17 ms·

Anki-fy your life

305 points by mililitre 4y ago

hidelooktropic 4y ago
Anki is a huge part of my routines having ADHD. https://www.adamgrant.info/Being+Human/ADHD/Strategies/Flashcards https://www.adamgrant.info/Being+Human/ADHD/Strategies/Flash... It's like slowly uploading information to my brain for permanent storage.
andersentobias 4y ago
Unless you want to compete in Jeopardy or something, why bother with ""uploading"" static chunks of information to your wetware? Language learning aside. When categorizing notes to be remembered, I think it's good to think in terms of memory retreival, not memory storage. In other words, not to become an "archiever", because you probably want to evolve your ideas by linking them together in your own unique way -- unique as dicated by your problem at hand plus your own idiosyncratic experiences. "How to take smart notes" by Sönke Ahrens is a great book on this topic, admittedly more oriented towards a Zettelkasten/Obsidian workflow.
- thenerdhead 4y ago
  We wrote pretty much the same comment. That's funny.
- nathanmcrae 4y ago
  I find a good way to link together ideas is to have them easily at hand i.e. memorized. Having a motivating problem is probably a better way to do this, but I've found that motivating problems which require concepts I would like to learn are not as readily available as I'd want.
- sowbug 4y ago
  It's like exercise. As a software engineer, I'm very unlikely to need to lift heavy things or run long distances. But my body is (probably) healthier long-term if I'm able to do those things. Disclaimer: going through my Anki decks is one of the 50 things on my 10-item to-do list. I don't get to it often enough. But it does work, and I now know how to memorize things I want to remember.
  - coffeebeqn 4y ago
    Hmm sure but I feel like my brain gets too much intellectual stimulation if anything from my job and relationships and reading. If I try to do a leetcode at 8pm my brain is just extremely fatigued and tells me to stop. My body on the other hand just sits in a chair for a very large amount of the day so I need to supplement there
    - sowbug 4y ago
      There's an old book called The Richest Man In Babylon that has to do with personal finance. One of the key points is to pay yourself first. You have your rent, utility bills, maybe credit-card debt, etc., and even tonight you want to order in, even though it's expensive, because you're way too tired to cook. That's all fine, as long as you first set aside 10% of your paycheck for savings. Although that leaves only 90% left for all the other needs clawing at you, somehow you make it all work. All too often people tend to their financial needs first, and find there's nothing left for themselves. No surprise most people die broke. Isn't it strange how their lifetime income just happened to almost exactly equal their lifetime expenses? Hmmm.... You might see where I'm going. Why are you giving the best of your time (rather than money) to everyone else, leaving nothing for yourself at the end of the day? Maybe start with just five minutes at the start of the day to pay yourself intellectually. If that works out, make it a habit!
- Juke_Ellington 4y ago
  This kind of static information retention is good for me. I’m an electrician so it’s nice to know off the top of my head that there’s a 10’ spacing on supports for EMT without going to the code book every time. Some of that knowledge gets beaten in through repetition, but there are enough fringe cases and things I don’t touch for years that are nice to have memorized.
- _43oo 4y ago
  I had a major concussion shortly before my GCSE exams that I'm still very slowly recovering from. I was completely unable to think, let alone study. I never did an IQ test, but I couldn't even listen to a book or stay awake for more than a few hours without a headache. And for a while I couldn't look at a screen or read. I was able to get the second highest grades in the school, with lower than expected grades in only two subjects (and dropping one, further maths), because of Anki. Because Anki does not require understanding, only sufficient repetition, and I had a lot of time on my hands, I was able to continuously do flashcards for hours on end while maths work would have me struggling to stay awake within 5 minutes. I could remember facts without understanding them. The exams were ~3 months after it happened, which gave me time to improve, plus during the actual exam a combination of painkillers, extra time, rest breaks, exam technique, and adrenaline allowed me to put together a plausible answer with the disconnected facts I had learnt in the months preceeding that I just about got the mark. As a sidenote - it's quite incredible how adrenaline can temporarily improve brain injuries, with the downside that the moment it went I was completely exhausted. Every subject bar maths I got the grades I wanted or just below, because Anki allowed me to memorise without learning. (These subjects were: Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, English Lit, English Lang, History, Computer Science, Digital something, Creative Media Production (didn't do exam), Further Maths (dropped).) Now, I would prefer not to revise using solely Anki, and I think the fact a braindead student with memorised facts (and good exam technique) was able to get good grades says a lot about the British education system. It also says a lot about Anki, and just how effective it is. Side note, because I'm tired of hearing drivel on HN: My life being (permanently?) ruined was entirely preventable, all it would have taken is a little less empathy, a little less second chances, for violent barbarians who damage everyone around them. When people preach empathy they forget about the human cost of allowing inherently violent, destructive people to continue their actions. If you're one of those people who thinks grammar schools are bad, restorative "justice" is the future, and we should prioritise those who hurt and destroy over those who want to learn and build: Your actions and your ideology have ugly consequences beyond your selfish delusion of making the world better through being nice and kind and the power of love - that belongs in novels, not policy.
  - hhjinks 4y ago
    I've never had a concussion, but I wanted to recount my similar experience in school, too. Like you, 5 minutes of math lectures had me dozing off. Really, a lecture in any subject would bore me to sleep. Only when we got practical tasks to work on, like math or physics problems, did my brain wake up and engage with and understand the material. As a result, I excelled in the natural sciences and math, where working on problems took up most of the time, while I did poorly in the more memorization-oriented social sciences and language subjects. Memorization is a skill like any other, and I'm happy I get to work in a field where understanding is more important than memorization.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  In my experience trying to follow Zettelkasten was an order of magnitude now work than spaced repetition.
- fierro 4y ago
  you could integrate a Zettelkasten workflow with Anki. Just send over certain ZK notes into Anki. I'm working on this -- a vim based ZK tool with ability to send over notes to Anki.
LastTrain 4y ago
[flagged]
- triyambakam 4y ago
  Anki is free. And the concept of SRS is free. There are apps that are clearly very good at capitalizing on the success of Anki and charging. If you found the paid iPad app, that's a one time fee to help the developers maintain it in the app store. I think it's pretty steep but otherwise Anki is free on other platforms. I actually don't like Anki but don't want it to be mischaracterized
- Ardon 4y ago
  Not sure where you found a subscription to Anki, but it's free and open source: https://github.com/ankitects/anki https://github.com/ankitects/anki The iOS app is a one-time payment though. This article is definitely not written with an unfamiliar reader in mind though, that's for sure.
- palmy 4y ago
  Anki is free on anything but iOS. Don't know why the iOS app is the only one with a fee.
  - rahimnathwani 4y ago
    IIRC the Android app is free because it wasn't started by Anki's original author. It was created by some other folks, using the source for Anki desktop.
  - JCharante 4y ago
    I imagine people with iphones have more disposable income and wouldn't be as affected by a cost compared to charging android users.
  - Jtsummers 4y ago
    https://faqs.ankiweb.net/why-does-ankimobile-cost-more-than-a-typical-mobile-app.html https://faqs.ankiweb.net/why-does-ankimobile-cost-more-than-... Here's the FAQ entry for why it costs as much as it does for iOS/iPadOS with some explanation for why he only charges on those platforms.
thenerdhead 4y ago
I really like https://readwise.io/ https://readwise.io/ for this purpose regarding all the books I've read and the quotes I like to re-visit here and there. It uses a SRS technique. While this type of article is almost cliche at this point regarding someone coming across the memory limitations and the power of anki for the first time, I really think the case for anki is exaggerated with "important ideas". Anki is great for preparing to go on jeopardy or being in say med school. It is not really needed for lifelong learning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten might be a better approach but even then it is debatable how often you'll ever actually use it once the novelty wears off. Anki is a tool to be used, not something that needs to be applied to everything.
- qznc 4y ago
  Zettelkasten is for facts you want to be easy to look up. Anki is for things you want to remember instantly without looking them up. I use both.
triyambakam 4y ago
Anki (or a Leitner box) is the recommended method from the book "Fluent Forever" After learning one language in school and a few others ad hoc on my own I gave this method a try. I quickly gave up, though, once I discovered Dr Krashen's work on comprehensible input, and how boring and time consuming creating and studying Anki is. Dr Krashen's work says that we learn language when we understand it. I.e. when we receive input at our level. There are quite a number of Youtube channels that claim to teach through this method, but many of them still resort to drills, themed vocabulary, grammar etc that are all pointless in the CI method. The best one I've seen so far is Dreaming Spanish. What's so cool about the CI method is that the spaced repetition is built in, implicit - if you're getting input at your level you will be getting repetition. Children's shows are a great way to get input. Many countries have TV apps on iPad and can be viewed free with a VPN. As an experiment I had my daughter only consume German media (living in Sweden) för a few years and she can now speak better German than I can, and I have never corrected her. She has broader and more modern vocabulary, naturally.
- bluquark 4y ago
  Personally, as an intermediate Japanese learner, I have been careful to choose the right input just as Krashen advocates, but I also find Anki indispensable. I found to my surprise that I have been improving about equally quickly using Anki+Animebook+Yomichan for 1-2 hours a day while living the US as I did during an earlier period when I was living in Japan (but without access to computerized methods beyond a basic pocket e-dict). As a beginner, appropriate input was enough to care of "spaced repetition" on its own, since children's media constantly rotates over the same small set of vocabulary. But after I improved past the ~2000 most common words or so, it happened more and more that a word I recently learned didn't appear again in my input until it had already been flushed. The probability that I would actually learn a new word for good progressively decreased as I picked the lower-hanging fruit, which is the cause of the dreaded "intermediate plateau". I gather Anki pushes out the plateau much further: I have heard that it starts to feel Sisyphean to learn new words with it around the 15000-20000 word mark instead.
- miklosz 4y ago
