9 ms·

Spaced Repitition

160 points by rfreytag 13y ago

lvevjo 13y ago
Repetition, not repitition. I have tried Anki, one of the spaced repetition programs he mentions. There are lots of different decks available. Browse some here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/ https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/ edit: Oh and this is a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6461936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6461936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129937
- kiba 13y ago
  I found premade decks, except for the simplest ones, are of limited value as opposed to me making the deck and continously edit them. It's like taking notes, which enhance learning, as opposed to merely listening to the teacher. Also, just because it is dupe doesn't mean it is valueless. Far too few people are aware of spaced repetition as a principle to even begin using it. For example, Khan Academy have some form of spaced repetition, but it is incomplete. If people knows more about the idea, they would be more likely to implement a full system.
  - lvevjo 13y ago
    You should share some of your decks. :) >Also, just because it is dupe doesn't mean it is valueless. Of course, but at some point dupes get to be annoying. I'm not saying it is breaking the rules (is there even a rule for that here?), just pointing it out. The last time gwern posted this it got a lot of attention.
- hhm 13y ago
  Anki is wonderful; I've been using it for a while. One nice feature of Anki is that it can sync between the web, desktop and mobile versions of the app.
  - lvevjo 13y ago
    I stopped using it because I couldn't summon the time/willpower to work at it every day. When you leave a deck for more than a day, the work starts to accumulate like crazy and it takes much more effort to catch up.
    - wingerlang 13y ago
      I've set up a cron job to automatically open the app at 7 in the morning every day (and to minimise all other apps would be nice but I can't find anything to do it). I'll also set up the same functionality on my iPhone (jailbroken devices can do this with Activator). Maybe this would work for you.
      - rmc 13y ago
        Could wmctl on Linux allow you to minimise apps
        wingerlang 13y ago
        Possibly, but I run OSX. Your reply did make me take another crack at it and I got it to work. The script if anyone is interested: http://pastebin.com/pC9VTzjv http://pastebin.com/pC9VTzjv. It does do some specific-to-me things to close apps I usually have open that did not want to minimise.
    - Jach 13y ago
      It's important to remember that you don't have to review all your "due" cards at once. Just open it up and do one card per deck. Maybe you'll do more as you get going or if the next card after the first is easy. It accumulates, but over time as you actually memorize things you'll whittle the due set down as every card starts becoming "due" months into the future.
    - kiba 13y ago
      Don't study too many cards then. Nobody is saying that you have to finish all the dues.
- jimeuxx 13y ago
  I've used Anki for years to learn Japanese. It made learning to read relatively painless. You do need discipline to get far with it though. I managed to get my vocab deck up over 10,000 words, but leaving it for even a week is difficult. As far as language learning goes, you also need to realise that no amount of SRS'd words is going to make you a natural, fluent speaker, so don't fall into the trap of spending all your study time reviewing.
- Steuard 13y ago
  I started using Anki this year to help me learn my students' names and faces, and it's been glorious. I was able to recognize about 75% of them on the first day of class, and within a few weeks I was solid on nearly everyone. That has always been one of my biggest weaknesses as a teacher, and I'm feeling great about the change.
  - mildtrepidation 13y ago
    This is a great idea! I'm terrible with names and faces, and this occurred to me as a way to improve that. It's definitely heartening to see that someone has done it with good results.
barry-cotter 13y ago
SRS is one of those things that make thinking about education depressing because it makes it obvious that merely being a massive improvement over the status quo isn't enough to get widespread adoption. It is absolutely wonderful. I recommend downloading a shared deck and using it to get into the habit, then building your own. There are better and worse ways of using it but it's been a real help to me in learning Chinese.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
yzzxy 13y ago
I've been building a small-scope SRS app for my high school's mandarin curriculum as a side project in Node. Building a simple Leitner system is amazingly simple, and while I don't support the same level of analytics as Anki, the effect is similar. I'm looking foward to launching later this week!
