6 ms·
One tip for working with Anki: you will likely learn better - and review cards more regularly - if you write the cards yourself instead of using a preexisting d
by SamPatt 3y ago
One tip for working with Anki: you will likely learn better - and review cards more regularly - if you write the cards yourself instead of using a preexisting deck.
Going through a course / textbook -> taking notes on paper -> adding key concepts as Anki flashcards -> reviewing them daily: extremely effective
Preexisting decks can work - I used one to successfully study for my Amateur Radio License - but that assumes a specific pool of questions you're memorizing, which isn’t how learning a subject typically works.
- tussa 3y ago> if you write the cards yourself I'd go so far to say it's almost an requirement. Unless you have a high quality deck made specifically for the book/course/material you have. Sadly most of the publicly available Anki are IMHO not of that quality.
- Version467 3y agoEven if they were, writing cards yourself forces you to engage with the material in a way that's highly conducive to learning it. It makes knowledge gaps more visible and forces you to understand it if you want to have any chance breaking the material down into pieces that make good cards. The positive effects of SRS rely just as much on the repetition as they do on the creation of the cards. I know that not everyone agrees with this, it's certainly been true for me. Premade decks might work for language learning, but even then I'd be wary.
- romeros 3y agowriting your own cards is very tedious.
- SamPatt 3y agoTrue, but I suspect that's due to learning being tedious. Memorization isn't the same as learning. Using a preexisting deck is memorizing someone else's learning.
- Version467 3y agoIt gets easier the more you do it. As you become more comfortable with the software as well as develop an intuition for what makes a good card, the effort shrinks dramatically. Not just because I'm faster at creating cards, I also create fewer cards overall.
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y agoI've been studying Chinese with a premade deck for several years and it's working very well. Of course, ideally one would want to create cards, but I only can devote around 30 minutes per day. Under that restriction, creating cards is not really an option.
- outlace 3y agoWhich deck?
- Al-Khwarizmi 3y agoSpoonfed Chinese.
- SamPatt 3y agoWell said, this is the key part for me: >It makes knowledge gaps more visible It's the same principle behind teaching others. It's easy to think you understand something until you are forced to communicate it beyond the surface level.
- mabster 3y agoI started making the cards, noticed a lot of repetition in what I was doing and then started coding solutions to clusters of cards. I definitely spent way too long on the "making the cards" phase!
- redcobra762 3y agoChatGPT is great at taking my notes and turning them into Anki cards. Some tweaks are occasionally needed, but I have done well on numerous exams letting ChatGPT figure out the cards (and the formatting tedium) for me.
- tyrust 3y agoThis is the opposite of what the commenter is suggesting.
- computerphage 3y agoI'm not sure it is. Not if chatgpt is operating off of the notes you already took yourself
- redcobra762 3y agoI’m offering my experience, while agreeing with the larger point that you need to customize your cards to your situation.
- CuriouslyC 3y agoOne of the biggest roadblocks to using anki or cards in general is coming up with good cards. Automating that part lets you use anki a lot more, which is a win. If you want to connect with the question you can still manually transcribe the card.
- _Algernon_ 3y agoThe biggest failure mode is adding to many notes at once, which leads to non obvious increased future workload. Automating card creation sounds like would worsen this issue unless extreme care is taken.
- samus 3y agoUsing Anki is not a goal in itself. It's just a tool to help you cram facts into your brain. Once you have done that, you can and should build associations and knowledge on top of them. Reviews ensure that less-often used facts are not forgotten. Anki is fine for that. But creating Anki cards is effectively a form of review as well. If you automate that, then you miss out on going through your own notes, engaging with the subject, and subdividing it into self-contained pieces, which is required to come up with good cards.
- atahanacar 3y ago>if you write the cards yourself instead of using a preexisting deck I disagree with this. Anki's power comes from spaced repetition. Spending your time creating cards instead of actually reviewing the material is very inefficient. If high quality decks exist for the topic you're learning, use them instead. I've learned this the hard way. Fields like medicine and language learning (you will still need to create your own deck for sentence mining but that's different as it's not a time sink) have great decks. For actual "niche" topics though, creating your own decks is your only choice. For people who are going to create their own decks: check the Anking deck to see how to create "great" cards.
- BeetleB 3y agoIt's great when high quality decks exist, but I doubt they do for what I use it for. Also, even when they do exist, chances are still high you'll find pieces of knowledge missing, and will have to create your own card.
- poirot2 3y agoI disagree with this strongly. Isolated individual facts don’t give you an overview or macro-structure to place the facts within. It’s very inefficient. Can only speak for medicine but using another persons deck is ‘quicker’ but performance is so much worse. Even in just learning how to summarise the info for yourself you gain a lot.
- atahanacar 3y agoI am also speaking from experience with medicine, there is no way I can create cards as good as Anking's and still have time left to actually study/review.
- jamager 3y agoNot at all, see f. ex.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_effect
- atahanacar 3y ago
- zilti 3y agoEven for learning in general. We even had teachers who told us we're allowed to make tiny cheat sheets - about 6x3cm or something - because the mere process of creating the sheet is a good learning strategy, and to fit all you don't know on such a small sheet means you already know almost everything.
- kirill5pol 3y agoI definitely agree that to absolutely maximize learning you should write the cards yourself but I think it really depends on the value of the content, say it may be 2x as effective for learning but take 5x the amount of effort. For some things where you want to learn but don't want to/have time to put in full effort premade cards are better than nothing. For example, I ended up learning German to B1 level from Duolingo (+ friends/time in germany) because using Duolingo was pretty low effort, even if it wasn't the fastest most effective way of learning. I think this is probably true for most things you may want to learn about outside of your job, school, or really strong reasoning behind it. Perfect is the enemy of good as they say (Shameless plug: I made a tool that makes spaced repetition questions for educational YouTube videos/podcasts that you watch, usually I was forgetting everything and wasn't really that invested to spend the time making decks for everything I watch, so I landed on this! https://www.platoedu.org https://www.platoedu.org)
- lamtung 3y agoWow, your tool is amazing. I have been searching for something like this for quite some time and even thought of writing such tool myself.
- rikafurude21 3y agoIs duolingo actually good for learning languages? i tested it briefly and it seemed more like a minigame of constructing sentences
- theshrike79 3y ago600 days of German on Duolingo and I can kinda read it and guess the words I don’t know yet. I can speak phrases and maybe understand a bit of spoken German depending on the speaker
- pawelduda 3y agoUsing someone else's decks in Anki === using vim with someone else's .vimrc
- Noumenon72 3y agoI downloaded premade cards for the Security+ exam acronyms[1]. Not only did it save me the time of making over 350 cards, but their selection of cards and explanations gave me more learning that wasn't in my notes. Like you say, it's good for a specific pool of questions. 1. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1553224110 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1553224110
- mcmoor 3y agoIs there any easy way to make card on mobile? I will likely never do this on PC and I haven't really see any easy way to do it on mobile