11 ms·

How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

199 points by simbyotic 6y ago

drewcoo 6y ago
> The Centuries Old Science They Don’t Tell You About Conspiracy? Well it must be true.
- thotsBgone 6y ago
  More like, "The not-yet centuries old science they constantly tell you about on Hacker News."
JamesBarney 6y ago
One way I've successfully used Anki is learning new technology. It can't directly teach you the concepts, but it's much easier to learn and and retain the concepts when you're drilling the building blocks.
- growman 6y ago
  The mere fact of retrieving information from memory helped me in understanding. I was using Anki back when I was learning Python, and it definitely helps in productivity (reducing my hits to StackOverflow to 50%+).
nomad225 6y ago
Any suggestions for what to use Anki to remember in everyday life as a software engineer?
- Graziano_M 6y ago
  * [your lang] std lib functions, their arg order. * HTTP status codes * Acronyms * Syntax mistakes (spot the bug). * Command line or vim snippets, e.g. "write a for loop over all files in a directory in bash" "grep and only show match" I find it most useful for catching things I commonly screw up. The trick, of course, is to build the habit of identifying when you've repeated a blunder and then to make it into a card. An example for this in Go would be using `range` and forgetting the second arg: `for val := range slice` is legal syntax, but `val` is actually the index var here, it should be `for _, val := range slice`.
- clankyclanker 6y ago
  That feels like a really broad question. I always find it useful to look up the reading lists for university courses on subjects I’m interested in. You can usually find the PDFs with a quick search in Google Scholar. Then, using something like Polar, you can annotate the readings and directly save your annotations as Anki cards. That way, you can build a knowledge base of what actually interests you, which you’re much more likely to study and retain in the first place.
- devilduck 6y ago
  Maybe start by using it to remember git commands, or something of that nature
- JxLS-cpgbe0 6y ago
  The NATO phonetic alphabet. If you've ever tried to read an email, password or any set of letters over the phone, it makes it a lot easier. It's not an obvious thing, but it's only 26 cards.
- jamestimmins 6y ago
  Possibly command line utilities like awk/sed/etc? I've used them a bit for Docker commands.
- qznc 6y ago
  Acronyms. In my role as software architect I encounter a new block of acronyms every few months.
- hpoe 6y ago
  I use it to help me as a cloud engineer. For an example of some of the things I use it for. I have cards that are for - Emacs Commands - Emacs Key Strokes - Greek letters, words and sounds - The wikipedia List of non-standard dates - Physic ideas - General principles of organization - Learning principles - Bible verses - Command line utility options - Vimium key strokes Basically anything that I want to learn I end up ankifying. I find that Anki is most effective for remembering things that I don't do all the time, but need to remember two or three times a week/month. Here's a good tip, if you need to DuckDuckGo it more than once it's probably a good idea to throw it in an Anki card.
- blackbear_ 6y ago
  Just make a card for anything that you had to look up more than once.
- simbyotic 6y ago
  Author of the piece here. My number one recommendation is to not get overly excited about it. One of the first things that happen when you start using Anki and realize the superpower that it is being in charge of your memory is that you want to include EVERYTHING in it. You start creating cards with obscure bash one-liners, little-used git commands, or Javascript functions you read about in a random article. You add all of it to Anki. After all, you might use them in the future right? And it doesn't cost you anything to create a card with them so why not. What happens is that because you don't have a clear picture of why those cards are valuable to you - you just added them because they might be useful, one of these days - you will have trouble retaining their knowledge, meaning that you will keep failing to successfully review those cards. And because of the way spaced repetition algorithms work, those cards will be constantly appearing in your reviews, and you will keep failing them. And they will keep appearing. And so on and so forth until you lose all motivation to use Anki because it's becoming a frustrating experience to do your reviews. The most important thing about using Anki is to keep using it. That's how you get the benefits of it, so be more selective about what you add to Anki instead of profligately adding cards that you gain nothing from.
  - moneywoes 6y ago
    Do you have a sample deck
  - Kelamir 6y ago
    I think a good way would be to only ankify things that would save one 5 or so minutes of one's time.
  - nullsense 6y ago
    This was exactly my experience when I tried to use it for software engineering. This is after having used it incredibly successfully to learn Japanese a decade prior and being very experienced with it.
    - porknubbins 6y ago
      I’m having some success remembering C++ with Anki because the language itself has such massive complexity and syntax. I am inputting Scott Meyers books into it right now. Its still really hard to write good prompts with enough context- akin to writing an interview type quiz. So far I think the main benefit is in understanding complicated template code I wouldn’t have a reason to write myself. I don’t expect to be able to use these features just recognize them though.
- wonder_er 6y ago
  I use it to remember the names of persons I encounter in my day-to-day. Coworkers, neighbors (like that neighbor 3 blocks away that I talked with for a few minutes about {such-and-such}, but don't see that often), restaurant employees/proprietors, delivery people, maintenance workers, friends-of-friends I've met. Without Anki I have an abysmal memory for names. I have aphantasia[0] which might relate to my difficulty with names. Now, with Anki, (if I'm using it regularly) I have a freakishly good memory for names. :) Goes a long way to helping others feel welcome and appreciated, which in turn means _I_ end up feeling welcome and appreciated. A very virtuous cycle. Edit: I'm a software engineer, but most of my Anki usage is not focused on software engineering directly. To create new Anki cards, I follow the "20 rules for formulating knowledge"[1], so it takes a bit of work before I can take some new bit of information and "process" it to something ready for Anki. [0] https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-... [1]: https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20rules https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru...
