[HN Gopher] Spaced repetition systems have gotten better
___________________________________________________________________
Spaced repetition systems have gotten better
Author : domenicd
Score : 636 points
Date : 2025-05-18 11:42 UTC (11 hours ago)
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| entropie wrote:
| Pretty OT: A few month ago I tried to marry my simple note system
| with anki. My goal was to be able to send simple front/backside
| cards to an api and it would get integrated and I can use it
| immediately. Ofc, when I edit cards via my notes-backend, the
| cards in anki should update too.
|
| Long story short: not possible with anki. It took like an entire
| day for me to realize its just not possible without diving deep
| into ankis sqlitedb and having the client installed on my server
| to interact in a horrible way with decks. I wrote my own space
| repetition [1] backend in a week and never looked back to anki.
| Ill intergrate FSRS in my software.
|
| 1:
| https://github.com/entropie/ha2itat/tree/main/plugins/entrom...
| welder wrote:
| Edit: nevermind
| entropie wrote:
| Iam not sure what you are trying to tell me. Do you think I
| didnt use the original anki software? I think I have never
| heard of "AnkiApp" before.
| johanyc wrote:
| Every anki card is just a webview. Its very possible to call an
| api
| entropie wrote:
| Then you should be able to link me to some docs.
| david_allison wrote:
| > In Anki, templates are written in HTML, which is the
| language that web pages are written in. The styling section
| is CSS, which is the language used for styling web pages.
|
| https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/intro.html
|
| ----
|
| But you'd want AnkiConnect, or a Python-based addon for
| your workflow
| criddell wrote:
| Have you looked into any of the open source clients to see
| how they are communicating with the server?
| entropie wrote:
| I did that. The consens is like, just an example, yanki-
| connect:
|
| > Anki desktop app auto-launch > Perhaps the most
| precarious aspect of the Anki-Connect add-on is that the
| Anki desktop application must be running for any of the
| API calls to work. Yanki Connect tries to sand down this
| rough edge by (optionally) automatically launching the
| Anki desktop app if it's not running already.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| I looked into this before too. Ankiweb (the place where cards
| created on Anki sync to) does not provide a rest API. The
| service is free though. It makes sense they may not want
| automated clients.
|
| There is an implementation of their sync server, which you can
| self host. And it has a REST API
|
| https://github.com/dsnopek/anki-sync-server
|
| I think I ran into a blocker with it not supporting something I
| needed last time I tried to use it though.
| SamPatt wrote:
| If you use Obsidian there's a great plugin which allows me to
| make flashcards easily within my notes:
|
| https://www.stephenmwangi.com/obsidian-spaced-repetition/
| kartikarti wrote:
| Wouldn't AnkiConnect be good enough here?
|
| https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2055492159
| jwrallie wrote:
| Anki can import .csv files and if one of the column content is
| matching an existing item, it will update the contents of the
| card while keeping the repetition history. Think of it like
| including a column with unique keys.
|
| I know this is not precisely what you wanted, but yes, Anki can
| update card contents.
| rsanek wrote:
| i use the python package genanki to accomplish this. I've found
| it to be extremely dependable -- just use the first field as a
| UUID and you're golden (future imports dedupe and auto update
| imported cards with the same first field)
| Macha wrote:
| I do think that Wanikani and Bunpro are kind of in a catch-22 on
| this compared to Anki. They've built their gamification features
| and UI on the idea that cards have specific buckets that they're
| in and something like FSRS is a lot more varied than that.
| Especially Wanikani, which has a system of unlocking more items
| based on your current items reaching a specific stage.
| bpev wrote:
| So I haven't integrated FSRS, and of these two, I've only used
| Wanikani, and have been playing with a reimplemention for
| Chinese hanzi: https://hanzi.bpev.me
|
| But seeing how it's implemented, I think they could totally
| integrate something like FSRS to at least just replace their
| scheduling (how long until an item is next shown). The
| unlocking system can be implemented as a separate gatekeeping
| mechanism, and the buckets can be coded for certain step
| thresholds (instead of wanikani's "stage").
|
| Basically, this is their entire srs system:
| https://docs.api.wanikani.com/20170710/#spaced-repetition-sy...
| bearjaws wrote:
| Spaced repetition has been all the rage for 20 years now.
|
| Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not
| really a silver bullet.
|
| There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just that people tend
| to fall off the same way they do on any other education pattern.
|
| A couple years ago I was thinking "If Google and Apple really
| cared about kids they would make a spaced repetition unlock
| system", where by you have to make note cards every week and then
| have to answer correctly to get into your phone. (obviously
| requires some bypass system, other rules, etc)
|
| You could probably jury rig it with a popup that comes up after
| you unlock, but people would never install it anyway.
| huhkerrf wrote:
| If you're expecting it to be a silver bullet, then you're in
| for a bad time.
|
| You still have to do the work.
|
| It's a lever or a pulley, nothing more.
| jgalt212 wrote:
| > You still have to do the work
|
| Spaced repetition is doing the work.
| antasvara wrote:
| The "work" is actively trying to recall the information on
| the card. Spaced repetition is just a more efficient way of
| doing this than (for example) cycling through every single
| card, every single day.
| aswegs8 wrote:
| ...and more efficient than reading long-form text or
| course material
| petesergeant wrote:
| > There's nothing really wrong with it
|
| And a gigantic amount right with it.
|
| This is a strange comment because it shrugs off something that
| has been transformative and hugely useful to a lot of people
| because it doesn't fix all conceivable problems.
| chjj wrote:
| I don't think it's a strange comment. He's mostly right (and
| so are you, but I think you're talking past each other).
| There's nothing wrong with SRS, and I agree with you that
| it's basically like cheat codes for memorization, but there
| is a limit to what most people can do. i.e. most people _do_
| tend to drop off.
|
| I remember reading some stats from WaniKani (Japanese SRS
| app) a while back...
|
| WaniKani has 60 "levels" to learn 2000+ kanji. Each level
| takes about a week (there's no skipping ahead), so the
| material takes about a year of study to complete -- that's if
| you're going at breakneck pace, which most people aren't.
|
| According to the numbers I saw on the WK forums, ~8% of users
| reach level 30 and less than 1% reach level 60... and that's
| just to learn as much kanji as a 9th grader. That's to say
| nothing of the grammar and the 20,000+ vocab words you'll
| need to SRS to truly learn the language, or the thousands of
| hours you'll have to spend speaking/listening/reading,
| immersing yourself in native content, etc.
|
| People give up very easily. The language learning community
| often gives year estimates to reach "near-native level" in a
| language based on frequency of study. In reality, the process
| takes a lifetime. I don't know if people truly know what
| they're signing up for when install those apps and begin
| studying. It's a lifelong commitment. It's just something you
| do now, every day.
|
| You can stop at any time of course, and most people do (more
| than 99% of them apparently).
| chongli wrote:
| Learning a language as a hobby is tough. If you don't need
| the language to communicate and survive in your environment
| then you have essentially zero real motivation to learn it.
|
| The problem with spaced repetition systems is that it
| doesn't supply that extra motivation. You're still just
| memorizing things in a vacuum. If you truly want to learn a
| language you need to use it to communicate. That means
| making friends, travelling, reading books, and consuming
| other media in that language.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| You can also be motivated because you like to consume
| media in the language (relevant for English and
| Japanese), because you think it will be useful for a job
| (English) or for travel (French, Spanish, etc.), or
| simply because you like the language.
|
| If you don't have any of these reasons to motivate you,
| the question arises of why you're bothering in the first
| place.
| chongli wrote:
| I started learning Mandarin on Duolingo while dating a
| Chinese woman. After we broke up I continued with it just
| because I found it fun.
|
| Now I have several Chinese friends and I'm learning
| Chinese cooking. I'm motivated to continue learning about
| Chinese food and Chinese culture, and the important role
| food plays within it.
| gnubison wrote:
| The article specifically points out WaniKani as an example
| of a very bad implementation of spaced repetition (see the
| "FSRS in practice" heading, under the paragraph "for
| Japanese language learning specifically...").
| oliwary wrote:
| I think this is a brilliant idea! Surprised nobody has built it
| yet. I would definitely use it.
| hiatus wrote:
| I would expect the flashcards produced under this regime to be
| utterly useless, like a flashcard with "A" and the answer is
| "B", or simple math problems. In other words, Goodhart's law.
| InkCanon wrote:
| This is a very big problem. Virtually all the results from
| research here comes from some form of simple word recall.
| Direct recall occupies some part of real world tasks, but IRL
| if you're stopped by doing something it's people not because
| you can't remember it (and you could look it up if you
| forgot).
| aswegs8 wrote:
| It's just logical that memorization is useful for broad
| areas like vocabulary and get progressively worse the more
| depth is involved, e.g. vocabulary>grammar>maths. The first
| one doesn't require generalization, the last one most
| certainly does. Even though I find that SRS leads to good
| generalization if it is used for relatively shallow
| conceptual knowledge.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| Spaced repetition is _time-optimised_ , but it isn't self-
| discipline optimised, nor motivation-optimised. If you're
| limited by time, it's very efficient, but it drains motivation.
| If you're anywhere close to being limited by motivation (or,
| failing that, self-discipline), it just causes burnout and
| failure.
