[HN Gopher] Anki-fy your life
___________________________________________________________________
Anki-fy your life
Author : mililitre
Score : 179 points
Date : 2023-03-18 15:19 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (abouttolearn.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (abouttolearn.substack.com)
| thrown123098 wrote:
| Using the pigeon hole principle on these systems tells me that if
| I don't eventually drop all cards completely I will reach a point
| where the only thing I'm doing is reviewing old material. None of
| the algorithms I've looked into seem to acknowledge this. Is
| there one which throws out a card after you get it right n times?
| andersentobias wrote:
| Unless you want to compete in Jeopardy or something, why bother
| with ""uploading"" static chunks of information to your wetware?
| Language learning aside.
|
| When categorizing notes to be remembered, I think it's good to
| think in terms of memory retreival, not memory storage. In other
| words, not to become an "archiever", because you probably want to
| evolve your ideas by linking them together in your own unique way
| -- unique as dicated by your problem at hand plus your own
| idiosyncratic experiences.
|
| "How to take smart notes" by Sonke Ahrens is a great book on this
| topic, admittedly more oriented towards a Zettelkasten/Obsidian
| workflow.
| sowbug wrote:
| It's like exercise. As a software engineer, I'm very unlikely
| to need to lift heavy things or run long distances. But my body
| is (probably) healthier long-term if I'm able to do those
| things.
|
| Disclaimer: going through my Anki decks is one of the 50 things
| on my 10-item to-do list. I don't get to it often enough. But
| it does work, and I now know how to memorize things I want to
| remember.
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Hmm sure but I feel like my brain gets too much intellectual
| stimulation if anything from my job and relationships and
| reading. If I try to do a leetcode at 8pm my brain is just
| extremely fatigued and tells me to stop. My body on the other
| hand just sits in a chair for a very large amount of the day
| so I need to supplement there
| sowbug wrote:
| There's an old book called _The Richest Man In Babylon_
| that has to do with personal finance. One of the key points
| is to _pay yourself first_. You have your rent, utility
| bills, maybe credit-card debt, etc., and even tonight you
| want to order in, even though it 's expensive, because
| you're way too tired to cook. That's all fine, as long as
| you first set aside 10% of your paycheck for savings.
| Although that leaves only 90% left for all the other needs
| clawing at you, somehow you make it all work.
|
| All too often people tend to their financial needs first,
| and find there's nothing left for themselves. No surprise
| most people die broke. Isn't it strange how their lifetime
| income just happened to almost exactly equal their lifetime
| expenses? Hmmm....
|
| You might see where I'm going. Why are you giving the best
| of your time (rather than money) to everyone else, leaving
| nothing for yourself at the end of the day? Maybe start
| with just five minutes at the start of the day to pay
| yourself intellectually. If that works out, make it a
| habit!
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| I had a major concussion shortly before my GCSE exams that I'm
| still very slowly recovering from. I was completely unable to
| think, let alone study. I never did an IQ test, but I couldn't
| even listen to a book or stay awake for more than a few hours
| without a headache. And for a while I couldn't look at a screen
| or read.
|
| I was able to get the second highest grades in the school, with
| lower than expected grades in only two subjects (and dropping
| one, further maths), because of Anki. Because Anki does not
| require understanding, only sufficient repetition, and I had a
| _lot_ of time on my hands, I was able to continuously do
| flashcards for hours on end while maths work would have me
| struggling to stay awake within 5 minutes. I could remember
| facts without understanding them.
|
| The exams were ~3 months after it happened, which gave me time
| to improve, plus during the actual exam a combination of
| painkillers, extra time, rest breaks, exam technique, and
| adrenaline allowed me to put together a plausible answer with
| the disconnected facts I had learnt in the months preceeding
| that I just about got the mark. As a sidenote - it's quite
| incredible how adrenaline can temporarily improve brain
| injuries, with the downside that the moment it went I was
| completely exhausted.
|
| Every subject bar maths I got the grades I wanted or just
| below, because Anki allowed me to memorise without learning.
|
| (These subjects were: Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology,
| English Lit, English Lang, History, Computer Science, Digital
| something, Creative Media Production (didn't do exam), Further
| Maths (dropped).)
|
| Now, I would prefer not to revise using solely Anki, and I
| think the fact a braindead student with memorised facts (and
| good exam technique) was able to get good grades says a lot
| about the British education system. It also says a lot about
| Anki, and just how effective it is.
|
| Side note, because I'm tired of hearing drivel on HN:
|
| My life being (permanently?) ruined was entirely preventable,
| all it would have taken is a little less empathy, a little less
| second chances, for violent barbarians who damage everyone
| around them. When people preach empathy they forget about the
| human cost of allowing inherently violent, destructive people
| to continue their actions.
|
| If you're one of those people who thinks grammar schools are
| bad, restorative "justice" is the future, and we should
| prioritise those who hurt and destroy over those who want to
| learn and build: Your actions and your ideology have ugly
| consequences beyond your selfish delusion of making the world
| better through being nice and kind and the _power of love_ -
| that belongs in novels, not policy.
| hhjinks wrote:
| I've never had a concussion, but I wanted to recount my
| similar experience in school, too. Like you, 5 minutes of
| math lectures had me dozing off. Really, a lecture in _any_
| subject would bore me to sleep. Only when we got practical
| tasks to work on, like math or physics problems, did my brain
| wake up and engage with and understand the material. As a
| result, I excelled in the natural sciences and math, where
| working on problems took up most of the time, while I did
| poorly in the more memorization-oriented social sciences and
| language subjects. Memorization is a skill like any other,
| and I 'm happy I get to work in a field where understanding
| is more important than memorization.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| We wrote pretty much the same comment. That's funny.
| Juke_Ellington wrote:
| This kind of static information retention is good for me. I'm
| an electrician so it's nice to know off the top of my head that
| there's a 10' spacing on supports for EMT without going to the
| code book every time. Some of that knowledge gets beaten in
| through repetition, but there are enough fringe cases and
| things I don't touch for years that are nice to have memorized.
| nathanmcrae wrote:
| I find a good way to link together ideas is to have them easily
| at hand i.e. memorized. Having a motivating problem is probably
| a better way to do this, but I've found that motivating
| problems which require concepts I would like to learn are not
| as readily available as I'd want.
| LastTrain wrote:
| OK. Anki-Fy my life, sounds good. Read lots and lots of words
| talking about improving memory. We are all knowledge workers,
| right? Who doesn't want better long term recall? This blog post
| links to another. More introductory words. The introduction goes
| on to explain how I will now easily understand journal papers and
| presentations. Great! But, to myself I think... "this sure is
| starting to sound like snake oil, when do I get to the part where
| it is actually explained what this Anki is..." and sure enough,
| eventually I grow impatient and just go google it up and Anki is
| just a $24.99 subscription flashcard app. Fuck me.