Tossrock 13y ago
Only marginally related, but what the heck is going on with the text on gwern's site? Are the per-character varying gray values supposed to convey some kind of information?
- dpatrick86 13y ago
  Looks like an aesthetic novelty rather than something functional.
  - rm445 13y ago
    It being gwern.net, there's probably a detailed article comparing meta-analyses of text-colouring somewhere on the site :-) Even as an aesthetic novelty, it's a fairly pleasant one, or at least unobjectionable since it's fairly muted. Gwern's articles can be quite hard to read, being a wall of text, and their structure tends to be much more spread-out than your typical introduction, body, conclusion - articles tend to have several 'chapters'.
- teoryn 13y ago
  It should be alternating lines with red, black and blue not greys, it's to increase reading speed: http://www.beelinereader.com/ http://www.beelinereader.com/
  - theon144 13y ago
    It "should" not, see the "Blues" option :)
  - mantrax4 13y ago
    What a coincidence that sites using it, including the beelinereader.com site itself, use super-tight line-height. Thing is, line-height helps with the same issue (but without the weird colors), so if they'd fix that, the funky colors aren't as useful anymore. But I guess we gotta save the trees from those printing their web pages or something. Whatever one may prefer, I see they offer a plugin, which is a better way to use this tech, not by random sites forcing it on us.
mantrax4 13y ago
Ok, why on earth is almost every word in this article body a different shade of gray? I don't like articles where I need to bring up the browser dev tools just so I can read it.
- ctidd 13y ago
  It appears to be an attempt to make it easier to find the beginning of the next line after you finish reading a line. However, the effect is much too subtle to be of use, and even if made more prominent, it would still ruin the typographic color and generally confuse readers. Better solutions include: Using a more optimal column width. 50-60 characters per line is a commonly suggested range for most media. Using a more optimal leading (line-height). "Set solid" type (ex. 12px/12px) is almost always a bad idea, particularly so in a long block of text. Depending on the type, media, etc, ratios in the range of 1.2-1.8 are a good starting point for improving readability.
  - gwern 13y ago
    > Using a more optimal column width. http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#max-width-redux http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#max-width-redux > Using a more optimal leading (line-height). http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#line-height http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#line-height
- gamegoblin 13y ago
  Do you have any form of colorblindness? For me it fades in and out along the gray-blue-purple spectrum.
  - ctidd 13y ago
    In my browser it renders as perfect grays, confirmed by the inspector.
    - gamegoblin 13y ago
      Very weird. This is what I see in Chrome: http://i.imgur.com/BbocHXW.png http://i.imgur.com/BbocHXW.png Ignore my 487 unread emails. I need to clean that out...
iagooar 13y ago
If you like spaced repetition and like to "compete" against people while learning, you must try out http://www.memrise.com/ http://www.memrise.com/ The website is appealing to the eye, has a lot of courses and users. There is a free (!) iOS / Android version which synchronizes with / through your Memrise web account. I get no money for recommending it, I just find it to be a very nicely polished alternative to Anki. I know that the latter is more flexible, but for the most cases Memrise is just good enough. Plus, the rankings bring in a whole new dimension by gamification of the learning / repeating process. I just can't sit there watching other people grow and getting more points than I have! They even send you an email remembering you that you have some new items to "water", as they call it.
- bennesvig 13y ago
  I used Memrise and found it surprisingly easy to memorize the order of half a deck of cards.
lutusp 13y ago
> Spaced Repitition [sic] You know, you can just copy the title of the linked article (which was spelled correctly). It's less work than typing, and the chance of misspelling words is dramatically reduced.
teemo_cute 13y ago
This is the reason why seminars are not good for learning. Art Markman discusses that issue in his book 'Smart Thinking.' Basically the human mind can only hold limited amounts of information at a time in short-term memory. If we contemplate what's on our short-term memory, the probability of it being stored in our long-term memory is much higher. It's like reading blogs one after another. Later on we have difficulty recalling what was on the previous blogs that we have read (of course there are exceptions, for the geniuses out there).
robertjwebb 13y ago
