[HN Gopher] Anki - Powerful, intelligent flash cards
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Anki - Powerful, intelligent flash cards
Author : bcg361
Score : 320 points
Date : 2024-01-28 06:35 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (apps.ankiweb.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (apps.ankiweb.net)
| gcr wrote:
| I LOVE anki!! I'm a heavy user.
|
| Everything goes in my morning flash cards. Knots, geography,
| language, tar commandline flags, papers, statistics homework.
| Fill them with things you like, is my advice - it's fun to say
| hello to hobbies on the verge of your memory in the morning.
|
| Bird calls! I'm learning sounds of bird calls since I can't see
| very well so I can't learn by sight. I listed eBird's set of
| common birds near me and downloaded their calls as mp3s from the
| Macaulay Library and batch-imported them into my flash cards (for
| my personal use). It's always rewarding to hear a bird outside
| and go "hey I think I know what that is!" Pairs well with Merlin
| Sound ID.
|
| Another great use is as a mnemonic Rolodex: I frequently forget
| to reach out and catch up with friends in my life, so I have a
| deck with just names of people to say hi to. Every time somebody
| comes up, I say hello, and then answer the card for whichever
| interval feels appropriate. This way, the SRS itself will make
| sure that I never forget someone for too long.
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| Wait a moment. "tar commandline flags"? When I was still
| learning how to program, the general advice was to avoid
| memorizing things you can easily look up, like language syntax,
| framework functionality or commandline flags, and just let it
| happen. In fact, I recently caught myself skimming Nest.js docs
| to make cards to learn how to use Nest.js BEFORE I even start
| working on my project, and almost felt like I'm procrastinating
| instead of being productive.
|
| I don't disagree with how Anki is effective at memorization,
| because that would be like disagreeing with the effectiveness
| of space repetition as a principle. I'm just wondering if it's
| worth putting stuff like "vim keybinds" in - John Carmack
| reportedly did that to check what's the fuss about Vim.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| At least for me this often means, that I just keep on lookin
| up the stuff over and over again. Takes some deliberate
| effort to actually store some obscure things in my memory.
|
| When I was still active with Anki, I was mostly picking up
| some random things I knew I would need fairly often and
| included those in my deck.
| OJFord wrote:
| But that means you're doing tar flag flashcards more often
| than you're using those tar flags? Because otherwise, and
| for me, the CLI usage _is_ the flashcard? _Using_ them is
| what teaches me and keeps fresh the commands and flags that
| I most often use.
| Version467 wrote:
| Not necessarily. Hypothetical example, but let's say I
| use some obscure tar command twice a month. That's too
| far apart for me to remember it, but often enough that it
| would annoy me to look it up every time. Chuck it into
| anki and I have a short time where I repeat it often
| enough so that it sticks and after that the time between
| repetitions quickly becomes far longer than the 14 day
| interval where I actually use the command.
|
| And now I never have to look it up again :)
| Arisaka1 wrote:
| I think that's the original claim: That you're memorizing
| something that you use 12-20 times per year. Why not turn
| that into a script, or make it a memorable alias?
| Version467 wrote:
| Because I perceive the cost of memorizing it to be almost
| zero.
|
| There's of course a need for nuance here. I do write
| scripts to automate stuff and I do have aliases
| configured for certain commands, directories, etc. I
| don't try to remember _all the things_ , just so that I
| never have to look something up again.
|
| If I wasn't a heavy anki user already, then I certainly
| wouldn't set it up _just_ to remember some commandline
| stuff. But that 's not the situation I'm in. I use it for
| lots of things already and I have an established habit to
| review the cards every day. Adding a card to remember
| specific flags has incredibly low overhead for me.
|
| A different, but similar example is using Anki for
| learning library/framework syntax. I made heavy use of it
| when I first learned Pytorch. There are so many different
| commands to wrangle your data into the shape you need it
| to be. I frequently mixed them up and got frustrated
| because it doesn't necessarily result in runtime errors
| and then it's hard to debug (because I didn't know what I
| was doing). So everyday I chucked a couple of the new
| commands I encountered into Anki and by the end of the
| week I was comfortable doing all kinds transformations.
| Would I have learned to do that without Anki? Probably.
| Did it give me an additional opportunity to consolidate
| that knowledge for very little cost? Also yes.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| This is the issue I've found with SRS style memorization
| in general. It's basically the definition of overfitting.
| alabhyajindal wrote:
| He should have used Vim instead of memorizing it's
| keybindings. That makes no sense at all.
| Lapha wrote:
| Well, he absolutely should have been using Vim, he instead
| spent the week learning vi.
| Swalden123 wrote:
| I managed to finally switch to using Vim after years of
| attempts, once I used Anki to help me memorize the common
| commands. I was less frustrated when using it day to day.
| dustincoates wrote:
| Bird calls is a great idea! I never thought of it, but it
| really does align with the medium.
| AstroJetson wrote:
| Where did you find a decent flash cards about knots?
| grep_name wrote:
| As someone who has a had some false starts with SRS, this seems
| like an interesting approach. Do you add all these disparate
| topics into one huge deck? What does adding a new topic domain
| look like?
|
| I think a bit of the problem (for me) when I tried anki before
| was friction from the overhead of 1.) deciding how to split
| time among decks and 2.) having to assign a 1-5 value for 'how
| well I remembered the info'. That second point is huge, I find
| that kind of task to be incredibly exhausting. Do you have any
| tips for getting over that?
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Every few years I use Anki heavily for language stuff (German,
| more recently Latin and Classical Chinese), up to 90 minutes a
| day, but I can never keep the workload under control, or my
| habits change, and give it up.
|
| I still benefit from a year of training, but it seems the long-
| tail of spaced repetition doesn't work for me at all. But so long
| as I get to the point where I can read or watch TV, the
| considerable effort I've invested in making cards (not to mention
| reviewing them) was worthwhile.
|
| It's also fun to have an extended/time-intensive personal task
| where it can be worth it to build up a highly personalised system
| that doesn't need to work for anyone else. It allows for a
| selfishness that's the polar opposite of accessibility design,
| but can end up resulting in quite novel/pleasing design
| decisions. (There've been some other posts about making software
| just for yourself on hacker news before).
|
| They have a lot of shared decks hosted online, but I guess for
| hosting costs or copyright reasons delete any decks that aren't
| regularly downloaded, which results in many niche decks getting
| deleted. I've uploaded several German-language decks that get
| deleted because of course they don't get the same traffic as
| English ones. Bit of a pity - I wonder what the ecosystem would
| look like if things were otherwise.
| kashunstva wrote:
| > They have a lot of shared decks hosted online
|
| I have mixed feelings about shared decks. I've tried many, yet
| always find something about them that irritates me -
| aesthetics, content accuracy, etc. Or more likely that just
| doesn't fit contextually with what I'm learning.
|
| However, the low startup energy with shared decks is certainly
| a selling point. I can't even begin to estimate how much time
| I've spent over the years creating 50K+ cards...
|
| > highly personalised system that doesn't need to work for
| anyone else.
|
| My experience exactly.
| clbrmbr wrote:
| > what the ecosystem would look like
|
| There is a third-party paid exchange here:
|
| https://www.ankihub.net/
|
| (I've had a few exchanges with the founder, and wish him luck.)
| growingkittens wrote:
| These two things are related:
|
| > I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits
| change, and give it up.
|
| > to build up a highly personalised system that doesn't need to
| work for anyone else.
|
| "Anyone else" includes "future you", because humans change over
| time. A highly personalized system is usually a highly
| _inflexible_ system.
| jan_Inkepa wrote:
| Hmm. Let me think about your point.
|
| The problem seems not dependent on the specifics of my
| efforts for me - it seems inherent to Anki for language-
| learning. That the flash cards have lots of bells and
| whistles seems unrelated to my giving up because 90 minutes a
| day wasn't enough to keep things under control.
|
| I haven't had any time that my circumstances have change so
| much that my accessorising ended up a negative. (And I'm
| having trouble thinking of situations where that would be the
| case).
|
| But sure, in general I can think of cases where it's probably
| more advisable to go with a general purpose solution (stairs
| rather than a climbing wall for going upstairs) in case
| personal circumstances change, temporarily or permanently.
| growingkittens wrote:
| Inessential complexity increases the workload of
| maintaining a system (like the climbing wall vs. stairs:
| can't maintain an upstairs floor unless you maintain the
| ability to use the climbing wall).
|
| Bells and whistles, especially when it comes to making
| things perfectly tidy, tend to introduce a lot of rules for
| using and maintaining a system. For example, a color-coding
| system with too many colors to reasonably recall without
| daily practice from using the system: any interruption,
| such as a vacation or even a weekend, will disrupt in some
| way the ability to use and maintain the color-coding
| system.
|
| Informal rules also accumulate over time, adding to the
| complexity of any given action. It doesn't take a major
| change to topple your flashcard system, but slow,
| accumulated changes have been enough to do so.
| xedrac wrote:
| 90 minutes is a very big ask if you want to be consistent.
| Maybe you're simply trying to bite off more than you can
| chew? I think consistency is king, so whatever you have to
| do to stay consistent will pay dividends, even if that
| means shaving your working set down to just 10 minutes a
| day.
| watwut wrote:
| The thing with Anki is that you cant control how much
| workload you have per day. Anki algorithm decides that.
| Say, you start by doing it little bit every day and you
| are fine for first three weeks. But then, Anki starts
| assigning you more and more repetition and that is it.
|
| If you do less one day, Anki gives you those cards the
| next day on top of the normal workload of that day. There
| is no way out.
|
| Worst, the less you retain, the more mistakes you make,
| the more your workload goes up. Anki algorithm never do
| the "lower workload because this person does not retain"
| decision. Instead, it will just give you more and more
| work in such case.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| There is a cap on how many cards will get reviewed from a
| deck each day. Lower it if the default cap is too high.
|
| If you're finding that you reliably do not recall some
| card Anki will eventually mark it as a leech. Those cards
| get suspended automatically after some number of lapses.
| That will reduce your workload because suspended cards
| are't part of your workload.
|
| https://docs.ankiweb.net/leeches.html
| zozbot234 wrote:
| The leech feature can also be dangerous if you're unaware
| of it, because AIUI Anki does not ask you whether to
| remove a difficult card or not, it just goes ahead and
| does it.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| That's true, though the stats screen will tell you how
| many suspended and buried cards you have. If I track that
| a few times a week I can usually tell when something has
| been suspended that I didn't suspend myself.
| jwrallie wrote:
| I had the same experience. I invested a lot of time on Anki and
| it paid back, but I could never stick to it. There is always a
| point where I have to skip 2 or 3 days because of life and the
| huge backlog is too much that I give up.
|
| I recently started to use Supermemo because of some comments on
| HN, and so far it have been going quite well. I feel less
| overwhelmed when I have to take a break, I think the algorithm
| (or maybe it is just good defaults?) is much less punishing. I
| am still new to it, and I have a baggage of knowledge from my
| past experiences using SRS, so it is unfair to compare it to
| Anki at the moment. But it renew my passion for memorizing, so
| far it has been worth the investment.
| cubefox wrote:
| I think Anki was based on an old version of Supermemo. It
| would make sense if the latter had a better algorithm.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > There is always a point where I have to skip 2 or 3 days
| because of life and the huge backlog is too much that I give
| up.
|
| Some things I do to manage this:
|
| You can put an upper bound on the number of cards reviewed
| per day. For me it's 50. After that it says I'm done for the
| day and I wait till the next day.
|
| If missing only 2-3 days leads to such a huge backlog, you
| really need to take a break in adding new cards. My aim is to
| spend no more than 5-10 minutes per day reviewing cards. If
| it seems I always have too many cards to review, I don't add
| any new cards until I get only a few cards to review per day
| (when really busy, I don't add a new card until I have a day
| with 0 cards).