  - lemming 6y ago
    I'm curious, what format do you use for cards to do this? Do you use Cloze cards like: My delivery driver is ___? How do you specify in the card which co-worker you mean?
    - wonder_er 6y ago
      I'm a few days late, so I don't know if you'll see this. When adding "people cards", I do anki's forward-and-reverse card, and I build the card so I can read both sides, and generate the opposite side. I'm just trying to build an association in my brain for their name, so I might do: Front: "people: Neighbors to west, older couple, he likes woodworking" Back: "people: Joe and Trish" I only use a single Anki deck for all my cards, which span many interests, so I'll usually give myself a word to specify the topic, like "Go, Ruby, People, Mental Models" Or if I can grab a headshot or picture from Slack, Twitter, or LinkedIn, I'll often put the picture on the front, name on the back. When I review the card "from the back", I try to remember what the person looks like. I have aphantasia [0] so this form of recall is effortful. [0] https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...
- jacobsenscott 6y ago
  As a software engineer I spend hours a day in the languages and tools I use. That's more than enough reinforcement for me. I've never felt like I couldn't remember enough in 20 years of programming. What sort of things do you think it would be helpful to memorize?
- iamwil 6y ago
  I've been using them to remember specific things I look up commonly. The rule is if I look things up 3 times, I add a card. If I can remember these things, I won't have to break my flow to look things up on Stackoverflow. It's usually simple things, like what's the method signature for slice? Or how do I run bash inside of a docker container? The tough part for me is sticking to reviewing. There, I'm trying to figure out where to attach it to something I often already do.
  - NateEag 6y ago
    > I'm trying to figure out where to attach it to something I often already do. I've started reviewing a question or three in the rest breaks during my workouts. Not all exercises or routines work great for that, but it works surprisingly well for things like bodyweight HIIT.
- isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
  I worked on a relatively narrow part of a complex domain, I had an anki deck to keep track of the various acronyms and remember some of the weirder processes my systems participated in. Most of the questions were one of: - what does ABC stand for - describe process X - how process X differs from Y, and why - what is the role of system A in process Z - what is the shape of data that comes from A to B in process Ł This vastly reduced the number of times I got stumped with something during various high-level meetings (to the point that I routinely pointed out some false assumptions people made). It worked better for me than passive documentation. The domain was unusually complex though.
ii550 6y ago
quizlet is another excellent alternative -- all web-based no installers
- iSpiderman 6y ago
  ... and unfortunately without spaced repetition. It was once part of the premium service but has been removed around a year ago. Source: I was a paying user.
- moralsupply 6y ago
  Same for Memrise
RootReducer 6y ago
I've been using Anki for about 3 years to learn Korean and it's been tremendously successful. In that time I've learned around 3000 new words (both English -> Korean and Korean -> English with reversed cards) and a ton of grammar (using Cloze cards). I couldn't imagine trying to memorize this amount of information any other way now.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  How do you do it? I've been torn on learning sentences or just words as both are difficult in their own right. One helps with speaking, another expands your vocab. It almost feels like to me they're both necessary to stay good at this.
  - RootReducer 6y ago
    Both! I make a card with English on the front and Korean on the back, and I include a sample sentence in a custom field with the target word highlighted. I always read the sentence out loud after I answer the card. I also make Cloze cards specifically for grammar where I'll cloze out the conjugated verb and put an English hint, like: 7시니까 댄 씨는 벌써 {{c1::퇴근했을 거예요::I think he left work}}.
    - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
      I will have to make an effort to give those a go. I'm always interested in finding new ways to make self study more worthwhile instead of just a memory game. Thanks!
  - mynameisash 6y ago
    I read Gabriel Wyner's book, _Fluent Forever_, which was pretty decent for giving ideas on how to effectively use SRS for language learning. That would probably be a good place to start. I disagree with his approach (which I haven't followed since original discussions) to then try to monetize this by basically creating a closed-source, locked-down Anki replacement. As I recall, he wanted to do what he said in his book wouldn't be effective -- to sell his cards to others.
johnny_b 6y ago
I feel like Anki is not designed to help you succeed. Eventually, you'll start missing your reviews. One day you'll open Anki, see that you have hundreds of cards scheduled, and just quit the app. The author of this article mentions he'll post an article tackling this issue, looking forward to that!
- jac241 6y ago
  You can use the ReMemorize add-on to distribute the cards you missed over the next X days. Here's a good video explaining how to manage it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXgck-g0nQA&t=1189s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXgck-g0nQA&t=1189s . If I get home too late and don't have time to do all my cards, that's what I do.
- DapperZoom 6y ago
  I'm not sure whether or not this is true. It may be based on personality. I've seen people struggle with it, but I've never had a problem. I've been using Anki for over 5 years, and hardly ever fall behind on reviews. I've been able to use it about 30-45 minutes per day, every single day for five years. Even when Im sick or traveling. If I know I am going to be busy, I just turn down the number of new cards in advance and by the time I'm busy my review count has usually responded.
- allenu 6y ago