Spaced repetition is great, but be warned - it's no substitute for really learning the content. It won't let you draw connections between concepts, because the information is presented in bite sized chunks in a way that each concept is considered independently, not parts of a whole. I've found that I learn things much better when I see how they are interconnected and AFAIK this is supported by research. For this reason, if you're considering using spaced rep for university courses I recommend that you write your own flashcards, not use somebody else's. The process of converting the knowledge in the course into appropriate flashcard sized pieces is a pretty handy way of learning the information itself.
nextos 13y ago
I just wanted to point out that Emacs supports spaced repetition (through org-mode's plug-in org-drill) for those fond of keeping things in plain text.
dsirijus 13y ago
Repitition. Giggle.
steveridout 13y ago
If anyone is interested in using spaced repetition for language learning, you might like to give http://readlang.com http://readlang.com a shot (disclaimer - my site). It generates a flashcard every time you come across an unknown word or phrase while reading a book or website, and each flashcard includes the context sentence. You can also export to other software like Anki.
- nopinsight 13y ago
  I checked out the site. Congrats for great work. I'll recommend it to people I know. There are so many language pairs you support. What sources (dictionaries) do you use for translations? Wiktionary? Since each word might translate differently in different contexts, do you also select the most appropriate translation to display? It would be interesting to discuss about the most optimal methods for that. Google Translate often gets this wrong. (I am working on NLP/AI for language learning myself although we will mostly use it for conversations at first.) I believe many people here can give interesting perspectives on this hard problem (semantic disambiguation for translation).
  - steveridout 13y ago
    Thanks! For the inline translations I use the Google Translate API, which is surprisingly good for words and short phrases. Unfortunately the API doesn't provide multiple translations, even though they show them on their own web site. Grrr. Users are encouraged to edit translations before learning them, and I often think it would be awesome to crowd source appropriate translations for given contexts using this data. I'm getting ahead of myself though, I'd need orders of magnitude more active users and development time for that to work.
    - nopinsight 13y ago
      Just an idea. For some individual words and common phrases, you can supplement the API translation with info from Wiktionary and many freely available dictionaries on the Web. When you have a lot of users, providing static translation for individual words with single meaning should also save you money in the long run, as Google Translate API charges you for all translations the user activates.
zhubert 13y ago
I wrote http://www.memorific.com http://www.memorific.com to be a spaced repetition tool/community for software related topics. Collaboration is easy, which was something I really wanted to see in this space...building knowledge together (like in a class or small team context). Personally it's helped me retain some Go language concepts as I learn.
greenmountin 13y ago
My problem with SRS is that it is useless for the first stage of memorization. The "vocab sheet" (20 word+definition lines, on a sheet) style is much more effective for me, and if this was available for any of the SRS vendors I would start using it immediately.
madiator 13y ago
Is there any SR tool that can just remind you to review stuff while taking into consideration the date it was added? The use case is as follows: Suppose I read some article on some neat python tricks today, if I don't review it or use it I am going to forget it in a month. But if I note that I learnt it today, the program should remind me after say 3 days later, two weeks later and then probably after one year. My understanding is that Anki cannot do this, since it doesn't know when things are added.
- yepguy 13y ago
  Anki does know when notes are added, and I'm confused how what you're asking is any different than how Anki normally works.
  - madiator 13y ago
    Ok I didn't know Anki knows when notes are added, thats great. Also I don't need front and back sides. I just want a note on the front that states what I need to refresh about.. but I guess I can just leave the back side of the flash card empty for that, I suppose?
- dfan 13y ago
  That's exactly what it does. Every spaced repetition tool takes into consideration how long it has been since you last got the flash card right. When you add a card, the time you added it at is used as the last time you got it right.
edgarvaldes 13y ago
Is there an option to use SRS in command line or VIM?

