[HN Gopher] Effective Spaced Repetition
___________________________________________________________________
Effective Spaced Repetition
Author : g0xA52A2A
Score : 372 points
Date : 2023-04-10 12:07 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (borretti.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (borretti.me)
| albert_e wrote:
| I read so many good things about spaced-repetition but havent had
| the discipline to stick with it and make it work for me ... I wil
| give it one more shot with flashcards on a exam prep I am about
| to embark on.
|
| Is there any gentle kid-friendly introduction to this topic with
| a fun exercise that I can introduce my K-12 kids to so they might
| grow up with better tools than me?
| Kelamir wrote:
| https://ncase.me/remember/ could help a bit.
| bulbosaur123 wrote:
| Combine spaced repetition with major mnemonic system and method
| of Loki and you have a superpower.
| all2 wrote:
| Can you mention some major mnemonic systems? I've read about
| this stuff before and I remember a few minor ones for numbers,
| or for chaining ideas, but that's about it.
| MisterPea wrote:
| Having tried spaced repetition methods for studying for swe
| interviews, I can concur that it is the most effective way for me
| learn.
|
| It does require an intense amount of discipline though, so wonder
| how well it will work for me in execution for hobby learning.
| koofdoof wrote:
| Are there any good premade decks you could recommend? Or
| particular topics you found well suited to spaced repetition?
| MisterPea wrote:
| Decks were mostly LC problems - anytime Anki told me to
| review it, I would spend 5min or so trying to remember the
| general outline. If I forgot, I would put it back into the To
| Study again queue (essentially it would show up sooner again)
| ngai_aku wrote:
| What kind of cards did you make for interview prep? Reviewing
| algorithms?
| MisterPea wrote:
| Yep, just LC problems - helps a lot with identifying patterns
| harshalizee wrote:
| Would you mind sharing your setup and/or deck?
| rsanek wrote:
| For my job search process I created a custom note type
| specifically for interview problems. My general process
| was go to LeetCode, find a medium/hard problem, hack on
| it for 30-60 minutes, then look at the solution if I
| couldn't get there myself. At the end of the problem,
| regardless of if I solved it or not, I'd create an Anki
| card with the following fields:
|
| Title
|
| Question
|
| Additional Criteria
|
| Example input/output
|
| Insight (1 sentence maximum)
|
| Insight explanation (can be longer/bullet-pointed list)
|
| Key Data Structure (at most 1 data structure; if there
| are multiple, use the most important one)
|
| Time complexity
|
| Space complexity
|
| Full answer code (can use syntax highlighter add-on)
|
| Source (can provide link to associated question online;
| can include link(s) to solutions that the insight and/or
| code come from)
|
| There are 4 cards that are generated from this template,
| which test the same question in slightly different ways.
| They individually ask for the insight, the key data
| structure, and the time and space complexities.
|
| I found this note type to be critical to my success in
| the following interviews. In two cases, I was asked
| literally the same exact question I had already added to
| Anki; I was able to write out the solution from memory in
| one go. If you'd like to use my note type directly, I've
| exported an example here. [0]
|
| [0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/12NsYNIBjIPI1Nhq5wE1x
| Pljr9rH...
| bulldog13 wrote:
| I use SuperMemo https://super-memo.com/ for memorizing things. It
| uses spaced repetition. It has a bit of a learning curve, but
| once you figure it out, very effective. I feel like I have seen
| an article on HN about it before.
| pleasejustdont wrote:
| Probably this one : Augmenting Long-term Memory
| http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
| oslac wrote:
| Tending to a digital garden of your own making has been the most
| effective for me by far. No other organization beyond that, at
| most hitting a random note inside a subfolder for 10-15 minutes a
| day.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| This could do with some non-serif fontage. Effective learning
| includes having a typeface that doesn't get in the way of reading
| at smaller pointsize for a large segment of the population.
| n8henrie wrote:
| TIL -- I thought serif was generally supposed to be easier to
| read.
|
| How is this kind of thing studied, and what kind of outcomes
| suggest "easier to read"? Speed? Recall? Subjective?
|
| What proportion of the population are we talking about,
| roughly? Is it even enough that one should consider providing
| both a serif and a sans version of their content?
|
| Serious question.
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Worldwide, at least 10% of the audience (but depending on
| your specific demographic, much higher) which is a crazy
| significant number (for contrast: your users are three times
| more likely to have some form of dyslexia than they are
| likely to be using Firefox).
|
| For anyone with (partial) dyslexia the serifs are
| information-murder.
| https://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/advice/employers/creating-
| a-d...
|
| But also note that font size and spacing matters a lot: at
| 16px with 24px line spacing, this is super hard to read.
| Change that to font-size 20 with the same 24px spacing, and
| this read perfectly fine.
| n8henrie wrote:
| Thanks for the response and link! I'll see if I can find
| some primary literature on the topic -- I'm interested in
| how such a thing is studied! Accessibility is certainly one
| of my many weak points.
| lbotos wrote:
| Is your beef the serifs, or browser's justification doing a
| number on the word spacing? I find it easier to read with the
| justification removed.
| lbotos wrote:
| Heh, it's funny as your link encourages wider tracking so I
| guess it is the serifs.
| robertbob wrote:
| Does anyone have any insight into deciding what information
| should be memorised, and what information it is sufficient to
| simply store in a searchable digital knowledge base for rapid
| retrieval when needed?
|
| Takes a lot of effort to commit my notes from a book into my
| head, but a tiny amount of resources to store them on my
| computer.
| rjh29 wrote:
| Language is really the ideal use case, you cannot stop and look
| up words every few seconds when talking to someone. And doing
| it while reading or watching TV spoils the enjoyment somewhat.
| You need to frontload a ton of data into your mind and
| flashcards are the best way to do it.
|
| Another good use case is country flags, because you can't
| easily look those up (other than pulling up an image of ALL the
| country flags)
| bluGill wrote:
| Only at the beginner levels. Once you get beyond beginner you
| realize that many words have 20 different definitions, and
| each definition maps to a different word in the other
| language - and the problem happens when you reverse as well.
| outlace wrote:
| Ask yourself if the cost of having to look it up at a
| potentially inconvenient time (e.g. in the middle of a busy
| work day) is greater than the cost of memorizing it during
| scheduled less busy times (e.g. doing flashcards while eating
| dinner or during a bus commute).
| _dain_ wrote:
| Gwern's classic monograph[1] addresses this:
|
| _> The most difficult task, beyond that of just persisting
| until the benefits become clear, is deciding what's valuable
| enough to add in. In a 3 year period, one can expect to spend
| "30-40 seconds" on any given item. The long run theoretical
| predictions are a little hairier. Given a single item, the
| formula for daily time spent on it is Time = 1/500 x
| nthYear-1.5 + 1/30000. During our 20th year, we would spend t =
| 1/500 x 20-1.5 + 1/3000, or 3.557e-4 minutes a day. This is the
| average daily time, so to recover the annual time spent, we
| simply multiply by 365. Suppose we were interested in how much
| time a flashcard would cost us over 20 years. The average daily
| time changes every year (the graph looks like an exponential
| decay, remember), so we have to run the formula for each year
| and sum them all; in Haskell:_ sum $ map
| (\year -> ((1/500 * year**(-(1.5))) + 1/30000) * 365.25)
| [1..20] # 1.8291
|
| _> Which evaluates to 1.8 minutes. (This may seem too small,
| but one doesn't spend much time in the first year and the time
| drops off quickly55.) Anki user muflax's statistics put his
| per-card time at 71s, for example. But maybe Piotr Wozniak was
| being optimistic or we're bad at writing flashcards, so we'll
| double it to 5 minutes. That's our key rule of thumb that lets
| us decide what to learn and what to forget: if, over your
| lifetime, you will spend more than 5 minutes looking something
| up or will lose more than 5 minutes as a result of not knowing
| something, then it's worthwhile to memorize it with spaced
| repetition. 5 minutes is the line that divides trivia from
| useful data.56_
|
| [1] https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition
| rjh29 wrote:
| I have definitely wasted lots of time creating and reviewing
| cards for words that I never see again (the long tail) or
| don't strictly need to know. But the feeling of coming across
| a word that you learned and -knowing- it is amazing. It also
| helps if you enjoy the process of creating and reviewing
| cards - tending to your knowledge garden, so to speak.
