Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards(apps.ankiweb.net) |
Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards(apps.ankiweb.net) |
I know spaced repetition is super helpful and I should be making and study cards to help with language learning and other topics I'm studying, but it always feels like a slog to try to find a deck (which won't end up being what you want) or manually make a bunch of cards, the UI is a little meh, etc.
[1] https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/ [2] https://github.com/themoeway/yomitan
It is a slow process, but for getting new ideas to stick, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
I don't usually bother with preexisting decks. If you’re building your own from your own study, it almost guarantees you actually understand what you're trying to memorize.
AnkiDroid is a separate, compatible implementation of Anki, for Android only, which uses local data.
I like the method. I found the app is still rough on the edges, and now I want to code a small one dedicated to science fields for him :)
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ankimobile-flashcards/id373493...
It's expensive, but it's the only paid app by the creator of ankiweb (web, android, and desktop versions made by them are all free).
I would think that having a web app would be much easier from a single developer point of view: maintain one application that can be accessed from any device. I am biased because I'm a web developer but I'd like to be corrected.
No clue on quality.
instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media during downtime, why not memorize poems and great song lyrics?
The issue is: I'm sick and tired of apps that want your web credentials. I want an app that doesn't share anything about me. Completely local.
I have to admit, I haven't searched on Play Store for one.
Privacy Policy: https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/wiki/Privacy-Polic...
From the F-Droid description:
Opt-in synchronization uses the non-free AnkiWeb service by default, but this can be changed in the settings to use, for example, an instance of the unofficial Anki Sync Server).
Opt-in / off-by-default crash reporting will send data to a private / AnkiDroid open source team controlled crash reporting server if enabled. This data is only used to help fix crash bugs.
Opt-in / off-by-default analytics will send data to Google Analytics via an an open-source implementation of the analytics API if enabled. This data is only used to focus developer efforts on popular features.
Anki does not require your web credentials, so it's very well suited for you!
You can create an account if you want to sync your decks between computers or to your phone. It is not necessary or required.
AnkiDroid has an Open Collective [1] https://opencollective.com/ankidroid
[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ankimobile-flashcards/id373493...
yes, kids: we know Anki exists
In this case, I like following the spaced repetition algorithm development and integrations into tools like Obsidian and Logseq.
I’m trying to get back into using the tool every now and then to see if it works for the current me.
It has completely changed how I approach the topic of learning. I've used it to study Spanish, Italian, Network engineering, AI, Art history, world history, and US history. It's made me much smarter than I was before using it.
Unfortunately it can be time consuming. A big part of it is not just studying cards, but creating cards that are actually well-crafted.
It's also key to understand that it isn't for learning things that you don't know, but rather for memorizing things that you've already learned.
I'm actually thinking of building my own app for a while since the all the flashcard apps on mobile don't really work for me. Not sure I'll find the motivation to do it though, I'm just using the least bad option I've found.
Specifically, I want to always auto-play cards with TTS and there doesn't seem to be an option with the apps to do that.
TTS instructions: https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/fields.html#text-to-speec...
Installing the alpha alongside stable: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pQZT9jNF6MU
Right now I'm using this one : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=flashcards.wor...
Which seems the only one I found supporting auto-TTS in lots of languages which you can toggle in the settings.
The UI is truly awful though and the space repetition algorithm is kind of borked.
I’ve always wanted a hands free version of Dualingo because if I’m driving or walking somewhere I don’t want to use my hands for obvious reasons.
Maybe biology had good reasons to not evolve us with perfect memory. I found that over time I only remember the big picture and forget the details that make it up. And mostly that's fine! Usually, I only need the big picture. Like a math theorem, where once you understood it it's fine to forget the details of the proof since going forward you'll only need the big picture of the theorem.
Of course, sometimes life is not a simple straight line and might circle back to ask again for previous details. But then, how many details, how often does it happen? Maybe it's fine to forget and look it up again in those few cases?
Personally, I found little need for active memorization in real life. If something is worth remembering, it usually comes up multiple times, and after looking it up repeatedly, it tends to get remembered automatically.
Sure, sometimes real life poses constraints in time or exposure that hinder natural memorization (e.g. educational exams, remembering names, etc.) in which case active memorization may be useful. But these occasions seem to happen rather rarely over the whole course of a life.
For these reasons, I don't use Anki personally. Instead, I try to accept having to look things up again when it happens, if necessary repeatedly. No, it's not easy to not be disappointed at myself that I forgot again. But we can't avoid the pain - it's always there in some form. Either in the forgetting, or in the work to not forget.
In hindsight, I'd tell my younger self to chill out and remember that learning a language is a marathon, not a sprint.
SuperMemo was a game-changer for me, boosting my memory like nothing else. It's like when you're coding in a language you haven't used in ages – things are on the tip of your tongue, but you're not quite sure. Is it len(arr), arr.length, arr.length(), or... darn it, is it size? sizeof? Space repetition solves this problem for good!
For my graduate math exams, SuperMemo was my secret weapon. I'd jot down all the proofs I needed to memorize and challenge myself to write them out. It worked wonders – I aced those exams. But interestingly, it wasn't about memorizing the proofs word for word; it was more about getting the structure and the key tricks down pat. In my practice runs, I'd often take shortcuts because who has the time to write everything out in full detail?
Then came Anki for my Spanish adventures. Nowadays, I'm dabbling in Portuguese but have given Anki and spaced repetition the cold shoulder. Why, you ask? Well, I'm a firm believer that if rapid recall is your goal, spaced repetition is your best friend. But most language learners don't use it. Are they missing a trick, or do they just not fancy efficiency? What stops them from optimizing their learning? I can only guess. As for myself, I've ditched it because, let's face it, reviewing cards over and over can be a snooze-fest. The most fun part about spaced repetition was creating the decks. Now, I'm learning Portuguese purely for the joy of it and don't mind how long it takes. I immerse myself in interesting content in Portuguese, occasionally revisiting something I've learned with a quick Google search. I'm perfectly fine with not reaching fluency quickly. After all, there's more to life than optimizing every bit of it!
Since then, I've branched into many other topics. The latest one that I've started building out is all of the Paris métro lines and stops. The most useful thing ever? No, but I feel happy knowing that I have a better understanding of the system I'm using ever day.
- A new language: Comprehensive Input. Basically immersive studying with tons of reading, watching, and interaction. Given youtube and streaming services and low-cost online tutoring, immersive studying is so affordable now. Language is all about the right intuition in the right context, which flash card can't offer any way.
- STEM. This is an easy one. God forbid one should rely on flash card to memorize any STEM topic. STEM is all about intuition and understanding why and making connections. Solving problems, real or designed, is the most effective way.
