29 ms·

Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

401 points by Smaug123 6y ago

fizixer 6y ago
> Anki as Learning Superpower If it's a superpower, it's at best a rote learning superpower. Can you use Anki to learn quantum field theory, and solve the lamb shift problem without looking at the existing solutions? Cut out the hyperbole please.
- HaoZeke 6y ago
  Yeah, somehow there's always a lot of love for spaced repetition even though it doesn't help with comprehension. I believe re learning complicated topics is better than mugging up jargon.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    Rote learning absolutely does help with comprehension. If you understand all of the words in “ Tod mach’s mir leicht, wenn du kommst vor deiner Zeit” reading it and understanding it is trivial. If you have to look up each word individually your comprehension will at best be enormously slowed. The same principle applies if what you’re reading is a chemical formula, a logical proof or a description of a historical event. Knowing the 200 or so most important events of the French Revolution by date with two sentences of explanation for context makes reading further on it enormously more productive.
    - HaoZeke 6y ago
      Probably for languages, but even still I would assert memorizing a dictionary is less informative than reading 50 books.
      - Smaug123 6y ago
        I think there's a false dichotomy here. Memorising a dictionary is easy, because memorisation is a choice (with spaced repetition). Reading a book in an unfamiliar language takes lots of time and mental effort. Both will contribute to your understanding of the language; perhaps memorising a dictionary contributes less, but then there's a lower activation energy involved in it too: whenever you have five minutes spare, you can just sit down and learn a couple of cards.
        HaoZeke 6y ago
        Thanks! I guess I never really thought of going over cards in spare time. In retrospect, that might be why I never got into them. I only used them when I had a lot of time to dedicated towards learning the material anyway and then I preferred reading.
      - flamble 6y ago
        If you use vocab flashcards that contain an example sentence or two showing usage in context, then it is more efficient than reading a book (with regard to the language rather than the book's actual content). Personally, I read books and when I encounter an unfamiliar word, I add it to the flashcard pile, ensuring that I don't forget the new knowledge. If you're trying to learn the content of the book, the process of converting the information into flashcards entails engaging with the material, so that isn't skipped.
      - sn9 6y ago
        No one memorizes dictionaries for language learning. There are frequency lists of vocabulary words for languages: basically some words are used more frequently than others so memorizing the most common 1000-3000 words is enough to get very high comprehension rates for everyday conversation and reading. https://blog.fluent-forever.com/vocabulary/ https://blog.fluent-forever.com/vocabulary/
- Rainymood 6y ago
  Perhaps an interesting article for you: Augmenting Long-Term Memory [1] by QUANTUM PHYSICIST Michael Nielson (emphasis mine) [1] http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
  - qznc 6y ago
    And his website which teaches quantum computing with spaced repetition: https://quantum.country/ https://quantum.country/
- Smaug123 6y ago
  (Author here.) Learning has many components. Even on its own, brute memorisation is a powerful tool. But see e.g. SuperMemo's creator on Incremental Reading (https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading) for a more generalised view of how to use spaced repetition for what you might refer to as "actual" understanding.
  - fizixer 6y ago
    "learning superpower" = A learning technique so effective so as to be sufficient for all kinds of learning, to the exclusion of all other learning techiques.
    - Smaug123 6y ago
      Wait, what? How is that even remotely implied? Captain America's superpower is his immense strength, speed, and ability to heal; he can't read/control minds, which is Charles Xavier's thing. Just because you have a superpower doesn't mean you're God.
- nabla9 6y ago
  Memory is important part of thinking. When you learn facts, they are easily accessible for thinking and the connections start forming even unconsciously. The idea that you can keep the facts in a book and the brain is just like CPU that processes them is wrong. You have to remember if you want to learn complex stuff like physics.
- hliyan 6y ago
  There is definitely a component of familiarity in the feeling or mental state that we call "understanding" (which is why analogies help understanding: they explain a lesser known thing using a more familiar thing). The brain is a neural network and repeated learning inputs definitely help. It's an oversimplification to look at the brain as if it's a simple Turing machine.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  > Can you use Anki to learn quantum field theory, Can you learn quantum field theory if you have to keep looking up Schrodinger's equations, and all the EM equations?
semicolonandson 6y ago
I went rather deep into ankification of computer science - 5500 cards deep. I've written up my experiences as a series of articles here for anyone interested https://www.jackkinsella.ie/articles/janki-method https://www.jackkinsella.ie/articles/janki-method
- yeutterg 6y ago
  Hey Jack, I've always found your Anki guides to be some of the best. I'm curious, are you still using it all these years later?
  - semicolonandson 6y ago
    As someone who is now over a decade into their programming career, today I find more value in doing analytical breakdowns of my various success and mistakes. What were my oversights on a project? How could I have communicated better? What made one particular library a success, etc.? Therefore, after years of Anki, I've stopped adding new cards and doing repetition; instead I now focus on keeping a code diary. I've published the first couple of hundred entries here so you can see what this entails: https://www.semicolonandsons.com/code_diary https://www.semicolonandsons.com/code_diary I see the relationship between my days of ankifying tidbits of knowledge and my current diarying as one of tactics vs. strategy. The Anki-stage was necessary to drill the basics. But now, a decade later, the focus is on the bigger picture — and trying to capture this bigger picture onto a double-sided flashcard is about as fruitful as trying to contain an ocean in a bathtub.
    - Noumenon72 6y ago
      Wow, you've worked on lots of different things. And this seems like a good way to keep learning.
    - namelessone 6y ago
      I love the code diary idea. Can I ask you what tools (software, pen&paper) you use for your diary?
shoaib1 6y ago
hello
amelius 6y ago
Anki is missing a button: "I don't care". For example, I don't care if for the question "In ruby, how do I get the previous regex match" the answer is "$&". If I ever need it, I'll just look it up.
- d33 6y ago
  You can just flag those cards and remove them from your deck. It's all about having it personalized.
- DavidSJ 6y ago
  If you don’t care, don’t add it to your deck. What’s that you say? You downloaded premade decks? Don’t do that! Constructing your deck yourself is an important part of the learning process.
  - Smaug123 6y ago
    (Author here.) Seconded on all counts! Ruthlessly delete cards you don't care about; make your own cards so that they reflect your own mental structures. In the article, I allude to this by talking about how people can undergo very different mental motions to obtain the same "serialised" fact like "78% of the air is nitrogen".
    - wenc 6y ago
      Deleting is often recommended but it's an irreversible operation. Suspending on the other hand, takes the card out of rotation, and if at some future point one cares about the card again, it is easy to unsuspend.
  - bhrgunatha 6y ago
    I use anki to document and remember all my emacs custom key-bindings. That might sound silly but it's easy to accumulate useful things over the years in emacs and forget about them. Emacs is vast and deep and there's a lot to learn and remember. It also serves the same purpose for key-bindings and functions in various modes and packages.
leke 6y ago
Trying to learn Finish vocab, Anki made me realize I had terrible recall. Sometimes, I couldn't even remember what the last freaking card was, and I would forget most things the next day, and everything the day after. After about 3 weeks, I had only remembered 3 or 4 words, so I gave up.
- knuthsat 6y ago
  There’s a setting you can tweak allowing you to set smaller intervals like 1 3 7 15 30 minutes until card will be postponed for the next day. Takes a bit longer to learn a new card but it should work. I went from 30% forgotten on each session to 5-10%.
- nabla9 6y ago
  Learning and memory is a complex thing. If you don't learn even after adjusting the interval, I think there is something else. Lack of motivation, some mental issue like depression, attention problem while learning. You can't learn stuff like you sweep a floor, tune out and just do the movements.
- pelario 6y ago
  Hi there. I'm also using Anki for Finish vocab, and it had helped me a lot. To the point it does feel like a super power. If you are going to use Anki, it's important to switch the knobs to adapt to what you are learning. I will share some of the things that have worked for me, for Finnish vocab: - Intervals for new cards (until they are considered 'learned'): 1 10 15 50 240. The 240 is critical for me: if I forgot it after 4 hours, it goes back to 1 again... if I got it after 4 hours, then it will have better chances in a couple of days. Of course this is personal, I have been tweaking those until something makes sense to me. - Lapese (when a known card is forgotten, and how to re-learn): 10 30 240. Again the 240 check. - Set an ammount of new cards and max reviews per day that does not make you feel misserable... there needs to be some joy on learning... If I may ask, are you just learning the vocab ? have you taken courses? Where are you getting the vocab from ?
  - eska 6y ago
    Just ignore the remaining card count and go by time instead. Getting the remaining count to 0 does nothing. Redefine success as "I set out to do Anki for 10 minutes and I did!".
jayflux 6y ago
Checkout https://github.com/jasonwilliams/anki https://github.com/jasonwilliams/anki if you want to send any markdown notes to Anki from VSCode