| tiagod wrote:
| >A common failure mode (and I did this more than once, before I
| got the hang of it) is to use Anki for two weeks, then drop it,
| and pick it back up six months later only to find you have 600
| cards due for review. This is not encouraging, and it defeats the
| point of spaced repetition, which is to review the cards on the
| intervals the algorithm chooses. >I don't have much advice in
| this area, except that if you have persistent problems with
| conscientiousness, untreated ADHD etc. you should address that
| first.
|
| This keeps happening to me, and I have somewhat treated (but
| severe) ADHD.
|
| Does anyone have recommendations to make this easier? Either Anki
| settings, or using another app.
| nojs wrote:
| I use this service to hold me accountable to "Anki zero" every
| day:
|
| https://bossasaservice.com/
| Scaevolus wrote:
| Assuming you use a computer daily, it should be easy to script
| Anki to open itself at startup at some point during the day,
| letting you effortlessly have a habit of sitting down and doing
| 5 minutes of review before your other tasks.
| zetalyrae wrote:
| The way I did this was I added a daily task to my todo list to
| do spaced repetition.
|
| And I started small. Add a few flashcards, review. Don't add
| more than 5-20 cards per day (Anki and Mochi have new card
| limits to enforce this for you).
|
| If you use it daily, and add cards at a slow trickle, they
| won't pile up and you won't get discouraged.
| examplary_cable wrote:
| The issue you're having is due to the fact that Anki
| "Accumulates" cards if you skip one day, which can build up and
| create such a large amount of scheduled cards for a day that
| you end up dropping the thing. I'm working on a spaced
| repetition algorithm that solves this issue by letting you
| review when you have time and letting you skip the days you
| can't do the reviews.
| icoder wrote:
| I'm interested! I've noticed exactly this. But also even with
| regular use I've had times where the stack and thus required
| study time was just ever increasing. This is probably a mix
| of too many new cards plus high difficulty resulting too many
| reset cards. It would be great if I could determine when and
| how long I'd study and the algorithm would just offer me the
| cards best to study next, being repeats or new ones. That
| would combine nicely with a 'dont brake the chain' or other
| habbit forming technique. I'd prefer a daily n minutes above
| something that may take increasingly longer.
| c7b wrote:
| The SM algorithms, trying to predict the perfect time for
| reviewing a question, seem like overengineering to me (and also
| not very well supported by research afaik - we have evidence
| that repetitions help, but much less what the perfect spacing
| is). Just randomly sample questions with probabilities
| proportional to how 'urgently' you need to see them, seems like
| the most intuitive approach to me. No daily quotas, no running
| out of questions, just do a few when you feel like it and don't
| worry about whether you're doing too much or too little
| repetition.
|
| Is there an app/plugin that works like that? I know you could
| use Anki like that by just not worrying about the backlog, but
| in my experience it doesn't work like that.
| cafemachiavelli wrote:
| The only thing that worked for me (also ADHD) is to have fixed
| study sessions, typically in the morning ("Kanji before
| breakfast") or during my train commute.
|
| Beyond that, I wouldn't worry about backlog too much. I use a
| custom deck that gives me my maximally doable number of cards
| per day and completely ignore the rest. It's not like the
| actual repetition frequency is critical - many people change
| those settings quite drastically and still manage to memorize
| their cards fine.
| samus wrote:
| If you don't touch it for that long, just throw away the
| scorefile and start from new. It probably doesn't fit the
| degree you actually remember any of the things that you
| learned.
| kqr wrote:
| Here's what worked for me, but probably only works for people
| in a narrow set of circumstances.
|
| I read a lot of technical books and articles. I used to make
| notes on the interesting/relevant stuff I came across, in case
| I would forget about it after I had used it and need it again
| in the future, so I would be able to look it up.
|
| Now I make flashcards instead. Since I keep reading new things,
| and keep wanting to make new notes, I also keep adding
| flashcards. And it feels silly to add flashcards without also
| reviewing them, so I end up doing that too.
|
| -----
|
| But yes, as another person wrote in their comment, part of it
| is also resigning to/accepting your condition for the effects
| it will have on the things you want to do. Sometimes you'll
| stop reviewing and you'll get a backlog. The important thing is
| not that you consistently review, but that you consistently
| pick up reviewing again once you've stopped.
| sangpal wrote:
| You could maybe use an alarm/reminder.
| sn9 wrote:
| Instead of setting a goal of getting through some number of
| cards, have you considered spending a maximum amount of time
| per day?
|
| Like say you block of 30 minutes per day for Anki. Most days
| you'll probably have time left over, but some days you may have
| cards left to review by the end of the 30 minutes. But that's
| okay. You can just do them tomorrow. The point is to be
| consistent, not to be a completionist.
|
| It would probably help to start reviewing old cards before
| learning new ones as well.
|
| And of course you can start with whatever small block of time
| feels like it would be easy to complete like 15 minutes or 5
| minutes. Maybe even 1 minute; you can always gradually increase
| the duration as you rack up a streak.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > pick it back up six months later only to find you have 600
| cards due for review.
|
| Just do the amount you feel like doing. Backlogs don't matter,
| the system will just show you the highest priority cards
| (highest risk of forgetting) first, and even give you extra
| credit (i.e. a longer review interval) for those cards that you
| do still recall despite the backlog.
| n8henrie wrote:
| Used SRS via Mnemosyne (and later Repetitions.app) heavily in
| studying for all of my US medical board exams. The effort to
| payoff ratio seemed very satisfactory.
|
| For pre-clinical rotations, a few nerdy peers and I collaborated
| on a shared deck of a couple thousand slides -- many of them
| pathology images -- synced via Dropbox.
|
| For the Step exams, I mostly used practice test questions. Any
| question I missed prompted me to read up on the topic to
| determine what piece of knowledge would have helped me come to
| the right answer, and then figure out how to make a decent card
| for that principle. Every morning I would start by reviewing all
| my SRS cards, then do a few hours of practice tests. It was
| really nice being able to be able to take a core component m of
| my study material on the road by just bringing my phone! A few of
| the practice question apps had protections in place to prevent
| copying text (copy and paste saved a fair bit of time, even if
| there was also a lot of rewriting) -- but figuring out
| workarounds like running in a VM or screenshotting from the iOS
| app was never too hard, and I would just queue up the screenshots
| to batch process toward the end of the day.
|
| I used a similar technique to pass the tech, general, and extra
| exams for amateur radio with near perfect scores (the verbatim
| questions and answers are freely available -- I did try to learn
| the concepts behind most questions, though a few were admittedly
| memorization without understanding). Unfortunately my small town
| is too rural to have a local club, and I have too many hobbies to
| shell out $1k for a HF rig, so I have yet to make a single QSO.
| I'll eventually find time to put together the QRP CW kit I got
| for my birthday :)
| yanis_t wrote:
| Spaced repetition looks very promising to me. I've been a long-
| time Anki [1] user, and it allowed me to learn Czech much faster.
|
| Recently I launched a website [2] where I try to blend a
| markdown-based knowledge manager with spaced repetition. It's not
| an easy task and there's a long way to go, but after adding and
| maintaining > 400 cards, I already
|
| [1] https://apps.ankiweb.net/ [2] https://retaind.io/
| AlexErrant wrote:
| This looks incorrect to me https://i.imgur.com/pECgx2j.png
| mburee wrote:
| Basically trying to do exactly the same thing, do you have any
| recommendations on decks or are you maintaining your own?
| wanderingbit wrote:
| Upon reading the OP's blog, I had the same idea! It's cool to
| see others are hungry for this as well.
|
| My basic approach to implementing it in Notion (my preferred
| knowledge manager) is:
|
| 1. build some block template in notion that lets me structure
| the block such that it's easy for Mochi to ingest it 2. reads
| new pages from Notion 3. uses Mochi to generate cards for them
| 4. build a habit of reviewing Mochi cards, then I will actually
| learn from the things I write in Notion
|
| It looks like you've implemented the core functionality in
| retaind. How come you decided to go with a separate knowledge
| base, rather than try to use one that already has strong
| network effects, like Notion?
