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I used Anki (similar to SuperMemo) to study for my PhD qualifiers and it definitely helped. I kept up the cards for a while after that, adding more and more. I'

I used Anki (similar to SuperMemo) to study for my PhD qualifiers and it definitely helped. I kept up the cards for a while after that, adding more and more. I'm convinced I would have not passed the measure theoretic probability theory class I took without spaced repetition software. The software also proved very useful when I would have a technical idea and had no reference on me as I could remember the details of many results. It seemed to accelerate my thoughts in a way too by removing the delay to look up some information. Eventually, I did not have the time or need to keep reviewing the cards, so I stopped. But I intend to pick it up again after cleaning up the cards after my PhD. I highly recommend the software. One piece of advice: I treat these flash cards as basically fast tests that trigger a review if you fail. I recommend this approach as many people seem to think flash cards can only be definitions. Some of my cards are definitions, some are short problems, some are proofs, etc. The definitions are unit tests. Problems and proofs are integration tests. Both are necessary.

ginnungagap 8y ago
I can also recommend Anki, I used it to improve my German vocabulary and it was rather helpful! I study maths and I never thought about using flashcards for it, but it's a cool idea, I might try it out!
- philbarr 8y ago
  Are there sets of cards for known problems, such as learning language X, or is making the cards part of the learning process?
  - kd5bjo 8y ago
    Both; success rates are significantly lower if you use somebody else’s cards. Seeing the card you made reminds you of making the card, which helps you remember the information you were trying to capture at the time.
  - joshvm 8y ago
    Languages, yes. There are plenty of pre-made decks for learning the basics of pretty much all the major languages. Beyond that it's a mixed bag. There are usually decks for things like verbs and common nouns. Getting comprehension practice (e.g. grammar) is harder because that only comes with ingesting lots of material from different places (otherwise you tend to 'overfit' and rote learn the flashcards). Making your own cards is more effective than using someone else's deck, simply because it's tailored to you. For anything other than a language, unless it's pop trivia, you should try to make your own cards. You typically have to work methodically through the thing you're trying to learn, which can help a lot. If you go with a pre-made deck then you're relying on what someone else thinks you ought to know.
    - corecoder 8y ago
      > There are plenty of pre-made decks for learning the basics of pretty much all the major languages. I tried a few of them and the quality varies. The Arabic one I tried was very funny, it would show you something, like أ, and then ask: does it mean "Alif" the letter o does it mean: "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood? A woodchuck would chuck how much a woodchuck would chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood". Pretty useless.
    - yorwba 8y ago
      > Getting comprehension practice (e.g. grammar) is harder because that only comes with ingesting lots of material from different places (otherwise you tend to 'overfit' and rote learn the flashcards). That could be solved by not treating flashcards as units of knowledge you need to memorize, but as tests that you can only pass if you know a certain set of things. Then you would simply add new things to learn (e.g. vocabulary, grammar rules) and the system selects appropriate flashcards from a large set of examples to test your knowledge. I've been working on something like that using example sentences from Tatoeba, but I didn't get very far yet, partially because defining the set of learnable grammar rules for a language I do not speak yet is a bit difficult.
  - ginnungagap 8y ago
    For me writing things down by myself is a huge part of the learning process (I take notes by hand in class even though I'm fluent enough with LaTeX to take them on my laptop directly) so I've never tried decks of flashcards made by other people, but you can find plenty of them for languages, divided by level or topic. Personally I used Langenscheidt's Basic German Vocabulary¹, which contains the most common 4000 German words, further divided into the top 2000 and the 2001st-4000th and by topic, with example sentences for all of them. I made a card for each of the top 2000 words and included the example sentences in the cards as well. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Basic-German-Vocabulary-Langenscheidt-Reference/dp/3468494009 https://www.amazon.com/Basic-German-Vocabulary-Langenscheidt... (I found a used copy sold online for about 10€, it can be a bit of a pain to get one)
  - Kagerjay 8y ago