  I find Anki essential for language learning. Did it for French, starting from 0 and finishing at B2 (except for writing) in two years (also taking a 3h / week course). Especially at the very beginning, I find learning the first 500 words as described in "Fluent Forever" very helpful. Going through that before starting with the course makes the experience much easier. I totally agree with Krashen's theories, but using Anki is a secret weapon here that puts the process on overdrive (e.g. reading on Kindle and then later going through words that I checked in the Kindle dictionary and adding them into Anki). Also, it's essential to retain the knowledge, e.g. if it's a language that you don't use daily. 5 years and 30'000+ cards later, I find Anki indispensable in learning anything which requires memorisation. Thinks I have to learn for work, for hobbies, certificates, improving my vocabulary in languages I care about. Basically, every fact I care about strongly enough, goes into Anki. If not enough, goes into Obsidian.
bitdivision 4y ago
I started out using anki to improve my Spanish vocabulary. Eventually discovered Mochi [0] here on HN. Far better designed and executed, well worth a look if you're interested in Anki. [0] https://mochi.cards/ https://mochi.cards/
zora_goron 4y ago
I also had a similar thought process regarding understanding vs memorizing facts while transitioning from studying CS (where I emphasized understanding the underlying concepts rather than trying to memorize atomic facts that I could derive) to medicine (where having facts memorized is also a key component). Interestingly, I found that committing to memorizing facts actually helped me gain a deeper understanding of the topics themselves, which was not what I originally expected! (I wrote a little bit about the above a few months ago -- https://samrawal.substack.com/p/on-the-relationship-between-memorizing https://samrawal.substack.com/p/on-the-relationship-between-...)
- Jensson 4y ago
  > Interestingly, I found that committing to memorizing facts actually helped me gain a deeper understanding of the topics themselves, which was not what I originally expected Be careful with this, perceived self understanding doesn't reflect real understanding.
  - rg111 4y ago
    There is only one real way to test, and the subject being CS, it is even more real: building things using those concepts. For other subjects (and CS, too): demonstrate mastery with teaching others, producing something with the concepts learned and get feedback. This way one can test true learning. And, even when tested this way, Spaced Repeatition really helps. I am speaking from experience. When you are in a place where you can immerse yourself in a proper environment, like a college or work- where you hear terms and their usage regularly, learning becomes easier. But when your environment is cut-off from the buzzing world, or everyone is doing ML and you want to do Cybersecurity, you can fake immersion using Anki. A good part of physical immersion can be replaced with using Anki.
1024core 4y ago
I'm trying to get into Anki, but it's difficult to get started. Here's what I'd like: while I'm reading a (PDF) book, I want to highlight some text (and maybe manually tweak it a little) and have it converted into some "Anki card" format so when I want to review the contents of the book later, I can use Anki for it. Any ideas?
- kneebonian 4y ago
  So sounds like more of what you are interested in is incremental reading. In the case the way you'd want to do things is copy the text to another document for the entire article then go back through determine which facts you want to keep. Then turn it into an Anki card, preferably with clozes. Half the benefit of Anki is making the Anki cards in the first place.
- resoluteteeth 4y ago
  Maybe you could use some app to pull out highlights but you still need to think carefully about how to make each text chunk into a card or multiple cards (otherwise you'll waste more time than you save) You also don't normally use an srs flashcard program like anki just when you want to review a book, you use it every day.
- yellow_postit 4y ago
  Check out AnkiConnect for getting things into Anki. Not sure about reader software that will call out after a highlight though.
- siegecraft 4y ago
  This is a common use case and many reader / annotation apps either support it natively (polarized and marginnote 3 are two that I have first hand experience with) or have third party tools available to copy annotations into anki.
- JCharante 4y ago
  Highlight the text in your dedicated PDF reading program and then after each lesson/chapter, when you sit down to review the lesson (you should be doing this even if you don't use Anki!) you can create the Anki cards manually. Creating Anki cards is really helpful for learning. I used to study at a langauge school and whenever I came across a word I didn't know, I'd quickly write it down in a notebook in the middle of class and then later in the day go back and create Anki cards for the words I had written down.
ryyr 4y ago
“Don’t memorize ideas. And don’t take us too seriously when we turn up our noses at rote learning. Rote helps build the man."
nohaydeprobleme 4y ago
A major limitation exists for spaced repetition software (e.g. Anki, SuperMemo, or other flashcard-style systems), in my experience using them for several years for long-term memory: it's neither necessary nor sufficient to use this software to learn certain topics. Several excellent physics and math students I worked with have never used spaced repetition software, but were excellent at their studies because they consistently solved textbook problems. For them, they got the "repetitions" (aka exposure to facts and problems) via solving more new problems from the book nearly every day. Later problems in the textbooks would provide review of previous problems. This method can be far more effective than spending too much studying with spaced repetition software (which I have done in the past), as the time spent creating new cards and reviewing cards that are due comes at the expense of time spent solving new problems. Ideally, you can perhaps find time for both activities. But in my personal experience, I learned mathematics more effectively by focusing primarily on textbook problems (reviewing older material through new problems) and spending a very limited amount of time with spaced repetition, versus even a fifty-fifty split between a textbook and spaced repetition that I've experimented with in the past. In the past, I also spent too much time in the past remembering phrases and vocabulary when learning new languages, and not enough time practicing listening, writing, and especially conversation. Certain skills can only be efficiently developed by directly practicing them. While spaced repetition software remains an essential part to my language studies, it is very far from sufficient (even just a couple hours of conversation practice per week over three months, got me much further than primarily focusing on Anki/spaced repetition for six months). Spaced repetition systems like Anki (though I moved to SuperMemo about a year back) are vital to my daily studies, but I've learned far more effectively by treating these systems as a supplement to more traditional and tested study methods that rely on active problem-solving. For technical fields, these are textbook problems from books by well-regarded authors, and for languages, these are conversation practice and writing articles that I request feedback on (in particular, teachers in small group classes have given me great, useful feedback on my writing).
- kneebonian 4y ago
  I've found the sweet spot.for Anki is the things that I need only occasionally but not never. Things I use frequently I already pick up through repeated use, things that I never use eventually falls out. But things that are somewhat relevant about that I find myself googling more than twice is a good candidate to Anki.
kneebonian 4y ago
I'll just throw out I've used Anki ever since I started it and haven't failed a knowledge test since I started doing it. Including passing my HAM test with only using Anki and the questions for 72 hours.
- bluquark 4y ago
  Using Anki for a 72-hour cram session is kind of missing the point though. For me, the main benefit of Anki is to escape the cram->forget cycle and learn things low-stress and for good.
  - kneebonian 4y ago
    I 100% agree that is the optimal way. But it can be useful to memorize 300 questions and answers in 72 hours if you have to.
- siva7 4y ago
  Word of caution to other readers: Don't use Anki for cramming. Especially not if you didn't learn and understand the material before cramming.
  - Kelamir 4y ago
    Could you explain why that might not be a good thing to do, siva7?
    - siva7 4y ago
      I've used anki for over a decade and done that mistake several times. Anki is designed to reinforce knowledge you've already learned, not to introduce new information. The cards shown in a SRS alogrithm don't follow an order which makes it suited from a pedagogic POV for acquiring new knowledge. Cramming tends to be done when knowledge hasn't been yet learned or understood sufficiently.
pixelperfect 4y ago
I find there's a sweet spot for Anki when the daily review of already-existing cards takes 20 minutes. If the daily review takes more than 25 minutes, I try not to add any cards that day.
- CGamesPlay 4y ago
  I have mine set to 20 new cards/day and 200 remember cards/day. This seems to steady out at about 20 mins day. That said, I wish Anki had a time-boxed mode, where it measured my speeds and then just chose the right balance of new cards. (Cards added above the new card limit go into a queue for future days automatically.)
  - somsak2 4y ago
    You can kind-of achieve this by setting it up such that new cards always appear after all reviews are completed. You can use the timebox time limit to cap based on time instead of card count -- https://docs.ankiweb.net/preferences.html#scheduler https://docs.ankiweb.net/preferences.html#scheduler
JaDogg 4y ago
Shameless plug if you want flashcards in your terminal: https://github.com/JaDogg/sbx https://github.com/JaDogg/sbx
MichaelNolan 4y ago
I'm a huge fan of spaced repetition and Anki. I strongly believe that most people's professional lives would be improved by using it. There is a huge amount of information that falls into the zone of it's needed often enough that not knowing it is a pain, but it's not needed often enough that you would "naturally" remember it. I've yet to find anything else that only takes 10 to 20 minutes a day that has a higher ROI. The amount of "compounding interest" it gives over time is incredible. Learning to write good cards is skill that takes time and practice. The article from Andy Matuschak [0] is a great guide to learn how to write good cards. [0] https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/
- yt-sdb 4y ago
  Do you have a TLDR for that article? It's pretty long and wordy.
  - submeta 4y ago
    The article discusses how to create effective prompts that aid in long-term learning using spaced repetition. Matuschak suggests that good prompts should be specific, clear, and concise, and should be designed to encourage active recall rather than passive recognition. He also emphasizes the importance of interleaving, which involves mixing up different types of problems or questions to enhance retention and facilitate transfer of knowledge. Additionally, he suggests that prompts should be personalized and contextualized to increase engagement and motivation.
    - jstummbillig 4y ago
      Okay, so was this written by chatgpt
  - zvmaz 4y ago
    I have found out that I was bad at card making when reviewing the first cards I made after a lapse of time of not using Anki. My then self got frustrated and irritated by how vague and non-specific the cards I made myself were. I certainly learned something about my memory and cognition. The article is long, but it has some insights that resonated with me. I think the quality of the cards one makes is as important, if not more so, than spaced repetition.
doktorhladnjak 4y ago
Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t think of anything in my job as a software engineer that I’d benefit from memorizing through flash cards. What are people memorizing exactly?
- johtso 4y ago