- History and etc. Reading novels and biographies to learn a great deal of historical context, reading engaging books written by scholars to get accessible yet rigorous treatment of a specific topic. Anecdotally, I find alternative-history novels particularly engagingI've been wanting to use something like Anki as a general purpose 'knowledge base'/reminder/learning system; if I do use Anki I'll certainly add this, cheers.
https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/fields.html#text-to-speec...
- Focusing on memorizing short sentences or phrases instead of isolated words. - Regularly adding new words, at least weekly, to keep the learning process engaging and not monotonous. - Including only words that I actually come across and learn in my daily life, which significantly aids in retention—possibly because I can recall the context in which I first heard them. - Installing AnkiDroid on my phone to make the most of idle times like commuting or waiting in lines for practice.
- line 1
- line 2
- line 3
Some things need work.
The import function is very fickle. Took me a long time to find a format that worked.
By default it will update existing cards when you import a new card with the same front-side text, even when they are in different sets. I feel the default there should be just creating the new card and leave the existing untouched, or else promt for an explicit disambiguating contextualization on both cards.
After each class, I take these words and put them in Anki. However, I feel that this is not a great system, a lot of times I need the context of the conversation, the word needs to be in a sentence or sometimes I would prefer the reverse card (English and Portuguese on the back)
Any recommendations for using Anki for learning languages that is not the basic word-translation pair ? I thought about incorporating Chatgpt in the process, and dump the chat history but I am not sure what would be a good system.
But yes, word only cards are good in the beginning when you are learning only the most basic nouns and verbs but you quickly need sentences.
I’m sure there are plenty of online dictionary services which can do some sort of Portuguese sentence search for you.
You may not have noticed, but there's also a reverse card type that only requires one note but adds two cards to your deck.
There are lots of people who have a similar intuition on the ChatGPT thing but none that I've seen create cards as good as the ones you could make yourself. Using ChatGPT as a dynamic pen pal is probably the better way to incorporate it into your language learning.
It’s a great tool, but it’s definitely got some oddities, like how its editor has every formatting and templating tool under the sun but is somehow missing spell check, how some features can only be had through fragile extensions, or how for some reason it’s one of the few programs one shouldn’t install from their distro’s package manager.
One of these days I’d like to take a crack at building my own cross-platform subject-agnostic SRS card app. There’s a number of things I’d do differently.
You know what I would like to see?
First, I'd love Anki / Anki Flashcards to work as a smartphone Android app.
Second, I'd love to see some way to for users to globally share their flash card decks with other users.
Third, I'd love to see a site where someone could search for the decks created by other users.
Forth, it should be permissible for users to charge very smallish amounts of money for their flash decks, and/or share them for free. Their choice!
Anyway, looks really cool and I wish Anki a lot of luck!
bbno4 already pointed you to the shared decks.
Some people do sell decks. The main issue with that business model is it's entirely trust-based. The decks have no form of DRM or anything, they're just sets of cards and media that get imported so can be freely passed around once purchased. But some people do sell them.
(1) there are multiple apps on all phones (2) this is already a thing https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks (3) this is the same as (2), are you an AI? (4) it is permissible.
It’s really helped me gain a deeper understanding of the language and feel more confident in conversations.
Anyone else who wants to learn just enough networking to never be 100% stumped by it again, I recommend both tools.
E.g. "10.1.0.0 - private or public?" "Private - everything in 10.0.0.0/8 is considered private". "192.169.0.0?" "Public".
On Android systems, if you use the free Japanese dictionary Japanese Kanji Study (by Chase Colburn) it can generate Anki flash cards directly from the app, so everytime you look up a word you can also generate the card for Ankidroid/Anki.
Is there similar functionality in any Chinese dictionary app for Android?
I believe the wiki[0] lists most of the apps which use our API
https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/wiki/Third-Party-A...
For example, is it possible to create Anki decks and make them available on github so that if there are any mistakes, others might raise a merge request and once merged, everyone else can "pull" the latest deck?
Used it when learning/practicing music theory - generated flash cards with notes and chords (python script that generates LilyPond, iirc), been a huge help, much better than 'specialized' apps that basically do the same.
[0] And even then I'd risk saying that you can probably get better results creating a personalized ChatGPT-4 tutoring/examination session on any topic except arithmetic/anything involving computation.
Huh? How about the tens of thousands of words you need to be able to recall and recognise in both directions in text and speech? You can't reason past irregular verbs and inconsistent rules about gender.
If you're learning a language like Chinese, you need to memorise the characters. If you're learning a romance language, you need to memorise the conjugation and genders.
Immersion doesn't replace dedicated study. The words that appear the least - which you're most likely to miss - are the ones with the highest entropy.
Essentially, I’m advocating learning like natives. There is an interesting contrast too: Chinese schools used to teach Chinese kids English with an emphasis on mechanical repetition: grammars, memorizing words with Anki-like mechanisms, and etc. The result? Generations of students knew no more than 4000 words after 10 years of learning English, let alone writing or speaking fluently. In the past 20 years or so, though, their elite schools changed course, trying to teach their kids English like teaching them Chinese. The result has been astonishing. For the first time, a generation of Chinese students in even elementary school can use English fluently.
I’m also speaking from my own experience: I’m fluent in English, Chinese. Can read novels like Project Hail Mary in Spanish, and N3 in Japanese. I can attest that remembering words has never been a problem with intensive reading. The repetition in reading is just so contextual, natural, and more frequent than using Anki card. Listening and speaking can be a problem precisely because I don’t do them often enough.
I'm limited in time now, and HN isn't the best place for user support. If you post a reddit thread/on our Discord, I'll likely be able to help further.
Links to Discord/Reddit are inside AnkiDroid: Help - Community
Looks like a bug with AnkiDroid and different Android versions (if the app was installed on a prior version of Android and Android was upgraded). Some workarounds in that thread.
Examples of things he's memorized, for fun:
* every country, recognized by unlabeled shape on the map
* spelling
* many body parts, names of bones and organs, from illustration
* chemical elements, by symbol (Na, Fe, Zn, etc)
* unix filesystem commands
* numeracy references (km from here to Japan, earth to sun, meters from home to school)
* recognizing/naming photos of places we've been since he was born
* recognizing musical instruments or musical pieces by listening
* notes on a piano
* religious facts (when Judaism began & who started it, when Muslims pray & towards what, where Jesus was born & died, etc)
* names of characters in books he's read
* wise aphorisms
He enjoys it, and dances around while answering, proud of himself. Sometimes when learning something new on YouTube, on his own, he'll say, "Dad can we add this to Anki? I want to remember this."
