8 ms·

A love letter to flashcards

206 points by surprisetalk 3mo ago

PandaRider 3mo ago
> From this perspective, fields that require deep understanding, like math, require memory just as fields with a breadth of shallow knowledge do, though in different ways. I'm interested in understanding how others use Anki for conceptual subjects like pure math or physics. I believe many fundamental rules in Spaced Repetition (e.g. like keeping cards concise) are thrown out the window for conceptual subjects.
- zetalyrae 3mo ago
  Yeah most of the advance assumes you have the data ready at hand and just need to phrase the cards right, get the number of words right. Whereas for conceptual domains the biggest problem is: how do I encode this as question-answer pairs at all? What I want to read more of is people sitting down and writing in the first-person perspective how they go about it, like Michael Nielsen does here: https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics I wrote a bit more about this problem here: https://borretti.me/article/the-applicability-of-spaced-repetition https://borretti.me/article/the-applicability-of-spaced-repe...
  - sasha-computer 3mo ago
    hey fernando, I read your article a lot and it's helped me a lot in my own spaced repetition so thanks from me! a note on your request, have you seen this video before? Andy has some custom PDF reader he built with flashcards built-in, and it's two hours of tacit flashcard creation centered around quantum mechanics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFuu4pesKf0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFuu4pesKf0
- tra3 3mo ago
  Perhaps "Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics " [1] might be of interest for you. I have read author's "Augmenting Long-term Memory" [2] and have incorporated a lot of his advice into my Anki practice. For me, it's quick access recipes (breakfast pancakes for kids), what was the name of the glacier that we hiked to last year, behavioral prompts etc. 1: https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics 2: https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
  - lugu 3mo ago
    Great blog posts. Exactly on point.
- wtetzner 3mo ago
  I kinda feel like using memorization techniques for things that require deeper understanding probably isn't the most efficient way to learn. IMO you want to be actively trying to map the new concepts to things you already understand, and constantly working to update your mental model.
  - calepayson 3mo ago
    I think of it like drills in a sport. If your practice is 100% drills, you'll be pretty bad. But drills give you an awesome foundation to do the really complex stuff intuitively.
  - BeetleB 3mo ago
    > IMO you want to be actively trying to map the new concepts to things you already understand, and constantly working to update your mental model. It's not an either-or. Where SRS comes in handy is when you have to take long breaks between your study sessions (due to job + family). Have you ever tried learning an advanced math topic where you get to work on it for a few days, then may have to stop for a few weeks (or even months), then resume, and repeat over and over? Chances are, no matter how intense you study during those few days, you'll likely forget important definitions/theorems in the periods you don't. SRS takes care of those gaps. Case in point - many years ago I put a lot of my intro to statistics course in flashcards and actively reviewed them. I hadn't done actual statistics for over a year, and then made a (false) claim here on HN. Someone gave me a counterexample using the chi-squared distribution. And it was amazing that I could recall the basic properties of the chi-squared distribution, and enough other theorems to verify what he said without consulting any book. I've never used the chi-squared distribution for anything before or after. (Sadly, I stopped using those cards years ago so I've forgotten the material!)
  - Jtarii 3mo ago
    Familiarity through repetition is 95% of learning any subject. Mathematics isn't special.
- calepayson 3mo ago
  I actually tend to keep my cards super concise. I treat Anki as a way to practice fundamentals, like memorizing certain formulas. Anytime I try to add conceptual stuff to cards I feel like I'm only memorizing one specialized version of the thing and it doesn't feel super useful.
- digital_ghoul 3mo ago
  I took my first real analysis course last semester, and I made flashcards with pen and paper for every single non trivial definition, theorem, lemma, and corollary that we covered in lecture. Analysis definitions and theorems get really complicated with intricate and difficult to follow logical chains, and there are a lot to remember. These definitions and results don’t mean much on their own without exploring their neighbourhoods by proving relevant things, and I could have learned these definitions and results by just doing proofs. But being absolutely sure I could recite every theorem and definition definitely helped me on the final exam. I think if you’re learning algorithms (like find the area under a curve) in a calculus course for example, flashcards might have more limited value, as in that case problems are relatively short and you’re better off just running through your set of algorithms a ton of times by doing problems. I also took a group theory course last semester and I memorized every definition and result from lecture via flashcard, but didn’t practice using them enough by writing proofs. I ended up with like 2 or 3 out of 10 complete proofs and the rest half finished on the final exam because I had the right starting points, but not enough practice using what I knew in unexpected ways. Still passed somehow.
  - BeetleB 3mo ago
    > I took my first real analysis course last semester, > These definitions and results don’t mean much on their own without exploring their neighbourhoods Were these epsilon-neighborhoods?
    - digital_ghoul 3mo ago
      I couldn’t resist :)
  - PandaRider 3mo ago
    > I ended up with like 2 or 3 out of 10 complete proofs and the rest half finished on the final exam because I had the right starting points, but not enough practice using what I knew in unexpected ways. I feel ya. I memorised definitions for my algorithms course as well and also experienced diminishing rewards of using SRS flashcards (especially when the conceptual questions get more novel). Like what you say, we have to practice using the factual knowledge enough by writing proofs. The next generation of flashcards would probably use AI to generate concise questions on writing proofs. [1] A Little Randomness May Not Be Enough - https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2014/11/07/srs-for-concepts/ https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2014/11/07/srs-for-concepts... Thank you for sharing your experiences!
- BeetleB 3mo ago
  It is a bit more challenging, but it is workable. Same caveat as in the article: Spaced repetition is just one (minor) part of learning math/physics. It alone won't get you anywhere. For math - particularly higher level math, the most obvious use case is definitions. There are so many! You can put theorems in there, but it is a bit challenging on how to phrase it. A single theorem could result in several smaller flash cards. I think what works better is taking a theorem, finding a representative problem that is solved via that theorem, and make the problem statement the question. The downside of this approach is each card takes longer to process as this is not just plain recall, but actively solving a problem. For this reason, I keep such cards in a separate deck and review them only when I have time I can dedicate (e.g. spending well over a minute per card).
- helterskelter 3mo ago
  Depends on how you use the flashcards. You can use them to memorize definitions and equalities, and you can also use them as quiz questions which excercise your reason and not simply your memory. For example, you make a flashcard for each excercise question in your textbook. Once you identify what you're struggling with, make more flashcards of that same problem type to avoid remembering the solutions. This will take you from a shaky understanding to much firmer ground pretty quickly. Honestly just making the flashcards and elaborating on/modifying problems you're struggling with will take you a very long way.
- Jtarii 3mo ago
  Just put every definition, theorem, and exercise in a textbook into a card in an anki deck. There are no "rules" for how flashcards should work.
- sn9 3mo ago
  You can take advantage of spaced repetition just for scheduling the review of proofs and problems you've solved before. By review, I mean attempting to solve them like you're seeing the problem statement for the first time.
jambalaya8 3mo ago
Used to use Anki for foreign language learning. Guessing it would have been useful to memorise calc, chem and physics equations if it had existed when I was young.
- SpaceManNabs 3mo ago
  it is less useful for physics, math, and music since fluency is so much important. It is important for language acquisition too, but the language involves a lot more rote memorization than the above.
  - Jtarii 3mo ago
    >it is less useful for physics, math, and music since fluency is so much important. I mean, you can put whatever you want on a flashcard. e.g "Derive the fundamental theorem of whatever", "Prove this theorem" etc. Also music has a extreme level of "stuff you just need to memorise".
    - jambalaya8 3mo ago
      Great for music vocabulary and symbols; pretty weird for learning scales and stuff. Generally best for things you need to and can answer fast, and need to know more verbally.
      - grep_name 3mo ago