    Yes, there are. Learning a language via anki is best by first knowing what all the common phrases and words used in 90% of the language's everyday use is. This is usually a google search away. Premade decks are really good for starting off, but ultimately making cards pays off more in the long run for associating memories to individual cards. This comes at a cost of a longer setup time and ongoing process, but with this you can guarantee all your cards are of high quality caliber. I have my own CSS Stylesheets on my cards too its helpful by visually associating different colors for answers. I use a variety of different formatting techniques too for faster visual grokking/grepping of cards
akshayaurora 8y ago
Seems like the main USP for SuperMemo is finding the optimum time for review. Does Anki also do this?
- icebraining 8y ago
  Yes, in fact it uses one of SuperMemo's algorithms: https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#what-algorithm https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#what-algorithm
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
robinwassen 8y ago
Another tip is to add mnemonics if possible. I wanted to learn Hiragana for fun, tried with flash cards and struggled for hours without progress (maybe got 25% right in the end). Then I tried with the app Dr Moku that has mnemonics, took like 90 minutes until I started to get a perfect score. Still takes spaced repetition to keep it in long term memory though.
DavidSJ 8y ago
Out of curiosity, what sort of cards do you use for math? For language learning it's obvious -- words, phrases, etc. -- but for math, is it like prompts for proofs of theorems, or what?
- edanm 8y ago
  Not the parent, but: I use Anki constantly to study Math (or really any technical stuff, but Math is what I mostly study). I would never study without it again - I'm still unhappy that I did an entire 1st degree in CS before I knew about Anki, and barely remember most of it. The more I use Anki to study Math, the more cards I tend to make. I usually make a few different kinds of cards (usually as I'm studying a textbook): 1. Definitions - usually something like "What is Normal operator? [Define]", with the back being something like "A Normal operator is an operator that commutes with its adjoint". I might add a bit more detail and flair (depending on the context). Sometimes it's a more complex definition, e.g. "What is a group [Explanation, 3 axioms]", with the back being an overview plus the group axioms. 2. Basic theorems/properties - no proofs, just something like "What kind of matrices always have property X", "Orthogonal matrices". These are often hard to phrase right, since it might be far too ambiguous to remember 2 years from now. I try to use these semi-sparingly. An easier example: "What is the project of vector U on vector V", answer: "<u,v>/<v,v>v". (Again, I'm omitting details here like saying "in an inner product space", etc.) 3. Proofs - I tend to use these a lot these days. I'll often either just make a card for a proof "Prove that a compact set in a metric space is closed". I'll also often err on the side of adding a proof, instead of using a "thereom result" card like in my point 2 above. E.g. instead of asking what is the project of u on v, I actually have a card saying "what is the projection of u on v? Answer and prove". That way I can always reprove it in my head. I usually do this when the proof or explanation is short, if not, I might just split it into two cards (one asking the answer, one asking for the proof). 4. Calculations - I have cards for base calculations if the subject warrants it. E.g. "what is the result of this matrix multiplication". Or even simpler things - I realized while studying math that I forgot a lot of even trivial stuff from high school, e.g. how to factor quadratics using "complete the square" - so I have cards with a few examples of this that I need to solve. 5. I also have some basic facts that I want to memorize, e.g. "derivative of ln(x)" or stuff like that. Note that while I use Anki extensively for Math, I actually use it for lots of other stuff too.
lihaciudaniel 8y ago
Not to mention the Google Effect, that's why I guess is useful to study from books I think.
xamuel 8y ago
I credit Anki with allowing me to successfully leap from ivory-tower academic to professional software engineer. I recognized right away that most academics would scoff at lowly "plebian" tasks like "actually learning the details of a programming language". So I forced myself to push through that prideful bottleneck and essentially memorized several programming manuals cover-to-cover using Anki.
- marmaduke 8y ago
  I've found I'm effective in Python simply because after 10 years I've learned by heart the most common APIs but would love to pick up one or more languages and it seems like Anki would be good approach, but I'd like to hear how you split up a language on to flash cards? do you make flashcards for every element of the API (module, type, class, method, function, etc)? Compiler flags, command line args etc?
  - xamuel 8y ago