|
| I credit Anki to my success at GCSEs and A Levels despite
| having a head injury, and I also credit it to me burning out so
| hard I took a gap year!
|
| And I'm enjoying the gap year, but Anki made it a near
| necessity.
| InkCanon wrote:
| There was an interesting post here awhile back about autonomy
| and motivation. The gist was people's motivation is
| proportional to their autonomy. This is quite intuitive, you
| can see people are really motivated when they have autonomy
| (think kids with Minecraft, musicians with instruments). One
| terrible thing about Anki is that it probably is horrible for
| autonomy. Quite possibly using anki actually has a negative
| effect on motivation.
| url00 wrote:
| That sounds very interesting! Do you still have a link to
| that post?
| Tomte wrote:
| Look up Deci/Ryan, self determination theory.
| maximus-decimus wrote:
| I don't understand, wouldn't it be worse for motivation to
| take longer to achieve the same results?
| avemuri wrote:
| Motivation is some combination of real and perceived effort
| Vs expected reward. Shorter isn't always better. For eg.
| Counting every single calorie is the shorter way to lose
| weight, but for most people, eating approximately healthy
| is more optimal from an effort /motivation poi t of view.
| dkarl wrote:
| I think both have a place. When someone is starting for
| the first time, they're enthusiastic, but they haven't
| built faith in the process yet. It's easy for them to
| lose confidence if they're putting in work but the
| results are slow or ambiguous. I think it's best to take
| advantage of their beginner's enthusiasm and kick them
| off with something higher effort that is guaranteed to
| show them clear results. After they build confidence they
| can settle in to something lower effort (aka "more
| sustainable") where the benefit is longer-term and you
| don't see dramatic results every week.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| Spending half an hour mind-numbingly learning words through
| flashcards will teach you about as much vocabulary as an
| hour watching educational videos, but it'll be far less fun
| and you'll feel like it actually took two hours.
|
| Keep that up every day and you'll burn out much faster with
| option 1 than option 2. Now, maybe you have enough
| motivation for that not to matter, or the self-discipline
| to keep going - as I did in my A levels - but don't be
| surprised if it kills your interest in the subject.
| runarberg wrote:
| I'm not super well versed in the literature but I know
| this has been researched, and--unless you are being
| hyperbolic--it completely fails the sniff test.
|
| As OP points out, SRS is optimized for memory retention.
| You will almost certainly _encounter_ many more words
| watching a two hour long video, but you certainly won't
| _retain_ nearly as many words as half an hour of SRS.
|
| Actually you can combine the two. Use the two hour long
| video to encounter new vocabulary in context, put the new
| vocabulary in your Anki deck, and review it with
| optimized SRS. You get the best of both worlds. As a
| bonus you often remember the source which will help you
| recall... This is actually common enough pattern that it
| has a name: Vocabulary mining.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| Yeah, and flashcards generally work better when you're
| reinforcing existing learning. Learning by flashcards is
| hellish for me.
| jldugger wrote:
| > Learning by flashcards is hellish for me.
|
| Wait, you're putting yourself in a situation where the
| first time you see a card, you have no idea what it is?
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| I've tried it in a few situations (e.g. my driving
| license theory test) and yeah it's absolutely awful and I
| quickly stopped. My modus operandi is obsidian
| notes->flashcards->revision to keep my knowledge up.
| However, a lot of people do actually do that!
|
| People will genuinely download top x wordlists for a
| language and try to learn from them. Hideous, but they do
| it.
| runarberg wrote:
| > People will genuinely download top x wordlists for a
| language and try to learn from them.
|
| I've done that, and I've even created a whole SRS app to
| learn kanji which does that by default
| (https://shodoku.app).
|
| I think this is common practice for the first 1000 words,
| and I don't exactly recommend against it. Unless your
| target language is close to another language you already
| know, you are going to have to learn your first 1000
| words somehow, and you will not learn them by
| comprehensible input in any reasonable time, unless you
| are actually living in the language area, and cannot use
| other languages.
|
| I actually bought a vocabulary book which has 1000 basic
| words and example sentences and puts them in categories
| (e.g. work, travel, food, etc.). I then downloaded an
| Anki deck from the book and use it. To be fair though, I
| first read the word in the book, and practice it with a
| red-sheet (albeit in reverse, i.e. from english and try
| to recall it in japanese).
|
| As for my kanji learning app. I made it so the first time
| you see a kanji, it does not hide any information, and it
| shows you the strokes in order as you write it on first
| encounter, after that you review it normally.
| ayrtondesozzla wrote:
| Oh thanks, I didn't know there was a name for the thing
| I've been doing. Vocabulary mining is a nice term.
|
| I agree with your general point too. People are correct
| to say SRS only helps with memorising and not with
| learning, but this is only a problem if you haven't
| developed functional learning techniques or you have to
| learn something you don't enjoy. Good learning
| essentially hinges on interest and excitement, and making
| the thing you're learning relatable or catchy.
|
| If you have exams and deadlines, this can be hard. If
| you've no exams and no deadlines, just flashcard anything
| interesting that comes your way, include context and
| jokes, and focus on enjoying yourself. Delete flashcards
| with a smile if they annoy you a few repetitions down the
| line. Make all your own cards. Invent funny stuff, find
| quirky facts that stand out.
|
| E.g., the area of Ireland is 84,421km^2 - all powers of
| 2. I never had a "yardstick" for big areas, now I do.
| Borneo is nearly nine Irelands in size.
|
| Or another example, French Polynesia has 121 islands, 75
| of which are inhabited. I found this fact shocking, so I
| thought I'd put it in to a flashcard. After some quick
| reflection, I'm sure you too could come up with ways to
| make those numbers stand out.
|
| Another - the title of Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico
| Philosophicus" - where truth tables were popularised -
| ends in SOS. No more forgetting the title, or where truth
| tables are from!
|
| In summary - learn things you like, and make it spicy for
| you.
| fluidcruft wrote:
| It's very likely that you're using Anki in situations
| that will burn you out and drain your motivation anyway.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| Nah, I love physics. It's just a lot!
|
| Edit: It's worth noting I had a nasty head injury that
| was slowing me down. Optimising my learning was a
| necessity, and the injury meant I spent more time
| studying than my peers, in more optimised and less
| enjoyable ways, to get the same result.
| pessimizer wrote:
| > Spending half an hour mind-numbingly learning words
| through flashcards will teach you about as much
| vocabulary as an hour watching educational videos, but
| it'll be far less fun and you'll feel like it actually
| took two hours.
|
| The first part is definitely untrue, you won't learn any
| vocabulary spending an hour watching an educational
| video, you'll be lucky if you remember one new word
| tomorrow. That half hour on Anki will be spread out over
| six months, and will teach you 20 words.
|
| As for the second part, doing Anki is like doing through
| any sort of timeline that spits out random rewards and
| failures. I get a rush whenever I remember stuff, and I
| get bummed out when I forget; it's basically facebook.
|
| I understand why one wouldn't think that with single-word
| vocabulary flashcards, because they are horrible to do
| and unhelpful. You should be running sentences, not
| words. Words rarely translate well, change form when they
| are in sentences, and often show up as part of seemingly
| ungrammatical set phrases.
| tikhonj wrote:
| What's worse for motivation than taking longer?
|
| Boredom?
|
| Feeling like what you're doing is low-quality or
| superficial?
|
| Doing something artificial for purely external reasons like
| grades or exams?
|
| Can't speak for anyone else, but for me I would take slower
| progress over any of these... which makes spaced repetition
| a hard sell.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| > What's worse for motivation than taking longer?
|
| Many things. I think HN is a bit of a bubble here, but
| you'll find a lot of people prefer something enjoyable
| but slower to something efficient and faster, even if
| they won't admit it.
|
| See the popularity of Duolingo vs Anki as an example! Or
| Quizlet vs Anki. Or the scores of students who revise by
| half-watching dopamine-ified youtube videos rather than
| doing past papers and flashcards. If you ask people,
| they'll often say they care for efficiency, but their
| revealed preferences say otherwise.
|
| Doing large amounts (hours) of Anki day in day out is
| truly miserable, particularly when the alternatives can
| be quite enjoyable. And if you burn out before you
| achieve your goal, is the "efficiency" really worth it vs
| going slower but eventually getting there?
|
| Plus, a lot of people want to learn e.g. a language
| because they enjoy the process as well as the end result.
| Making the process miserable in order to get to the end
| result faster isn't always a good tradeoff.
|
| Which is what it's about. It's a tradeoff. I'm a big
| proponent of flashcards, but I think it's important to
| recognise that you're trading enjoyment for speed in most
| cases.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| Maybe an 80/20 approach where you only create flashcards
| for the 20% of knowledge that's most useful? E.g. for a
| language, you could create 1000 flashcards for the 1000
| most common words which allow for basic real-world
| communication?