|
| You can only learn so much per day. You need to limit card
| additions to ensure you don't exceed that amount.
|
| The other thing I noticed is that I had two types of cards:
| One where the answer can be instantaneous (e.g. facts). And
| ones where some thinking is involved (proof sketch of a
| theorem, details of some algorithm, etc). The latter would
| kill the experience because of the time involved. So I
| separated the decks: Simple cards (the majority) go in one
| deck and this is reviewed daily. Hard cards have their own
| deck(s) and I'm not as committed to them - I work on them
| only when I know I have time and am committed to it.
| stardom5761 wrote:
| I also use anki for german. I use a deck with 1850 cards to
| learn the nouns' gender.
|
| I just pulled up my stats.I have been studiyng for almost a
| year and have averaged less than 2 minutes of study a day (with
| the average review lasting less than 2 seconds). In total it's
| more or less 10 hours.
|
| It has been insanely effective. I read somewhere on HN that
| making extremely easy cards helps. It for sure helped me to
| keep the habit.
| jwells89 wrote:
| I have issues keeping up with large language decks, too. In my
| case the problem usually lies not with Anki but all the other
| stuff going on in my life -- stressors, work, etc. There's just
| a cap on what I can be juggling at any point in time and if
| things aren't flowing smoothly it's going to be more difficult
| to stick to working through a long deck. If I could just hit
| pause on everything else there would be no problems.
|
| Retention is high so that helps keep progress between periods
| of deck usage at least.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > Every few years I use Anki heavily for language stuff
| (German, more recently Latin and Classical Chinese), up to 90
| minutes a day, but I can never keep the workload under control,
| or my habits change, and give it up.
|
| Well... yeah? I guess if you're a full time student or
| something it's fine but IMO if your review times exceed _5_
| minutes it 's time to stop adding cards for a while.
| mustaflex wrote:
| I had the same problem when studying English. I just capped
| my review/new cards study time to 30 mins per day. Basically
| if you have too much cards to review your vocabulary hits a
| "plateau" until your workload becomes manageable again.
| aoanla wrote:
| Yeah, I've had the same thing every time I have tried Anki -
| it's fine for a while, but once you get enough cards added, or
| just have been memorising a deck for long enough, even missing
| one session generates a huge unsurmountable backlog. It's bad
| and consistent enough for me that I just stopped trying to use
| Anki at all.
| Swalden123 wrote:
| Is there no way to skip a day? And simply pause?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| You can suspend cards and decks, but also you can skip
| days.
|
| It'll create a backlog of cards to review, but that's
| surmountable. The number can become intimidating (I think
| my worst was around 2k cards), but there are a few ways to
| clear it. You can "just" get back into the daily habit,
| it'll take (by the default numbers, if one deck) #
| cards/100 days to clear out, more or less (some cards may
| come up for review again in that period so the actual
| number might be a bit higher). You can also up the daily
| review limit to clear it faster (I did this when I hit 2k,
| 200/day was about my personal time limit to spend on it so
| it took just over 10 days to clear).
| Swalden123 wrote:
| I get skipping days is against the algorithm, but
| wouldn't it be better to simply freeze the algorithm for
| a few days opposed to get a backlog at all? A backlog
| would break the habit for me making me unlikely to
| return.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Skipping days is not against the algorithm, it accounts
| for skipped days.
|
| In a simplified system suppose that we just double easy
| card review times, and reset hard cards back to 1. You
| have a card up for review today, you last saw it N days
| ago. Two scenarios:
|
| 1. You don't delay. You review the card now. It's either
| hard and reset to 1 (see it again tomorrow) or easy and
| you see it again in 2N days.
|
| 2. You delay. You review it M days from now. When you
| finally do it's either hard and reset to 1 (see it again
| the next day) or easy and you see it again in 2(N + M)
| days.
|
| That's it. The algorithm has you covered if you delay. It
| doesn't do something silly like say "This card was
| supposed to be reviewed after 2 days, but you waited a
| month. You remembered it, but we're going to show it to
| you again in 4 days." The algorithms will take the delay
| into account (maybe not one-for-one) like I illustrated
| above.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Good point. The real risk in skipping days is that you
| might forget altogether some of the cards that were due
| for review. But the Anki default is to review often
| enough that probability of recall for each card is very
| high, so if you're only skipping a few days at a time
| this is not a huge concern. Capping the amount of cards
| you do per day has a similar effect; Anki will prompt you
| with the highest-risk cards first, and some will be left
| unreviewed for the day (hence, practically skipped).
| colin_jack wrote:
| FSRS seems to reduce the amount of reviews required, might be
| worth enabling it and seeing if it helps.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Yeah I've had a similar issue with the Anki-like system
| Wanikani uses for learning Japanese Kanji. I can keep up for
| some time, but as soon as I get busy with something else, I get
| overwhelmed by the piling up reviews. It has been very
| effective for the ones I learned when I was able to keep up
| though.
|
| Recently a friend got me into Duolingo with him, I've been
| managing to maintain a streak on it because if I'm too busy I
| can atleast just do a quick "lesson" before midnight, but I
| don't really find it to be very effective for learning unless
| you're coming from literally zero starting knowledge.
|
| I already know the basic vocabulary (especially phonetically)
| and sentence structure, so it's too slow. I usually just do the
| first handful of lessons and have figured out the kanji enough
| to just jump ahead to the test to unlock the next unit.
| atahanacar wrote:
| Are you using Duolingo for Japanese? If so, please stop.
| There are better and more efficient ways, as you've probably
| noticed. Anki (with a Core3k or similar deck, 10-50 new cards
| a day depending on your daily life) + reading is the way to
| go in my opinion. You can use jpdb to see your progress
| relative to the material you want to read.
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Yeah, as I said, it's not very effective and I'm only
| really managing to keep it up due to being able to do a
| quick 15 minute lesson right before bed. I have some
| workbooks and do often end up perusing and attempting to
| converse in japanese to practice, but I don't manage to
| keep it as consistent due to all the other things I have to
| balance.
|
| Language learning and art practice both tend to quickly get
| put on the backburner for weeks whenever I get busy with a
| project or whenever work gets busy.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| The trigger that helps me is Anki on my phone will put little
| notification badges on itself if I have cards to review, and I
| hate to see unresolved notifications, so it forces me to study.
| AlexErrant wrote:
| > I wonder what the ecosystem would look like if things were
| otherwise.
|
| Shameless plug - I'm building
| https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive which is basically
| GitHub/Reddit for flashcards. Very much pre-product and a WIP,
| though the offline client proof of concept is done.
| cwales95 wrote:
| Used Anki quite a bit in my final years of university. Using it
| now as well for AWS certification prep. Can't recommend enough!
| kashunstva wrote:
| Long-term user of Anki ~ 13-14 yrs, with mostly language learning
| focus. It's good; but out of the box, I find that most users
| barely tap into its utility. It's templating engine, ability to
| shape card content and formatting via JS and CSS put it in a
| league above most other SRS applications. (With the caveat that
| it's easy to waste a lot of time on inconsequential card-
| tweaking...)
|
| A lot of people complain that it uses an inferior SRS algorithm.
| Other algorithms can be patched in; but I've never bothered
| because it seems like a hyper-optimization without known real-
| world outcomes. (i.e. Will I speak better {L2} if I use alternate
| SRS algorithm?)
| subtra3t wrote:
| I think the issue of inferior SRS algorithm is at least partly
| alleviated by the existence of FSRS.
| OJFord wrote:
| ... https://github.com/open-spaced-
| repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/The... ...
|
| I'm not sure I believe we understand our own learning/memory
| anything like enough for this not to be total pseudoscience?
| Reminds me of _A Beautiful Mind_.
| g-w1 wrote:
| I'm not really sure what you mean? It's been empirically
| validated to predict how you remember better than
| alternatives (or equal to SM-17) (essentially when it
| predicts that your % recall is below a certain threshold,
| it just shows you the card)
| kouteiheika wrote:
| It doesn't matter whether this actually models how memory
| works in reality, as long as it has actual predictive
| capabilities which correlate to how it works in practice.
|
| And this can be easily verified with data and simulations.
| The algorithm predicts how likely it is that you'll
| remember a given piece of information (e.g. in three days
| you'll remember this card with 80% probability), so if you
| can get a big dataset of reviews and run it through the
| algorithm you can easily check how accurate it is, e.g by
| calculating a brier score, or by comparing predicted vs
| actual recall curves.
|
| Source: I've developed an even better algorithm than FSRS
| (I've directly compared them in the past, although that was
| quite a while ago so it might have been for one of the
| older versions of FSRS, so I'm not sure how the newest one
| compares), and now I'm working on an even better one.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Sitting down with Michael W. Lucas's _Networking for System
| Administrators_ and making Anki flashcards out of them was
| probably the highest impact thing I did for my career last
| spring. It 's an incredible tool, truly.
|
| Anyone else who wants to learn just enough networking to never be
| 100% stumped by it again, I recommend both tools.
| n3t wrote:
| Can you share what your typical flashcard for the book looks
| like?
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| There's a bunch of different subtypes I've used. But one
| surprisingly high ROI example has been private vs public IP
| flashcard examples.
|
| E.g. "10.1.0.0 - private or public?" "Private - everything in
| 10.0.0.0/8 is considered private". "192.169.0.0?" "Public".
| realusername wrote:
| I'm using a competitor on Android since both Anki apps
| (AnkiMobile and AnkiDroid) really aren't good enough for my
| language learning activity. They aren't as good as the desktop
| Anki app.
|
| I'm actually thinking of building my own app for a while since
| the all the flashcard apps on mobile don't really work for me.
| Not sure I'll find the motivation to do it though, I'm just using
| the least bad option I've found.
|
| Specifically, I want to always auto-play cards with TTS and there
| doesn't seem to be an option with the apps to do that.
| gessha wrote:
| That would be a cool extension of the project.
|
| I've always wanted a hands free version of Dualingo because if
| I'm driving or walking somewhere I don't want to use my hands
| for obvious reasons.
| kebsup wrote:
| Hi, my app which I've mentioned in my previous comment does
| that. Is there anything else that you're looking for in a
| flashcards language learning app that Anki misses?
| realusername wrote:
| It seems pretty good but your app is only targetting German
| right? I'm learning another language.
|
| Right now I'm using this one : https://play.google.com/store/
| apps/details?id=flashcards.wor...
|
| Which seems the only one I found supporting auto-TTS in lots
| of languages which you can toggle in the settings.
|
| The UI is truly awful though and the space repetition
| algorithm is kind of borked.
| kebsup wrote:
| Ah, unfortunate. I will be adding more languages, but it
| will take some time. I prefer to have really figured out
| how to make the app great for German and then expanding,
| rather then doing everything at once.
| realusername wrote:
| Yeah that makes sense, the UI seems pretty good though,
| we are very far from what I'm using now. I could see
| myself using it if I was learning German.
| david_allison wrote:
| Hi, I've recently integrated TTS into the AnkiDroid alpha
| series, could you give it a whirl when you have time?
|
| TTS instructions:
| https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/fields.html#text-to-speec...
|
| Installing the alpha alongside stable:
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pQZT9jNF6MU
| realusername wrote:
| Thanks, I'll give it a go again!
| clbrmbr wrote:
| I used Anki to learn to recognize the top 300 plant species (and
| top mushroom species) in my area by sight. Totally changed my
| perception of nature.
| yorwba wrote:
| How did you find out what the top species in your area are? Did
| you start by taking pictures of random plants and then
| researching what they could be, or did you use something like a
| guidebook? And what did your Anki cards look like?
| clbrmbr wrote:
| I used iNaturalist website to list 500 most observed plant
| species in Eastern USA and Canada, and used a script to
| scrape the species names (scientific and common) and the URL
| of the title photo.