    Back then, I pretty much made cards for everything possible. One trick is I found it's best to design the cards so you can say the answer fast. You don't want to waste time verbalizing long asnwers. So my cards end up looking like this: (Front of card) Evaluate: {'foo': 'bar'}.get('baz', 0) (Back of card) 0 Or like this: (Front of card) How to get [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] in lodash? _.___(1, 6) (Back of card) _.range(1, 6) That latter is an example of what's called a "cloze", where you show the full answer on the front of the card, except with one part blocked out. You can block out different parts of the answer to create multiple cards for the same question e.g. (Front of card) How to get [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] in lodash? _.range(___) (Back of card) _.range(1, 6)
    - marmaduke 8y ago
      I see what you mean, that's very pragmatic, in the sense that accelerating those sorts of question-response makes coding faster.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
wjn0 8y ago
I'm taking a measure theoretic probability course this fall, and while I've had great success with using Anki for my biology (i.e. memorization-heavy) courses, I've struggled with using Anki effectively for math. Would you mind sharing your deck as an example? I like the unit test analogy - agree 100%.
- btrettel 8y ago
  I'd be happy to share the deck. Send me an email at the address in my profile here. For what it's worth, if I were to go back in time and take the class again I would add many more cards (perhaps up to 10 times more) and also improve the existing cards. My background in measure theory was far too weak for the class. I passed, but I don't feel that I knew the material very well.
eikama 8y ago
Grad math student here. I'm always amazed when I hear other people use such stuff - I tried it out a long time ago, but hadn't success (if I have to learn hundreds of pages of math, there is no other way than creating my own lecture notes, basically). So I'm curios, if you cram a piece of knowledge that is so interconnected as math is in flashcards and you rote learn all the definitions, theorems, proofs and examples - are you then capable of seeing the connections between them? What happens at the exam, if the professors asks you to prove a new lemma, where you have to combine previous knowledge, does that work? Also, some proofs are pages long. Do you put them in one huge flashcard? Since I've never use Anki succesfully for math, as I said, I'm keen to hear from someone who has.
- neltnerb 8y ago
  So going far afield, I teach karate and use this all the time though I was unaware that there were typical time constants across the population. I may start using that to teach better. In karate we teach some forms we call kata. When I teach these, I like to cover the details slowly at the beginning, break for other stuff, and then come back to it at the end to test their memory because it's long enough that short-term memory will start to degrade and they'll have to actually work at remembering it (and thus identify the parts they didn't really quite get). It's very obvious to watch in realtime. It's a waste of time to just work on teaching the kata for 2 hours straight because they get exhausted and lose focus. It's just as effective to teach it for a half hour at the beginning as long as I have a 10 minute review at the end to solidify what they learned. I usually think of it as three separate practices -- warming up the form, practicing the form, and executing the form. Warming up means going at half speed with the intent being to refresh the memory. Practicing means going at 70% of full speed to help get it into active memory more solidly. Executing means going at 80% of full speed and focusing on checking muscle memory (video works great) under conditions of some mental stress, and also actually developing the techniques and theory further. To get back to your point, I see no reason why you couldn't make your card require all three types of reviewing something. But I am not sure if the time constants on forgetting practiced skills is different than memorized facts. In karate your deeply practiced skills are in muscle memory (or for you perhaps in your most accessible memory with the math details you don't even realize you're using which are not known to most people). Having stuff in muscle memory is the bare minimum required to actually move further. You can't learn karate from reading a bunch of articles and watching karate videos. You have to actually practice it to reinforce the memory and build new connections between different concepts. Does that sound familiar to how you think about learning math?
garmaine 8y ago
Throw out your old decks. The point of SRS, which most people miss, is that once learned and solidified in long-term memory, you _stop_.
- btrettel 8y ago
  Many of the topics I had cards for are solidified, but I'd say the majority are not. The scheduling is the software's responsibility, and I've found it does a pretty good job. So if I've truly solidified something, Anki will tend to schedule for months or even years away.