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| My personal approach with A levels was to strictly learn
| content through classes, then organise things (which
| teaches you a lot on its own!) and make my own
| flashcards. Then I used the flashcards to keep it fresh
| till exam season. It was crazy, during revision lessons
| everyone else in the class would be going "uhhh I have no
| clue, that was two years ago" while I'd just know it.
|
| I have tried different approaches, including using other
| people's flashcards (not as good - objectively they were
| high quality, but you gain a lot from writing your own +
| tailoring to your own way of looking at things) and
| learning from them (for my driving theory - terrible
| idea!). That hybrid approach is the best I've found, and
| the one I intend to use for my degree.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| I appreciate you replying to my comments!
|
| I confess I'm interested to hear your thoughts re: the
| usefulness of SRS from a more holistic perspective.
|
| Gwern writes:
|
| >...if, over your lifetime, you will spend more than 5
| minutes looking something up or will lose more than 5
| minutes as a result of not knowing something, then it's
| worthwhile to memorize it with spaced repetition. 5
| minutes is the line that divides trivia from useful data.
|
| https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition
|
| My sense is that there are very few facts I will spend
| more than 5 minutes of my life repeatedly looking up. And
| even then, many of those are facts that I will naturally
| end up memorizing regardless of SRS, since I'm using the
| info so often.
|
| I understand the utility of SRS for test takers or
| language learners. When Google is impractical or
| unavailable, memorization makes sense. But for everything
| else -- why not just Google it?
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| Honestly, I'm not sure I'm a particularly good person to
| ask about this. I've experimented with Anki for areas
| other than test taking and language learning, but it
| didn't stick.
|
| I used it for some geography stuff, and that was fine I
| suppose, I like geography, but I stopped after a while.
|
| I find it easy to remember things if I care about them.
| Ergo, if I care enough to put it in Anki, Anki is
| useless.
|
| Particularly with LLMs being a thing, you don't even need
| to concretely know what you're looking for - just give
| chatgpt a vague description and let it list out
| suggestions until it jogs your memory.
|
| When it comes to physics etc, you'll end up memorising
| everything relevant to the areas you actually use. In
| areas like "What is the star type of a star with a
| temperature of 6000K" - something that I memorised using
| Anki, and which took me a while - if I actually worked in
| that area of astrophysics I'd obviously learn that quite
| quickly.
|
| I suppose it could be useful for maintaining knowledge.
| Had I not been burnt out I would have kept up my
| flashcards through my gap year, which would've presumably
| been quite useful - I'm currently going through the slog
| of relearning how to integrate so I'm not totally
| embarrassed at uni!
| jldugger wrote:
| > Many things. I think HN is a bit of a bubble here, but
| you'll find a lot of people prefer something enjoyable
| but slower to something efficient and faster, even if
| they won't admit it.
|
| This is so well known that it was covered extensively in
| the book Make It Stick[1], that you might as well call it
| the "student fallacy." (And they might have; ironically,
| I've forgotten if they do or not!)
|
| [1]: https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-
| Successful-Learnin...
| tikhonj wrote:
| Yeah, 100%. I worded my comment a bit awkwardly, but
| that's exactly what I was getting at too :)
| tsumnia wrote:
| Mastery by George Leonard touches on some of this;
| learners can fall into 3 categories during the learning
| process: Dabblers, Obsessives, and Hackers. Each one has
| strengths and weaknesses, but the core philosophy is that
| "mastery takes time". After 2-3 years of practice, you
| know all the moves in a school of martial arts, or all
| the chord progressions for an instrument. But its the
| "after" where you either continue to refine or move on to
| the next skill.
|
| Anything advertising that you can learn X in Y days isn't
| addressing that "after" period. Once you've learned the
| skill, you need motivation toward applying it, which in
| turn refines your skills. Conversely, becoming hyper
| fixated can be detrimental to overall skill. "Jack of all
| trades, master of none" HOWEVER the rest of the quote
| goes "but often times better than a master of one"
|
| Sometimes you gotta slog through the boring bits to
| progress.
| barrell wrote:
| I would say the implementations are time optimized, over the
| others. I'm building a language learning application, and
| have put in a lot of effort to make sure that the Spaced
| Repeition is motivation-optimized.
|
| It's centered around your performance and review times, to
| make sure you aren't struggling to much; no due dates to
| avoid Anki slogs; gamified with some internal mechanics;
| dopaminergically influenced with aspects of randomness.
|
| Spaced Repetition is just an equation (SM2 is laughable
| simple), but a lot of applications just slap a UI on it and
| call it a day, but that's not the only way to use it!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| IMO, the most limiting feature is that spaced repetition is a
| method for _memorization_ , but memorization is only one part
| of learning and it's very often not the most prevalent part.
|
| But when memorization applies, gamification is a really good
| way to avoiding burnout (as long as you don't overexpose
| yourself to it). There are many spaced repetition games for
| children, I don't know why people make so few of them for
| adults. (But then, fearing the duolingo owl is a popular meme
| nowadays.)
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >I also credit it to me burning out so hard I took a gap
| year!
|
| Do you think targeting a sub-90% difficulty could help reduce
| burnout? My experience is that working to recall something
| I'm on the verge of forgetting can be very effortful.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| I experimented with this, actually. The default was 0.85
| iirc, and I tried pushing it up over time to 0.91, but I
| ended up reducing it to 0.83. It isn't that many more
| cards, and it makes it far less laborious.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Fellow longtime Anki user, I can say letting myself drop
| from 0.9 to 0.85 was like letting myself experience the
| taste of clover honey for the first time. Accepting a
| slightly worse hit rato in exchange for 2/3rds the
| workload made life considerably more pleasant.
| InkCanon wrote:
| There's some UX problems of SRS (that I'm working on) that
| makes it high friction 1) Time taken to create cards 2) Need
| for self marking 3) Creates a one to one mapping of prompt-
| answer 4) If you're an autodidact, you have to teach yourself
| first (alternatively called understanding, scaffolding, etc)
|
| More fundamentally, SRS isn't a superpower because it's just
| very specific to creating a direct prompt retrieval.
| Generalization is poor. Even creating a graph of knowledge, is
| a chain of edges between bits of knowledge, isn't done very
| well here.
|
| And I suspect there's a very deep, fundamental difference
| between recollection knowledge and logical-modeling knowledge.
| Recollection seems very similar to a dictionary access, and if
| you recorded the time to recall in humans I suspect they'd all
| be constant. But learning the knowledge of a logical model,
| like of a mathematical concept, appears to be vastly different
| and have very different time to compute.
|
| Proponents of SRS will point out logical models need facts as
| well, like formulas, lemmas, etc. Which is true. But if you
| already grasped it before you'd grasp it faster the second
| time. So the practical use of SRS is a significant step above
| having a very well sorted and labeled notebook, but still way
| below becoming a genius.
| barrell wrote:
| Where do we find more about what you're working on? :)
| nomadpenguin wrote:
| Poor generalization (overtraining on prompts) and loss of
| context over time are the biggest issues I've found with
| them. Slow card creation workflows and needing to rate your
| own reviews are merely UX issues -- losing context and losing
| generalization make SRS actively harmful when used for some
| topics.
|
| There's 2 solutions I've thought of but haven't tried
| implementing:
|
| 1. A free-recall based approach. Free recall allows you to
| operate at a higher level of organization and connect
| concepts at lower levels. However, how you would schedule SRS
| with free recall is not clear.
|
| 2. Have an LLM generate questions on-the-fly so that you
| don't overtrain on prompts. You might also instruct the LLM
| to create questions that connect multiple concepts together.
| The problem with this approach is that LLMs are still not so
| good at creating good test questions.
| barrell wrote:
| I implemented free recall into FSRS pretty easily. Granted,
| it's only for language learning, and I have it set up to
| work in a free recall friendly way (you don't learn cards,
| you learn actual words and morphemes) but it's been working
| for a few weeks now. I'm working on a product video atm,
| but once that's done my next task (sometime this week) is
| to clean up the UI and merge it to master.
|
| I almost never see someone talk about free recall so I was
| too excited to see it mentioned not to comment
| nomadpenguin wrote:
| How are you handling scheduling with FSRS? The challenge
| that I quickly saw was that it was difficult to figure
| out when you should advance a segment of information. If
| you get 80% of the info right, should it be advanced?
| What happens to the 20% you missed? How do you prevent
| yourself from missing the same 20% every time it comes
| around?
| fao_ wrote:
| > Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its
| not really a silver bullet.
|
| I mean, you say that, but I did mandarin for maybe 6 months, I
| did reviews for maybe a year or two on and off, I haven't done
| a review of mandarin for 8, 9 years now and I can still recall
| quite a bit of it. So for me it's worked quite well.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its
| not really a silver bullet.
|
| Easy statement to make when you're not defining the silver
| bullet. Kind of like saying dieting turns out not to be a
| silver bullet.
|
| I've used spaced repairing for over 6 years. It's been
| transformative for me.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| What info did you memorize?
| aswegs8 wrote:
| Would love to hear about how it was transformative for you
| sn9 wrote:
| You say that but it's completely revolutionized the way medical
| students study.
|
| IIRC the effect was so profound they had to modify the
| structure of some tests or something to that effect.
|
| And polyglots have been using SRS for years.
|
| As always, the real problem when people fail to do something
| that works is psychological, not technical. I'd say anyone who
| made an Ozempic for motivation would make a killing, but I
| believe it's already a scheduled substance. Maybe one without
| potential for addiction or abuse. Or maybe an Ozempic for
| conscientiousness.
| cpburns2009 wrote:
| I'm not so sure. My brother's medical school had to tell
| students they had to study the actual material rather than
| Anki decks because so many students were failing tests.
