I don't find doing things tangential to the thing you want to learn all that effective compared to just doing the thing you want to get better at. Maybe it is just me.
If you want to improve your vocabulary read more books. If you want to improve in a programming language program more in that language. If you want to learn chess openings - play more chess.
Actually doing things you want to learn is way more fun than rote memorization so you are more likely to stick with it.
Anki was my introduction to spaced repetition and started me down a learning journey that I'm very happy to be taking. That said, Anki didn't end up sticking as the way I do spaced repetition - but it took me a long time to be able to articulate why. These days I am using Roam along with roam-toolkit. Having tried it this way, my biggest realization is that facts are memorable when they have many visceral associations. A corollary of this is that, to remember well, I should practice making lots of different connections between the things I know. Now when I do spaced repetition, I annotate things as I go, forming new connections and associations, then putting them in my knowledge graph forever (forever, knock on wood). By contrast, Anki feels like I am over-training flash cards in a very siloed and narrow way, such that the skill I learn is closer to "answering flash cards" as opposed to the actual thing I want to be good at.
That's exactly my idea of a lifelong learning journey, spaced repetition where you build connections as you gain deeper understanding. I've built Traverse.link to do this natively (ie connected notes with spaced repetition), let me know if you find it helpful
I've been using Anki for about 3 years to learn Korean and it's been tremendously successful. In that time I've learned around 3000 new words (both English -> Korean and Korean -> English with reversed cards) and a ton of grammar (using Cloze cards). I couldn't imagine trying to memorize this amount of information any other way now.
My number one recommendation is to not get overly excited about it. One of the first things that happen when you start using Anki and realize the superpower that it is being in charge of your memory is that you want to include EVERYTHING in it.
You start creating cards with obscure bash one-liners, little-used git commands, or Javascript functions you read about in a random article. You add all of it to Anki. After all, you might use them in the future right? And it doesn't cost you anything to create a card with them so why not.
What happens is that because you don't have a clear picture of why those cards are valuable to you - you just added them because they might be useful, one of these days - you will have trouble retaining their knowledge, meaning that you will keep failing to successfully review those cards.
And because of the way spaced repetition algorithms work, those cards will be constantly appearing in your reviews, and you will keep failing them. And they will keep appearing. And so on and so forth until you lose all motivation to use Anki because it's becoming a frustrating experience to do your reviews.
The most important thing about using Anki is to keep using it. That's how you get the benefits of it, so be more selective about what you add to Anki instead of profligately adding cards that you gain nothing from.
I use it to remember the names of persons I encounter in my day-to-day.
Coworkers, neighbors (like that neighbor 3 blocks away that I talked with for a few minutes about {such-and-such}, but don't see that often), restaurant employees/proprietors, delivery people, maintenance workers, friends-of-friends I've met.
Without Anki I have an abysmal memory for names. I have aphantasia[0] which might relate to my difficulty with names.
Now, with Anki, (if I'm using it regularly) I have a freakishly good memory for names. :)
Goes a long way to helping others feel welcome and appreciated, which in turn means _I_ end up feeling welcome and appreciated. A very virtuous cycle.
Edit: I'm a software engineer, but most of my Anki usage is not focused on software engineering directly. To create new Anki cards, I follow the "20 rules for formulating knowledge"[1], so it takes a bit of work before I can take some new bit of information and "process" it to something ready for Anki.
I worked on a relatively narrow part of a complex domain, I had an anki deck to keep track of the various acronyms and remember some of the weirder processes my systems participated in. Most of the questions were one of:
- what does ABC stand for
- describe process X
- how process X differs from Y, and why
- what is the role of system A in process Z
- what is the shape of data that comes from A to B in process Ł
This vastly reduced the number of times I got stumped with something during various high-level meetings (to the point that I routinely pointed out some false assumptions people made). It worked better for me than passive documentation. The domain was unusually complex though.
I use it to help me as a cloud engineer. For an example of some of the things I use it for. I have cards that are for
- Emacs Commands
- Emacs Key Strokes
- Greek letters, words and sounds
- The wikipedia List of non-standard dates
- Physic ideas
- General principles of organization
- Learning principles
- Bible verses
- Command line utility options
- Vimium key strokes
Basically anything that I want to learn I end up ankifying. I find that Anki is most effective for remembering things that I don't do all the time, but need to remember two or three times a week/month. Here's a good tip, if you need to DuckDuckGo it more than once it's probably a good idea to throw it in an Anki card.
That feels like a really broad question. I always find it useful to look up the reading lists for university courses on subjects I’m interested in. You can usually find the PDFs with a quick search in Google Scholar. Then, using something like Polar, you can annotate the readings and directly save your annotations as Anki cards.
That way, you can build a knowledge base of what actually interests you, which you’re much more likely to study and retain in the first place.