  I found that issue too when I tried Anki. I missed a few days and when I returned there was a pile of cards that needed review. I later wrote my own flashcard app[1] with spaced repetition and ended up hiding the details of what was overdue and instead just let you set up a daily goal of number of cards reviewed. When you do a lesson, it picks up the overdue cards first, but if there aren't any, it pulls in new cards instead. It's funny because I originally thought telling you how many were due each day would be a great motivator (at least for me), but I'm finding I actually don't care. If you miss a few days, the cards still remain overdue, but when you return it doesn't feel bad. I think for me, it's more important when learning to aim for the long-term commitment to it than to be perfect each day in your studies. If you aim for perfection, you end up not meeting your high standards and may end up quitting. Also, I think the "deadline" for when to review in spaced repetition isn't exactly accurate to the day or hour that something is due, so there's a little bit of malleability there, and I think that's okay. [1] https://www.ussherpress.com/freshcards/ https://www.ussherpress.com/freshcards/
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kazinator 6y ago
> Instead of turning in your bed unable to sleep terrified of the exam coming the next day, you would soundly sleep with the knowledge that you know everything you need to know to ace the exam. What? If you can ace the exam by memorizing, it must mean that awarding of merit in your field of study requires little more than the mere regurgitation of facts. In a typical engineering exam, you can bring a sheet of formulas and facts, and a programmable calculator. This is so that the exam is less about rote memorization and more about application.
chrisandchips 6y ago
I would recommend Joshua Foer "Moonwalking with Einstein" for those interested in memory. Spaced repition is effective to an extent, but I find the techniques explored in his book to be much more effective. The tl;dr is that you are much better off constructing "memory palaces" in your head. You pick a place you know extremely well (like your family home), and you imagine yourself navigating that space and "placing" reminders of the things you'd like to remember along the way. It's like inventing a very surreal dream to help you avoid forgetting things. I use variants of it for things like people's names and ideas I'd like to explore all the time, it's super helpful.
- masterofmisc 6y ago
  That's all very well and good but what happens if you move house? /s
- redmaverick 6y ago
  The memory palace technique is not a silver bullet to permanently remember things. Sure it is fun at first. Eventually, you will have to review your memory palace periodically otherwise you will forget it.
- nathanasmith 6y ago
  I put my memory palaces in Anki.
  - clockman 6y ago
    This seems like the Holy Grail. Is it?
edjrage 6y ago
Am I the only one who finds Anki's UI/UX to be absolutely atrocious? I know it's petty, but it's literally the only reason that's always made me not use it for more than just a few days at a time. Is anyone working on improving the UI? Or are there alternative "frontends" out there? Does anyone know how hard it would be do it? (I assume it might not be trivial since Anki has a plugin system, but I don't know to what extent they can modify the UI)
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  I know it's not perfect, but imo it's design was more focused on additional functionality and it working fine. It's by no means pretty and definitely has a learning curve. That's what makes it such a useful tool though. Otherwise you end up with duolingo...
- knubie 6y ago
  While not a "frontend" to Anki, I built Mochi[0] in part because I was also frustrated with Anki's UI/UX and it supports importing Anki decks to an extent. It uses a similar scheduling algorithm to Anki, but it's based on simple markdown note cards, and has some features around that as well, such as bi-directional link references. [0] https://mochi.cards/ https://mochi.cards/
- tpoacher 6y ago
  In the words of the venerable late Steve Jobs: "You're using it wrong." Personally I find the UI/UX to be exactly what I want it to be. What exactly do you not like about it?
- bibelo 6y ago
  Anki is just terrible, even to the point of losing data in my case.
- moralsupply 6y ago
  There's always Memrise https://www.memrise.com/ https://www.memrise.com/ which does pretty much the same as Anki, with some interesting extra features
- 6y ago
jacobsenscott 6y ago
I don't find doing things tangential to the thing you want to learn all that effective compared to just doing the thing you want to get better at. Maybe it is just me. If you want to improve your vocabulary read more books. If you want to improve in a programming language program more in that language. If you want to learn chess openings - play more chess. Actually doing things you want to learn is way more fun than rote memorization so you are more likely to stick with it.
- Evan_Hellmuth 6y ago
  I agree with your first paragraph. But if your goal is purely to expand your vocabulary, don’t you think reading is more tangential than drilling words with flash cards?
  - leke 6y ago
    I've never had luck with flash cards for learning Finnish. The time->recall thing has never worked for me in this respect. If, for example I get Perehdytys, then Kuljettajaohje I've forgotten them straight away. After half an hour, I still can't recall how to spell them - at which point I'm going crazy. However, after a couple of weeks coding a project related to Perehdytykset and Kuljettajaohjeet, I now know the words.
    - navait 6y ago
      I think you have to do the flash cards multiple times to be effective. I've manually written out 1000 hindi flash cards. I would go through them a few times each day. I usually add a few of the older cards randomly, and I've had good progress over the course of a year. I think it was better for me to use that than Anki since I had to learn to write the devegnari. I also heard finnish is a really hard language, so maybe it's that.
      - leke 6y ago
        For speakers of European based languages with Latin character sets, learning to read and write Finnish isn't so hard IMO. It's phonetically spelled, and the character sounds are more or less the same as other European languages. The grammar is tricky, but literacy is simple. Or at least it should be.
iamwil 6y ago
I kinda wish there was spaced repetition for interview practice. So that everyday, I have a set number of questions to try, and I don't have to make that decision. And if I don't get it the first time, no problem, I know it'll come up again. And if I do get it, the goal is to get faster. Anyone else study this way, like an Anki for interview questions? If not, how do you pick what questions to practice and what order do them in when studying for interviews?
- Xophmeister 6y ago
  An interview that sings from a hymn sheet of blessed questions is not a good interview. Anki is good for learning cold hard facts, but applying those or synthesising something new from them — which is what a good interview should be establishing — is not its goal.
- Jtsummers 6y ago