| sn9 wrote:
| That seems highly atypical.
|
| Perhaps they were relying on LLMs to generate decks?
| pastage wrote:
| Doing anki cards with words two hours every day, and not
| doing any reading of material is very detrimental for me.
|
| I do not study medicin, but for language I have to actually
| be able to use what I memorize. Knowing how to use words is
| harder than it sounds, you need context. A common mistake
| when constructing sentences is getting the tone wrong and
| choosing the wrong synonyms.
| ragazzina wrote:
| ..this is why you usually have whole sentences on Anki
| cards, not single words.
| pastage wrote:
| Does not always help, but I am not picking. You are right
| it only fails in 1/100 cards.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| >I'd say anyone who made an Ozempic for motivation would make
| a killing
|
| This is just ADHD meds right? That's why the uni students
| spend so much buying them.
| dkarl wrote:
| > it turns out its not really a silver bullet
|
| One thing that bothers me about SRS is that it doesn't get
| enough attention from people who understand the difference
| between memorization and language acquisition. It gets a ton of
| attention from people who are doing test prep or who get
| intrinsic reward from their memorization accomplishments.
|
| Memorization is not my goal -- I want to get better at reading
| Spanish and French -- but I find that drilling on vocabulary
| and example sentences helps a lot. I compare it to using
| scaffolding in construction. Scaffolding is not a building.
| Scaffolding doesn't serve any of the purposes a building does.
| But if you need to build, expand, or refurbish a building,
| sometimes building scaffolding in and around it can speed
| things up a hell of a lot.
|
| I wish there were better guidance for using memorization to
| assist in language learning, but the world seems to be split
| between people who are satisfied with memorization as their
| goal (for test prep or intrinsic satisfaction) and people who
| dismiss memorization entirely because it isn't their goal.
| IshKebab wrote:
| It's a silver bullet for learning facts. You still have to
| actually do the learning. Nobody was claiming it would download
| knowledge into your brain Matrix-style.
|
| You'd probably say silver bullets aren't a silver bullet
| because you still have to load the gun and shoot it.
| keiferski wrote:
| I've been using Anki for about a decade now, and as far as I'm
| concerned, the only real improvements needed are design/UI based.
| It is functionally irrelevant if the algorithm is optimized or
| not when the actual user interface seems boring to potential
| users. While I do like that Anki has power user options, it's
| also very unintuitive to the average person just looking into it.
|
| Which is really a shame, as the spacing effect itself is such an
| underrated aspect of human learning that it almost feels like
| cheating.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| I love Anki but it's an archetypal example of "designed by an
| engineer".
|
| It's powerful, with a lot of depth to its features - but it's
| also hideous, clunky and unintuitive, and it takes a long time
| to figure out how to use it effectively.
|
| An HN-reading tech nerd can probably figure it out, but your
| average Duolingomaxxing normie? No chance.
| cenamus wrote:
| Sorry, but what's clunky about it? All buttons in reach of
| your thumb on the mobile app and usable keybindings on
| desktop?
|
| Is there not enough useless whitespace around every button?
| dustincoates wrote:
| I'll give you one example. Occasionally, I come across
| something that needs to be not be shown anymore. I realize
| that the question wasn't a good one, or my template spit
| out something empty. Now, do I suspend card or suspend
| note? Every single time, I have to go search for which is
| the right one. (Okay, okay, maybe user error, but still.)
|
| Another example until recently was the extremely useful
| image occlusion enhanced add-on. Can you easily tell the
| difference between overlapping and nonoverlapping? At least
| they renamed those settings to the much more intuitive
| "Hide One , Reveal All" and "Hide All, Reveal One."
| felipeerias wrote:
| I have been trying to use Anki for years. Every time it is
| the same story: I keep it up for a few months until I miss
| a couple days, then due cards accumulate far beyond what
| can be reasonably managed, and I end up spending more time
| trying to fix the app than actually learning anything.
| pm215 wrote:
| This is an area where I feel like there's scope for
| improvement in the SRS space. All the SRS systems I've
| seen essentially assume the user is a perfect robot who
| will do their reviews every day without fail. But most
| people will have off days or go on holiday for a week and
| not look at the app, or whatever -- and as you note, the
| user experience in that case is awful: you come back to a
| huge number of reviews which is pretty discouraging to
| even start, you probably get more of them wrong than
| usual, so you likely do fewer reviews than you normally
| would, and the situation tends to get worse instead of
| better.
|
| An SRS system which took more account of the human
| failings of the user might:
|
| - let you pick a "max daily reviews" and then keep you
| from putting in too many new items up front, rather than
| letting you accidentally give yourself a huge daily
| workload after a few months
|
| - let you tell it "I'm going to be on holiday in a
| month's time" and have it figure out what to do with
| reviews and new items to minimise disruption
|
| - when you do come back after a break, pick the most
| useful reviews to offer the user up to the daily limit
| (e.g. something whose review interval is six months can
| wait a few more days, something the user added very
| recently and has seen only once could be put back into
| the "new items" bucket to relearn later, so if the user
| is only going to do 100 of their 300 due cards, other
| cards are more important to review today)
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| >- let you pick a "max daily reviews" and then keep you
| from putting in too many new items up front, rather than
| letting you accidentally give yourself a huge daily
| workload after a few months
|
| Anki allows you to do that. It's in the deck preset
| options under deck limits. Nowadays you can also set
| weekday workloads, to reduce workload eg. during the
| weekend.
| pm215 wrote:
| Looking at the manual, Anki seems to let you manually set
| a new card limit, and also to set a review limit (after
| which it won't show more reviews even if they exist), but
| I didn't see anything for "given that I want a daily
| workload of this many reviews, limit my new cards
| automatically to try to not exceed that in future".
| watwut wrote:
| It is not a human failing. A human who has huge amount of
| free time on Sunday, but comes home from work super tired
| on Monday did not failed anything. And from the other
| side, there wont be any difference between you revising a
| card after 89, 90 or even 95 days.
|
| A human who had a lot of time to learn during January,
| because his job workload was easy is not failing anything
| if his job related workload becomes high in March and
| April. But, all that January effort will be punished by
| super high workloads in March and April in Anki.
| jarrett-ye wrote:
| Anki has a feature named Easy Days which allows you to
| spend less time on Anki on some days of the week.
|
| Source: https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-
| options.html?highlight=easy%20...
| pm215 wrote:
| You seem to be reading more into the phrase "human
| failing" than I intended by it. All I meant was the
| ordinary variations in human behaviour where we sometimes
| fall a little short of what we hoped we would or could
| do.
|
| We seem to agree on the substance: that the SRS system
| should be able to work more humanely with and for the
| kind of entirely normal situations you describe, by for
| instance being able to adjust to variations in available
| time and picking the "best" cards to review rather than
| assuming the user will get through the whole lot, and in
| suggesting to them when they should do fewer new items to
| avoid difficulties in a month or two.
| yorwba wrote:
| I feel like from a habit-forming perspective Anki would
| benefit from a fixed-time mode instead of varying the
| number of reviews. The default daily maximum is 200
| reviews per deck, I think, but it's hard to tell whether
| that's too little or way too much until you've hit that
| level.
|
| If you could set a study time of say 30 minutes, then
| when you skip a day, you could just do your usual 30
| minutes and maybe only get through 50% of the scheduled
| cards, but you could slowly catch up over the next few
| days. And if on the contrary you run out of reviews for
| today, you could carry on with some scheduled for
| tomorrow until you've hit your target time.
|
| FSRS can handle off-schedule reviews just fine, I think,
| so it should be able to accommodate such a rhythm where
| you don't always review cards on exactly the optimal day.
| travisjungroth wrote:
| > All the SRS systems I've seen essentially assume the
| user is a perfect robot who will do their reviews every
| day without fail.
|
| This reminds me of GTO (game theory optimal) play in
| poker.
|
| There's a perfect way to do things, so we should just try
| to do something as close to that as possible, right? The
| reality is that you can't actually do things in this
| perfect way. In GTO's case it's that it's too complex for
| a human to have memorized and in SRS many (not all)
| people will fail to follow the algorithm for one reason
| or another.
|
| The problem is these strategies aren't very resilient. If
| you miss the implementation by a bit, it can cause big
| losses. An algorithm that's less theoretically optimal
| but more attainable by actual humans can end up much
| stronger in the real world.
| rsanek wrote:
| biggest insight for me as a decade+ user: ignore the due
| count. just plug away at reviews when you have time. I've
| come back multiple times from backlogs of thousands of
| cards.
|
| i really wish the UI would just hide number of cards due
| by default
| gwd wrote:
| This is one of the reasons I ended up writing my own
| language study system. I haven't used the FSRS thing
| mentioned above, but I've heard it's much better, and
| having looked at the algorithm, it seems like it should
| be better.
|
| The other reason I wrote my own system was to integrate
| SRS with extensive reading. Basically, my algorithm
| tracks the difficulty of all the words and grammar
| concepts, like FSRS; but then it gives you content at the
| right level for learning (either fewer than 5 new
| concepts, or an average of 95% known material).