  I've also never used anki for anything related to my work / programming. What I have used it for: Memorising how to identify plants and their latin names Memorising the technical terms for different morphological features of plants so that I could efficiently use a vegetative identification key without constantly flicking to the glossary Memorising foreign language vocabulary
- shusaku 4y ago
  One of these days I need to make flash cards of those makefile automatic variables…
- sowbug 4y ago
  Coworkers' names and the reason for meeting with them. I used Anki for this when I was in a management position that involved meeting with many people, often just once or twice each, across my very large company. It was nice to be able to greet someone by name in the cafeteria six months after our meeting, and ask how such-and-such project was going. I'm sure some people already remember names, faces, and context effortlessly. I'm not one of those people. But I always appreciate when someone remembers me, so I was willing to work to do the same for them. I stopped doing it once my work universe got a little more stable, and life's daily encounters were themselves the spaced repetition I needed to remember everyone.
- kobalsky 4y ago
  you can use it to memorize some console commands, library calls, anything you would like to be able to remember without checking the source material.
- 1123581321 4y ago
  Mine’s a grab bag. If I had to look something up, and value knowing it cold the next time it comes up, it goes in. I could see some engineers having nothing that fits that criteria.
keiferski 4y ago
I’ve experimented with Anki over the years and currently have a somewhat custom setup that I do every day / nearly every day. I’ll explain below for anyone that might find it useful. At one point I realized that my capacity for learning new items for a particular topic is limited to a few items per day. Any more than 2 or 3 and I struggle to retain the information. So, for example, trying to learn 20 words in Chinese per day is impossible without spending multiple hours on it. The trick, however, is that I get around this by having many items from multiple topics, instead of many items from a single topic. Instead of 20 words in Chinese, I learn 1 word each in 20 different languages. Surprisingly, I have a much easier time with this and don’t need to spend much time on it in order to retain the information. I don’t know why this psychologically works, but it does. And while learning 2 or 3 words a day won’t make you fluent anytime soon, it does add up over time, especially for topics that you aren’t in a hurry to learn but would like to know on a slow timeline, in a year or two. For example, learning the Japanese hiragana/katakana or the numbers of all the US presidents. However, this proved to be somewhat unwieldy logistically as I had to open 20 different PDFs, download audio for each word, then stitch it all together daily. So I created a little web app (stitched together from some WordPress plugins, actually) that allows me to import learning materials and then display 2-3 of them per topic on a single page, each time the page is loaded. I just visit the page once a day and add the items to Anki. This was all a bit complex to set up, but if you enjoy learning new things and want an efficient system for adding stuff into your brain, I recommend making something similar.
- hobo_mark 4y ago
  Is that a real example? Are you learning 20 languages in parallel? Two is already more than enough for me.
  - keiferski 4y ago
    Yes I am currently learning one word/phrase (it depends on the language) daily in about twenty different languages. Again, I wouldn’t claim it to be equivalent to serious study and conversational practice, but I have absolutely learned various phrases in all of the languages. I think most people make “language learning” a heavy task that seems insurmountable. In reality, once you understand the basic sounds of a language, it can be as simple as learning a new phrase everyday. Just think of it as learning the names of capital cities or elements on the periodic table: a lot of information that is organized into patterns. No, you won’t be fluent quickly, but it is absolutely beneficial to know “hello”, “thank you”, “where is?” and 100 other phrases in a language. Or in the case of Russian or Hebrew or Greek, it’s awesome to just be able to read the alphabet, even if you don’t know many of the words.
rounakdatta 4y ago
I'm surprised no one mentioned Memoet (https://github.com/memoetapp/memoet https://github.com/memoetapp/memoet). It is a much more modern version of Anki - much more open algorithm, REST APIs and universal interfaces and self-hosted control over one's data.
- igloopan 4y ago
  I agree that Anki is likely less developer friendly but its popularity does make up for that I feel, with ostensibly state of the art SRS algorithms being published with Anki implementations (https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki) out of the box. Though as someone that's solely used Anki for language learning, I do value the ability to remember more words in less time more than ease of development so it's not unlikely Memoet is a better choice for other usecases.
  - Kelamir 4y ago
    In what way is Anki less developer friendly? They participated in Google Summer of Code last year!
- AlexErrant 4y ago
  Anki, imo, already has an open algorithm (that the user can change via plugins), universal interfaces, and is "self-hosted". My eyes perked up at REST api, but it doesn't look like there's a centralized server that hosts shared cards, which is where my mind went. I'm building https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive/ https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive/ which is basically Anki + Github + Reddit; people can optionally upload their cards for others to download/fork, and the most popular cards rise to the top. It's FLOSS, offline-first, supports plugins and p2p syncing, and is very much a WIP. My proof of concept is almost done though, which demos the critical technologies in a secure way.
- Kelamir 4y ago
  But does it have as many addons and decks? https://ankiweb.net/shared/addons/ https://ankiweb.net/shared/addons/ https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/german https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/german There's a number of Anki alternatives such as https://mnemosyne-proj.org/ https://mnemosyne-proj.org/, but Anki has an active collaborative community, as opposed to most of alternatives, as far as I know.
ichverstehe 4y ago
Allow me to mention my project Ankivalenz[1], which turns structured HTML files into Anki decks. I use it with Quarto[2][3] to generate my Anki decks. Instead of having an unorganized "pool" of Anki cards, I can create hierarchical, well-organized notes and turn them into an Anki deck. This makes it easier to create Anki decks, but more importantly, it makes it easier to keep Anki decks up to date. [1] https://github.com/vangberg/ankivalenz https://github.com/vangberg/ankivalenz [2] https://quarto.org/ https://quarto.org/ [3] https://github.com/vangberg/quarto-ankivalenz https://github.com/vangberg/quarto-ankivalenz
spoonjim 4y ago
What kinds of things are useful to learn in this rote way? Except maybe foreign language vocabulary?
- keiferski 4y ago
  Pretty much anything. I use it to learn foreign alphabets and languages, historical people and events, philosophical terms, computer networking concepts, outdoor survival tips, and a bunch of other things. The best sources of information are encyclopedias (traditional ones, not Wikipedia) and dictionaries, as they are written to summarize a concept in a few hundred words.
- knubie 4y ago
  Spaced repetition systems are not used to learn things. They’re used to remember things you’ve already learned.
bigbluesax 4y ago
I actually really strugle to retain anything I learned with anki and I was wondering if this affects anyone else. A prominent example is when I was working through a deck of japanese hiragana and katakana, I was doing my cards at a moderate pace every day, and I just kept mixing them up, even when I was repeating them in short succession. After a few very frustrating weeks of this i ditched anki and started trying to write out the whole table from memory and checking for mistakes after, this strategy proved so successful I only needed three sessions for perfect recall. I used anki a few other times with similar results. I know the idea of learning styles is disputed, but this app just doesn't appear to work for me.
- keiferski 4y ago
  It sounds like you didn’t learn the information sufficiently enough before making them into cards. Anki isn’t good for teaching you new things, it’s good for remembering stuff that you already know - or are at least familiar with.
- Kelamir 4y ago
  As the other responder said, don't use Anki for memorization, only for reviewing what you already remember. I recommend using mnemonics for memorizing words. For katakana hiragana, refer to https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/ https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/
thrown123098 4y ago
Using the pigeon hole principle on these systems tells me that if I don't eventually drop all cards completely I will reach a point where the only thing I'm doing is reviewing old material. None of the algorithms I've looked into seem to acknowledge this. Is there one which throws out a card after you get it right n times?
- somsak2 4y ago
  You can do it based on how many times you got it right, but I think a more sensible approach is to do it based on how many times you've go it wrong. Anki does this through its concept of leeches and the way that it's explained makes alot of sense to me. So much so that I've cut my leech threshold in half to 4. If my brain is having a hard time remembering something, it's probably not the best usage of my time to just mindlessly keep drilling. https://docs.ankiweb.net/leeches.html https://docs.ankiweb.net/leeches.html
- BeetleB 4y ago
  Not sure how. I have flashcards that are due a decade from now. Everyday you'll have cards that are due after you die.
- Kelamir 4y ago
  As an example, if you're learning a langauge and studying vocab, you could discard any cards that have over 90 days interval. After all, you're going to meet that word while reading a book or watching something in the target language in the next 90 days, and if not - you shouldn't have memorized that word anyway.
tastysandwich 4y ago
I absolutely love Anki. A lot of software make empty promises around productivity improvements. Especially in education. Anki is one of those rare tools that genuinely 10x's you over your peers. I used it when studying Japanese and it was a massive help. However, having used it for over 12 years to memorise many different things I have noticed one caveat. If you're not also using what you're memorising outside of Anki, I feel like your ability to recall gets trapped within the context of using Anki. For example, if you're learning Japanese vocab through Anki, and also trying out your new words via conversation and reading/writing, you'll rapidly learn new vocab AND be able to recall it anywhere. However if you're learning Japanese on your own and not really conversing/writing, no matter how good your recall with Anki is, you'll struggle to recall those same words anywhere else. The cool thing about Anki is you can also use pictures/audio. So if you're learning music theory you could memorise chord shapes/intervals. Or human anatomy.
- TwentyPosts 4y ago
  This is also what I'd call the classic issue with Duolingo. Or rather, one of them, considering that the app has all sorts of issues. If you use nothing but Duolingo you'll plateau very quickly. It's probably "okay" as a casual side spaced-repetition learning tool—when you're learning languages you generally want to pull from several different resources, and learn with different tools anyway. But don't make the mistake of thinking that Duolingo alone will get you anywhere. I think this universally applies to repetition-learning, at least when it comes to languages. You need to "cross-train".
  - mock-possum 4y ago
    Yep, my entire takeaway from six months of doing Duolingo is that ‘stark’ means ‘strong’ in German.
  - bluquark 4y ago
