7 ms·

I sometimes wonder if tools like Anki aren't just another form of procrastination. The time invested could probably be better spent.

Roxo 7y ago
That depends on what knowledge you're trying to retain. When I majored in Spanish in college I was extremely efficient compared to my classmates. Whereas most would memorize lists of words and sentences and dedicate tens of hours to it, I would average less than 5 hours of preparation time per exam.
- redmaverick 7y ago
  >> When I majored in Spanish in college I was extremely efficient compared to my classmates. Did you use spaced rep?
  - Roxo 7y ago
    Yes. After class, I would review my notes and add new items. Reviewing for exams amounted to those 5 hours average, spread over 3-4 weeks.
wccrawford 7y ago
I tried to use Anki to study for a tech certification. In the end, I got a lot more out of doing the research to create the cards than I did from the actually looking at the cards. I might even go so far as to say that after creating the cards, they were practically worthless. This would be less true if the exam was further from the creation of the cards, though. It was within a month. Someone else's cards might have helped a little, but not nearly as much.
- Hamuko 7y ago
  >This would be less true if the exam was further from the creation of the cards, though. It was within a month. Anki is basically meant for longer term studying. The criteria for when a card matures in Anki is when the interval becomes 21+ days.
ProstetnicJeltz 7y ago
Really? I have a rule with Anki where the question is one line and the answer is no more than 3. No cards take longer than a minute to write, or more than 10 seconds to remember. If it's anything longer, then it's probably not a subject you should be using anki to learn or you're trying to remember too large a bloc of information at once. I have absolutely no idea how this could be a form of procrastination, or how I could more efficiently memorize information that must be memorized.
- kd5bjo 7y ago
  > I have absolutely no idea ... how I could more efficiently memorize information that must be memorized. Outside of a schooling/testing context, memorization alone is rarely beneficial. You need to be able to practically apply the knowledge, which happens through experience; looking details up when you need them forms a natural kind of spaced repetition anyway that’s tuned to what you actually need to know.
  - mattlutze 7y ago
    Well, as a counterpoint, imagine how much time could be saved if you were able to recall from memory not just the most-used functions that you need for a problem, but the next level down of sometimes or rarely used ones. Or for patterns, or for other such things that can be simplified down into memorizable / recallable blocks. Regularly looking things up is ok, but actively re-experiencing the thing you're trying to learn is a better way to make it stick.
    - bluGill 7y ago
      In many cases less time that what I spend looking it up. I regularly look up things I haven't needed before, a few minutes of reading and I know it. Many of those things are something I expect to never need again in my lifetime. The few seconds to memorize all those things is greater than the time saved. Particularly since I don't know what I will need next week and so I'll be spending a lot of time learning things I turn out to never need.
    - deleted 7y ago
throwaway9d0291 7y ago
It depends what you're doing. I mainly use it for learning vocabulary. I'm learning German and Anki is nothing short of amazing. I'm easily able to learn ~20 words a day primarily just practicing on my phone during bathroom breaks. On the other hand I'm also learning Russian and Anki just doesn't work. Words won't stick in my head the way they do with German. I've heard very numerous accounts of it being great for Japanese.
- Hamuko 7y ago
  >I've heard very numerous accounts of it being great for Japanese. There's at least great pre-made Japanese vocab decks. I'm about two months into one. Maybe less so for kanji (I at least don't have one), so that's probably something you need to do outside.
- Grue3 7y ago
  >On the other hand I'm also learning Russian and Anki just doesn't work. Words won't stick in my head the way they do with German. Because (for English speakers) Russian is harder than German. You need to reduce the number of words learned per day. Japanese is even harder to learn, but you have to be persistent. I spent more than an hour every single day for several years straight to learn the vocabulary. Also there's a unique challenge with Russian is that nouns, verbs and adjectives are all conjugated, and the rules are quite complex. The noun cases would be completely foreign to non-Slavic language speaker. Even if you learn the vocabulary, using it in sentences is not trivial at all.
  - CrazyStat 7y ago
    Just going to be a bit nitpicky here. Noun declension is a feature of various non-slavic languages, including Latin which English speakers have a decent chance of having been exposed to. Modern Russian has 6 cases (with a couple more that pop up very rarely) with 3 genders and singular/plural endings. It's a total of 36 possible combinations, which is not that bad. Masculine and neuter also share most endings so there aren't actually 36 unique ones Probably the most difficult thing about cases when I was learning Russian was remembering which verbs took a different case than I would expect, e.g. dative instead of accusative for what seems like a direct object.
rgoulter 7y ago
It is worth considering the cost, yes. My time isn't so optimised that 15 minutes each day on Anki is otherwise going to be spent on deep work. http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html This writeup estimates his usage of Anki is 4-7 minutes of review time for each card over 20 years. So, if it's worth taking 10 minutes to remember a fact, it's worth putting in Anki. (This writeup also explains it's not worth putting things you don't care about into Anki). Anki seems well suited for domains where you need to quickly access facts from a wide domain, e.g. vocabulary for language learning. It's harder to see as important for programming. If you're programming you'll be able to recall the things you have experience using.
- misiti3780 7y ago
  I use it for programming. My general rule is anytime i need to keep looking up some command, i just stick it in anki. Here are two python cards I added this week: What method do you use to format a datetime object in python: strftime() How do you create a new virtual env using python 3 python3 -m venv <NAME> Those may seem stupid to you, but I was looking them up and now i do not need to. I also use them for other concepts when I want to know a language better. For example What are the three prototypical methods of a js promise? then, catch, finally What does the constructor of a promise take? and executor function How many parameters does a executor take? 2 What are the two parameter of the executor function (constructor of a js promise) resolve() and reject() Things like this just help me as a programmer. I agree it's not for everyone, but I have the time an enjoying doing it.
  - rgoulter 7y ago
    Those are much closer to what I'd put in if I added Anki cards for programming than other things I've seen online. Nice and short. Why not just `new Promise((res, rej) => ..)` instead of intermediate facts like "an executor takes 2 arguments"? I don't think I'd be able to recall what's meant by 'an executor' without first recalling that snippet.
    - misiti3780 7y ago
SamBam 7y ago
I think that many people could think that fair assessment, but really it's just about what you value in the world. Is becoming more knowledgable just "procrastination?" Is reading non-fiction outside your specialty procrastination? I feel like for much of human history we've held people who have read an entire library's-worth of books in high esteem. Were they just procrastinating? I still see where you're coming from. I used to think that people who meditated, or hiked the Appalachian Trail were "selfish," because they were doing something that benefitted only them. And I still find it hard to understand someone who decides to learn Mandarin at the age of 93. But people should be allowed to enlighten and actualize themselves however they wish, and it seems absurd to think that a planet full of more knowledgable people would be a bad thing.
jac241 7y ago
Saves me a ton of time in medical school vs trying to brute force the facts in. Plus it keeps things I learned over a year ago fresh so it has been very helpful for preparing for USMLE Step 1. Medicine might be an ideal case for this kind of learning though.
togs 7y ago
If I don’t absolutely hate doing it then I know I’m not learning.