|
| And among the things that fits, it balances reviewing
| older material and learning newer material, based on what
| would have the largest impact. (Reviewing something
| you're about to forget has a bigger impact than learning
| something new, because the new thing you're going to
| forget much more quickly. So the balance of new / review
| and spaced repetition falls out naturally.)
| watwut wrote:
| First thing that comes to my mind is that it is basically
| impossible to make it show you both sides of all the cards
| you are about to see for the first time today at the same
| time. So that you can actually try to learn it in more
| effective and less frustrating way then flashing cards on
| you in random order.
|
| Second thing, control over workload should not be that
| hard. Anki requires too much tweaking to work reasonably.
|
| Third thing, both old and new algorithm have a notion of
| "you are pressing the buttons wrong". If you are pressing
| the buttons wrong, you will end up with absurd intervals -
| like 4 months interval on something you just learned.
| Pooge wrote:
| I think the default settings are fine for 99% of the users.
| I've used them to "master" a language and I've been more than
| fine. Actually, I'd argue I was more effective than people
| who _didn 't_ use SRS.
| federicotdn wrote:
| Reminds me of how I'm using Anki on iOS to learn German, and
| my phone's configured language is German, except for the Anki
| app, which is ironically the only app I've configured to be
| in English because I couldn't understand what 80% of the
| buttons meant.
| Muromec wrote:
| >An HN-reading tech nerd can probably figure it out, but your
| average Duolingomaxxing normie? No chance.
|
| Me, the person who reversengineered obfuscated code doing
| weird crypto primitives and submitted patches to linux kernel
| can't figure it out either. Maybe I'm not HN nerd enough, so
| I had to do the duolingo to pass my citizenship exams.
|
| Anki seems like it works for a lot of people with a very
| specific flow, but I don't know what the flow is and why it
| doesn't work for me. It's weird.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Those reasons are why I love Anki. I'd rather have a program
| that exposes every mechanism of how it works and allows me to
| access it than a program that doesn't and the program appears
| to appear to work by magic. Give me visible cogs that I can
| tune and a good manual any day of the week.
|
| Anki is refreshing function over form design. It's beautiful.
| yellow_lead wrote:
| Compared to i.e Duolingo, the app is quite boring. I still have
| been using it for years. But I sometimes wonder if adding a bit
| of gamification may help. For instance, streaks, sound effects,
| etc. Obviously, those should be optional
| keiferski wrote:
| I used to be something of an Anki evangelist and recommended
| it to anyone that would listen. But the minute I showed it to
| someone that isn't already technically-minded, their eyes
| glazed over and they lost interest immediately.
|
| I think it just needs a fresh minimal design, a tutorial, and
| some premade decks that aren't just the half-baked free ones.
| dustincoates wrote:
| There are streaks, but they're hard to find. There is a heat
| map add-on that makes them a lot more obvious.
| wccrawford wrote:
| I've quit Duolingo _because_ of the gamification. It 's far,
| far too much, and it puts me in the wrong mindset for
| learning. Instead of concentrating on the knowledge, I'm
| gaming the system to improve my score the most. There were
| times I would stop learning because I knew if I saved it for
| later, I could use a multiplier for a higher score.
|
| And the daily emotion-tugging streak reminders started to
| actually piss me off.
|
| On top of that, at one point they were changing the icon
| regularly and made it really ugly. Despite a ton of
| complaints, they left it that way for a long time.
|
| So I canceled my subscription and I'm done with them. I'll
| find another way to study that I like (I've already tried
| Anki and it works, but I don't like it) and isn't mentally
| abusive.
| watwut wrote:
| > On top of that, at one point they were changing the icon
| regularly and made it really ugly. Despite a ton of
| complaints, they left it that way for a long time.
|
| My kids loved it. I did not cared. So, the likely
| explanation is that many people like that icon changes or
| dont mind it.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I'm of two minds about it. Duolingo is off-putting for me,
| not because of gamification as a concept, but rather
| because of their particular implementation - with tons of
| clearly user-abusive bullshit with gems and chests and
| watching ads and shit.
|
| I used to not care for gamification because I knew that my
| brain is resistant to it in activities that aren't
| otherwise rewarding on their own. Like, I quickly realize
| I'm just tricking myself, and then it stops working. But
| somewhere over the years, I must have burned out of my
| dopamine reserves or something, because apps like Anki feel
| now _actively off-putting_ , in the sense that I lose all
| energy just looking at them. Memorizing cards gets tricky
| when your eyes just glaze over them and nothing is loaded
| even to short-term memory, much less long-term. So at this
| point I'd appreciate even a little bit of immediate
| feedback and some progress tracker that evokes ever so
| slightly positive feelings.
| djeastm wrote:
| >But somewhere over the years, I must have burned out of
| my dopamine reserves or something, because apps like Anki
| feel now actively off-putting, in the sense that I lose
| all energy just looking at them
|
| This resonated with me. I think the decline in excitement
| towards learning, that we used to do without thinking
| about it, happens naturally with aging.
|
| Evolution doesn't reward older humans that much for
| learning so most of us don't feel that same excitement.
| Compare this to when we're young and need to learn fast,
| so the dopamine rewards are off the charts.
|
| Consider all of the retirees who spend hours at slot
| machines (or virtual ones like Candy Crush) to get that
| dopamine fix as easily as possible.
|
| Maybe a more tasteful gamification balance can be found.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| >watching ads
|
| Does it show you ads in the language you're learning?
| Because if so, that could be an asset...
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| There's an excellent heat map addon that helps with that.
| Some people have tried the "dopamine effect" style things
| (confetti when you answer a question etc), and it didn't work
| for me, but there are addons for it if you'd like to try it.
| watwut wrote:
| Yeah, you do Duolingo because you want to. And you control
| perfectly how much duolingo you do any give day.
|
| You do anki because you feel like you must and you have very
| little control over it.
| brightball wrote:
| I've been reading about spaced repetition and Anki for years.
| Never got around to actually trying it on anything.
|
| I wonder if there are any good recommendations for something to
| try it on?
| keiferski wrote:
| Language learning is the classic use case, but I also use it
| from everything from historical facts to encyclopedia entries
| on a subject I'm trying to master.
|
| Probably the simplest use case to get started is improving
| your English vocabulary. (Assuming English is your first
| language.) I try to add a card for any word I come across
| that I don't know the meaning of, and it works very well.
| Muromec wrote:
| Try to learn a different writing system, alphabet or not.
| Arabic, Cyrillic, Hangul, whatever. It has finite number of
| cards and you don't need large context to understand them.
| sn9 wrote:
| A quick and easy one is learning the NATO phonetic alphabet.
| You can find premade decks for it.
| yCombLinks wrote:
| Leetcode patterns, and common problem types to apply those
| patterns to.
| david_allison wrote:
| AnkiDroid maintainer here: we're actively working on a new
| design for the reviewer (currently available in the Developer
| Options in the production app).
|
| I don't think any of us are satisfied with how most things
| look, but we're severely under-resourced.
|
| Feel free to email me if you'd be interested in getting
| involved with the Android side of things.
| rsanek wrote:
| it'd be nice to have a better UI. but the reason people don't
| use Anki isn't because it's hard to use. it's because the time
| to value is high, and the value really only comes from long
| term discipline and motivation.
|
| people that are motivated and will succeed with Anki regardless
| of design will power through an annoying UI. so with better
| design, you'll increase top of funnel but radically decrease
| conversion.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| My biggest gripe with it is how clunky the editor window is.
| That's the main part that's due for a redesign in my opinion.
|
| It has other oddities too though, like the tab bar in the main
| window that doesn't act like a tab bar. It should also really
| have two button mode (Again and Good only) for the review
| screen as a built in option, too -- the addon that adds this is
| very popular and it'd be dead simple to implement.
| montebicyclelo wrote:
| Language vocab seems a good use case. What other things are
| people here using spaced repition for?
| aeonik wrote:
| Everything, I use it to memorize anything that doesn't stick
| the first time.
|
| I just don't use an app. I will challenge myself to remember
| things or practice things manually.
|
| It's probably sub optimal compared to structured spaced
| repetition, but it works well enough for me.
| Xelbair wrote:
| I used it whenever i studied anything, but with a 'recursive'
| twist.
|
| Every time i did repetition, i've made a shorter note about the
| subject.
|
| Then next repetition cycle, i'm reading the note, and making
| shorter note based on it. and so on.
|
| once few cycles i'm re-reading the main starting note i made.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Mine has all sorts of shit in it. Mac keyboard shortcuts.
| Nautical terms. Cyrillic characters. Credit card verification
| codes. Phone numbers. Airport codes. Ionic component names.
| Names of my friends' kids. A surprising amount of Z
| Specification. Anything I think it would be useful to remember.
| pcl wrote:
| How do you manage the data? Multiple decks or just one with
| everything? Do you directly use the app to add new phrases,
| or do you have some sort of automation / tooling on your
| phone or laptop?
| jicksaw wrote:
| Used it to memorize the 16 times table in decimal and
| hexadecimal.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| There's an anki deck built from the jeopardy archive with
| 400,000 questions, so I'm studying trivia that way. I enjoy
| trivia.