ginnungagap 8y ago

I can also recommend Anki, I used it to improve my German vocabulary and it was rather helpful! I study maths and I never thought about using flashcards for it, but it's a cool idea, I might try it out!

philbarr 8y ago
Are there sets of cards for known problems, such as learning language X, or is making the cards part of the learning process?
- kd5bjo 8y ago
  Both; success rates are significantly lower if you use somebody else’s cards. Seeing the card you made reminds you of making the card, which helps you remember the information you were trying to capture at the time.
- joshvm 8y ago
  Languages, yes. There are plenty of pre-made decks for learning the basics of pretty much all the major languages. Beyond that it's a mixed bag. There are usually decks for things like verbs and common nouns. Getting comprehension practice (e.g. grammar) is harder because that only comes with ingesting lots of material from different places (otherwise you tend to 'overfit' and rote learn the flashcards). Making your own cards is more effective than using someone else's deck, simply because it's tailored to you. For anything other than a language, unless it's pop trivia, you should try to make your own cards. You typically have to work methodically through the thing you're trying to learn, which can help a lot. If you go with a pre-made deck then you're relying on what someone else thinks you ought to know.
  - corecoder 8y ago
    > There are plenty of pre-made decks for learning the basics of pretty much all the major languages. I tried a few of them and the quality varies. The Arabic one I tried was very funny, it would show you something, like أ, and then ask: does it mean "Alif" the letter o does it mean: "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood? A woodchuck would chuck how much a woodchuck would chuck if a woodchuck would chuck wood". Pretty useless.
  - yorwba 8y ago
    > Getting comprehension practice (e.g. grammar) is harder because that only comes with ingesting lots of material from different places (otherwise you tend to 'overfit' and rote learn the flashcards). That could be solved by not treating flashcards as units of knowledge you need to memorize, but as tests that you can only pass if you know a certain set of things. Then you would simply add new things to learn (e.g. vocabulary, grammar rules) and the system selects appropriate flashcards from a large set of examples to test your knowledge. I've been working on something like that using example sentences from Tatoeba, but I didn't get very far yet, partially because defining the set of learnable grammar rules for a language I do not speak yet is a bit difficult.
- ginnungagap 8y ago
  For me writing things down by myself is a huge part of the learning process (I take notes by hand in class even though I'm fluent enough with LaTeX to take them on my laptop directly) so I've never tried decks of flashcards made by other people, but you can find plenty of them for languages, divided by level or topic. Personally I used Langenscheidt's Basic German Vocabulary¹, which contains the most common 4000 German words, further divided into the top 2000 and the 2001st-4000th and by topic, with example sentences for all of them. I made a card for each of the top 2000 words and included the example sentences in the cards as well. [1] https://www.amazon.com/Basic-German-Vocabulary-Langenscheidt-Reference/dp/3468494009 https://www.amazon.com/Basic-German-Vocabulary-Langenscheidt... (I found a used copy sold online for about 10€, it can be a bit of a pain to get one)
- Kagerjay 8y ago
  Yes, there are. Learning a language via anki is best by first knowing what all the common phrases and words used in 90% of the language's everyday use is. This is usually a google search away. Premade decks are really good for starting off, but ultimately making cards pays off more in the long run for associating memories to individual cards. This comes at a cost of a longer setup time and ongoing process, but with this you can guarantee all your cards are of high quality caliber. I have my own CSS Stylesheets on my cards too its helpful by visually associating different colors for answers. I use a variety of different formatting techniques too for faster visual grokking/grepping of cards

akshayaurora 8y ago

Seems like the main USP for SuperMemo is finding the optimum time for review. Does Anki also do this?

icebraining 8y ago
Yes, in fact it uses one of SuperMemo's algorithms: https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#what-algorithm https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html#what-algorithm
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

robinwassen 8y ago

Another tip is to add mnemonics if possible. I wanted to learn Hiragana for fun, tried with flash cards and struggled for hours without progress (maybe got 25% right in the end). Then I tried with the app Dr Moku that has mnemonics, took like 90 minutes until I started to get a perfect score. Still takes spaced repetition to keep it in long term memory though.

DavidSJ 8y ago

Out of curiosity, what sort of cards do you use for math? For language learning it's obvious -- words, phrases, etc. -- but for math, is it like prompts for proofs of theorems, or what?

edanm 8y ago
Not the parent, but: I use Anki constantly to study Math (or really any technical stuff, but Math is what I mostly study). I would never study without it again - I'm still unhappy that I did an entire 1st degree in CS before I knew about Anki, and barely remember most of it. The more I use Anki to study Math, the more cards I tend to make. I usually make a few different kinds of cards (usually as I'm studying a textbook): 1. Definitions - usually something like "What is Normal operator? [Define]", with the back being something like "A Normal operator is an operator that commutes with its adjoint". I might add a bit more detail and flair (depending on the context). Sometimes it's a more complex definition, e.g. "What is a group [Explanation, 3 axioms]", with the back being an overview plus the group axioms. 2. Basic theorems/properties - no proofs, just something like "What kind of matrices always have property X", "Orthogonal matrices". These are often hard to phrase right, since it might be far too ambiguous to remember 2 years from now. I try to use these semi-sparingly. An easier example: "What is the project of vector U on vector V", answer: "<u,v>/<v,v>v". (Again, I'm omitting details here like saying "in an inner product space", etc.) 3. Proofs - I tend to use these a lot these days. I'll often either just make a card for a proof "Prove that a compact set in a metric space is closed". I'll also often err on the side of adding a proof, instead of using a "thereom result" card like in my point 2 above. E.g. instead of asking what is the project of u on v, I actually have a card saying "what is the projection of u on v? Answer and prove". That way I can always reprove it in my head. I usually do this when the proof or explanation is short, if not, I might just split it into two cards (one asking the answer, one asking for the proof). 4. Calculations - I have cards for base calculations if the subject warrants it. E.g. "what is the result of this matrix multiplication". Or even simpler things - I realized while studying math that I forgot a lot of even trivial stuff from high school, e.g. how to factor quadratics using "complete the square" - so I have cards with a few examples of this that I need to solve. 5. I also have some basic facts that I want to memorize, e.g. "derivative of ln(x)" or stuff like that. Note that while I use Anki extensively for Math, I actually use it for lots of other stuff too.

lihaciudaniel 8y ago

Not to mention the Google Effect, that's why I guess is useful to study from books I think.