|
| [Edit: "fuck me" because I spent a few minutes suckered by an
| elaborate advertisement disguised as actual content.]
| magnio wrote:
| Anki is an open source app: https://github.com/ankitects/anki
|
| Only the iOS version costs money, which is probably their only
| revenue stream.
| LastTrain wrote:
| Hey I don't fault them for that, at all, I just get annoyed
| when I am dumb enough to click on ads disguised as blog
| posts.
| Name_Chawps wrote:
| Do you also get annoyed when you're dumb enough to think
| Anki isn't free?
| shostack wrote:
| Uh, I'm on Windows and Android and never once paid for it. Not
| at what you're seeing. iOS pricing?
| [deleted]
| Jtsummers wrote:
| The Anki dev sells the app on iOS and iPadOS (his only
| revenue stream for Anki other than donations), but it's a one
| time cost, not a subscription. GP just failed to read or
| comprehend what they read. Or possibly they found one of the
| other apps also called Anki which try to capitalize on the
| name and confusion.
| triyambakam wrote:
| Anki is free. And the concept of SRS is free. There are apps
| that are clearly very good at capitalizing on the success of
| Anki and charging. If you found the paid iPad app, that's a one
| time fee to help the developers maintain it in the app store. I
| think it's pretty steep but otherwise Anki is free on other
| platforms. I actually don't like Anki but don't want it to be
| mischaracterized
| Ardon wrote:
| Not sure where you found a subscription to Anki, but it's free
| and open source: https://github.com/ankitects/anki
|
| The iOS app is a one-time payment though.
|
| This article is definitely not written with an unfamiliar
| reader in mind though, that's for sure.
| palmy wrote:
| Anki is free on anything but iOS. Don't know why the iOS app is
| the only one with a fee.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://faqs.ankiweb.net/why-does-ankimobile-cost-more-
| than-...
|
| Here's the FAQ entry for why it costs as much as it does for
| iOS/iPadOS with some explanation for why he only charges on
| those platforms.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| IIRC the Android app is free because it wasn't started by
| Anki's original author. It was created by some other folks,
| using the source for Anki desktop.
| JCharante wrote:
| I imagine people with iphones have more disposable income and
| wouldn't be as affected by a cost compared to charging
| android users.
| throwaway675309 wrote:
| I literally just typed in Anki on Google and the first link to
| their homepage very obviously explains that it's free to use
| even with synchronization across multiple devices. The only
| cost I can think of is that they charge a one time fee for the
| mobile app for iOS, but the clients for android and desktop
| apps for computers are completely free. I have no idea where
| you got your information from but perhaps next time do a basic
| cursory search on the internet instead of querying ChatGPT.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| To be fair, Anki is trademark-squatted in many flash card
| apps on the net. Even on the iOS App Store, there are
| multiple squatters for "Anki" that outrank the real one.
| thenerdhead wrote:
| I really like https://readwise.io/ for this purpose regarding all
| the books I've read and the quotes I like to re-visit here and
| there. It uses a SRS technique.
|
| While this type of article is almost cliche at this point
| regarding someone coming across the memory limitations and the
| power of anki for the first time, I really think the case for
| anki is exaggerated with "important ideas".
|
| Anki is great for preparing to go on jeopardy or being in say med
| school. It is not really needed for lifelong learning.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten might be a better
| approach but even then it is debatable how often you'll ever
| actually use it once the novelty wears off.
|
| Anki is a tool to be used, not something that needs to be applied
| to everything.
| qznc wrote:
| Zettelkasten is for facts you want to be easy to look up. Anki
| is for things you want to remember instantly without looking
| them up. I use both.
| JaDogg wrote:
| Shameless plug if you want flashcards in your terminal:
| https://github.com/JaDogg/sbx
| MichaelNolan wrote:
| I'm a huge fan of spaced repetition and Anki. I strongly believe
| that most people's professional lives would be improved by using
| it. There is a huge amount of information that falls into the
| zone of it's needed often enough that not knowing it is a pain,
| but it's not needed often enough that you would "naturally"
| remember it.
|
| I've yet to find anything else that only takes 10 to 20 minutes a
| day that has a higher ROI. The amount of "compounding interest"
| it gives over time is incredible.
|
| Learning to write good cards is skill that takes time and
| practice. The article from Andy Matuschak [0] is a great guide to
| learn how to write good cards.
|
| [0] https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/
| coffeebeqn wrote:
| Why is it useful? My job at least isn't bottlenecked by me not
| memorizing enough things. Or maybe it is! But I'm not convinced
| senguidev wrote:
| This could give you some clues: http://augmentingcognition.co
| m/ltm.html#:~:text=How%20import... (see part II)
| watwut wrote:
| It seems to me that pretty much anything has better ROI then
| 10-20 minutes of pure rote memorization a day. Plus, keeping in
| 10-20 minutes a day requires separate skill on itself. Anki has
| a way of taking over and expanding the time it requires.
| MichaelNolan wrote:
| > of pure rote memorization
|
| I wouldn't describe my use of Anki as "rote memorization".
| Though certainly some people use it that way. There is a big
| difference between blindly putting raw and unfamiliar facts
| into an SRS, and using an SRS to remember things you have
| learned and understand. It's the second case that pays large
| dividends over time.
| yt-sdb wrote:
| Do you have a TLDR for that article? It's pretty long and
| wordy.
| andrem wrote:
| This is from Kagi's summarizer: Anki is a
| powerful tool for improving long-term memory. Anki is
| best used in service to a creative project. It is
| important to ask good questions when using Anki. Anki
| is most useful for learning new fields. Anki can be
| used to develop virtuoso skills. It is important to
| avoid orphan questions and yes/no patterns when using Anki.
| Memory is complicated and we should be careful before putting
| too much faith in any given model. Distributed practice
| is important for maximizing retention. Anki can be used
| to remember non-verbal experiences. Anki can be used to
| memorize APIs and code.
| submeta wrote:
| The article discusses how to create effective prompts that
| aid in long-term learning using spaced repetition. Matuschak
| suggests that good prompts should be specific, clear, and
| concise, and should be designed to encourage active recall
| rather than passive recognition.
|
| He also emphasizes the importance of interleaving, which
| involves mixing up different types of problems or questions
| to enhance retention and facilitate transfer of knowledge.