160 points by rfreytag 13y ago

Repetition, not repitition. I have tried Anki, one of the spaced repetition programs he mentions. There are lots of different decks available. Browse some here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/ https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/ edit: Oh and this is a dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6461936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6461936 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3129937

kiba 13y ago
I found premade decks, except for the simplest ones, are of limited value as opposed to me making the deck and continously edit them. It's like taking notes, which enhance learning, as opposed to merely listening to the teacher. Also, just because it is dupe doesn't mean it is valueless. Far too few people are aware of spaced repetition as a principle to even begin using it. For example, Khan Academy have some form of spaced repetition, but it is incomplete. If people knows more about the idea, they would be more likely to implement a full system.
- lvevjo 13y ago
  You should share some of your decks. :) >Also, just because it is dupe doesn't mean it is valueless. Of course, but at some point dupes get to be annoying. I'm not saying it is breaking the rules (is there even a rule for that here?), just pointing it out. The last time gwern posted this it got a lot of attention.
hhm 13y ago
Anki is wonderful; I've been using it for a while. One nice feature of Anki is that it can sync between the web, desktop and mobile versions of the app.
- lvevjo 13y ago
  I stopped using it because I couldn't summon the time/willpower to work at it every day. When you leave a deck for more than a day, the work starts to accumulate like crazy and it takes much more effort to catch up.
  - wingerlang 13y ago
    I've set up a cron job to automatically open the app at 7 in the morning every day (and to minimise all other apps would be nice but I can't find anything to do it). I'll also set up the same functionality on my iPhone (jailbroken devices can do this with Activator). Maybe this would work for you.
    - rmc 13y ago
      Could wmctl on Linux allow you to minimise apps
      - wingerlang 13y ago
        Possibly, but I run OSX. Your reply did make me take another crack at it and I got it to work. The script if anyone is interested: http://pastebin.com/pC9VTzjv http://pastebin.com/pC9VTzjv. It does do some specific-to-me things to close apps I usually have open that did not want to minimise.
  - Jach 13y ago
    It's important to remember that you don't have to review all your "due" cards at once. Just open it up and do one card per deck. Maybe you'll do more as you get going or if the next card after the first is easy. It accumulates, but over time as you actually memorize things you'll whittle the due set down as every card starts becoming "due" months into the future.
  - kiba 13y ago
    Don't study too many cards then. Nobody is saying that you have to finish all the dues.
jimeuxx 13y ago
I've used Anki for years to learn Japanese. It made learning to read relatively painless. You do need discipline to get far with it though. I managed to get my vocab deck up over 10,000 words, but leaving it for even a week is difficult. As far as language learning goes, you also need to realise that no amount of SRS'd words is going to make you a natural, fluent speaker, so don't fall into the trap of spending all your study time reviewing.
Steuard 13y ago
I started using Anki this year to help me learn my students' names and faces, and it's been glorious. I was able to recognize about 75% of them on the first day of class, and within a few weeks I was solid on nearly everyone. That has always been one of my biggest weaknesses as a teacher, and I'm feeling great about the change.
- mildtrepidation 13y ago
  This is a great idea! I'm terrible with names and faces, and this occurred to me as a way to improve that. It's definitely heartening to see that someone has done it with good results.

barry-cotter 13y ago

SRS is one of those things that make thinking about education depressing because it makes it obvious that merely being a massive improvement over the status quo isn't enough to get widespread adoption. It is absolutely wonderful. I recommend downloading a shared deck and using it to get into the habit, then building your own. There are better and worse ways of using it but it's been a real help to me in learning Chinese.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

yzzxy 13y ago

I've been building a small-scope SRS app for my high school's mandarin curriculum as a side project in Node. Building a simple Leitner system is amazingly simple, and while I don't support the same level of analytics as Anki, the effect is similar. I'm looking foward to launching later this week!