pushpendra7 6y ago
Rqr1qqqqqêeeeee
- prox 6y ago
  Hi cat! Stop walking on the keyboard!
prox 6y ago
What’s the program of anki they use? Somehow none of the links mention that.
- Smaug123 6y ago
  Anki is a program. The first link in the entire article is to https://apps.ankiweb.net https://apps.ankiweb.net.
  - prox 6y ago
    Gotcha! Thanks!
Jabbles 6y ago
I have used Anki productively, I think it's a great tool, and should be a component of learning in many fields. But I can't help but think it could be a lot better, a lot more efficient, perhaps even 2x more. Anki allows you to customise many aspects of when cards are shown. But presumably those settings can be tuned for a individual, a subject, or even a card. One person probably doesn't have enough data to know what would be most efficient, so they guess, or stay with the defaults. Part of this is due to the lack of data - and the privacy concerns that would accompany Anki harvesting it all and feeding it to a machine learning system. But if an SRS system were recommended by and developed by a national curriculum, I suspect it could be a lot cleverer and more efficient. As one example, consider if you had to learn the translations of 2 words. And students often got them confused. Then perhaps getting one wrong should also prompt a test of the other, or indeed maybe it should delay the test of the other? Who knows...
- nuclearnice1 6y ago
  This is a great idea. Thanks for sharing. Just to restate what you said, adding nothing. Imagine you had Anki for a similar cohort studying a coherent single course. You’ll be able to get a sense of what topics confuse everyone and what correlation there are in confusion. If you had trouble with X, then you need extra guidance on A & B.
  - germinalphrase 6y ago
    I’m a teacher. There is a great deal to the profession that does depend on experience, intuition and relationship building; however, better data on what - exactly - my students know/can do would be a great boon. I believe better assessment tools are the key here, but SRS system data would be another useful channel (and does, of course, have an assessment component to it).
    - nuclearnice1 6y ago
      What level of granularity do you think about “what the students know?” do problems, say in math, map to concepts? students don’t know concepts? Or is it more subtle?
m3kw9 6y ago
Isn't Anki good only for memorization? Spaced repetition doesn't seem to help learning how something relates to another logically like how to determine when to use what programming patterns.
- ratsimihah 6y ago
  I think Anki helps build the necessary knowledge base to make such connections, but actually making those connections comes with putting that knowledge into practice.
- Smaug123 6y ago
  It can help. In the article, I recommend Nielsen "Seeing through a piece of mathematics", which is about exactly this. http://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics http://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics
- BeetleB 6y ago
  > Spaced repetition doesn't seem to help learning how something relates to another logically like how to determine when to use what programming patterns. You can make cards for those. Of course, if you're making cards on those without understanding and internalizing, the cards won't help you.
- milansm 6y ago
  Back at the uni days if I struggled to understand a math concept, proof or algo, I would just memorize it. After a while the understanding part would also come.
- TheTrotters 6y ago
  It's great for math, for example. It's spacing + testing effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_effect Suppose you can solve some problem or prove some theorem today. Then you try to do it again next week, next month and so on. It's very different from rote memorization.
- sn9 6y ago
  Yes you don't use Anki for understanding. First you understand something, then you convert that understanding into flashcards so it sticks in your long-term memory.
CoffeePython 6y ago
Seems to be a lot of interest in this space. I’m trying to combine the “rote-ness” of anki with learning by doing. In Deliberate Python[1] I’m combining spaced repetition lessons with small exercises that encourage you to really focus and get the question right the first time. The encouragement to get it right the first time, as often as possible, is something I learned from learning music. Practice makes permanent [1] https://www.sendfox.com/deliberatepython https://www.sendfox.com/deliberatepython Note: this project is pre launch so this is a newsletter where I’m giving progress updates. Plan to launch into beta in a month or two
wendyshu 6y ago
What's the point of memorizing a bunch of facts you could easily look up on the web?
- dieortin 6y ago
  I guess people shouldn’t study history anymore when they can just look up things on the web
  - wendyshu 6y ago
    There's more to learning history than memorizing facts.
- arkitaip 6y ago
  Competency and efficiency.
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  If the facts are in your head, you can make a connection between them. If they are in different places on the web, unless someone else already linked them for you, they remain separate.
  - wendyshu 6y ago
    Can you give an example?
    - waxachasee 6y ago
      Anki is used a lot in medical education. There's a lot of small details, and you can string them along to form the big picture. An example is going from symptoms -> diagnosis -> treatment options -> drug side effects. You can't just memorize use drug X for Y, but you incorporate information that you know to formulate the best plan. Suppose the patient has kidney disease - you've memorized X is nephrotoxic so you find another treatment. I will say this is easier for some and harder for others. I've noticed some people have a lot of difficulty recalling facts without a specific cue when using Anki. It's best used with traditional learning, but you can focus more on the why.
noman-land 6y ago
Excuse me if this is dumb question but this is the second time I've downloaded AnkiDroid and... am I supposed to answer the questions in the app or just do it in my head and then click show answer. I don't see any buttons to answer the question or enter your answer in the app. I am dumb or is something not working right?
- Smaug123 6y ago
  Answer the question in your head, show the answer, and click the button corresponding to how easy it was. It's digital flashcards.
  - noman-land 6y ago
    Thank you for clarifying.
- Anon1096 6y ago
  You can add cards with answerable fields, but after many thousands of reviews I think that simple front-back cards where you answer in your head are the most effective. The extra work to type out an answer is not worth the hassle at all.
maxdarapper 6y ago
Anki is good, but the problems that I had with it was that I was not learning the flashcards well enough on the first day to to recall those flashcards on subsequent days and it took too long to make flashcards, so I made myself a flashcards app. http://flashcardmax.com/download http://flashcardmax.com/download
moralsupply 6y ago
Is there a software less clunky than Anki out there with similar functionality?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- wenc 6y ago
  Quizlet has a vastly better UI but they quietly removed the SRS functionality for some reason.
- ricg 6y ago
  Shameless plug: I make an SRS app called Flashcard Hero[1] (iOS/macOS/Windows). I strive to keep the app as easy to use as possible. [1]: http://flashcardhero.com http://flashcardhero.com
  - jbc1 6y ago
    Definitely looks more user friendly than Anki. Could you talk a little about your SRS algorithm? Are you using SM2?
    - ricg 6y ago
      After you memorized a card for the first time, it is presented again on the very next day. If you can still recall it right away it moves to the next stage, which is then shown again in 2 days. Intervals double from then on. If you have difficulties recalling a card, it moves back to the start. You can customize the intervals yourself per deck to adjust for the subject (e.g. vocabulary cards with only one word per card probably can have longer intervals than, let's say, an anatomy card with details about a muscle, bone or nerve).
- allenu 6y ago
  I'm actually about to release my own SRS-based flash card app in a few days if you can wait a little bit. [1] I'm just putting the finishing touches on it and will release to macOS and iOS. I think Anki is a great tool, but I think there are so many aspects of it that can be improved, so I decided to write my own app. I'm hoping to refine the SRS algorithm, lesson UI, and card layout over time as I get input from folks about what works and what doesn't. I think there's a lot of potential for improvement in this space if someone devotes some time to it. 1. https://www.ussherpress.com/freshcards/ https://www.ussherpress.com/freshcards/
krosaen 6y ago
I use Anki a few times a week. When I've used it for math (as I work my way through Gilbert Strang's book "Linear Algebra and its applications"), I add full problems that seemed to be key to the topic, or surprised me in some way. These take longer to review, but I find it's been really helpful. And once it sticks, I don't have to review it again for months. I also find it can be helpful to have a single card that prompts review of related definitions, for instance: "What are the four subspaces of a matrix A? What are their dimensions with respect to the rank r of A? What are they subspaces of? (Fundamental theorem of Linear Algebra part 1)" Remembering these things together is easier for me than breaking this down into multiple cards as one piece of this in isolation doesn't make as much sense as a part of the whole. This is all to say that I disagree with the author on the point that it's important to find ways to break up cards to be bite sized. Otherwise great post IMO!
- Smaug123 6y ago
  If it works for you, then go for it - just do keep an eye on it, and if it stops working then notice early!
- eska 6y ago
  But by keeping those things together you're essentially cheating. You won't be able to remember these things in isolation as well. Also if it's easy for you to remember the rank of the matrix, but not the subspaces, you will be asked about the rank too often, since you connected it to subspaces.
  - krosaen 6y ago
