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I've been using Anki for some time and I love it but it's not a perfect tool. What I especially like is it's flexibility when it comes to designing flashcards.

by jacekm 8y ago

I've been using Anki for some time and I love it but it's not a perfect tool. What I especially like is it's flexibility when it comes to designing flashcards. You can adjust colors, font-sizes and pretty much every visual aspect using css code. You can even embed your own font within a deck, which can come in handy when you are dealing with Japanese kanji (Printed and handwritten kanji sometimes differ and iPhone contains only "printed" versions of kanji fonts. I searched online for a "handwritten" font and embedded it into my decks). There are cons too. The flexibility comes at the price - while reviewing the flashcards is smooth and easy, creating a deck can be very frustrating - the interface is not the most user-friendly. I ended up creating decks in Excel, exporting to csv and importing in Anki. That made the whole process much easier but I still had to jump through some hoops to achieve that. Another problem (with the algorithm, not Anki itself) is that it's very easy to forget what you've just learned if you don't keep using the app. It's super easy to learn hundreds of vocabulary within a short period of time and pass the exam, but you need to keep reviewing the deck for at least a year, otherwise you'll forget it as quickly as you've learned it.

wodenokoto 8y ago
> Another problem (with the algorithm, not Anki itself) My main gripe with the algorithm is you can't take weekends off. I used Anki a lot in College, and Mondays where terrible, due to the backlog built-up over the weekend. One could also say, one shouldn't be drinking the weekend away ...
- aasasd 8y ago
  Actually, it's mentioned several times in the docs that you shouldn't think that backlog build-up means you have to crunch―or more specifically, IMO, 'backlog' isn't a thing here at all. If you can only put in thirty minutes a day, then do it and then close the app, this doesn't change because of a missed day. The cards will be there the next day, it's not like they catch fire when you skip a session. Stressing over the backlog would likely only make your mind work worse. Instead, change the limit of cards to review to the number that you can get through in the time you have. (Unless your college schedule requires you to actually crunch some number of cards every day? I don't know if that's a thing, but using spaced repetition in such a case would seem ill-fitting anyway.)
  - wodenokoto 8y ago
    > Instead, change the limit of cards to review to the number that you can get through in the time you have. I actually brought this up with the devs. The way Anki counts this limit is just how many draws from the stack. A better way (and much more intuitively aligned with the wording) to count this, would be to limit the size of the stack you draw from.
roger_wiz 8y ago
> Another problem (with the algorithm, not Anki itself) is that it's very easy to forget what you've just learned if you don't keep using the app. It's super easy to learn hundreds of vocabulary within a short period of time and pass the exam, but you need to keep reviewing the deck for at least a year, otherwise you'll forget it as quickly as you've learned it. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that this is a problem with human memory in general?

by jacekm 8y ago

wodenokoto 8y ago

> Another problem (with the algorithm, not Anki itself) My main gripe with the algorithm is you can't take weekends off. I used Anki a lot in College, and Mondays where terrible, due to the backlog built-up over the weekend. One could also say, one shouldn't be drinking the weekend away ...

aasasd 8y ago
Actually, it's mentioned several times in the docs that you shouldn't think that backlog build-up means you have to crunch―or more specifically, IMO, 'backlog' isn't a thing here at all. If you can only put in thirty minutes a day, then do it and then close the app, this doesn't change because of a missed day. The cards will be there the next day, it's not like they catch fire when you skip a session. Stressing over the backlog would likely only make your mind work worse. Instead, change the limit of cards to review to the number that you can get through in the time you have. (Unless your college schedule requires you to actually crunch some number of cards every day? I don't know if that's a thing, but using spaced repetition in such a case would seem ill-fitting anyway.)
- wodenokoto 8y ago
  > Instead, change the limit of cards to review to the number that you can get through in the time you have. I actually brought this up with the devs. The way Anki counts this limit is just how many draws from the stack. A better way (and much more intuitively aligned with the wording) to count this, would be to limit the size of the stack you draw from.

roger_wiz 8y ago

> Another problem (with the algorithm, not Anki itself) is that it's very easy to forget what you've just learned if you don't keep using the app. It's super easy to learn hundreds of vocabulary within a short period of time and pass the exam, but you need to keep reviewing the deck for at least a year, otherwise you'll forget it as quickly as you've learned it. Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that this is a problem with human memory in general?