Anki cloze cards for learning paradigms

Comprehensible input is the way to go. The research in second language acquisition indicates that consciously memorized knowledge can’t morph into facility with a language in the brain. The brain builds its own black-box model of a language through our interaction with it. This process relies on understanding the meaning of what we read or hear, not on understanding the grammar.

In my experience, having familiarity with the paradigms and tables helps figure out what an unfamiliar form in the text it. At least it helps me think through whether this is a new form or a completely new word. This in turns helps make unfamiliar things more understandable. This increasing my ability to understand is the pay off, not the conscious knowledge of the grammar.

Memorizing tables is a pain and is probably not worth too much effort. Familiarity, however, has been helpful to me. The following is a method to use Anki¹ and cloze deletion flashcards to help with this process of building familiarity.

What is a cloze card?

A cloze card is a flashcard where the piece of information to be learned it blanked out or deleted. This blanked out info is called a “cloze deletion”. When studying our task is to recall the missing piece.

Our brain remembers things better if we can form associations between the new information and other things that we know. The more connections, the stronger the memory and the easier the recall.

So instead of trying to memorize and recall a whole paradigm, I propose that we use cloze deletions and blank out only a few pieces of the paradigm.

The advantage is that we are only asking ourselves to recall a few forms at a time. This lowers our stress and makes our minds more open to receiving the information. Also we are seeing the other forms on the table and thus seeing the connections between the current form and the rest of the paradigm.

For example if we wanted to learn or become familiar with the following paradigm:

We could create cloze cards as follows in order to learn the Masc and Neut, NOM SG forms:

Then the following could be used for the Masc and Neut Gen SG forms:

And the following to learn the Fem, Gen SG form:

We could proceed by adding cloze deletions for the other pieces of the paradigm that we want to recall. Note that it may not be necessary to create a cloze deletion for every piece of the table. Remember that the goal is familiarity.

Creating tables in Anki

Anki includes a cloze deletion card type. The trick is the table. You can either use spaces or tabs to format the table manually or you can use HTML.

Spaces and tabs

Spaces and tables would be the simplest, but the result may not look as nice. You have to manually line up the columns. I the result would be as follows.

       Masc Fem  Neut
NOM SG εῖς  μία     έν
GEN SG ενός μιᾶς ενός
DAT SG ενί  μιᾷ    ενί
ACC SG ένα  μίαν έν

HTML tables

The following instruction assume you are using the Desktop version of Anki to create the cards. Once you sync your collection to your phone, you can view the html tables there too.

Either you have to write the HTML manually, or you can use an HTML table generator such as tablesgenerator.com.

Once you have your html code, click Add to add a card. Select the cloze card type. Then click on the field under the label Text. After that, click on the three horizontal bars on the right size of the formatting bar. After that select Edit HTML or hit CTRL + SHIFT + X then paste the html code into the pop-up and click close.

Creating the cloze deletions

The following assume the desktop app, but the process is very similar for creating cloze deletions on the mobile apps.

To create a cloze deletion, you first select the text you want to turn into recall and click on the button [...] button on the format bar or hit CTRL + SHIFT + C. This will wrap the info in a cloze code that looks like {{c1::info to be learned}}.

You can create multiple cloze deletions per card. c1 will be the first, then c2 will be the second, and so forth.

If you want to have multiple pieces of the table blanked out at the same time, edit the number following the c so they that they are the same. For example, if I wanted ‘εν’ and ‘λογος’ to be cloze deletions at the same time, I need to manually edit the number following the c so that it looks like {{c1::εν}} αρχη ην {{c1::ο λογος}}.

Final thoughts

Should creating and studying flashcard in Anki replace other learning activities that focus on comprehensible input? No. But they might be a useful parallel activity.