing but no delays either and it took me 8 minutes. What could be slowing me down is that I use iKnow! on the iPad and am tapping in the results on the onscreen keyboard with a stylus. This, of course, takes up a good amount of time. Next time I have a review, I'll try it on the PC. If I can get an easy review session down to 4 minutes, without any skipping, I would be satisfied.

Yes, I unsuspend cards in anki once they're mastered in Iknow. In fact I do it by batches of 100 at the end of each step. The Iknow srs is fine, but I'm gonna quit it once I'm done with all 6000, like Zgarbas said, there's not much point paying once you don't have anything to learn, but this way I'll already have a functional anki deck for Core 6000 with appropriate intervals.
As for review time I can't help, I write down the word and sometimes the whole sentence, which is obviously much more time consuming