* Command line or vim snippets, e.g. "write a for loop over all files in a directory in bash" "grep and only show match"
I find it most useful for catching things I commonly screw up. The trick, of course, is to build the habit of identifying when you've repeated a blunder and then to make it into a card. An example for this in Go would be using `range` and forgetting the second arg: `for val := range slice` is legal syntax, but `val` is actually the index var here, it should be `for _, val := range slice`.
I've been using them to remember specific things I look up commonly. The rule is if I look things up 3 times, I add a card. If I can remember these things, I won't have to break my flow to look things up on Stackoverflow.
It's usually simple things, like what's the method signature for slice? Or how do I run bash inside of a docker container?
The tough part for me is sticking to reviewing. There, I'm trying to figure out where to attach it to something I often already do.
As a software engineer I spend hours a day in the languages and tools I use. That's more than enough reinforcement for me. I've never felt like I couldn't remember enough in 20 years of programming. What sort of things do you think it would be helpful to memorize?
The NATO phonetic alphabet. If you've ever tried to read an email, password or any set of letters over the phone, it makes it a lot easier. It's not an obvious thing, but it's only 26 cards.
I feel like Anki is not designed to help you succeed. Eventually, you'll start missing your reviews. One day you'll open Anki, see that you have hundreds of cards scheduled, and just quit the app.
The author of this article mentions he'll post an article tackling this issue, looking forward to that!
One way I've successfully used Anki is learning new technology. It can't directly teach you the concepts, but it's much easier to learn and and retain the concepts when you're drilling the building blocks.
The mere fact of retrieving information from memory helped me in understanding. I was using Anki back when I was learning Python, and it definitely helps in productivity (reducing my hits to StackOverflow to 50%+).
I've been using Anki quite successfully to learn things about wines in french, especially about the wine domains in Bordeaux and Bourgogne. It's easy to create, as a flash card. One side shows the map, the other shows the name.
Now, I'm keen on learning the list of the main french authors of each century, but I don't know how to proceed.
Let's say a list of 20 names, how would you do it?
You would not create one flash card with 19th century on one side, and the 20 names on the other side. I've been struggling with that issue.
In general you want to reduce the amount of things you have to retrieve from memory in one go, and attempting to retrieve a 20 person list is just going to give you problems.
The cloze solution is certainly better than the full list (and does follow the minimum information principle because you just have to retrieve a single name) but the problem is that it doesn't give you any handles. If you have 19 names and Flaubert is hidden, how would you know it's Flaubert that's missing? Long-term you're bound to fail those cards.
But I would also question the premise of the card. Do you expect to have to come up with the 20 names each time you want to talk about 19th century French literature? As in, each time the context is "19th century French literature" is the appropriate knowledge to retrieve "* list of 20 authors *"?
Instead a better approach might be to flip it around and ask yourself, "In which century did Flaubert write Madame Bovary?" or something along those lines. You can both reconstruct the list from that and if you're writing about Flaubert the knowledge that he wrote during the 19th century will come more fluidly to you.
Anki is great for learning individual arbitrary facts, ie vocab words that would otherwise be difficult to encounter frequently enough in the wild. Learning to reproduce a list doesn’t fit well as you observed because there is no 1:1 prompt for each author, unless you come up with one like “Author of Madame Bovary”, and 20 things is too much for one card. This is more like memory palace territory which I rarely find useful in real life but fits exactly your task.
I kinda wish there was spaced repetition for interview practice. So that everyday, I have a set number of questions to try, and I don't have to make that decision. And if I don't get it the first time, no problem, I know it'll come up again. And if I do get it, the goal is to get faster.
Anyone else study this way, like an Anki for interview questions? If not, how do you pick what questions to practice and what order do them in when studying for interviews?
I have heard a lots of good stuff about Anki. The adoption of it is wider than expected, and people really enjoy it. Up to a point when they are requesting to offer Anki for Summon The JSON, what seems to be an interesting idea
I would recommend Joshua Foer "Moonwalking with Einstein" for those interested in memory. Spaced repition is effective to an extent, but I find the techniques explored in his book to be much more effective. The tl;dr is that you are much better off constructing "memory palaces" in your head. You pick a place you know extremely well (like your family home), and you imagine yourself navigating that space and "placing" reminders of the things you'd like to remember along the way.
It's like inventing a very surreal dream to help you avoid forgetting things. I use variants of it for things like people's names and ideas I'd like to explore all the time, it's super helpful.
The memory palace technique is not a silver bullet to permanently remember things. Sure it is fun at first. Eventually, you will have to review your memory palace periodically otherwise you will forget it.