| Additionally, he suggests that prompts should be personalized
| and contextualized to increase engagement and motivation.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Okay, so was this written by chatgpt
| zvmaz wrote:
| I have found out that I was bad at card making when reviewing
| the first cards I made after a lapse of time of not using
| Anki. My then self got frustrated and irritated by how vague
| and non-specific the cards I made myself were. I certainly
| learned something about my memory and cognition. The article
| is long, but it has some insights that resonated with me. I
| think the quality of the cards one makes is as important, if
| not more so, than spaced repetition.
| triyambakam wrote:
| Anki (or a Leitner box) is the recommended method from the book
| "Fluent Forever"
|
| After learning one language in school and a few others ad hoc on
| my own I gave this method a try.
|
| I quickly gave up, though, once I discovered Dr Krashen's work on
| comprehensible input, and how boring and time consuming creating
| and studying Anki is.
|
| Dr Krashen's work says that we learn language when we understand
| it. I.e. when we receive input at our level. There are quite a
| number of Youtube channels that claim to teach through this
| method, but many of them still resort to drills, themed
| vocabulary, grammar etc that are all pointless in the CI method.
|
| The best one I've seen so far is Dreaming Spanish.
|
| What's so cool about the CI method is that the spaced repetition
| is built in, implicit - if you're getting input at your level you
| will be getting repetition.
|
| Children's shows are a great way to get input. Many countries
| have TV apps on iPad and can be viewed free with a VPN.
|
| As an experiment I had my daughter only consume German media
| (living in Sweden) for a few years and she can now speak better
| German than I can, and I have never corrected her. She has
| broader and more modern vocabulary, naturally.
| miklosz wrote:
| I find Anki essential for language learning. Did it for French,
| starting from 0 and finishing at B2 (except for writing) in two
| years (also taking a 3h / week course).
|
| Especially at the very beginning, I find learning the first 500
| words as described in "Fluent Forever" very helpful. Going
| through that before starting with the course makes the
| experience much easier.
|
| I totally agree with Krashen's theories, but using Anki is a
| secret weapon here that puts the process on overdrive (e.g.
| reading on Kindle and then later going through words that I
| checked in the Kindle dictionary and adding them into Anki).
|
| Also, it's essential to retain the knowledge, e.g. if it's a
| language that you don't use daily.
|
| 5 years and 30'000+ cards later, I find Anki indispensable in
| learning anything which requires memorisation. Thinks I have to
| learn for work, for hobbies, certificates, improving my
| vocabulary in languages I care about. Basically, every fact I
| care about strongly enough, goes into Anki. If not enough, goes
| into Obsidian.
| mojomark wrote:
| It'd be cool to have a system like chatgpt (maybe converted to
| audio) that you could use to practice conversations in a
| different language.
| bluquark wrote:
| Personally, as an intermediate Japanese learner, I have been
| careful to choose the right input just as Krashen advocates,
| but I _also_ find Anki indispensable. I found to my surprise
| that I have been improving about equally quickly using
| Anki+Animebook+Yomichan for 1-2 hours a day while living the US
| as I did during an earlier period when I was living in Japan
| (but without access to computerized methods beyond a basic
| pocket e-dict).
|
| As a beginner, appropriate input was enough to care of "spaced
| repetition" on its own, since children's media constantly
| rotates over the same small set of vocabulary. But after I
| improved past the ~2000 most common words or so, it happened
| more and more that a word I recently learned didn't appear
| again in my input until it had already been flushed. The
| probability that I would _actually_ learn a new word for good
| progressively decreased as I picked the lower-hanging fruit,
| which is the cause of the dreaded "intermediate plateau".
|
| I gather Anki pushes out the plateau much further: I have heard
| that it starts to feel Sisyphean to learn new words with it
| around the 15000-20000 word mark instead.
| wenc wrote:
| Learning languages is a statistical problem.
|
| You have to learn the high frequency words/phrases _in context_
| (forget 500 most common vocabulary lists -- those don 't work).
| As a child, you do this naturally.
|
| However, there are certain situations where Anki helps. I find
| it's with words that are useful but don't occur frequently
| enough to pattern match. For instance, the word "ad hoc" in
| English -- it occurs in professional speech, but not quite
| often enough for you to remember what it means in context. This
| is where Ankifying can really help.
|
| Ankifying commonly confused words/phrases can also help. For
| instance, in English the word "put" can be used in so many
| contexts, and many of those contexts don't occur frequently,
| but can be the source of funny mistakes.
|
| "Put up (with)" and "put out" and "put in" all mean different
| things in different contexts. Embedding context in your Anki
| cards will help you recall these contexts.
| pixelperfect wrote:
| I find there's a sweet spot for Anki when the daily review of
| already-existing cards takes 20 minutes. If the daily review
| takes more than 25 minutes, I try not to add any cards that day.
| CGamesPlay wrote:
| I have mine set to 20 new cards/day and 200 remember cards/day.
| This seems to steady out at about 20 mins day. That said, I
| wish Anki had a time-boxed mode, where it measured my speeds
| and then just chose the right balance of new cards.
|
| (Cards added above the new card limit go into a queue for
| future days automatically.)
| bitdivision wrote:
| I started out using anki to improve my Spanish vocabulary.
| Eventually discovered Mochi [0] here on HN. Far better designed
| and executed, well worth a look if you're interested in Anki.
|
| [0] https://mochi.cards/
| liendolucas wrote:
| Question aside. Does anyone know straightforward ways to create
| anki decks?
|
| Last time I checked on this it was like a lot of effort to put on
| and got discouraged to build my own decks to improve my italian.
| I was expecting anki decks to be constructed easily, in its most
| basic form from plain text files (html, markdown, etc) with
| references to maybe resources (audio, images, etc) just from a
| filesystem directory but is not that simple.
|
| I can't recall the name of a Python tool that allowed you to
| create decks programmatically but I found it way too much effort
| to use it and I couldn't find other good alternatives (maybe this
| has changed recently, don't know).
|
| Does anyone recommend a good, simple and straightforward tool to
| create decks/cards? (I'm using FreeBSD).
| vector_spaces wrote:
| There's a Python library called genanki that has a minor
| learning curve but isn't terrible to figure out. My process is
| to maintain a gsheet with data I use to generate my flashcards,
| then manually download the CSV data, and run a Python script to
| convert everything into the Anki format.
|
| If I'm not mistaken it's also possible to import CSV data
| directly into anki without the intermediate Python script
| liendolucas wrote:
| Yes, this is the one I previously found (thanks for sharing).
| Found it ridiculously complex for what an anki card seems to
| be... I mean from the docs I found this:
|
| > "...You need to pass a model_id so that Anki can keep track
| of your model."