    > Or rather, one of them, considering that [Duolingo] has all sorts of issues. Yep. I agree with measured criticisms of Anki even while feeling the app is really useful if you use it well. Whereas Duolingo isn't worth bothering with at all. It's purely optimized to maximize engagement/revenue.
kayo_20211030 4y ago
Is there a measure, anywhere, of the bollocks to content ratio on HN on Saturdays? It seems to peak that day. But, this one is so bad, it's not even wrong. Who on earth knows what the future will bring? Who on earth knows, ahead of time, what's worth 10 minutes, or 2 minutes, or no time at all. That's intuition, and that's a gift. All the rest is bollocks, and it seems to turn up on Saturdays too much; that is, the pieces that claim to have identified a "system".
- deleted 4y ago
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nearmuse 4y ago
I am trying this approach right now. It is difficult to do it for big concepts because they take time to recall in their entirety and can't be reduced to one key idea to be recalled quickly. It may also be hard to estimate what interval to use, and bloated repetition sessions are killing the whole idea of spending some 10s of minutes a day, causing a sort of fatigue if not outright burnout.
mahathu 4y ago
I'm sure taking 10 minutes out of their day to reflect and write a diary entry would increase most peoples wellbeing a lot more than trying to neurotically remember everything you come across.
- BeetleB 4y ago
  I'm sure spending those ten minutes doing some cardio will have more benefit both physically and mentally than writing a diary. We could do this all day. The fact that there's something better one can do doesn't negate the benefits of the former.
nirav72 4y ago
This might be a good idea to refresh memory every so often. As an IT guy , sometimes I’ll mentally go blank when I trying to recall some linux command option/switch or some sql query operation. Especially when I’ve used that linux commend or wrote that specific type of query 1000s of times throughout my career. This has become more apparent as I’ve gotten older. (I’m 50 now). So now I’m increasingly relying on search engines to quickly find that info when I face those mental blocks. So I probably should try anki style flash cards.
liendolucas 4y ago
Question aside. Does anyone know straightforward ways to create anki decks? Last time I checked on this it was like a lot of effort to put on and got discouraged to build my own decks to improve my italian. I was expecting anki decks to be constructed easily, in its most basic form from plain text files (html, markdown, etc) with references to maybe resources (audio, images, etc) just from a filesystem directory but is not that simple. I can't recall the name of a Python tool that allowed you to create decks programmatically but I found it way too much effort to use it and I couldn't find other good alternatives (maybe this has changed recently, don't know). Does anyone recommend a good, simple and straightforward tool to create decks/cards? (I'm using FreeBSD).
- vector_spaces 4y ago
  There's a Python library called genanki that has a minor learning curve but isn't terrible to figure out. My process is to maintain a gsheet with data I use to generate my flashcards, then manually download the CSV data, and run a Python script to convert everything into the Anki format. If I'm not mistaken it's also possible to import CSV data directly into anki without the intermediate Python script
  - liendolucas 4y ago
    Yes, this is the one I previously found (thanks for sharing). Found it ridiculously complex for what an anki card seems to be... I mean from the docs I found this: > "...You need to pass a model_id so that Anki can keep track of your model." At that time I wondered myself: "Why on earth do I need to keep track of a model id for an anki card?" then quickly move forward on the docs without paying too much attention and finally put it aside...
    - somsak2 4y ago
      Sounds like you got tripped up by digging too much into the specifics of models. While a powerful concept, they're not necessary to understand if you just want to generate basic front-back cards. Simply create a `MODEL_ID` static constant in your file and never touch it again.
orbisvicis 4y ago
I wish I could generate a personal memex by training GTP-4 solely on bookmarked content, in a way that minimizes hallucinations and unrelated content. Then that memex could generate quiz prompts or anki decks for me.
s1mon 4y ago
Every time I see something about Anki, I think it's about toy robots. https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/5/21050378/anki-vector-saved-shutdown-servers-assets-bought https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/5/21050378/anki-vector-saved... https://www.digitaldreamlabs.com https://www.digitaldreamlabs.com
- Kelamir 4y ago
  Etymology of Anki is the Japanese word which means memorization :)
fma 4y ago
I wish the author gave examples...I've used it for language, and currently using it for my daughter to learn the alphabet...but how to you "Anki-fy your life?" His only example is an Alpha-Go research paper, which he didn't read, but Nielsen? Why does he write about Anki-fying your life but uses someone else's example. Confused...
- dev_0 4y ago
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examplary_cable 4y ago
I like to use spaced repetition for everything. I used it so much it has become sort of a "Corgnitive Primitive" where I put everything there: Questions, Facts, Interesting Things, Calendar Events, Prompts, Writing Tips, Mutate-this-idea, Mood Controls, Historical Events and Dates, Todos(Spaced Repetition Productivity?) etc. One example would be: I've grown from a (...) to a (...). I complete the (...) with something from my current mood. This is good because I'm accumulating "Writings" from myself to publish a novel, manga or story later on. When I need to write something then I just consult my notes for everything I have written at that moment. I'm currently working on a tool[1] that has built-in Spaced Repetition(I made my own algorithm and don't use SM-2[Anki's Algorithm]) [1] https://github.com/ilse-langnar/notebook https://github.com/ilse-langnar/notebook
Vaslo 4y ago
I use anki with my young son on sight words. Works great but wish it was a little easier to do what I want instead of following protocol exactly. I know the whole point of anki but sometimes I just want to test him on older stuff or stuff he hasn’t seen for various reasons. Can never quite figure it out on the phone.
- IvanVergiliev 4y ago
  You can use a “Custom Study Session” [1] for this. I tried it recently and it was fairly decent. One possible way to get there on mobile: 1. Start reviewing a deck. 2. Click the gear button. 3. Choose “Custom study” and select one of the options. 4. If studying tagged cards, go tag some cards via the Browse view. [1] https://docs.ankiweb.net/filtered-decks.html#custom-study https://docs.ankiweb.net/filtered-decks.html#custom-study
komali2 4y ago
> The challenges of using Anki to store facts about friends and family: I've experimented with using Anki to store (non-sensitive!) questions about friends and family. It works well for things like “Is [my friend] a vegan?” But my use has run somewhat aground on thornier questions. For instance, suppose I talk with a new friend about their kids, but have never met those kids. I could put in questions like “What is the name of [my friend's] eldest child?” Or, if we'd chatted about music, I might put in: “What is a musician [my friend] likes?” I was on a boat and learned someone's name, and said to her "I'll try to remember it, but-" she cut me off and said "stop telling yourself you're bad at remembering names, everyone does that, then they can't remember names!" I'm aware of the self helpy concept of self actualization and all that and couldn't help but internally roll my eyes a bit, but it did make me think: damn, I really am bad at remembering names, seriously bad, worse than anyone I've ever met in fact. Someone will approach me at s grocery store, call me by name, and start reminiscing with me about things we did together that clearly were fond memories for them, and throughout the whole conversation I'll have no memory of the person's name or any of the things they're talking about. This has happened greater than 20 times in my life, so I was worried I maybe had early onset Alzheimer's or something, but two psychologists have told me It's probably just a symptom of my severe ADHD. So I put my foot down, fuck it, I'm not forgetting people anymore. I made an anki deck on my phone with three fields: picture of their face, name, and basic info about them, maybe times we've hung out etc. The "question" side is their face, answer is name and description. I started throwing in people immediately after I met them and backfilling people from Facebook events and Line chat groups. I'd lift their profile pics or whatever else. It's pretty fuckin creepy to be honest and if I ever get caught reviewing the deck I'll be really embarrassed, but it's working extraordinarily well, and I haven't had the far more embarrassing moment of forgetting that the person I'm talking to went to a baseball game with me once or whatever. Some might say "well clearly that person and event just didn't matter to you if you don't naturally remember them," to which I say I will genuinely forget entirely what I did yesterday sometimes. Something's messed up with my memory and anki is able to fix it, just like daily outline journaling every night has fixed the thing where I'll just forget an entire day.
Pawka 4y ago
While reading the post and comments I also was raising the same question. What I'm going to try - add separate facts from technical books. I like reading tech books which are not directly related to my job as SWE. E.g. I'm not working with Bitcoin or ML, but found those books very interesting. However after a year pass - I barely can remember little bits which I've found very interesting when read the books. I think adding some facts to Anki cards would help me to remember those certain things. I guess difficult part would be to detect the fact which is worth to be added as a card. Since while reading the book - these things seems obvious. Going to try anyways.
- Kelamir 4y ago
  > I guess difficult part would be to detect the fact which is worth to be added as a card. The time to memorize something is supposed to outweight the time you'd need to look it up. Say the target is five minutes - in that case, it's important to follow the Pareto rule as well, and to discard any cards that take you more than that to memorize in total, including the time you recall them. In practice, it means discarding over 20% of cards if possible, to learn 80% that are easy to remember.
mo_42 4y ago
Seems like this could come from GPT? At least partly: - Text is rather verbose - No thoughts on the topic I haven’t seen already
littlecranky67 4y ago
I love Anki for language learning. I export my cards from a browser extension that exports marked words from Netflix subtitles, together with the full sentence and audiotrack of the sentence. Greatly helps to build vocab.
DeathArrow 4y ago
Using mind maps is a better approach for me. I will remember what I can but if I can't, retrieving the info from the mind map takes seconds.
emsign 4y ago
Anyone ever measured how much time it costs to create all those Anki cards? It seems it would considereably more time coming up with the questions than reading the new information. Prep time > learning?
- somsak2 4y ago
  Many people consider the prep time to be valuable itself as it usually involves you gaining understanding. That said, I don't really buy that argument and the vast majority of my cards these days are auto-generated using https://github.com/kerrickstaley/genanki https://github.com/kerrickstaley/genanki.
diyseguy 4y ago
It occurs to me that advertisements are just spaced repetition suggestions. Someone should make a match three or other addictive game that periodically shows you flash cards instead of ads.
qrck13 4y ago
Anki is great. In the last 12 month, I've learned Ukrainian to the level where I can read & listen news with full comprehension, as well as truck driver theory test (to the level where examiner was blown away with my knowledge of theory on the day of the driving test) - all with much help from Anki.