I find the spaces repetition approach good for learning new Japanese words I don’t often use. I made an app that lets you look up a word and get a reminder a few days later: https://shirabe.app/
Pretty useless for code and math. Making my concise own notes in Latex/Asciidoc which I review at regular intervals helps me far more and I don't need to fight the interface.
Am I the only one who finds Anki's UI/UX to be absolutely atrocious? I know it's petty, but it's literally the only reason that's always made me not use it for more than just a few days at a time.
Is anyone working on improving the UI? Or are there alternative "frontends" out there? Does anyone know how hard it would be do it? (I assume it might not be trivial since Anki has a plugin system, but I don't know to what extent they can modify the UI)
While not a "frontend" to Anki, I built Mochi[0] in part because I was also frustrated with Anki's UI/UX and it supports importing Anki decks to an extent.
It uses a similar scheduling algorithm to Anki, but it's based on simple markdown note cards, and has some features around that as well, such as bi-directional link references.
> Instead of turning in your bed unable to sleep terrified of the exam coming the next day, you would soundly sleep with the knowledge that you know everything you need to know to ace the exam.
What? If you can ace the exam by memorizing, it must mean that awarding of merit in your field of study requires little more than the mere regurgitation of facts.
In a typical engineering exam, you can bring a sheet of formulas and facts, and a programmable calculator. This is so that the exam is less about rote memorization and more about application.
... and unfortunately without spaced repetition. It was once part of the premium service but has been removed around a year ago. Source: I was a paying user.
[+] [-] jacobsenscott|5 years ago|reply
If you want to improve your vocabulary read more books. If you want to improve in a programming language program more in that language. If you want to learn chess openings - play more chess.
Actually doing things you want to learn is way more fun than rote memorization so you are more likely to stick with it.
[+] [-] asab|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edylemond|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sharmi|5 years ago|reply
I always saw Anki as an implementation of spaced repetition. What is your process?
How do you codify connections and associations into spaced repetition?
[+] [-] RootReducer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andai|5 years ago|reply
If it just has the proper dispersal.
You would just be an ass,
To do it en masse,
Your remembering would turn out much worsal.”
Ulrich Neisser, Retrieval Practice and The Maintenance of Knowledge
https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/1988-bjork.pdf
[+] [-] nomad225|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] simbyotic|5 years ago|reply
My number one recommendation is to not get overly excited about it. One of the first things that happen when you start using Anki and realize the superpower that it is being in charge of your memory is that you want to include EVERYTHING in it.
You start creating cards with obscure bash one-liners, little-used git commands, or Javascript functions you read about in a random article. You add all of it to Anki. After all, you might use them in the future right? And it doesn't cost you anything to create a card with them so why not.
What happens is that because you don't have a clear picture of why those cards are valuable to you - you just added them because they might be useful, one of these days - you will have trouble retaining their knowledge, meaning that you will keep failing to successfully review those cards.
And because of the way spaced repetition algorithms work, those cards will be constantly appearing in your reviews, and you will keep failing them. And they will keep appearing. And so on and so forth until you lose all motivation to use Anki because it's becoming a frustrating experience to do your reviews.
The most important thing about using Anki is to keep using it. That's how you get the benefits of it, so be more selective about what you add to Anki instead of profligately adding cards that you gain nothing from.
[+] [-] wonder_er|5 years ago|reply
Coworkers, neighbors (like that neighbor 3 blocks away that I talked with for a few minutes about {such-and-such}, but don't see that often), restaurant employees/proprietors, delivery people, maintenance workers, friends-of-friends I've met.
Without Anki I have an abysmal memory for names. I have aphantasia[0] which might relate to my difficulty with names.
Now, with Anki, (if I'm using it regularly) I have a freakishly good memory for names. :)
Goes a long way to helping others feel welcome and appreciated, which in turn means _I_ end up feeling welcome and appreciated. A very virtuous cycle.
Edit: I'm a software engineer, but most of my Anki usage is not focused on software engineering directly. To create new Anki cards, I follow the "20 rules for formulating knowledge"[1], so it takes a bit of work before I can take some new bit of information and "process" it to something ready for Anki.
[0] https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...
[1]: https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru...
[+] [-] isbvhodnvemrwvn|5 years ago|reply
- what does ABC stand for
- describe process X
- how process X differs from Y, and why
- what is the role of system A in process Z
- what is the shape of data that comes from A to B in process Ł
This vastly reduced the number of times I got stumped with something during various high-level meetings (to the point that I routinely pointed out some false assumptions people made). It worked better for me than passive documentation. The domain was unusually complex though.
[+] [-] hpoe|5 years ago|reply
- Emacs Commands
- Emacs Key Strokes
- Greek letters, words and sounds
- The wikipedia List of non-standard dates
- Physic ideas
- General principles of organization
- Learning principles
- Bible verses
- Command line utility options
- Vimium key strokes
Basically anything that I want to learn I end up ankifying. I find that Anki is most effective for remembering things that I don't do all the time, but need to remember two or three times a week/month. Here's a good tip, if you need to DuckDuckGo it more than once it's probably a good idea to throw it in an Anki card.
