[anon2020dot00]

My idea is that there is a market for community-curated spaced repetition decks. Many people want to learn the same things such as a foreign language or a programming language.

The difficult part is creating a deck and crafting the answers and questions. Because usually this is a time-consuming process. So if it was a community-effort then it would be a win-win.

This is probably not an original idea and if anyone knows already where to find such decks, that would be cool.

[allenu]

> This is probably not an original idea and if anyone knows already where to find such decks, that would be cool.

This is something I've wanted to do with my app (Fresh Cards). I ended up defining a simple text file format for the flashcards[1] to help make it easier to share and import cards. You could post flashcards as simple text that someone could drag and drop into the app to import. (Formats like Anki's .apkg file are great, but they don't make it easy to peruse the cards without importing into Anki.)

What's missing in all of this, though, is an actual community where you could search and browse the decks and collaborate to create new ones. Though, if you simply use text files, you could host a deck on github, for instance, and allow people to create pull requests to improve it. I think there's room for creating nicer user experiences to surface decks and encourage sharing, however. (Imagine, for instance, a social media-like feed where you could see new flashcards being created and you could search by tag for your target language.) Anyway, I think this area is ripe for exploration, but the user experience has to be done right to encourage collaboration and sharing of decks.

[1] https://www.freshcardsapp.com/help/tech/index.html#text

[darkteflon]

I hadn’t heard of Fresh Cards before, but this looks lovely.

I’ve used Anki over the years to great effect with second language learning and am fully bought into the paradigm, but I do find Anki quite clunky as a piece of software. Fresh Cards seems like it’s designed specifically in response to that.

Does this use a similar repetition algorithm to Anki? Are there any obvious limitations versus Anki? What sort of UX differences would a long-term Anki user need to get comfortable with?

Would also be keen to hear from anyone here that’s used this.

[biophysboy]

I've been using spaced repetition software (Anki) to learn Japanese. Community decks are really powerful for the basics, but personal decks are unavoidable later on.

For language learning, there are flash card generators that make this a simple one-click process. I think these strike the right balance of simplicity & flexibility/personalization. Of course, a tool like this relies on a free database that you can map concepts onto. But I could see this sort of working with wikipedia or some documentation.

[pastram_i]

Is anki the solution you imagine? https://apps.ankiweb.net/ Or is there a use case that anki doesn’t solve?

[p-christ]

Anki public decks are usually too low quality to be useful unfortunately

[segh]

https://quantum.country/ teaches quantum computing as essays with embedded flashcards, as a new "mnemonic medium". I wonder if there is a market for context plus flashcards. What if books came with their own spaced repetition decks?

[cfu28]

At least coming from the medical school perspective - there is a huge culture of using shared Anki decks built off of popular board review books and courses so you can read a chapter/finish a section in some course and immediately jump to Anki to do the corresponding flashcards.

It's gotten so popular that now theres a shared 30,000k card deck called AnKing that a lot of students use. The deck itself is free, but the curators of the deck recently launched a new paid service to automatically update the deck as new cards from the community are added: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschoolanki/comments/rb62m6/a...

[p-christ]

I completely agree. We’ve started building that on Save All and will be going more in that direction in future.

The Anki public decks are usually too low quality to be useful unfortunately

[cfu28]

I guess it depends on the community. AnKing's deck is the gold standard in medical education community despite being public.

[belkarx]

Another idea: decent, effective decks of cards exist for other platforms like Quizlet - just figure out how to convert them (there are apparently some extensions that do this as of now)

[CubsFan1060]

Is this what you are looking for? https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/

[p-christ]

I find the Anki shared decks are basically not high quality enough. Do you ever use them? Which ones do you use?

[visarga]

You might get more value from cards you write yourself. You should do that when you encounter the information.

[an_aparallel]

the point of spaced repetition - like Anki is to be involved with the creation process of the deck. Simply downloading it ready is not as effective.