| Pooge wrote:
| I think I've used that deck for a few weeks. Mind sharing the
| link so I may take a look at it? :)
| kwakubiney wrote:
| I would love to get my hands on this, please share if you can
| :)
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1348564164
| johanyc wrote:
| Anything you wanna the retain the knowledge of. Basic usage is
| remebering shortcuts, names of people, apis, you name it. More
| advanced usage is you can break down complex concepts into
| atomic cards, which helps you remember how things work.
| dustincoates wrote:
| I'm using it to memorize all of the Paris metro stops and study
| for the French drivers license test. It was also a huge boon
| when I prepared for my citizenship interview.
|
| I tried it for a while with my eldest child (then aged 3) to
| help her remember numbers, letters, etc. She didn't find it
| very fun past the first couple of times, so I figured I wasn't
| going to hoist it on her.
| SamPatt wrote:
| A few uses for me:
|
| * Memorizing Geoguessr metas. Made it to Master I rank this
| way.
|
| * Memorizing new words. When I come across a word I don't know,
| I make a new flashcard for it.
|
| * Memorizing things about people. My wife's favorite ice cream
| flavors, which spices each of my children dislikes, etc.
|
| Anything I want to memorize but wouldn't be exposed to
| frequently enough in my day to day life. Flashcard review takes
| only a few minutes each day.
| patapong wrote:
| I used it all throughout my legal studies, for remembering
| legal terms, concepts, tests and any other thing I had to
| learn. It served me very nicely.
| cjauvin wrote:
| For language learning I find that using longer phrase fragments
| is better than single words.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| The advice with gendered languages is to always learn the
| word alongside some context that includes its gender, e.g.
| "Der Tisch" (The masculine table) rather than merely
| "Tisch->Table".
| jwrallie wrote:
| If the phrases are found by yourself in context from your own
| exposure to the language, it is even better.
|
| I got introduced to this idea a few years ago from AJATT [1]
| and my personal experience is that it works very well.
|
| [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100406173634/http://www.all
| jap...
| ix101 wrote:
| It's surprising how much easier to translate a foreign when
| it's given in a sentence. Also helps when there are multiple
| translations for a word depending on context.
| bryancoxwell wrote:
| I've been meaning to build a unix shell deck for a while. There
| are so many tools that are so powerful but I just don't use
| them regularly enough to remember how they work when I need
| them.
| jwrallie wrote:
| I used it to get my Amateur Radio license, since a superset of
| the questions that can be in the test are public.
|
| I downloaded an existing deck and modified it so that only the
| correct answer is shown instead of multiple choices.
|
| I still can remember some of the content even though I deleted
| the deck short after receiving my license.
| drivers99 wrote:
| HamStudy.org is exactly this, an SRS site/app that already
| has the questions and some explanations to go with it (the
| site is free, but they also have an app which is a couple
| bucks and almost the same but in my opinion slightly better).
| I used that a couple months ago I studied for the technician
| class license and got a perfect score when I took the test.
| Then I studied the general class license and got one wrong
| (34 out of 35 = 97%. You only need 26/35 = 74% to pass.) I
| could probably go for the third one next but maybe it would
| be more useful if I actually go get a radio and start using
| it first.
| nanoxide wrote:
| Used to use it in university (CS) for cramming before tests,
| mostly when there were lots of definitions to memorize. Also
| summarizing stuff and writing your own cards for it helps
| already with learning itself.
| kwakubiney wrote:
| I use it to practice Leetcode problems
| Pooge wrote:
| I'm sorry, I didn't read the article but I thought my experience
| would be a good anecdote.
|
| I've used Anki for multiple years and learned around 18'000
| Japanese words. It's difficult to say but I'd say I've learned
| how to read around 5'000 kanji. When I studied in Japan, my kanji
| reading--don't mix that up with _comprehension_!--was _way_ above
| everyone else 's. And most of my classmates were either Korean or
| Chinese.
|
| That's what 10 minutes of free time--I did that during my daily
| train rides--can get you! Keep practicing. Being ignorant is the
| first step towards becoming more knowledgeable.
| cjauvin wrote:
| There's a surprising gulf between word recognition and overall
| sentence comprehension. I'm learning Farsi with a combination
| of Anki and Youtube videos and sometimes I find myself in the
| weird state where I recognize every word in a sentence, but yet
| cannot assemble its overall meaning.
| Pooge wrote:
| I completely get what you mean and I had the same trouble.
| But keep at it, it will click.
| 55555 wrote:
| Yeah there's a few different levels. 1) not knowing the words
| 2) knowing all the words but not what they mean together 3)
| not being able to keep up with the speed at which the
| sentence is spoken...
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| Not buying at all that you learned 18000 words and 5000 kanji
| in ten minutes per day. Thats 60 hours a year for say five
| year, or 300 hours. Thats leaves you with about 70 words and/or
| kanji per hour or less than a minute per word/kanji. A rate
| which far surpasses native speakers.
|
| Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.
| iamben wrote:
| Sure, but I didn't read it as 10 minutes a day. The comment
| says ten minutes of free time. So could be 4 train rides, 10
| mins after you finish your sandwich at lunch, 10 mins with
| your coffee in the morning, etc etc.
| mdp2021 wrote:
| > _ten minutes per day_
|
| ...Maybe the poster meant "<<10 minutes>> _per ride_ "?
| (<<That's what 10 minutes of free time - I did that during my
| daily train rides>>)
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| That isn't terribly far off. I used Anki throughout my A
| levels, spending about 250 hours on it in total according to
| its statistics, and had something like 10k cards that I
| reviewed 50k times.
|
| Now, those cards weren't alone - they were reinforcing
| content that I'd learnt in lessons. But if they were doing it
| for 10 minutes a day a few times a day, it seems quite
| plausible to me.
| Pooge wrote:
| Whoops, sorry if that was confusing.
|
| Actually, it took me 20 minutes of time per day to do my
| reviews + new words. I had, on average, 200 cards to go
| through daily (180 review + 20 new cards).[1] Going through
| 18'000 words took me around 5 years. 5x365x20=36'500
|
| > A rate which far surpasses native speakers.
|
| Are you comparing me to babies? It took me 2 weekends to
| learn all kana, but it takes _years_ for a toddler to learn
| just hiragana. It 's not a fair comparison.
|
| > Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.
|
| I wonder why you think it's unrealistic. It's not like I'm a
| genius or anything.[2]
|
| [1] Two cards is one word; one for English -> Japanese, one
| for Japanese -> English.
|
| [2] Some teachers definitely thought I was a genius because
| of my memory, but it was all thanks to Anki. And proof is
| that I was absolutely _bad_ at text comprehension. Anki doesn
| 't make you practice that.
| latentsea wrote:
| I learned 17.5k words comprised of ~3k kanji in around 2
| years at about an hour a day of review time. That's reviews +
| new cards, not including time immersing in order to find the
| daily quota of new vocab which itself was 2 to 3 hours of
| study.
|
| So, by my calculations for just the Anki time alone it's
| about 17.5k words split across 730 hours, which comes out to
| about 23 words and hour or one word every 2.5 minutes.
|
| I've seen a pretty wide variety of people do Anki, and I can
| say there's a distribution in length of time per card for
| basically the exact same types of cards among people. The
| slowest people average around 3x slower than the fastest.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| I made a tool based on this principle!
|
| We spend hours a day browsing the web, so I made a browser
| extension[0] that translates sentences at your knowledge level
| into the language you're learning, so that you're always
| learning a little through immersion.
|
| I also used the same "10 minutes a day on Anki" strategy with
| my A levels, and it made the revision process so so much nicer
| because stuff I'd learnt two years ago was as fresh as if I'd
| learnt it a couple of months ago, rather than years.
|
| [0] https://nuenki.app
| chappi42 wrote:
| Looks not bad but a) billing/prices should imho be prominent
| and not hidden behind trial or get started. And b) not sure
| if 5/12/20 per month is not too much? The About section is
| nice. (I use two other paid language services, thus no
| need/interest in another)
| jjmarr wrote:
| Fascinating, great app. I wish it automatically adjusted the
| difficulty based on whether I understood the sentence.
| grep_name wrote:
| I've tried to get into anki a bunch of times but never stick
| with it. It's an on-and-off thing for me that I end up looking
| into again every few years, which I've gone through about 5
| times now. Here's how it usually goes:
|
| * Get interested in memorizing something / multiple things
|
| * Find that the decks available to me are actually not so great
|
| * Get reading online, people say that the _real_ way to benefit
| from it is to make your own deck (which ups the time commitment
| significantly)
|
| * Read online about how to get the most out of anki, find out
| that everyone universally agrees that the default settings are
| _terrible_ but nobody quite agrees on how to set it for best
| results
|
| * Try to hit a happy medium, but find that the overhead of
| 'rating' the difficulty of recall for cards (and how it
| interacts with the complex settings that I still don't have
| complete confidence in) adds an incredibly (to me) distracting
| amount of overhead and never get used to it
|
| * Miss a few days, get overwhelmed with the amount of cards
| stacked up, don't feel good about my settings (which have
| implications for what cards show up like, a year + down the
| line)
|
| * Ultimately fizzle out
|
| I'm probably going to start the cycle over again soon. I really
| do want it to work out for me. Any tips to avoid this issue?