    In the example of the fundamental theorem of LA, the key point is the relationship between the subspaces (there are other ones just about the definition of a nullspace for example) - agree if every card was like this it would not be ideal. I think my more important point was about problem sets, for instance: Construct a matrix with the required property, or explain why you can't. - left nullspace contains [1 3]^T - rowspace contains [3 1]^T breaks down into a few steps, and trying to break that down into bite sized flashcards such as, "what's the key idea in constructing a matrix with left nullspace [1 3]^T" and "given a matrix that is the product of L with row [1 3] can you choose a U so that combined they form a matrix with row space [3 1]?" seems like it could risk in resulting in me not being able to figure out the entire problem together. But maybe not? Bringing it back to the post's proof example, what if you had completely nailed every step of the proof such that Anki doesn't ask you about it for a while, and then 6 months later, one of the harder steps comes up in isolation: "What is the second adjustment we make in the proof of the ratio test, a < 1?" what if you can't remember the first steps? Would having the rest of the context help? I guess it's a tradeoff.
tedmcory77 6y ago
What anki desperately needs (to the point years ago I explored this), is out of app nudges. I know I know, lots of folks dont like nagware, but I've found that for recreational things sometimes life happens and I just forget to go back to certain decks. If it's not tied to a goal I never get back to it.
- JulianWasTaken 6y ago
  At least on Android, it definitely has this. Settings > AnkiDroid > Notify when (X number of cards due, etc.)
  - tedmcory77 6y ago
    Nice! I wasn't aware of this (but sadly wont be able to take advantage of it).
    - pokemod97 6y ago
      The IOS app also has the ability to set a notification at a certain time.
- jedimastert 6y ago
  Just make sure you don't go full Duolingo... never go full Duolingo...
- ngokevin 6y ago
  Building my own Anki, but focused on language learning for couples, so you'll get nudges. Both from the app, and from your partner :)
wenc 6y ago
Just wondering if anyone has tried combining Anki with handwriting for improved retention? (any personal experiments?) In language learning, memorizing words in a shallow way tends to not be as helpful as memorizing them in a sentence (shallow vs deep encoding). One can try to ankify sentences, but it's too easy to click on the green button and fool oneself that one has mastered the sentence. Anki works great for snippets of atomic knowledge but doesn't work as well for sequential/series knowledge like sentences. On the other hand, there's another method called the Gold List method which is a pen-and-paper based SRS system which requires writing out complete sentences and testing recall every 2 weeks or so. Pen-and-paper folks like it, but due to the limitations of paper, implementing a proper SRS is far too tedious. What if one were to use Anki for the SRS part, and handwrite the responses? Handwriting sounds tedious, but I wonder if it helps deepen the encoding? (by forcing reconstruction of the sentence, slowing one down enough to dwell on the form and grammar, as well as adding a physical element to the task)
- codyb 6y ago
  I’ve used Anki prior and always wished there was an easy way to inject a bit of randomness into it. For instance, you could have the idea of a “template” such as <Pronoun> <Tense of to go> <Place> and <Same Tense of to see> a <Noun>. A lot of times things probably would be a bit non sensical such as “They went to the bank and saw an apple.” “She will go to the Eiffel Tower to see a motorboat.” But I always thought it would really help me a lot more than the more rote aspects. Of course, then the spaced repetition might be less effective due to the variety of the same card, and it may be more like studying something new.
  - IanCal 6y ago
    I think you can embed JavaScript in a card so you could do this. You'd probably want something to help you create them though.
- mrwebmaster 6y ago
  I do, but not for language learning, but for mathematical proofs and logic proofs. Example "Prove that the dot product between 2 unit vectors is cos θ".
Ozzie_osman 6y ago
What programs do people use for Anki? I've tried the usual suspects, and found them a little too tedious. What I'd love is: - seamless syncing of cards between my devices. - more thought into the engagement loop (ie getting me to not be lazy and actually do the work). - an easily searchable database with credible curated decks.
- codyb 6y ago
  I think Anki’s official app has those features? It was about 20 bucks on iPhone and free on OS X I believe, not sure about other platforms. The thing that would always get me would be that I would make a card on the phone and forget to manually sync it or something and then make a card on the computer and have to resolve conflicts. They really just needed an “add all cards from all sources” feature since that was generally all I wanted.
- hamolton 6y ago
  Ankidroid syncs with Ankiweb just like Anki desktop does, and I like it because I can swipe right/left to say if I remember a card or not. The decks are on https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/ https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/ although I wouldn't call that curated; the most used curated list is probably the sidebar of /r/medicalschoolanki. I am unaware of CS/higher math decks, though. Perhaps this is a decent list? https://github.com/MilesCranmer/anki_science https://github.com/MilesCranmer/anki_science
crumbshot 6y ago
I tried using Anki but found it far too boring to sustain my interest. Staring at fact flashcards for hours on end just felt like a waste of time. In my experience it was much more useful and engaging to learn by doing things (creating, writing, experimenting) that the facts were related to - then the most necessary facts would become deeply embedded in my memory, with others at just the right level of vagueness necessary to look up the details if needed.
- agd 6y ago
  I think to make the most of it you need to engage your imagination. Relating stories and context to the facts transforms it from ‘staring at flashcards for hours’ into more of a game and something to enjoy. And the great thing is, because of the spaced repetition, you don’t need to spend hours on it at a time. You can learn a lot in 5/10 mins a day.
  - leppr 6y ago
    When I was starting Anki, I would spend time really focusing my thinking on the cards while reviewing them (reading sentences aloud multiple times until pronunciation is good, relating concepts to others, ...). I'm now convinced this is a waste of time and Anki is best used rushing through sessions as fast as possible (maximum 20min a day). This takes care of the small, boring but often essential rote memorization part, allowing you to use as much of your time and intellect for actual practice in the target domains. (This may not apply if the target domain is actually itself rote memorization, e.g. medical exams)
    - BeetleB 6y ago
      20 min a day is still a lot - unless it's mostly due to adding a lot of cards per day.
      - tomcatfish 6y ago
        For context in this thread, my maximum study in the last 2 months was 10.42 minutes, but my mode (and average as well, that point is an outlier) is close to 3 or 4
miguelrochefort 6y ago
I've completed my Bachelor of Computer Science in just 3 months thanks to deliberate practice and memorization techniques (flashcards, Anki). It shows how outdated our education system is and how much better it could be.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  You should write an article or blog post on how you did it.
  - miguelrochefort 6y ago
    It's not a big secret, it's WGU. I'll write about it in November.
jkmcf 6y ago
Pro tip: review flash cards while taking a bio break instead of social media, etc.
nmca 6y ago
Has anyone got a solid anki deck for probability and linear algebra?
- Smaug123 6y ago
  I'd strongly recommend making them yourself. Everyone understands these things differently, and ideally your cards will complement the structures already represented in your own mind. Ideally, a card will shine light on one tiny aspect of the model you already have in your mind; if you're using cards shaped around a different model, and you drop them into place around your own model, the lights may be at strange angles or highlighting big complex things.
  - RMPR 6y ago
    Can definitely relate, Anki started to make sense after I started creating my own cards. Not batch-creating mind you, but carefully crafting each one, and updating when necessary while reviewing.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  Decks other people wrote usually aren't useful. You need to make your own flash cards. It's painful, but it's much more useful.
  - hikarudo 6y ago
    I used to think so too. Then I read the research on this, and the evidence suggests the opposite of what you wrote: your time is better spent doing retrieval practice than creating your own cards. https://www.learningscientists.org/ https://www.learningscientists.org/
    - BeetleB 6y ago
      I think the counterargument is more along the lines of: Downloadable decks will have a fairly high percentage of irrelevant cards for you, and will always lack a lot of useful cards for you (the latter is something I'm pretty sure is true). When I am exposed to some new thing, parts of it will stick immediately, and other parts will need some kind of processing on my part before I internalize it. When you are exposed to the same new thing, those parts that stick and those that need processing will usually differ from mine. Hence it's hard to make a deck that works well for the majority.
quantum_state 6y ago
Thought people have been using similar techniques all along since ages ago ... the post seemed to present it as something new ...
- Smaug123 6y ago
  Really? I may be the author, but I have been utterly unable to extract that meaning from… any of the text I wrote.
ochronus 6y ago
I'm new to this method, earlier (much earlier) I dismissed it as something silly (I know, I know...) - what are your favorite decks?
ablekh 6y ago
I have just installed Anki on my Windows 10 computer and was disappointed to find that it has no ability to scale the application's UI or, better yet, configure font size (and, maybe even font family) on a per-component basis. If any Anki developers are reading this thread, please consider this comment as a relevant feature request.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
DarmokJalad1701 6y ago
I used Anki to pass my GRE Verbal Test back in the day. Haven't really used it since then.
galfarragem 6y ago