        Idk, I've been meaning to get around to music flash cards because quick recall has honestly become a bottleneck for me in musical situations. I think it's pretty huge even for learning scales, which you should be able to derive from facts which I should but don't have memorized. Some of examples of cards that would be of high utility to me: - What are the sharps in the key of E? (can be derived using the circle of fifths, but is better to do that with random practice until it's deeply internalized and eventually memorized, helps memorize info on the circle of fifths as well) - What is the 5 chord in the key of G? (can be generalized to all chords in all keys) - What is the relative minor of A? - What scale is A dorian (or any mode) the ionian (or any other mode) of? - What scale degrees are raised in mixolydian (or any other) mode? - What chords are 2 5 1 in (key)? - What are the chord degree numbers for an F-turn in c? - What are the chords for an f-turn in c? - What are the numerals for the andalusian (or any other) cadence? The more I think about it, the more I think analyzing common progressions and how they often fit together via flashcards would be huge for actual in-practice musicianship as well, but I on't belabor that by adding more here. Most of these can be derived from the circle of fifths, but building the connections from repeatedly doing that over and over again is invaluable and there's so so much more you could make just reviewing the relationships there than what I have listed here. It would also be interesting to make flashcards for practicing audiation, I can pretty easily imagine how a major, aolean, mixolydian, or harmonic minor scale sounds but am not nearly as clear on all the other ones should sound and couldn't hum them on demand.
felooboolooomba 3mo ago
Flashcards are brilliant. Anki is finally usable after they ditched the hot garbage algorithm they were using. Previously I've used the Leitner method and I stil think that's the best one for me.
- dqv 3mo ago
  Which algorithm is the hot garbage one to you? SuperMemo 2?
  - felooboolooomba 3mo ago
    Yes
    - grep_name 3mo ago
      Last time I looked into anki was years ago, and I ended up giving up after researching it and finding a billion videos all claiming the default settings are terrible and you have to set up an elaborate bunch of settings nobody could agree on to actually get effective SRS spacing. Are the defaults better now? I never really got into anki because I couldn't get a good handle on how to set it up effectively
      - felooboolooomba 3mo ago
        I don't know what's the default, but you basically just have to pick the FSRS algo and you're good. That one is actually based on scientific research: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition
- cpburns2009 3mo ago
  Wait do they finally allow you to actually go through every card?
  - Revisional_Sin 3mo ago
    [dead]
zeafoamrun 3mo ago
I tried to make an auto flashcard generator but ran into the issue that one word can map to many senses. But most word frequency datasets don't disambiguate the sense. So if you want to include all the senses for a word while ranking words by frequency they all get the same starting position.
- lugu 3mo ago
  The fun is in making the cards truly yours, by writing them yourself based on your experience. After experimenting with generated cards, I throw them away. They were semantically correct, but not relatable/memorable.
- bunderbunder 3mo ago
  This is a big part of why language learners have largely moved toward sentence mining as the preferred way to build an Anki deck. Getting your words from real-world contexts, and keeping that context on the front of the card, largely eliminates the ambiguity problem. If a word has multiple senses, it gets multiple cards with different example sentences to illustrate each one. It also helps a bunch with words that don’t really have a concise translation to your native language. For example the French words “mur” and “paroi” both mean “wall” in English, but the contexts where you use them are quite different. An example sentence helps with that, and getting that sentence from an even richer context such as a book or article you’ve read helps even more. It’s also, frankly, just more enjoyable. I’ve come to view frequency lists as an antiquated tool. I needed them in the 1990s when good authentic-context study materials were hard to come by, but the modern Internet has made so-called immersion-based learning methods so easy and inexpensive I’m frankly mystified that people still cling to the joyless, almost mechanistic methods we were stuck with in the previous century.
  - zeafoamrun 3mo ago
    Thank you, its good to hear some of what the state of the art is. My natural language processing studies at university are around the vintage you mention. I will have a go at this...
deviation 3mo ago
I use Anki to learn French, Chess openings/tactics/techniques, to unscramble letters for scrabble, for Pub Trivia... The options are kind of limitless. As a mid-30s guy who has well passed the neuroplasticity of his teen years, it's a godsend for me. To echo the author's thoughts though, I can't prove empirically that I learn more effectively using Anki (or spaced repetition) than other methods... Only anecdotally. I have a shockingly poor memory, but now I'm B2 certified in French and an ~1800 Elo on chess.com . Do I still forget things all the time? Yes.
- all2 3mo ago
  When I was doing rote memorization and flashcards frequently (some years ago now) I observed that remembering things became a lot easier for me. I also find my verbal fluency is directly affected by how much pure social time I have in my schedule. It makes me think its one of those 'use it or lose it' things and that I need to schedule more time with people.
- helterskelter 3mo ago
  Practicing your retrieval is actually one of the best ways to retain knowledge of something. Flashcard programs like Anki are really great because it identifies where you need more work and drills you on your weak points -- it feels awkward working constantly on your weak points, but you get quantifiably better results with the flashcard method it uses. Some people criticize flashcards as optimizing for rote memorization and deemphasizing understanding, but you'll never achieve understanding or mastery in general without a solid platform of knowledge to work from.
  - cwnyth 3mo ago
    My problem with Anki is that it's very, very inefficient. It will take much more time and effort to memorize the vocabulary words you learn, and losing those words is very quick. It's much better to use SRS with actual and varied sentences.
    - SubmarineClub 3mo ago
taude 3mo ago
I do a really lightweight version of flash cards. Everytime I'm learning a new tool or tech, I grab oversized notecards (my favorite are 8x5" dot-grid cards). I put a label at the top, and create bullet points of each item i want to remember. I then review. No individual cards for each item or anything. Just all the things grouped on one card as bullet points. For example, I'll have a `sqlite` card, and put all the commands and everything on it, as I learn them. I'll use it as a cheatsheet, but then also a few minutes of mindful review. This for the toolings that I want to know well enough to not get slowed down googling the commands. I do this for a lot of CLI tools, but also things I need to remember about the business of my company and working across group, etc.... Eventually the five or six working cards I have, get put on a pile and new ones come in.....
apparent 3mo ago
> prefer your own flashcards to other people’s flashcards, at least for fields that require deep understanding For me, much of the value of flashcards comes in the making of them. Part of it is thinking about what each flashcard will say, and part of it is the action of writing it down in handwriting.
manytimesaway 3mo ago
It seems I am the only one who expected this paper to talk about R4 and fellow DS/GBA cartridges.
iamanllm 3mo ago
The best advice I've ever read about flash cards is if you are dreading to review, because you are forgetting your cards or they are too complicated, you are writing cards wrong. Learning is supposed to be fun! Also, Common Core should ship Anki decks. I seriously think so many problems with education stem from students not realizing that memorizing is actually very easy with FSRS, and thus struggling and hating learning.
- paytonjjones 3mo ago
  I feel like...that's terrible advice? Voluntary retrieval (the memory "mode" of flashcards), even for simple pairs, is perceived as highly effortful by almost everyone, on a similar tier to doing mental math. It's incredibly efficient for learning, and achieving your goals quickly can be very rewarding, but I don't think "learning flashcards should be fun!" is a reasonable expectation for the vast majority of people.
  - iamanllm 3mo ago
    Most people don't use flash cards at all. So if their experience with them is terrible then why would they keep doing it? Also effort can be fun. Working out is effortful and most people don't do it. So, they should go to the gym and try to have a good time. If they aren't, maybe the advice to do some 5x5 program or Jocko whatever workout is not good for them. It's just a heuristic to stay motivated. But yeah, my friend just finished med school and memorized like 30k extremely complicated cards. He did not "have fun".
  - rsanek 3mo ago
    It's a balance. Maybe a helpful analogy would be a book -- yes, reading a book is effortful, and yes, "almost everyone" does not read. Still, I think most wouldn't consider it crazy to say that reading can be "fun."
flakiness 3mo ago
> How do I actually use flashcards? My software of choice is Anki. I am not completely satisfied with it. The UI looks dated, the WYSIWYG HTML editor is clunky, and the undocumented file format makes potential porting and interoperability tricky. And we still love it. I'm on the same page. This phenomena feels oddly satisfying.
kixiQu 3mo ago
My sense is the same as the authors that LLMs + an Anki-like -> mediocrity. But I feel like there ought to be such potential there! Even just things as simple as rewording the same question a bunch of equivalent ways to avoid recognizing the sentence structure... Downside for AI potential as a whole, framed broadly: We don't seem to be good enough yet at identifying what friction is functional and what we should strive to automate/eliminate.
