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I love Anki. I use it for 10 minutes a day for retaining math, vocabulary, and programming languages. I've also hacked together a system, inspired by spaced re

I love Anki. I use it for 10 minutes a day for retaining math, vocabulary, and programming languages. I've also hacked together a system, inspired by spaced repetition, for remembering better books I've read. It's turned into so much more. If you have an interest in remembering books better or using technology to get more out of reading, I'd love to chat.

drieddust 10y ago
Sure, I would love to understand how you are managing your reading. Some of text is prolific that I would like to commit it to my long term memory. I use Anki for some of the stuff for year, but it never came to point where I am using it regularly.
- hoodwink 10y ago
  Shoot me an email at daniel dot doyon at gmail
ai_ia 10y ago
Can you give me your email id? Cannot find it in your bio.
- hoodwink 10y ago
  Sure, daniel dot doyon at gmail
rwill128 10y ago
I would like to chat for sure. I ran across Anki a few months ago, and thought about all the potentially incredible interactions between spaced repetition and Natural Language Processing techniques. For a super basic idea, imagine a Chrome plugin that creates an Anki deck out of a Wikipedia article at the click of a button? (Maybe not the most useful application, but pretty neat and a great place for a simple proof of concept.) And what if you took that a step farther and made an app that does the same thing with text extracted from an image set. So you could take pictures of a textbook page or pages and have it do the same thing with those. Of course, there are many practical challenges to developing the NLP process in a way that it can identify the most salient parts of a text and capture flash-card-friendly phrases or factual statements, but I think the challenges could be overcome. And it would be an amazing feat to capture the benefits of spaced repetition without the upfront cost of manual deck creation.
- hoodwink 10y ago
  Shoot me an email at daniel dot doyon at gmail
- misiti3780 10y ago
  i think one of the problems with this one-click card software is part of the the reason anki is effective is you make the cards yourself. it is just part of the processes. ive been using anki for the past six month to learn italian, and had great success but books like forever fluent show studies that say if you dont create the cards yourself, you will not see as much progress.
- sharun 10y ago
  You could call it version 1.0 of the system Neo uses to learn everything about everything in the Matrix :) I don't think NLP is necessary though. If you take a look at the stackoverflow data dump sooner or later every possible variation of a question for a particular answer is going to get asked. Ofcourse there are always new topics that haven't been covered but this is a minuscule portion of the entire data set. I think it's a safe bet looking at Q&A happening on sites like Quora\Reddit etc in a couple years the chances that someone is going come up with a question that no one has asked before is going to be very low. Wikipedia is missing 2 important pieces. 1. Linkage between all these questions and the content on the site. Currently Google provides this link. 2. A system to communicate to the reader what skill level /pre-reqs they need to fully appreciate/understand the content they are looking at. The UI for such a system already exists in most games. Once these pieces are in place you are ready to create a very useful Anki deck on anything. What most people don't realize is the entire mass of human knowledge given the size of most wiki/q&a site dump is about 100-150 GB. Throw in all the edu video content being produced on Khan Academy, NPTEL etc and you get to a 1-2TB. This isn't a big amount of data. All it needs is a learning system built on top of it for it all to be put to good use.
- nubbins 10y ago
  I've tried stuff like this before and am certainly interested for language learning but there are drawbacks to becoming too efficient at entering flashcards. A huge amount of the benefit comes from seeking out and manually encoding the info into a flashcard. A big caveat on SRS systems that gets overlooked is they are very good at reinforcing knowledge but not great at teaching it to start with.
HiroshiSan 10y ago
I would also like to know how you remember books better. Perhaps you can write up a blog spot since there seems to be enough people interested?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
BeetleB 10y ago
I've not had good luck with these types of software. Initially it works well, but doesn't seem to scale with the number of "flash cards". It wouldn't be long before I get to the point where I'm not learning any more...
- hoodwink 10y ago
  That happened to me. I have maybe 30 books loaded equating to approximately 4000 flashcards. I just set a timer and do 10 minutes worth of reviews each morning or review on my phone when waiting around. The benefits seem to be worth it.
  - BeetleB 10y ago
    >I just set a timer and do 10 minutes worth of reviews each morning or review on my phone when waiting around. The benefits seem to be worth it. This may be part of why it didn't work for me: 1. I don't want to do 10 minutes - that's a lot. Perhaps 1-3 minutes. 2. There will be times/days I will not or cannot do it. The tool I used to use seemed to not handle that too well. I think it expected the usage to be too regular. Spaced repetition does not require regular usage.
    - daveguy 10y ago
      Check out beeminder. The threat of giving money to a company if you fail your goals has been particularly motivating to me. Plus the progress visualization is helpful too. Edit: maybe not worth it for something you want to spend so little time on. I think it's better than the calendar chain-link apps out there because the visualization/progress doesn't completely break if you miss a day.
misiti3780 10y ago
I am interested, please email me

drieddust 10y ago

Sure, I would love to understand how you are managing your reading. Some of text is prolific that I would like to commit it to my long term memory. I use Anki for some of the stuff for year, but it never came to point where I am using it regularly.