I have mixed feelings on Anki: - It worked great to memorize cyrillic alphabet. - It's working not so well to memorize Polish words (I have around 500 in a custom-made deck). Reading Polish news simply works better for me but I don't know why.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  Application of knowledge frequently (e.g. reading Polish news regularly) works on somewhat the same principle as Anki (repeated exposure is the key), but is likely a bit better as its more interesting and with context.
baby 6y ago
I can’t get used to Anki’s UI. I’ve tried it many times and failed. It’s sort of like org mode to me. Instead I use memrise.com
- digianarchist 6y ago
  Anki's UI is really bad across all applications.
biophysboy 6y ago
I've been learning Japanese since the pandemic hit, and Anki has been an indispensible tool. One thing that is great about it is people have already created great decks of the most common vocabulary, complete with audio and images. I would imagine people have done this for comp sci as well.
JoeDaDude 6y ago
For those that would rather use an analog method, you can make a Leitner Box of flash cards, which, if you follow the schedule, works in a similar way as Anki. I find that writing the cards out by hand is the first step in memorizing them. See how to use one in this interactive comic: https://ncase.me/remember/ https://ncase.me/remember/
- eska 6y ago
  The issue with that is that I'd be at a 5 digit number of cards by now, certainly wouldn't keep all of those around, and so I'd stop revising old knowledge.
  - JoeDaDude 6y ago
    True. The method sends cards that are already memorized to the back (so to speak) where they are revisited less often. You could conceivably retire those cards forever and take them out the box.
a-dub 6y ago
Tried anki in college, found that creating the cards took too much time and doing them was boring. What did work for me was really simple. A single 8 1/2 by 11 double sided sheet of paper could usually fit everything I needed to memorize at one given time. I'd write out a cheat sheet (a very valuable exercise in condensing and distilling while reviewing) and then reproduce it from memory before and after bed three days in a row allowing a tapered amount of cheating/peeking (with the first few being pretty much all peeking). After three days, it was pretty much good as memorized.
- Normal_gaussian 6y ago
  and many years later? As I understand it the benefit is to have strong recall over longer than just an exam or university course; more like for an entire career stage. How far into your career are you, and how much of the material you learned in this way have you retained? Have you fairly tested the retention?
  - a-dub 6y ago
    like anything it's use it or lose it. memorization works for short term, continued application in different settings is what makes it stick.
    - BeetleB 6y ago
      Memorization works well in the long term if you use flash cards, which was the point of the question.
- sah55 6y ago
  This is just memorization through brute repetition without the SRS optimization. Less efficient, and more time consuming.
  - BeetleB 6y ago
    That's a bit harsh. As someone who regularly uses flash cards, creating them really is a bottleneck. It's a lot quicker to handwrite something on a paper. It's not as effective, but it definitely is faster.
virissimo 6y ago
I definitely agree that SRS can reasonably be thought of as a learning superpower. I very much regret that I didn't start using Anki until college. To save my own kids from such a regret, I've created Boethius, a SRS web application for the classical liberal arts to augment our homeschool curriculum. It's now in public beta here: https://www.boethi.us/ https://www.boethi.us/. Let me know what you think!
realjohng 6y ago
Wish I had used this when I was student learning history or biology or even cs algo run times!
sone3d 6y ago
An iOS Anki alternative app? The official costs 27,99€ and I would give it a shot if not for the high price.
clockman 6y ago
I use anki with org-noter and the anki-editor minor mode for digesting PDFs, a sort of hacked version of incremental reading. I just stuff entire definitions and proofs into it and use cloze deletions for almost everything, then I attach a bunch of screenshots from the source material in the "Extra" field for any context when/if I fail the card. That, combined with the load balancer plugin and a limit of 5 new cards per day keeps my daily reviews around 1 hour. I have 18,000 cards. I'm familiar with the 20 rules for formulating knowledge but I just don't care to break things down into atoms. So I cloze and forget.
phobosanomaly 6y ago
Usage of Anki in the biomedical community is frequently mentioned, but I just wanted to add some notes. These are based on my own personal experiences and conversations with med students, so YMMV. I personally use Anki with the Image Occlusion Enhanced and Speed Focus Mode add-ons almost every-day, and frequently use text-to-speech/swipe gestures on the android app to review cards while hiking. If you're casually doing like 20 cards a day on the train while commuting to work, this will definitely not apply. A. Anki is almost never used alone in medical education. It's used as an aid to retaining information within a heavily-structured curriculum where you're going over the same concepts over, and over, and over in the form of lectures, clinical encounters, supplemental videos, more lectures, anatomy lab, histology lab, boards-prep, etc. So, like the author said, there's a ton of med students using it, but context is very important. B. Lots of people don't use the algorithm. They use it in cram-mode to drill a subset of a pre-made deck into their head before an exam. Even if you never use the SRS algorithm, Anki is by-far the greatest flashcard program ever built (cloud sync, TTS, robust image support, open-source, etc.). C. Many of the people grinding thousands of cards a day have a lot of factual knowledge, but really aren't great at stitching it together for practical application. If you need to memorize random facts, great, but be very aware of that potential limitation. D. Game-pads are the secret weapon. Joy2Key, or roll-your-own in Python like I did with the Inputs and PyAutoGui packages. E. Use it with a very specific goal in mind. Med students are by-and-large using it specifically for the USMLE Step 1 exam, in which you have to memorize a finite, well-delineated set of information, much of which is irrelevant after the first two years. I've never met anyone who has graduated med school and kept using it, because grinding cards sucks and life is short. F. Don't be afraid to commit deck bankruptcy. If you're reviewing 900 cards a day, and you don't know why anymore, delete the deck and start from scratch. G. There's a distinct balance between reviewing cards so frequently that you've memorized the cards not the concepts, and making the cards so challenging that it takes too long to review efficiently (I did 871 cards in about 2 hours today - that's a common number for a med student, some kids are doing thousands per-day - like, they roll out of bed and start tapping on that game controller). Be very, very aware of that memorizing the cards thing. You probably don't know as much as you think you do. So, in summary, it's a really cool program. I wouldn't characterize it as a superpower, however, since it has some glaring downsides, and is not particularly noteworthy when used in a vacuum. Again, that's from somebody doing >500 cards/day.
pooya13 6y ago
Quickly skimming through the webpage for the app it worded like they came up with the idea of spaced repetition. Just want to clarify that this is not a new concept: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
iamjohnsears 6y ago
I used Anki extensively in grad school. There was a moment when I realized it was really working in a class on linear dynamical systems— all of a sudden everything just got easy. It takes discipline to both create good cards and study regularly, but man the payoff is good. That said... I stopped as soon as grad school was over and haven’t had the willpower to continue consolidating that knowledge.
bicepjai 6y ago
First of all, thanks for showing Anki to me. I see lot of apps for Anki; any suggestion which ones are good to start with ?
Valakas 6y ago
I've used Anki for language learning but didn't find it that useful. A problem I encountered was that while I could remember words and expressions in the Anki environment, I couldn't do it outside of it. Or I could memorize an expression exactly as it was written down, but if I saw a little variation then it was useless. For language learning I found it works way better to use another technique: ridiculous imagery and word association. Higher initial time investment (have to spend some time for each new word in the first time I see) but after that I don't EVER need to recall it again. It just sticks. I also used that to memorize different alphabets and it's WAY easier and does feel like a superpower as opposed to just brute force memorize something by repetition and recall with no other brain connections between what we're memorizing and what we already know.
cafard 6y ago
At the moment, this is #180. At #173 is an article about walking as a superpower. Did I mess a memo about superpowers as the meme of the month?
KerryJohnson 6y ago
I’ve used several learning apps with SRS for learning Chinese. I started with Anki, then tried Memrise and eventually stumbled upon a relatively new alternative - https://www.hackchinese.com/ https://www.hackchinese.com/ Anki is no doubt a helpful tool. However, at some stage, I caught myself wasting a lot of time making my vocabulary cards and I noticed that my progress slowed down. It seems to me that in Memrise and Hack Chinese language learning features are implemented more effectively. Most likely, as the article suggests, the point is that these apps were designed specifically for learning a language in the case of Memrise, and for learning Chinese in the case of Hack Chinese. Well, it’s quite reasonable to assume that spaced repetition principles work better when adjusted to a narrow goal. Anyway, even though SRS software is very useful, I don’t think it has a superpower. I’m not sure how it works for maths and computer science, but when it comes to learning languages, you can’t reach a high level of proficiency by focusing on some relatively isolated parts of a language. Reading, listening, writing, and speaking are necessary to learn how words are used and to achieve the ability to use these words yourself. For serious learners, SRS software is important, but it’s just one tool in their toolkit.