|
| At that time I wondered myself: "Why on earth do I need to
| keep track of a model id for an anki card?" then quickly move
| forward on the docs without paying too much attention and
| finally put it aside...
| huimang wrote:
| Anki can import csv files.
|
| That said, making decks is extremely tedious. It's better than
| a premade deck for learning language vocabulary, but it's time
| consuming.
|
| You shouldn't make vocabulary cards programmatically. If you're
| going to invest time into learning a card, you need to be
| absolutely sure that it's correct. Otherwise you've wasted your
| own time.
|
| When I was using Anki daily, I'd reserve about 20 mins or so in
| the evening to input new words.
| doktorhladnjak wrote:
| Maybe it's just me, but I can't think of anything in my job as a
| software engineer that I'd benefit from memorizing through flash
| cards. What are people memorizing exactly?
| sowbug wrote:
| Coworkers' names and the reason for meeting with them.
|
| I used Anki for this when I was in a management position that
| involved meeting with many people, often just once or twice
| each, across my very large company. It was nice to be able to
| greet someone by name in the cafeteria six months after our
| meeting, and ask how such-and-such project was going. I'm sure
| some people already remember names, faces, and context
| effortlessly. I'm not one of those people. But I always
| appreciate when someone remembers me, so I was willing to work
| to do the same for them.
|
| I stopped doing it once my work universe got a little more
| stable, and life's daily encounters were themselves the spaced
| repetition I needed to remember everyone.
| johtso wrote:
| I've also never used anki for anything related to my work /
| programming.
|
| What I have used it for: Memorising how to
| identify plants and their latin names Memorising the
| technical terms for different morphological features of plants
| so that I could efficiently use a vegetative identification key
| without constantly flicking to the glossary Memorising
| foreign language vocabulary
| shusaku wrote:
| One of these days I need to make flash cards of those makefile
| automatic variables...
| kobalsky wrote:
| you can use it to memorize some console commands, library
| calls, anything you would like to be able to remember without
| checking the source material.
| tastysandwich wrote:
| I absolutely love Anki.
|
| A lot of software make empty promises around productivity
| improvements. Especially in education. Anki is one of those rare
| tools that genuinely 10x's you over your peers. I used it when
| studying Japanese and it was a massive help.
|
| However, having used it for over 12 years to memorise many
| different things I have noticed one caveat.
|
| If you're not also using what you're memorising outside of Anki,
| I feel like your ability to recall gets trapped within the
| context of using Anki.
|
| For example, if you're learning Japanese vocab through Anki, and
| also trying out your new words via conversation and
| reading/writing, you'll rapidly learn new vocab AND be able to
| recall it anywhere.
|
| However if you're learning Japanese on your own and not really
| conversing/writing, no matter how good your recall with Anki is,
| you'll struggle to recall those same words anywhere else.
|
| The cool thing about Anki is you can also use pictures/audio. So
| if you're learning music theory you could memorise chord
| shapes/intervals. Or human anatomy.
| dkarl wrote:
| The way I think of memorization is as scaffolding. Rote
| memorization is very different from the skill or understand you
| are trying to build, and for this reason, many people are
| skeptical about the value of it. Why practice rote memorization
| when what you really want is very different? But this is like
| trying to construct a building without using scaffolding.
|
| If you only use Anki and don't do anything else, it's like
| building scaffolding on an empty lot, and then building more
| and more scaffolding without using it to build anything else.
| bluquark wrote:
| I've noticed this too, I study with Anki J->E cards and it
| supercharges my reading skill, helps somewhat my listening
| skill, and basically does nothing at all for my speaking skill.
|
| I was wondering how much adding audio cards or "reversed" E->J
| cards to my routine might help. Are those variations worth the
| trouble?
| Macha wrote:
| My experience is that doing so has had a minor improvement in
| my J->E recall, but a major improvement in my E->J recall. If
| you never intend to write/speak Japanese and just want to
| build to watching anime or something, I guess you could give
| it a miss, but I think it's pretty worthwhile.
|
| The one caveat with Anki specifically for reversed cards is
| when you add a bunch of new cards or a new deck and it
| presents you the reversed card right after the basic card.
|
| e.g. seeing the Xing se -> shiawase (happy) card then
| immediately after the happy -> Xing se card, sure you're
| going to be telling Anki this was an "easy" card, but that's
| much more about the immediacy than the level of recall you
| have.
|
| For my purposes I actually have three sets of cards in my
| Japanese deck, one each for kana, kanji and english front
| card and the other two on the reverse cards (unless my
| textbook omits the kanji because of it being rarely used in
| the real world, as for some words).
| bluquark wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| > unless my textbook omits the kanji because of it being
| rarely used in the real world, as for some words
|
| I have found this usually proves to be a mistake, textbooks
| and dictionaries pretend that you need far less kanji than
| you actually do. Lately I started to mine Anki words from
| conversations on Japanese twitter and I discovered that
| everyone casually throw around all kinds of kanji that are
| not on the Jouyou list and in words every textbook insisted
| were primarily kana.
|
| I think it might be because modern IMEs have made it much
| easier to casually use rare-ish kanji. Technology has
| expanded the range of everyone's recall and writing speed,
| while the textbooks are still reflecting the world of 20
| years ago.
| tastysandwich wrote:
| Personally I never did audio cards (though I did a lot of
| listening and conversation outside of Anki) or reverse cards
| for Japanese. My vocab decks were J->E, and my Kanji decks
| were Kana->Kanji. I always practised writing my answers on
| the screen using the whiteboard feature.
|
| I think you should strive to keep your decks under 15 minutes
| total. That means you can complete them in three 5-minute
| blocks a day. Any longer and I found I would A) miss a deck,
| meaning I had to catch up the next day; or B) try to rush
| through them.
|
| I highly recommend trying to engage in conversation as much
| as possible. In my city (in Australia) I went to
| "conversation classes". Basically Japanese people wanting to
| improve their English would meet with Australians wanting to
| improve their Japanese. It went for an hour, half of which
| was spent talking in English, and half in Japanese. And if
| you can only speak a little bit of Japanese, it's totally
| fine, you can just speak in broken Japanese mixed with
| English. It was really fun! You'll find opportunities to use
| your new vocab, and it'll stick much better.
| TwentyPosts wrote:
| This is also what I'd call the classic issue with Duolingo. Or
| rather, one of them, considering that the app has all sorts of
| issues.
|
| If you use nothing but Duolingo you'll plateau very quickly.
| It's probably "okay" as a casual side spaced-repetition
| learning tool--when you're learning languages you generally
| want to pull from several different resources, and learn with
| different tools anyway. But don't make the mistake of thinking
| that Duolingo alone will get you anywhere.