hoodwink 10y ago
Shoot me an email at daniel dot doyon at gmail

ai_ia 10y ago

Can you give me your email id? Cannot find it in your bio.

hoodwink 10y ago
Sure, daniel dot doyon at gmail

rwill128 10y ago

I would like to chat for sure. I ran across Anki a few months ago, and thought about all the potentially incredible interactions between spaced repetition and Natural Language Processing techniques. For a super basic idea, imagine a Chrome plugin that creates an Anki deck out of a Wikipedia article at the click of a button? (Maybe not the most useful application, but pretty neat and a great place for a simple proof of concept.) And what if you took that a step farther and made an app that does the same thing with text extracted from an image set. So you could take pictures of a textbook page or pages and have it do the same thing with those. Of course, there are many practical challenges to developing the NLP process in a way that it can identify the most salient parts of a text and capture flash-card-friendly phrases or factual statements, but I think the challenges could be overcome. And it would be an amazing feat to capture the benefits of spaced repetition without the upfront cost of manual deck creation.

hoodwink 10y ago
Shoot me an email at daniel dot doyon at gmail
misiti3780 10y ago
i think one of the problems with this one-click card software is part of the the reason anki is effective is you make the cards yourself. it is just part of the processes. ive been using anki for the past six month to learn italian, and had great success but books like forever fluent show studies that say if you dont create the cards yourself, you will not see as much progress.
sharun 10y ago
You could call it version 1.0 of the system Neo uses to learn everything about everything in the Matrix :) I don't think NLP is necessary though. If you take a look at the stackoverflow data dump sooner or later every possible variation of a question for a particular answer is going to get asked. Ofcourse there are always new topics that haven't been covered but this is a minuscule portion of the entire data set. I think it's a safe bet looking at Q&A happening on sites like Quora\Reddit etc in a couple years the chances that someone is going come up with a question that no one has asked before is going to be very low. Wikipedia is missing 2 important pieces. 1. Linkage between all these questions and the content on the site. Currently Google provides this link. 2. A system to communicate to the reader what skill level /pre-reqs they need to fully appreciate/understand the content they are looking at. The UI for such a system already exists in most games. Once these pieces are in place you are ready to create a very useful Anki deck on anything. What most people don't realize is the entire mass of human knowledge given the size of most wiki/q&a site dump is about 100-150 GB. Throw in all the edu video content being produced on Khan Academy, NPTEL etc and you get to a 1-2TB. This isn't a big amount of data. All it needs is a learning system built on top of it for it all to be put to good use.
nubbins 10y ago
I've tried stuff like this before and am certainly interested for language learning but there are drawbacks to becoming too efficient at entering flashcards. A huge amount of the benefit comes from seeking out and manually encoding the info into a flashcard. A big caveat on SRS systems that gets overlooked is they are very good at reinforcing knowledge but not great at teaching it to start with.

HiroshiSan 10y ago

I would also like to know how you remember books better. Perhaps you can write up a blog spot since there seems to be enough people interested?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

BeetleB 10y ago

I've not had good luck with these types of software. Initially it works well, but doesn't seem to scale with the number of "flash cards". It wouldn't be long before I get to the point where I'm not learning any more...

hoodwink 10y ago
That happened to me. I have maybe 30 books loaded equating to approximately 4000 flashcards. I just set a timer and do 10 minutes worth of reviews each morning or review on my phone when waiting around. The benefits seem to be worth it.
- BeetleB 10y ago
  >I just set a timer and do 10 minutes worth of reviews each morning or review on my phone when waiting around. The benefits seem to be worth it. This may be part of why it didn't work for me: 1. I don't want to do 10 minutes - that's a lot. Perhaps 1-3 minutes. 2. There will be times/days I will not or cannot do it. The tool I used to use seemed to not handle that too well. I think it expected the usage to be too regular. Spaced repetition does not require regular usage.
  - daveguy 10y ago
    Check out beeminder. The threat of giving money to a company if you fail your goals has been particularly motivating to me. Plus the progress visualization is helpful too. Edit: maybe not worth it for something you want to spend so little time on. I think it's better than the calendar chain-link apps out there because the visualization/progress doesn't completely break if you miss a day.

misiti3780 10y ago

I am interested, please email me