401 points by Smaug123 6y ago

> Anki as Learning Superpower If it's a superpower, it's at best a rote learning superpower. Can you use Anki to learn quantum field theory, and solve the lamb shift problem without looking at the existing solutions? Cut out the hyperbole please.

HaoZeke 6y ago
Yeah, somehow there's always a lot of love for spaced repetition even though it doesn't help with comprehension. I believe re learning complicated topics is better than mugging up jargon.
- barry-cotter 6y ago
  Rote learning absolutely does help with comprehension. If you understand all of the words in “ Tod mach’s mir leicht, wenn du kommst vor deiner Zeit” reading it and understanding it is trivial. If you have to look up each word individually your comprehension will at best be enormously slowed. The same principle applies if what you’re reading is a chemical formula, a logical proof or a description of a historical event. Knowing the 200 or so most important events of the French Revolution by date with two sentences of explanation for context makes reading further on it enormously more productive.
  - HaoZeke 6y ago
    Probably for languages, but even still I would assert memorizing a dictionary is less informative than reading 50 books.
    - Smaug123 6y ago
      I think there's a false dichotomy here. Memorising a dictionary is easy, because memorisation is a choice (with spaced repetition). Reading a book in an unfamiliar language takes lots of time and mental effort. Both will contribute to your understanding of the language; perhaps memorising a dictionary contributes less, but then there's a lower activation energy involved in it too: whenever you have five minutes spare, you can just sit down and learn a couple of cards.
      - HaoZeke 6y ago
        Thanks! I guess I never really thought of going over cards in spare time. In retrospect, that might be why I never got into them. I only used them when I had a lot of time to dedicated towards learning the material anyway and then I preferred reading.
    - flamble 6y ago
      If you use vocab flashcards that contain an example sentence or two showing usage in context, then it is more efficient than reading a book (with regard to the language rather than the book's actual content). Personally, I read books and when I encounter an unfamiliar word, I add it to the flashcard pile, ensuring that I don't forget the new knowledge. If you're trying to learn the content of the book, the process of converting the information into flashcards entails engaging with the material, so that isn't skipped.
    - sn9 6y ago
      No one memorizes dictionaries for language learning. There are frequency lists of vocabulary words for languages: basically some words are used more frequently than others so memorizing the most common 1000-3000 words is enough to get very high comprehension rates for everyday conversation and reading. https://blog.fluent-forever.com/vocabulary/ https://blog.fluent-forever.com/vocabulary/
Rainymood 6y ago
Perhaps an interesting article for you: Augmenting Long-Term Memory [1] by QUANTUM PHYSICIST Michael Nielson (emphasis mine) [1] http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
- qznc 6y ago
  And his website which teaches quantum computing with spaced repetition: https://quantum.country/ https://quantum.country/
Smaug123 6y ago
(Author here.) Learning has many components. Even on its own, brute memorisation is a powerful tool. But see e.g. SuperMemo's creator on Incremental Reading (https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading) for a more generalised view of how to use spaced repetition for what you might refer to as "actual" understanding.
- fizixer 6y ago
  "learning superpower" = A learning technique so effective so as to be sufficient for all kinds of learning, to the exclusion of all other learning techiques.
  - Smaug123 6y ago
    Wait, what? How is that even remotely implied? Captain America's superpower is his immense strength, speed, and ability to heal; he can't read/control minds, which is Charles Xavier's thing. Just because you have a superpower doesn't mean you're God.
nabla9 6y ago
Memory is important part of thinking. When you learn facts, they are easily accessible for thinking and the connections start forming even unconsciously. The idea that you can keep the facts in a book and the brain is just like CPU that processes them is wrong. You have to remember if you want to learn complex stuff like physics.
hliyan 6y ago
There is definitely a component of familiarity in the feeling or mental state that we call "understanding" (which is why analogies help understanding: they explain a lesser known thing using a more familiar thing). The brain is a neural network and repeated learning inputs definitely help. It's an oversimplification to look at the brain as if it's a simple Turing machine.
BeetleB 6y ago
> Can you use Anki to learn quantum field theory, Can you learn quantum field theory if you have to keep looking up Schrodinger's equations, and all the EM equations?

semicolonandson 6y ago

I went rather deep into ankification of computer science - 5500 cards deep. I've written up my experiences as a series of articles here for anyone interested https://www.jackkinsella.ie/articles/janki-method https://www.jackkinsella.ie/articles/janki-method

yeutterg 6y ago
Hey Jack, I've always found your Anki guides to be some of the best. I'm curious, are you still using it all these years later?
- semicolonandson 6y ago
  As someone who is now over a decade into their programming career, today I find more value in doing analytical breakdowns of my various success and mistakes. What were my oversights on a project? How could I have communicated better? What made one particular library a success, etc.? Therefore, after years of Anki, I've stopped adding new cards and doing repetition; instead I now focus on keeping a code diary. I've published the first couple of hundred entries here so you can see what this entails: https://www.semicolonandsons.com/code_diary https://www.semicolonandsons.com/code_diary I see the relationship between my days of ankifying tidbits of knowledge and my current diarying as one of tactics vs. strategy. The Anki-stage was necessary to drill the basics. But now, a decade later, the focus is on the bigger picture — and trying to capture this bigger picture onto a double-sided flashcard is about as fruitful as trying to contain an ocean in a bathtub.
  - Noumenon72 6y ago
    Wow, you've worked on lots of different things. And this seems like a good way to keep learning.
  - namelessone 6y ago
    I love the code diary idea. Can I ask you what tools (software, pen&paper) you use for your diary?

shoaib1 6y ago

hello

amelius 6y ago

Anki is missing a button: "I don't care". For example, I don't care if for the question "In ruby, how do I get the previous regex match" the answer is "$&". If I ever need it, I'll just look it up.

d33 6y ago
You can just flag those cards and remove them from your deck. It's all about having it personalized.
DavidSJ 6y ago
If you don’t care, don’t add it to your deck. What’s that you say? You downloaded premade decks? Don’t do that! Constructing your deck yourself is an important part of the learning process.
- Smaug123 6y ago
  (Author here.) Seconded on all counts! Ruthlessly delete cards you don't care about; make your own cards so that they reflect your own mental structures. In the article, I allude to this by talking about how people can undergo very different mental motions to obtain the same "serialised" fact like "78% of the air is nitrogen".
  - wenc 6y ago
    Deleting is often recommended but it's an irreversible operation. Suspending on the other hand, takes the card out of rotation, and if at some future point one cares about the card again, it is easy to unsuspend.
- bhrgunatha 6y ago
  I use anki to document and remember all my emacs custom key-bindings. That might sound silly but it's easy to accumulate useful things over the years in emacs and forget about them. Emacs is vast and deep and there's a lot to learn and remember. It also serves the same purpose for key-bindings and functions in various modes and packages.

leke 6y ago

Trying to learn Finish vocab, Anki made me realize I had terrible recall. Sometimes, I couldn't even remember what the last freaking card was, and I would forget most things the next day, and everything the day after. After about 3 weeks, I had only remembered 3 or 4 words, so I gave up.

knuthsat 6y ago
There’s a setting you can tweak allowing you to set smaller intervals like 1 3 7 15 30 minutes until card will be postponed for the next day. Takes a bit longer to learn a new card but it should work. I went from 30% forgotten on each session to 5-10%.
nabla9 6y ago
Learning and memory is a complex thing. If you don't learn even after adjusting the interval, I think there is something else. Lack of motivation, some mental issue like depression, attention problem while learning. You can't learn stuff like you sweep a floor, tune out and just do the movements.
pelario 6y ago
Hi there. I'm also using Anki for Finish vocab, and it had helped me a lot. To the point it does feel like a super power. If you are going to use Anki, it's important to switch the knobs to adapt to what you are learning. I will share some of the things that have worked for me, for Finnish vocab: - Intervals for new cards (until they are considered 'learned'): 1 10 15 50 240. The 240 is critical for me: if I forgot it after 4 hours, it goes back to 1 again... if I got it after 4 hours, then it will have better chances in a couple of days. Of course this is personal, I have been tweaking those until something makes sense to me. - Lapese (when a known card is forgotten, and how to re-learn): 10 30 240. Again the 240 check. - Set an ammount of new cards and max reviews per day that does not make you feel misserable... there needs to be some joy on learning... If I may ask, are you just learning the vocab ? have you taken courses? Where are you getting the vocab from ?
- eska 6y ago
  Just ignore the remaining card count and go by time instead. Getting the remaining count to 0 does nothing. Redefine success as "I set out to do Anki for 10 minutes and I did!".

jayflux 6y ago

Checkout https://github.com/jasonwilliams/anki https://github.com/jasonwilliams/anki if you want to send any markdown notes to Anki from VSCode

pushpendra7 6y ago

Rqr1qqqqqêeeeee

prox 6y ago
Hi cat! Stop walking on the keyboard!

prox 6y ago

What’s the program of anki they use? Somehow none of the links mention that.