| I'm planning to actually pay for some decks this time to see if
| that gets me to the quality I want, and going to skip the whole
| 'trying to make my own deck' thing for now
| david_allison wrote:
| Given what you've said:
|
| * Make your own cards (unless there's an automated workflow
| [Japanese, sentence mining], really good shared decks, or
| you're studying for a standardized exam [USMLE])
|
| * Deck Settings (scheduling): Enable FSRS. Press 'Optimize',
| then press optimize once per month.
|
| * Deck Settings (workload): Wait 2 weeks before gradually
| increasing new cards per day (if you want to study for
| longer). Decrease it immediately if you feel you're getting
| overwhelmed.
|
| * Deck Settings (backlog): Set max reviews/day to 9999
|
| * App Settings: Disable 'Show next review time above answer
| buttons'
|
| * Addons: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/876946123 (you seem
| to have a problem with answer button selection)
|
| * Recommended: Press 'sync', and create an AnkiWeb account.
| In app settings, set Anki to auto-sync on open/close. This is
| a free backup.
|
| * Optional: Use a mobile client (AnkiDroid is free on
| Android, AnkiWeb is free on iOS)
|
| You'll feel like you completed the first day far too quickly,
| and will want to do more. Avoid overstudying until you build
| intuition for how it impacts your daily workload.
|
| Use Anki every day
| grep_name wrote:
| Thank you, the pass / fail addon will help a lot I think,
| in addition to the FSRS features included in the article.
| I'll come back to this comment for setting up my settings
| before starting up again with Anki.
|
| If I'm planning to learn several topics at once (I'm never
| preparing for anything I will be tested on or hit a
| deadline for, this is not for a school, work, or travel
| program), is it better to treat the decks as one big
| combined review do you think?
| david_allison wrote:
| Your call.
|
| Ideally one deck, but add a tag when creating the note,
| so you can separate things out later if you want to pause
| learning something/split them out.
| Pooge wrote:
| > Use Anki every day
|
| I think this is great advice. I have some friends that used
| Anki that told me "oh yeah I just study once per week" and
| I just had PTSD of when I forgot to do one _day_. Sometimes
| I would miss a day due to traveling and timezone difference
| and I would instantly panic when I would see 400+ cards to
| review.
|
| If you don't do it daily, Anki doesn't make any sense to
| me. My recommendation--to that friend and everyone else--is
| to study a little bit _every_ day. It 's much better for
| building a strong foundation, especially for languages.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| Yeah, ignore the "defaults are terrible" people. Turn on
| FSRS, if it isn't on by default (I think it is), and forget
| about it.
|
| I have seen this opinion offered hundreds of times and each
| and every time I reflect upon the irony that not one of these
| commenters having trouble navigating the UI, etc to their
| liking doesn't just ... Make Anki cards about Anki.
|
| If that sounds silly, it shouldn't. I've made flashcards out
| of all kinds of other programs, from vim to shell shortcuts
| to Photoshop. Nobody ever expects an interface built for
| professionals to be something they can just waltz in on and
| understand perfectly on day 1.
| charcircuit wrote:
| The current version of the supermemo algorithm is SM-18. The
| author thinks SRS has gotten way better since the author was
| previously using an out of date version of the algorithm, SM-2.
| npinsker wrote:
| SM-17 is linked from the benchmark repo:
| https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-vs-sm17, though
| I get the impression those numbers come with a dash of
| subjectivity. It seems fair to compare to older versions of the
| algorithm though because SM-17 is only used in the SuperMemo
| software (and Anki) and isn't widespread.
| mark38848 wrote:
| Why does everybody want to learn Japanese? What makes Japanese so
| enticing? Why not Mandarin or at lead Spanish?
| Pooge wrote:
| I'd say it's confirmation bias. In my personal circle, not a
| lot of people are interested in the Japanese _language_ , but I
| know a few who took at least a few lessons on Mandarin or
| Spanish.
|
| I've learned Japanese and part of the reason is that I thought
| kanji were attractive. I remember watching anime on TV when I
| was a kid and seeing the opening credits with Japanese
| characters looked soo cool.
| wccrawford wrote:
| For me, it's about the media. I'm interested in Japanese anime
| and manga, and now light novels.
|
| I'm not at all interested in anything I've seen in other non-
| English languages, except _possibly_ Korean now, since they
| seem to be producing a lot of stuff.
|
| However, almost everything that I'd enjoy gets translated to
| English for both Japanese and Korean now, so there's a lot less
| incentive to learn them.
| jwrallie wrote:
| When I was a kid, most of the foreign culture I was exposed
| from came from the US, and then Japan followed with a small
| amount.
|
| No wonder my second language was English and third language
| Japanese.
|
| Never heard a single word of Mandarin in any media I was
| exposed to. I can understand Spanish very well but I do not
| count it as a learned language as it is too close to Portuguese
| (my first language).
| FranzFerdiNaN wrote:
| Online everyone learns Japanese, in real life i have never
| encountered anyone learning it, while i know multiple people
| learning French.
| dagw wrote:
| Japanese media is quite popular, and many fans want to
| watch/read their favourite thing in its original language. This
| is probably the reason most people learn a language, and a huge
| reason why so many kids around the world speak English. Chinese
| culture doesn't have the same impact, yet. As to Spanish, most
| kids who want to learn Spanish can do so at school so there is
| no need to go above and beyond to learn Spanish on your own.
| Llamamoe wrote:
| > Chinese culture doesn't have the same impact, yet.
|
| At this rate if 2/3rds of their popular media(manhua, games,
| animation) continues being cultivation fantasy featuring the
| exact same power system, tropes, character archetypes, often
| even setting(murim) and content, it never will.
|
| Animanga were always poised to make it big, because for all
| their shortcomings, they have interesting, exotic(to us)
| themes/tropes/vibes, and go really hard on hyping scenes up.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Ego.
|
| Chinese evil. Communist. Bad. Bad Chinese. Bad bad. Cheap
| products.
|
| Japanese. exotic. mystical. Samurai. Ninja. Anime. Good. Sony.
| Good. Good cars. Zen. Good.
|
| Me good. Me learn Japanese. Me exotic and mystical. Super
| power. Me good. Me smart. Me learned Japanse. Me great.
|
| Me me me. Me me me. Me me me.
| bowsamic wrote:
| 1. Generally people using such systems to learn language only
| need to do so if they aren't immersed in the country where it
| is being spoken. I stopped using Anki for German after a while
| of living here, even though I'm still learning. Therefore, most
| language learners are doing so not because they want to live in
| the country but because they want to consume media written in
| that language
|
| 2. Japanese is becoming one of the most popular languages for
| foreign media, probably even surpassing English at this point.
| Anime is really huge now, particularly in the US. It has
| shifted from being a nerd thing to being of interest for the
| "cool kids" (if there is even such a thing now). Japan also had
| a huge and very interesting media industry in the 80s and 90s
| including some very novel video game concepts, most of which
| has not been translated
| wongarsu wrote:
| You learn Japanese for the media and culture; Mandarin for the
| financial opportunities; Russian for the reverse-engineering
| community; Spanish, French or Arabic to be able to speak with
| large diverse groups of people, typically for travel; Klingon,
| Na'vi, Esperanto or Elvish to fit in certain communities
|
| Accordingly, the stereotypical CS major is attracted to
| Japanese and Klingon, the stereotypical Business major to
| Chinese. Even though few follow through because of the amount
| of work and perseverance required
| OuterVale wrote:
| For anyone looking to read more about spaced repetition, Gwern's
| Spaced Repetition for Efficient Learning is worth checking out.
|
| https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition
| SirHumphrey wrote:
| I find with spaced repetition that it works really well for some
| well-known things like vocabulary (EDIT: well-known meant as
| "spaced repetition is well-known to work for this use-case, not
| well-known as "the subject is well understood"), medical etc. but
| for everything else it becomes a struggle for a long time.
|
| I have been trying for years to fined a way to use it for
| mathematics and physics - with the former being more of a focus
| and didn't really get anywhere. For definitions it works, but
| it's quite hard to write proofs in a way where there is a short
| obvious memorization based answer. Either you spend far too much
| time on a card or the card gives you too much information so you
| don't really test the knowledge.
|
| I also tried it for computer shortcuts - it seems to me that they
| are really useful only when part of the muscle memory - so
| practicing them works better then memorization.
| Muvasa wrote:
| i've learned entire math topics calc 1, calc2, calc3,
| statistics, linear algebra with anki. It's really easy. Just
| add the parctice problems at the end of the chapter to the
| front and the answer on the back.
| sn9 wrote:
| Yeah you're basically just using the algorithm to schedule
| review, just like going through old problem sets.
|
| It's the next best thing to getting an infinite stream of new
| problems of a type of problem.
| bawolff wrote:
| I feel like its asking a lot to use flash cards to learn things
| that aren't about memorization.
| raincole wrote:
| > it works really well for some well-known things like
| vocabulary
|
| And mathematics and physics, which are (at undergraduate level)
| even more well-understood than vocabulary.
| InkCanon wrote:
| It's someone I wondered, what is the point of memorizing a
| proof if it only ever proves something you already know. The
| answer is you hope it generalises. There is a possible way you
| can do it in SRS, being inspired by RL training. Instead of
| cards you'd show options within a game or simulation. But this
| would need a lot of expert knowledge for a single concept.