305 points by mililitre 4y ago

Anki is a huge part of my routines having ADHD. https://www.adamgrant.info/Being+Human/ADHD/Strategies/Flashcards https://www.adamgrant.info/Being+Human/ADHD/Strategies/Flash... It's like slowly uploading information to my brain for permanent storage.

andersentobias 4y ago

Unless you want to compete in Jeopardy or something, why bother with ""uploading"" static chunks of information to your wetware? Language learning aside. When categorizing notes to be remembered, I think it's good to think in terms of memory retreival, not memory storage. In other words, not to become an "archiever", because you probably want to evolve your ideas by linking them together in your own unique way -- unique as dicated by your problem at hand plus your own idiosyncratic experiences. "How to take smart notes" by Sönke Ahrens is a great book on this topic, admittedly more oriented towards a Zettelkasten/Obsidian workflow.

thenerdhead 4y ago
We wrote pretty much the same comment. That's funny.
nathanmcrae 4y ago
I find a good way to link together ideas is to have them easily at hand i.e. memorized. Having a motivating problem is probably a better way to do this, but I've found that motivating problems which require concepts I would like to learn are not as readily available as I'd want.
sowbug 4y ago
It's like exercise. As a software engineer, I'm very unlikely to need to lift heavy things or run long distances. But my body is (probably) healthier long-term if I'm able to do those things. Disclaimer: going through my Anki decks is one of the 50 things on my 10-item to-do list. I don't get to it often enough. But it does work, and I now know how to memorize things I want to remember.
- coffeebeqn 4y ago
  Hmm sure but I feel like my brain gets too much intellectual stimulation if anything from my job and relationships and reading. If I try to do a leetcode at 8pm my brain is just extremely fatigued and tells me to stop. My body on the other hand just sits in a chair for a very large amount of the day so I need to supplement there
  - sowbug 4y ago
    There's an old book called The Richest Man In Babylon that has to do with personal finance. One of the key points is to pay yourself first. You have your rent, utility bills, maybe credit-card debt, etc., and even tonight you want to order in, even though it's expensive, because you're way too tired to cook. That's all fine, as long as you first set aside 10% of your paycheck for savings. Although that leaves only 90% left for all the other needs clawing at you, somehow you make it all work. All too often people tend to their financial needs first, and find there's nothing left for themselves. No surprise most people die broke. Isn't it strange how their lifetime income just happened to almost exactly equal their lifetime expenses? Hmmm.... You might see where I'm going. Why are you giving the best of your time (rather than money) to everyone else, leaving nothing for yourself at the end of the day? Maybe start with just five minutes at the start of the day to pay yourself intellectually. If that works out, make it a habit!
Juke_Ellington 4y ago
This kind of static information retention is good for me. I’m an electrician so it’s nice to know off the top of my head that there’s a 10’ spacing on supports for EMT without going to the code book every time. Some of that knowledge gets beaten in through repetition, but there are enough fringe cases and things I don’t touch for years that are nice to have memorized.
_43oo 4y ago
I had a major concussion shortly before my GCSE exams that I'm still very slowly recovering from. I was completely unable to think, let alone study. I never did an IQ test, but I couldn't even listen to a book or stay awake for more than a few hours without a headache. And for a while I couldn't look at a screen or read. I was able to get the second highest grades in the school, with lower than expected grades in only two subjects (and dropping one, further maths), because of Anki. Because Anki does not require understanding, only sufficient repetition, and I had a lot of time on my hands, I was able to continuously do flashcards for hours on end while maths work would have me struggling to stay awake within 5 minutes. I could remember facts without understanding them. The exams were ~3 months after it happened, which gave me time to improve, plus during the actual exam a combination of painkillers, extra time, rest breaks, exam technique, and adrenaline allowed me to put together a plausible answer with the disconnected facts I had learnt in the months preceeding that I just about got the mark. As a sidenote - it's quite incredible how adrenaline can temporarily improve brain injuries, with the downside that the moment it went I was completely exhausted. Every subject bar maths I got the grades I wanted or just below, because Anki allowed me to memorise without learning. (These subjects were: Maths, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, English Lit, English Lang, History, Computer Science, Digital something, Creative Media Production (didn't do exam), Further Maths (dropped).) Now, I would prefer not to revise using solely Anki, and I think the fact a braindead student with memorised facts (and good exam technique) was able to get good grades says a lot about the British education system. It also says a lot about Anki, and just how effective it is. Side note, because I'm tired of hearing drivel on HN: My life being (permanently?) ruined was entirely preventable, all it would have taken is a little less empathy, a little less second chances, for violent barbarians who damage everyone around them. When people preach empathy they forget about the human cost of allowing inherently violent, destructive people to continue their actions. If you're one of those people who thinks grammar schools are bad, restorative "justice" is the future, and we should prioritise those who hurt and destroy over those who want to learn and build: Your actions and your ideology have ugly consequences beyond your selfish delusion of making the world better through being nice and kind and the power of love - that belongs in novels, not policy.
- hhjinks 4y ago
  I've never had a concussion, but I wanted to recount my similar experience in school, too. Like you, 5 minutes of math lectures had me dozing off. Really, a lecture in any subject would bore me to sleep. Only when we got practical tasks to work on, like math or physics problems, did my brain wake up and engage with and understand the material. As a result, I excelled in the natural sciences and math, where working on problems took up most of the time, while I did poorly in the more memorization-oriented social sciences and language subjects. Memorization is a skill like any other, and I'm happy I get to work in a field where understanding is more important than memorization.
BeetleB 4y ago
In my experience trying to follow Zettelkasten was an order of magnitude now work than spaced repetition.
fierro 4y ago
you could integrate a Zettelkasten workflow with Anki. Just send over certain ZK notes into Anki. I'm working on this -- a vim based ZK tool with ability to send over notes to Anki.

LastTrain 4y ago

[flagged]

triyambakam 4y ago
Anki is free. And the concept of SRS is free. There are apps that are clearly very good at capitalizing on the success of Anki and charging. If you found the paid iPad app, that's a one time fee to help the developers maintain it in the app store. I think it's pretty steep but otherwise Anki is free on other platforms. I actually don't like Anki but don't want it to be mischaracterized
Ardon 4y ago
Not sure where you found a subscription to Anki, but it's free and open source: https://github.com/ankitects/anki https://github.com/ankitects/anki The iOS app is a one-time payment though. This article is definitely not written with an unfamiliar reader in mind though, that's for sure.
palmy 4y ago
Anki is free on anything but iOS. Don't know why the iOS app is the only one with a fee.
- rahimnathwani 4y ago
  IIRC the Android app is free because it wasn't started by Anki's original author. It was created by some other folks, using the source for Anki desktop.
- JCharante 4y ago
  I imagine people with iphones have more disposable income and wouldn't be as affected by a cost compared to charging android users.
- Jtsummers 4y ago
  https://faqs.ankiweb.net/why-does-ankimobile-cost-more-than-a-typical-mobile-app.html https://faqs.ankiweb.net/why-does-ankimobile-cost-more-than-... Here's the FAQ entry for why it costs as much as it does for iOS/iPadOS with some explanation for why he only charges on those platforms.

thenerdhead 4y ago

I really like https://readwise.io/ https://readwise.io/ for this purpose regarding all the books I've read and the quotes I like to re-visit here and there. It uses a SRS technique. While this type of article is almost cliche at this point regarding someone coming across the memory limitations and the power of anki for the first time, I really think the case for anki is exaggerated with "important ideas". Anki is great for preparing to go on jeopardy or being in say med school. It is not really needed for lifelong learning. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten might be a better approach but even then it is debatable how often you'll ever actually use it once the novelty wears off. Anki is a tool to be used, not something that needs to be applied to everything.

qznc 4y ago
Zettelkasten is for facts you want to be easy to look up. Anki is for things you want to remember instantly without looking them up. I use both.

triyambakam 4y ago

Anki (or a Leitner box) is the recommended method from the book "Fluent Forever" After learning one language in school and a few others ad hoc on my own I gave this method a try. I quickly gave up, though, once I discovered Dr Krashen's work on comprehensible input, and how boring and time consuming creating and studying Anki is. Dr Krashen's work says that we learn language when we understand it. I.e. when we receive input at our level. There are quite a number of Youtube channels that claim to teach through this method, but many of them still resort to drills, themed vocabulary, grammar etc that are all pointless in the CI method. The best one I've seen so far is Dreaming Spanish. What's so cool about the CI method is that the spaced repetition is built in, implicit - if you're getting input at your level you will be getting repetition. Children's shows are a great way to get input. Many countries have TV apps on iPad and can be viewed free with a VPN. As an experiment I had my daughter only consume German media (living in Sweden) för a few years and she can now speak better German than I can, and I have never corrected her. She has broader and more modern vocabulary, naturally.

bluquark 4y ago
Personally, as an intermediate Japanese learner, I have been careful to choose the right input just as Krashen advocates, but I also find Anki indispensable. I found to my surprise that I have been improving about equally quickly using Anki+Animebook+Yomichan for 1-2 hours a day while living the US as I did during an earlier period when I was living in Japan (but without access to computerized methods beyond a basic pocket e-dict). As a beginner, appropriate input was enough to care of "spaced repetition" on its own, since children's media constantly rotates over the same small set of vocabulary. But after I improved past the ~2000 most common words or so, it happened more and more that a word I recently learned didn't appear again in my input until it had already been flushed. The probability that I would actually learn a new word for good progressively decreased as I picked the lower-hanging fruit, which is the cause of the dreaded "intermediate plateau". I gather Anki pushes out the plateau much further: I have heard that it starts to feel Sisyphean to learn new words with it around the 15000-20000 word mark instead.
miklosz 4y ago
I find Anki essential for language learning. Did it for French, starting from 0 and finishing at B2 (except for writing) in two years (also taking a 3h / week course). Especially at the very beginning, I find learning the first 500 words as described in "Fluent Forever" very helpful. Going through that before starting with the course makes the experience much easier. I totally agree with Krashen's theories, but using Anki is a secret weapon here that puts the process on overdrive (e.g. reading on Kindle and then later going through words that I checked in the Kindle dictionary and adding them into Anki). Also, it's essential to retain the knowledge, e.g. if it's a language that you don't use daily. 5 years and 30'000+ cards later, I find Anki indispensable in learning anything which requires memorisation. Thinks I have to learn for work, for hobbies, certificates, improving my vocabulary in languages I care about. Basically, every fact I care about strongly enough, goes into Anki. If not enough, goes into Obsidian.