- david_allison 3mo ago
  There's an arena/research report by Ozzie Kirkby and Andy Matuschak at https://memory-machines.com/ https://memory-machines.com/ which you might find interesting. I predict that things will be 'good' within the next 5 years, but your intuition is correct (and the SOTA models are often producing worse prompts than older models).
__MatrixMan__ 3mo ago
I once took a psychology course with my girlfriend at the time. She and her pals would be up all night studying with flashcards. I'd just walk into class, learn about it, never study, and get A's on the tests. When they asked me how I was doing it I explained that I'm there to learn understand the topic and I don't give a damn about the test. So I just let my curiosity lead the way, it causes me to ask questions in and out of class, email the professor about them, do my own research and experiments. Despite not letting the test be my guide, this prepared me for the test anyhow. I'm glad they work for some people, but flashcards to me seem like they provide a shallow kind of understanding. I don't want to remember the equation, I want to be able to derive it in a pinch, and flash cards don't give me that.
- pheewma 3mo ago
  It depends on the subject. For classes/subjects that are very terminology-heavy, with a lot of dependencies between topics, memorizing things is a pre-requisite to the "deeper" understanding, especially under time-constraint of a semester or whatever. I think most people would agree that it's ideal to "naturally" explore a subject in order to get a deeper understanding of it, but one can't always be expected to 1. Be able to deploy that "curiosity" for all subjects at any time and 2. Be able to adequately achieve competence in a subject within the given timeframe
- varun_ch 3mo ago
  I think that really depends on how you use the cards. I know medicine students who clearly are passionate about their subject, but just need to get the reminders on individual terms because there’s such a wide range of topics they need to be prepared for, and lots of very similar words. I also know that in math courses, there’s certain formulas with similar names I simply need to remember because deriving them on a test would be too time consuming. Or I could imagine in chemistry there’s various special cases that you’d want to be able to recite on a test. I’ve never tried it for language learning but people talk highly of it, so there’s definitely some truth in their utility there. I think the trick is flash cards are fantastic supplementally with other studying strategies.
- jagraff 3mo ago
hintymad 3mo ago
For language learning, I wish there was an audio-first flashcard app that changes up the example sentences every time. Right now, I'm using Anki to learn Japanese vocabulary from N5 to N3[1]. I know the words and the example sentences well enough to read N3-level text, provided I know the grammar. But when it comes to listening, I struggle to understand even N4-level spoken Japanese. Anki just doesn't offer enough variety for me to truly internalize what the sound means in different contexts. Plus, seeing the text before hearing the audio tricks my brain. I think I'm learning the sound, but it's an illusion because I already know the meaning from seeing the word first. [1] I feel like Anki offers diminishing returns once you get past N3. Advanced words usually have subtle nuances that you can only really pick up through rich context, like in a full paragraph or a TV scene. Native-speaking kids can understand complex words in context because they have a deep grasp of a smaller, simpler vocabulary. That’s why I’m focusing on mastering high-frequency, simple words first to build a learning flywheel. I'm hoping this will eventually let me pick up new words naturally through reading and listening, just like a native kid does.
- frostlynx 3mo ago
  IMHO Anki (the software) has very little value now with coding agents. The spaced repetition algorithm is quite simple and just 100 lines of python (or even less). Every coding agent can write that for you in minutes. The value of Anki comes from (1) its flexibility, and (2) the pre-made decks, but building an app that’s tailored to you is better, and you can find a lot of word lists online if that’s what you need. If you have a Claude (or similar) subscription, you can build yourself a language learning app that’s better for you than most products out there, in a small number of days. TTS, dictionary lookup, you name it, the AI will build it. Azure TTS has a generous free tier, so all you need is the AI subscription (one month is plenty) and a place to host your app. It’s a simple prompt to ask the model to modify cards so it plays the audio first before showing the text. Off the top of my head I don’t have a good idea for your specific issue of having audio for the same word in multiple contexts. Maybe for this you could use LLM-generated sentences. About your footnotes, personally I think vocabulary becomes more important with progress, because you just won’t be exposed often enough to some rarer words (e.g. politics or economy), or learning words in groups can help you better understand them. And flashcards can help not forget them. But don’t learn words with flash cards, learn them in context.
rsanek 3mo ago
> Some people also use LLMs to generate flashcards. And of course, the result will be those impersonal, mediocre cards. > I won’t say LLMs are useless for this. But from my trials, I get about 1 card that’s useful to me out of 10, and even that 1 card still needs rewriting. I don't know the specifics of how the author tried to do so, but from what I've seen the majority of attempts are, let me drop a chapter of a textbook and say "make flashcards." If that is what we are talking about, then yes, LLMs are useless. In my mind, though, this is sort of like looking at the very first GitHub Copilot LLM autocomplete from a couple of years ago and concluding, yeah it's nice for one-liners, but it cannot write an app. If you create a framework around your card-creation AI so that it can use tools, and verify its work to ensure common card-creation pitfalls don't happen, you can get pretty high-quality cards. In my experience, you go from a 10~20% hit rate to a ~90% hit rate, which in my mind is good enough. I got to ~75% quality just from a two extra LLM calls that would assess a potential card against a standard set of rules (adapted from [0]). There are huge Pareto gains to be had here. I've generated thousdands of cards over the last few months this way. I let the AI add it directly to Anki via AnkiConnect. Then, if when I go to review I find a card that my AI created and I don't like it, I just delete it. Removing the limitation of card creation is really quite compelling, and I think the area is still highly under-invested in. Would be cool to see a generic framework evolve that one could use. For now, I've been using a personal fork of clanki [1]. [0] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/20_rules_of_knowledge_formulation https://supermemo.guru/wiki/20_rules_of_knowledge_formulatio... [1] https://github.com/jasperket/clanki https://github.com/jasperket/clanki
- anotherpaulg 3mo ago
  Clanki is a great name. I’ve had a lot of success using AI to generate memorable images to show alongside vocabulary cards.
- SamBam 3mo ago
  I think the objection about AI-generated cards, or decks found online, is that the context of the card creation is lost. What made you write the card? How did you find the answer/translation/whatever? What was all the learning around the card that the card is supposed to represent? If you're just doing simple word translations into a new language maybe that's ok. But if you're trying to learn a concept in organic chemistry or SQL, then you're more likely to memorize the card itself than learn the concept.
etrvic 3mo ago
I used anki for learning japanese, and what I noticed while is that, at least for me the act of reviewing flashcards became a burden itself. It was not fun nor pleasant. I’d go back to using Anki if i’d know how to solve this.
xhevahir 3mo ago
> Most of my cards are handwritten by me and accommodate my brain. I'm guessing from all the talk about Anki that people are missing this part. I think these frictionless, digital replacements for note cards are solving the wrong problem. You're never going to spend more time on a given flashcard, and better absorb the information on it, than the first time, when you're sitting there making the thing. Making this step as brief as possible is a bad idea.
- pessimizer 3mo ago
  I think it's better not to fall in love with any single flashcard. Mature them and forget about them. You're not trying to learn flashcards, you're trying to learn facts and skills.
- mhjkl 3mo ago
  I'd say Anki has more friction that writing physical cards though
merryocha 3mo ago
When I was a kid I used flashcards to memorize the multiplication tables up to 12 and it allowed me to do very rapid mental math from that point on, and I still can to this day. It was useful for math quizzes and tests in school but it's also useful for life in general. Going up to 16 might be even better. I use the Livio English Dictionary to look up words when I read on my tablet and I noticed one day that it keeps a search history, and I got an idea to make an Anki flashcard collection consisting of all the words I've needed to look up while reading. Despite being an obsessive reader my entire life I still regularly encounter words I'm not 100% certain about. Reading itself has spaced repetition built right in, assuming you quiz yourself and then follow up with a dictionary.
abecedarius 3mo ago
Aside: the example question ("What is the intuition that two reflections gives a rotation?") could have a more intuitive answer involving flipping an actual flashcard over twice, funnily enough...
ioreader 3mo ago
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mimo84 3mo ago