  Take a problem set and dump it into Anki. Tune the deck to only give you 2-3 new problems and 2-3 review problems (because these take time). Solve them, rate them, just like any other deck. If you don't want to practice programming exercises, but rather memorize facts, Anki is fine. Go through the common algorithms/data structures (and the less common ones) and create cards that ask you things about it. "What's the big-O for inserting into a sorted linked list?" Or do like me, and skip those interviews because they're usually a miserable experience and don't really gauge the quality of the hire.
- samiulg3 6y ago
  Yeah! I actually built a Chrome extension that is basically like Anki. I'm actually using it to study for interviews! Its called Yeerodite! It basically shows cards on the website you're browsing at intervals (e.g. every 10 minutes, 5 cards show up to test me).
bibelo 6y ago
Thanks for the article, I've read though. I've been using Anki quite successfully to learn things about wines in french, especially about the wine domains in Bordeaux and Bourgogne. It's easy to create, as a flash card. One side shows the map, the other shows the name. Now, I'm keen on learning the list of the main french authors of each century, but I don't know how to proceed. Let's say a list of 20 names, how would you do it? You would not create one flash card with 19th century on one side, and the 20 names on the other side. I've been struggling with that issue. Maybe using the cloze type?
- simbyotic 6y ago
  Piotr Woznaik recommends turning lists into enumerations. You can see more here: https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20rules https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru... In general you want to reduce the amount of things you have to retrieve from memory in one go, and attempting to retrieve a 20 person list is just going to give you problems. The cloze solution is certainly better than the full list (and does follow the minimum information principle because you just have to retrieve a single name) but the problem is that it doesn't give you any handles. If you have 19 names and Flaubert is hidden, how would you know it's Flaubert that's missing? Long-term you're bound to fail those cards. But I would also question the premise of the card. Do you expect to have to come up with the 20 names each time you want to talk about 19th century French literature? As in, each time the context is "19th century French literature" is the appropriate knowledge to retrieve "* list of 20 authors *"? Instead a better approach might be to flip it around and ask yourself, "In which century did Flaubert write Madame Bovary?" or something along those lines. You can both reconstruct the list from that and if you're writing about Flaubert the knowledge that he wrote during the 19th century will come more fluidly to you.
  - bibelo 6y ago
    Thank you. Your answer and your link (especially the paragraph about sets) help me a lot
- porknubbins 6y ago
  Anki is great for learning individual arbitrary facts, ie vocab words that would otherwise be difficult to encounter frequently enough in the wild. Learning to reproduce a list doesn’t fit well as you observed because there is no 1:1 prompt for each author, unless you come up with one like “Author of Madame Bovary”, and 20 things is too much for one card. This is more like memory palace territory which I rarely find useful in real life but fits exactly your task.
andai 6y ago
“You can get a good deal from rehearsal, If it just has the proper dispersal. You would just be an ass, To do it en masse, Your remembering would turn out much worsal.” Ulrich Neisser, Retrieval Practice and The Maintenance of Knowledge https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/1988-bjork.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/1988-bjork.pdf
tomaszs 6y ago
I have heard a lots of good stuff about Anki. The adoption of it is wider than expected, and people really enjoy it. Up to a point when they are requesting to offer Anki for Summon The JSON, what seems to be an interesting idea
vrperson 6y ago
I never managed to use Anki for long. Maybe the interface is just too clunky. Sets that can be downloaded are also often low quality, or at least there is no way to tell in advance. I think some day there may be a unicorn startup doing the flash card thing right.
- cnasc 6y ago
  I’ve heard that for Anki to be very effective you need to make your own cards. There are software companies doing the spaced repetition thing (like Duolingo).
asab 6y ago
Anki was my introduction to spaced repetition and started me down a learning journey that I'm very happy to be taking. That said, Anki didn't end up sticking as the way I do spaced repetition - but it took me a long time to be able to articulate why. These days I am using Roam along with roam-toolkit. Having tried it this way, my biggest realization is that facts are memorable when they have many visceral associations. A corollary of this is that, to remember well, I should practice making lots of different connections between the things I know. Now when I do spaced repetition, I annotate things as I go, forming new connections and associations, then putting them in my knowledge graph forever (forever, knock on wood). By contrast, Anki feels like I am over-training flash cards in a very siloed and narrow way, such that the skill I learn is closer to "answering flash cards" as opposed to the actual thing I want to be good at.
- sharmi 6y ago
  That is an interesting take on Anki. I always saw Anki as an implementation of spaced repetition. What is your process? How do you codify connections and associations into spaced repetition?
  - asab 6y ago
    Here's a concrete example. Some of my spaced repetition is to translate between languages. When I do a translation, if it's different from the canonical answer, I write it in below. Over time I have a list of the different ways I translated, which helps me notice when I repeat mistakes or of what kind.
- edylemond 6y ago
  That's exactly my idea of a lifelong learning journey, spaced repetition where you build connections as you gain deeper understanding. I've built Traverse.link to do this natively (ie connected notes with spaced repetition), let me know if you find it helpful
lmiller1990 6y ago
I find the spaces repetition approach good for learning new Japanese words I don’t often use. I made an app that lets you look up a word and get a reminder a few days later: https://shirabe.app/ https://shirabe.app/
iscrewyou 6y ago
Can Anki or spaced repetition be used to learn software development? Or can you become more proficient at it?
lenkite 6y ago
Pretty useless for code and math. Making my concise own notes in Latex/Asciidoc which I review at regular intervals helps me far more and I don't need to fight the interface.