bitdivision 4y ago

I started out using anki to improve my Spanish vocabulary. Eventually discovered Mochi [0] here on HN. Far better designed and executed, well worth a look if you're interested in Anki. [0] https://mochi.cards/ https://mochi.cards/

zora_goron 4y ago

I also had a similar thought process regarding understanding vs memorizing facts while transitioning from studying CS (where I emphasized understanding the underlying concepts rather than trying to memorize atomic facts that I could derive) to medicine (where having facts memorized is also a key component). Interestingly, I found that committing to memorizing facts actually helped me gain a deeper understanding of the topics themselves, which was not what I originally expected! (I wrote a little bit about the above a few months ago -- https://samrawal.substack.com/p/on-the-relationship-between-memorizing https://samrawal.substack.com/p/on-the-relationship-between-...)

Jensson 4y ago
> Interestingly, I found that committing to memorizing facts actually helped me gain a deeper understanding of the topics themselves, which was not what I originally expected Be careful with this, perceived self understanding doesn't reflect real understanding.
- rg111 4y ago
  There is only one real way to test, and the subject being CS, it is even more real: building things using those concepts. For other subjects (and CS, too): demonstrate mastery with teaching others, producing something with the concepts learned and get feedback. This way one can test true learning. And, even when tested this way, Spaced Repeatition really helps. I am speaking from experience. When you are in a place where you can immerse yourself in a proper environment, like a college or work- where you hear terms and their usage regularly, learning becomes easier. But when your environment is cut-off from the buzzing world, or everyone is doing ML and you want to do Cybersecurity, you can fake immersion using Anki. A good part of physical immersion can be replaced with using Anki.

1024core 4y ago

I'm trying to get into Anki, but it's difficult to get started. Here's what I'd like: while I'm reading a (PDF) book, I want to highlight some text (and maybe manually tweak it a little) and have it converted into some "Anki card" format so when I want to review the contents of the book later, I can use Anki for it. Any ideas?

kneebonian 4y ago
So sounds like more of what you are interested in is incremental reading. In the case the way you'd want to do things is copy the text to another document for the entire article then go back through determine which facts you want to keep. Then turn it into an Anki card, preferably with clozes. Half the benefit of Anki is making the Anki cards in the first place.
resoluteteeth 4y ago
Maybe you could use some app to pull out highlights but you still need to think carefully about how to make each text chunk into a card or multiple cards (otherwise you'll waste more time than you save) You also don't normally use an srs flashcard program like anki just when you want to review a book, you use it every day.
yellow_postit 4y ago
Check out AnkiConnect for getting things into Anki. Not sure about reader software that will call out after a highlight though.
siegecraft 4y ago
This is a common use case and many reader / annotation apps either support it natively (polarized and marginnote 3 are two that I have first hand experience with) or have third party tools available to copy annotations into anki.
JCharante 4y ago
Highlight the text in your dedicated PDF reading program and then after each lesson/chapter, when you sit down to review the lesson (you should be doing this even if you don't use Anki!) you can create the Anki cards manually. Creating Anki cards is really helpful for learning. I used to study at a langauge school and whenever I came across a word I didn't know, I'd quickly write it down in a notebook in the middle of class and then later in the day go back and create Anki cards for the words I had written down.

ryyr 4y ago

“Don’t memorize ideas. And don’t take us too seriously when we turn up our noses at rote learning. Rote helps build the man."

nohaydeprobleme 4y ago

A major limitation exists for spaced repetition software (e.g. Anki, SuperMemo, or other flashcard-style systems), in my experience using them for several years for long-term memory: it's neither necessary nor sufficient to use this software to learn certain topics. Several excellent physics and math students I worked with have never used spaced repetition software, but were excellent at their studies because they consistently solved textbook problems. For them, they got the "repetitions" (aka exposure to facts and problems) via solving more new problems from the book nearly every day. Later problems in the textbooks would provide review of previous problems. This method can be far more effective than spending too much studying with spaced repetition software (which I have done in the past), as the time spent creating new cards and reviewing cards that are due comes at the expense of time spent solving new problems. Ideally, you can perhaps find time for both activities. But in my personal experience, I learned mathematics more effectively by focusing primarily on textbook problems (reviewing older material through new problems) and spending a very limited amount of time with spaced repetition, versus even a fifty-fifty split between a textbook and spaced repetition that I've experimented with in the past. In the past, I also spent too much time in the past remembering phrases and vocabulary when learning new languages, and not enough time practicing listening, writing, and especially conversation. Certain skills can only be efficiently developed by directly practicing them. While spaced repetition software remains an essential part to my language studies, it is very far from sufficient (even just a couple hours of conversation practice per week over three months, got me much further than primarily focusing on Anki/spaced repetition for six months). Spaced repetition systems like Anki (though I moved to SuperMemo about a year back) are vital to my daily studies, but I've learned far more effectively by treating these systems as a supplement to more traditional and tested study methods that rely on active problem-solving. For technical fields, these are textbook problems from books by well-regarded authors, and for languages, these are conversation practice and writing articles that I request feedback on (in particular, teachers in small group classes have given me great, useful feedback on my writing).

kneebonian 4y ago
I've found the sweet spot.for Anki is the things that I need only occasionally but not never. Things I use frequently I already pick up through repeated use, things that I never use eventually falls out. But things that are somewhat relevant about that I find myself googling more than twice is a good candidate to Anki.

kneebonian 4y ago

I'll just throw out I've used Anki ever since I started it and haven't failed a knowledge test since I started doing it. Including passing my HAM test with only using Anki and the questions for 72 hours.

bluquark 4y ago
Using Anki for a 72-hour cram session is kind of missing the point though. For me, the main benefit of Anki is to escape the cram->forget cycle and learn things low-stress and for good.
- kneebonian 4y ago
  I 100% agree that is the optimal way. But it can be useful to memorize 300 questions and answers in 72 hours if you have to.
siva7 4y ago
Word of caution to other readers: Don't use Anki for cramming. Especially not if you didn't learn and understand the material before cramming.
- Kelamir 4y ago
  Could you explain why that might not be a good thing to do, siva7?
  - siva7 4y ago
    I've used anki for over a decade and done that mistake several times. Anki is designed to reinforce knowledge you've already learned, not to introduce new information. The cards shown in a SRS alogrithm don't follow an order which makes it suited from a pedagogic POV for acquiring new knowledge. Cramming tends to be done when knowledge hasn't been yet learned or understood sufficiently.

pixelperfect 4y ago

I find there's a sweet spot for Anki when the daily review of already-existing cards takes 20 minutes. If the daily review takes more than 25 minutes, I try not to add any cards that day.

CGamesPlay 4y ago
I have mine set to 20 new cards/day and 200 remember cards/day. This seems to steady out at about 20 mins day. That said, I wish Anki had a time-boxed mode, where it measured my speeds and then just chose the right balance of new cards. (Cards added above the new card limit go into a queue for future days automatically.)
- somsak2 4y ago
  You can kind-of achieve this by setting it up such that new cards always appear after all reviews are completed. You can use the timebox time limit to cap based on time instead of card count -- https://docs.ankiweb.net/preferences.html#scheduler https://docs.ankiweb.net/preferences.html#scheduler

JaDogg 4y ago

Shameless plug if you want flashcards in your terminal: https://github.com/JaDogg/sbx https://github.com/JaDogg/sbx

MichaelNolan 4y ago

I'm a huge fan of spaced repetition and Anki. I strongly believe that most people's professional lives would be improved by using it. There is a huge amount of information that falls into the zone of it's needed often enough that not knowing it is a pain, but it's not needed often enough that you would "naturally" remember it. I've yet to find anything else that only takes 10 to 20 minutes a day that has a higher ROI. The amount of "compounding interest" it gives over time is incredible. Learning to write good cards is skill that takes time and practice. The article from Andy Matuschak [0] is a great guide to learn how to write good cards. [0] https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/

yt-sdb 4y ago
Do you have a TLDR for that article? It's pretty long and wordy.
- submeta 4y ago
  The article discusses how to create effective prompts that aid in long-term learning using spaced repetition. Matuschak suggests that good prompts should be specific, clear, and concise, and should be designed to encourage active recall rather than passive recognition. He also emphasizes the importance of interleaving, which involves mixing up different types of problems or questions to enhance retention and facilitate transfer of knowledge. Additionally, he suggests that prompts should be personalized and contextualized to increase engagement and motivation.
  - jstummbillig 4y ago
    Okay, so was this written by chatgpt
- zvmaz 4y ago
  I have found out that I was bad at card making when reviewing the first cards I made after a lapse of time of not using Anki. My then self got frustrated and irritated by how vague and non-specific the cards I made myself were. I certainly learned something about my memory and cognition. The article is long, but it has some insights that resonated with me. I think the quality of the cards one makes is as important, if not more so, than spaced repetition.

doktorhladnjak 4y ago

Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t think of anything in my job as a software engineer that I’d benefit from memorizing through flash cards. What are people memorizing exactly?