I find using flashcards very stimulating, however to reach this status it took me quite some time and some trial and error. So if you're new at using flashcards don't quit just yet! Keep using them. My morning ritual is now coffee and anki. Like the author said, understanding the card you're writing in your deck is fundamental. In my case, I would add, this is even true of when you add language cards. For example, I once added the word `thwart`. This card doesn't "cleanly" translate to my native tongue, and I was failing it at all times, I was confusing it with other words such as stifle, stymie etc because have a close meaning but not quite the one in thwart. Only after I grasped the exact definition and usage of it I started to not block on it anymore. I now attempt to be better at it by trying to also recall or make up the antonym of a certain word. Also I started to create decks for: 1. Emacs commands, including custom shortcut which I use daily, or trying to drill new commands or features that I leant. 2. passages from books I read, mostly for those I use cloze deletions. 3. simple arithmetic, in order to be quicker at doing those without having to use a calculator at all times with me 4. shell commands, for example less frequently used git commands, grep or rg options. A final note on using LLMs for flashcard creation. Sometimes the LLM can come up with some useful examples, or memory hooks, which help in retaining the information. Yes, I agree here with the author: out of 10 cards created with the LLM you're probably going to retain just one, and even that one will need rewriting.
tpoacher 3mo ago
Most people commenting here seem to be focusing on memorization, which seems to miss the main point of the article. The big insight here is the chunking part, not the memorization bit. I use anki in a similar way to the author and it has been truly transformative to my learning and daily habits. And, like the author, anki has become part of my daily workflow even for things that it's not really specifically designed for; e.g. easy frictionless LaTeX notetaking, cross-referenceable database (via note ids), incremental learning repo, long-term reminders (gtd-style) etc.
james_ross 3mo ago
I've always loved and used flashcards, and relate to this article. I have built my own learning tool based on concept maps, which was inspired by Joseph D. Novak's book "Learning How to Learn". Concept maps are focused on how large networks of concepts connect to each other forming large graph spaces. One of the key problems after creating or encountering a very large map, though, is how to approach them in chunks. So I built a flashcard-inspired feature that chooses a concept at random and focuses your view on just that concept and its directly connected concepts. It's effectively a conceptual flashcard generator. You can check it out here: https://thinkingtools.software/concepticon https://thinkingtools.software/concepticon It's a (sorry, Mac only at the moment) desktop app that uses plain text files in a format you can easily edit yourself in any text editor.
AyanamiKaine 3mo ago
Two really good modern books on how we actual learn are. 1. The ABCs of How We Learn by Daniel L. Schwartz 2. How Learning Happens 2nd by Paul A. Kirschner & Carl Hendrick I can really recommend them. Now back to flashcards and active recall. They are the secret sauce. People in the thread are saying that understanding is important, while I agree you should understand things its not THAT important. Important is that you remember not only *facts* what something is. But also how to do something. If you stare at a blank page not being able to do something like writing a a simple typedef struct in C. But knowing what a typedef and struct is, you are missing procedural knowledge. If you can only programming with an IDE giving you cues like autocompletion you will never form the memory for the actual symbol. Only when you active recall something it will be rememberd until it becomes automatic freeing your working memory from the load and reducing cognitive load overall. I strongly believe that an AI rephrasing your backside and giving some additional knowledge from your own notes is helpful. You should still write your own notes and flashcards, an AI can help here too but just dont copy and paste them. Learning can be so much, creating mental models and checking their validity, creating anecdotes, connecting new knowledge and ideas to already learned ones. Have fun! There are many people that start using anki or flashcards only to stop doing them after a month. Another interesting observation is that some people use flashcards to optimize for testing not learning. You can get good grades (really good ones) but it might hurt your actual learning. (What that actual means would be a longer topic)
- aswegs8 3mo ago
  I agree, having learned something with flashcards is like you have a repertoire to choose from. Instead of having to sort everything A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, C1, C2, C3 you get to sort A, B, C. It has built in chunking. And what I noticed is that with memorizing comes understanding. Your flashcard says A on the front and A1, A2, A3 on the back. After reading it a few times you will understand what A means. But it will also help you put together the overall topic of A, B, C. It is wonderful compression.
- PandaRider 3mo ago
  Thank you for the recommendations! The 2 books seem to be a little more detailed than the average general-audience book but not too intense and deep like a textbook. Would definitely take a look!
shevy-java 3mo ago
He makes some good points. Anki is indeed popular, so this is true too. I am using my own set of flashcards via self-written computer programs, mostly small scripts. The core is simple: one "side" has the question, the other "side" has the answer. I enhanced this on the commandline though, e. g. I can refer to local images (we can show this on the terminal, e. g. I use KDE konsole and then some different commandline programs to show things there. I can even show individual slides of .pdf pages via https://github.com/hzeller/timg https://github.com/hzeller/timg, which is pretty cool since I can control which pdf file to show, sometimes manipulating them before showing that). The author of that blog post at lesleylai, though, is wrong in some regards. For instance: > don’t memorize what you don’t understand I totally understand what he means, e. g. "understand it first before memorizing", and while this is in some ways true, in other ways it is not. I literally had to memorize crap knowledge in order to pass some exams. Some of it was simply boring to no ends, other things were too complicated, but in BOTH cases, being able to memorize it, helped. I may not always understand everything, but being able to connect at the least some parts, did help, just like a spider web that is built up slowly. With that I could lateron learn more, connect more and so forth. So, while I do agree that understanding is better, sometimes you can not, perhaps you lack time. Even in ALL these cases I had over the years, it still was better to be able to memorize even trivial facts. Of course eventually you have to be picky as to what knowledge you want to store in the brain, since I think it can not store infinite knowledge really (just about everyone forgets stuff eventually), but if your goal is to e. g. pass some exams quickly, then being able to quickly memorize even trivial crap, can be useful. There are a few other things I disagree with too, but for the most part I think this is a very useful blog entry. I am curious what people use else, e. g. other than anki and so forth. Or they may have other learning tricks. I always try to re-align my knowledge when it is for an important topic I care about; topics I once learned but never need again I kind of put into a "storage" preservation mode, e. g. if I ever need it again, I can look it up, but other than that I focus on what seems to be more important to me.
Grombobulous 3mo ago
My problem with Anki/flashcards is that I hate doing it so much that their effectiveness is moot. If they help me learn at 100% speed and some other more enjoyable method helps me learn at 25% speed, I’ll pick the latter every time. Thankfully, I didn’t become a doctor or lawyer, I would have been screwed.
- PandaRider 3mo ago
  For most folks, the incentive of learning at 100% speed [1] is getting better grades in school. It's a huge ego boost to walk in to an exam hall with zero handwritten cheat sheets while everyone others have font 6 cheat sheets. As a working adult, we hardly get this kind of ego boost unless we somehow know our colleagues salary. Even so, there are many other factors outside of knowledge storage that determine one's salary (e.g. feedback from teammates, number of closed sales etc) [1] Actually, it's not 100% speed but 1 step back and 2 steps forward. Because the initial time and motivation cost is non-trivial.
- msm_ 3mo ago
  Just as a datapoint - I really like learning with Anki. If there was another method that would let me learn at 200% speed, I would pick Anki. This is moot anyway, because most other learning methods require longer focus and are not possible to do while on the go, during short commute in a tram, or 3 minute wait in a queue, and much more.
mortsnort 3mo ago
I vibed this app a few weeks ago that lets you share highlighted text with it and it will provide you with an AI explanation of the text and the option to make an Anki flashcard. I find the instant AI explanation less disruptive to flow than pasting a question into Claude/ChatGPT. I'm currently using it to help me read philosophy books and it's been really helpful. I did a while back try to make an auto flash card creator that would create flashcards from a large body of text, but the card quality wasn't great and you're skipping an important step for recall of actually selecting the text you want to remember yourself. https://github.com/mortsnort/Splain https://github.com/mortsnort/Splain