Smaug123 6y ago
Anki is a program. The first link in the entire article is to https://apps.ankiweb.net https://apps.ankiweb.net.
- prox 6y ago
  Gotcha! Thanks!

Jabbles 6y ago

I have used Anki productively, I think it's a great tool, and should be a component of learning in many fields. But I can't help but think it could be a lot better, a lot more efficient, perhaps even 2x more. Anki allows you to customise many aspects of when cards are shown. But presumably those settings can be tuned for a individual, a subject, or even a card. One person probably doesn't have enough data to know what would be most efficient, so they guess, or stay with the defaults. Part of this is due to the lack of data - and the privacy concerns that would accompany Anki harvesting it all and feeding it to a machine learning system. But if an SRS system were recommended by and developed by a national curriculum, I suspect it could be a lot cleverer and more efficient. As one example, consider if you had to learn the translations of 2 words. And students often got them confused. Then perhaps getting one wrong should also prompt a test of the other, or indeed maybe it should delay the test of the other? Who knows...

nuclearnice1 6y ago
This is a great idea. Thanks for sharing. Just to restate what you said, adding nothing. Imagine you had Anki for a similar cohort studying a coherent single course. You’ll be able to get a sense of what topics confuse everyone and what correlation there are in confusion. If you had trouble with X, then you need extra guidance on A & B.
- germinalphrase 6y ago
  I’m a teacher. There is a great deal to the profession that does depend on experience, intuition and relationship building; however, better data on what - exactly - my students know/can do would be a great boon. I believe better assessment tools are the key here, but SRS system data would be another useful channel (and does, of course, have an assessment component to it).
  - nuclearnice1 6y ago
    What level of granularity do you think about “what the students know?” do problems, say in math, map to concepts? students don’t know concepts? Or is it more subtle?

m3kw9 6y ago

Isn't Anki good only for memorization? Spaced repetition doesn't seem to help learning how something relates to another logically like how to determine when to use what programming patterns.

ratsimihah 6y ago
I think Anki helps build the necessary knowledge base to make such connections, but actually making those connections comes with putting that knowledge into practice.
Smaug123 6y ago
It can help. In the article, I recommend Nielsen "Seeing through a piece of mathematics", which is about exactly this. http://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics http://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics
BeetleB 6y ago
> Spaced repetition doesn't seem to help learning how something relates to another logically like how to determine when to use what programming patterns. You can make cards for those. Of course, if you're making cards on those without understanding and internalizing, the cards won't help you.
milansm 6y ago
Back at the uni days if I struggled to understand a math concept, proof or algo, I would just memorize it. After a while the understanding part would also come.
TheTrotters 6y ago
It's great for math, for example. It's spacing + testing effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_effect Suppose you can solve some problem or prove some theorem today. Then you try to do it again next week, next month and so on. It's very different from rote memorization.
sn9 6y ago
Yes you don't use Anki for understanding. First you understand something, then you convert that understanding into flashcards so it sticks in your long-term memory.

CoffeePython 6y ago

Seems to be a lot of interest in this space. I’m trying to combine the “rote-ness” of anki with learning by doing. In Deliberate Python[1] I’m combining spaced repetition lessons with small exercises that encourage you to really focus and get the question right the first time. The encouragement to get it right the first time, as often as possible, is something I learned from learning music. Practice makes permanent [1] https://www.sendfox.com/deliberatepython https://www.sendfox.com/deliberatepython Note: this project is pre launch so this is a newsletter where I’m giving progress updates. Plan to launch into beta in a month or two

wendyshu 6y ago

What's the point of memorizing a bunch of facts you could easily look up on the web?

dieortin 6y ago
I guess people shouldn’t study history anymore when they can just look up things on the web
- wendyshu 6y ago
  There's more to learning history than memorizing facts.
arkitaip 6y ago
Competency and efficiency.
Viliam1234 6y ago
If the facts are in your head, you can make a connection between them. If they are in different places on the web, unless someone else already linked them for you, they remain separate.
- wendyshu 6y ago
  Can you give an example?
  - waxachasee 6y ago
    Anki is used a lot in medical education. There's a lot of small details, and you can string them along to form the big picture. An example is going from symptoms -> diagnosis -> treatment options -> drug side effects. You can't just memorize use drug X for Y, but you incorporate information that you know to formulate the best plan. Suppose the patient has kidney disease - you've memorized X is nephrotoxic so you find another treatment. I will say this is easier for some and harder for others. I've noticed some people have a lot of difficulty recalling facts without a specific cue when using Anki. It's best used with traditional learning, but you can focus more on the why.

noman-land 6y ago

Excuse me if this is dumb question but this is the second time I've downloaded AnkiDroid and... am I supposed to answer the questions in the app or just do it in my head and then click show answer. I don't see any buttons to answer the question or enter your answer in the app. I am dumb or is something not working right?

Smaug123 6y ago
Answer the question in your head, show the answer, and click the button corresponding to how easy it was. It's digital flashcards.
- noman-land 6y ago
  Thank you for clarifying.
Anon1096 6y ago
You can add cards with answerable fields, but after many thousands of reviews I think that simple front-back cards where you answer in your head are the most effective. The extra work to type out an answer is not worth the hassle at all.

maxdarapper 6y ago

Anki is good, but the problems that I had with it was that I was not learning the flashcards well enough on the first day to to recall those flashcards on subsequent days and it took too long to make flashcards, so I made myself a flashcards app. http://flashcardmax.com/download http://flashcardmax.com/download

moralsupply 6y ago

Is there a software less clunky than Anki out there with similar functionality?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
wenc 6y ago
Quizlet has a vastly better UI but they quietly removed the SRS functionality for some reason.
ricg 6y ago
Shameless plug: I make an SRS app called Flashcard Hero[1] (iOS/macOS/Windows). I strive to keep the app as easy to use as possible. [1]: http://flashcardhero.com http://flashcardhero.com
- jbc1 6y ago
  Definitely looks more user friendly than Anki. Could you talk a little about your SRS algorithm? Are you using SM2?
  - ricg 6y ago
    After you memorized a card for the first time, it is presented again on the very next day. If you can still recall it right away it moves to the next stage, which is then shown again in 2 days. Intervals double from then on. If you have difficulties recalling a card, it moves back to the start. You can customize the intervals yourself per deck to adjust for the subject (e.g. vocabulary cards with only one word per card probably can have longer intervals than, let's say, an anatomy card with details about a muscle, bone or nerve).
allenu 6y ago
I'm actually about to release my own SRS-based flash card app in a few days if you can wait a little bit. [1] I'm just putting the finishing touches on it and will release to macOS and iOS. I think Anki is a great tool, but I think there are so many aspects of it that can be improved, so I decided to write my own app. I'm hoping to refine the SRS algorithm, lesson UI, and card layout over time as I get input from folks about what works and what doesn't. I think there's a lot of potential for improvement in this space if someone devotes some time to it. 1. https://www.ussherpress.com/freshcards/ https://www.ussherpress.com/freshcards/

krosaen 6y ago

I use Anki a few times a week. When I've used it for math (as I work my way through Gilbert Strang's book "Linear Algebra and its applications"), I add full problems that seemed to be key to the topic, or surprised me in some way. These take longer to review, but I find it's been really helpful. And once it sticks, I don't have to review it again for months. I also find it can be helpful to have a single card that prompts review of related definitions, for instance: "What are the four subspaces of a matrix A? What are their dimensions with respect to the rank r of A? What are they subspaces of? (Fundamental theorem of Linear Algebra part 1)" Remembering these things together is easier for me than breaking this down into multiple cards as one piece of this in isolation doesn't make as much sense as a part of the whole. This is all to say that I disagree with the author on the point that it's important to find ways to break up cards to be bite sized. Otherwise great post IMO!