Tossrock 13y ago

Only marginally related, but what the heck is going on with the text on gwern's site? Are the per-character varying gray values supposed to convey some kind of information?

dpatrick86 13y ago
Looks like an aesthetic novelty rather than something functional.
- rm445 13y ago
  It being gwern.net, there's probably a detailed article comparing meta-analyses of text-colouring somewhere on the site :-) Even as an aesthetic novelty, it's a fairly pleasant one, or at least unobjectionable since it's fairly muted. Gwern's articles can be quite hard to read, being a wall of text, and their structure tends to be much more spread-out than your typical introduction, body, conclusion - articles tend to have several 'chapters'.
teoryn 13y ago
It should be alternating lines with red, black and blue not greys, it's to increase reading speed: http://www.beelinereader.com/ http://www.beelinereader.com/
- theon144 13y ago
  It "should" not, see the "Blues" option :)
- mantrax4 13y ago
  What a coincidence that sites using it, including the beelinereader.com site itself, use super-tight line-height. Thing is, line-height helps with the same issue (but without the weird colors), so if they'd fix that, the funky colors aren't as useful anymore. But I guess we gotta save the trees from those printing their web pages or something. Whatever one may prefer, I see they offer a plugin, which is a better way to use this tech, not by random sites forcing it on us.

mantrax4 13y ago

Ok, why on earth is almost every word in this article body a different shade of gray? I don't like articles where I need to bring up the browser dev tools just so I can read it.

ctidd 13y ago
It appears to be an attempt to make it easier to find the beginning of the next line after you finish reading a line. However, the effect is much too subtle to be of use, and even if made more prominent, it would still ruin the typographic color and generally confuse readers. Better solutions include: Using a more optimal column width. 50-60 characters per line is a commonly suggested range for most media. Using a more optimal leading (line-height). "Set solid" type (ex. 12px/12px) is almost always a bad idea, particularly so in a long block of text. Depending on the type, media, etc, ratios in the range of 1.2-1.8 are a good starting point for improving readability.
- gwern 13y ago
  > Using a more optimal column width. http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#max-width-redux http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#max-width-redux > Using a more optimal leading (line-height). http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#line-height http://www.gwern.net/AB%20testing#line-height
gamegoblin 13y ago
Do you have any form of colorblindness? For me it fades in and out along the gray-blue-purple spectrum.
- ctidd 13y ago
  In my browser it renders as perfect grays, confirmed by the inspector.
  - gamegoblin 13y ago
    Very weird. This is what I see in Chrome: http://i.imgur.com/BbocHXW.png http://i.imgur.com/BbocHXW.png Ignore my 487 unread emails. I need to clean that out...

iagooar 13y ago

If you like spaced repetition and like to "compete" against people while learning, you must try out http://www.memrise.com/ http://www.memrise.com/ The website is appealing to the eye, has a lot of courses and users. There is a free (!) iOS / Android version which synchronizes with / through your Memrise web account. I get no money for recommending it, I just find it to be a very nicely polished alternative to Anki. I know that the latter is more flexible, but for the most cases Memrise is just good enough. Plus, the rankings bring in a whole new dimension by gamification of the learning / repeating process. I just can't sit there watching other people grow and getting more points than I have! They even send you an email remembering you that you have some new items to "water", as they call it.

bennesvig 13y ago
I used Memrise and found it surprisingly easy to memorize the order of half a deck of cards.

lutusp 13y ago

> Spaced Repitition [sic] You know, you can just copy the title of the linked article (which was spelled correctly). It's less work than typing, and the chance of misspelling words is dramatically reduced.

teemo_cute 13y ago

This is the reason why seminars are not good for learning. Art Markman discusses that issue in his book 'Smart Thinking.' Basically the human mind can only hold limited amounts of information at a time in short-term memory. If we contemplate what's on our short-term memory, the probability of it being stored in our long-term memory is much higher. It's like reading blogs one after another. Later on we have difficulty recalling what was on the previous blogs that we have read (of course there are exceptions, for the geniuses out there).