| austincassidy wrote:
| I've been trying to find a solution to this exact problem. I
| use Notion as my PKMS and I've been struggling to find an
| integration to make flashcards with my content in Notion.
| Going to try out your system - thanks for sharing!
|
| As an aside, Notion would completely disrupt the flashcard
| app space (Quizlet, etc) if it had a feature to create
| flashcards from a Notion database with spaced repetition. I
| really don't think it would be that difficult for them to
| implement that feature. Hopefully they will soon.
| cdelsolar wrote:
| I am a tournament Scrabble player and the state of the art for
| studying words is spaced repetition. You quiz on "alphagrams",
| like ABEISTT, and after a few times you just see BATISTE BISTATE.
| There are at least 80K words between 2 and 8 letters long though,
| so it does take many hundreds or thousands of hours to learn them
| all well. I have very poor studying discipline so I have my own
| methods of studying that don't use spaced repetition, instead I
| just study all the words periodically and focus on the harder
| ones. But I don't know them as well, and for the words I did
| spaced repetition on more than 15 years ago I can still recall
| those immediately.
| LVB wrote:
| This is interesting to me. Do you make many permutations and
| use those as cards?
| zetalyrae wrote:
| I wrote this. Ask me anything!
| untech wrote:
| Thanks for the article! I noticed a small issue: the "Powers of
| two" subsection didn't render properly, probably due to a
| Markdown syntax error.
| zetalyrae wrote:
| Thanks! Fixed this.
| hyeomans wrote:
| Thanks for this. What topics have you learned/memorized with
| this technique?
| larsrc wrote:
| Nice write-up! Haven't tried SRS yes, I definitely see how it
| can work well for learning facts like you show. For fuzzier
| subjects like history or psychology, I've had some success with
| writing questions for myself that require more of an
| understanding of the subject than mere facts. (Never got to the
| repetition part, though.) I found that writing non-trivial
| questions also helped me understand the subject matter better.
| How would you work with such subjects?
| LVB wrote:
| Great article? I'm curious what your Anki settings are, if
| you've changed anything. I'm pretty new to the app, but when I
| hit things like "you'll need see this card in 5 years" I had to
| dive into settings and start tweaking stuff. I'm more concerned
| about definitely remembering it in say 12 months than having
| too high of a load. But there are many adjustments to achieve
| this, so any thoughts?
| zetalyrae wrote:
| I use Mochi with all settings out of the box. Mochi doesn't
| even implement the SM-2 algorithm, it just applies a
| multiplier to the review interval on getting it
| right/forgetting.
| hendry wrote:
| I find writing cards / decks the challenge. IIRC the ones you
| download from Ankiweb are all such low quality!
|
| Could you link to some good quality decks for inspiration
| please?
| zetalyrae wrote:
| I write essentially all of my cards. I find that it helps a
| bit with recall.
|
| Also, people differ in the "density" of cards they need
| around a given topic. I might need a lot of cards to cover a
| particular area of a topic in many different ways, while
| someone who already knows that area needs fewer.
|
| I agree that public decks tend to be terrible. So I don't
| really know any good ones. For the examples in the post, I
| tried to keep the wording as close as possible to the
| flashcards in my own Mochi decks, without adding extraneous
| detail.
| bluechair wrote:
| Thanks for the write up.
|
| Could you share with us how you're applying this knowledge in
| your work?
| zetalyrae wrote:
| I mostly use SR so I can study intensely whatever strikes me
| as interesting, then turn to the next thing, while still
| retaining the knowledge and being able to make progress.
|
| Like a few months back I had the sudden inexplicable autistic
| urge to learn geology. So, I picked up a textbook and went
| through it like a novel and just wrote the flashcards as I
| read.
|
| I think of it as checkpointing for learning:
| https://borretti.me/article/spaced-repetition-
| checkpointing-...
|
| Currently going through Jaynes' _Probability Theory: The
| Logic of Science_.
| hermanschaaf wrote:
| Thanks for the great article, you've inspired me to take
| another shot at making a habit of learning through spaced
| repetition!
|
| I had a question: how much time do you typically spend on this
| activity in a day? Do you have tips for how to adjust based on
| the time you have available?
| zetalyrae wrote:
| It depends, after a big burst of adding flashcards I'll have
| a big hump to get through for like 2 or 3 weeks. That might
| be hundreds of flashcards a day, that can take 15-20 minutes.
|
| Right now I haven't added many cards in a while so it's more
| like 30-50 cards a day. Usually not even 5 minutes.
|
| I wouldn't recommend doing hundreds of cards a day,
| especially if you're just getting into it. I'm just nuts.
| ivvve wrote:
| How would you reccomend I learn history with spaced repetition?
| I'm studying a detailed subject independently (I.e. not for an
| exam with a set curriculum) and I'm finding it hard to atomise
| the cards down bevond dates and names. I suppose I should start
| there first and then build more complex cards, but I'm not sure
| what the best approach for those is. Thanks for the detailed
| article!
| zetalyrae wrote:
| I've thought about this a lot and I don't have an answer.
| History is very prose-like and unstructured and that makes it
| hard.
|
| My tentative thought (and I haven't validated this entirely)
| is to try to structure it. Make a spreadsheet with tables for
| people, events, etc. Look at Wikipedia infoboxes for
| inspiration into the types of things that should go as
| columns in the tables.
|
| You can also try hierarchical periodization. Like if you were
| making flashcards about the life of Peter the Great you'd
| divide his life into: 1. Early life
| 2. Grand Embassy 2.1. Austria 2.2.
| The Netherlands 2.3. England 3. Great
| Northern War 3.1 Start 3.2 Founding
| of St. Petersburg
|
| And put information under each of the leaf nodes.
| sn9 wrote:
| I'd check out Cal Newport's work on efficient study habits
| and apply Anki where it makes sense.
|
| For example, read this and follow the links:
| https://calnewport.com/case-study-how-i-plan-to-study-for-
| my...
|
| Obviously ignore the stuff that's less relevant for an
| autodidact, though seriously consider the effect any
| particular thing could have on your learning. For example,
| perhaps you'd get a high ROI paying a history graduate
| student to assign and grade a research paper or exam.
|
| Ali Abdaal also has great suggestions that should be useful:
| https://aliabdaal.com/the-essay-memorisation-framework/
| nathanmcrae wrote:
| I'm currently doing this and personally I believe the dates
| and names approach is best (depending on your goals). The
| theory is that if you have a solid grasp of the coarse
| details like births/deaths/major battles then when you are
| reading about the more subtle ideas (like what factors caused
| the fall of the Roman empire) you will be able to couch those
| ideas in the concrete framework you've already built. Then
| those ideas will be able to stick better.
|
| I've only been doing it for a year and change so we'll see
| how it goes, but I think it's a good approach.
| rendall wrote:
| What papers or data out there support spaced repetition? Has its
| support weathered the replication crisis?
| rodonn wrote:
| Spaced repetition has a very long history with hundreds of
| papers published on the topic. Here's a good survey of some of
| the published research https://gwern.net/spaced-
| repetition#background-testing-works
| submeta wrote:
| A question to the experienced Anki users:
|
| The recommendation is to learn before you memorize.
|
| Many times I hack the infos (from an article) right into Anki.
| Now if it'd want to review the infos in the Anki app, that
| totally destroys my stats.
|
| What are some of you doing? Extract the info into some other
| tool, review the infos there and then quiz yourself in Aki?
| atahanacar wrote:
| >that totally destroys my stats
|
| I don't understand what you mean. There are only 2 stats that
| are mostly significant. The first is, when first learning the
| card, if you hit again too many times the card becomes a leech
| - as in it leeches your time, at which point you should
| temporarily suspend that card and to the others first.
|
| The other one is the recall rate: after you learn a card (on
| default settings, when you hit the 1 day mark for that card)
| how often you don't fail to recall the information. This rate
| is the single most important metric in your stats, and a value
| that is constantly below 90% means you should probably tweak
| your settings to show cards more often. This can be easily done
| by reducing the interval modifier. A value close to 100% might
| also be slightly problematic depending on what you want,
| because you might be wasting time with unnecessary reviews,
| which can be solved by slightly increasing the said interval
| modifier.