|
| I used another script to download the images and build the
| anki deck.
|
| My decks have just the photo on the front, then scientific
| name + common name + notes on back.
|
| I've made many notes in my decks, mostly about the etymology
| of the scientific names to help remember them.
|
| I've also added extra photos to the front to show other parts
| of the plant needed to distinguish from look-alikes, with
| notes on these features.
|
| My reference is usually The Flora of Virginia and/or Sam
| Thayer's recent field guide (which is a major new
| contribution through all his field observations).
|
| I have not shared because the photos are mostly ALL RIGHTS
| RESERVED, but I've been considering redoing the photos using
| CC0/CC-BY (and asking some authors for permission but this is
| hard as iNat is pseudonymous).
| throw_pm23 wrote:
| I tried to make it work for me many times. Several people in my
| circle recommend it, I understand the concept of spaced
| repetition, I wanted it to be useful. Still, it always feels off
| somehow, and mechanical, and never seems to click for me. I guess
| memorization is just not the bottleneck in anything I do.
| james-bcn wrote:
| Yes. I've tried it various times too. But there is something
| that just doesn't seem right about it. It's memorisation for
| the sake of it.
|
| I've found that writing about the things that interest me,
| giving presentations, and talking about stuff with people with
| similar interests, is much more effective.
| dmarchand90 wrote:
| In the most bizarre of coincidences I just installed anki now
| before seeing it on the front page of hackernews
| subtra3t wrote:
| A piece of advice: stick with it. The usefulness of Anki lies
| in its ability to efficiently schedule flashcards, so it will
| be of little use if you review cards only occasionally. Review
| most/all of your due cards everyday. If you find that your
| workload is too much stop creating new cards or perhaps
| increase the base multiplier for flashcard intervals (not
| recommended unless you're _really_ exhausted).
| sivers wrote:
| My boy is 11 now. We've used Anki with him every day since he was
| about 5.
|
| Examples of things he's memorized, for fun:
|
| * every country, recognized by unlabeled shape on the map
|
| * spelling
|
| * many body parts, names of bones and organs, from illustration
|
| * chemical elements, by symbol (Na, Fe, Zn, etc)
|
| * unix filesystem commands
|
| * numeracy references (km from here to Japan, earth to sun,
| meters from home to school)
|
| * recognizing/naming photos of places we've been since he was
| born
|
| * recognizing musical instruments or musical pieces by listening
|
| * notes on a piano
|
| * religious facts (when Judaism began & who started it, when
| Muslims pray & towards what, where Jesus was born & died, etc)
|
| * names of characters in books he's read
|
| * wise aphorisms
|
| He enjoys it, and dances around while answering, proud of
| himself. Sometimes when learning something new on YouTube, on his
| own, he'll say, "Dad can we add this to Anki? I want to remember
| this."
| l3x4ur1n wrote:
| Do you have any particular system in place for creating decks?
| itsrajju wrote:
| Your boy is precious! He's on his way to becoming a highly
| intelligent adult.
|
| I've seen a lot of people going like... why remember stuff when
| you can easily google it? But it doesn't work that way. The
| more facts reside in your brain, the more avenues it has to
| connect them together and generate insights (after all, that
| thing is the OG "neural network").
|
| I highly admire your parenting in this aspect, and I hope to do
| the same when I have kids of my own.
|
| Edit: I noticed after publishing my comment that you're Derek
| Sivers! I've been a long time reader of your blog :)
| exe34 wrote:
| Yep! This kid has a super power! I don't understand why this
| sort of learning to learn isn't taught in schools - I only
| discovered anki and even spaced repetition at age 35, and I
| could really have used it at school!
|
| I think the workaround that I came up with myself was to work
| through a large amount of derivations (maths, physics and
| chemistry) and try to note the common stuff and prepared
| shorter and shorter versions of the notes from which I could
| rapidly reconstruct everything else.
|
| In hindsight, I was training an autoencoder.
| jhrmnn wrote:
| I've never remembered anything by memorization. Only at
| school and university for exams, and only to promptly forget
| it one week later. The stuff that I have remembered for years
| I learned organically by using it, as part of some mental
| process, by embedding it in some larger structure. Be it
| coding, physics, or history. So I think this is a fairly
| individual matter
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| I highly doubt this is an individual matter. Cramming
| (massing) for exams is literally the antithesis of SRS.
|
| Look into Andy Matuschaks work: [Dwarkesh
| Podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmeRQN9z504) [How
| to write good prompts](https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/)
| kiba wrote:
| That's spaced repetition in a nutshell.
| blago wrote:
| I think it's even more precious that the boy has learned how
| to learn and has developed a taste for achievement based on a
| dopamine loop that doesn't employ sugar or special effects in
| 4K.
| j4yav wrote:
| I swear I have read this exact same comment before
|
| Edit: oh good I'm not crazy -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38428309
| amelius wrote:
| You can put that card at the end of the deck now ;)
| packetlost wrote:
| That's super weird, I wonder if GP just copy-pasted it or if
| there's some other weird automated business going on.
| torbengee wrote:
| We'll find out in a year ... boy should be 12 by then.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| GP is a well known entrepreneur:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Baby
| jerrre wrote:
| Interestingly this taught me I never look at usernames,
| thanks for pointing out
| sivers wrote:
| Yeah sorry, I started writing the comment, then had deja
| vu, so I looked at my HN history, realized I'd already said
| it better before, and thought it was worth just pasting the
| previous one. Not automated.
| mcbishop wrote:
| 100% relevant here, and I appreciate you sharing it
| again. I'm inspired to try this with my 9 year old.
| bheadmaster wrote:
| Damn, that's a really human-like response. This bot game
| is really getting serious.
| koala_man wrote:
| Reposted story, reposted comment -\\_(tsu)_/-
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That's marketing for you - now with Genuine People
| Personalities(tm).
| indigoabstract wrote:
| Proof for everyone that these programs do work. You have a
| good memory!
|
| :)
| 99catmaster wrote:
| I'm curious, how did you manage to get a child into Anki and
| make them self sufficient on it? Kudos to you
| sivers wrote:
| We do it together, just 2-5 minutes a day. When I'm away he
| does it on his own maybe 50/50.
| akxixn123 wrote:
| Is he on the autism spectrum?
| redcobra762 wrote:
| Who, the commenter or his child?
| queuebert wrote:
| All of us.
| sivers wrote:
| Not at all, and not particularly smart. Just a normal fun-
| loving kid, and this is something we do just 2-5 minutes a
| day.
| shepherdjerred wrote:
| Do you have a similar habit? How does one get started making
| Anki a habit? I've used Anki for studying before exams, but I
| haven't been able to integrate it into my life.
| sivers wrote:
| If you care enough, you'll do it. Every day I brush my teeth,
| write in my diary, do my Anki, check email, eat something,
| etc. It's only a few minutes a day.
| FemmeAndroid wrote:
| Are these separate decks or a single deck for your son? Do
| things come out of the deck(s)? What triggers that?
| sivers wrote:
| His decks:
|
| * computer
|
| * culture
|
| * English
|
| * math
|
| * music
|
| * nature
|
| * where
|
| I don't think we've ever pulled anything out of the deck.
| There are some cards that it says, when we mark [easy], that
| it will ask him again in 6 years. We joke about how at the
| age of 17 it will be asking him how to spell "sing", or
| whatever.
| bitcoinmoney wrote:
| Can we get a copy of your deck?
| kazinator wrote:
| Most of these things don't require Anki. It's a tedious waste
| of time.
|
| > _every country, recognized by unlabeled shape on the map_
|
| That's a stupid thing to memorize, not to mention constantly
| churning due to political instability.
|
| You really need to gatekeep what you stuff into your noggin.
|
| Most educated people could recognize certain countries by
| shape, like Italy, Africa, USA. But _every_ country? Come on
| ...
| BeetleB wrote:
| > You really need to gatekeep what you stuff into your
| noggin.
|
| Pointless self imposed limitations don't help.
| mhb wrote:
| Unless he runs out of memory.
| dotancohen wrote:
| That's what swap is for.
|
| When I stop responding and the wife asks if I'm still
| listening, sometimes I tell her I'm swapping right at the
| moment.
| kazinator wrote:
| Self-imposed limitations are absolutely key to being
| effective in life. You cannot go everywhere, do everything
| and memorize everything.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Self-imposed limitations _are_ key to being effective. I
| was referring to _pointless_ self imposed limitations.
|
| I was reading an interview with Andy Matuschak[1].
|
| > One of the things that I think is kind of weird about
| this memory system stuff, or like memory champions, or
| something like that is "Oh, if you do these things, will
| you start to forget other normal human stuff?" And what's
| weird is, no. I've been doing this memory system stuff
| for years and I just know more stuff now. This is aligned
| with the experimental literature, which seems to suggest
| that, there's probably upper bounds but we're not close
| to them. Some of these memory champions have memorized
| maybe two orders of magnitude more things than I have
| practiced. Certainly people who are multi-lingual have
| really, really absurd numbers of things memorized. So
| there isn't a resource management argument.
|
| The notion that stuffing your brain with trivia will be
| damaging is merely an unwarranted fear.
|
| [1] https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/andy-matuschak
| kazinator wrote:
| > _So there isn 't a resource management argument._
|
| Time???
| BeetleB wrote:
| You think you know better how to spend Derek Siver's
| son's time than he does?
|
| If you enjoy it and want to learn it, it's not a waste of
| time. Or at least, there are likely plenty of things
| ordinary people do that are bigger wastes of time.
| sevg wrote:
| A parent is sharing their joy(!) of using Anki to help their
| child develop curiosity, feel a sense of accomplishment, and
| learn about the world.
|
| And your response at someone else's joy is to swat it down
| and call it tedious and stupid?
| kazinator wrote:
| > _swat it down_
|
| I don't know what you're imagining by "it", but my remarks
| are only about memorizing all countries by border shape,
| not the use of spaced repetition as a whole.
|
| That's the "it" I have swatted down.
|
| Memorizing names of countries -> continent, I could
| swallow. That is useful. Or even latitude and longitude
| (rounded off to nearest ten degrees, say). Or some general
| indication: is it to the north, south; landlocked or
| coastal.
|
| So if someone talks about Venezuela, the kid knows it's a
| coastal country in South America's north.
|
| If you can't tell me that, what's the use of recognizing
| the shape of Venezuela and mapping it to a name?
| sevg wrote:
| I think you're missing my point.
|
| The OP was a positive story. There could be an
| interesting discussion to be had around the subject of
| useful things to remember. But you literally used the
| words "tedious" and "stupid", and this sort of comment
| doesn't usually result in good conversation or debate.
|
| You'd do well to heed the downvotes and constructive
| feedback you're getting :)
|
| Here are some quotes from HN guidelines in case you
| missed them!
|
| > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't
| cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
|
| > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead
| of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3"
| can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
|
| > Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including
| at the rest of the community.
|
| > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of
| other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us
| something.
| commenter1234 wrote:
| I wasn't aware that Africa was a country, seems like I need
| to do some flashcard learning myself
| kazinator wrote:
| You got my George W. Bush reference!
|
| "Africa is a nation that suffers from terrible disease ..."
| BeetleB wrote:
| Curious: How many cards are in his deck(s)? Do you do it with
| him daily? I was wondering when to start with my kid. Any
| writeup would be great.
|
| My other question: For me a lot of this is trivia (No
| judgement! That's fine!) Has he found it useful for education
| (i.e. school), and for anything that he applies on a semi-
| frequent basis (I suppose UNIX commands could be a good
| example).?
|
| I personally have used SRS since late 2018, and it's been quite
| useful - as if releasing a latent superpower. But I haven't
| applied it for regular schooling.