206 points by surprisetalk 3mo ago

> From this perspective, fields that require deep understanding, like math, require memory just as fields with a breadth of shallow knowledge do, though in different ways. I'm interested in understanding how others use Anki for conceptual subjects like pure math or physics. I believe many fundamental rules in Spaced Repetition (e.g. like keeping cards concise) are thrown out the window for conceptual subjects.

zetalyrae 3mo ago
Yeah most of the advance assumes you have the data ready at hand and just need to phrase the cards right, get the number of words right. Whereas for conceptual domains the biggest problem is: how do I encode this as question-answer pairs at all? What I want to read more of is people sitting down and writing in the first-person perspective how they go about it, like Michael Nielsen does here: https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics I wrote a bit more about this problem here: https://borretti.me/article/the-applicability-of-spaced-repetition https://borretti.me/article/the-applicability-of-spaced-repe...
- sasha-computer 3mo ago
  hey fernando, I read your article a lot and it's helped me a lot in my own spaced repetition so thanks from me! a note on your request, have you seen this video before? Andy has some custom PDF reader he built with flashcards built-in, and it's two hours of tacit flashcard creation centered around quantum mechanics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFuu4pesKf0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFuu4pesKf0
tra3 3mo ago
Perhaps "Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics " [1] might be of interest for you. I have read author's "Augmenting Long-term Memory" [2] and have incorporated a lot of his advice into my Anki practice. For me, it's quick access recipes (breakfast pancakes for kids), what was the name of the glacier that we hiked to last year, behavioral prompts etc. 1: https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics 2: https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
- lugu 3mo ago
  Great blog posts. Exactly on point.
wtetzner 3mo ago
I kinda feel like using memorization techniques for things that require deeper understanding probably isn't the most efficient way to learn. IMO you want to be actively trying to map the new concepts to things you already understand, and constantly working to update your mental model.
- calepayson 3mo ago
  I think of it like drills in a sport. If your practice is 100% drills, you'll be pretty bad. But drills give you an awesome foundation to do the really complex stuff intuitively.
- BeetleB 3mo ago
  > IMO you want to be actively trying to map the new concepts to things you already understand, and constantly working to update your mental model. It's not an either-or. Where SRS comes in handy is when you have to take long breaks between your study sessions (due to job + family). Have you ever tried learning an advanced math topic where you get to work on it for a few days, then may have to stop for a few weeks (or even months), then resume, and repeat over and over? Chances are, no matter how intense you study during those few days, you'll likely forget important definitions/theorems in the periods you don't. SRS takes care of those gaps. Case in point - many years ago I put a lot of my intro to statistics course in flashcards and actively reviewed them. I hadn't done actual statistics for over a year, and then made a (false) claim here on HN. Someone gave me a counterexample using the chi-squared distribution. And it was amazing that I could recall the basic properties of the chi-squared distribution, and enough other theorems to verify what he said without consulting any book. I've never used the chi-squared distribution for anything before or after. (Sadly, I stopped using those cards years ago so I've forgotten the material!)
- Jtarii 3mo ago
  Familiarity through repetition is 95% of learning any subject. Mathematics isn't special.
calepayson 3mo ago
I actually tend to keep my cards super concise. I treat Anki as a way to practice fundamentals, like memorizing certain formulas. Anytime I try to add conceptual stuff to cards I feel like I'm only memorizing one specialized version of the thing and it doesn't feel super useful.
digital_ghoul 3mo ago
I took my first real analysis course last semester, and I made flashcards with pen and paper for every single non trivial definition, theorem, lemma, and corollary that we covered in lecture. Analysis definitions and theorems get really complicated with intricate and difficult to follow logical chains, and there are a lot to remember. These definitions and results don’t mean much on their own without exploring their neighbourhoods by proving relevant things, and I could have learned these definitions and results by just doing proofs. But being absolutely sure I could recite every theorem and definition definitely helped me on the final exam. I think if you’re learning algorithms (like find the area under a curve) in a calculus course for example, flashcards might have more limited value, as in that case problems are relatively short and you’re better off just running through your set of algorithms a ton of times by doing problems. I also took a group theory course last semester and I memorized every definition and result from lecture via flashcard, but didn’t practice using them enough by writing proofs. I ended up with like 2 or 3 out of 10 complete proofs and the rest half finished on the final exam because I had the right starting points, but not enough practice using what I knew in unexpected ways. Still passed somehow.
- BeetleB 3mo ago
  > I took my first real analysis course last semester, > These definitions and results don’t mean much on their own without exploring their neighbourhoods Were these epsilon-neighborhoods?
  - digital_ghoul 3mo ago
    I couldn’t resist :)
- PandaRider 3mo ago
  > I ended up with like 2 or 3 out of 10 complete proofs and the rest half finished on the final exam because I had the right starting points, but not enough practice using what I knew in unexpected ways. I feel ya. I memorised definitions for my algorithms course as well and also experienced diminishing rewards of using SRS flashcards (especially when the conceptual questions get more novel). Like what you say, we have to practice using the factual knowledge enough by writing proofs. The next generation of flashcards would probably use AI to generate concise questions on writing proofs. [1] A Little Randomness May Not Be Enough - https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2014/11/07/srs-for-concepts/ https://www.scotthyoung.com/blog/2014/11/07/srs-for-concepts... Thank you for sharing your experiences!
BeetleB 3mo ago
It is a bit more challenging, but it is workable. Same caveat as in the article: Spaced repetition is just one (minor) part of learning math/physics. It alone won't get you anywhere. For math - particularly higher level math, the most obvious use case is definitions. There are so many! You can put theorems in there, but it is a bit challenging on how to phrase it. A single theorem could result in several smaller flash cards. I think what works better is taking a theorem, finding a representative problem that is solved via that theorem, and make the problem statement the question. The downside of this approach is each card takes longer to process as this is not just plain recall, but actively solving a problem. For this reason, I keep such cards in a separate deck and review them only when I have time I can dedicate (e.g. spending well over a minute per card).
helterskelter 3mo ago
Depends on how you use the flashcards. You can use them to memorize definitions and equalities, and you can also use them as quiz questions which excercise your reason and not simply your memory. For example, you make a flashcard for each excercise question in your textbook. Once you identify what you're struggling with, make more flashcards of that same problem type to avoid remembering the solutions. This will take you from a shaky understanding to much firmer ground pretty quickly. Honestly just making the flashcards and elaborating on/modifying problems you're struggling with will take you a very long way.
Jtarii 3mo ago
Just put every definition, theorem, and exercise in a textbook into a card in an anki deck. There are no "rules" for how flashcards should work.
sn9 3mo ago
You can take advantage of spaced repetition just for scheduling the review of proofs and problems you've solved before. By review, I mean attempting to solve them like you're seeing the problem statement for the first time.

jambalaya8 3mo ago

Used to use Anki for foreign language learning. Guessing it would have been useful to memorise calc, chem and physics equations if it had existed when I was young.