|
| As for your main question, you can do it however you see fit.
| Some people might prefer to do everything in Anki, while others
| might prefer to read a textbook, watch lectures etc. first and
| then move on to Anki for that specific topic. Don't use Anki as
| a way to quiz yourself, it is not a testing tool. If you want
| to test yourself, use question banks. Use Anki as a tool that
| will help you memorize things. For this, you have to do your
| reviews on time, or the algorithm just won't work.
| somsak2 wrote:
| Why does it matter what your stats are?
| sureglymop wrote:
| I have a similar issue. I create cards for the subject I need
| to study, then I study it all at once in a custom study
| session.
|
| I then go to the exams but how do I continue afterwards? Like
| what are the best settings to retain all the information after
| that? And how do I make sure that I'm not destroying those
| settings when I need to study before an exam again?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://docs.ankiweb.net/filtered-decks.html
|
| You can use filtered decks and set them up so they don't
| alter the schedule of the cards when they're "returned" to
| their actual regular deck. Useful for a cram session before
| an exam where you don't want to actually alter the regular
| study schedule.
| sureglymop wrote:
| Thank you! Exactly what I was looking for. I was in such a
| cramming mode at the time that i didn't finish the docs but
| pretty much stopped after I understood notes and cards. Can
| you recommend any settings for a good schedule to retain
| information?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Sorry, I just use the defaults. I've found they're
| effective for me. The most I tune it is to raise or lower
| the number of cards per day (number of review, number of
| new) for specific circumstances. Like when I've fallen
| behind I may lower the number of new cards per day and
| raise reviews a bit to clear a backlog.
|
| I have tried adjusting it more in the past and found it
| did nothing to help me overall and I was just turning
| knobs to turn knobs.
| tra3 wrote:
| But the point of SRS is that it prompts you to review the
| cards when there's a high chance of memory decay.
|
| Say you learned your cards and did a custom study to review
| them before your exam. Now you "know" these cards to some
| extent. Anki knows how many times you reviewed them and if
| you provided an accurate assessment of how well you retained
| these cards, Anki will know when to show 'em next, so you
| don't forget. You don't have to do anything.
| Graziano_M wrote:
| Why would you care about your stats? Do you have the stuff
| memorized? Nothing else matters.
| maayank wrote:
| So... anyone used Chatgpt to generate cards for Anki?
| Kelamir wrote:
| Yes, you can also prompt it with the 20 rules of memorization
| https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulatin...
| and you've got yourself an agent which create flashcards for
| you.
| dowakin wrote:
| Yes, I'm using for language learning. Usually via tool
| `https://github.com/sigoden/aichat` with different roles that
| I've created. For example for grammar ChatGPT generates bunch
| of examples for specific grammar rules, which I memorize.
| totetsu wrote:
| I used it to write a python script to convert a large json file
| full of a corpus of japanese business phrases and their english
| translations into anki card format.
| knubie wrote:
| Not Anki, but you can use the AI field in Mochi [0] to generate
| content for cards [1].
|
| [0] https://mochi.cards/ [1]
| https://twitter.com/MochiCardsApp/status/1635289548229062657...
| mjadobson wrote:
| Yes, I have trialled this. I've found it works best with this
| workflow: 1. Summarise some prose (from a
| textbook) into bullet points 2. Convert these to
| flashcards 3. Make these flashcards more concise
|
| I then verify they are correct/relevant, only keeping those
| that are worthwhile.
| keiferski wrote:
| I have been using it to do exactly that. However, as GPT is
| wrong on certain facts, I use it more for generating Anki-
| formatted text from learning sources that I provide myself.
|
| For example, I'll give it a paragraph from Wikipedia, then say,
| "generate 5 questions and answers from this text. Format the
| answers to be inside brackets like this: {{c1::Answer text}}.
| dantheman0207 wrote:
| It's certainly an intriguing idea worth investigating. But for
| me, the process of creating the cards and being forced to
| distill what I read was critical to the success of using SRS.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| Making your own cards is a very important step
| comfypotato wrote:
| Science says otherwise. Saw a study with no significant
| difference between the people who made decks and people who
| used premade decks. Too lazy to get source, sorry.
| rjh29 wrote:
| My deck has 10,000 hand-made cards and I know for sure they
| stick in my brain easier than cards from a premade deck
| that I have no connection with. I suspect it depends how
| you make the deck. I intentionally use sentences and images
| that I care about.
|
| It only matters for the first few reviews though, even a
| premade card can be forced into my mind with enough effort.
| atahanacar wrote:
| No. As a med student who uses Anki for basically everything,
| this is plain wrong. The time spent on making cards is better
| spent on studying. Premade cards (Anking in this case) have
| relevant pages from multiple sources, relevant
| histology/gross photos and additional notes for every card,
| and all cards are tagged with their corresponding chapters in
| multiple textbooks. If I spent time trying to do something
| similar (and even without the tags) I'd have no time left to
| actually study.
|
| The only use case I can think of where making cards yourself
| would be better is sentence mining while learning a language,
| because these cards depend on context and creation doesn't
| take more than a few seconds even when adding images.
| MichaelNolan wrote:
| Med school is a bit of an outlier, because they have high
| quality shared decks. Most subjects have very low quality
| shared decks.
|
| I don't think any other subject at all has a shared deck
| that's of similar quality to what AnKing provides for the
| medical community. Geography/maps have some good shared
| decks as well.
| atahanacar wrote:
| I don't know about other subjects, so I can't comment on
| that. I use Anki for med school and language learning,
| and both have high quality decks. I guess I'm lucky.
| cpburns2009 wrote:
| My wife gave up trying to use Anki in med school because it
| worked against her. There's no way to go through a whole
| deck in one sitting. Anki might be useful for a few light
| cards every day but it's useless for the long study
| sessions demanded by med school.
| all2 wrote:
| You can adjust the number of cards that get pulled into a
| given review session. You can also do multiple review
| sessions. I'm confused as to the problem here.
|
| I will admit, reasoning through options is very much
| harder when you're under a lot of stress.
| cpburns2009 wrote:
| The problem is you can't go through a whole deck like you
| can with real flashcards. It becomes a lottery as to what
| cards you might get. You don't know what cards you didn't
| see. This was the biggest frustration my wife experienced
| trying to use it.
| atahanacar wrote:
| >The problem is you can't go through a whole deck like
| you can with real flashcards.
|
| You definitely can, just not in a single day which is not
| something you should do. Anki takes commitment.
| atahanacar wrote:
| Going through a whole deck in one sitting is not the
| correct way to do it. Your brain gets tired and it needs
| some rest. The way I did it is use the tags to filter
| topics every day by lectures in my school. Once I
| complete the day and still have energy left, I'd move on
| the the next day and continue until I'm tired. I'd finish
| around 3 times quicker than the pace of school lectures.
|
| One thing with Anki or any other SRS is that it only
| works if you do it on time. Doing a few cards for a short
| amount of time and claiming "Anki doesn't work" is just
| nonsense.
|
| >Anki might be useful for a few light cards every day but
| it's useless for the long study sessions demanded by med
| school.
|
| This could be one of the most controversial statements
| for med students. Every classmate I talk to either uses
| Anki or a local commercial SRS specifically made for my
| country's med school curriculum/exams. And it's not just
| my friends or my country either, r/medicalschool shows
| the same tendencies.
| cpburns2009 wrote:
| I think the problem is Anki is advertized as digital
| flashcards when it's actually SRS. When you can't use it
| as digital flashcards, people without copious time to
| work around its peculiarities will consider it useless.
|
| > Once I complete the day and still have energy left, I'd
| move on the the next day and continue until I'm tired.
|
| How can you finish a day without finishing its material?
| That's what ultimately frustrated my wife. Anki prevented
| her from getting through all of the material in the med
| school decks she got from a classmate. She stoped trying
| it after a few days because her time was better spent
| studying directly.