|
| Thanks!
| sivers wrote:
| About 1000 cards now. We do it daily. It's often just a few
| cards per day, so it takes 1-5 minutes.
|
| Spelling is the biggest category. I record myself saying a
| word that I've seen him spell wrong. The answer is the
| written word.
|
| Many of his old life-memories are saved. A picture of a
| playground he loved, where we used to live. A frame from a
| movie he liked. Asking for the name of the hero in a book he
| loved. Anki makes him recognize these things, which keep his
| memories of them alive. Often ilicits an "Oh yeah!"
| nostalgia.
|
| Recognizing countries on the map is not trivial. On the
| playground, he met a kid from Syria. He asked the boy if he
| lived closer to Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, or Lebanon. My jaw
| dropped, but the boy was touched and yelled, "Mom! He knows
| where it is!" and they became friends (for the day). Other
| times he'll decide out of the blue that he wants to know more
| about Azerbaijan or some other country that he only knows by
| shape.
|
| The rest, he's just really proud to know. A kid at school
| says the moon is a million miles away. He was proud to know
| the more accurate distance. He wants to know the actual
| distance to the beach from our house, instead of just "takes
| forever".
| BeetleB wrote:
| > About 1000 cards now. We do it daily. It's often just a
| few cards per day, so it takes 1-5 minutes.
|
| 1000 cards over 5-6 years is 160-200 per year, so on
| average less than one a day. Did you start out slow and
| increased the pace as he grew, or is it more of chunking
| (e.g. add a few cards per day for some days, then just
| review for days before adding more)?
|
| I'm sure whatever approach you did was organic and not
| planned the way I'm writing it, but am curious how it
| actually evolved.
|
| > Recognizing countries on the map is not trivial. On the
| playground, he met a kid from Syria. He asked the boy if he
| lived closer to Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, or Lebanon.
|
| OK, this is beyond simply recognizing the country from its
| shape. How did he encode what the _neighboring_ countries
| are?
|
| When learning the countries, does the card show only the
| outline of that country, or is it more like a map with all
| countries, and the one under review is highlighted? If the
| latter, then it makes sense.
|
| > The rest, he's just really proud to know. A kid at school
| says the moon is a million miles away. He was proud to know
| the more accurate distance.
|
| Psst... _Everyone_ knows it 's 300,000 km away.
|
| <checks>
|
| OK, fine. I memorized it wrong as a kid. Need to add it to
| my Anki deck ;-)
| dse wrote:
| one deck or a different one for each topic ?
| arboles wrote:
| Interesting, because the creator of Supermemo wrote that Spaced
| Repetition doesn't work on children because their brain re-
| arranges and repurposes structures far too much, making
| children's forgetting curve far too unpredictable, or at least
| different from adults.
|
| https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_does_not_work_for_kids
|
| Spaced repetition flaschard software is all about scheduling
| the flashcards around predictions of your forgetting curve, and
| Anki and Supermemo are designed for the forgetting curves of
| adults.
| sivers wrote:
| It's not perfect, but it's better than not doing it. He
| enjoys it.
| samus wrote:
| That is important. SRS doesn't work for many people
| because, in short, they don't really enjoy it.
| appplication wrote:
| I think sometimes statements like this probably apply in
| aggregate, as in you can't safely say they work in the
| general case due to too much response variance. But it's not
| unrealistic to think it works well for some.
| DiogenesKynikos wrote:
| > when Judaism began & who started it
|
| A bit off topic, but this is a very tricky question to answer.
| The traditional answer is Moses, ca. 1200 BC. The real answer
| would take many PhD theses to arrive at. It's really a process
| that took place between the 10th and 5th centuries BC (and
| arguably continued even much later than that).
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Jesus christ. I often wonder why I can't compete at school and
| this is why.. you never know how much prep/silver spoon other
| kids got
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Derek Sivers is definitely better off than most of us, but
| what he's describing is something any engaged parent could
| do. That's not a "silver spoon". Hell, my family was lower-
| middle-income (into solid middle-income with both parents
| working, then down again, these things can cycle) and they
| would quiz us on things like that. Though not with Anki. It's
| just good parental engagement.
| ifeja wrote:
| You're setting your kid up for a bright future, great
| parenting.
| alberth wrote:
| Genuine question, how will memorizing this info help him?
|
| I'm a parent too, and have prioritized activities that teach my
| child critical thinking (so they can self-solve problems).
|
| I'm curious if I should be layering in some memorization
| activities like this, which is why I ask.
|
| (Please don't take my question as judging, I'm genuinely
| curious how it's helped because I might replicate)
| 1f60c wrote:
| Is there a good iOS app to create or review Anki flash cards?
| subtra3t wrote:
| There is an official app, made by the same devs.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ankimobile-flashcards/id373493...
| itsrajju wrote:
| Yup -- https://apps.apple.com/in/app/ankimobile-
| flashcards/id373493...
|
| It's expensive, but it's the only paid app by the creator of
| ankiweb (web, android, and desktop versions made by them are
| all free).
| gessha wrote:
| I recommend the iOS app by the original app develop for
| reviewing but the desktop version for creation.
| ssd532 wrote:
| That's what I do. Creation is difficult on mobile, easy on
| desktop and review is easy on mobile but difficult on
| desktop.
| lbotos wrote:
| I was hesitant to pay $25 for an iOS app but after doing
| reviews for 180 days I'm at $0.14 a day and it will only get
| cheaper... one of the best investments I've made for sure
| Player6225 wrote:
| I've been using Anki a bit to supplement my language learning. I
| built an Anki deck generator that makes emoji/tts/word
| flashcards! It's worked pretty well for me to get some better
| word recognition.
|
| https://flashcards.bpev.me
| OJFord wrote:
| Nice! My feedback was going to be that I don't even know some
| of them in English (my native language) because it's just not
| clear to me what the emoji mix is supposed to mean, but I see
| that 'from emoji' is sort of the whole point, so that's not
| really helpful.
|
| I've been wanting to use something like Anki as a general
| purpose 'knowledge base'/reminder/learning system; if I do use
| Anki I'll certainly add this, cheers.
| Player6225 wrote:
| Thanks! Yaya... selecting what emojis to show has been
| challenging, trying to balance clarity with word usefullness.
| Also cuz sometimes I miss how different some specific emojis
| look on different OS; it can muddy the intended meaning for
| some platforms.
| david_allison wrote:
| Just to note: Anki supports `{{tts}}`, using the system TTS
| providers
|
| https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/fields.html#text-to-speec...
| francoismassot wrote:
| I used it with my 10 years old boy for spelling.
|
| I like the method. I found the app is still rough on the edges,
| and now I want to code a small one dedicated to science fields
| for him :)
| Tarrosion wrote:
| Anyone have suggestions for the lowest friction / best UX way to
| generate and study Anki cards? (my smartphone is Android, if that
| matters.)
|
| I know spaced repetition is super helpful and I should be making
| and study cards to help with language learning and other topics
| I'm studying, but it always feels like a slog to try to find a
| deck (which won't end up being what you want) or manually make a
| bunch of cards, the UI is a little meh, etc.
| SamPatt wrote:
| I take notes on paper while studying the subject, then when I'm
| done I put the essential concepts or whatever I want to
| memorize into cards in Anki via my computer (I usually avoid
| adding them on my phone, it's slower).
|
| It is a slow process, but for getting new ideas to stick, I'm
| not sure that's a bad thing.
|
| I don't usually bother with preexisting decks. If you're
| building your own from your own study, it almost guarantees you
| actually understand what you're trying to memorize.
| exe34 wrote:
| For language learning, I tend to watch TV with subtitles, type
| the new words into a text file, run that through Google
| translate (and edit a little bit), save as CSV, and import via
| the desktop app.
| igloopan wrote:
| To generate: if you're trying to learn Japanese, you can use
| the Yomichan [1] (or Yomitan now that Yomichan [2] has been
| sunset) extension for Chrome or Firefox which integrates with
| Anki so you can create a card for a word you don't know with
| two key presses.
|
| [1] https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/ [2]
| https://github.com/themoeway/yomitan
| g-w1 wrote:
| Anki has literally changed the way I think. It's insane how I can
| just choose to remember anything and how I have gotten really
| good at creating flashcards to the point where I predict how I'm
| going to learn when making flashcards. It is the one thing that
| has easily changed my life.
| exe34 wrote:
| I see it as a commitment, this is something I will remember for
| as long as I choose to. If it becomes irrelevant, I can delete
| the card. If it's too hard, I'll break it down into simpler
| things, or sometimes I even just write stuff out on paper cards
| that I review throughout the day. But once it's in anki, I'm
| committing to remembering it.
| OJFord wrote:
| Weird, I was actually thinking of a related AskHN, that comments
| here are obviously now the place for.
|
| Is there anything similar people use for sort of general
| 'knowledge base' type things - like people use one big text file,
| or Obsidian, or Logseq, or Notion, or whatever - but with some
| kind of Anki-like reminder/retrieval rather than just deliberate
| searching to look something up?
|
| Or do people successfully use Anki itself in that way? (Maybe I'm
| wrong to associate it with focussed studying/cramming on a
| specific topic for an exam say?)
|
| The closest I could think of was a Zettlekasten system, where
| though you wouldn't have the automated reminder prompts, you
| would (if you'd done a good job linking things) have a rabbit
| hole to fall down once you opened _something_.
| itsrajju wrote:
| There's an Obsidian plugin for Anki --
| https://github.com/reuseman/flashcards-obsidian
|
| It connects with your Anki desktop app. You create notes in
| Obsidian in a specific format, and they get converted to Anki
| flashcards. This way your flashcard creation process becomes
| _much_ easier if you already use Obsidian for note-taking.
| nairboon wrote:
| Unfortunately, while super useful, that plugin is quite out-
| of-date. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't depending
| on what Obsidian/Anki version combination you use. If one of
| them updates, it breaks. I think I had to pin Obsidian to
| some older version to keep it working.
| naitgacem wrote:
| I think a related, but often overlooked question is: is there
| really a need for remembering things off the top of one's head?
|
| Since there was no need to look it up, perhaps it's not
| relevant to whatever one is doing at the moment.
| nanna wrote:
| When learning a language, yes!
| OJFord wrote:
| There are things I used to understand while studying that I
| no longer do, but wish I did. I can look them up and
| understand if I want to _intentionally_ use them, but they
| 're not sort of available in my mind for me to draw on;
| information that might apply to something without me knowing
| in order to look it up, if that makes sense?
|
| And also as a sibling comment says, language. In particular
| vocabulary - I've learnt a decent amount of Hindi _grammar_
| by self-study, in fact I think totally sufficient for casual
| or even professional conversation, but my vocabulary 's
| really lacking, and it holds me back from speaking, which
| means even when I do have the opportunity to practice
| speaking with others, I can only say stupid basic things, I
| lack the vocabulary to say what I want most of the time. (And
| casual Hindi's way more forgiving than most languages,
| because 'Hinglish' is so common. But I don't get any better
| by just using Hindi connectives and ancillary words in an
| otherwise English sentence!)
| SamPatt wrote:
| I'm studying data structures and algorithms, out of interest,
| and to pass technical interviews. I can't fire up ChatGPT
| during interviews.
|
| Anki has definitely helped me. It's surprising how well it
| works if you do it daily.
|
| I also add new cards when I come across a word I don't know.
| If I keep this up for years or decades, my vocabulary should
| be extraordinary.
| niyumard wrote:
| Actually Logseq comes with built-in flash cards. That's why I
| love it.
|
| https://unofficial-logseq-docs.gitbook.io/unofficial-logseq-...
| a7b3fa wrote:
| RemNote seems like a close match to what you're describing:
| https://www.remnote.com
| pavelboyko wrote:
| Spaced repetition, especially when using tools like Anki, is
| effective for memorizing facts. However, memorization represents
| the most basic level of learning objectives, see e.g. [1] and
| [2]. Are there any recommended tools for practicing more advanced
| levels of knowledge, such as relational analysis, synthesis, and
| critical evaluation?