Edit: oh good I’m not crazy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38428309
:)
https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_does_not_work_for_kids
Spaced repetition flaschard software is all about scheduling the flashcards around predictions of your forgetting curve, and Anki and Supermemo are designed for the forgetting curves of adults.
I've seen a lot of people going like... why remember stuff when you can easily google it? But it doesn't work that way. The more facts reside in your brain, the more avenues it has to connect them together and generate insights (after all, that thing is the OG "neural network").
I highly admire your parenting in this aspect, and I hope to do the same when I have kids of my own.
Edit: I noticed after publishing my comment that you're Derek Sivers! I've been a long time reader of your blog :)
I think the workaround that I came up with myself was to work through a large amount of derivations (maths, physics and chemistry) and try to note the common stuff and prepared shorter and shorter versions of the notes from which I could rapidly reconstruct everything else.
In hindsight, I was training an autoencoder.
I’m a parent too, and have prioritized activities that teach my child critical thinking (so they can self-solve problems).
I’m curious if I should be layering in some memorization activities like this, which is why I ask.
(Please don’t take my question as judging, I’m genuinely curious how it’s helped because I might replicate. And I’ve got huge respect for all your writing over the years)
In mathematics that might be related theorems/lemmas. In programming it might be existing functionality of libraries. Problem solving is often chaining a few things together, which you already know.
Children should understand how to derive the quadractic formula but memorizing makes solving equations a lot faster.
https://tabularasaeducation.wordpress.com/2015/06/27/knowled...
So anki help to write into memory, expose to new things eventually, and associate two ideas. But the more there is association to ideas, to different contexts, the better.
I think kids benefit from Anki, it's not as different as a puzzle game, but side activities are as important as anki.
I think teaching kid all countries of the world might not be necessary, it might vanish if not used. But it's definitly not harmfull.
My other question: For me a lot of this is trivia (No judgement! That's fine!) Has he found it useful for education (i.e. school), and for anything that he applies on a semi-frequent basis (I suppose UNIX commands could be a good example).?
I personally have used SRS since late 2018, and it's been quite useful - as if releasing a latent superpower. But I haven't applied it for regular schooling.
Thanks!
Spelling is the biggest category. I record myself saying a word that I've seen him spell wrong. The answer is the written word.
Many of his old life-memories are saved. A picture of a playground he loved, where we used to live. A frame from a movie he liked. Asking for the name of the hero in a book he loved. Anki makes him recognize these things, which keep his memories of them alive. Often ilicits an "Oh yeah!" nostalgia.
Recognizing countries on the map is not trivial. On the playground, he met a kid from Syria. He asked the boy if he lived closer to Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, or Lebanon. My jaw dropped, but the boy was touched and yelled, "Mom! He knows where it is!" and they became friends (for the day). Other times he'll decide out of the blue that he wants to know more about Azerbaijan or some other country that he only knows by shape.
The rest, he's just really proud to know. A kid at school says the moon is a million miles away. He was proud to know the more accurate distance. He wants to know the actual distance to the beach from our house, instead of just "takes forever".
A bit off topic, but this is a very tricky question to answer. The traditional answer is Moses, ca. 1200 BC. The real answer would take many PhD theses to arrive at. It's really a process that took place between the 10th and 5th centuries BC (and arguably continued even much later than that).
* computer
* culture
* English
* math
* music
* nature
* where
I don't think we've ever pulled anything out of the deck. There are some cards that it says, when we mark [easy], that it will ask him again in 6 years. We joke about how at the age of 17 it will be asking him how to spell "sing", or whatever.
I'm also a long time anki user for the purpose of learning a foreign language. It is one of the core tools that got me to the level that I am today. I like it so much that I am also using it with my son. I'm using it for spellings mostly. But (and here comes the question) I'm also contemplating making him another deck for the foreign language that I'm studying, however, I'm wondering whether to have separate decks or just one big deck of cards. What do you do with your son? Different decks for different topics or just lump them all together in the same singular deck?
Any advice would be most welcome.
Father of the century, just for that alone.
I taught my daughter to read and write before she started school. Being part of your children’s education is awesome.
> every country, recognized by unlabeled shape on the map
That's a stupid thing to memorize, not to mention constantly churning due to political instability.
You really need to gatekeep what you stuff into your noggin.
Most educated people could recognize certain countries by shape, like Italy, Africa, USA. But every country? Come on ...
And your response at someone else's joy is to swat it down and call it tedious and stupid?
Pointless self imposed limitations don't help.
I doubt anything requires Anki; rather it's more efficient than the alternatives.
Going through a course / textbook -> taking notes on paper -> adding key concepts as Anki flashcards -> reviewing them daily: extremely effective
Preexisting decks can work - I used one to successfully study for my Amateur Radio License - but that assumes a specific pool of questions you're memorizing, which isn’t how learning a subject typically works.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_taxonomy
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_observed_learni...
I still benefit from a year of training, but it seems the long-tail of spaced repetition doesn't work for me at all. But so long as I get to the point where I can read or watch TV, the considerable effort I've invested in making cards (not to mention reviewing them) was worthwhile.
It's also fun to have an extended/time-intensive personal task where it can be worth it to build up a highly personalised system that doesn't need to work for anyone else. It allows for a selfishness that's the polar opposite of accessibility design, but can end up resulting in quite novel/pleasing design decisions. (There've been some other posts about making software just for yourself on hacker news before).
They have a lot of shared decks hosted online, but I guess for hosting costs or copyright reasons delete any decks that aren't regularly downloaded, which results in many niche decks getting deleted. I've uploaded several German-language decks that get deleted because of course they don't get the same traffic as English ones. Bit of a pity - I wonder what the ecosystem would look like if things were otherwise.
During my Erasmus in Germany, I've tried almost all of the top language learning apps (Duolingo, Babel, Seedlang, Anki...) and none of them have really worked me.
What I wanted was:
* Learning in context --> A lot of German words do not have direct English/Czech translation, so learning the 1:1 word translation did not work well
* Having audio for each card
* Intensive pace --> Going through a lot of cards in one session. Duolingo is the worst in this as you spend a lot of time doing super easy childish exercises. If I want to learn let's say 30 min a day, I want to pack as much content as I can into it.
* Skipping ahead --> My level is around B1/B2, I don't want to do placement tests and then re-learning the words I already know
* Learning from my content --> I like to consume German podcast/youtube videos/websites and in some apps, it was quite difficult or impossible to add words I've just encountered "in the wild".
Anki has worked the best, but generating cards with sentences and audio was quite cumbersome and (a seemingly minor detail) I was loosing flow while thinking whether I knew the card "well", "good", "easy" or whatever the options are. What I like better is a simple knew/didnt know, while still using spaced-repetition.