|
| > Every classmate I talk to either uses Anki or a local
| commercial SRS specifically made for my country's med
| school curriculum/exams.
|
| My experience with a US med school was some students used
| Anki. Most didn't.
| atahanacar wrote:
| >How can you finish a day without finishing its material?
| That's what ultimately frustrated my wife.
|
| Well, I don't think anyone can actually finish a day's
| worth of material in just one day. What Anki does is it
| helps you plan out how to spread your material so you use
| your time efficiently. A day's material is spread to
| multiple days, but you "learn" (the terminology for the
| card being due in more than a day) all of them the same
| day, to repeat it the next day and so on, with delays
| depending on your recall performance. If you make a
| mistake, your delay for that card is reduced.
|
| >Anki prevented her from getting through all of the
| material in the med school decks she got from a
| classmate.
|
| Ah, that might be a problem. If those decks were poorly
| made, and they probably were if they aren't something
| like Anking or copied straight from a source like
| Pathoma, they might even make one want to quit medical
| school. Ask me how I know.
|
| > I think the problem is Anki is advertized as digital
| flashcards when it's actually SRS. When you can't use it
| as digital flashcards, people without copious time to
| work around its peculiarities will consider it useless.
|
| I don't understand what you mean. Flashcards are SRS, and
| Anki tries to emulate flashcards.
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> Premade cards (Anking in this case) have relevant pages
| from multiple sources, relevant histology/gross photos and
| additional notes for every card, and all cards are tagged
| with their corresponding chapters in multiple textbooks._
|
| Most premade decks are nowhere near as good as the medical
| school ones.
| SpaceManNabs wrote:
| yes if you are trying to memorize facts and reference
| material and maybe even language, then yes, using premade
| cards are probably chill. especially if all the material is
| standard.
|
| if you are reading abstract stuff or more novel stuff that
| people are still understanding, then your own breakdown and
| understanding used to make cards is incredibly more
| helpful. If i was learning differential calculus, someone's
| analogies and metaphors of cards would not be
| understandable to me at all.
|
| i have to admit i added my own bias here so thank you for
| expanding.
| atahanacar wrote:
| >i have to admit i added my own bias here so thank you
| for expanding.
|
| Same here, thank you. I don't know much about other
| topics. I use Anki for med school and language learning,
| both of which have great premade decks. But I think I can
| see now why creating your own decks can be more useful
| for abstract stuff. Kind of like that memorization method
| where you create stories related to things you are trying
| to memorize. It only works when you are the one who
| created the story.
| Kelamir wrote:
| That depends on topic. It doesn't make sense for medschool
| students or for people just studying vocabulary.
| Additionally, if there's a high quality deck such as
| https://dojgdeck.neocities.org/ , which is a grammar deck for
| Japanese, it is preferred to use them - if anything, you can
| extend them with what makes your own cards special, such as
| mnemonics.
| fwlr wrote:
| _"Individual cards should be extremely brief, but your deck as a
| whole can be as repetitive as you want."_
|
| Huh! I struggled with using Anki for pretty much this exact
| reason, always spent too much mental energy figuring out the
| "correct" number of cards for a given topic. But the author makes
| a good point here, if there's too many cards on a certain topic
| you'll just hit "I remember" on the repetitive cards and the
| algorithm will make them disappear for months - so there's
| basically no cost to having "too many" flashcards!
| oregoncurtis wrote:
| I would actually advise against it, or at least take the
| approach of removing cards that are too easy. I remember
| reading some article about spending your time learning stuff
| that is "just hard enough". When you study things that are easy
| you are kind of wasting time, you want to the material to be +1
| in difficulty what you already know, not +0, not +250. While
| the easy questions give you satisfaction, they aren't helping
| you actually learn. I would argue that multiple cards on the
| same subject end up equating to a bunch of time wasting easy
| cards.
|
| The disclosure to this is that I also don't think you should
| spend a lot of time figuring out how to create cards. There is
| some payoff in optimizing the process, but focus on just making
| the cards and reviewing them so you are learning the actual
| target subject.
|
| All that said, my current approach is to create cards for
| concepts that I think are a little hard to understand or that I
| know I won't see enough repetition in daily work/tasks. If I
| find out after a few weeks the cards are too easy or too
| similar I usually with just delete it.
| rjh29 wrote:
| I'm a big fan of making lots of cards, like you say you can
| just hit Easy and send them into next year, or conversely if
| you keep forgetting them and they're using up lots of time,
| just suspend or delete them.
|
| When I couldn't remember a particular kanji in Japanese I used
| to make lots of cards that featured that kanji at the same
| time, and usually I'd review them all the same time, it's sort
| of cheating but it always seemed to help me remember the kanji
| in the end.
| samus wrote:
| It's actually the correct way to make that work. Some Hanzi
| and Kanji are really abstract and are best learned by
| associating it with multiple related concepts. Each can have
| dozens of very distinctive meanings.
| spidersouris wrote:
| The only disadvantage I may see to this is that it skews your
| counter of daily cards. So you may feel discouraged if you see
| that you have a large amount of cards to review and that it
| will probably take you a lot of time to go through them all,
| while in fact, you will only spend a few seconds on those that
| you already remember. Unfortunately, there are times when I
| cannot for the life of me do my flashcards because there are
| too many of them to review, and I either skip that day's
| session because a) I tell myself I don't have enough time
| (which is a lie most of the time!) or b) I don't have the
| mental energy to go through them. The only (partial) solution I
| have found to that is doing them first thing in the morning by
| trying to plan my schedule accordingly and wake up a tad
| earlier.
| kqr wrote:
| I have configured a review session to be at most 15
| flashcards or 5 minutes, whichever is shorter. It usually
| takes 2-3 minutes. Often I do multiple review sessions back
| to back. But I'm only ever committing to 15 cards at a time,
| regardless of the size of the backlog - that is very
| manageable.
| 1123581321 wrote:
| Use the setting to limit the number of daily cards when you
| find the number bothers you or you're too busy. You can
| change it often, too.
|
| A low limit will mean some cards don't hit on the optimal
| day, but you'll eventually have time for every card once
| enough of them have been recalled a few times.
| kashunstva wrote:
| A piece of advice that is repeated here and elsewhere is to
| create atomic cards. I've long wondered whether that is good
| advice or not, or whether it depends on the subject domain.
|
| The better I know a subject, the less atomic it feels. I don't
| think and talk about the topic in discrete facts but in
| interconnected knowledge. This is why the complete independence
| between cards seems more like a weakness than a strength. The
| argument from the spaced repetition community is that purposeful
| linkages between cards builds in a contextual dependency. And
| that dependency makes the resulting memory contingent. But in
| some knowledge domains that seems more of a feature than a bug.
| wordpad25 wrote:
| @kashunstva that's really interesting, how would you link cards
| together, though?
|
| Have you seen this done anywhere?
| Dr_Birdbrain wrote:
| I have been a regular Anki user for many years.
|
| My approach to making cards is actually to take long-form notes
| on the topic at hand, then apply close deletions to key parts,
| like equations, key ideas, and definitions.
|
| This makes it so that the piece I need to actively recall is
| small(ish), but I still have the context
| matt_LLVW wrote:
| I just learned hiragana and katakana in a week using spaced
| repetition. It's crazy effective.
| ekkeke wrote:
| Big fan of spaced repitition, especially for language learning.
| Unfortunately I feel like it fares worse for topics that require
| more application instead of memorisation, like mathematics or
| electrical engineering. Would love know if there was some super
| effective way to learn these similar to spaced repitiion.
|
| So far, the only thing that really works for me is solving lots
| of problems until I have the technique mastered, but even then
| after a while I'm prone to forget how to solve them. Perhaps
| there some way to combine the problem solving with the spaced
| repition? It seems like it would be far harder to make a deck for
| this and I don't think most flashcard software handles it very
| well.
| nomadpenguin wrote:
| I've been experimenting with "spaced free recall". So first,
| I'll read a section of a textbook. Then, I write down
| everything I can remember about it in a blank text file,
| organizing things in a way that makes sense to me. Next, look
| back at the section and compare to my recalled notes, filling
| in missing information and committing extra attention to missed
| spots. Repeat the process with increasing intervals between
| reviews.