Roxo 7y ago

That depends on what knowledge you're trying to retain. When I majored in Spanish in college I was extremely efficient compared to my classmates. Whereas most would memorize lists of words and sentences and dedicate tens of hours to it, I would average less than 5 hours of preparation time per exam.

redmaverick 7y ago
>> When I majored in Spanish in college I was extremely efficient compared to my classmates. Did you use spaced rep?
- Roxo 7y ago
  Yes. After class, I would review my notes and add new items. Reviewing for exams amounted to those 5 hours average, spread over 3-4 weeks.

wccrawford 7y ago

I tried to use Anki to study for a tech certification. In the end, I got a lot more out of doing the research to create the cards than I did from the actually looking at the cards. I might even go so far as to say that after creating the cards, they were practically worthless. This would be less true if the exam was further from the creation of the cards, though. It was within a month. Someone else's cards might have helped a little, but not nearly as much.

Hamuko 7y ago
>This would be less true if the exam was further from the creation of the cards, though. It was within a month. Anki is basically meant for longer term studying. The criteria for when a card matures in Anki is when the interval becomes 21+ days.

ProstetnicJeltz 7y ago

Really? I have a rule with Anki where the question is one line and the answer is no more than 3. No cards take longer than a minute to write, or more than 10 seconds to remember. If it's anything longer, then it's probably not a subject you should be using anki to learn or you're trying to remember too large a bloc of information at once. I have absolutely no idea how this could be a form of procrastination, or how I could more efficiently memorize information that must be memorized.

kd5bjo 7y ago
> I have absolutely no idea ... how I could more efficiently memorize information that must be memorized. Outside of a schooling/testing context, memorization alone is rarely beneficial. You need to be able to practically apply the knowledge, which happens through experience; looking details up when you need them forms a natural kind of spaced repetition anyway that’s tuned to what you actually need to know.
- mattlutze 7y ago
  Well, as a counterpoint, imagine how much time could be saved if you were able to recall from memory not just the most-used functions that you need for a problem, but the next level down of sometimes or rarely used ones. Or for patterns, or for other such things that can be simplified down into memorizable / recallable blocks. Regularly looking things up is ok, but actively re-experiencing the thing you're trying to learn is a better way to make it stick.
  - bluGill 7y ago
    In many cases less time that what I spend looking it up. I regularly look up things I haven't needed before, a few minutes of reading and I know it. Many of those things are something I expect to never need again in my lifetime. The few seconds to memorize all those things is greater than the time saved. Particularly since I don't know what I will need next week and so I'll be spending a lot of time learning things I turn out to never need.
  - deleted 7y ago