SpaceManNabs 3mo ago
it is less useful for physics, math, and music since fluency is so much important. It is important for language acquisition too, but the language involves a lot more rote memorization than the above.
- Jtarii 3mo ago
  >it is less useful for physics, math, and music since fluency is so much important. I mean, you can put whatever you want on a flashcard. e.g "Derive the fundamental theorem of whatever", "Prove this theorem" etc. Also music has a extreme level of "stuff you just need to memorise".
  - jambalaya8 3mo ago
    Great for music vocabulary and symbols; pretty weird for learning scales and stuff. Generally best for things you need to and can answer fast, and need to know more verbally.
    - grep_name 3mo ago
      Idk, I've been meaning to get around to music flash cards because quick recall has honestly become a bottleneck for me in musical situations. I think it's pretty huge even for learning scales, which you should be able to derive from facts which I should but don't have memorized. Some of examples of cards that would be of high utility to me: - What are the sharps in the key of E? (can be derived using the circle of fifths, but is better to do that with random practice until it's deeply internalized and eventually memorized, helps memorize info on the circle of fifths as well) - What is the 5 chord in the key of G? (can be generalized to all chords in all keys) - What is the relative minor of A? - What scale is A dorian (or any mode) the ionian (or any other mode) of? - What scale degrees are raised in mixolydian (or any other) mode? - What chords are 2 5 1 in (key)? - What are the chord degree numbers for an F-turn in c? - What are the chords for an f-turn in c? - What are the numerals for the andalusian (or any other) cadence? The more I think about it, the more I think analyzing common progressions and how they often fit together via flashcards would be huge for actual in-practice musicianship as well, but I on't belabor that by adding more here. Most of these can be derived from the circle of fifths, but building the connections from repeatedly doing that over and over again is invaluable and there's so so much more you could make just reviewing the relationships there than what I have listed here. It would also be interesting to make flashcards for practicing audiation, I can pretty easily imagine how a major, aolean, mixolydian, or harmonic minor scale sounds but am not nearly as clear on all the other ones should sound and couldn't hum them on demand.

felooboolooomba 3mo ago

Flashcards are brilliant. Anki is finally usable after they ditched the hot garbage algorithm they were using. Previously I've used the Leitner method and I stil think that's the best one for me.

dqv 3mo ago
Which algorithm is the hot garbage one to you? SuperMemo 2?
- felooboolooomba 3mo ago
  Yes
  - grep_name 3mo ago
    Last time I looked into anki was years ago, and I ended up giving up after researching it and finding a billion videos all claiming the default settings are terrible and you have to set up an elaborate bunch of settings nobody could agree on to actually get effective SRS spacing. Are the defaults better now? I never really got into anki because I couldn't get a good handle on how to set it up effectively
    - felooboolooomba 3mo ago
      I don't know what's the default, but you basically just have to pick the FSRS algo and you're good. That one is actually based on scientific research: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition
cpburns2009 3mo ago
Wait do they finally allow you to actually go through every card?
- Revisional_Sin 3mo ago
  [dead]

zeafoamrun 3mo ago

I tried to make an auto flashcard generator but ran into the issue that one word can map to many senses. But most word frequency datasets don't disambiguate the sense. So if you want to include all the senses for a word while ranking words by frequency they all get the same starting position.

lugu 3mo ago
The fun is in making the cards truly yours, by writing them yourself based on your experience. After experimenting with generated cards, I throw them away. They were semantically correct, but not relatable/memorable.
bunderbunder 3mo ago
This is a big part of why language learners have largely moved toward sentence mining as the preferred way to build an Anki deck. Getting your words from real-world contexts, and keeping that context on the front of the card, largely eliminates the ambiguity problem. If a word has multiple senses, it gets multiple cards with different example sentences to illustrate each one. It also helps a bunch with words that don’t really have a concise translation to your native language. For example the French words “mur” and “paroi” both mean “wall” in English, but the contexts where you use them are quite different. An example sentence helps with that, and getting that sentence from an even richer context such as a book or article you’ve read helps even more. It’s also, frankly, just more enjoyable. I’ve come to view frequency lists as an antiquated tool. I needed them in the 1990s when good authentic-context study materials were hard to come by, but the modern Internet has made so-called immersion-based learning methods so easy and inexpensive I’m frankly mystified that people still cling to the joyless, almost mechanistic methods we were stuck with in the previous century.
- zeafoamrun 3mo ago
  Thank you, its good to hear some of what the state of the art is. My natural language processing studies at university are around the vintage you mention. I will have a go at this...

deviation 3mo ago

I use Anki to learn French, Chess openings/tactics/techniques, to unscramble letters for scrabble, for Pub Trivia... The options are kind of limitless. As a mid-30s guy who has well passed the neuroplasticity of his teen years, it's a godsend for me. To echo the author's thoughts though, I can't prove empirically that I learn more effectively using Anki (or spaced repetition) than other methods... Only anecdotally. I have a shockingly poor memory, but now I'm B2 certified in French and an ~1800 Elo on chess.com . Do I still forget things all the time? Yes.

all2 3mo ago
When I was doing rote memorization and flashcards frequently (some years ago now) I observed that remembering things became a lot easier for me. I also find my verbal fluency is directly affected by how much pure social time I have in my schedule. It makes me think its one of those 'use it or lose it' things and that I need to schedule more time with people.
helterskelter 3mo ago
Practicing your retrieval is actually one of the best ways to retain knowledge of something. Flashcard programs like Anki are really great because it identifies where you need more work and drills you on your weak points -- it feels awkward working constantly on your weak points, but you get quantifiably better results with the flashcard method it uses. Some people criticize flashcards as optimizing for rote memorization and deemphasizing understanding, but you'll never achieve understanding or mastery in general without a solid platform of knowledge to work from.
- cwnyth 3mo ago
  My problem with Anki is that it's very, very inefficient. It will take much more time and effort to memorize the vocabulary words you learn, and losing those words is very quick. It's much better to use SRS with actual and varied sentences.
  - SubmarineClub 3mo ago

taude 3mo ago

I do a really lightweight version of flash cards. Everytime I'm learning a new tool or tech, I grab oversized notecards (my favorite are 8x5" dot-grid cards). I put a label at the top, and create bullet points of each item i want to remember. I then review. No individual cards for each item or anything. Just all the things grouped on one card as bullet points. For example, I'll have a `sqlite` card, and put all the commands and everything on it, as I learn them. I'll use it as a cheatsheet, but then also a few minutes of mindful review. This for the toolings that I want to know well enough to not get slowed down googling the commands. I do this for a lot of CLI tools, but also things I need to remember about the business of my company and working across group, etc.... Eventually the five or six working cards I have, get put on a pile and new ones come in.....

apparent 3mo ago

> prefer your own flashcards to other people’s flashcards, at least for fields that require deep understanding For me, much of the value of flashcards comes in the making of them. Part of it is thinking about what each flashcard will say, and part of it is the action of writing it down in handwriting.

manytimesaway 3mo ago

It seems I am the only one who expected this paper to talk about R4 and fellow DS/GBA cartridges.

iamanllm 3mo ago

The best advice I've ever read about flash cards is if you are dreading to review, because you are forgetting your cards or they are too complicated, you are writing cards wrong. Learning is supposed to be fun! Also, Common Core should ship Anki decks. I seriously think so many problems with education stem from students not realizing that memorizing is actually very easy with FSRS, and thus struggling and hating learning.

paytonjjones 3mo ago
I feel like...that's terrible advice? Voluntary retrieval (the memory "mode" of flashcards), even for simple pairs, is perceived as highly effortful by almost everyone, on a similar tier to doing mental math. It's incredibly efficient for learning, and achieving your goals quickly can be very rewarding, but I don't think "learning flashcards should be fun!" is a reasonable expectation for the vast majority of people.
- iamanllm 3mo ago
  Most people don't use flash cards at all. So if their experience with them is terrible then why would they keep doing it? Also effort can be fun. Working out is effortful and most people don't do it. So, they should go to the gym and try to have a good time. If they aren't, maybe the advice to do some 5x5 program or Jocko whatever workout is not good for them. It's just a heuristic to stay motivated. But yeah, my friend just finished med school and memorized like 30k extremely complicated cards. He did not "have fun".
- rsanek 3mo ago
  It's a balance. Maybe a helpful analogy would be a book -- yes, reading a book is effortful, and yes, "almost everyone" does not read. Still, I think most wouldn't consider it crazy to say that reading can be "fun."

flakiness 3mo ago

> How do I actually use flashcards? My software of choice is Anki. I am not completely satisfied with it. The UI looks dated, the WYSIWYG HTML editor is clunky, and the undocumented file format makes potential porting and interoperability tricky. And we still love it. I'm on the same page. This phenomena feels oddly satisfying.

kixiQu 3mo ago

My sense is the same as the authors that LLMs + an Anki-like -> mediocrity. But I feel like there ought to be such potential there! Even just things as simple as rewording the same question a bunch of equivalent ways to avoid recognizing the sentence structure... Downside for AI potential as a whole, framed broadly: We don't seem to be good enough yet at identifying what friction is functional and what we should strive to automate/eliminate.

david_allison 3mo ago
There's an arena/research report by Ozzie Kirkby and Andy Matuschak at https://memory-machines.com/ https://memory-machines.com/ which you might find interesting. I predict that things will be 'good' within the next 5 years, but your intuition is correct (and the SOTA models are often producing worse prompts than older models).