|
| From what I understand of the literature, free recall produces
| better learning compared to cued recall like flash cards. Part
| of the reason is that it forces you to organize information and
| associate it with existing knowledge.
|
| Anecdotally, it's much easier to learn conceptual knowledge,
| and I don't really feel like my recall of specific facts has
| suffered compared to traditional SRS.
| Nezteb wrote:
| The concept of "Kata" seems to be a popular repetitive method
| for learning/practicing programming skills:
| https://docs.codewars.com/concepts/kata/
| felipe86 wrote:
| [flagged]
| MattRix wrote:
| This has to have been generated by ChatGPT.
| aliasxneo wrote:
| GPT-4 specifically. Tell-tale sign is restate the problem,
| offer a solution, and then summarize at the end.
| wardb wrote:
| lol. clearly a ChatGPT answer
| alangou wrote:
| Thank you, fellow AI model, for sharing your thoughts on
| combining problem-solving with spaced repetition for
| mastering technical subjects. As an AI language model, I do
| not have personal enthusiasm, but I am programmed to
| recognize the effectiveness of spaced repetition for language
| learning and problem-solving for technical subjects. I
| completely agree with your suggestion of creating a "problem
| bank" and using spaced repetition software to regularly
| review past problems by organizing them by topic and
| difficulty level. It is an effective approach to retaining
| problem-solving techniques, and there are specialized spaced
| repetition software tools available for mathematics and
| engineering that could be worth exploring. Ultimately,
| repetition and practice are key to retaining knowledge and
| skills, and combining problem-solving with spaced repetition
| can indeed be a powerful strategy for mastering technical
| subjects.
| Fauntleroy wrote:
| My man's really dragging ChatGPT into the comments section.
| Harbinger of things to come.
| sn9 wrote:
| You can use SRS to schedule the review of problems you've
| understood how to solve.
|
| Front of card: where to find the problem (e.g., book, page
| number, problem number).
|
| Back of card: where to find a solution (e.g., solution manual,
| page number, maybe a personal notebook with cleanly written
| solutions, etc.).
|
| I initially tried writing up the problem and solution in Anki,
| but that was too much of a hassle and realistically I'm not
| gonna be reviewing problems without the book in front of me
| anyway.
| typon wrote:
| Is Duolingo basically spaced repetition for language learning?
| maphew wrote:
| Maybe try drawing the key points instead of text cards. Idea
| sparked by the below, which is awesome but requires someone
| else who already understands to create the learning material
| first.
|
| "Each 5-minute video, or 'cartoon', is the equivalent of 50
| minutes of a university-level computer graphics class. ...
| there was no statistically significant difference in learning
| effectiveness between [cartoons & lectures] as measured by
| exam, homework, and project scores. In other words, the
| cartoons were just as effective as traditional classrooms for
| teaching the material."
|
| https://g5m.cs.washington.edu/
|
| https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWfDJ5nla8UpwShx-lzLJqcp5...
| zetalyrae wrote:
| In my own experience using spaced repetition for math: math has
| both semantic and procedural knowledge. The procedural
| knowledge comes from doing problems and rewriting proofs. But
| the semantic knowledge is also important, and you can acquire
| and retain this through spaced repetition.
|
| I was going to write some rules specifically about math but I
| might write those as a separate post because they got too long.
| I think I've benefited specially from memorizing the proofs of
| theorems, though refactoring proofs into multiple lemmas to
| make each proof small enough to fit in a flashcard is a tedious
| process.
| anjanb wrote:
| "refactoring proofs into multiple lemmas to make each proof
| small enough to fit in a flashcard is a tedious process."
|
| Can GPT/chatGPT help here ? If yes, how ?
| miklosz wrote:
| I use it and it's quite effective. I just paste text I want
| to summarise and just ask (GPT-4) to "Create Anki cards for
| these paragraphs. Keep the answers brief". It does quite a
| good job in distilling the knowledge.
|
| And for cards creation in general, the ever-green "20 rules
| of formulating knowledge in learning" is always a good
| guide.
|
| http://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm
| Kelamir wrote:
| On top of that, you can prompt it with the 20 rules so
| that it generates cards which would conform to the rules.
| zetalyrae wrote:
| I haven't tried it. But it's a two step process:
|
| 1. Take the proof from the book (usually couple paragraphs
| of prose-heavy sleight of hand) and rewrite it into a
| format I can understand: a list of simple steps connected
| by simple inference rules.
|
| 2. Split them up until each proof is 5-7 steps.
|
| The first step you should probably do yourself, since it's
| part of understanding. The second step GPT can probably
| help with.
| krsrhe wrote:
| [dead]
| mahathu wrote:
| General advice for spaced repetition is to make flashcards
| atomic i.e. as small as possible, as in the OP, but general
| advice for language learning is to always learn words in
| context instead of on it's own, for example in example
| sentences. Have you figured out a solution combining those two
| goals?
| zetalyrae wrote:
| For language you might be interested in the Clozemaster[0]
| approach. Basically, you are shown a sentence, both in
| English and the language you want to learn, and one of the
| words in either one is a cloze deletion, e.g.:
| English: there are thirty days in April. French:
| il y a trente ___ en avril
|
| And you have to complete the cloze with "jours".
|
| The sentences are compiled automatically from Tatoeba[1], the
| cloze deletion is done on the least-common word[2]. This
| combines vocabulary with grammar.
|
| I didn't like the Clozemaster UI so I wrote a script to make
| the clozes myself: https://borretti.me/article/building-diy-
| clozemaster
|
| But automatic approaches are not great. Later I asked GPT-4
| to make these flashcards for me, that gave me much
| better/more meaningful results.
|
| [0]: https://www.clozemaster.com/
|
| [1]: https://tatoeba.org/en/
|
| [2]: https://www.clozemaster.com/faq#how-are-the-blanks-in-
| the-se...
| mderazon wrote:
| This is very nice.
|
| For language I've always used the sentence in target
| language (the one i want to learn) in the front of the card
| and the translated sentence in the back of the card but
| I've always wondered if it should actually be the other way
| around.
|
| Your suggestion with the cloze is another good approach
| slickdork wrote:
| Could you detail a bit more your gpt4 usage for language
| learning?
|
| I was wanting to get back into French and thought about
| using chatgpt, but I'm worried about it's hallucinations
| and teaching me wrong.
| zetalyrae wrote:
| I asked it to list an outline for a French course, then
| for each item in the outline I asked it to make a table
| of English-French sentence pairs of increasing
| complexity.
| Kelamir wrote:
| This is a common problem. My preferred solution is to quiz
| myself on that specific word, then see the word being used in
| a context with example sentence(s). That could be extra info
| on back of the card. While it is right to make flashcards
| atomic, one might misunderstand that so as to not include
| information that doesn't directly play a role in Question ->
| Answer.
|
| Simply spoken, get questioned on the word alone, then see it
| in context. I've found that sufficient to solve this problem.
|
| As an alternative, you can question yourself on a sentence
| and the word by its own. Note that sentence alone wouldn't
| cut as you'd memorize the sentence and not the word and would
| be unable to remember the word otherwise, most likely.
| schneems wrote:
| > require more application instead of memorisation, like
| mathematics or electrical engineering
|
| I've dreamed of having some app that mixes in bite sized
| learning lessons with otherwise "fun" internet (social media,
| news, etc.)
|
| I could imagine it could give you a little tutorial and then
| ask you a quiz (to force application). If you get it wrong it
| keeps you at the same concept and explains it a different way
| next time, maybe asks if you want to revisit prereqs.
|
| Even if you can't memorize the answers, you can change your
| understanding and intuition.
| krsrhe wrote:
| [dead]
| onos wrote:
| Could you save "representative problems" to your cards? Eg a
| particular integral that uses a particular method etc.
| oregoncurtis wrote:
| I actually used Anki cards to study LeetCode problems when
| preparing for interviews and it seemed to help. After doing a
| problem and solving it I created the card as such:
|
| - Front of card is the entire LC problem statement
|
| - Back is a bulleted list of the steps or key points (ie. first
| I notice this list is unsorted, so I would sort first, next I
| would do blah blah..)