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_taxonomy
|
| [2]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_observed_learni...
| ehnto wrote:
| Immersion is the only "tool" I know that tries to make the next
| leap formalized. For language learning at least, saturating
| yourself with input lets the brain build the deep relational
| maps it needs to use language, and no amount of rote learning
| of arbitrary grammar and vocab can replace that process.
| spencerchubb wrote:
| I think the closest thing would be concept mapping software or
| knowledgebase software like Obsidian. But that's more about
| _storing_ concepts and not so much about _learning_ concepts.
|
| If that software existed, it would be incredible.
| xbar wrote:
| I think you are minimizing something that is very important.
|
| Understanding deeply and completely any topic is much easier
| when you understand deeply and completely the fundamental
| components and concepts--which starts with memorization.
| unshavedyak wrote:
| Yea, i thought that was studied, but perhaps not. Ie the
| knowledge we retain help us formalize larger more complex
| thoughts. Perhaps facts are a too small unit? Though i don't
| see why you couldn't also use Spaced Rep to memorize larger
| relationships.
| FL33TW00D wrote:
| You can use Anki to learn subjects more deeply - it's just
| harder.
|
| Check out this experimental work to learn Quantum Physics using
| SRS: https://quantum.country/
| g-w1 wrote:
| You can use incremental reading, which is built on top of
| spaced repetition. Lots of people have invented it
| independently [1] and it works amazingly! Once you get the hang
| of it, it changes the way you think about learning stuff.
|
| [1] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Michael_Nielsen_re-
| discovers_inc...
| kazinator wrote:
| Going to school.
| mumblemumble wrote:
| The best tool for that kind of thing is developing good note-
| taking skills.
|
| When I'm doing language study, for example, the backbone of my
| memory reinforcement strategy is a plain old pen-and-paper
| notebook. Anki is only used for specific, targeted
| reinforcement.
|
| Most my time with Anki these days is learning Chinese
| characters. That's arguably an ideal use case for brute-forcing
| with SRS, and that is indeed a very popular way to learn them.
| But I prefer to start with good note-taking there, too. I keep
| a notebook where I write down new characters and make some
| notes about their composition, etymology, and the nature of any
| relationship they might have with other characters that have a
| similar appearance or show up as components in this new one.
| IME even the simple act of physically jotting down a
| handwritten note to not confuse Mai with Mai or Zhao with Wo
| is worth some large number of flashcard repetitions all by
| itself.
|
| I also create cards for hanzi in Anki, but typically only after
| I've already encountered it a few times in my reading and it's
| starting to feel familiar. Leech cards are a huge waste of time
| when tackling a large subject, so I don't really like to add a
| card to my deck until I'm reasonably confident that I won't be
| hitting the "again" button on it more than once or twice, if
| ever.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Supermemo (an earlier-established piece of Anki-adjacent
| software) and its fans are big pushers of something called
| "Incremental Reading":
|
| https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading
|
| https://www.help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_reading
| siddbudd wrote:
| For all you people who have used Anki or other SRS for many
| years: how do you get over the problem of being bored by it? Or
| does that not happen to you?
|
| Though I have not used Anki, I used a similar SRS for learning
| Chinese - the flashcards built in Pleco, but no matter how often
| I try to use it, I never last longer than 5-10 days, I just get
| bored by it. Also, no matter how I try to adjust the algo, I have
| the feeling that I am constantly over- or underwhelmed, no _flow_
| for me.
|
| In the meanwhile I love learning, no matter if flashy (e.g.
| Duolingo) or traditional (from books) or something in between (a
| class), but I just never got the hang of SRS, though so many
| people recommend it.
| jwrallie wrote:
| This is quite subjective, but for me being in control of what I
| learn in SRS means I don't get bored. I am only adding things
| that I am interested in learning, and if I become bored of
| something, I just delete it.
|
| It might sound counter-intuitive with the "remember things
| forever" side of SRS, but it is better to forget boring things
| than not use SRS at all.
| biophysboy wrote:
| I've used it for 4 years now to learn Japanese. It might be a
| simple matter of lowering the max # of review cards or the max
| # of new cards.
|
| Also, given that you mentioned enjoying duolingo more, there
| are browser extensions/repos out there to enhance the Anki
| experience. I have some that help me make cards based on
| material I'm reading for fun.
|
| I was having the same issue as you, and I had to fix it by
| making it more engaging and personal. Now all of my words
| concern material I'm interested in, and have some context.
| TheArcane wrote:
| > there are browser extensions/repos out there to enhance the
| Anki experience
|
| Any specific ones you wanna give a shout out to?
| Version467 wrote:
| So I have never actually used Anki for languages specifically,
| but I use it heavily for almost everything I deem important
| enough that I want to remember.
|
| There are two very common reasons why people lose
| interest/motivation after trying out Anki. The first one is
| creating too many cards when you first start out. People get
| excited by SRS and then start creating cards for a lot of
| things, especially for stuff they don't actually care to
| remember. This is understandable, since you can't do SRS when
| you have nothing to repeat. But that gets overwhelming quickly,
| because it's hard to be motivated if you don't actually care
| about the material.
|
| The solution for this is to only create flashcards when an
| opportunity arises organically. This has the additional benefit
| of your review sessions being extremely short in the beginning,
| which makes it easier to establish the habit of reviewing.
|
| The second problem that often leads to people quickly giving up
| is not knowing what makes a good card. It's actually not as
| easy as one might think. Especially not when you want to get
| more out of SRS than just rote memorization of trivia. There's
| an excellent article from Andy Matuschak on this topic that
| explains it way better than I ever could
| https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/
|
| If you specifically want to do language learning, then you
| might be tempted to download premade decks. This might work a
| little bit better than for everything that's not languages, but
| in my experience _making_ a card is at least as important as
| the repetition itself. It forces you to distill the knowledge
| down into good cards, which is only possible if you engage with
| the material and also helps you find gaps in your knowledge. So
| I 'd recommend against it.
|
| Regarding your comment on adjusting the repetition algorithm...
| don't. It's highly unlikely that you'd be able to improve on
| the defaults if you don't have a good feel for how slow/fast
| you forget things. Even then, it's pretty difficult to make
| good adjustments. It's much more likely that the flow you're
| missing is just from not doing it long enough.
|
| Hope that helps :)
| guytv wrote:
| I've noticed that sticking exclusively to words I already know
| results in boredom, leading me to skip several days. This
| typically ends with me needing to catch up in a lengthy session
| (40 minutes to an hour), which seems less effective for memory
| retention.
|
| Now, I make it a point to introduce new words at least weekly,
| which maintains my interest and reduces boredom. The challenge
| of new words, balanced with the familiarity of known ones,
| creates an engaging experience, much like a well-designed game
| with a mix of easy and challenging elements. This approach
| keeps me motivated.
|
| Additionally, actively using the language by conversing with
| native speakers greatly enhances my motivation. The positive
| feedback and tangible understanding of its value significantly
| boost my commitment to learning.
| queuebert wrote:
| I love Pleco, especially the OCR, but I had the same
| experience. Learning from flash cards is boring to me and, no
| matter how well I drill it, I eventually forget the material.
| Probably it works better for people who will be using
| Mandarin/HSK vocabulary in the near future and for a long
| duration.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| User of Supermemo, then Mnemosyne, then Anki for about 11
| years. I use them for all kinds of stuff, language learning
| (Finnish) being one of them over the last few years.
|
| If I'm bored by it one day, I just don't do it that day. Or
| week, like this one, where I was too entrancee by playing FTL.
|
| Then I let myself get back into it. It comes and goes in waves.
| That's fine. The only person keeping score is yourself.
| nairboon wrote:
| Anki is a great software, but unfortunately it is quite difficult
| to install on Linux systems. Almost all packages on major distros
| are by now years out of date or kicked out, because Anki changed
| its build systems so many times, that the existing package
| maintainers simply dropped it:
| https://github.com/ankitects/anki/issues/1378
|
| Nowadays, the Anki version in Ubuntu is from 2019! The snaps are
| also hopelessly outdated.
| red_trumpet wrote:
| The package on Flathub[1] seems to incorporate the most recent
| version.
|
| [1] https://flathub.org/apps/net.ankiweb.Anki
| mu53 wrote:
| Just to add another perspective, I use the anki package on
| apt/ubuntu and yum/fedora, and both repos work for me. I ran
| into one small issue on fedora that was really annoying, but it
| was fixable. The sync from the cloud worked on both
| tuna74 wrote:
| I just installed the Flathub version on Fedora. No problem at
| all!
|
| Some addons seem to be not installable due to obsolete deps
| (like PyQt5), but a lot of stuff work without any problems.
| jwells89 wrote:
| It's also a pain to get working right with fractional scaling
| on non-GTK desktops.
|
| I had been using GNOME on my little "study pod" ThinkPad X1
| Nano (which has a screen that requires 1.5x UI scale) but Anki
| was a real pain under that and so started using KDE instead.
| Anki runs well there but KDE isn't quite my cup of tea. Wish it
| were more DE-agnostic.
| userabchn wrote:
| There is no Anki package for Debian 12, and the binaries on the
| Anki website are only 64bit, so on my 32bit system I use the
| online version on ankiweb.net, which actually works pretty
| well.
| albntomat0 wrote:
| I've used their tarballed installer, which is straightforward.
| The app itself then checks for updates, and displays a reminder
| when there's a new version.
|
| Not as nice as having an updated version in apt, but it's a
| trivial amount of work for something I personally get so much
| value out of.
| BeetleB wrote:
| Use Mnemosyne instead.
|
| I personally use org-drill on Emacs.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| This is like the 20th time the Anki-promoting mafia have posted
| it on HN
|
| yes, kids: we know Anki exists
| gessha wrote:
| I see value in different HN-"mafias" posting about their
| favorite niches from time to time. It's a reminder of sorts
| that the niche exists and that people find value in it.
|
| In this case, I like following the spaced repetition algorithm
| development and integrations into tools like Obsidian and
| Logseq.
|
| I'm trying to get back into using the tool every now and then
| to see if it works for the current me.
| exe34 wrote:
| So you're saying "easy, 4 days" for the next repetition?
| Swalden123 wrote:
| The fact I didn't know about SRS till I was 30, is a sad one.
| School and university would have been much easier for me had I
| known about it. I am very happy for it to be posted constantly!
| victorlf wrote:
| Anki is unbeatable for acing any test with a bounded number of
| questions [1]. It's been successfully used by some top TV show
| contestants to remember thousands of words [2].
|
| I've been using it recently to remember recipes and cooking
| facts, such as the time it takes to boil X vegetable, or the
| ingredients for some dish.
|
| Apart from language learning and medicine, there's a lack of pre-
| built decks that you can use to learn topics. I'm building
| Python.cards [3] to apply spaced repetition to learn Python with
| pre-built decks, daily reminders, etc. to make it the most
| convenient.
|
| [1] https://www.thediligentdeveloper.com/spaced-repetition-
| reall...
|
| [2]
| https://www.esquire.com/es/tecnologia/a36913467/pasapalabra-...
|
| [3] https://python.cards
| jwrallie wrote:
| When Anki is the right tool for the job, it is amazing. I used
| it to study the questions for the FCC radio amateur license.
| Pre-made decks were available, so I just loaded it and studied
| on my phone when I had free time. I had around 2 months before
| the test, so it was very pleasant to slowly go through all the
| questions.
| victorlf wrote:
| It seems the tricky part is motivation. Very few people get
| excited by card-reviewing itself. The method shines when
| there is external pressure, such as exams.