johtso 4y ago
I've also never used anki for anything related to my work / programming. What I have used it for: Memorising how to identify plants and their latin names Memorising the technical terms for different morphological features of plants so that I could efficiently use a vegetative identification key without constantly flicking to the glossary Memorising foreign language vocabulary
shusaku 4y ago
One of these days I need to make flash cards of those makefile automatic variables…
sowbug 4y ago
Coworkers' names and the reason for meeting with them. I used Anki for this when I was in a management position that involved meeting with many people, often just once or twice each, across my very large company. It was nice to be able to greet someone by name in the cafeteria six months after our meeting, and ask how such-and-such project was going. I'm sure some people already remember names, faces, and context effortlessly. I'm not one of those people. But I always appreciate when someone remembers me, so I was willing to work to do the same for them. I stopped doing it once my work universe got a little more stable, and life's daily encounters were themselves the spaced repetition I needed to remember everyone.
kobalsky 4y ago
you can use it to memorize some console commands, library calls, anything you would like to be able to remember without checking the source material.
1123581321 4y ago
Mine’s a grab bag. If I had to look something up, and value knowing it cold the next time it comes up, it goes in. I could see some engineers having nothing that fits that criteria.

keiferski 4y ago

I’ve experimented with Anki over the years and currently have a somewhat custom setup that I do every day / nearly every day. I’ll explain below for anyone that might find it useful. At one point I realized that my capacity for learning new items for a particular topic is limited to a few items per day. Any more than 2 or 3 and I struggle to retain the information. So, for example, trying to learn 20 words in Chinese per day is impossible without spending multiple hours on it. The trick, however, is that I get around this by having many items from multiple topics, instead of many items from a single topic. Instead of 20 words in Chinese, I learn 1 word each in 20 different languages. Surprisingly, I have a much easier time with this and don’t need to spend much time on it in order to retain the information. I don’t know why this psychologically works, but it does. And while learning 2 or 3 words a day won’t make you fluent anytime soon, it does add up over time, especially for topics that you aren’t in a hurry to learn but would like to know on a slow timeline, in a year or two. For example, learning the Japanese hiragana/katakana or the numbers of all the US presidents. However, this proved to be somewhat unwieldy logistically as I had to open 20 different PDFs, download audio for each word, then stitch it all together daily. So I created a little web app (stitched together from some WordPress plugins, actually) that allows me to import learning materials and then display 2-3 of them per topic on a single page, each time the page is loaded. I just visit the page once a day and add the items to Anki. This was all a bit complex to set up, but if you enjoy learning new things and want an efficient system for adding stuff into your brain, I recommend making something similar.

hobo_mark 4y ago
Is that a real example? Are you learning 20 languages in parallel? Two is already more than enough for me.
- keiferski 4y ago
  Yes I am currently learning one word/phrase (it depends on the language) daily in about twenty different languages. Again, I wouldn’t claim it to be equivalent to serious study and conversational practice, but I have absolutely learned various phrases in all of the languages. I think most people make “language learning” a heavy task that seems insurmountable. In reality, once you understand the basic sounds of a language, it can be as simple as learning a new phrase everyday. Just think of it as learning the names of capital cities or elements on the periodic table: a lot of information that is organized into patterns. No, you won’t be fluent quickly, but it is absolutely beneficial to know “hello”, “thank you”, “where is?” and 100 other phrases in a language. Or in the case of Russian or Hebrew or Greek, it’s awesome to just be able to read the alphabet, even if you don’t know many of the words.

rounakdatta 4y ago

I'm surprised no one mentioned Memoet (https://github.com/memoetapp/memoet https://github.com/memoetapp/memoet). It is a much more modern version of Anki - much more open algorithm, REST APIs and universal interfaces and self-hosted control over one's data.

igloopan 4y ago
I agree that Anki is likely less developer friendly but its popularity does make up for that I feel, with ostensibly state of the art SRS algorithms being published with Anki implementations (https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki) out of the box. Though as someone that's solely used Anki for language learning, I do value the ability to remember more words in less time more than ease of development so it's not unlikely Memoet is a better choice for other usecases.
- Kelamir 4y ago
  In what way is Anki less developer friendly? They participated in Google Summer of Code last year!
AlexErrant 4y ago
Anki, imo, already has an open algorithm (that the user can change via plugins), universal interfaces, and is "self-hosted". My eyes perked up at REST api, but it doesn't look like there's a centralized server that hosts shared cards, which is where my mind went. I'm building https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive/ https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive/ which is basically Anki + Github + Reddit; people can optionally upload their cards for others to download/fork, and the most popular cards rise to the top. It's FLOSS, offline-first, supports plugins and p2p syncing, and is very much a WIP. My proof of concept is almost done though, which demos the critical technologies in a secure way.
Kelamir 4y ago
But does it have as many addons and decks? https://ankiweb.net/shared/addons/ https://ankiweb.net/shared/addons/ https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/german https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/german There's a number of Anki alternatives such as https://mnemosyne-proj.org/ https://mnemosyne-proj.org/, but Anki has an active collaborative community, as opposed to most of alternatives, as far as I know.

ichverstehe 4y ago

Allow me to mention my project Ankivalenz[1], which turns structured HTML files into Anki decks. I use it with Quarto[2][3] to generate my Anki decks. Instead of having an unorganized "pool" of Anki cards, I can create hierarchical, well-organized notes and turn them into an Anki deck. This makes it easier to create Anki decks, but more importantly, it makes it easier to keep Anki decks up to date. [1] https://github.com/vangberg/ankivalenz https://github.com/vangberg/ankivalenz [2] https://quarto.org/ https://quarto.org/ [3] https://github.com/vangberg/quarto-ankivalenz https://github.com/vangberg/quarto-ankivalenz

spoonjim 4y ago

What kinds of things are useful to learn in this rote way? Except maybe foreign language vocabulary?

keiferski 4y ago
Pretty much anything. I use it to learn foreign alphabets and languages, historical people and events, philosophical terms, computer networking concepts, outdoor survival tips, and a bunch of other things. The best sources of information are encyclopedias (traditional ones, not Wikipedia) and dictionaries, as they are written to summarize a concept in a few hundred words.
knubie 4y ago
Spaced repetition systems are not used to learn things. They’re used to remember things you’ve already learned.

bigbluesax 4y ago

I actually really strugle to retain anything I learned with anki and I was wondering if this affects anyone else. A prominent example is when I was working through a deck of japanese hiragana and katakana, I was doing my cards at a moderate pace every day, and I just kept mixing them up, even when I was repeating them in short succession. After a few very frustrating weeks of this i ditched anki and started trying to write out the whole table from memory and checking for mistakes after, this strategy proved so successful I only needed three sessions for perfect recall. I used anki a few other times with similar results. I know the idea of learning styles is disputed, but this app just doesn't appear to work for me.

keiferski 4y ago
It sounds like you didn’t learn the information sufficiently enough before making them into cards. Anki isn’t good for teaching you new things, it’s good for remembering stuff that you already know - or are at least familiar with.
Kelamir 4y ago
As the other responder said, don't use Anki for memorization, only for reviewing what you already remember. I recommend using mnemonics for memorizing words. For katakana hiragana, refer to https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/ https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/

thrown123098 4y ago

Using the pigeon hole principle on these systems tells me that if I don't eventually drop all cards completely I will reach a point where the only thing I'm doing is reviewing old material. None of the algorithms I've looked into seem to acknowledge this. Is there one which throws out a card after you get it right n times?

somsak2 4y ago
You can do it based on how many times you got it right, but I think a more sensible approach is to do it based on how many times you've go it wrong. Anki does this through its concept of leeches and the way that it's explained makes alot of sense to me. So much so that I've cut my leech threshold in half to 4. If my brain is having a hard time remembering something, it's probably not the best usage of my time to just mindlessly keep drilling. https://docs.ankiweb.net/leeches.html https://docs.ankiweb.net/leeches.html
BeetleB 4y ago
Not sure how. I have flashcards that are due a decade from now. Everyday you'll have cards that are due after you die.
Kelamir 4y ago
As an example, if you're learning a langauge and studying vocab, you could discard any cards that have over 90 days interval. After all, you're going to meet that word while reading a book or watching something in the target language in the next 90 days, and if not - you shouldn't have memorized that word anyway.

tastysandwich 4y ago

I absolutely love Anki. A lot of software make empty promises around productivity improvements. Especially in education. Anki is one of those rare tools that genuinely 10x's you over your peers. I used it when studying Japanese and it was a massive help. However, having used it for over 12 years to memorise many different things I have noticed one caveat. If you're not also using what you're memorising outside of Anki, I feel like your ability to recall gets trapped within the context of using Anki. For example, if you're learning Japanese vocab through Anki, and also trying out your new words via conversation and reading/writing, you'll rapidly learn new vocab AND be able to recall it anywhere. However if you're learning Japanese on your own and not really conversing/writing, no matter how good your recall with Anki is, you'll struggle to recall those same words anywhere else. The cool thing about Anki is you can also use pictures/audio. So if you're learning music theory you could memorise chord shapes/intervals. Or human anatomy.