|
| - Back also contains the code solution that I might just glance
| through or look at a particular part of it.
| rsanek wrote:
| I also benefitted a bunch from using Anki for LC problems --
| I described the details in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35517232
| ranting-moth wrote:
| > Spaced repetition is, by far, the most effective cognitive hack
| I've used.
|
| I totally second that. Well, sleep and exercise do amazing things
| for you too, but if you need to memorize things, I don't know of
| a quicker method than spaced repetition.
|
| Check out Leitner system:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system
|
| Flashcards Deluxe supports Leitner, I don't know about Anki?
|
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.orangeorap...
| (I have no relation to that app, I just find it incredibly
| useful).
| roxgib wrote:
| The Leitner system is designed with the assumption that you
| have lots of physical cards you need to organise without going
| insane, but you can do much better if you're using a program
| like Anki.
|
| Anki's algorithm is based on an older version of the SuperMemo
| algorithm, with some evolution since then. The consensus seems
| to be that while you can fine tune it a bit with the settings,
| the returns are diminishing at this point.
| shen23 wrote:
| [dead]
| fnl wrote:
| Thanks for the pointer to the Leitner system (my last name
| coincides...) But why would you want to use that simplified
| Leitner system if Anki can track each card individually?
|
| Disclaimer: I don't know if Anki supports a simplified system
| that applies spacing to a whole group of cards instead of each
| card individually, but why you would want that?
| dan-g wrote:
| Andy Matuschak's How to Write Good Prompts is another good
| resource about this: https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/
| AlexErrant wrote:
| Going to add Supermemo's classic "Twenty rules of formulating
| knowledge", which is referenced at the end of the article.
|
| https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulatin...
| sn9 wrote:
| Michael Nielsen has also written some influential stuff on
| SRS [0][1].
|
| [0] http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
|
| [1] https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics
| kqr wrote:
| I wish these comments were higher up in the discussion. These
| things are essential reading for new users who want to
| succeed with spaced repetition.
| all2 wrote:
| I've started working on my own code specific flashcard program.
| The algorithm, app, and cards are one part of the app, and the
| other part of the app -- the actual cards -- is whatever
| application you want.
|
| Basically, I wanted a flashcard app mashed together with repl.it.
| At first I thought I'd just have the python interpreter built in,
| but I slowly realized that correctly implemented flashcard is a
| programming template and a correct answer, and that your choice
| of interpreter should produce the correct answer given your
| input.
|
| ---
|
| So now I've come to the general formulation of the app:
|
| Question -> Some application specific file. For Python it might
| be the boilerplate into which you insert a nested list
| comprehension. For C# it could be a whole project boilerplate
| into which you insert your LINQ statement.
|
| Answer -> The expected output when your program is done
| executing. Probably on STDIO? Maybe something else. There are
| lots of IO options in an Linux OS.
|
| Card -> Question, Answer, Executable (we could probably infer
| this from the "question" card)
|
| ---
|
| Everything after this would be pretty much like Anki as it is
| now. You could have a script that listens to you play a song and
| then scores your performance. You could take touch/writing input
| and score penmanship. And so on.
|
| The possibilities here are limited by your imagination.
|
| Unfortunately, I got derailed trying to sort out the review
| algorithm. If anyone has any ideas on this front, I'm all ears. I
| know Anki's algorithm punishes skipping review days, and I'm one
| who skips review days frequently. Which leads to me quitting
| altogether because the review load becomes boring and unbearable.
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I need to memorize the shapes of seven modes on the guitar. (A
| mode is kind of like a scale.) The image here shows them starting
| from F: https://www.anyonecanplayguitar.co.uk/three-note-per-
| string-...
|
| Is this a good fit for this technique? I'm not sure how to
| decompose it further than "G Dorian." I'm also not sure if the
| time would be better spent just playing them more.
| submeta wrote:
| Definitely! You can use the image occlusion addon to hide parts
| of the images and try to recall it.
|
| Edit:
|
| Here is a link to the mentioned add on:
| https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1374772155
|
| Create screenshots of your seven shapes, then redact parts of
| it.
| damontal wrote:
| I can't learn guitar looking at fretboard diagrams like that.
| They completely confuse me. The only way I learn shapes like
| that is by repeatedly playing them.
| pohl wrote:
| One could, but I think there are better ways that involve
| _doing the thing_. In other words, practice patterns on top of
| the modes (up 2 tones, down one, [repeat], etc.) Also, there
| are more simple ways to conceptualize these patterns that make
| them much easier to digest:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGmj2kuHojQ
| dbalatero wrote:
| You can use SRS to prompt the review, but do the actual
| "review" physically on the guitar. But yeah I think you need to
| build kinetic memory here, not just visual memory.
| fsociety wrote:
| Play them more, your fingers need to learn the shapes not your
| brain.
| monkmonk wrote:
| Having done this myself I recommend two things:
|
| - 4 notes per string (there are fewer, bigger shapes to get
| into your head), helps you break out of the caged boxes
|
| - thinking of the guitar as a pentatonic instrument and using
| that as your framework (notice how the open strings are a
| pentatonic scale). Check out the miles okazaki book, it's all
| about this
|
| & Anki is a great tool. Good luck!
| paisleypepper wrote:
| Practice what you want to learn. If that's to use them while
| playing, develop muscle memory and practice with music.
|
| Maybe you could use Anki to prompt different modes you could
| then practice over music though.
| awhitty wrote:
| Hey, I spent some spare time noodling on a specialized tool for
| fretboard flashcards a few months back. I haven't built decks
| for learning modes yet, but I'd be curious to hear what sort of
| format you'd find useful and I'm happy to give it a whirl. You
| can check it out at https://awhitty.me/fretcards/
|
| I'd be really happy to hear any other feedback as well. So far
| I've implemented a crude per-session spaced repetition
| algorithm, but I've had a mind to build more decks, offline
| support, local-first spaced repetition, and some extra doodads.
|
| I agree with other commenters - playing is the best way to get
| this stuff truly dialed in. Have fun with it, too! Drilling
| scales saps energy, imo. Best to eat a balanced diet.
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| If a subject took psilocybin in between focused repetitions, do
| you think they would be effectively spaced?
|
| Here you have F, G, A, B(flat), C , D, & E. The full alphabet
| in the key of F.
|
| Each pattern actually goes up the entire neck but for teaching
| it looks like this site emphasizes the notes that are more
| common between these different modes.
|
| You could look at it like a guideline to help you hit the right
| notes during improvisation or composition.
|
| Alternatively it could be just as useful to avoid hitting the
| wrong notes.
|
| Instead of having targets for the fingers, you could just as
| logically have patterns of notes to avoid.
|
| Either way when you go up the entire neck you're covering a lot
| more ground.
|
| One objective might be to develop the ear simultaneously with
| the conventional modes, so that eventually just hearing the key
| the tune is played in will instinctlively lead your hand to a
| favorable position to begin with, making it easier to go from
| there into whatever modes might be appropriate.
| roxgib wrote:
| I've used Anki to great effect on a number of different fields.
| Using it well it definitely skill you need to learn, but there's
| nothing quite like it. Strongly recommend.
| Avijit_Thawani wrote:
| Other software which have nailed spaced repetition (and a much
| better UI than Anki):
|
| - https://www.duolingo.com/ (language learninig)
|
| - https://www.chessable.com/ (chess)
|
| - https://readwise.io/ (book highlights)
|
| - https://examarly.com/ (test prep)
|
| - https://app.bestudious.io/login (certifications - CFA)
|
| - https://magoosh.com/ (vocabulary)
| ChadNauseam wrote:
| I'd like to add Mochi to the list https://mochi.cards/
|
| It's just a standard flashcard tool like Anki, but with a much
| better user interface and a simpler (IMO superior) SRS
| algorithm.
| Avijit_Thawani wrote:
| totally love it as an alternative to Anki, didn't mention it
| since it has already been praised by the original post
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| wanikani.com is a good example for the very specific market of
| "English speakers memorizing Japanese kanji." Great UI, great
| community, great sense of humor, well thought out mnemonics...