So for the past year, I'm on-off working on a language learning app, currently only supports German, which helps you extract words from content (youtube, web, text), handles different word forms, and then generates cards with infinitely many sentence examples through GPT4, with a nice audio (latest GCP model).
The project website with Android and iOS links: https://vokabeln.io/ (web design is old, app looks very different now)
Today, I have one deck, which has a flashcard for each set of tricky bars from all the pieces I've worked on. Now when I sit down to practice the piano, I just load up that deck, and those bars are what I practice, and I grade myself on each flashcard to indicate how quickly I need to re-practise those particular tricky bars.
I've done this 5+ year now, and I'm impressed at how good the default algorithm seems to be at effectively ordering my piano practice sessions.
When I am using the deck, on each card, I immediately hit the "space" key to show the back (because I am not using the deck to "memorize"). I practice the few bars on the screenshot, and then when I am bored (usually after a minute or two), I grade myself, by hitting the most relevant button (Again, Hard, Good, Easy), which gives the algorithm the info it needs to know when it should show me those bars to me again.
The deck works great on a PC, iPad or phone. Piano Practice in your pocket at all times!
There’s something there. Physical skills learned with spaced repetition.
Everything goes in my morning flash cards. Knots, geography, language, tar commandline flags, papers, statistics homework. Fill them with things you like, is my advice - it’s fun to say hello to hobbies on the verge of your memory in the morning.
Bird calls! I’m learning sounds of bird calls since I can’t see very well so I can’t learn by sight. I listed eBird’s set of common birds near me and downloaded their calls as mp3s from the Macaulay Library and batch-imported them into my flash cards (for my personal use). It’s always rewarding to hear a bird outside and go “hey I think I know what that is!” Pairs well with Merlin Sound ID.
Another great use is as a mnemonic Rolodex: I frequently forget to reach out and catch up with friends in my life, so I have a deck with just names of people to say hi to. Every time somebody comes up, I say hello, and then answer the card for whichever interval feels appropriate. This way, the SRS itself will make sure that I never forget someone for too long.
After using it for a while though, I began to value how the quick recall encouraged by the system actually seemed to /enhance/ my deeper understanding of concepts, rather than replace it (I wrote a short post about this a couple years ago [0]).
[0] https://samrawal.substack.com/p/on-the-relationship-between-...
1) Import/export is limited when I want to create a batch of flashcards from the list (from ChatGPT for example)
2) It's hard to stick to it and do it everyday. I wish it showed some progress in motivating way. This is why we use TODO lists after all. We human beings love to see the progress. I wish it also included some sticky effect of Pop It Game or Bubble Wrap.
So I just created an Airtable table with few fields: Word, Translation, Days, Repeat (function field "DATEADD(Edited, Days, 'days')"), - used for filtering, Attachment, Edited_at (automatic field).
"Days" is "Single select": 1, 4, 10, 25, 55, 90, 200 days. I set this field with number of days I want to repeat flashcard in.
Sounds cumbersome but it's not. I see the progress - less rows in the table after every click. It's far from ideal anyway and it's not an actual SSR of course but it works for me. And because of some reason it's easier to stick to.
Anyway, Anki is great for most of the cases.
There is a very popular plugin called Heatmap which essentially shows you a github-style graph in anki. Instead of commit frequency it counts reviews.
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ankimobile-flashcards/id373493... <- the legitimate one
All other platforms are free, including AnkiWeb, which can be used on iDevices
A lot of people complain that it uses an inferior SRS algorithm. Other algorithms can be patched in; but I’ve never bothered because it seems like a hyper-optimization without known real-world outcomes. (i.e. Will I speak better {L2} if I use alternate SRS algorithm?)
I'm not sure I believe we understand our own learning/memory anything like enough for this not to be total pseudoscience? Reminds me of A Beautiful Mind.
I used another script to download the images and build the anki deck.
My decks have just the photo on the front, then scientific name + common name + notes on back.
I’ve made many notes in my decks, mostly about the etymology of the scientific names to help remember them.
I’ve also added extra photos to the front to show other parts of the plant needed to distinguish from look-alikes, with notes on these features.
My reference is usually The Flora of Virginia and/or Sam Thayer’s recent field guide (which is a major new contribution through all his field observations).
I have not shared because the photos are mostly ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, but I’ve been considering redoing the photos using CC0/CC-BY (and asking some authors for permission but this is hard as iNat is pseudonymous).
Though I have not used Anki, I used a similar SRS for learning Chinese - the flashcards built in Pleco, but no matter how often I try to use it, I never last longer than 5-10 days, I just get bored by it. Also, no matter how I try to adjust the algo, I have the feeling that I am constantly over- or underwhelmed, no flow for me.
In the meanwhile I love learning, no matter if flashy (e.g. Duolingo) or traditional (from books) or something in between (a class), but I just never got the hang of SRS, though so many people recommend it.
Much prettier than Anki, has a simpler algorithm that doesn't require rating difficulty, and has lots of the same features. I'm a subscriber just because of the cloud sync - wish I could self-host but I'm happy to support the developer.
Nowadays, the Anki version in Ubuntu is from 2019! The snaps are also hopelessly outdated.
Not as nice as having an updated version in apt, but it’s a trivial amount of work for something I personally get so much value out of.
I had been using GNOME on my little “study pod” ThinkPad X1 Nano (which has a screen that requires 1.5x UI scale) but Anki was a real pain under that and so started using KDE instead. Anki runs well there but KDE isn’t quite my cup of tea. Wish it were more DE-agnostic.
Some addons seem to be not installable due to obsolete deps (like PyQt5), but a lot of stuff work without any problems.
I personally use org-drill on Emacs.
As much as I don’t like Reddit, I still find it better than Discord. Purely because it’s discoverable by the search engine
I've found that writing about the things that interest me, giving presentations, and talking about stuff with people with similar interests, is much more effective.
Is there anything similar people use for sort of general 'knowledge base' type things - like people use one big text file, or Obsidian, or Logseq, or Notion, or whatever - but with some kind of Anki-like reminder/retrieval rather than just deliberate searching to look something up?
Or do people successfully use Anki itself in that way? (Maybe I'm wrong to associate it with focussed studying/cramming on a specific topic for an exam say?)
The closest I could think of was a Zettlekasten system, where though you wouldn't have the automated reminder prompts, you would (if you'd done a good job linking things) have a rabbit hole to fall down once you opened something.
shameless self-plug:
On macos and iOS we found Anki a bit out of place so we build a competitor explicitly for language learning (https://wokabulary.com/).
