Outgrowing my learning method

[SaxSalute]

For the last year and a half I've been learning German in college. Discarding my completely unenthusiastic experience with Spanish in grade school, this is my first real foray into language learning, and I think I'm starting to outgrow the way I've always done things and I'm looking for some advice on moving forward from those of you with more experience.

Since my first day of introductory German, I've kept a very detailed, organized Anki deck of every word in every vocabulary list. It has always served me really well, but now I'm getting to the point where I'm reading literature and ending up with tons of very very similar words. For example, after reading "Draußen vor der Tür" I now have probably 8 new words for various flavors of awful, terrible, gruesome, etc. Synonyms will come up and I just have to try to remember every single word that could have that definition. It has started getting rather unmanageable and I think I'm really forcing myself to latch onto these artificial differences in the cards to try to differentiate. It's made me pretty good at recall, but in terms of formulating new thoughts I feel like I'm slipping. I'm still doing the best of anybody in all my classes, but I feel like my learning method has been too tailored to doing well in a classroom environment. Now I'm looking for alternate ways to approach vocab.

I've been reading about the Goldbook method, and it sounds rather interesting, though I've seen a lot of talk from both sides either saying it's snake oil or a really effective way to learn vocabulary in the long term.

I commit a lot of time to my German between class, homework, and my personal study (~2 or 3 hours a day on average) and I'm starting to lose motivation as this core part of my retention starts to fail as the words start to overlap.

TL;DR I've been using Anki for the 1.5 years since I started learning German but the vocab overlap from synonyms is starting to get unmanageable. Any suggestions on better ways to approach my vocabulary?

[eskandar]

Since my first day of introductory German, I've kept a very detailed, organized Anki deck of every word in every vocabulary list. It has always served me really well, but now I'm getting to the point where I'm reading literature and ending up with tons of very very similar words. For example, after reading "Draußen vor der Tür" I now have probably 8 new words for various flavors of awful, terrible, gruesome, etc. Synonyms will come up and I just have to try to remember every single word that could have that definition. It has started getting rather unmanageable and I think I'm really forcing myself to latch onto these artificial differences in the cards to try to differentiate.

This sounds counterproductive - if your Anki cards for these words are English > German, and you're sitting there trying to come up with every German word you know that has 'awful' (for example) as a definition, you're not only wasting your time, but as you mentioned, potentially forcing artificial distinctions between words that could hinder rather than help your learning. For the subtler German vocabulary I would just make German > English cards. You could also have an English card that says 'awful (8 synonyms)' and then when you see it, you try to remember all 8 German words you've learned, but again, I think the best way would be to just go German > English on those words with multiple synonyms.

[SaxSalute]

I keep all of my cards in both directions. As I've been looking into this, I'm thinking I'm now at a point where I should disable the cards that go English->German. That will probably be a good starting point to making some more progress.

[anothermoron]

Maybe do German -> German cards, like you (probably) did when doing vocab-learning in your native language? I don't know how far along you are, but I definitely recommend this if you're capable of understanding a monolingual dictionary.

Back in middleschool I had to make English vocab cards with 1) the definition(s), 2) an example sentence (one for each definition), and, if possible, 3) two+ synonyms and 4) 2+ antonyms. All of this would be on a single card. It worked well then, so I've been trying the same thing with French.

So far it's been working pretty well, even when doing definition -> word, although I had to make separate cards for this direction in Anki because I can't cover up the example sentences like I did with my physical flashcards in middleschool. Other than that, I find monolingual cards help me make connections between French words instead of having to step back into English first before I finally remember a word. E.g., if I'm trying to recall méchant, when I'm thinking in French, I think "Like mauvais(=bad), but more than that," but since I've learned it as the translation of evil, I have to mentallly switch to English before I make the connection. Doing monolingual flashcards helps with this problem.

[SaxSalute]

As a side note @anothermoron, you can hide the example sentences for one direction in Anki. Go to Tools -> Manage Note Types -> Whatever the note type you use is called -> Cards -> Side you don't want example sentences on -> Delete the {{ExampleField}} from the Front Template.

I don't think I'm quite far enough to be able to use a monolingual dictionary entirely yet. A lot of the vocabulary used in definitions is really dense at this point. I think my main adjustment for now is going to be removing En->De flashcards from my rotation.