[+] [-] clankyclanker|5 years ago|reply
That way, you can build a knowledge base of what actually interests you, which you’re much more likely to study and retain in the first place.
[+] [-] Graziano_M|5 years ago|reply
* HTTP status codes
* Acronyms
* Syntax mistakes (spot the bug).
* Command line or vim snippets, e.g. "write a for loop over all files in a directory in bash" "grep and only show match"
I find it most useful for catching things I commonly screw up. The trick, of course, is to build the habit of identifying when you've repeated a blunder and then to make it into a card. An example for this in Go would be using `range` and forgetting the second arg: `for val := range slice` is legal syntax, but `val` is actually the index var here, it should be `for _, val := range slice`.
[+] [-] iamwil|5 years ago|reply
It's usually simple things, like what's the method signature for slice? Or how do I run bash inside of a docker container?
The tough part for me is sticking to reviewing. There, I'm trying to figure out where to attach it to something I often already do.
[+] [-] jacobsenscott|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamestimmins|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qznc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blackbear_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JxLS-cpgbe0|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] devilduck|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnny_b|5 years ago|reply
The author of this article mentions he'll post an article tackling this issue, looking forward to that!
[+] [-] JamesBarney|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] growman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bibelo|5 years ago|reply
I've been using Anki quite successfully to learn things about wines in french, especially about the wine domains in Bordeaux and Bourgogne. It's easy to create, as a flash card. One side shows the map, the other shows the name.
Now, I'm keen on learning the list of the main french authors of each century, but I don't know how to proceed.
Let's say a list of 20 names, how would you do it?
You would not create one flash card with 19th century on one side, and the 20 names on the other side. I've been struggling with that issue.
Maybe using the cloze type?
[+] [-] simbyotic|5 years ago|reply
In general you want to reduce the amount of things you have to retrieve from memory in one go, and attempting to retrieve a 20 person list is just going to give you problems.
The cloze solution is certainly better than the full list (and does follow the minimum information principle because you just have to retrieve a single name) but the problem is that it doesn't give you any handles. If you have 19 names and Flaubert is hidden, how would you know it's Flaubert that's missing? Long-term you're bound to fail those cards.
But I would also question the premise of the card. Do you expect to have to come up with the 20 names each time you want to talk about 19th century French literature? As in, each time the context is "19th century French literature" is the appropriate knowledge to retrieve "* list of 20 authors *"?
Instead a better approach might be to flip it around and ask yourself, "In which century did Flaubert write Madame Bovary?" or something along those lines. You can both reconstruct the list from that and if you're writing about Flaubert the knowledge that he wrote during the 19th century will come more fluidly to you.
[+] [-] porknubbins|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iamwil|5 years ago|reply
Anyone else study this way, like an Anki for interview questions? If not, how do you pick what questions to practice and what order do them in when studying for interviews?
[+] [-] tomaszs|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisandchips|5 years ago|reply
It's like inventing a very surreal dream to help you avoid forgetting things. I use variants of it for things like people's names and ideas I'd like to explore all the time, it's super helpful.
[+] [-] redmaverick|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] masterofmisc|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nathanasmith|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmiller1990|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] lenkite|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edjrage|5 years ago|reply
Is anyone working on improving the UI? Or are there alternative "frontends" out there? Does anyone know how hard it would be do it? (I assume it might not be trivial since Anki has a plugin system, but I don't know to what extent they can modify the UI)
[+] [-] knubie|5 years ago|reply
It uses a similar scheduling algorithm to Anki, but it's based on simple markdown note cards, and has some features around that as well, such as bi-directional link references.
[0] https://mochi.cards/
[+] [-] tpoacher|5 years ago|reply
Personally I find the UI/UX to be exactly what I want it to be. What exactly do you not like about it?
[+] [-] MeinBlutIstBlau|5 years ago|reply
It's by no means pretty and definitely has a learning curve. That's what makes it such a useful tool though. Otherwise you end up with duolingo...
[+] [-] edylemond|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moralsupply|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bibelo|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kazinator|5 years ago|reply
What? If you can ace the exam by memorizing, it must mean that awarding of merit in your field of study requires little more than the mere regurgitation of facts.
In a typical engineering exam, you can bring a sheet of formulas and facts, and a programmable calculator. This is so that the exam is less about rote memorization and more about application.
[+] [-] iscrewyou|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drewcoo|5 years ago|reply
Conspiracy? Well it must be true.
[+] [-] thotsBgone|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ii550|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iSpiderman|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moralsupply|5 years ago|reply