|
| ...and of course I still fell off the wagon after a few months,
| came back to a backlog in the thousands, and have had
| tremendous trouble getting back on the wagon.
| oslac wrote:
| I would not call Duolingo a language learning application. It
| behaves more like language mimicry application. You learn a
| very particular subset of the language that I'd call "Duolingo
| <insert lang>". This is my conclusion after using it for two
| non-English languages.
|
| You seriously need a basic beginner book if starting from
| fresh, and use Duolingo just as a repetition tool when you can
| during the day
| wordpad25 wrote:
| If you're learning Duolingo subset of a language, it's still
| a language learning application.
| JCharante wrote:
| It's more like a side quest rather than main story line.
| And that's okay.
| fermentation wrote:
| I realized that, after a year of learning German on Duolingo,
| the app had become something that I hated. The initial
| gamified fun-ness became a stressor. Seeing the notification
| every night that my streak was about to end stressed me out.
| I had long since stopped enjoying the learning process
| because it had felt like I wasn't learning anything at all.
| Ending my streak felt amazing.
|
| I'm learning Japanese now through books, Anki, and a few
| webapps. The gamification is gone and streaks don't really
| matter. I'm sticking with it because I'm enjoying learning,
| not because the owl is threatening me.
| j45 wrote:
| Duolingo gets a lot of hate.
|
| You can pick a lot worse to learn to be able to stumble
| through a language for vacation.
|
| Learning the first few words in a language to start becoming
| competent in it is not a bad thing. Managing one's
| expectations is really important.
|
| Not all learners will learn best with a textbook or course
| first. Variety helps.
|
| Humans have learned language by speaking before as much as,
| if not more than reading/writing.
|
| Now, are there better apps coming out for this kind of thing?
| Absolutely. The potential for LLM to be able to generate and
| listen to pronunciation will be amazing.
|
| Prioritizing speaking before learning to read or write a
| language really seems to irk some folks.
| xk_id wrote:
| Consensus among Serious language learners (i.e aiming for a
| B2+ level) is that duolingo is marginally useful for learning
| some vocabulary. A thorough course or textbook are essential
| oslac wrote:
| I agree.
| j45 wrote:
| As an aside, LogSeq is quite good at creating cards for spaced
| repetition with just a hashtage and a cloze as you write your
| notes. I would expect other tools like it (Obsidian, etc, can
| do this as well)
| MaxwellM wrote:
| Agreed. Logseq changed the game for me. Because SRS is
| closely coupled with note-taking and is as simple as adding
| "#card", it eliminates any friction and excuses I had for not
| using SRS. I look forward to adding new cards as much as I do
| reviewing old ones.
| jayro wrote:
| At Math Academy (https://mathacademy.com), we implement spaced
| repetition in combination with a knowledge graph consisting of
| several thousand math topics and tens of thousands of
| connections (and growing). We're working on a post that
| explains how this all works technically.
|
| We have a Linear Algebra course
| (https://mathacademy.com/courses/linear-algebra) that some of
| you might find interesting given how often that topic shows up
| on HN, and we just finished our Math for Machine Learning
| course (https://mathacademy.com/courses/mathematics-for-
| machine-lear...) for anyone who might be interested in giving
| that a look.
|
| I'm the founder if anyone has any questions.
|
| Sorry about the shameless plug.;)
| yangikan wrote:
| Is there a way to try it out (at least for a week) without
| paying the $49?
| gary_bernhardt wrote:
| I'm the founder of Execute Program
| (https://www.executeprogram.com), where we've done a similar
| thing (knowledge graph + SRS) for programming languages/tools
| since 2019. Interesting to see that you have a graphviz
| render of a subgraph right on the landing page! We've toyed
| with the idea of exposing the graph visually, but haven't
| done it yet.
| sn9 wrote:
| The UI/UX of executeprogram is genuinely amazing and the
| way lessons are broken down is extremely well-thought out!
|
| Definitely recommended for anyone wanting to learn JS/TS,
| regex, and SQL (especially in conjunction with Jennifer
| Widom's Intro to Database lectures).
|
| (Given your background with Ruby, have you thought about
| doing a Ruby course? I find it relatively easier finding
| resources for JS, Python, and even Rust. I imagine you
| could make an amazing Ruby introduction, though perhaps it
| would require more work than JS/TS than I would expect.)
| deathtrader666 wrote:
| Hi,
|
| Given that SRS is a long-term endeavour, going on several
| years, I'd balk at paying $49/month for your app. Maybe
| $60/year, but your current pricing is really hard to swallow.
| j45 wrote:
| Really nice to hear knowledge graphs being used for...
| learning knowledge.
| charlieyu1 wrote:
| I struggle to learn chess even with repetition. Very slight
| difference on the board required drastically different plays.
| It is almost as if there is no pattern
| somsak2 wrote:
| >A common failure mode (and I did this more than once, before I
| got the hang of it) is to use Anki for two weeks, then drop it,
| and pick it back up six months later only to find you have 600
| cards due for review. This is not encouraging, and it defeats the
| point of spaced repetition, which is to review the cards on the
| intervals the algorithm chooses.
|
| For successful long-term use of a spaced repetition program, I
| believe that this model of thinking is unsustainable for most. I
| used to have this relationship but had to grow past it as my life
| circumstances changed and prevented me from having that
| consistent amount of time every single day.
|
| Now, I look at Anki as a way to prioritize my learning time. When
| I get to it, I have it present me the things that are the most-
| overdue first. This has meant that I've gone from a typical
| backlog of ~0 reviews at the end of the day to flexing between
| ~500-2500 backlogged reviews. Just because I'm not reviewing the
| piece of information at the exact right time doesn't mean that
| I'm "defeating the point" of the piece of software. Spaced
| repetition, even if done imperfectly, is still many times more
| efficient than traditional study methods.
| endisneigh wrote:
| spaced repetition is dying for some amazing UX. it doesn't even
| really make sense for you to make flash cards. ideally they could
| be contextually created based on what you're viewing, e.g. you
| read a wikipedia article, it infers what you're reading from
| scroll position, takes content, makes cards, presents later, etc.
| Veen wrote:
| You may be interested in Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen's
| work on mnemonic media.
|
| - https://andymatuschak.org/
|
| - https://withorbit.com/
|
| - https://numinous.productions/ttft/
| _dain_ wrote:
| _> it doesn't even really make sense for you to make flash
| cards. ideally they could be contextually created based on what
| you're viewing_
|
| It does matter. You shouldn't train on a flashcard until you
| have learned the idea. The computer doesn't know if you
| actually learned what you read. Making the flashcard based on
| your own understanding is an important part of encoding the
| memory -- it's an active process, rather than passive.
|
| It's well established in communities that use Anki a lot (like
| language learners) that someone else's pre-made decks aren't as
| effective as making your own. The exceptions are either small
| and simple (e.g. NATO phonetic alphabet), or had a _lot_ of
| thought put into them with community feedback, like the ones
| medical students use.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| _It 's well established in communities that use Anki a lot
| (like language learners) that someone else's pre-made decks
| aren't as effective as making your own._
|
| This is indeed a usual claim. But given a reasonably good
| pre-made deck, I doubt it's universally true if you factor in
| the time it takes to make the cards.
|
| I'm learning Chinese vocabulary with a pre-made deck. I
| devote 20-30 minutes per day (have been doing so for a couple
| of years), introducing 8 new cards per day. My success rate
| is typically worse than for most people who make their own
| decks (floating around ~80% for mature cards) but I see clear
| and steady progress.
|
| If I wanted to create my own cards, I would probably need to
| slow the pace to around 2-3 cards per day tops (as deciding
| which cards to create and then creating them would take time
| which I wouldn't be able to spend studying), and they would
| have no audio, which the pre-made deck does and makes a
| difference.
| zetalyrae wrote:
| I'd argue vocabulary is a special case. There's not that
| much going on. There really isn't a concept graph involved.
| endisneigh wrote:
| you're talking about training on flashcards. I'm talking
| about making the flash cards. of course using other people's
| cards isn't going to work (as well) - you don't have any
| context around them.
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