Smaug123 6y ago
If it works for you, then go for it - just do keep an eye on it, and if it stops working then notice early!
eska 6y ago
But by keeping those things together you're essentially cheating. You won't be able to remember these things in isolation as well. Also if it's easy for you to remember the rank of the matrix, but not the subspaces, you will be asked about the rank too often, since you connected it to subspaces.
- krosaen 6y ago
  In the example of the fundamental theorem of LA, the key point is the relationship between the subspaces (there are other ones just about the definition of a nullspace for example) - agree if every card was like this it would not be ideal. I think my more important point was about problem sets, for instance: Construct a matrix with the required property, or explain why you can't. - left nullspace contains [1 3]^T - rowspace contains [3 1]^T breaks down into a few steps, and trying to break that down into bite sized flashcards such as, "what's the key idea in constructing a matrix with left nullspace [1 3]^T" and "given a matrix that is the product of L with row [1 3] can you choose a U so that combined they form a matrix with row space [3 1]?" seems like it could risk in resulting in me not being able to figure out the entire problem together. But maybe not? Bringing it back to the post's proof example, what if you had completely nailed every step of the proof such that Anki doesn't ask you about it for a while, and then 6 months later, one of the harder steps comes up in isolation: "What is the second adjustment we make in the proof of the ratio test, a < 1?" what if you can't remember the first steps? Would having the rest of the context help? I guess it's a tradeoff.

tedmcory77 6y ago

What anki desperately needs (to the point years ago I explored this), is out of app nudges. I know I know, lots of folks dont like nagware, but I've found that for recreational things sometimes life happens and I just forget to go back to certain decks. If it's not tied to a goal I never get back to it.

JulianWasTaken 6y ago
At least on Android, it definitely has this. Settings > AnkiDroid > Notify when (X number of cards due, etc.)
- tedmcory77 6y ago
  Nice! I wasn't aware of this (but sadly wont be able to take advantage of it).
  - pokemod97 6y ago
    The IOS app also has the ability to set a notification at a certain time.
jedimastert 6y ago
Just make sure you don't go full Duolingo... never go full Duolingo...
ngokevin 6y ago
Building my own Anki, but focused on language learning for couples, so you'll get nudges. Both from the app, and from your partner :)

wenc 6y ago

Just wondering if anyone has tried combining Anki with handwriting for improved retention? (any personal experiments?) In language learning, memorizing words in a shallow way tends to not be as helpful as memorizing them in a sentence (shallow vs deep encoding). One can try to ankify sentences, but it's too easy to click on the green button and fool oneself that one has mastered the sentence. Anki works great for snippets of atomic knowledge but doesn't work as well for sequential/series knowledge like sentences. On the other hand, there's another method called the Gold List method which is a pen-and-paper based SRS system which requires writing out complete sentences and testing recall every 2 weeks or so. Pen-and-paper folks like it, but due to the limitations of paper, implementing a proper SRS is far too tedious. What if one were to use Anki for the SRS part, and handwrite the responses? Handwriting sounds tedious, but I wonder if it helps deepen the encoding? (by forcing reconstruction of the sentence, slowing one down enough to dwell on the form and grammar, as well as adding a physical element to the task)

codyb 6y ago
I’ve used Anki prior and always wished there was an easy way to inject a bit of randomness into it. For instance, you could have the idea of a “template” such as <Pronoun> <Tense of to go> <Place> and <Same Tense of to see> a <Noun>. A lot of times things probably would be a bit non sensical such as “They went to the bank and saw an apple.” “She will go to the Eiffel Tower to see a motorboat.” But I always thought it would really help me a lot more than the more rote aspects. Of course, then the spaced repetition might be less effective due to the variety of the same card, and it may be more like studying something new.
- IanCal 6y ago
  I think you can embed JavaScript in a card so you could do this. You'd probably want something to help you create them though.
mrwebmaster 6y ago
I do, but not for language learning, but for mathematical proofs and logic proofs. Example "Prove that the dot product between 2 unit vectors is cos θ".

Ozzie_osman 6y ago

What programs do people use for Anki? I've tried the usual suspects, and found them a little too tedious. What I'd love is: - seamless syncing of cards between my devices. - more thought into the engagement loop (ie getting me to not be lazy and actually do the work). - an easily searchable database with credible curated decks.

codyb 6y ago
I think Anki’s official app has those features? It was about 20 bucks on iPhone and free on OS X I believe, not sure about other platforms. The thing that would always get me would be that I would make a card on the phone and forget to manually sync it or something and then make a card on the computer and have to resolve conflicts. They really just needed an “add all cards from all sources” feature since that was generally all I wanted.
hamolton 6y ago
Ankidroid syncs with Ankiweb just like Anki desktop does, and I like it because I can swipe right/left to say if I remember a card or not. The decks are on https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/ https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/ although I wouldn't call that curated; the most used curated list is probably the sidebar of /r/medicalschoolanki. I am unaware of CS/higher math decks, though. Perhaps this is a decent list? https://github.com/MilesCranmer/anki_science https://github.com/MilesCranmer/anki_science

crumbshot 6y ago

I tried using Anki but found it far too boring to sustain my interest. Staring at fact flashcards for hours on end just felt like a waste of time. In my experience it was much more useful and engaging to learn by doing things (creating, writing, experimenting) that the facts were related to - then the most necessary facts would become deeply embedded in my memory, with others at just the right level of vagueness necessary to look up the details if needed.

agd 6y ago
I think to make the most of it you need to engage your imagination. Relating stories and context to the facts transforms it from ‘staring at flashcards for hours’ into more of a game and something to enjoy. And the great thing is, because of the spaced repetition, you don’t need to spend hours on it at a time. You can learn a lot in 5/10 mins a day.
- leppr 6y ago
  When I was starting Anki, I would spend time really focusing my thinking on the cards while reviewing them (reading sentences aloud multiple times until pronunciation is good, relating concepts to others, ...). I'm now convinced this is a waste of time and Anki is best used rushing through sessions as fast as possible (maximum 20min a day). This takes care of the small, boring but often essential rote memorization part, allowing you to use as much of your time and intellect for actual practice in the target domains. (This may not apply if the target domain is actually itself rote memorization, e.g. medical exams)
  - BeetleB 6y ago
    20 min a day is still a lot - unless it's mostly due to adding a lot of cards per day.
    - tomcatfish 6y ago
      For context in this thread, my maximum study in the last 2 months was 10.42 minutes, but my mode (and average as well, that point is an outlier) is close to 3 or 4

miguelrochefort 6y ago

I've completed my Bachelor of Computer Science in just 3 months thanks to deliberate practice and memorization techniques (flashcards, Anki). It shows how outdated our education system is and how much better it could be.

barry-cotter 6y ago
You should write an article or blog post on how you did it.
- miguelrochefort 6y ago
  It's not a big secret, it's WGU. I'll write about it in November.

jkmcf 6y ago

Pro tip: review flash cards while taking a bio break instead of social media, etc.

nmca 6y ago

Has anyone got a solid anki deck for probability and linear algebra?

Smaug123 6y ago
I'd strongly recommend making them yourself. Everyone understands these things differently, and ideally your cards will complement the structures already represented in your own mind. Ideally, a card will shine light on one tiny aspect of the model you already have in your mind; if you're using cards shaped around a different model, and you drop them into place around your own model, the lights may be at strange angles or highlighting big complex things.
- RMPR 6y ago
  Can definitely relate, Anki started to make sense after I started creating my own cards. Not batch-creating mind you, but carefully crafting each one, and updating when necessary while reviewing.
BeetleB 6y ago
Decks other people wrote usually aren't useful. You need to make your own flash cards. It's painful, but it's much more useful.
- hikarudo 6y ago
  I used to think so too. Then I read the research on this, and the evidence suggests the opposite of what you wrote: your time is better spent doing retrieval practice than creating your own cards. https://www.learningscientists.org/ https://www.learningscientists.org/
  - BeetleB 6y ago
    I think the counterargument is more along the lines of: Downloadable decks will have a fairly high percentage of irrelevant cards for you, and will always lack a lot of useful cards for you (the latter is something I'm pretty sure is true). When I am exposed to some new thing, parts of it will stick immediately, and other parts will need some kind of processing on my part before I internalize it. When you are exposed to the same new thing, those parts that stick and those that need processing will usually differ from mine. Hence it's hard to make a deck that works well for the majority.

quantum_state 6y ago

Thought people have been using similar techniques all along since ages ago ... the post seemed to present it as something new ...

Smaug123 6y ago
Really? I may be the author, but I have been utterly unable to extract that meaning from… any of the text I wrote.

ochronus 6y ago

I'm new to this method, earlier (much earlier) I dismissed it as something silly (I know, I know...) - what are your favorite decks?

ablekh 6y ago

I have just installed Anki on my Windows 10 computer and was disappointed to find that it has no ability to scale the application's UI or, better yet, configure font size (and, maybe even font family) on a per-component basis. If any Anki developers are reading this thread, please consider this comment as a relevant feature request.

deleted 6y ago
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DarmokJalad1701 6y ago

I used Anki to pass my GRE Verbal Test back in the day. Haven't really used it since then.

galfarragem 6y ago

I have mixed feelings on Anki: - It worked great to memorize cyrillic alphabet. - It's working not so well to memorize Polish words (I have around 500 in a custom-made deck). Reading Polish news simply works better for me but I don't know why.