xamuel 8y ago

I credit Anki with allowing me to successfully leap from ivory-tower academic to professional software engineer. I recognized right away that most academics would scoff at lowly "plebian" tasks like "actually learning the details of a programming language". So I forced myself to push through that prideful bottleneck and essentially memorized several programming manuals cover-to-cover using Anki.

marmaduke 8y ago
I've found I'm effective in Python simply because after 10 years I've learned by heart the most common APIs but would love to pick up one or more languages and it seems like Anki would be good approach, but I'd like to hear how you split up a language on to flash cards? do you make flashcards for every element of the API (module, type, class, method, function, etc)? Compiler flags, command line args etc?
- xamuel 8y ago
  Back then, I pretty much made cards for everything possible. One trick is I found it's best to design the cards so you can say the answer fast. You don't want to waste time verbalizing long asnwers. So my cards end up looking like this: (Front of card) Evaluate: {'foo': 'bar'}.get('baz', 0) (Back of card) 0 Or like this: (Front of card) How to get [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] in lodash? _.___(1, 6) (Back of card) _.range(1, 6) That latter is an example of what's called a "cloze", where you show the full answer on the front of the card, except with one part blocked out. You can block out different parts of the answer to create multiple cards for the same question e.g. (Front of card) How to get [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] in lodash? _.range(___) (Back of card) _.range(1, 6)
  - marmaduke 8y ago
    I see what you mean, that's very pragmatic, in the sense that accelerating those sorts of question-response makes coding faster.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

wjn0 8y ago

I'm taking a measure theoretic probability course this fall, and while I've had great success with using Anki for my biology (i.e. memorization-heavy) courses, I've struggled with using Anki effectively for math. Would you mind sharing your deck as an example? I like the unit test analogy - agree 100%.

btrettel 8y ago
I'd be happy to share the deck. Send me an email at the address in my profile here. For what it's worth, if I were to go back in time and take the class again I would add many more cards (perhaps up to 10 times more) and also improve the existing cards. My background in measure theory was far too weak for the class. I passed, but I don't feel that I knew the material very well.

eikama 8y ago

Grad math student here. I'm always amazed when I hear other people use such stuff - I tried it out a long time ago, but hadn't success (if I have to learn hundreds of pages of math, there is no other way than creating my own lecture notes, basically). So I'm curios, if you cram a piece of knowledge that is so interconnected as math is in flashcards and you rote learn all the definitions, theorems, proofs and examples - are you then capable of seeing the connections between them? What happens at the exam, if the professors asks you to prove a new lemma, where you have to combine previous knowledge, does that work? Also, some proofs are pages long. Do you put them in one huge flashcard? Since I've never use Anki succesfully for math, as I said, I'm keen to hear from someone who has.

neltnerb 8y ago
So going far afield, I teach karate and use this all the time though I was unaware that there were typical time constants across the population. I may start using that to teach better. In karate we teach some forms we call kata. When I teach these, I like to cover the details slowly at the beginning, break for other stuff, and then come back to it at the end to test their memory because it's long enough that short-term memory will start to degrade and they'll have to actually work at remembering it (and thus identify the parts they didn't really quite get). It's very obvious to watch in realtime. It's a waste of time to just work on teaching the kata for 2 hours straight because they get exhausted and lose focus. It's just as effective to teach it for a half hour at the beginning as long as I have a 10 minute review at the end to solidify what they learned. I usually think of it as three separate practices -- warming up the form, practicing the form, and executing the form. Warming up means going at half speed with the intent being to refresh the memory. Practicing means going at 70% of full speed to help get it into active memory more solidly. Executing means going at 80% of full speed and focusing on checking muscle memory (video works great) under conditions of some mental stress, and also actually developing the techniques and theory further. To get back to your point, I see no reason why you couldn't make your card require all three types of reviewing something. But I am not sure if the time constants on forgetting practiced skills is different than memorized facts. In karate your deeply practiced skills are in muscle memory (or for you perhaps in your most accessible memory with the math details you don't even realize you're using which are not known to most people). Having stuff in muscle memory is the bare minimum required to actually move further. You can't learn karate from reading a bunch of articles and watching karate videos. You have to actually practice it to reinforce the memory and build new connections between different concepts. Does that sound familiar to how you think about learning math?

garmaine 8y ago

Throw out your old decks. The point of SRS, which most people miss, is that once learned and solidified in long-term memory, you _stop_.

btrettel 8y ago
Many of the topics I had cards for are solidified, but I'd say the majority are not. The scheduling is the software's responsibility, and I've found it does a pretty good job. So if I've truly solidified something, Anki will tend to schedule for months or even years away.