Initially, and for many years, we also tried to not have a subscription but steady development needs to paid somehow, same goes for customer support. If Apple would allow for paid upgrades…
For example, if you have time or are bored today and do some extra cards, your workload month later goes up. Except that month later you might be tired and not have time. And if you skip a day or dont do everything, the next day your workload goes up by twice ... and a week later too and a month later too for the same batch of cards.
I've used Anki and found it amazing, but it got to the point where making flashcards was too time consuming and couldn't keep up with them.
Mid-last year I found my brother having the same problem and realised after playing with GPT how effective it was at generating flashcards. Not perfect, but good enough to save many hours of writing them.
Now with Flashka we have started re-thinking the medium a bit more and try to make a great study-tool out of it
I've been using it recently to remember recipes and cooking facts, such as the time it takes to boil X vegetable, or the ingredients for some dish.
Apart from language learning and medicine, there's a lack of pre-built decks that you can use to learn topics. I'm building Python.cards [3] to apply spaced repetition to learn Python with pre-built decks, daily reminders, etc. to make it the most convenient.
[1] https://www.thediligentdeveloper.com/spaced-repetition-reall...
[2] https://www.esquire.com/es/tecnologia/a36913467/pasapalabra-...
I think a sense of community can help provide this motivation (like a group of people all learning at the same time), but it's still tricky.
I disagree with this. Anki's power comes from spaced repetition. Spending your time creating cards instead of actually reviewing the material is very inefficient. If high quality decks exist for the topic you're learning, use them instead. I've learned this the hard way.
Fields like medicine and language learning (you will still need to create your own deck for sentence mining but that's different as it's not a time sink) have great decks. For actual "niche" topics though, creating your own decks is your only choice.
For people who are going to create their own decks: check the Anking deck to see how to create "great" cards.
For some things where you want to learn but don't want to/have time to put in full effort premade cards are better than nothing. For example, I ended up learning German to B1 level from Duolingo (+ friends/time in germany) because using Duolingo was pretty low effort, even if it wasn't the fastest most effective way of learning.
I think this is probably true for most things you may want to learn about outside of your job, school, or really strong reasoning behind it. Perfect is the enemy of good as they say
(Shameless plug: I made a tool that makes spaced repetition questions for educational YouTube videos/podcasts that you watch, usually I was forgetting everything and wasn't really that invested to spend the time making decks for everything I watch, so I landed on this! https://www.platoedu.org)
I'd go so far to say it's almost an requirement. Unless you have a high quality deck made specifically for the book/course/material you have.
Sadly most of the publicly available Anki are IMHO not of that quality.
The positive effects of SRS rely just as much on the repetition as they do on the creation of the cards. I know that not everyone agrees with this, it's certainly been true for me.
Premade decks might work for language learning, but even then I'd be wary.
I definitely spent way too long on the "making the cards" phase!
On a different note, ChatGPT has been making me feel stupid because I fail to come up with many use cases, while it seems like tons of technically unskilled people come up with all kinds of uses...
Understanding deeply and completely any topic is much easier when you understand deeply and completely the fundamental components and concepts--which starts with memorization.
Anyone interested in the theoretical underpinnings of the idea can read about it in the blog post [1] the co-authors wrote. For anyone who objects to the idea that rote-memorisation can aide learning rather than simply let you mechanically repeat facts, you should read the paragraph "How important is memory, anyway?" [2].
[0]: https://quantum.country/ [1]: https://numinous.productions/ttft/ [2]: https://numinous.productions/ttft/#how-important-is-memory
It also keeps you from having to interrupt your flow to stop and go look something up.
When I'm doing language study, for example, the backbone of my memory reinforcement strategy is a plain old pen-and-paper notebook. Anki is only used for specific, targeted reinforcement.
Most my time with Anki these days is learning Chinese characters. That's arguably an ideal use case for brute-forcing with SRS, and that is indeed a very popular way to learn them. But I prefer to start with good note-taking there, too. I keep a notebook where I write down new characters and make some notes about their composition, etymology, and the nature of any relationship they might have with other characters that have a similar appearance or show up as components in this new one. IME even the simple act of physically jotting down a handwritten note to not confuse 买 with 卖 or 找 with 我 is worth some large number of flashcard repetitions all by itself.
I also create cards for hanzi in Anki, but typically only after I've already encountered it a few times in my reading and it's starting to feel familiar. Leech cards are a huge waste of time when tackling a large subject, so I don't really like to add a card to my deck until I'm reasonably confident that I won't be hitting the "again" button on it more than once or twice, if ever.
[1] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Michael_Nielsen_re-discovers_inc...
Check out this experimental work to learn Quantum Physics using SRS: https://quantum.country/
Example:
Front: Rotator cuff tear - diagnosis? Why would this make sense?
Back: MRI is generally better for soft tissue; you wouldn't use a CT scan, which is much better for bone. Remember that X-rays / CTs generally work by shooting high-frequency electromagnetic radiation "X-rays" at tissue - if the tissue has dense elements like Ca++ in bone, the X-rays will be reflected back by the dense elements. This is why X-rays and CTs are good for detecting dense things like blood (iron in heme is dense), bone (calcium is dense) or even why we use contrast (things like barium or iodide are dense elements)
If that software existed, it would be incredible.
So you just put #flashcards inline (or whatever you tell it to look for) at the bottom if your file.
And then:
This is a question::this is the answer. This is another question::this is another answer.
I run through my cards about 30 minutes before I start work. It works very well.
Work on encoding information, understand things deeply, relate concepts, and then create your cards.
For language learning, for instance, this means that if you have 10 new words you want to learn, you create f.ex. 15 sentences so that each sentence contains 2 of those words, and each words appears in 3 sentences. Then you run them eg. by your a tutor to validate them, and add it to your Anki deck.
Now you will only review each sentence 5-8 times, and you can do it very fast.
Doesn't need to be exactly like that, but you get the idea
Well... yeah? I guess if you're a full time student or something it's fine but IMO if your review times exceed 5 minutes it's time to stop adding cards for a while.
I recently started to use Supermemo because of some comments on HN, and so far it have been going quite well. I feel less overwhelmed when I have to take a break, I think the algorithm (or maybe it is just good defaults?) is much less punishing. I am still new to it, and I have a baggage of knowledge from my past experiences using SRS, so it is unfair to compare it to Anki at the moment. But it renew my passion for memorizing, so far it has been worth the investment.
Some things I do to manage this:
You can put an upper bound on the number of cards reviewed per day. For me it's 50. After that it says I'm done for the day and I wait till the next day.
If missing only 2-3 days leads to such a huge backlog, you really need to take a break in adding new cards. My aim is to spend no more than 5-10 minutes per day reviewing cards. If it seems I always have too many cards to review, I don't add any new cards until I get only a few cards to review per day (when really busy, I don't add a new card until I have a day with 0 cards).