|
| I think a sense of community can help provide this motivation
| (like a group of people all learning at the same time), but
| it's still tricky.
| saintradon wrote:
| Definitely interested in the Python cards - subscribed
| aldanor wrote:
| Anki is great.
|
| Used it when learning/practicing music theory - generated flash
| cards with notes and chords (python script that generates
| LilyPond, iirc), been a huge help, much better than 'specialized'
| apps that basically do the same.
| tonyjstark wrote:
| A lot of people seem to like shared card decks but creating your
| own cards is part of the learning process, you spent time with
| the material you want to learn, which is the main thing that
| helps you learning.
|
| shameless self-plug:
|
| On macos and iOS we found Anki a bit out of place so we build a
| competitor explicitly for language learning
| (https://wokabulary.com/).
| tempaccount1234 wrote:
| Looks like a cool app, but a monthly subscription for a content
| free flash card App is asking too much. (Personally I prefer my
| learning tools to stay around without monthly payments)
| tonyjstark wrote:
| We plan to introduce a lifetime purchase.
|
| Initially, and for many years, we also tried to not have a
| subscription but steady development needs to paid somehow,
| same goes for customer support. If Apple would allow for paid
| upgrades...
| nmfisher wrote:
| Were conservative pundits outraged that you were pushing
| wokabulary?
| tonyjstark wrote:
| Haha, at least it hurts our Google score. When we came up
| with the name it was just an innocent wordplay.
| lordwiz wrote:
| I have heard many times of this, I even have it installed. Need
| to start using this now, seeing the benefits in this thread makes
| me excited.
| SamPatt wrote:
| One tip for working with Anki: you will likely learn better - and
| review cards more regularly - if you write the cards yourself
| instead of using a preexisting deck.
|
| Going through a course / textbook -> taking notes on paper ->
| adding key concepts as Anki flashcards -> reviewing them daily:
| extremely effective
|
| Preexisting decks can work - I used one to successfully study for
| my Amateur Radio License - but that assumes a specific pool of
| questions you're memorizing, which isn't how learning a subject
| typically works.
| tussa wrote:
| > if you write the cards yourself
|
| I'd go so far to say it's almost an requirement. Unless you
| have a high quality deck made specifically for the
| book/course/material you have.
|
| Sadly most of the publicly available Anki are IMHO not of that
| quality.
| Version467 wrote:
| Even if they were, writing cards yourself forces you to
| engage with the material in a way that's highly conducive to
| learning it. It makes knowledge gaps more visible and forces
| you to understand it if you want to have any chance breaking
| the material down into pieces that make good cards.
|
| The positive effects of SRS rely just as much on the
| repetition as they do on the creation of the cards. I know
| that not everyone agrees with this, it's certainly been true
| for me.
|
| Premade decks _might_ work for language learning, but even
| then I 'd be wary.
| romeros wrote:
| writing your own cards is very tedious.
| SamPatt wrote:
| True, but I suspect that's due to learning being tedious.
|
| Memorization isn't the same as learning. Using a
| preexisting deck is memorizing someone else's learning.
| Version467 wrote:
| It gets easier the more you do it. As you become more
| comfortable with the software as well as develop an
| intuition for what makes a good card, the effort shrinks
| dramatically. Not just because I'm faster at creating
| cards, I also create fewer cards overall.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| I've been studying Chinese with a premade deck for several
| years and it's working very well.
|
| Of course, ideally one would want to create cards, but I
| only can devote around 30 minutes per day. Under that
| restriction, creating cards is not really an option.
| outlace wrote:
| Which deck?
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| Spoonfed Chinese.
| SamPatt wrote:
| Well said, this is the key part for me:
|
| >It makes knowledge gaps more visible
|
| It's the same principle behind teaching others. It's easy
| to think you understand something until you are forced to
| communicate it beyond the surface level.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| ChatGPT is great at taking my notes and turning them into Anki
| cards. Some tweaks are occasionally needed, but I have done
| well on numerous exams letting ChatGPT figure out the cards
| (and the formatting tedium) for me.
| tyrust wrote:
| This is the opposite of what the commenter is suggesting.
| computerphage wrote:
| I'm not sure it is. Not if chatgpt is operating off of the
| notes you already took yourself
| redcobra762 wrote:
| I'm offering my experience, while agreeing with the larger
| point that you need to customize your cards to your
| situation.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| One of the biggest roadblocks to using anki or cards in
| general is coming up with good cards. Automating that part
| lets you use anki a lot more, which is a win. If you want
| to connect with the question you can still manually
| transcribe the card.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| The biggest failure mode is adding to many notes at once,
| which leads to non obvious increased future workload.
| Automating card creation sounds like would worsen this
| issue unless extreme care is taken.
| samus wrote:
| Using Anki is not a goal in itself. It's just a tool to
| help you cram facts into your brain. Once you have done
| that, you can and should build associations and knowledge
| on top of them. Reviews ensure that less-often used facts
| are not forgotten. Anki is fine for that.
|
| But creating Anki cards is effectively a form of review
| as well. If you automate that, then you miss out on going
| through your own notes, engaging with the subject, and
| subdividing it into self-contained pieces, which is
| required to come up with good cards.
| redcobra762 wrote:
| > If you automate that, then you miss out on going
| through your own notes, engaging with the subject, and
| subdividing it into self-contained pieces
|
| Why wouldn't you get this? You just don't have to do it
| in order to make Anki cards.
|
| > which is required to come up with good cards
|
| Yes, and ChatGPT does this for you.
|
| This isn't theoretical. I've used this to get As in
| multiple classes in college. This works.
| samus wrote:
| Of course you don't _have_ to create your own cards, but
| they would work better if you _did_. You can use ChatGPT
| to automate onerous tasks, but have to compensate for it
| by engaging with the material in other ways. I doubt that
| grinding decks is enough. Depends on the activity and the
| goal I guess. Acing exams, sure, without doubt.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I would rather get cards that are really well designed
| ___as cards__ (which chat gpt will do better than me
| given the time I want to spend) even if there is some
| loss of "value" from not breaking the material into cards
| myself, because I will make it up on the back end by
| studying the cards more, and having cards that are more
| correctly designed for optimal study. Who cares if I did
| the work of breaking the material into cards myself if it
| results in shitty cards that aren't good study aids and
| thus you never use.
| heyoni wrote:
| If you're modifying the cards to fit your needs and ChatGPT
| is basing them off of your personal notes then I'm not sure
| you understood the commenters suggestion you're referring
| to.
| queuebert wrote:
| So is your brain.
| ametrau wrote:
| Time to write card: x. Number of times review card: x * big
| number.
| antiframe wrote:
| I find in my usage that creating a card can take several
| minutes (5-10 for a hard card) but reviewing them takes a
| few seconds per occurrence. To reach the initial creation
| time would take me decades of reviews.
|
| That said, I still make all my cards myself and some cards
| are trivial. For the trivial cards, review time can
| outweigh creation time. But trivial cards take seconds.
|
| Crafting effective prompts is important to getting the
| value out of an SRS. That sometimes is the bull of the
| "work". Not the review.
| burntwater wrote:
| Would you mind giving an example of the kind of prompt(s) you
| use to get these card generated?
|
| On a different note, ChatGPT has been making me feel stupid
| because I fail to come up with many use cases, while it seems
| like tons of technically unskilled people come up with all
| kinds of uses...
| atahanacar wrote:
| >if you write the cards yourself instead of using a preexisting
| deck
|
| I disagree with this. Anki's power comes from spaced
| repetition. Spending your time creating cards instead of
| actually reviewing the material is very inefficient. If high
| quality decks exist for the topic you're learning, use them
| instead. I've learned this the hard way.
|
| Fields like medicine and language learning (you will still need
| to create your own deck for sentence mining but that's
| different as it's not a time sink) have great decks. For actual
| "niche" topics though, creating your own decks is your only
| choice.
|
| For people who are going to create their own decks: check the
| Anking deck to see how to create "great" cards.
| BeetleB wrote:
| It's great when high quality decks exist, but I doubt they do
| for what I use it for. Also, even when they do exist, chances
| are still high you'll find pieces of knowledge missing, and
| will have to create your own card.
| zilti wrote:
| Even for learning in general. We even had teachers who told us
| we're allowed to make tiny cheat sheets - about 6x3cm or
| something - because the mere process of creating the sheet is a
| good learning strategy, and to fit all you don't know on such a
| small sheet means you already know almost everything.
| kirill5pol wrote:
| I definitely agree that to absolutely maximize learning you
| should write the cards yourself but I think it really depends
| on the value of the content, say it may be 2x as effective for
| learning but take 5x the amount of effort.
|
| For some things where you want to learn but don't want to/have
| time to put in full effort premade cards are better than
| nothing. For example, I ended up learning German to B1 level
| from Duolingo (+ friends/time in germany) because using
| Duolingo was pretty low effort, even if it wasn't the fastest
| most effective way of learning.
|
| I think this is probably true for most things you may want to
| learn about outside of your job, school, or really strong
| reasoning behind it. Perfect is the enemy of good as they say
|
| (Shameless plug: I made a tool that makes spaced repetition
| questions for educational YouTube videos/podcasts that you
| watch, usually I was forgetting everything and wasn't really
| that invested to spend the time making decks for everything I
| watch, so I landed on this! https://www.platoedu.org)
| pawelduda wrote:
| Using someone else's decks in Anki === using vim with someone
| else's .vimrc
| dustincoates wrote:
| Like many people, I started using Anki for language learning, and
| it has been wildly useful for that. I'm always told that I have a
| good vocabulary, which was precisely my problem last time I tried
| to learn a language.
|
| Since then, I've branched into many other topics. The latest one
| that I've started building out is all of the Paris metro lines
| and stops. The most useful thing ever? No, but I feel happy
| knowing that I have a better understanding of the system I'm
| using ever day.
| lenartowski wrote:
| SSR tools and flashcards are amazing for knowledge retention.
| When I started learning new language, my google sheet with words
| I wanted memorize grew to hundreds pretty quickly. I wanted the
| simplest possible app that would let me to import and repeat
| words from my list anytime I have even a few minutes to spare.
| And being a developer, of course I decided to write one myself.
| It's a bit different than anki and obviously has less features
| (it's a pet project after all) but the concept is pretty similar:
| https://byheart.io/
| alabhyajindal wrote:
| This looks amazing! Love the design.
| kebsup wrote:
| (Shameless plug at the end)
|
| During my Erasmus in Germany, I've tried almost all of the top
| language learning apps (Duolingo, Babel, Seedlang, Anki...) and
| none of them have really worked me.
|
| What I wanted was:
|
| * Learning in context --> A lot of German words do not have
| direct English/Czech translation, so learning the 1:1 word
| translation did not work well
|
| * Having audio for each card
|
| * Intensive pace --> Going through a lot of cards in one session.
| Duolingo is the worst in this as you spend a lot of time doing
| super easy childish exercises. If I want to learn let's say 30
| min a day, I want to pack as much content as I can into it.
|
| * Skipping ahead --> My level is around B1/B2, I don't want to do
| placement tests and then re-learning the words I already know
|
| * Learning from my content --> I like to consume German
| podcast/youtube videos/websites and in some apps, it was quite
| difficult or impossible to add words I've just encountered "in
| the wild".
|
| Anki has worked the best, but generating cards with sentences and
| audio was quite cumbersome and (a seemingly minor detail) I was
| loosing flow while thinking whether I knew the card "well",
| "good", "easy" or whatever the options are. What I like better is
| a simple knew/didnt know, while still using spaced-repetition.
|
| So for the past year, I'm on-off working on a language learning
| app, currently only supports German, which helps you extract
| words from content (youtube, web, text), handles different word
| forms, and then generates cards with infinitely many sentence
| examples through GPT4, with a nice audio (latest GCP model).