199 points by simbyotic 6y ago

drewcoo 6y ago

> The Centuries Old Science They Don’t Tell You About Conspiracy? Well it must be true.

thotsBgone 6y ago
More like, "The not-yet centuries old science they constantly tell you about on Hacker News."

JamesBarney 6y ago

One way I've successfully used Anki is learning new technology. It can't directly teach you the concepts, but it's much easier to learn and and retain the concepts when you're drilling the building blocks.

growman 6y ago
The mere fact of retrieving information from memory helped me in understanding. I was using Anki back when I was learning Python, and it definitely helps in productivity (reducing my hits to StackOverflow to 50%+).

nomad225 6y ago

Any suggestions for what to use Anki to remember in everyday life as a software engineer?

Graziano_M 6y ago
* [your lang] std lib functions, their arg order. * HTTP status codes * Acronyms * Syntax mistakes (spot the bug). * Command line or vim snippets, e.g. "write a for loop over all files in a directory in bash" "grep and only show match" I find it most useful for catching things I commonly screw up. The trick, of course, is to build the habit of identifying when you've repeated a blunder and then to make it into a card. An example for this in Go would be using `range` and forgetting the second arg: `for val := range slice` is legal syntax, but `val` is actually the index var here, it should be `for _, val := range slice`.
clankyclanker 6y ago
That feels like a really broad question. I always find it useful to look up the reading lists for university courses on subjects I’m interested in. You can usually find the PDFs with a quick search in Google Scholar. Then, using something like Polar, you can annotate the readings and directly save your annotations as Anki cards. That way, you can build a knowledge base of what actually interests you, which you’re much more likely to study and retain in the first place.
devilduck 6y ago
Maybe start by using it to remember git commands, or something of that nature
JxLS-cpgbe0 6y ago
The NATO phonetic alphabet. If you've ever tried to read an email, password or any set of letters over the phone, it makes it a lot easier. It's not an obvious thing, but it's only 26 cards.
jamestimmins 6y ago
Possibly command line utilities like awk/sed/etc? I've used them a bit for Docker commands.
qznc 6y ago
Acronyms. In my role as software architect I encounter a new block of acronyms every few months.
hpoe 6y ago
I use it to help me as a cloud engineer. For an example of some of the things I use it for. I have cards that are for - Emacs Commands - Emacs Key Strokes - Greek letters, words and sounds - The wikipedia List of non-standard dates - Physic ideas - General principles of organization - Learning principles - Bible verses - Command line utility options - Vimium key strokes Basically anything that I want to learn I end up ankifying. I find that Anki is most effective for remembering things that I don't do all the time, but need to remember two or three times a week/month. Here's a good tip, if you need to DuckDuckGo it more than once it's probably a good idea to throw it in an Anki card.
blackbear_ 6y ago
Just make a card for anything that you had to look up more than once.
simbyotic 6y ago
Author of the piece here. My number one recommendation is to not get overly excited about it. One of the first things that happen when you start using Anki and realize the superpower that it is being in charge of your memory is that you want to include EVERYTHING in it. You start creating cards with obscure bash one-liners, little-used git commands, or Javascript functions you read about in a random article. You add all of it to Anki. After all, you might use them in the future right? And it doesn't cost you anything to create a card with them so why not. What happens is that because you don't have a clear picture of why those cards are valuable to you - you just added them because they might be useful, one of these days - you will have trouble retaining their knowledge, meaning that you will keep failing to successfully review those cards. And because of the way spaced repetition algorithms work, those cards will be constantly appearing in your reviews, and you will keep failing them. And they will keep appearing. And so on and so forth until you lose all motivation to use Anki because it's becoming a frustrating experience to do your reviews. The most important thing about using Anki is to keep using it. That's how you get the benefits of it, so be more selective about what you add to Anki instead of profligately adding cards that you gain nothing from.
- moneywoes 6y ago
  Do you have a sample deck
- Kelamir 6y ago
  I think a good way would be to only ankify things that would save one 5 or so minutes of one's time.
- nullsense 6y ago
  This was exactly my experience when I tried to use it for software engineering. This is after having used it incredibly successfully to learn Japanese a decade prior and being very experienced with it.
  - porknubbins 6y ago
    I’m having some success remembering C++ with Anki because the language itself has such massive complexity and syntax. I am inputting Scott Meyers books into it right now. Its still really hard to write good prompts with enough context- akin to writing an interview type quiz. So far I think the main benefit is in understanding complicated template code I wouldn’t have a reason to write myself. I don’t expect to be able to use these features just recognize them though.
wonder_er 6y ago
I use it to remember the names of persons I encounter in my day-to-day. Coworkers, neighbors (like that neighbor 3 blocks away that I talked with for a few minutes about {such-and-such}, but don't see that often), restaurant employees/proprietors, delivery people, maintenance workers, friends-of-friends I've met. Without Anki I have an abysmal memory for names. I have aphantasia[0] which might relate to my difficulty with names. Now, with Anki, (if I'm using it regularly) I have a freakishly good memory for names. :) Goes a long way to helping others feel welcome and appreciated, which in turn means _I_ end up feeling welcome and appreciated. A very virtuous cycle. Edit: I'm a software engineer, but most of my Anki usage is not focused on software engineering directly. To create new Anki cards, I follow the "20 rules for formulating knowledge"[1], so it takes a bit of work before I can take some new bit of information and "process" it to something ready for Anki. [0] https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-... [1]: https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20rules https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru...
- lemming 6y ago
  I'm curious, what format do you use for cards to do this? Do you use Cloze cards like: My delivery driver is ___? How do you specify in the card which co-worker you mean?
  - wonder_er 6y ago
    I'm a few days late, so I don't know if you'll see this. When adding "people cards", I do anki's forward-and-reverse card, and I build the card so I can read both sides, and generate the opposite side. I'm just trying to build an association in my brain for their name, so I might do: Front: "people: Neighbors to west, older couple, he likes woodworking" Back: "people: Joe and Trish" I only use a single Anki deck for all my cards, which span many interests, so I'll usually give myself a word to specify the topic, like "Go, Ruby, People, Mental Models" Or if I can grab a headshot or picture from Slack, Twitter, or LinkedIn, I'll often put the picture on the front, name on the back. When I review the card "from the back", I try to remember what the person looks like. I have aphantasia [0] so this form of recall is effortful. [0] https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504/ https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...
jacobsenscott 6y ago
As a software engineer I spend hours a day in the languages and tools I use. That's more than enough reinforcement for me. I've never felt like I couldn't remember enough in 20 years of programming. What sort of things do you think it would be helpful to memorize?
iamwil 6y ago
I've been using them to remember specific things I look up commonly. The rule is if I look things up 3 times, I add a card. If I can remember these things, I won't have to break my flow to look things up on Stackoverflow. It's usually simple things, like what's the method signature for slice? Or how do I run bash inside of a docker container? The tough part for me is sticking to reviewing. There, I'm trying to figure out where to attach it to something I often already do.
- NateEag 6y ago
  > I'm trying to figure out where to attach it to something I often already do. I've started reviewing a question or three in the rest breaks during my workouts. Not all exercises or routines work great for that, but it works surprisingly well for things like bodyweight HIIT.
isbvhodnvemrwvn 6y ago
I worked on a relatively narrow part of a complex domain, I had an anki deck to keep track of the various acronyms and remember some of the weirder processes my systems participated in. Most of the questions were one of: - what does ABC stand for - describe process X - how process X differs from Y, and why - what is the role of system A in process Z - what is the shape of data that comes from A to B in process Ł This vastly reduced the number of times I got stumped with something during various high-level meetings (to the point that I routinely pointed out some false assumptions people made). It worked better for me than passive documentation. The domain was unusually complex though.