TwentyPosts 4y ago
This is also what I'd call the classic issue with Duolingo. Or rather, one of them, considering that the app has all sorts of issues. If you use nothing but Duolingo you'll plateau very quickly. It's probably "okay" as a casual side spaced-repetition learning tool—when you're learning languages you generally want to pull from several different resources, and learn with different tools anyway. But don't make the mistake of thinking that Duolingo alone will get you anywhere. I think this universally applies to repetition-learning, at least when it comes to languages. You need to "cross-train".
- mock-possum 4y ago
  Yep, my entire takeaway from six months of doing Duolingo is that ‘stark’ means ‘strong’ in German.
- bluquark 4y ago
  > Or rather, one of them, considering that [Duolingo] has all sorts of issues. Yep. I agree with measured criticisms of Anki even while feeling the app is really useful if you use it well. Whereas Duolingo isn't worth bothering with at all. It's purely optimized to maximize engagement/revenue.

kayo_20211030 4y ago

Is there a measure, anywhere, of the bollocks to content ratio on HN on Saturdays? It seems to peak that day. But, this one is so bad, it's not even wrong. Who on earth knows what the future will bring? Who on earth knows, ahead of time, what's worth 10 minutes, or 2 minutes, or no time at all. That's intuition, and that's a gift. All the rest is bollocks, and it seems to turn up on Saturdays too much; that is, the pieces that claim to have identified a "system".

deleted 4y ago
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nearmuse 4y ago

I am trying this approach right now. It is difficult to do it for big concepts because they take time to recall in their entirety and can't be reduced to one key idea to be recalled quickly. It may also be hard to estimate what interval to use, and bloated repetition sessions are killing the whole idea of spending some 10s of minutes a day, causing a sort of fatigue if not outright burnout.

mahathu 4y ago

I'm sure taking 10 minutes out of their day to reflect and write a diary entry would increase most peoples wellbeing a lot more than trying to neurotically remember everything you come across.

BeetleB 4y ago
I'm sure spending those ten minutes doing some cardio will have more benefit both physically and mentally than writing a diary. We could do this all day. The fact that there's something better one can do doesn't negate the benefits of the former.

nirav72 4y ago

This might be a good idea to refresh memory every so often. As an IT guy , sometimes I’ll mentally go blank when I trying to recall some linux command option/switch or some sql query operation. Especially when I’ve used that linux commend or wrote that specific type of query 1000s of times throughout my career. This has become more apparent as I’ve gotten older. (I’m 50 now). So now I’m increasingly relying on search engines to quickly find that info when I face those mental blocks. So I probably should try anki style flash cards.

liendolucas 4y ago

Question aside. Does anyone know straightforward ways to create anki decks? Last time I checked on this it was like a lot of effort to put on and got discouraged to build my own decks to improve my italian. I was expecting anki decks to be constructed easily, in its most basic form from plain text files (html, markdown, etc) with references to maybe resources (audio, images, etc) just from a filesystem directory but is not that simple. I can't recall the name of a Python tool that allowed you to create decks programmatically but I found it way too much effort to use it and I couldn't find other good alternatives (maybe this has changed recently, don't know). Does anyone recommend a good, simple and straightforward tool to create decks/cards? (I'm using FreeBSD).

vector_spaces 4y ago
There's a Python library called genanki that has a minor learning curve but isn't terrible to figure out. My process is to maintain a gsheet with data I use to generate my flashcards, then manually download the CSV data, and run a Python script to convert everything into the Anki format. If I'm not mistaken it's also possible to import CSV data directly into anki without the intermediate Python script
- liendolucas 4y ago
  Yes, this is the one I previously found (thanks for sharing). Found it ridiculously complex for what an anki card seems to be... I mean from the docs I found this: > "...You need to pass a model_id so that Anki can keep track of your model." At that time I wondered myself: "Why on earth do I need to keep track of a model id for an anki card?" then quickly move forward on the docs without paying too much attention and finally put it aside...
  - somsak2 4y ago
    Sounds like you got tripped up by digging too much into the specifics of models. While a powerful concept, they're not necessary to understand if you just want to generate basic front-back cards. Simply create a `MODEL_ID` static constant in your file and never touch it again.

orbisvicis 4y ago

I wish I could generate a personal memex by training GTP-4 solely on bookmarked content, in a way that minimizes hallucinations and unrelated content. Then that memex could generate quiz prompts or anki decks for me.

s1mon 4y ago

Every time I see something about Anki, I think it's about toy robots. https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/5/21050378/anki-vector-saved-shutdown-servers-assets-bought https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/5/21050378/anki-vector-saved... https://www.digitaldreamlabs.com https://www.digitaldreamlabs.com

Kelamir 4y ago
Etymology of Anki is the Japanese word which means memorization :)

fma 4y ago

I wish the author gave examples...I've used it for language, and currently using it for my daughter to learn the alphabet...but how to you "Anki-fy your life?" His only example is an Alpha-Go research paper, which he didn't read, but Nielsen? Why does he write about Anki-fying your life but uses someone else's example. Confused...

dev_0 4y ago
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examplary_cable 4y ago

I like to use spaced repetition for everything. I used it so much it has become sort of a "Corgnitive Primitive" where I put everything there: Questions, Facts, Interesting Things, Calendar Events, Prompts, Writing Tips, Mutate-this-idea, Mood Controls, Historical Events and Dates, Todos(Spaced Repetition Productivity?) etc. One example would be: I've grown from a (...) to a (...). I complete the (...) with something from my current mood. This is good because I'm accumulating "Writings" from myself to publish a novel, manga or story later on. When I need to write something then I just consult my notes for everything I have written at that moment. I'm currently working on a tool[1] that has built-in Spaced Repetition(I made my own algorithm and don't use SM-2[Anki's Algorithm]) [1] https://github.com/ilse-langnar/notebook https://github.com/ilse-langnar/notebook

Vaslo 4y ago

I use anki with my young son on sight words. Works great but wish it was a little easier to do what I want instead of following protocol exactly. I know the whole point of anki but sometimes I just want to test him on older stuff or stuff he hasn’t seen for various reasons. Can never quite figure it out on the phone.

IvanVergiliev 4y ago
You can use a “Custom Study Session” [1] for this. I tried it recently and it was fairly decent. One possible way to get there on mobile: 1. Start reviewing a deck. 2. Click the gear button. 3. Choose “Custom study” and select one of the options. 4. If studying tagged cards, go tag some cards via the Browse view. [1] https://docs.ankiweb.net/filtered-decks.html#custom-study https://docs.ankiweb.net/filtered-decks.html#custom-study

komali2 4y ago

> The challenges of using Anki to store facts about friends and family: I've experimented with using Anki to store (non-sensitive!) questions about friends and family. It works well for things like “Is [my friend] a vegan?” But my use has run somewhat aground on thornier questions. For instance, suppose I talk with a new friend about their kids, but have never met those kids. I could put in questions like “What is the name of [my friend's] eldest child?” Or, if we'd chatted about music, I might put in: “What is a musician [my friend] likes?” I was on a boat and learned someone's name, and said to her "I'll try to remember it, but-" she cut me off and said "stop telling yourself you're bad at remembering names, everyone does that, then they can't remember names!" I'm aware of the self helpy concept of self actualization and all that and couldn't help but internally roll my eyes a bit, but it did make me think: damn, I really am bad at remembering names, seriously bad, worse than anyone I've ever met in fact. Someone will approach me at s grocery store, call me by name, and start reminiscing with me about things we did together that clearly were fond memories for them, and throughout the whole conversation I'll have no memory of the person's name or any of the things they're talking about. This has happened greater than 20 times in my life, so I was worried I maybe had early onset Alzheimer's or something, but two psychologists have told me It's probably just a symptom of my severe ADHD. So I put my foot down, fuck it, I'm not forgetting people anymore. I made an anki deck on my phone with three fields: picture of their face, name, and basic info about them, maybe times we've hung out etc. The "question" side is their face, answer is name and description. I started throwing in people immediately after I met them and backfilling people from Facebook events and Line chat groups. I'd lift their profile pics or whatever else. It's pretty fuckin creepy to be honest and if I ever get caught reviewing the deck I'll be really embarrassed, but it's working extraordinarily well, and I haven't had the far more embarrassing moment of forgetting that the person I'm talking to went to a baseball game with me once or whatever. Some might say "well clearly that person and event just didn't matter to you if you don't naturally remember them," to which I say I will genuinely forget entirely what I did yesterday sometimes. Something's messed up with my memory and anki is able to fix it, just like daily outline journaling every night has fixed the thing where I'll just forget an entire day.

Pawka 4y ago

While reading the post and comments I also was raising the same question. What I'm going to try - add separate facts from technical books. I like reading tech books which are not directly related to my job as SWE. E.g. I'm not working with Bitcoin or ML, but found those books very interesting. However after a year pass - I barely can remember little bits which I've found very interesting when read the books. I think adding some facts to Anki cards would help me to remember those certain things. I guess difficult part would be to detect the fact which is worth to be added as a card. Since while reading the book - these things seems obvious. Going to try anyways.

Kelamir 4y ago
> I guess difficult part would be to detect the fact which is worth to be added as a card. The time to memorize something is supposed to outweight the time you'd need to look it up. Say the target is five minutes - in that case, it's important to follow the Pareto rule as well, and to discard any cards that take you more than that to memorize in total, including the time you recall them. In practice, it means discarding over 20% of cards if possible, to learn 80% that are easy to remember.

mo_42 4y ago

Seems like this could come from GPT? At least partly: - Text is rather verbose - No thoughts on the topic I haven’t seen already

littlecranky67 4y ago

I love Anki for language learning. I export my cards from a browser extension that exports marked words from Netflix subtitles, together with the full sentence and audiotrack of the sentence. Greatly helps to build vocab.

DeathArrow 4y ago

Using mind maps is a better approach for me. I will remember what I can but if I can't, retrieving the info from the mind map takes seconds.

emsign 4y ago

Anyone ever measured how much time it costs to create all those Anki cards? It seems it would considereably more time coming up with the questions than reading the new information. Prep time > learning?

somsak2 4y ago
Many people consider the prep time to be valuable itself as it usually involves you gaining understanding. That said, I don't really buy that argument and the vast majority of my cards these days are auto-generated using https://github.com/kerrickstaley/genanki https://github.com/kerrickstaley/genanki.

diyseguy 4y ago

It occurs to me that advertisements are just spaced repetition suggestions. Someone should make a match three or other addictive game that periodically shows you flash cards instead of ads.

qrck13 4y ago

Anki is great. In the last 12 month, I've learned Ukrainian to the level where I can read & listen news with full comprehension, as well as truck driver theory test (to the level where examiner was blown away with my knowledge of theory on the day of the driving test) - all with much help from Anki.