|
| The project website with Android and iOS links:
| https://vokabeln.io/ (web design is old, app looks very different
| now)
| exe34 wrote:
| > What I like better is a simple knew/didnt know, while still
| using spaced-repetition.
|
| Could you just click on the two ends, 1min Vs the scaled max
| time? I.e. ignore the two middle buttons.
| clbrmbr wrote:
| Dude. You rock at UX design. This is amazing...
|
| Only trouble I have tbh is figuring out what I want to read in
| German! But I've signed up and will give this a spin, and send
| what feedback I can.
| kebsup wrote:
| Thanks! My design is the one on the website. The neo-
| brutalism was done by a junior designer who was looking for
| her first project and she did extremely good job!
| huhtenberg wrote:
| FWIW the one on the website is much cleaner, self-
| consistent and overall more pleasant to look at it. The one
| in the app (at least the iOS one) is a clear step down.
| Just 2c.
| clbrmbr wrote:
| The real delight point for me was how painless it was to
| mark 700 words as already known and pickup a bunch of
| fairly common words i am not comfortable using (like
| "allerdings" and "eigentlich") using that scroll-to-set-
| learned control.
| kebsup wrote:
| That one took 3 completely different iterations and bunch
| of tweaking to get right. For example, when you open in,
| it scrolls a bit to the first word. When it did not
| scroll, a friend of mine was looking at it helplessly,
| trying to scroll on the left side with no success. UX is
| so difficult.
| kebsup wrote:
| Also if you are going to give this a try, two features that are
| missing and frequently requested: - articles and plurals for
| nouns - wordlist with A1, A2, B1 words for people doing
| certificates I'm hoping to implement them next month.
| clbrmbr wrote:
| I'd recommend using GPT4 to generate English sentences and then
| Google Translate to get the German. Harder to get example
| sentences for a specific German word, but may improve the
| quality of the German. (I had this issue when generating
| specialized language learning podcasts in Swedish and Polish.
| Lots of English-isms in GPT4's output).
| jamespwilliams wrote:
| I can recommend this too, although I use DeepL instead of
| Google Translate, and I also use DeepL Write to identify
| issues in my grammar
| jamespwilliams wrote:
| It doesn't cover all of your requirements but you might find
| Clozemaster interesting
| kebsup wrote:
| Yes, I've tried that one as well, but text input is too
| difficult and slow, whereas multiple choice is too easy. A
| lot of the time, I would be able to click correct option
| elimination method.
| samus wrote:
| If you are really overwhelmed by the answers, then you could
| stick to just one or two of them. I agree that having too many
| can be overwhelming. The SRS algorithm should still work. I
| don't recommend to use "well", as you won't see the cards again
| for a very long time.
| tuna74 wrote:
| Ankidroid question here:
|
| On Android systems, if you use the free Japanese dictionary
| Japanese Kanji Study (by Chase Colburn) it can generate Anki
| flash cards directly from the app, so everytime you look up a
| word you can also generate the card for Ankidroid/Anki.
|
| Is there similar functionality in any Chinese dictionary app for
| Android?
| david_allison wrote:
| Pleco: Settings - Flashcards - Flashcard System - select
| AnkiDroid
|
| I believe the wiki[0] lists most of the apps which use our API
|
| https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/wiki/Third-Party-A...
| tuna74 wrote:
| I could never get Pleco to work. What settings do you use?
| david_allison wrote:
| What do you mean 'not work': not adding cards, or AnkiDroid
| not appearing as an option?
|
| I'm limited in time now, and HN isn't the best place for
| user support. If you post a reddit thread/on our Discord,
| I'll likely be able to help further.
|
| Links to Discord/Reddit are inside AnkiDroid: Help -
| Community
| bbno4 wrote:
| love anki! i use it for japanese. although i wish i could donate
| to the devs at least, they dont take donations
| david_allison wrote:
| If you really want, buy AnkiMobile [0] as a gift for someone
| (the only monetisation for the dev)
|
| AnkiDroid has an Open Collective [1]
| https://opencollective.com/ankidroid
|
| [0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ankimobile-
| flashcards/id373493...
|
| [1] https://opencollective.com/ankidroid
|
| https://faqs.ankiweb.net/how-can-i-donate.html
| jwells89 wrote:
| Been using Anki on and off for years for learning Japanese and
| more recently, have been using it for studying for university
| courses.
|
| It's a great tool, but it's definitely got some oddities, like
| how its editor has every formatting and templating tool under the
| sun but is somehow missing spell check, how some features can
| only be had through fragile extensions, or how for some reason
| it's one of the few programs one _shouldn't_ install from their
| distro's package manager.
|
| One of these days I'd like to take a crack at building my own
| cross-platform subject-agnostic SRS card app. There's a number of
| things I'd do differently.
| saintradon wrote:
| I love anki, I've used it from everything to Japanese to my
| college lectures, but my only issue is that it's UI/UX is a bit
| subpar, there's quite a learning curve to figure out all the
| little bits and details of the program, and it's easy to waste
| your time tweaking flashcard layout settings instead of actually
| studying. Then again, for me, I found often times for college
| lectures I rarely actually used the flashcards in traditional
| anki format - I found the act of cultivating all my notes,
| homework, organizing questions, creating layouts, creating the
| flashcards - that alone was 50% of the review that I needed to
| study the material.
| alabhyajindal wrote:
| Can anyone comment on why most people want software like Anki to
| be a native application? Most people who implemented their own
| SRS have done so in the form of a mobile app. Why?
|
| I would think that having a web app would be much easier from a
| single developer point of view: maintain one application that can
| be accessed from any device. I am biased because I'm a web
| developer but I'd like to be corrected.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I want a native app for Anki (and similar things) because I
| don't always have an internet connection. It's pretty much as
| simple as that. Anki does have a web version which I have used,
| though.
| kazinator wrote:
| With a mobile app like AnkiDroid, you can do SRS where you have
| no coverage. E.g. waiting in a car, while parked several levels
| underground.
| vsizov wrote:
| Anki is awesome. I used it for a couple of years to improve my
| English vocabulary but I ended up using spreadsheets like
| airtable because of few reasons:
|
| 1) Import/export is limited when I want to create a batch of
| flashcards from the list (from ChatGPT for example)
|
| 2) It's hard to stick to it and do it everyday. I wish it showed
| some progress in motivating way. This is why we use TODO lists
| after all. We human beings love to see the progress. I wish it
| also included some sticky effect of Pop It Game or Bubble Wrap.
|
| So I just created an Airtable table with few fields: Word,
| Translation, Days, Repeat (function field "DATEADD(Edited, Days,
| 'days')"), - used for filtering, Attachment, Edited_at (automatic
| field).
|
| "Days" is "Single select": 1, 4, 10, 25, 55, 90, 200 days. I set
| this field with number of days I want to repeat flashcard in.
|
| Sounds cumbersome but it's not. I see the progress - less rows in
| the table after every click. It's far from ideal anyway and it's
| not an actual SSR of course but it works for me. And because of
| some reason it's easier to stick to.
|
| Anyway, Anki is great for most of the cases.
| 99catmaster wrote:
| Any Anki power users here have any anecdotes with FSRS?
| spencerchubb wrote:
| Anki is commonly used by Rubik's Cube enthusiasts who want to
| memorize lots of algorithms. You can do basic methods with just a
| few algorithms, but people use Anki when you want to memorize
| hundreds.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I actually looked into Anki recently, my idea being:
|
| instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media during
| downtime, why not memorize poems and great song lyrics?
|
| The issue is: I'm sick and tired of apps that want your web
| credentials. I want an app that doesn't share _anything_ about
| me. Completely local.
|
| I have to admit, I haven't searched on Play Store for one.
| rpearl wrote:
| > The issue is: I'm sick and tired of apps that want your web
| credentials. I want an app that doesn't share anything about
| me. Completely local.
|
| Anki does not require your web credentials, so it's very well
| suited for you!
|
| You can create an account if you want to sync your decks
| between computers or to your phone. It is not necessary or
| required.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Excellent. Thanks.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| You can also run your own sync server so you can get the
| benefit of multi-device syncing without needing to use the
| free provided service.
|
| https://docs.ankiweb.net/sync-server.html
| david_allison wrote:
| AnkiDroid: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.ichi2.anki/
|
| Privacy Policy: https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-
| Android/wiki/Privacy-Polic...
|
| From the F-Droid description:
|
| Opt-in synchronization uses the non-free AnkiWeb service by
| default, but this can be changed in the settings to use, for
| example, an instance of the unofficial Anki Sync Server).
|
| Opt-in / off-by-default crash reporting will send data to a
| private / AnkiDroid open source team controlled crash reporting
| server if enabled. This data is only used to help fix crash
| bugs.
|
| Opt-in / off-by-default analytics will send data to Google
| Analytics via an an open-source implementation of the analytics
| API if enabled. This data is only used to focus developer
| efforts on popular features.
| zora_goron wrote:
| I used Anki quite a bit in med school, where it's extremely
| popular. Admittedly, it took me a couple years to fully buy in to
| it as a tool for cramming hundreds of facts, especially coming
| from an academic background (computer science) where memorizing
| facts at a high rate was not a huge emphasis at all.
|
| After using it for a while though, I began to value how the quick
| recall encouraged by the system actually seemed to /enhance/ my
| deeper understanding of concepts, rather than replace it (I wrote
| a short post about this a couple years ago [0]).
|
| [0] https://samrawal.substack.com/p/on-the-relationship-
| between-...
| xbar wrote:
| Thank you for sharing your experience. This confirms my bias in
| the deep value of anki.
| colordrops wrote:
| I've put cards into Anki on several occasions and somehow when I
| come back after a few months they've disappeared in one way or
| another. Fool me once.
| watwut wrote:
| I tried to use Anki a while ago, but stopped. I felt like Anki is
| trying to control my life while I could not control it. It was
| too easy to make strategic mistake that would affect your
| workload in an uncontrollable way a week or month later.
|
| For example, if you have time or are bored today and do some
| extra cards, your workload month later goes up. Except that month
| later you might be tired and not have time. And if you skip a day
| or dont do everything, the next day your workload goes up by
| twice ... and a week later too and a month later too for the same
| batch of cards.
| kylegalbraith wrote:
| Been using Anki for years for more advanced language learning. I
| usually keep notes of words or phrases that come up during my day
| to day living in France that are new to me (or used a way I'm
| less familiar with). I research their construction/uses and throw
| them in an ongoing study deck I review every morning.
|
| It's really helped me gain a deeper understanding of the language
| and feel more confident in conversations.
| thinkingofthing wrote:
| Shameless plug: I'm working on www.flashka.ai , a platform that
| solves a bunch of painpoints I and many others have had with
| flashcards.
|
| I've used Anki and found it amazing, but it got to the point
| where making flashcards was too time consuming and couldn't keep
| up with them.
|
| Mid-last year I found my brother having the same problem and
| realised after playing with GPT how effective it was at
| generating flashcards. Not perfect, but good enough to save many
| hours of writing them.
|
| Now with Flashka we have started re-thinking the medium a bit
| more and try to make a great study-tool out of it
| kazinator wrote:
| I've only ever used Anki for some heavy editing of decks for use
| with AnkiDroid.
|
| AnkiDroid is a separate, compatible implementation of Anki, for
| Android only, which uses local data.
| jjjjj55555 wrote:
| I'm an Anki fanatic. I use it about 1.5-2 hours per day.
|
| It has completely changed how I approach the topic of learning.
| I've used it to study Spanish, Italian, Network engineering, AI,
| Art history, world history, and US history. It's made me much
| smarter than I was before using it.