ii550 6y ago

quizlet is another excellent alternative -- all web-based no installers

iSpiderman 6y ago
... and unfortunately without spaced repetition. It was once part of the premium service but has been removed around a year ago. Source: I was a paying user.
moralsupply 6y ago
Same for Memrise

RootReducer 6y ago

I've been using Anki for about 3 years to learn Korean and it's been tremendously successful. In that time I've learned around 3000 new words (both English -> Korean and Korean -> English with reversed cards) and a ton of grammar (using Cloze cards). I couldn't imagine trying to memorize this amount of information any other way now.

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
How do you do it? I've been torn on learning sentences or just words as both are difficult in their own right. One helps with speaking, another expands your vocab. It almost feels like to me they're both necessary to stay good at this.
- RootReducer 6y ago
  Both! I make a card with English on the front and Korean on the back, and I include a sample sentence in a custom field with the target word highlighted. I always read the sentence out loud after I answer the card. I also make Cloze cards specifically for grammar where I'll cloze out the conjugated verb and put an English hint, like: 7시니까 댄 씨는 벌써 {{c1::퇴근했을 거예요::I think he left work}}.
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
    I will have to make an effort to give those a go. I'm always interested in finding new ways to make self study more worthwhile instead of just a memory game. Thanks!
- mynameisash 6y ago
  I read Gabriel Wyner's book, _Fluent Forever_, which was pretty decent for giving ideas on how to effectively use SRS for language learning. That would probably be a good place to start. I disagree with his approach (which I haven't followed since original discussions) to then try to monetize this by basically creating a closed-source, locked-down Anki replacement. As I recall, he wanted to do what he said in his book wouldn't be effective -- to sell his cards to others.

johnny_b 6y ago

I feel like Anki is not designed to help you succeed. Eventually, you'll start missing your reviews. One day you'll open Anki, see that you have hundreds of cards scheduled, and just quit the app. The author of this article mentions he'll post an article tackling this issue, looking forward to that!

jac241 6y ago
You can use the ReMemorize add-on to distribute the cards you missed over the next X days. Here's a good video explaining how to manage it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXgck-g0nQA&t=1189s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXgck-g0nQA&t=1189s . If I get home too late and don't have time to do all my cards, that's what I do.
DapperZoom 6y ago
I'm not sure whether or not this is true. It may be based on personality. I've seen people struggle with it, but I've never had a problem. I've been using Anki for over 5 years, and hardly ever fall behind on reviews. I've been able to use it about 30-45 minutes per day, every single day for five years. Even when Im sick or traveling. If I know I am going to be busy, I just turn down the number of new cards in advance and by the time I'm busy my review count has usually responded.
allenu 6y ago
I found that issue too when I tried Anki. I missed a few days and when I returned there was a pile of cards that needed review. I later wrote my own flashcard app[1] with spaced repetition and ended up hiding the details of what was overdue and instead just let you set up a daily goal of number of cards reviewed. When you do a lesson, it picks up the overdue cards first, but if there aren't any, it pulls in new cards instead. It's funny because I originally thought telling you how many were due each day would be a great motivator (at least for me), but I'm finding I actually don't care. If you miss a few days, the cards still remain overdue, but when you return it doesn't feel bad. I think for me, it's more important when learning to aim for the long-term commitment to it than to be perfect each day in your studies. If you aim for perfection, you end up not meeting your high standards and may end up quitting. Also, I think the "deadline" for when to review in spaced repetition isn't exactly accurate to the day or hour that something is due, so there's a little bit of malleability there, and I think that's okay. [1] https://www.ussherpress.com/freshcards/ https://www.ussherpress.com/freshcards/