|
| I think this universally applies to repetition-learning, at
| least when it comes to languages. You need to "cross-train".
| bluquark wrote:
| > Or rather, one of them, considering that [Duolingo] has all
| sorts of issues.
|
| Yep. I agree with measured criticisms of Anki even while
| feeling the app is really useful if you use it well. Whereas
| Duolingo isn't worth bothering with at all. It's purely
| optimized to maximize engagement/revenue.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| Duolingo used to be better: people who are talking about
| Duolingo might be referencing how it used to be.
| TwentyPosts wrote:
| I'm not. I'm a new user, and I notice that Duolingo kind
| of sucks, but I am getting some amount of value out of
| it. I'm very open to suggestions for better language
| learning apps, though.
| bluquark wrote:
| When you hit diminishing returns on a walled-garden
| language-learning app, it's time to create a continuous
| intake of real-world media at your level that you enjoy,
| plus a suite of inline understanding+memory tools to
| extract the maximum learning out of that media.
|
| I have been following many of the recommendations on
| https://learnjapanese.moe/resources/. Most of the recs
| are language-specific, but perhaps you can still draw
| some inspiration from the methods and look for equivalent
| tools in your target language.
| TwentyPosts wrote:
| As someone who didn't like the idea of learning a language
| at all but has to, I'm glad that Duolingo gave me a very,
| _very_ easy way to get started with literally anything at
| all. It 's simple and streamlined, meaning that it's easy
| to start and stick with it instead of getting hung up on
| how to find a good textbook, or figuring out how to use
| Anki "properly".
|
| This also applies to practicing every single day: I find it
| easy to do a few Duolingo "lessons" as warm-up before
| delving into more in-depth practice.
|
| Nowadays I would not use it for real "practice" at all. I
| use it to check my understanding for 5-15 minutes a day. If
| I make mistakes in Duolingo (eg. forming the plural,
| remembering the dative for a given grammatical gender) then
| I look these things up and study them.
|
| I might drop Duolingo completely at some point, but for now
| I'm getting a non-zero amount of value out of it--I am
| increasingly looking into better options, though. I'm
| already looking Anki, and I'm sure there are some other
| language learning apps out there.
| zora_goron wrote:
| I also had a similar thought process regarding understanding vs
| memorizing facts while transitioning from studying CS (where I
| emphasized understanding the underlying concepts rather than
| trying to memorize atomic facts that I could derive) to medicine
| (where having facts memorized is also a key component).
| Interestingly, I found that committing to memorizing facts
| actually helped me gain a deeper understanding of the topics
| themselves, which was not what I originally expected! (I wrote a
| little bit about the above a few months ago --
| https://samrawal.substack.com/p/on-the-relationship-between-...)
| Jensson wrote:
| > Interestingly, I found that committing to memorizing facts
| actually helped me gain a deeper understanding of the topics
| themselves, which was not what I originally expected
|
| Be careful with this, perceived self understanding doesn't
| reflect real understanding.
| rg111 wrote:
| There is only one real way to test, and the subject being CS,
| it is even more real: _building things using those concepts_.
|
| For other subjects (and CS, too): demonstrate mastery with
| teaching others, producing something with the concepts
| learned and get feedback.
|
| This way one can test true learning. And, even when tested
| this way, Spaced Repeatition really helps. I am speaking from
| experience.
|
| When you are in a place where you can immerse yourself in a
| proper environment, like a college or work- where you hear
| terms and their usage regularly, learning becomes easier.
|
| But when your environment is cut-off from the buzzing world,
| or everyone is doing ML and you want to do Cybersecurity, you
| can _fake_ immersion using Anki. A good part of physical
| immersion can be replaced with using Anki.
| nearmuse wrote:
| I am trying this approach right now. It is difficult to do it for
| big concepts because they take time to recall in their entirety
| and can't be reduced to one key idea to be recalled quickly. It
| may also be hard to estimate what interval to use, and bloated
| repetition sessions are killing the whole idea of spending some
| 10s of minutes a day, causing a sort of fatigue if not outright
| burnout.
| mahathu wrote:
| I'm sure taking 10 minutes out of their day to reflect and write
| a diary entry would increase most peoples wellbeing a lot more
| than trying to neurotically remember everything you come across.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| Is there a measure, anywhere, of the bollocks to content ratio on
| HN on Saturdays? It seems to peak that day. But, this one is so
| bad, it's not even wrong. Who on earth knows what the future will
| bring? Who on earth knows, ahead of time, what's worth 10
| minutes, or 2 minutes, or no time at all. That's intuition, and
| that's a gift. All the rest is bollocks, and it seems to turn up
| on Saturdays too much; that is, the pieces that claim to have
| identified a "system".
| 1024core wrote:
| I'm trying to get into Anki, but it's difficult to get started.
|
| Here's what I'd like: while I'm reading a (PDF) book, I want to
| highlight some text (and maybe manually tweak it a little) and
| have it converted into some "Anki card" format so when I want to
| review the contents of the book later, I can use Anki for it.
|
| Any ideas?
| siegecraft wrote:
| This is a common use case and many reader / annotation apps
| either support it natively (polarized and marginnote 3 are two
| that I have first hand experience with) or have third party
| tools available to copy annotations into anki.
| kneebonian wrote:
| So sounds like more of what you are interested in is
| incremental reading. In the case the way you'd want to do
| things is copy the text to another document for the entire
| article then go back through determine which facts you want to
| keep.
|
| Then turn it into an Anki card, preferably with clozes.
|
| Half the benefit of Anki is making the Anki cards in the first
| place.
| JCharante wrote:
| Highlight the text in your dedicated PDF reading program and
| then after each lesson/chapter, when you sit down to review the
| lesson (you should be doing this even if you don't use Anki!)
| you can create the Anki cards manually. Creating Anki cards is
| really helpful for learning. I used to study at a langauge
| school and whenever I came across a word I didn't know, I'd
| quickly write it down in a notebook in the middle of class and
| then later in the day go back and create Anki cards for the
| words I had written down.
| resoluteteeth wrote:
| Maybe you could use some app to pull out highlights but you
| still need to think carefully about how to make each text chunk
| into a card or multiple cards (otherwise you'll waste more time
| than you save)
|
| You also don't normally use an srs flashcard program like anki
| just when you want to review a book, you use it every day.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| Check out AnkiConnect for getting things into Anki. Not sure
| about reader software that will call out after a highlight
| though.
