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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 be

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?
patresh 6y ago
I agree with your comment. As a sidenote concerning your last point, Gabriel Wyner's book "Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It" explains in detail how to build an SRS system to learn a language and it strongly advises against using translation tasks in your SRS. Instead of thinking in the target language, your mind will create strong associations with the words in your original language and make it difficult to think in the target language by always having to refer to the original language. A better task design would be receiving images and coming up with the word in the target language.
- marta_morena_28 6y ago
  Yeah that works for the first 1000 words perhaps. Then you run out of images to show. Many of the more complicated words simply can't be disambiguated by images. Learning words by translation is totally fine. The point is not to use this as your ONLY learning method. You use it to SEED words. Once you know like 5000 words, you will be able to read books and also look up words in same-language dictionaries. But still learning more words with translation still should work well as long as you get 90% or so of your language exposure without translation. Learning words is just a tiny part of the task.
  - patresh 6y ago
    Learning words by translation is fine but what the book argues is that it's very inefficient, because you seed them with respect to your original language so you build a habit of going back and forth between the languages when trying to come up with a word instead of staying immersed. The advantage of images is first of all that visual cues are very powerful for memory, the more senses you associate with a memory the stronger it will be (I wonder if anyone has ever tried to incorporate smells into SRS?). Furthermore, it is not always easy to find a decent image but the mere search for this image will make your brain work with that word in mind and create associations. Granted, it is not easy to find images for words such as "philosophy" but with a bit of creativity it is possible and if not, it's always possible to explain the target word in the target language to stay immersed.
allenu 6y ago
I agree that there could be so much more to how cards are reviewed. For instance, what if some cards were made dependent on other cards? You could have some cards that have basic vocabulary and then another set of cards that use that vocabulary in sentences. There's no point in learning the sentences if you haven't sufficiently mastered the vocabulary, so what if the app showed you the sentence cards only if it has determined that you've learned the word cards sufficiently?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
divan 6y ago
So much this. I use Anki for more than a decade, and every single time there is a touch of frustration that Anki UX stuck in mid-2000. Another super annoying feature is that historically Anki is free except iOS – somehow mentality of "iOS users are rich" sneaked in – and Anki for iOS costs ~25$. This makes it prohibitively hard to recommend Anki to non-Android users, especially to younger generation which virtually don't use desktops, type much faster on mobile rather then PC keyboard, etc.
- hpfr 6y ago
  As a desktop and iOS user (and a member of a younger generation), this doesn’t bother me too much, to be honest. Free software projects might as well take advantage of closed distribution platforms as a revenue source when they’re the only option for distribution, in my opinion. That said, $25 is on the high side, but is that really prohibitive, even for students, or has the history of ingrained low price expectations in the mobile app ecosystem made us more shocked than we should be at a $25 one-time fee? People certainly frequently pay more for subscriptions now. Regardless of the reason behind it, you’re right, it is admittedly hard to convince a large portion of iOS users that $25 for an app is worth it, which is unfortunate for Anki. But I don’t know if a free version would be worth the trade-offs.
- kixiQu 6y ago
  It costs money to publish an iOS app in a way that it does not for Android. In addition, the Android app was able to leverage the fact that Anki's desktop app is written in Java. It has nothing to do with an idea that "iOS users are rich". It is easy to recommend Ankiweb instead since it works well enough for mobile. (I also question whether there are really a significant number of people who type -- at least Latin characters -- faster on mobile than a PC keyboard, but that's a digression)
  - nullsense 6y ago
    I thought the desktop app was written in Python?
    - 6y ago
knuthsat 6y ago
It’s a SRS without context. You could probably put contextual bandits somewhere in the loop and optimize for the individual. I found it very disappointing when Duolingo released their paper on optimizing their global SRS on data they collected from the users. There was no context, only curve fitting for a better multipler of fail and success.
garfieldnate 6y ago
I wish that Anki would do some opt-in data gathering and open-source the resulting data. Some really amazing stuff could be done with that! Duolingo open-sourced a data set and a model for learning the best time to present ideas for review; however, the model seems to be extremely limited and I could not get it to work at all. I think the best open source solution here is Ebisu: https://github.com/fasiha/ebisu https://github.com/fasiha/ebisu. It uses a custom statistical model which incorporates the idea of memory half-life, which is supported by learning research.