You can only learn so much per day. You need to limit card additions to ensure you don't exceed that amount.
The other thing I noticed is that I had two types of cards: One where the answer can be instantaneous (e.g. facts). And ones where some thinking is involved (proof sketch of a theorem, details of some algorithm, etc). The latter would kill the experience because of the time involved. So I separated the decks: Simple cards (the majority) go in one deck and this is reviewed daily. Hard cards have their own deck(s) and I'm not as committed to them - I work on them only when I know I have time and am committed to it.
I think SRS needs to be only a small part of the learning routine, the cherry on the cake. For me that is ~15 minutes / day, and backlog is manageable even if I occasionally take 2-3 days off.
Retention is high so that helps keep progress between periods of deck usage at least.
I just pulled up my stats.I have been studiyng for almost a year and have averaged less than 2 minutes of study a day (with the average review lasting less than 2 seconds). In total it's more or less 10 hours.
It has been insanely effective. I read somewhere on HN that making extremely easy cards helps. It for sure helped me to keep the habit.
This is a problem, but perhaps not the one you think. The goal here is the habit; how much you get through is way secondary. As a multi-year user of Anki, I'd recommend working on the daily habit as an addition to whatever German, etc. you're already doing.
Anki has easy ways to limit your use; set your max-card-per-day to something silly like 5. You can do 5 cards a day, yeah? That'd take less than a minute, typically.
Once you're ok with that, up it a bit. Don't make this the SOLE vector of practice, use it as an adjunct to your normal routine of learning.
A habit done suboptimally is >>>> missing doing it, but perfectly. Frequency is generally better than quality. Once you get the former, ratchet up the latter.
> I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up.
> to build up a highly personalised system that doesn't need to work for anyone else.
"Anyone else" includes "future you", because humans change over time. A highly personalized system is usually a highly inflexible system.
The problem seems not dependent on the specifics of my efforts for me - it seems inherent to Anki for language-learning. That the flash cards have lots of bells and whistles seems unrelated to my giving up because 90 minutes a day wasn't enough to keep things under control.
I haven't had any time that my circumstances have change so much that my accessorising ended up a negative. (And I'm having trouble thinking of situations where that would be the case).
But sure, in general I can think of cases where it's probably more advisable to go with a general purpose solution (stairs rather than a climbing wall for going upstairs) in case personal circumstances change, temporarily or permanently.
Recently a friend got me into Duolingo with him, I've been managing to maintain a streak on it because if I'm too busy I can atleast just do a quick "lesson" before midnight, but I don't really find it to be very effective for learning unless you're coming from literally zero starting knowledge.
I already know the basic vocabulary (especially phonetically) and sentence structure, so it's too slow. I usually just do the first handful of lessons and have figured out the kanji enough to just jump ahead to the test to unlock the next unit.
There is a third-party paid exchange here:
(I’ve had a few exchanges with the founder, and wish him luck.)
I have mixed feelings about shared decks. I’ve tried many, yet always find something about them that irritates me - aesthetics, content accuracy, etc. Or more likely that just doesn’t fit contextually with what I’m learning.
However, the low startup energy with shared decks is certainly a selling point. I can’t even begin to estimate how much time I’ve spent over the years creating 50K+ cards…
> highly personalised system that doesn't need to work for anyone else.
My experience exactly.
Shameless plug - I'm building https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive which is basically GitHub/Reddit for flashcards. Very much pre-product and a WIP, though the offline client proof of concept is done.
Der Fußballspieler schießt auf das _____.
Should be “Tor”. Nobody would say “Ziel”.
Could you just click on the two ends, 1min Vs the scaled max time? I.e. ignore the two middle buttons.
Only trouble I have tbh is figuring out what I want to read in German! But I’ve signed up and will give this a spin, and send what feedback I can.
I don't disagree with how Anki is effective at memorization, because that would be like disagreeing with the effectiveness of space repetition as a principle. I'm just wondering if it's worth putting stuff like "vim keybinds" in - John Carmack reportedly did that to check what's the fuss about Vim.
When I was still active with Anki, I was mostly picking up some random things I knew I would need fairly often and included those in my deck.
I think a bit of the problem (for me) when I tried anki before was friction from the overhead of 1.) deciding how to split time among decks and 2.) having to assign a 1-5 value for 'how well I remembered the info'. That second point is huge, I find that kind of task to be incredibly exhausting. Do you have any tips for getting over that?
Also, given that you mentioned enjoying duolingo more, there are browser extensions/repos out there to enhance the Anki experience. I have some that help me make cards based on material I’m reading for fun.
I was having the same issue as you, and I had to fix it by making it more engaging and personal. Now all of my words concern material I’m interested in, and have some context.
Any specific ones you wanna give a shout out to?
Now, I make it a point to introduce new words at least weekly, which maintains my interest and reduces boredom. The challenge of new words, balanced with the familiarity of known ones, creates an engaging experience, much like a well-designed game with a mix of easy and challenging elements. This approach keeps me motivated.
Additionally, actively using the language by conversing with native speakers greatly enhances my motivation. The positive feedback and tangible understanding of its value significantly boost my commitment to learning.
There are two very common reasons why people lose interest/motivation after trying out Anki. The first one is creating too many cards when you first start out. People get excited by SRS and then start creating cards for a lot of things, especially for stuff they don't actually care to remember. This is understandable, since you can't do SRS when you have nothing to repeat. But that gets overwhelming quickly, because it's hard to be motivated if you don't actually care about the material.
The solution for this is to only create flashcards when an opportunity arises organically. This has the additional benefit of your review sessions being extremely short in the beginning, which makes it easier to establish the habit of reviewing.
The second problem that often leads to people quickly giving up is not knowing what makes a good card. It's actually not as easy as one might think. Especially not when you want to get more out of SRS than just rote memorization of trivia. There's an excellent article from Andy Matuschak on this topic that explains it way better than I ever could https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/
If you specifically want to do language learning, then you might be tempted to download premade decks. This might work a little bit better than for everything that's not languages, but in my experience making a card is at least as important as the repetition itself. It forces you to distill the knowledge down into good cards, which is only possible if you engage with the material and also helps you find gaps in your knowledge. So I'd recommend against it.
Regarding your comment on adjusting the repetition algorithm... don't. It's highly unlikely that you'd be able to improve on the defaults if you don't have a good feel for how slow/fast you forget things. Even then, it's pretty difficult to make good adjustments. It's much more likely that the flow you're missing is just from not doing it long enough.
Hope that helps :)
It might sound counter-intuitive with the "remember things forever" side of SRS, but it is better to forget boring things than not use SRS at all.
If I'm bored by it one day, I just don't do it that day. Or week, like this one, where I was too entrancee by playing FTL.