BeetleB 6y ago
Application of knowledge frequently (e.g. reading Polish news regularly) works on somewhat the same principle as Anki (repeated exposure is the key), but is likely a bit better as its more interesting and with context.

baby 6y ago

I can’t get used to Anki’s UI. I’ve tried it many times and failed. It’s sort of like org mode to me. Instead I use memrise.com

digianarchist 6y ago
Anki's UI is really bad across all applications.

biophysboy 6y ago

I've been learning Japanese since the pandemic hit, and Anki has been an indispensible tool. One thing that is great about it is people have already created great decks of the most common vocabulary, complete with audio and images. I would imagine people have done this for comp sci as well.

JoeDaDude 6y ago

For those that would rather use an analog method, you can make a Leitner Box of flash cards, which, if you follow the schedule, works in a similar way as Anki. I find that writing the cards out by hand is the first step in memorizing them. See how to use one in this interactive comic: https://ncase.me/remember/ https://ncase.me/remember/

eska 6y ago
The issue with that is that I'd be at a 5 digit number of cards by now, certainly wouldn't keep all of those around, and so I'd stop revising old knowledge.
- JoeDaDude 6y ago
  True. The method sends cards that are already memorized to the back (so to speak) where they are revisited less often. You could conceivably retire those cards forever and take them out the box.

a-dub 6y ago

Tried anki in college, found that creating the cards took too much time and doing them was boring. What did work for me was really simple. A single 8 1/2 by 11 double sided sheet of paper could usually fit everything I needed to memorize at one given time. I'd write out a cheat sheet (a very valuable exercise in condensing and distilling while reviewing) and then reproduce it from memory before and after bed three days in a row allowing a tapered amount of cheating/peeking (with the first few being pretty much all peeking). After three days, it was pretty much good as memorized.

Normal_gaussian 6y ago
and many years later? As I understand it the benefit is to have strong recall over longer than just an exam or university course; more like for an entire career stage. How far into your career are you, and how much of the material you learned in this way have you retained? Have you fairly tested the retention?
- a-dub 6y ago
  like anything it's use it or lose it. memorization works for short term, continued application in different settings is what makes it stick.
  - BeetleB 6y ago
    Memorization works well in the long term if you use flash cards, which was the point of the question.
sah55 6y ago
This is just memorization through brute repetition without the SRS optimization. Less efficient, and more time consuming.
- BeetleB 6y ago
  That's a bit harsh. As someone who regularly uses flash cards, creating them really is a bottleneck. It's a lot quicker to handwrite something on a paper. It's not as effective, but it definitely is faster.

virissimo 6y ago

I definitely agree that SRS can reasonably be thought of as a learning superpower. I very much regret that I didn't start using Anki until college. To save my own kids from such a regret, I've created Boethius, a SRS web application for the classical liberal arts to augment our homeschool curriculum. It's now in public beta here: https://www.boethi.us/ https://www.boethi.us/. Let me know what you think!

realjohng 6y ago

Wish I had used this when I was student learning history or biology or even cs algo run times!

sone3d 6y ago

An iOS Anki alternative app? The official costs 27,99€ and I would give it a shot if not for the high price.

clockman 6y ago

I use anki with org-noter and the anki-editor minor mode for digesting PDFs, a sort of hacked version of incremental reading. I just stuff entire definitions and proofs into it and use cloze deletions for almost everything, then I attach a bunch of screenshots from the source material in the "Extra" field for any context when/if I fail the card. That, combined with the load balancer plugin and a limit of 5 new cards per day keeps my daily reviews around 1 hour. I have 18,000 cards. I'm familiar with the 20 rules for formulating knowledge but I just don't care to break things down into atoms. So I cloze and forget.

phobosanomaly 6y ago

Usage of Anki in the biomedical community is frequently mentioned, but I just wanted to add some notes. These are based on my own personal experiences and conversations with med students, so YMMV. I personally use Anki with the Image Occlusion Enhanced and Speed Focus Mode add-ons almost every-day, and frequently use text-to-speech/swipe gestures on the android app to review cards while hiking. If you're casually doing like 20 cards a day on the train while commuting to work, this will definitely not apply. A. Anki is almost never used alone in medical education. It's used as an aid to retaining information within a heavily-structured curriculum where you're going over the same concepts over, and over, and over in the form of lectures, clinical encounters, supplemental videos, more lectures, anatomy lab, histology lab, boards-prep, etc. So, like the author said, there's a ton of med students using it, but context is very important. B. Lots of people don't use the algorithm. They use it in cram-mode to drill a subset of a pre-made deck into their head before an exam. Even if you never use the SRS algorithm, Anki is by-far the greatest flashcard program ever built (cloud sync, TTS, robust image support, open-source, etc.). C. Many of the people grinding thousands of cards a day have a lot of factual knowledge, but really aren't great at stitching it together for practical application. If you need to memorize random facts, great, but be very aware of that potential limitation. D. Game-pads are the secret weapon. Joy2Key, or roll-your-own in Python like I did with the Inputs and PyAutoGui packages. E. Use it with a very specific goal in mind. Med students are by-and-large using it specifically for the USMLE Step 1 exam, in which you have to memorize a finite, well-delineated set of information, much of which is irrelevant after the first two years. I've never met anyone who has graduated med school and kept using it, because grinding cards sucks and life is short. F. Don't be afraid to commit deck bankruptcy. If you're reviewing 900 cards a day, and you don't know why anymore, delete the deck and start from scratch. G. There's a distinct balance between reviewing cards so frequently that you've memorized the cards not the concepts, and making the cards so challenging that it takes too long to review efficiently (I did 871 cards in about 2 hours today - that's a common number for a med student, some kids are doing thousands per-day - like, they roll out of bed and start tapping on that game controller). Be very, very aware of that memorizing the cards thing. You probably don't know as much as you think you do. So, in summary, it's a really cool program. I wouldn't characterize it as a superpower, however, since it has some glaring downsides, and is not particularly noteworthy when used in a vacuum. Again, that's from somebody doing >500 cards/day.

pooya13 6y ago

Quickly skimming through the webpage for the app it worded like they came up with the idea of spaced repetition. Just want to clarify that this is not a new concept: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

iamjohnsears 6y ago

I used Anki extensively in grad school. There was a moment when I realized it was really working in a class on linear dynamical systems— all of a sudden everything just got easy. It takes discipline to both create good cards and study regularly, but man the payoff is good. That said... I stopped as soon as grad school was over and haven’t had the willpower to continue consolidating that knowledge.

bicepjai 6y ago

First of all, thanks for showing Anki to me. I see lot of apps for Anki; any suggestion which ones are good to start with ?

Valakas 6y ago

I've used Anki for language learning but didn't find it that useful. A problem I encountered was that while I could remember words and expressions in the Anki environment, I couldn't do it outside of it. Or I could memorize an expression exactly as it was written down, but if I saw a little variation then it was useless. For language learning I found it works way better to use another technique: ridiculous imagery and word association. Higher initial time investment (have to spend some time for each new word in the first time I see) but after that I don't EVER need to recall it again. It just sticks. I also used that to memorize different alphabets and it's WAY easier and does feel like a superpower as opposed to just brute force memorize something by repetition and recall with no other brain connections between what we're memorizing and what we already know.

cafard 6y ago

At the moment, this is #180. At #173 is an article about walking as a superpower. Did I mess a memo about superpowers as the meme of the month?

KerryJohnson 6y ago

I’ve used several learning apps with SRS for learning Chinese. I started with Anki, then tried Memrise and eventually stumbled upon a relatively new alternative - https://www.hackchinese.com/ https://www.hackchinese.com/ Anki is no doubt a helpful tool. However, at some stage, I caught myself wasting a lot of time making my vocabulary cards and I noticed that my progress slowed down. It seems to me that in Memrise and Hack Chinese language learning features are implemented more effectively. Most likely, as the article suggests, the point is that these apps were designed specifically for learning a language in the case of Memrise, and for learning Chinese in the case of Hack Chinese. Well, it’s quite reasonable to assume that spaced repetition principles work better when adjusted to a narrow goal. Anyway, even though SRS software is very useful, I don’t think it has a superpower. I’m not sure how it works for maths and computer science, but when it comes to learning languages, you can’t reach a high level of proficiency by focusing on some relatively isolated parts of a language. Reading, listening, writing, and speaking are necessary to learn how words are used and to achieve the ability to use these words yourself. For serious learners, SRS software is important, but it’s just one tool in their toolkit.