| ichverstehe wrote:
| Allow me to mention my project Ankivalenz[1], which turns
| structured HTML files into Anki decks. I use it with Quarto[2][3]
| to generate my Anki decks. Instead of having an unorganized
| "pool" of Anki cards, I can create hierarchical, well-organized
| notes and turn them into an Anki deck. This makes it easier to
| create Anki decks, but more importantly, it makes it easier to
| keep Anki decks up to date.
|
| [1] https://github.com/vangberg/ankivalenz
|
| [2] https://quarto.org/
|
| [3] https://github.com/vangberg/quarto-ankivalenz
| keiferski wrote:
| I've experimented with Anki over the years and currently have a
| somewhat custom setup that I do every day / nearly every day.
| I'll explain below for anyone that might find it useful.
|
| At one point I realized that my capacity for learning new items
| for a particular topic is limited to a few items per day. Any
| more than 2 or 3 and I struggle to retain the information. So,
| for example, trying to learn 20 words in Chinese per day is
| impossible without spending multiple hours on it.
|
| The trick, however, is that I get around this by having _many
| items_ from _multiple topics_ , instead of many items from a
| single topic. Instead of 20 words in Chinese, I learn 1 word each
| in 20 different languages. Surprisingly, I have a much easier
| time with this and don't need to spend much time on it in order
| to retain the information. I don't know why this psychologically
| works, but it does. And while learning 2 or 3 words a day won't
| make you fluent anytime soon, it does add up over time,
| especially for topics that you aren't in a hurry to learn but
| would like to know on a slow timeline, in a year or two. For
| example, learning the Japanese hiragana/katakana or the numbers
| of all the US presidents.
|
| However, this proved to be somewhat unwieldy logistically as I
| had to open 20 different PDFs, download audio for each word, then
| stitch it all together daily. So I created a little web app
| (stitched together from some WordPress plugins, actually) that
| allows me to import learning materials and then display 2-3 of
| them per topic on a single page, each time the page is loaded. I
| just visit the page once a day and add the items to Anki.
|
| This was all a bit complex to set up, but if you enjoy learning
| new things and want an efficient system for adding stuff into
| your brain, I recommend making something similar.
| hobo_mark wrote:
| Is that a real example? Are you learning 20 languages in
| parallel? Two is already more than enough for me.
| keiferski wrote:
| Yes I am currently learning one word/phrase (it depends on
| the language) daily in about twenty different languages.
| Again, I wouldn't claim it to be equivalent to serious study
| and conversational practice, but I have absolutely learned
| various phrases in all of the languages.
|
| I think most people make "language learning" a heavy task
| that seems insurmountable. In reality, once you understand
| the basic sounds of a language, it can be as simple as
| learning a new phrase everyday. Just think of it as learning
| the names of capital cities or elements on the periodic
| table: a lot of information that is organized into patterns.
|
| No, you won't be fluent quickly, but it is absolutely
| beneficial to know "hello", "thank you", "where is?" and 100
| other phrases in a language. Or in the case of Russian or
| Hebrew or Greek, it's awesome to just be able to read the
| alphabet, even if you don't know many of the words.
| ryyr wrote:
| "Don't memorize ideas. And don't take us too seriously when we
| turn up our noses at rote learning. Rote helps build the man."
| spoonjim wrote:
| What kinds of things are useful to learn in this rote way? Except
| maybe foreign language vocabulary?
| knubie wrote:
| Spaced repetition systems are not used to learn things. They're
| used to remember things you've already learned.
| keiferski wrote:
| Pretty much anything. I use it to learn foreign alphabets and
| languages, historical people and events, philosophical terms,
| computer networking concepts, outdoor survival tips, and a
| bunch of other things. The best sources of information are
| encyclopedias (traditional ones, not Wikipedia) and
| dictionaries, as they are written to summarize a concept in a
| few hundred words.
| hidelooktropic wrote:
| Anki is a huge part of my routines having ADHD.
| https://www.adamgrant.info/Being+Human/ADHD/Strategies/Flash...
|
| It's like slowly uploading information to my brain for permanent
| storage.
| nohaydeprobleme wrote:
| A major limitation exists for spaced repetition software (e.g.
| Anki, SuperMemo, or other flashcard-style systems), in my
| experience using them for several years for long-term memory:
| it's neither necessary nor sufficient to use this software to
| learn certain topics.
|
| Several excellent physics and math students I worked with have
| never used spaced repetition software, but were excellent at
| their studies because they consistently solved textbook problems.
| For them, they got the "repetitions" (aka exposure to facts and
| problems) via solving more new problems from the book nearly
| every day. Later problems in the textbooks would provide review
| of previous problems. This method can be far more effective than
| spending too much studying with spaced repetition software (which
| I have done in the past), as the time spent creating new cards
| and reviewing cards that are due comes at the expense of time
| spent solving new problems.
|
| Ideally, you can perhaps find time for both activities. But in my
| personal experience, I learned mathematics more effectively by
| focusing primarily on textbook problems (reviewing older material
| through new problems) and spending a very limited amount of time
| with spaced repetition, versus even a fifty-fifty split between a
| textbook and spaced repetition that I've experimented with in the
| past.
|
| In the past, I also spent too much time in the past remembering
| phrases and vocabulary when learning new languages, and not
| enough time practicing listening, writing, and especially
| conversation. Certain skills can only be efficiently developed by
| directly practicing them. While spaced repetition software
| remains an essential part to my language studies, it is very far
| from sufficient (even just a couple hours of conversation
| practice per week over three months, got me much further than
| primarily focusing on Anki/spaced repetition for six months).
|
| Spaced repetition systems like Anki (though I moved to SuperMemo
| about a year back) are vital to my daily studies, but I've
| learned far more effectively by treating these systems as a
| supplement to more traditional and tested study methods that rely
| on active problem-solving. For technical fields, these are
| textbook problems from books by well-regarded authors, and for
| languages, these are conversation practice and writing articles
| that I request feedback on (in particular, teachers in small
| group classes have given me great, useful feedback on my
| writing).
| Kokouane wrote:
| > I learned mathematics more effectively by focusing primarily
| on textbook problems (reviewing older material through new
| problems)
|
| As a caveat, sometimes it can be hard to do this. If I randomly
| pick textbook problems, I have no guarantee that the new
| material will review the old.
| crazygringo wrote:
| Right, there's a big distiction to be made here.
|
| Knowledge that is primarily _conceptual_ (like almost all of
| math) generally does not benefit from spaced repetition. The
| learning involved is _understanding_ -- a new concept may be
| hard to understand in the first place, but once you get it, you
| don 't really forget it. Or you just need a super-quick
| refresher if you haven't touched it for a few months.