Then I let myself get back into it. It comes and goes in waves. That's fine. The only person keeping score is yourself.
It connects with your Anki desktop app. You create notes in Obsidian in a specific format, and they get converted to Anki flashcards. This way your flashcard creation process becomes much easier if you already use Obsidian for note-taking.
https://unofficial-logseq-docs.gitbook.io/unofficial-logseq-...
Edit: found it: github.com/logseq/logseq#7519 (maybe there's another way of a basic page link that isn't a query so it's not quite as bad as I described above, but still)
Since there was no need to look it up, perhaps it's not relevant to whatever one is doing at the moment.
And also as a sibling comment says, language. In particular vocabulary - I've learnt a decent amount of Hindi grammar by self-study, in fact I think totally sufficient for casual or even professional conversation, but my vocabulary's really lacking, and it holds me back from speaking, which means even when I do have the opportunity to practice speaking with others, I can only say stupid basic things, I lack the vocabulary to say what I want most of the time. (And casual Hindi's way more forgiving than most languages, because 'Hinglish' is so common. But I don't get any better by just using Hindi connectives and ancillary words in an otherwise English sentence!)
Anki has definitely helped me. It's surprising how well it works if you do it daily.
I also add new cards when I come across a word I don't know. If I keep this up for years or decades, my vocabulary should be extraordinary.
But in general: puzzles, strategy games, building blocks, and asking my kiddo questions that force them to think.
"Africa is a nation that suffers from terrible disease ..."
I can speak phrases and maybe understand a bit of spoken German depending on the speaker
That said, I still make all my cards myself and some cards are trivial. For the trivial cards, review time can outweigh creation time. But trivial cards take seconds.
Crafting effective prompts is important to getting the value out of an SRS. That sometimes is the bull of the "work". Not the review.
Front: Computer noise: top differential diagnosis? How dos this make sense?
Back: Check the fans for dust. Plastic...static electricity...etc
The point is that it's not necessary to review individual facts anymore because the concepts require their utilization, so it's just "common sense" knowledge to physicians. Of course, the knowledge from one physician to the next can vary greatly.
People focus way too much on the backlog - don't even look at it, just set your max cards per day to something you can actually DO and let Anki schedule them out as best it can.
It is, after all, just a scheduler.
Language learning and art practice both tend to quickly get put on the backburner for weeks whenever I get busy with a project or whenever work gets busy.
Look into Andy Matuschaks work: [Dwarkesh Podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmeRQN9z504) [How to write good prompts](https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/)
Then when I review them I think, "Well, that was informative but not answerable, what does 'easy' or 'hard' mean when I'm re-reading a paragraph?" So I spend some time refining them. This is iterative. The first pass on a paragraph of content might just be to split it out into several cards with one sentence each, nothing more. Then when I see the sentence cards (some time later) I turn them into clozes or Q&A cards. Then I realize they need images to really help so I add some. After 2-5 iterations they're useful and effective cards, but the work ends up being distributed over a more reasonable period of time (usually 1-3 weeks). Each refinement step only takes a minute or two per card, if that, especially as you get more comfortable with the editor.
I wonder about why this is.
I don't know what you're imagining by "it", but my remarks are only about memorizing all countries by border shape, not the use of spaced repetition as a whole.
That's the "it" I have swatted down.
Memorizing names of countries -> continent, I could swallow. That is useful. Or even latitude and longitude (rounded off to nearest ten degrees, say). Or some general indication: is it to the north, south; landlocked or coastal.
So if someone talks about Venezuela, the kid knows it's a coastal country in South America's north.
If you can't tell me that, what's the use of recognizing the shape of Venezuela and mapping it to a name?
The OP was a positive story. There could be an interesting discussion to be had around the subject of useful things to remember. But you literally used the words "tedious" and "stupid", and this sort of comment doesn't usually result in good conversation or debate.
You'd do well to heed the downvotes and constructive feedback you're getting :)
Here are some quotes from HN guidelines in case you missed them!
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
I've done something similar in the past, scraping images + info and then used genanki I think to make the deck. Works fine for my basic cards at least.
Though I'd prefer to be able to use normal bash tools to manipulate markdown cards.
I think there are solutions to generate anki decks from markdown or anki alternatives that use markdown cards directly, but using genanki ended up being sufficient and giving me enough flexibility, considering I wouldn't be editing the deck much after.
I should emphasize that in the process of going through the deck I was able to improve quality significantly. I changed many of the photos and added helpful notes so the script was really just a means to get the initial deck. A lot of the creation process occurred as I was reviewing and editing.
Possibly, Samaritanism is closer to the religion of the ancient Israelites than contemporary Rabbinic (or even Karaite) Judaism is.
1000 cards over 5-6 years is 160-200 per year, so on average less than one a day. Did you start out slow and increased the pace as he grew, or is it more of chunking (e.g. add a few cards per day for some days, then just review for days before adding more)?
I'm sure whatever approach you did was organic and not planned the way I'm writing it, but am curious how it actually evolved.
> Recognizing countries on the map is not trivial. On the playground, he met a kid from Syria. He asked the boy if he lived closer to Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, or Lebanon.
OK, this is beyond simply recognizing the country from its shape. How did he encode what the neighboring countries are?
When learning the countries, does the card show only the outline of that country, or is it more like a map with all countries, and the one under review is highlighted? If the latter, then it makes sense.
> The rest, he's just really proud to know. A kid at school says the moon is a million miles away. He was proud to know the more accurate distance.
Psst... Everyone knows it's 300,000 km away.
<checks>
OK, fine. I memorized it wrong as a kid. Need to add it to my Anki deck ;-)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria#/media/File:Syria_(ortho...
That map of the globe is what we use as the front of the card
He sees that and knows the answer is Syria.
But because we also do that for the other countries around it, he knows Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, etc. He knows where that country is, in context of its neighbors.
We have some little mnemonics to remember things like, "I packed my bags in Pakistan. After that, Afghanistan. Then Iraaaan all the way til I hit a rock in Iraq."
I bet he's really good at it!
And this can be easily verified with data and simulations. The algorithm predicts how likely it is that you'll remember a given piece of information (e.g. in three days you'll remember this card with 80% probability), so if you can get a big dataset of reviews and run it through the algorithm you can easily check how accurate it is, e.g by calculating a brier score, or by comparing predicted vs actual recall curves.
Source: I've developed an even better algorithm than FSRS (I've directly compared them in the past, although that was quite a while ago so it might have been for one of the older versions of FSRS, so I'm not sure how the newest one compares), and now I'm working on an even better one.