__MatrixMan__ 3mo ago

I once took a psychology course with my girlfriend at the time. She and her pals would be up all night studying with flashcards. I'd just walk into class, learn about it, never study, and get A's on the tests. When they asked me how I was doing it I explained that I'm there to learn understand the topic and I don't give a damn about the test. So I just let my curiosity lead the way, it causes me to ask questions in and out of class, email the professor about them, do my own research and experiments. Despite not letting the test be my guide, this prepared me for the test anyhow. I'm glad they work for some people, but flashcards to me seem like they provide a shallow kind of understanding. I don't want to remember the equation, I want to be able to derive it in a pinch, and flash cards don't give me that.

pheewma 3mo ago
It depends on the subject. For classes/subjects that are very terminology-heavy, with a lot of dependencies between topics, memorizing things is a pre-requisite to the "deeper" understanding, especially under time-constraint of a semester or whatever. I think most people would agree that it's ideal to "naturally" explore a subject in order to get a deeper understanding of it, but one can't always be expected to 1. Be able to deploy that "curiosity" for all subjects at any time and 2. Be able to adequately achieve competence in a subject within the given timeframe
varun_ch 3mo ago
I think that really depends on how you use the cards. I know medicine students who clearly are passionate about their subject, but just need to get the reminders on individual terms because there’s such a wide range of topics they need to be prepared for, and lots of very similar words. I also know that in math courses, there’s certain formulas with similar names I simply need to remember because deriving them on a test would be too time consuming. Or I could imagine in chemistry there’s various special cases that you’d want to be able to recite on a test. I’ve never tried it for language learning but people talk highly of it, so there’s definitely some truth in their utility there. I think the trick is flash cards are fantastic supplementally with other studying strategies.
jagraff 3mo ago

hintymad 3mo ago

For language learning, I wish there was an audio-first flashcard app that changes up the example sentences every time. Right now, I'm using Anki to learn Japanese vocabulary from N5 to N3[1]. I know the words and the example sentences well enough to read N3-level text, provided I know the grammar. But when it comes to listening, I struggle to understand even N4-level spoken Japanese. Anki just doesn't offer enough variety for me to truly internalize what the sound means in different contexts. Plus, seeing the text before hearing the audio tricks my brain. I think I'm learning the sound, but it's an illusion because I already know the meaning from seeing the word first. [1] I feel like Anki offers diminishing returns once you get past N3. Advanced words usually have subtle nuances that you can only really pick up through rich context, like in a full paragraph or a TV scene. Native-speaking kids can understand complex words in context because they have a deep grasp of a smaller, simpler vocabulary. That’s why I’m focusing on mastering high-frequency, simple words first to build a learning flywheel. I'm hoping this will eventually let me pick up new words naturally through reading and listening, just like a native kid does.

frostlynx 3mo ago
IMHO Anki (the software) has very little value now with coding agents. The spaced repetition algorithm is quite simple and just 100 lines of python (or even less). Every coding agent can write that for you in minutes. The value of Anki comes from (1) its flexibility, and (2) the pre-made decks, but building an app that’s tailored to you is better, and you can find a lot of word lists online if that’s what you need. If you have a Claude (or similar) subscription, you can build yourself a language learning app that’s better for you than most products out there, in a small number of days. TTS, dictionary lookup, you name it, the AI will build it. Azure TTS has a generous free tier, so all you need is the AI subscription (one month is plenty) and a place to host your app. It’s a simple prompt to ask the model to modify cards so it plays the audio first before showing the text. Off the top of my head I don’t have a good idea for your specific issue of having audio for the same word in multiple contexts. Maybe for this you could use LLM-generated sentences. About your footnotes, personally I think vocabulary becomes more important with progress, because you just won’t be exposed often enough to some rarer words (e.g. politics or economy), or learning words in groups can help you better understand them. And flashcards can help not forget them. But don’t learn words with flash cards, learn them in context.

rsanek 3mo ago

> Some people also use LLMs to generate flashcards. And of course, the result will be those impersonal, mediocre cards. > I won’t say LLMs are useless for this. But from my trials, I get about 1 card that’s useful to me out of 10, and even that 1 card still needs rewriting. I don't know the specifics of how the author tried to do so, but from what I've seen the majority of attempts are, let me drop a chapter of a textbook and say "make flashcards." If that is what we are talking about, then yes, LLMs are useless. In my mind, though, this is sort of like looking at the very first GitHub Copilot LLM autocomplete from a couple of years ago and concluding, yeah it's nice for one-liners, but it cannot write an app. If you create a framework around your card-creation AI so that it can use tools, and verify its work to ensure common card-creation pitfalls don't happen, you can get pretty high-quality cards. In my experience, you go from a 10~20% hit rate to a ~90% hit rate, which in my mind is good enough. I got to ~75% quality just from a two extra LLM calls that would assess a potential card against a standard set of rules (adapted from [0]). There are huge Pareto gains to be had here. I've generated thousdands of cards over the last few months this way. I let the AI add it directly to Anki via AnkiConnect. Then, if when I go to review I find a card that my AI created and I don't like it, I just delete it. Removing the limitation of card creation is really quite compelling, and I think the area is still highly under-invested in. Would be cool to see a generic framework evolve that one could use. For now, I've been using a personal fork of clanki [1]. [0] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/20_rules_of_knowledge_formulation https://supermemo.guru/wiki/20_rules_of_knowledge_formulatio... [1] https://github.com/jasperket/clanki https://github.com/jasperket/clanki

anotherpaulg 3mo ago
Clanki is a great name. I’ve had a lot of success using AI to generate memorable images to show alongside vocabulary cards.
SamBam 3mo ago
I think the objection about AI-generated cards, or decks found online, is that the context of the card creation is lost. What made you write the card? How did you find the answer/translation/whatever? What was all the learning around the card that the card is supposed to represent? If you're just doing simple word translations into a new language maybe that's ok. But if you're trying to learn a concept in organic chemistry or SQL, then you're more likely to memorize the card itself than learn the concept.

etrvic 3mo ago

I used anki for learning japanese, and what I noticed while is that, at least for me the act of reviewing flashcards became a burden itself. It was not fun nor pleasant. I’d go back to using Anki if i’d know how to solve this.

xhevahir 3mo ago

> Most of my cards are handwritten by me and accommodate my brain. I'm guessing from all the talk about Anki that people are missing this part. I think these frictionless, digital replacements for note cards are solving the wrong problem. You're never going to spend more time on a given flashcard, and better absorb the information on it, than the first time, when you're sitting there making the thing. Making this step as brief as possible is a bad idea.

pessimizer 3mo ago
I think it's better not to fall in love with any single flashcard. Mature them and forget about them. You're not trying to learn flashcards, you're trying to learn facts and skills.
mhjkl 3mo ago
I'd say Anki has more friction that writing physical cards though

merryocha 3mo ago

When I was a kid I used flashcards to memorize the multiplication tables up to 12 and it allowed me to do very rapid mental math from that point on, and I still can to this day. It was useful for math quizzes and tests in school but it's also useful for life in general. Going up to 16 might be even better. I use the Livio English Dictionary to look up words when I read on my tablet and I noticed one day that it keeps a search history, and I got an idea to make an Anki flashcard collection consisting of all the words I've needed to look up while reading. Despite being an obsessive reader my entire life I still regularly encounter words I'm not 100% certain about. Reading itself has spaced repetition built right in, assuming you quiz yourself and then follow up with a dictionary.

abecedarius 3mo ago

Aside: the example question ("What is the intuition that two reflections gives a rotation?") could have a more intuitive answer involving flipping an actual flashcard over twice, funnily enough...