|
| While knowledge that is primarily _arbitrary-factual_ is the
| perfect candidate for spaced repetition -- mainly things like
| vocabulary, medical terms, and so forth. Just associating a
| largely arbitrary name for something. And indeed they are
| mostly useful for learning for exams. E.g. I used it to learn
| Chinese characters and could never have passed Chinese class
| otherwise. But on the other hand when I actually _lived_ in
| another country that speaks a different language, spaced
| repetition _isn 't_ much of a help -- you learn vocab just by
| absorbing it day-to-day, like a kid does.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| N=1. I found that conceptual knowledge and eureka moments
| always result in substantial or at least non trivial changes
| in the way I parse and understand information, so much so
| that their integration is seamless, automatic and permanent.
|
| Otoh, certain stuff that are not particularly important need
| frequent repetition, eg learning a foreign language that you
| are not actively using.
|
| I am considering using it for leetcode problems and
| questions.
| watwut wrote:
| > Otoh, certain stuff that are not particularly important
| need frequent repetition, eg learning a foreign language
| that you are not actively using.
|
| In that use case, you are much better off reading content
| in that language and watching content in that language.
| Vocabulary memorization as isolated activity makes sense
| only as additional activity if you have additional time on
| top of that.
| PartiallyTyped wrote:
| I mainly use anki with cards that involve the vocab in
| some context. I found that the context enabled me to
| eventually understand without translating to any other
| language, I am still quite limited though. I think that
| falls into your suggestion of learning within some kind
| of broader context, which I agree.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| But the arbitrary-factual isn't they way people recommend
| using Anki. I really struggle to understand exactly what
| people are actually using it to learn. There are a lot of
| medical students and that makes sense, but that is...
| arbitrary-factual.
|
| I've tried many times with other material, but I always get
| far more out of creating condensed notes and reviewing actual
| notes than quizzing random factioids in Anki.
|
| I get that probably the idea is that creating prompts could
| guide me about which notes to review, but it seems easier to
| just review the notes. I think the people doing Anki are just
| putting the effort into making cards rather than into making
| notes. It would probably be nice if it were easy to convert
| notes into Anki but everything I've tried sucks and it just
| make taking each hour of taking notes into two hours of
| making notes and cards. I could have just reviewed notes for
| that hour. Closures are sort of okay but converting notes
| into closures is a bigger pain in the ass than it should be.
|
| Maybe someone can make a LLM that takes some corpus of text
| and generates Anki cards of key points for review. Then I
| could just feed my notes in. But otherwise it really seems
| like a huge waste of time.
| roundandround wrote:
| It would definitely be hard to use Anki for conceptual
| learning that requires fresh problems to prevent memorizing
| answers. One could link to an outside site keyword
| categorizing problems matching specifics, I suppose..
|
| Really though a lack of spaced repetition on practising
| conceptual problems is just as noticeable as the lack of
| spaced repetition on factual learning. Very few fields are so
| perfectly structured that you get practices on their earliest
| levels by doing later levels and then working in the field,
| i.e. plenty of mathematicians admit they no longer do
| arithmetic well.
| kneebonian wrote:
| I've found the sweet spot.for Anki is the things that I need
| only occasionally but not never.
|
| Things I use frequently I already pick up through repeated use,
| things that I never use eventually falls out.
|
| But things that are somewhat relevant about that I find myself
| googling more than twice is a good candidate to Anki.
| qznc wrote:
| I'm switching my job next month. That means a lot of new
| acronyms to learn of software components, departments, and
| projects. Anki helps me learn them.
| watwut wrote:
| > Several excellent physics and math students I worked with
| have never used spaced repetition software, but were excellent
| at their studies because they consistently solved textbook
| problems.
|
| Isn't it the case that only minority of students uses this
| software or flashcards in general anyway? I mean, of course it
| is possible to succeed without it, because overwhelming
| majority of students/learners are not using it.
| nohaydeprobleme wrote:
| The idea gets more interesting depending on your idea of
| success. If success just means passing the course, you
| definitely don't need spaced repetition (but then again, you
| can also maybe get by via cramming two or three days before
| each test and rushing assignments, though this wouldn't be a
| good experience).
|
| If you define success as doing very well in the course (and
| remembering what you learn in the long-term), the idea gets
| more interesting because more people interested in these
| outcomes use flashcard systems. Anki is especially popular
| among medical students, so it's a tempting idea to consider
| that applying spaced repetition to subjects like mathematics
| or physics can also be useful.
|
| To some people studying math or physics, the software can
| potentially be a nice aide, but in my individual experience,
| I understood and remembered concepts better by spending more
| time practicing problems and doing sample tests, versus
| spending more time using spaced repetition software.
| watwut wrote:
| That is the thing ... I don't recall best students doing
| flashcards all that much in cs, math and physics. I
| actually associated this more with groups of students who
| don't understand, so they memorize without understanding.
| When you understand the concept, it is also much easier to
| remember the thing.
| nohaydeprobleme wrote:
| That's a fair observation. My personal experience has a
| bias because I knew a math and computer science major who
| was hardworking and seemed bright at academics, and he
| was really into Anki.
|
| Knowing him led to my impression that a decent number of
| math and physics students might have studied with spaced
| repetition without talking much about it, as he only
| mentioned it after he saw me studying with the software
| once. But in hindsight, I agree that it's more likely
| that math & physics students stick to the learning habits
| they developed earlier on--often through lots of practice
| tests and exercises.
|
| Anki seems to be more of a natural progression for people
| in other fields like biology, where students might
| develop habits of using flashcards with software like
| Quizlet, where using software with better study schedules
| like Anki can be a natural progression.
| MichaelNolan wrote:
| > (though I moved to SuperMemo about a year back)
|
| What pushed you to make the switch? Was it Incremental Reading,
| or some other feature/reason?
| nohaydeprobleme wrote:
| My main motivation behind the switch was that I had too many
| daily reviews of very old cards that I knew well in Anki,
| after using the software very close to daily for several
| years. I read that SuperMemo handled older reviews better,
| and I was also optimistic at the time that the learning
| schedule really was better than Anki's (as SuperMemo uses a
| significantly later version of the algorithm that Anki is
| based on for scheduling reviews).
|
| The software switch had its ups and downs. First, the
| downsides: a significant one-time cost included the time
| spent learning all the items from scratch, as the import of
| cards from Anki to SuperMemo didn't preserve the repetition
| history. Another one-time cost, though minor, was some
| friction setting up the software (it took an abnormal number
| of days to receive the activation code, which I eventually
| received after a follow-up; maybe the company had a problem
| with their system at the time).
