How do you deal with leeches?

I’m not talking about traditional medicine here (not to downplay the modern application of the age-old treatment at all!). The leeches I’m more concerned with on the day-to-day are those Anki cards you forget so persistently that the app takes charge, suspending them from your deck.

It’s an apt description for an item that sucks away your time and motivation. I don’t know about you, but I also get that sinking feeling of failure when “card was a leech” pops up baldly.

Catching Leeches

First of all, fight that feeling. Leeches can creep up for a number of reasons, and your memory lapse is the least of them. Despite the cold rebuke, Anki means well. It suspends the cards to save you wasting any more time on part of your learning strategy that isn’t quite working. So, for now, let them go.

Instead, schedule a review of leeches regularly. Once a month or so seems about right if you’re a prolific language learning user – I always have a couple to deal with in that time span. In the Anki desktop app, head to Browse. Then, there are two ways to list leeches. You can simply highlight Suspended under Card State in the left-hand menu.

Otherwise, you can use the fact that Anki tags leech cards with the text leech to draw them out. Highlight one of your decks in the left-hand menu, then in the bar at the top of the Browse panel, add the text tag:leech to narrow the results to that set.

Now out in the open, we need to think of a rehabilitation strategy for our annoyingly helpful leeches.

Treating the Cause, Not the Problem

It’s tempting to just un-suspend by removing that leech tag, and pop the card right back in the deck. But there’s a reason Anki singled it out – something wasn’t working.

Often, it’s not simply failure to remember. Many of mine aren’t words I’ve forgotten, but words I get mixed up – either with other target language words, or with the wrong English translation. For example, in Greek, I leeched out παραδέχομαι (paradéchomai – admit) with αποδέχομαι (apodéchomai – accept), due to their similarity – same root verb, different prefix.

It’s not always just soundalikes, either, but happens with concepts. Left and right are a case in point in Swahili. I know both words very well – kushoto and kulia – but I’d always say one for the other, to the point that they were marked as leeches.

I could recall them – it had just become 50/50 whether I’d say one or the other!

These cases of interference usually arises because there’s a lack of distinguishing information on the vocab card. The easiest way to fix that is to make your cards clearer and more precise. Any defining detail will do, and with language learning, context is key. Short sentences that embed the vocabulary items are perfect. To give the brain more to hang onto, you can expand them from basic X is Y types to X is Y, so/because…, and even make use of allegory and rhyme in your examples.

Taking the Swahili example, there’s a topical hook with those that adds layers of meaning: politics. There’s also a good rhyme for kulia in pia (also). So to my card, I add the sentence (and forgive the unpalatable mention of unpopular politicians here) Boris yuko kulia, na Rishi pia (Boris is on the right, and Rishi too).

And (of course) there’s a wee AI tip for that. If you struggle to fine rhymes – not unreasonable if you’re at an early stage in a language – then just ask your LLM of choice for rhyming pointers, or even entire couplets. It’s one of the things is does a pretty decent job of!

 

 

Leeches are an initially frustrating but ultimately helping feature of the Anki lifestyle! Do you have alternative methods for bashing them? Let us know in the comments!