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?

patresh 6y ago

I agree with your comment. As a sidenote concerning your last point, Gabriel Wyner's book "Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It" explains in detail how to build an SRS system to learn a language and it strongly advises against using translation tasks in your SRS. Instead of thinking in the target language, your mind will create strong associations with the words in your original language and make it difficult to think in the target language by always having to refer to the original language. A better task design would be receiving images and coming up with the word in the target language.

marta_morena_28 6y ago
Yeah that works for the first 1000 words perhaps. Then you run out of images to show. Many of the more complicated words simply can't be disambiguated by images. Learning words by translation is totally fine. The point is not to use this as your ONLY learning method. You use it to SEED words. Once you know like 5000 words, you will be able to read books and also look up words in same-language dictionaries. But still learning more words with translation still should work well as long as you get 90% or so of your language exposure without translation. Learning words is just a tiny part of the task.
- patresh 6y ago
  Learning words by translation is fine but what the book argues is that it's very inefficient, because you seed them with respect to your original language so you build a habit of going back and forth between the languages when trying to come up with a word instead of staying immersed. The advantage of images is first of all that visual cues are very powerful for memory, the more senses you associate with a memory the stronger it will be (I wonder if anyone has ever tried to incorporate smells into SRS?). Furthermore, it is not always easy to find a decent image but the mere search for this image will make your brain work with that word in mind and create associations. Granted, it is not easy to find images for words such as "philosophy" but with a bit of creativity it is possible and if not, it's always possible to explain the target word in the target language to stay immersed.

allenu 6y ago

I agree that there could be so much more to how cards are reviewed. For instance, what if some cards were made dependent on other cards? You could have some cards that have basic vocabulary and then another set of cards that use that vocabulary in sentences. There's no point in learning the sentences if you haven't sufficiently mastered the vocabulary, so what if the app showed you the sentence cards only if it has determined that you've learned the word cards sufficiently?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

divan 6y ago

So much this. I use Anki for more than a decade, and every single time there is a touch of frustration that Anki UX stuck in mid-2000. Another super annoying feature is that historically Anki is free except iOS – somehow mentality of "iOS users are rich" sneaked in – and Anki for iOS costs ~25$. This makes it prohibitively hard to recommend Anki to non-Android users, especially to younger generation which virtually don't use desktops, type much faster on mobile rather then PC keyboard, etc.

hpfr 6y ago
As a desktop and iOS user (and a member of a younger generation), this doesn’t bother me too much, to be honest. Free software projects might as well take advantage of closed distribution platforms as a revenue source when they’re the only option for distribution, in my opinion. That said, $25 is on the high side, but is that really prohibitive, even for students, or has the history of ingrained low price expectations in the mobile app ecosystem made us more shocked than we should be at a $25 one-time fee? People certainly frequently pay more for subscriptions now. Regardless of the reason behind it, you’re right, it is admittedly hard to convince a large portion of iOS users that $25 for an app is worth it, which is unfortunate for Anki. But I don’t know if a free version would be worth the trade-offs.
kixiQu 6y ago
It costs money to publish an iOS app in a way that it does not for Android. In addition, the Android app was able to leverage the fact that Anki's desktop app is written in Java. It has nothing to do with an idea that "iOS users are rich". It is easy to recommend Ankiweb instead since it works well enough for mobile. (I also question whether there are really a significant number of people who type -- at least Latin characters -- faster on mobile than a PC keyboard, but that's a digression)
- nullsense 6y ago
  I thought the desktop app was written in Python?
  - 6y ago

knuthsat 6y ago

It’s a SRS without context. You could probably put contextual bandits somewhere in the loop and optimize for the individual. I found it very disappointing when Duolingo released their paper on optimizing their global SRS on data they collected from the users. There was no context, only curve fitting for a better multipler of fail and success.

garfieldnate 6y ago

I wish that Anki would do some opt-in data gathering and open-source the resulting data. Some really amazing stuff could be done with that! Duolingo open-sourced a data set and a model for learning the best time to present ideas for review; however, the model seems to be extremely limited and I could not get it to work at all. I think the best open source solution here is Ebisu: https://github.com/fasiha/ebisu https://github.com/fasiha/ebisu. It uses a custom statistical model which incorporates the idea of memory half-life, which is supported by learning research.