|
| Long-term downsides include the lack of easy image occlusion
| (aka, covering up parts of a labelled image and revealing
| just one label in separate flashcards). If I studied
| maps/diagrams with spaced repetition or anatomy like in my
| high school biology class, this would be a dealbreaker
| (though I suppose you could use keep using Anki along
| SuperMemo). In my experience, it's far easier to occlude
| images in Anki than in SuperMemo. Also, the Windows desktop
| version I use doesn't have a mobile version, which is a very
| significant downside. I'm now used to reviewing SuperMemo in
| the evening or when I think it's a good time, via software
| called Parallels to run a Windows virtual machine on a
| MacBook, but there's a lot more friction to starting a review
| session. To add to the friction, backups are a bit harder
| (though I've made it easier by setting up a custom keyboard
| shortcut to press the sequence of keys create a backup in a
| folder in cloud storage).
|
| The main upside is that I do think (noting that I may have
| confirmation bias) that the flashcard scheduling really is
| effective and also more efficient. I no longer face
| significant numbers of very old reviews, and I do
| subjectively feel that I retain my cards better.
|
| To add objectivity on effectiveness for accuracy, according
| to SuperMemo's data, I have a 97% retention rate on my French
| cards which contain a lot of very old cards, though I
| aggressively remake cards that become "leeches"; an 89%
| retention rate on my Spanish cards, which have much more
| newer cards; and a 93% retention rate on my
| mathematics/sciences/miscellaneous readings cards.
| Unfortunately, I didn't keep a records for Anki cards in
| comparison, and there may be other factors behind increased
| retention (if any) such as following better practices when
| making new cards [1]. I wish I had numbers for time
| efficiency, but I can confidently say that I don't dread
| spending time reviewing old cards (though once again, there
| may be some other factor).
|
| On SuperMemo's other features: I also did try the
| "incremental reading" feature of SuperMemo, but ultimately, I
| borrowed some of the principles and stuck to a personal
| method of taking notes from different books, while switching
| between books (instead of only focusing on one subject a day)
| to help stay alert while studying the materials. There are
| also other features of SuperMemo for sleep tracking and task
| scheduling, but I didn't personally enjoy using them (I
| personally found that sleep tracking didn't account well for
| daylight savings, and I prefer other simple apps accessible
| by mobile devices for scheduling and task tracking).
|
| To make a very long story short: I switched to try and reduce
| time spent during reviews, but ended up spending a lot more
| time setting up and getting used to the software. I didn't
| really mind the fiddling that much, as spaced repetition
| software was a sort-of hobby for me in the past, but for
| other people who'd just like to learn, Anki provides a far
| more direct way to try spaced repetition.
|
| SuperMemo is effective for me now, as I don't spend much time
| at all fiddling with the software. But I'm not sure if I
| would enthusiastically recommend the switch to other people
| unless they're interested in spaced repetition software (and
| thus don't mind fiddling with it), and they also have some
| dissatisfaction with Anki in some way. In any case, with
| either software, I've found my studies to be more effective
| by treating spaced repetition as just a supplement to other
| forms of study that require active problem solving.
|
| [1] Better practices included more strictly following
| Wozniak's twenty rules here (also relevant for Anki users):
| https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-
| formulatin...
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| You're right that retrieval practice isn't optimal for all
| types of knowledge. But not all spaced repetition systems are
| flashcard systems.
|
| Just under a month ago, I read about 'math academy' here on HN.
| One thing it does is sort of what it sounds like you envisage:
| surfacing exercises relating to concepts you might be about to
| forget.
| kneebonian wrote:
| I'll just throw out I've used Anki ever since I started it and
| haven't failed a knowledge test since I started doing it.
| Including passing my HAM test with only using Anki and the
| questions for 72 hours.
| bluquark wrote:
| Using Anki for a 72-hour cram session is kind of missing the
| point though. For me, the main benefit of Anki is to escape the
| cram->forget cycle and learn things low-stress and for good.
| kneebonian wrote:
| I 100% agree that is the optimal way. But it can be useful to
| memorize 300 questions and answers in 72 hours if you have
| to.
| rounakdatta wrote:
| I'm surprised no one mentioned Memoet
| (https://github.com/memoetapp/memoet). It is a much more modern
| version of Anki - much more open algorithm, REST APIs and
| universal interfaces and self-hosted control over one's data.
| AlexErrant wrote:
| Anki, imo, already has an open algorithm (that the user can
| change via plugins), universal interfaces, and is "self-
| hosted". My eyes perked up at REST api, but it doesn't look
| like there's a centralized server that hosts shared cards,
| which is where my mind went.
|
| I'm building https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive/ which is
| basically Anki + Github + Reddit; people can optionally upload
| their cards for others to download/fork, and the most popular
| cards rise to the top. It's FLOSS, offline-first, supports
| plugins and p2p syncing, and is very much a WIP. My proof of
| concept is almost done though, which demos the critical
| technologies in a secure way.
| igloopan wrote:
| I agree that Anki is likely less developer friendly but its
| popularity does make up for that I feel, with ostensibly state
| of the art SRS algorithms being published with Anki
| implementations (https://github.com/open-spaced-
| repetition/fsrs4anki) out of the box. Though as someone that's
| solely used Anki for language learning, I do value the ability
| to remember more words in less time more than ease of
| development so it's not unlikely Memoet is a better choice for
| other usecases.
| bigbluesax wrote:
| I actually really strugle to retain anything I learned with anki
| and I was wondering if this affects anyone else.
|
| A prominent example is when I was working through a deck of
| japanese hiragana and katakana, I was doing my cards at a
| moderate pace every day, and I just kept mixing them up, even
| when I was repeating them in short succession. After a few very
| frustrating weeks of this i ditched anki and started trying to
| write out the whole table from memory and checking for mistakes
| after, this strategy proved so successful I only needed three
| sessions for perfect recall.
|
| I used anki a few other times with similar results. I know the
| idea of learning styles is disputed, but this app just doesn't
| appear to work for me.
| keiferski wrote:
| It sounds like you didn't learn the information sufficiently
| enough before making them into cards. Anki isn't good for
| teaching you new things, it's good for remembering stuff that
| you already know - or are at least familiar with.
| nirav72 wrote:
| This might be a good idea to refresh memory every so often. As an
| IT guy , sometimes I'll mentally go blank when I trying to recall
| some linux command option/switch or some sql query operation.
| Especially when I've used that linux commend or wrote that
| specific type of query 1000s of times throughout my career. This
| has become more apparent as I've gotten older. (I'm 50 now). So
| now I'm increasingly relying on search engines to quickly find
| that info when I face those mental blocks. So I probably should
| try anki style flash cards.
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