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kazinator 6y ago

> Instead of turning in your bed unable to sleep terrified of the exam coming the next day, you would soundly sleep with the knowledge that you know everything you need to know to ace the exam. What? If you can ace the exam by memorizing, it must mean that awarding of merit in your field of study requires little more than the mere regurgitation of facts. In a typical engineering exam, you can bring a sheet of formulas and facts, and a programmable calculator. This is so that the exam is less about rote memorization and more about application.

chrisandchips 6y ago

I would recommend Joshua Foer "Moonwalking with Einstein" for those interested in memory. Spaced repition is effective to an extent, but I find the techniques explored in his book to be much more effective. The tl;dr is that you are much better off constructing "memory palaces" in your head. You pick a place you know extremely well (like your family home), and you imagine yourself navigating that space and "placing" reminders of the things you'd like to remember along the way. It's like inventing a very surreal dream to help you avoid forgetting things. I use variants of it for things like people's names and ideas I'd like to explore all the time, it's super helpful.

masterofmisc 6y ago
That's all very well and good but what happens if you move house? /s
redmaverick 6y ago
The memory palace technique is not a silver bullet to permanently remember things. Sure it is fun at first. Eventually, you will have to review your memory palace periodically otherwise you will forget it.
nathanasmith 6y ago
I put my memory palaces in Anki.
- clockman 6y ago
  This seems like the Holy Grail. Is it?

edjrage 6y ago

Am I the only one who finds Anki's UI/UX to be absolutely atrocious? I know it's petty, but it's literally the only reason that's always made me not use it for more than just a few days at a time. Is anyone working on improving the UI? Or are there alternative "frontends" out there? Does anyone know how hard it would be do it? (I assume it might not be trivial since Anki has a plugin system, but I don't know to what extent they can modify the UI)

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
I know it's not perfect, but imo it's design was more focused on additional functionality and it working fine. It's by no means pretty and definitely has a learning curve. That's what makes it such a useful tool though. Otherwise you end up with duolingo...
knubie 6y ago
While not a "frontend" to Anki, I built Mochi[0] in part because I was also frustrated with Anki's UI/UX and it supports importing Anki decks to an extent. It uses a similar scheduling algorithm to Anki, but it's based on simple markdown note cards, and has some features around that as well, such as bi-directional link references. [0] https://mochi.cards/ https://mochi.cards/
tpoacher 6y ago
In the words of the venerable late Steve Jobs: "You're using it wrong." Personally I find the UI/UX to be exactly what I want it to be. What exactly do you not like about it?
bibelo 6y ago
Anki is just terrible, even to the point of losing data in my case.
moralsupply 6y ago
There's always Memrise https://www.memrise.com/ https://www.memrise.com/ which does pretty much the same as Anki, with some interesting extra features
6y ago

jacobsenscott 6y ago

I don't find doing things tangential to the thing you want to learn all that effective compared to just doing the thing you want to get better at. Maybe it is just me. If you want to improve your vocabulary read more books. If you want to improve in a programming language program more in that language. If you want to learn chess openings - play more chess. Actually doing things you want to learn is way more fun than rote memorization so you are more likely to stick with it.

Evan_Hellmuth 6y ago
I agree with your first paragraph. But if your goal is purely to expand your vocabulary, don’t you think reading is more tangential than drilling words with flash cards?
- leke 6y ago
  I've never had luck with flash cards for learning Finnish. The time->recall thing has never worked for me in this respect. If, for example I get Perehdytys, then Kuljettajaohje I've forgotten them straight away. After half an hour, I still can't recall how to spell them - at which point I'm going crazy. However, after a couple of weeks coding a project related to Perehdytykset and Kuljettajaohjeet, I now know the words.
  - navait 6y ago
    I think you have to do the flash cards multiple times to be effective. I've manually written out 1000 hindi flash cards. I would go through them a few times each day. I usually add a few of the older cards randomly, and I've had good progress over the course of a year. I think it was better for me to use that than Anki since I had to learn to write the devegnari. I also heard finnish is a really hard language, so maybe it's that.
    - leke 6y ago
      For speakers of European based languages with Latin character sets, learning to read and write Finnish isn't so hard IMO. It's phonetically spelled, and the character sounds are more or less the same as other European languages. The grammar is tricky, but literacy is simple. Or at least it should be.

iamwil 6y ago

I kinda wish there was spaced repetition for interview practice. So that everyday, I have a set number of questions to try, and I don't have to make that decision. And if I don't get it the first time, no problem, I know it'll come up again. And if I do get it, the goal is to get faster. Anyone else study this way, like an Anki for interview questions? If not, how do you pick what questions to practice and what order do them in when studying for interviews?

