Writing is one of my favorite ways to actively study German. It is great for vocabulary building and grammar practice, and in the absence of speaking opportunities, it is the only way to get practice with production skills. But beyond simply being a great way to practice on its own, writing is a key component of how I use flashcards and spaced repetition to learn German. In this post, I break down how to use writing practice to get more out of spaced repetition systems like Anki.

I received a lot of reccomendations of the Pimsleur language programs from family members back when I was preparing to head to Denmark in 2019. So naturally, I picked up Pimsleur Danish 1, never finished it, and forgot about it until about a month ago when I found the little blue Pimsleur logo lurking in my app drawer. I had been focusing on German exclusively until then, but given what I’d paid for Pimsleur (too much, see below), my stinginess demanded that I give Danish another shot.

One of my major frustrations with Anki is the stiffness of cloze-formatted cards. They just don’t play nice with basic card types. So while I often want to incorperate cloze deletions into my decks, making seperate notes for clozes of my example sentences is simply beyond my effort tolerance. So instead of spending an extra 30sec/card, I did the clearly easier thing and spent a week figuring out how to get basic cards to automatically make cloze deletions based on example sentences.