robertjwebb 13y ago

Spaced repetition is great, but be warned - it's no substitute for really learning the content. It won't let you draw connections between concepts, because the information is presented in bite sized chunks in a way that each concept is considered independently, not parts of a whole. I've found that I learn things much better when I see how they are interconnected and AFAIK this is supported by research. For this reason, if you're considering using spaced rep for university courses I recommend that you write your own flashcards, not use somebody else's. The process of converting the knowledge in the course into appropriate flashcard sized pieces is a pretty handy way of learning the information itself.

nextos 13y ago

I just wanted to point out that Emacs supports spaced repetition (through org-mode's plug-in org-drill) for those fond of keeping things in plain text.

dsirijus 13y ago

Repitition. Giggle.

steveridout 13y ago

If anyone is interested in using spaced repetition for language learning, you might like to give http://readlang.com http://readlang.com a shot (disclaimer - my site). It generates a flashcard every time you come across an unknown word or phrase while reading a book or website, and each flashcard includes the context sentence. You can also export to other software like Anki.

nopinsight 13y ago
I checked out the site. Congrats for great work. I'll recommend it to people I know. There are so many language pairs you support. What sources (dictionaries) do you use for translations? Wiktionary? Since each word might translate differently in different contexts, do you also select the most appropriate translation to display? It would be interesting to discuss about the most optimal methods for that. Google Translate often gets this wrong. (I am working on NLP/AI for language learning myself although we will mostly use it for conversations at first.) I believe many people here can give interesting perspectives on this hard problem (semantic disambiguation for translation).
- steveridout 13y ago
  Thanks! For the inline translations I use the Google Translate API, which is surprisingly good for words and short phrases. Unfortunately the API doesn't provide multiple translations, even though they show them on their own web site. Grrr. Users are encouraged to edit translations before learning them, and I often think it would be awesome to crowd source appropriate translations for given contexts using this data. I'm getting ahead of myself though, I'd need orders of magnitude more active users and development time for that to work.
  - nopinsight 13y ago
    Just an idea. For some individual words and common phrases, you can supplement the API translation with info from Wiktionary and many freely available dictionaries on the Web. When you have a lot of users, providing static translation for individual words with single meaning should also save you money in the long run, as Google Translate API charges you for all translations the user activates.

zhubert 13y ago

I wrote http://www.memorific.com http://www.memorific.com to be a spaced repetition tool/community for software related topics. Collaboration is easy, which was something I really wanted to see in this space...building knowledge together (like in a class or small team context). Personally it's helped me retain some Go language concepts as I learn.

greenmountin 13y ago

My problem with SRS is that it is useless for the first stage of memorization. The "vocab sheet" (20 word+definition lines, on a sheet) style is much more effective for me, and if this was available for any of the SRS vendors I would start using it immediately.

madiator 13y ago

Is there any SR tool that can just remind you to review stuff while taking into consideration the date it was added? The use case is as follows: Suppose I read some article on some neat python tricks today, if I don't review it or use it I am going to forget it in a month. But if I note that I learnt it today, the program should remind me after say 3 days later, two weeks later and then probably after one year. My understanding is that Anki cannot do this, since it doesn't know when things are added.

yepguy 13y ago
Anki does know when notes are added, and I'm confused how what you're asking is any different than how Anki normally works.
- madiator 13y ago
  Ok I didn't know Anki knows when notes are added, thats great. Also I don't need front and back sides. I just want a note on the front that states what I need to refresh about.. but I guess I can just leave the back side of the flash card empty for that, I suppose?
dfan 13y ago
That's exactly what it does. Every spaced repetition tool takes into consideration how long it has been since you last got the flash card right. When you add a card, the time you added it at is used as the last time you got it right.

edgarvaldes 13y ago

Is there an option to use SRS in command line or VIM?