|
| Unfortunately it can be time consuming. A big part of it is not
| just studying cards, but creating cards that are actually well-
| crafted.
|
| It's also key to understand that it isn't for learning things
| that you don't know, but rather for memorizing things that you've
| already learned.
| mderazon wrote:
| I have weekly Portuguese classes in Skype. During the lesson,
| when there's a word I don't know, the teacher explains and writes
| it in the chat.
|
| After each class, I take these words and put them in Anki.
| However, I feel that this is not a great system, a lot of times I
| need the context of the conversation, the word needs to be in a
| sentence or sometimes I would prefer the reverse card (English
| and Portuguese on the back)
|
| Any recommendations for using Anki for learning languages that is
| not the basic word-translation pair ? I thought about
| incorporating Chatgpt in the process, and dump the chat history
| but I am not sure what would be a good system.
| marvel_boy wrote:
| Yes, just writing down the word-translation pair is not useful
| at all. To add a little context helps, for example use app ,
| like Linguee or similar ,that adds phrases when then context
| makes sense.
| mderazon wrote:
| Nice site, I will try and see if I can integrate it into my
| flow somehow and give it words and get back sentences to put
| in Anki
| wodenokoto wrote:
| You can ask Anki to also generate reverse cards.
|
| But yes, word only cards are good in the beginning when you are
| learning only the most basic nouns and verbs but you quickly
| need sentences.
|
| I'm sure there are plenty of online dictionary services which
| can do some sort of Portuguese sentence search for you.
| ikesau wrote:
| Cloze cards also work well for this sort of thing, I think.
| Though they're easy to mass produce and create an overwhelming
| amount of revision, so be careful.
|
| You may not have noticed, but there's also a reverse card type
| that only requires one note but adds two cards to your deck.
|
| There are lots of people who have a similar intuition on the
| ChatGPT thing but none that I've seen create cards as good as
| the ones you could make yourself. Using ChatGPT as a dynamic
| pen pal is probably the better way to incorporate it into your
| language learning.
| tempaccount1234 wrote:
| My prompt to ChatGPT is to give me the 50 most common words for
| a given topic with translation and an example sentence (plus
| translation) in CSV format. Which quickly gives me a handful of
| usable flash cards.
| studley wrote:
| I've found Anki useful for focusing piano practice. Each piece of
| music I have worked on over the years has a few tricky bars in
| it. Before Anki, I was really bad at remembering which bars I was
| bad at in each piece, and would tend to practice the bars I
| already know how to play, which is pleasant to do.
|
| Today, I have one deck, which has a flashcard for each set of
| tricky bars from all the pieces I've worked on. Now when I sit
| down to practice the piano, I just load up that deck, and those
| bars are what I practice, and I grade myself on each flashcard to
| indicate how quickly I need to re-practise those particular
| tricky bars.
|
| I've done this 5+ year now, and I'm impressed at how good the
| default algorithm seems to be at effectively ordering my piano
| practice sessions.
| rossant wrote:
| Wow nice, thanks for the tip! I'd never have thought of using
| spaced repetition for piano practice, sounds like great advice.
| sodality2 wrote:
| No one has mentioned it yet, so I'll drop this alternative:
| https://mochi.cards/
|
| Much prettier than Anki, has a simpler algorithm that doesn't
| require rating difficulty, and has lots of the same features. I'm
| a subscriber just because of the cloud sync - wish I could self-
| host but I'm happy to support the developer.
| peter_d_sherman wrote:
| Looks really cool!
|
| You know what I would like to see?
|
| First, I'd love Anki / Anki Flashcards to work as a smartphone
| Android app.
|
| Second, I'd love to see some way to for users to globally share
| their flash card decks with other users.
|
| Third, I'd love to see a site where someone could search for the
| decks created by other users.
|
| Forth, it should be permissible for users to charge very smallish
| amounts of money for their flash decks, and/or share them for
| free. Their choice!
|
| Anyway, looks really cool and I wish Anki a lot of luck!
| bbno4 wrote:
| hi bestie...
|
| (1) there are multiple apps on all phones (2) this is already a
| thing https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks (3) this is the same as
| (2), are you an AI? (4) it is permissible.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| AnkiDroid for Android works well, I used it for a while when I
| didn't have an iPad (old one had died, had an Android tablet
| collecting dust so switched to it).
|
| bbno4 already pointed you to the shared decks.
|
| Some people do sell decks. The main issue with that business
| model is it's entirely trust-based. The decks have no form of
| DRM or anything, they're just sets of cards and media that get
| imported so can be freely passed around once purchased. But
| some people do sell them.
| graypegg wrote:
| I have Anki to thank for helping me study a language I now speak
| in every day. What an insanely well scoped, well made, simple
| tool.
| ListeningPie wrote:
| Anki deck is one of the first if not the first spaced repetition
| tool. What do they do to remain relevant after all these years,
| ain't broke don't fix it, or is there more?
| umanwizard wrote:
| It's not the first; it's basically an open-source clone of
| Supermemo.
| Tomte wrote:
| Not even close. Anki came out 2006, SuperMemo's first version
| came out 1987!
| wirrbel wrote:
| Everyone should be aware that someone hijacked the Anki name, so
| there is the genuine anki project and some copycat SaaS anki
| service with mobile apps in the app stores using the same name
| dtornabene wrote:
| I did not know this, and recommended someone recently install
| from the app store and it was $25. Makes a lot more sense now.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| The $25 one on the app store is probably the actual one. The
| creator of Anki has only monetized on iOS/iPadOS (one app,
| works on both) with a $25 one-time purchase. It's free on all
| other platforms it's available on (AnkiDroid is not his
| project, but is compatible and is also free), including on
| the web. His syncing service is free to use.
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ankimobile-
| flashcards/id373493... <- the legitimate one
| david_allison wrote:
| AnkiMobile is legit and is a $25 one-time purchase on iOS.
|
| All other platforms are free, including AnkiWeb, which can be
| used on iDevices
| afiodorov wrote:
| I'm a big fan of spaced repetition, though I've hung up my hat
| with it for now. My journey with spaced repetition is a bit of a
| throwback - think pre-smartphone days, armed with SuperMemo on my
| trusty iPAQ hx4700. Picture this: a 19-year-old me, fresh in
| England for university studies, diligently working through
| English lessons on the Tube to and from work. Back then, I was
| convinced I'd settled in England for good, despite my English
| being a bit of a work in progress.
|
| In hindsight, I'd tell my younger self to chill out and remember
| that learning a language is a marathon, not a sprint.
|
| SuperMemo was a game-changer for me, boosting my memory like
| nothing else. It's like when you're coding in a language you
| haven't used in ages - things are on the tip of your tongue, but
| you're not quite sure. Is it len(arr), arr.length, arr.length(),
| or... darn it, is it size? sizeof? Space repetition solves this
| problem for good!
|
| For my graduate math exams, SuperMemo was my secret weapon. I'd
| jot down all the proofs I needed to memorize and challenge myself
| to write them out. It worked wonders - I aced those exams. But
| interestingly, it wasn't about memorizing the proofs word for
| word; it was more about getting the structure and the key tricks
| down pat. In my practice runs, I'd often take shortcuts because
| who has the time to write everything out in full detail?
|
| Then came Anki for my Spanish adventures. Nowadays, I'm dabbling
| in Portuguese but have given Anki and spaced repetition the cold
| shoulder. Why, you ask? Well, I'm a firm believer that if rapid
| recall is your goal, spaced repetition is your best friend. But
| most language learners don't use it. Are they missing a trick, or
| do they just not fancy efficiency? What stops them from
| optimizing their learning? I can only guess. As for myself, I've
| ditched it because, let's face it, reviewing cards over and over
| can be a snooze-fest. The most fun part about spaced repetition
| was creating the decks. Now, I'm learning Portuguese purely for
| the joy of it and don't mind how long it takes. I immerse myself
| in interesting content in Portuguese, occasionally revisiting
| something I've learned with a quick Google search. I'm perfectly
| fine with not reaching fluency quickly. After all, there's more
| to life than optimizing every bit of it!
| guytv wrote:
| I've been using Anki for around two years to learn Arabic
| vocabulary. It's an excellent tool that has helped me remember
| and continuously recall thousands of words. Some strategies I've
| found particularly effective are:
|
| - Focusing on memorizing short sentences or phrases instead of
| isolated words. - Regularly adding new words, at least weekly, to
| keep the learning process engaging and not monotonous. -
| Including only words that I actually come across and learn in my
| daily life, which significantly aids in retention--possibly
| because I can recall the context in which I first heard them. -
| Installing AnkiDroid on my phone to make the most of idle times
| like commuting or waiting in lines for practice.
| EasyMark wrote:
| if you want to make a list you need to add an empty line
| between each "-"
|
| - line 1
|
| - line 2
|
| - line 3
| hintymad wrote:
| Flash card may be good for memorizing lots of stuff in a short
| time, but I find using flash card is incredibly boring. If we
| manage to learn things in long term, and we always should,
| there's always a more fun, more effective, and more efficient way
| to remember than paced reminder with flash card. For instance,
| - A new language: Comprehensive Input. Basically immersive
| studying with tons of reading, watching, and interaction. Given
| youtube and streaming services and low-cost online tutoring,
| immersive studying is so affordable now. Language is all about
| the right intuition in the right context, which flash card can't
| offer any way. - STEM. This is an easy one. God
| forbid one should rely on flash card to memorize any STEM topic.
| STEM is all about intuition and understanding why and making
| connections. Solving problems, real or designed, is the most
| effective way. - History and etc. Reading novels and
| biographies to learn a great deal of historical context, reading
| engaging books written by scholars to get accessible yet rigorous
| treatment of a specific topic. Anecdotally, I find alternative-
| history novels particularly engaging
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| Yeah I agree. Apart from very specific situations like learning
| for tests[0] flashcards are not the optimal method.
|
| [0] And even then I'd risk saying that you can probably get
| better results creating a personalized ChatGPT-4
| tutoring/examination session on any topic except
| arithmetic/anything involving computation.
| hintymad wrote:
| Yeah, even for a test that I need to cram, I'd use Feynman's
| method, focus on core concepts, plus solve representative
| problem sets
| kamaraju wrote:
| How to create "community curated" Anki decks?
|
| For example, is it possible to create Anki decks and make them
| available on github so that if there are any mistakes, others
| might raise a merge request and once merged, everyone else can
| "pull" the latest deck?
| edanm wrote:
| I've seen a community-managed Anki Shared deck, I think the
| "Ultimate Geography" deck is community-shared.
| rickcarlino wrote:
| I love how much attention spaced repetition gets on HN. Does
| anyone know if there are any communities for researchers or
| engineers working on spaces repetition and adjacent problems?
| /r/spacedRepetition is basicly dead. I really wish there was a
| place where I could discuss space repetition research with
| technical peers. if such a place does not yet exist and there is
| interest in creating one, please reach out I am easy to find.
| Maybe we could start a Discord server.
| 1024core wrote:
| I wanted to fire up the AnkiDroid app on my Android device (which
| I installed a couple of years ago), and all I get is an error
| saying: "Please grant AnkiDroid storage permission to continue"
| and there's no way forward.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| I suspect that's because it needs to store the cards and media.
| Are you unable to grant it storage permissions for some reason?
| 1024core wrote:
| I don't see any "storage permissions" option. Android 14.
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/issues/14423
|
| Looks like a bug with AnkiDroid and different Android
| versions (if the app was installed on a prior version of
| Android and Android was upgraded). Some workarounds in that
| thread.
| onewheeltom wrote:
| Anki is a great tool for learning.
| toss1 wrote:
| Does anyone know of a card set for FAA pilot's license? Seems
| like a near-ideal use...
| Jtsummers wrote:
| https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=faa
|
| No clue on quality.
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