ioreader 3mo ago

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mimo84 3mo ago

I find using flashcards very stimulating, however to reach this status it took me quite some time and some trial and error. So if you're new at using flashcards don't quit just yet! Keep using them. My morning ritual is now coffee and anki. Like the author said, understanding the card you're writing in your deck is fundamental. In my case, I would add, this is even true of when you add language cards. For example, I once added the word `thwart`. This card doesn't "cleanly" translate to my native tongue, and I was failing it at all times, I was confusing it with other words such as stifle, stymie etc because have a close meaning but not quite the one in thwart. Only after I grasped the exact definition and usage of it I started to not block on it anymore. I now attempt to be better at it by trying to also recall or make up the antonym of a certain word. Also I started to create decks for: 1. Emacs commands, including custom shortcut which I use daily, or trying to drill new commands or features that I leant. 2. passages from books I read, mostly for those I use cloze deletions. 3. simple arithmetic, in order to be quicker at doing those without having to use a calculator at all times with me 4. shell commands, for example less frequently used git commands, grep or rg options. A final note on using LLMs for flashcard creation. Sometimes the LLM can come up with some useful examples, or memory hooks, which help in retaining the information. Yes, I agree here with the author: out of 10 cards created with the LLM you're probably going to retain just one, and even that one will need rewriting.

tpoacher 3mo ago

Most people commenting here seem to be focusing on memorization, which seems to miss the main point of the article. The big insight here is the chunking part, not the memorization bit. I use anki in a similar way to the author and it has been truly transformative to my learning and daily habits. And, like the author, anki has become part of my daily workflow even for things that it's not really specifically designed for; e.g. easy frictionless LaTeX notetaking, cross-referenceable database (via note ids), incremental learning repo, long-term reminders (gtd-style) etc.

james_ross 3mo ago

I've always loved and used flashcards, and relate to this article. I have built my own learning tool based on concept maps, which was inspired by Joseph D. Novak's book "Learning How to Learn". Concept maps are focused on how large networks of concepts connect to each other forming large graph spaces. One of the key problems after creating or encountering a very large map, though, is how to approach them in chunks. So I built a flashcard-inspired feature that chooses a concept at random and focuses your view on just that concept and its directly connected concepts. It's effectively a conceptual flashcard generator. You can check it out here: https://thinkingtools.software/concepticon https://thinkingtools.software/concepticon It's a (sorry, Mac only at the moment) desktop app that uses plain text files in a format you can easily edit yourself in any text editor.

AyanamiKaine 3mo ago

Two really good modern books on how we actual learn are. 1. The ABCs of How We Learn by Daniel L. Schwartz 2. How Learning Happens 2nd by Paul A. Kirschner & Carl Hendrick I can really recommend them. Now back to flashcards and active recall. They are the secret sauce. People in the thread are saying that understanding is important, while I agree you should understand things its not THAT important. Important is that you remember not only *facts* what something is. But also how to do something. If you stare at a blank page not being able to do something like writing a a simple typedef struct in C. But knowing what a typedef and struct is, you are missing procedural knowledge. If you can only programming with an IDE giving you cues like autocompletion you will never form the memory for the actual symbol. Only when you active recall something it will be rememberd until it becomes automatic freeing your working memory from the load and reducing cognitive load overall. I strongly believe that an AI rephrasing your backside and giving some additional knowledge from your own notes is helpful. You should still write your own notes and flashcards, an AI can help here too but just dont copy and paste them. Learning can be so much, creating mental models and checking their validity, creating anecdotes, connecting new knowledge and ideas to already learned ones. Have fun! There are many people that start using anki or flashcards only to stop doing them after a month. Another interesting observation is that some people use flashcards to optimize for testing not learning. You can get good grades (really good ones) but it might hurt your actual learning. (What that actual means would be a longer topic)

aswegs8 3mo ago
I agree, having learned something with flashcards is like you have a repertoire to choose from. Instead of having to sort everything A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, B3, C1, C2, C3 you get to sort A, B, C. It has built in chunking. And what I noticed is that with memorizing comes understanding. Your flashcard says A on the front and A1, A2, A3 on the back. After reading it a few times you will understand what A means. But it will also help you put together the overall topic of A, B, C. It is wonderful compression.
PandaRider 3mo ago
Thank you for the recommendations! The 2 books seem to be a little more detailed than the average general-audience book but not too intense and deep like a textbook. Would definitely take a look!

shevy-java 3mo ago

He makes some good points. Anki is indeed popular, so this is true too. I am using my own set of flashcards via self-written computer programs, mostly small scripts. The core is simple: one "side" has the question, the other "side" has the answer. I enhanced this on the commandline though, e. g. I can refer to local images (we can show this on the terminal, e. g. I use KDE konsole and then some different commandline programs to show things there. I can even show individual slides of .pdf pages via https://github.com/hzeller/timg https://github.com/hzeller/timg, which is pretty cool since I can control which pdf file to show, sometimes manipulating them before showing that). The author of that blog post at lesleylai, though, is wrong in some regards. For instance: > don’t memorize what you don’t understand I totally understand what he means, e. g. "understand it first before memorizing", and while this is in some ways true, in other ways it is not. I literally had to memorize crap knowledge in order to pass some exams. Some of it was simply boring to no ends, other things were too complicated, but in BOTH cases, being able to memorize it, helped. I may not always understand everything, but being able to connect at the least some parts, did help, just like a spider web that is built up slowly. With that I could lateron learn more, connect more and so forth. So, while I do agree that understanding is better, sometimes you can not, perhaps you lack time. Even in ALL these cases I had over the years, it still was better to be able to memorize even trivial facts. Of course eventually you have to be picky as to what knowledge you want to store in the brain, since I think it can not store infinite knowledge really (just about everyone forgets stuff eventually), but if your goal is to e. g. pass some exams quickly, then being able to quickly memorize even trivial crap, can be useful. There are a few other things I disagree with too, but for the most part I think this is a very useful blog entry. I am curious what people use else, e. g. other than anki and so forth. Or they may have other learning tricks. I always try to re-align my knowledge when it is for an important topic I care about; topics I once learned but never need again I kind of put into a "storage" preservation mode, e. g. if I ever need it again, I can look it up, but other than that I focus on what seems to be more important to me.

Grombobulous 3mo ago

My problem with Anki/flashcards is that I hate doing it so much that their effectiveness is moot. If they help me learn at 100% speed and some other more enjoyable method helps me learn at 25% speed, I’ll pick the latter every time. Thankfully, I didn’t become a doctor or lawyer, I would have been screwed.

PandaRider 3mo ago
For most folks, the incentive of learning at 100% speed [1] is getting better grades in school. It's a huge ego boost to walk in to an exam hall with zero handwritten cheat sheets while everyone others have font 6 cheat sheets. As a working adult, we hardly get this kind of ego boost unless we somehow know our colleagues salary. Even so, there are many other factors outside of knowledge storage that determine one's salary (e.g. feedback from teammates, number of closed sales etc) [1] Actually, it's not 100% speed but 1 step back and 2 steps forward. Because the initial time and motivation cost is non-trivial.
msm_ 3mo ago
Just as a datapoint - I really like learning with Anki. If there was another method that would let me learn at 200% speed, I would pick Anki. This is moot anyway, because most other learning methods require longer focus and are not possible to do while on the go, during short commute in a tram, or 3 minute wait in a queue, and much more.

mortsnort 3mo ago

I vibed this app a few weeks ago that lets you share highlighted text with it and it will provide you with an AI explanation of the text and the option to make an Anki flashcard. I find the instant AI explanation less disruptive to flow than pasting a question into Claude/ChatGPT. I'm currently using it to help me read philosophy books and it's been really helpful. I did a while back try to make an auto flash card creator that would create flashcards from a large body of text, but the card quality wasn't great and you're skipping an important step for recall of actually selecting the text you want to remember yourself. https://github.com/mortsnort/Splain https://github.com/mortsnort/Splain