It'll create a backlog of cards to review, but that's surmountable. The number can become intimidating (I think my worst was around 2k cards), but there are a few ways to clear it. You can "just" get back into the daily habit, it'll take (by the default numbers, if one deck) # cards/100 days to clear out, more or less (some cards may come up for review again in that period so the actual number might be a bit higher). You can also up the daily review limit to clear it faster (I did this when I hit 2k, 200/day was about my personal time limit to spend on it so it took just over 10 days to clear).
In a simplified system suppose that we just double easy card review times, and reset hard cards back to 1. You have a card up for review today, you last saw it N days ago. Two scenarios:
1. You don't delay. You review the card now. It's either hard and reset to 1 (see it again tomorrow) or easy and you see it again in 2N days.
2. You delay. You review it M days from now. When you finally do it's either hard and reset to 1 (see it again the next day) or easy and you see it again in 2(N + M) days.
That's it. The algorithm has you covered if you delay. It doesn't do something silly like say "This card was supposed to be reviewed after 2 days, but you waited a month. You remembered it, but we're going to show it to you again in 4 days." The algorithms will take the delay into account (maybe not one-for-one) like I illustrated above.
Bells and whistles, especially when it comes to making things perfectly tidy, tend to introduce a lot of rules for using and maintaining a system. For example, a color-coding system with too many colors to reasonably recall without daily practice from using the system: any interruption, such as a vacation or even a weekend, will disrupt in some way the ability to use and maintain the color-coding system.
Informal rules also accumulate over time, adding to the complexity of any given action. It doesn't take a major change to topple your flashcard system, but slow, accumulated changes have been enough to do so.
If you do less one day, Anki gives you those cards the next day on top of the normal workload of that day. There is no way out.
Worst, the less you retain, the more mistakes you make, the more your workload goes up. Anki algorithm never do the "lower workload because this person does not retain" decision. Instead, it will just give you more and more work in such case.
If you're finding that you reliably do not recall some card Anki will eventually mark it as a leech. Those cards get suspended automatically after some number of lapses. That will reduce your workload because suspended cards are't part of your workload.
The only bit missing is some algorithm deciding how often to introduce new cards based on your historical data.
But creating Anki cards is effectively a form of review as well. If you automate that, then you miss out on going through your own notes, engaging with the subject, and subdividing it into self-contained pieces, which is required to come up with good cards.
Why wouldn't you get this? You just don't have to do it in order to make Anki cards.
> which is required to come up with good cards
Yes, and ChatGPT does this for you.
This isn't theoretical. I've used this to get As in multiple classes in college. This works.
And now I never have to look it up again :)
>It makes knowledge gaps more visible
It's the same principle behind teaching others. It's easy to think you understand something until you are forced to communicate it beyond the surface level.
Of course, ideally one would want to create cards, but I only can devote around 30 minutes per day. Under that restriction, creating cards is not really an option.
Memorization isn't the same as learning. Using a preexisting deck is memorizing someone else's learning.
"please generate a series of short questions and answers that conform to a flashcard format, easy for studying, from these notes"
The responses were too verbose, so I asked:
"Please shorten the answers to short, easily memorizable lines"
That returned pretty good flashcards, so from there I asked it to reformat in a way Anki could consume:
"these are great, please convert these into a code block, where the question and the answer is on the same line, separated by a semicolon and not numbered"
But that put all of the flashcards on the same line, so I added:
"sorry I wasn't clear, each question should be on its own line"
That gave me what I was looking for. The next step is to paste it into Anki, fiddle with the recall and cards-per-day settings, and then get to training!
I was reading an interview with Andy Matuschak[1].
> One of the things that I think is kind of weird about this memory system stuff, or like memory champions, or something like that is “Oh, if you do these things, will you start to forget other normal human stuff?” And what's weird is, no. I've been doing this memory system stuff for years and I just know more stuff now. This is aligned with the experimental literature, which seems to suggest that, there's probably upper bounds but we're not close to them. Some of these memory champions have memorized maybe two orders of magnitude more things than I have practiced. Certainly people who are multi-lingual have really, really absurd numbers of things memorized. So there isn't a resource management argument.
The notion that stuffing your brain with trivia will be damaging is merely an unwarranted fear.
Time???
When I stop responding and the wife asks if I'm still listening, sometimes I tell her I'm swapping right at the moment.
There's of course a need for nuance here. I do write scripts to automate stuff and I do have aliases configured for certain commands, directories, etc. I don't try to remember all the things, just so that I never have to look something up again.
If I wasn't a heavy anki user already, then I certainly wouldn't set it up just to remember some commandline stuff. But that's not the situation I'm in. I use it for lots of things already and I have an established habit to review the cards every day. Adding a card to remember specific flags has incredibly low overhead for me.
A different, but similar example is using Anki for learning library/framework syntax. I made heavy use of it when I first learned Pytorch. There are so many different commands to wrangle your data into the shape you need it to be. I frequently mixed them up and got frustrated because it doesn't necessarily result in runtime errors and then it's hard to debug (because I didn't know what I was doing). So everyday I chucked a couple of the new commands I encountered into Anki and by the end of the week I was comfortable doing all kinds transformations. Would I have learned to do that without Anki? Probably. Did it give me an additional opportunity to consolidate that knowledge for very little cost? Also yes.
> If you keep failing that card, Anki will continue to alert you about the leech periodically. These warnings occur at half the initial leech threshold. For example, if you set the warning at 8 lapses, future warnings will happen every 4 lapses (at 12, 16, and so on).
Suspend means you never see the card again. So how could you keep failing it after it's been suspended for being a leech?
If it becomes leech, it will be ignored entirely by anki.
All of that is too much expertise about how to mark cards instead of allowing you to do it intuitively.
[1] youtube.com/watch?v=No3sUctcAOA
If you enjoy it and want to learn it, it's not a waste of time. Or at least, there are likely plenty of things ordinary people do that are bigger wastes of time.
There is not necessarily a tradeoff here. Sure, you will make some errors, but if you find a card to be so bad that it's useless for SRS (unlikely, unless the answer is very vague or too long to quickly validate) you will just delete it and replace it with a better one.
Optimizing your study time by taking the "boring" work, e.g. building flashcards of material you organized yourself, cuts down on time spent not doing work that's maximally effective (memorizing flashcards).
If a person had infinite time, making flashcards would be just one more thing on an unbound list of things they could do to learn the material better. But people don't have infinite time, and considering you're already "familiar" with the material since you wrote and organized it, building flashcards is something you can't really afford to spend time on.
When I went back to school to get my undergrad, I focused on optimizing my time, because procrastination was a huge problem for me the first time around. Being efficient and not spending a single second longer than I have to in order to get an "A" is important to me, and using ChatGPT to help me with that has been wildly successful so far.
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