throwaway9d0291 7y ago

It depends what you're doing. I mainly use it for learning vocabulary. I'm learning German and Anki is nothing short of amazing. I'm easily able to learn ~20 words a day primarily just practicing on my phone during bathroom breaks. On the other hand I'm also learning Russian and Anki just doesn't work. Words won't stick in my head the way they do with German. I've heard very numerous accounts of it being great for Japanese.

Hamuko 7y ago
>I've heard very numerous accounts of it being great for Japanese. There's at least great pre-made Japanese vocab decks. I'm about two months into one. Maybe less so for kanji (I at least don't have one), so that's probably something you need to do outside.
Grue3 7y ago
>On the other hand I'm also learning Russian and Anki just doesn't work. Words won't stick in my head the way they do with German. Because (for English speakers) Russian is harder than German. You need to reduce the number of words learned per day. Japanese is even harder to learn, but you have to be persistent. I spent more than an hour every single day for several years straight to learn the vocabulary. Also there's a unique challenge with Russian is that nouns, verbs and adjectives are all conjugated, and the rules are quite complex. The noun cases would be completely foreign to non-Slavic language speaker. Even if you learn the vocabulary, using it in sentences is not trivial at all.
- CrazyStat 7y ago
  Just going to be a bit nitpicky here. Noun declension is a feature of various non-slavic languages, including Latin which English speakers have a decent chance of having been exposed to. Modern Russian has 6 cases (with a couple more that pop up very rarely) with 3 genders and singular/plural endings. It's a total of 36 possible combinations, which is not that bad. Masculine and neuter also share most endings so there aren't actually 36 unique ones Probably the most difficult thing about cases when I was learning Russian was remembering which verbs took a different case than I would expect, e.g. dative instead of accusative for what seems like a direct object.

rgoulter 7y ago

It is worth considering the cost, yes. My time isn't so optimised that 15 minutes each day on Anki is otherwise going to be spent on deep work. http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html This writeup estimates his usage of Anki is 4-7 minutes of review time for each card over 20 years. So, if it's worth taking 10 minutes to remember a fact, it's worth putting in Anki. (This writeup also explains it's not worth putting things you don't care about into Anki). Anki seems well suited for domains where you need to quickly access facts from a wide domain, e.g. vocabulary for language learning. It's harder to see as important for programming. If you're programming you'll be able to recall the things you have experience using.

misiti3780 7y ago
I use it for programming. My general rule is anytime i need to keep looking up some command, i just stick it in anki. Here are two python cards I added this week: What method do you use to format a datetime object in python: strftime() How do you create a new virtual env using python 3 python3 -m venv <NAME> Those may seem stupid to you, but I was looking them up and now i do not need to. I also use them for other concepts when I want to know a language better. For example What are the three prototypical methods of a js promise? then, catch, finally What does the constructor of a promise take? and executor function How many parameters does a executor take? 2 What are the two parameter of the executor function (constructor of a js promise) resolve() and reject() Things like this just help me as a programmer. I agree it's not for everyone, but I have the time an enjoying doing it.
- rgoulter 7y ago
  Those are much closer to what I'd put in if I added Anki cards for programming than other things I've seen online. Nice and short. Why not just `new Promise((res, rej) => ..)` instead of intermediate facts like "an executor takes 2 arguments"? I don't think I'd be able to recall what's meant by 'an executor' without first recalling that snippet.
  - misiti3780 7y ago

SamBam 7y ago

I think that many people could think that fair assessment, but really it's just about what you value in the world. Is becoming more knowledgable just "procrastination?" Is reading non-fiction outside your specialty procrastination? I feel like for much of human history we've held people who have read an entire library's-worth of books in high esteem. Were they just procrastinating? I still see where you're coming from. I used to think that people who meditated, or hiked the Appalachian Trail were "selfish," because they were doing something that benefitted only them. And I still find it hard to understand someone who decides to learn Mandarin at the age of 93. But people should be allowed to enlighten and actualize themselves however they wish, and it seems absurd to think that a planet full of more knowledgable people would be a bad thing.

jac241 7y ago

Saves me a ton of time in medical school vs trying to brute force the facts in. Plus it keeps things I learned over a year ago fresh so it has been very helpful for preparing for USMLE Step 1. Medicine might be an ideal case for this kind of learning though.

togs 7y ago

If I don’t absolutely hate doing it then I know I’m not learning.