Anki Design Study: Adverb Phrases
Here are a few Spanish cards that recently came up for refactoring in my biweekly design review:
I added these cards almost four years ago now, as a Spanish beginner, and I’ve learned to despise them. It’s not hard to see why: two of them are actually in ease hell on both sides, meaning that I end up reviewing them far too often:
What’s happening here is that little two-word adverb and preposition phrases like this are pretty difficult to master, as far as language elements go. They’re abstract, have many uses, and often a lot of close synonyms.
There’s nothing really wrong about these cards by themselves. They were missing audio clips, but I quickly fixed that.
Adding Context
The real problem is that they are isolated: you can see from my search above that my deck has zero sentences that apply these phrases to a real context. And as we’ve seen, context is king in language learning.
Whatever book or lesson I took these from is long gone, so I’ll need new examples. In a situation like this it’s not hard to scan the internet for some illustrative examples on demand.
In this case, I found a few easy examples via Wiktionary and Reverso’s context search tool. Usually I prefer to take examples from a book or article I’m actually studying, but Reverso is great for card-refactoring problems like today, where we need to work in the opposite direction:
These cards just scratch the surface — there’s more ways these phrases are used. I wanted to hit en cuanto especially carefully here, because I realize from Wiktionary that it takes the subjunctive in some contexts (thus llegue instead of llega). And bonus! I learned a new work: arroyo was not previously in my vocabulary.
But we can leave most of that nuance for later, when I encounter these buggers again in my studies. Today the goal was just to refactor at least 1 card, and we’ve achieved that!