Xophmeister 6y ago
An interview that sings from a hymn sheet of blessed questions is not a good interview. Anki is good for learning cold hard facts, but applying those or synthesising something new from them — which is what a good interview should be establishing — is not its goal.
Jtsummers 6y ago
Take a problem set and dump it into Anki. Tune the deck to only give you 2-3 new problems and 2-3 review problems (because these take time). Solve them, rate them, just like any other deck. If you don't want to practice programming exercises, but rather memorize facts, Anki is fine. Go through the common algorithms/data structures (and the less common ones) and create cards that ask you things about it. "What's the big-O for inserting into a sorted linked list?" Or do like me, and skip those interviews because they're usually a miserable experience and don't really gauge the quality of the hire.
samiulg3 6y ago
Yeah! I actually built a Chrome extension that is basically like Anki. I'm actually using it to study for interviews! Its called Yeerodite! It basically shows cards on the website you're browsing at intervals (e.g. every 10 minutes, 5 cards show up to test me).

bibelo 6y ago

Thanks for the article, I've read though. I've been using Anki quite successfully to learn things about wines in french, especially about the wine domains in Bordeaux and Bourgogne. It's easy to create, as a flash card. One side shows the map, the other shows the name. Now, I'm keen on learning the list of the main french authors of each century, but I don't know how to proceed. Let's say a list of 20 names, how would you do it? You would not create one flash card with 19th century on one side, and the 20 names on the other side. I've been struggling with that issue. Maybe using the cloze type?

simbyotic 6y ago
Piotr Woznaik recommends turning lists into enumerations. You can see more here: https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20rules https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru... In general you want to reduce the amount of things you have to retrieve from memory in one go, and attempting to retrieve a 20 person list is just going to give you problems. The cloze solution is certainly better than the full list (and does follow the minimum information principle because you just have to retrieve a single name) but the problem is that it doesn't give you any handles. If you have 19 names and Flaubert is hidden, how would you know it's Flaubert that's missing? Long-term you're bound to fail those cards. But I would also question the premise of the card. Do you expect to have to come up with the 20 names each time you want to talk about 19th century French literature? As in, each time the context is "19th century French literature" is the appropriate knowledge to retrieve "* list of 20 authors *"? Instead a better approach might be to flip it around and ask yourself, "In which century did Flaubert write Madame Bovary?" or something along those lines. You can both reconstruct the list from that and if you're writing about Flaubert the knowledge that he wrote during the 19th century will come more fluidly to you.
- bibelo 6y ago
  Thank you. Your answer and your link (especially the paragraph about sets) help me a lot
porknubbins 6y ago
Anki is great for learning individual arbitrary facts, ie vocab words that would otherwise be difficult to encounter frequently enough in the wild. Learning to reproduce a list doesn’t fit well as you observed because there is no 1:1 prompt for each author, unless you come up with one like “Author of Madame Bovary”, and 20 things is too much for one card. This is more like memory palace territory which I rarely find useful in real life but fits exactly your task.

andai 6y ago

“You can get a good deal from rehearsal, If it just has the proper dispersal. You would just be an ass, To do it en masse, Your remembering would turn out much worsal.” Ulrich Neisser, Retrieval Practice and The Maintenance of Knowledge https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/1988-bjork.pdf https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/1988-bjork.pdf

tomaszs 6y ago

I have heard a lots of good stuff about Anki. The adoption of it is wider than expected, and people really enjoy it. Up to a point when they are requesting to offer Anki for Summon The JSON, what seems to be an interesting idea

vrperson 6y ago

I never managed to use Anki for long. Maybe the interface is just too clunky. Sets that can be downloaded are also often low quality, or at least there is no way to tell in advance. I think some day there may be a unicorn startup doing the flash card thing right.

cnasc 6y ago
I’ve heard that for Anki to be very effective you need to make your own cards. There are software companies doing the spaced repetition thing (like Duolingo).

asab 6y ago

Anki was my introduction to spaced repetition and started me down a learning journey that I'm very happy to be taking. That said, Anki didn't end up sticking as the way I do spaced repetition - but it took me a long time to be able to articulate why. These days I am using Roam along with roam-toolkit. Having tried it this way, my biggest realization is that facts are memorable when they have many visceral associations. A corollary of this is that, to remember well, I should practice making lots of different connections between the things I know. Now when I do spaced repetition, I annotate things as I go, forming new connections and associations, then putting them in my knowledge graph forever (forever, knock on wood). By contrast, Anki feels like I am over-training flash cards in a very siloed and narrow way, such that the skill I learn is closer to "answering flash cards" as opposed to the actual thing I want to be good at.

sharmi 6y ago
That is an interesting take on Anki. I always saw Anki as an implementation of spaced repetition. What is your process? How do you codify connections and associations into spaced repetition?
- asab 6y ago
  Here's a concrete example. Some of my spaced repetition is to translate between languages. When I do a translation, if it's different from the canonical answer, I write it in below. Over time I have a list of the different ways I translated, which helps me notice when I repeat mistakes or of what kind.
edylemond 6y ago
That's exactly my idea of a lifelong learning journey, spaced repetition where you build connections as you gain deeper understanding. I've built Traverse.link to do this natively (ie connected notes with spaced repetition), let me know if you find it helpful

lmiller1990 6y ago

I find the spaces repetition approach good for learning new Japanese words I don’t often use. I made an app that lets you look up a word and get a reminder a few days later: https://shirabe.app/ https://shirabe.app/

iscrewyou 6y ago

Can Anki or spaced repetition be used to learn software development? Or can you become more proficient at it?

lenkite 6y ago

Pretty useless for code and math. Making my concise own notes in Latex/Asciidoc which I review at regular intervals helps me far more and I don't need to fight the interface.