| bawolff wrote:
| Sure, but if you are memorizing the proof instead of
| understanding it, you aren't going to be able to generalize
| it.
|
| In general, math is not a subject where memorization is going
| to get you ahead. The "why" matters much more than the
| "what".
| jarrett-ye wrote:
| Math Academy provided a self-service learning system with a
| novel spaced repetition algorithm which could take the
| hierarchical body of math into account.
| on_the_train wrote:
| Anki is a good piece of software. But I couldn't come up with a
| worse scheduling algorithm if I tried (old and new one). It's
| like "here's the thing you just added one second ago. Here it's
| again immediately after. Ok you got it, you'll see it once again
| in a month or so lol".
|
| It makes it unusable and every time I tried I went back to my own
| self written program that just lets me set/adjust the intervals
| myself.
| dark_mode wrote:
| When was the last time you tried? Anki used a static algorithm
| (SuperMemo 2) before the new FSRS - which is dramatically
| different.
|
| In the short term (first day), I think it's still better to set
| your own intervals (typicall 1 minute, then 5, then 10). But
| after that, the algorithm optimizes for reminding you just
| before forgetting. Highly recommend giving it a try.
| on_the_train wrote:
| I try Anki every couple of years because it has an app and
| can sync. I also tried fsrs and rage quitted after a few
| tests. These people can get high and mighty on their algos
| and research. If they'd just add a manual interval mode
| they'd contribute a lot more to humanity.
| jarrett-ye wrote:
| I guess what you need is Set Due Date, which allows you
| manually schedule cards in Anki.
| on_the_train wrote:
| In my own tool I can do "+10%" or "+2 days"
| jarrett-ye wrote:
| Good feature! I guess someone could implement it via an
| add-on of Anki.
| cjauvin wrote:
| What I find interesting about spaced repetition is the underlying
| thesis that raw memorization, in certain contexts, is playing a
| more important role for learning than what some modern education
| ideas would make you assume. In mathematics or programming, for
| instance, there is this idea that understanding a concept is
| better than memorizing algorithms or recipes (derivation methods
| for instance). But spaced repetition challenges that, in a sense.
| keiferski wrote:
| If you zoom out and look and the shift in educational systems
| from pre-industrial revolution to modernity, memorization is a
| key topic. Basically educational reformers wanted a switch from
| memorization-heavy classics-based education with lots of Latin
| and Greek - to one with less emphasis on memorizing and more
| technical focus, more "understanding" and so on.
|
| Like other big cultural shifts from the time, the correction
| was necessary but also probably went too far in the opposite
| direction.
|
| Which is a long way of saying that memorization is underrated
| and it mostly has a bad reputation from anti-Victorian
| reformers.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Most modern programming lives by the idea that you don't need
| to remember something as long as you remember where to look it
| up. Of course that's only true for some things: I can look up
| an API call, but I need a reasonably complete working knowledge
| of the concepts offered by my chosen programming language and
| its idiomatic design patterns. In most cases this is maintained
| through application (practice is unstructured spaced
| repetition), but if I wanted to get into say C++-based driver
| development then spaced repetition would definitely help build
| and maintain the necessary knowledge
| InkCanon wrote:
| I think the difference in recall- knowledgeable and logical-
| model-knowledge will be really interesting. LLMs appear to
| strongly be the first. But this is very hopeless on
| mathematics.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >But spaced repetition challenges that, in a sense.
|
| Common sense challenges this honestly. Education systems that
| traditionally have put a strong focus on repetition,
| memorization and what you could call neuromuscular training
| (e.g China, the USSR, France) in particluar in STEM far
| outperform anyone else. Vietnam outperforms most rich
| countries.
|
| In programming circles it's a cultural cliche because our
| profession is full of people who go by: "I am a genius, I work
| smart, not hard", probably the most damaging idea ever uttered
| in education, and in the humanities it's seen as culturally
| unsophisticated.
|
| In reality, 95% of everything is mechanics. Starcraft, math,
| even literature and acting. Creative freedom is enabled only by
| a large body of effortless recollection.
| 0xDEAFBEAD wrote:
| The UK and Germany outperform France in average learning
| outcomes according to Our World in Data:
|
| https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-harmonized-
| learni...
| sn9 wrote:
| Memory is a prerequisite for understanding.
|
| You can't understand something you can't remember.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| It makes sense to memorize elementary operations that are
| reused frequently because that frees your mind to focus on the
| "higher level of abstraction" of learning. You probably learned
| the multiplication tables by heart before you were asked to do
| more complicated multiplication problems for example.
| c7b wrote:
| Are there any algorithms/plugins that are optimized for an
| on-/off-review style (ie, potentially months-long gaps between
| sessions)? I know that the ideal would be to do reviews every
| day, but I'm doing this for pleasure and I'd rather tweak the
| algorithm to what works for me than the other way round.
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| I made this a long time ago, it uses embeddings to prioritize
| diversity:
| https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/AnnA_Anki_neuronal_A...
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Repeatedly memorizing the same thing over and again does not make
| one smart.
|
| Ofocurse it does help you win stupid games.
|
| Like scoring good marks in exams.
|
| So that you can spend the next 30 years of your life doing jobs
| you hate for money to just end up dead for infinity.
| Smaug123 wrote:
| You're free to choose not to memorise things, but please don't
| be an arsehole about people who do want to do so for whatever
| reason. Having said that, you seem to misunderstand the point
| of spaced repetition, which is that you _don 't_ memorise the
| same thing over and over again; instead, you memorise it enough
| times to learn it, and not many more.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| When was I being an asshole. Your ego took whatever I said
| personally.
| kaklslkd wrote:
| Reality check incoming. Yes you are an asshole. Your word
| choice matters, and you picked a large number of insulting
| terms.
|
| "not ... smart", "[only use is to] win stupid games.",
| "[you will spend] your life doing jobs you hate for money".
|
| My dude, I'm learning Japanese vocabulary, which has helped
| me to start reading light novels for fun. By your argument:
| I'm not smart, wasting my time, and hate my life, or soon
| will?
|
| Thing is I would fully agree with you that memorizing !=
| comprehension, but that doesn't mean than memorizing is
| without it's use. Do yourself a favor and learn to not be
| so rude. It is literally the first item in the site
| guidelines:
|
| > Be kind. Don't be snarky.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| You got triggered because I said memorizing something
| doesn't make one smart. And called me an asshole.
|
| You also said reading stuff in English give you less
| satisfaction than reading in Japanese.
|
| You might want to reflect on why that is the case.
| kaklslkd wrote:
| Triggered? Nah, I was merely answering your question.
| It's clear at this point that any more time I spend here
| would only be feeding a troll, so rather than address any
| of that nonsense I think I'll do something more
| productive instead. Maybe I'll do some flashcards.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Capable of making any arguments than name calling?
| iandanforth wrote:
| I wrote "Why Anki Doesn't Work for Me"
| (https://medium.com/@iandanforth/why-anki-doesnt-work-for-me-...)
| six years ago, which means it was before the new algorithm was
| implemented. While Anki likely still suffers from all the other
| issues I mentioned, this directly addresses my point (3). I'm
| going to have to give it another try and see if the other points
| are still too much friction, or if the frustration caused by the
| algorithm was a majority of my pain.
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| I switched to FSRS via the extension partway through my A
| levels. I also used the little google collab notebook to custom
| fit it to my learning patterns - I'm not sure if that's in the
| version that was merged into the main version.
|
| It about halved the amount of reviews I needed to do, and they
| didn't come up in bursts, so they were a lot more pleasant. I
| didn't quite believe it at first, and worried that it would be
| less effective, but it worked just as well if not better.
|
| I really recommend giving it another try!
| scalingpilled wrote:
| I'm doing my A-levels at the moment with economics and
| geography still to go, do you have any tips or advice for
| leveraging FSRS / tailoring it to my learning style that is
| more specific to A-levels, based on your experience?
| Alex-Programs wrote:
| Good luck!
|
| I personally used Anki the whole time, so if you're
| currently doing your exams some of my advice might not be
| super useful. I did maths, physics, and computer science. I
| didn't use flashcards much for maths - just for the
| irritating stats equations - but used it extensively for
| physics, and a little for compsci (I barely studied for
| compsci).
|
| During my GCSEs I extensively used them for history, which
| is probably the closest analogue to the wordy questions
| you'll get in geography. I used it for facts, order of
| events, etc. I found that the process of organising history
| into a well-organised Obsidian database, then distilling it
| into flashcards, was as useful as the flashcard reviews
| itself. I recommend separating your rough working during
| class (e.g. the short essays you write at the end of a
| lesson) and your organised notes, which I split into
| separate, interlinked concepts with flashcards at the
| bottom of the file synced with Anki via an extension.
|
| I suppose the advice I'd have is
|
| - Cloze cards are excellent, and you should use them
|
| - You can't flashcard your way to mental models. Absolutely
| don't rely on them alone, and you need to do practice
| questions for every separate question type you'll get until
| you're confident with the mental model itself.
|
| - That said, it's easy to get into the trap of remembering
| the answers to flashcards as words. While this lets you
| "learn" quicker, and speed up reviews, I found that I had
| much better real-world results when I tried to actually
| "load in" the mental model into my head. So for example, if
| I had a flashcard about refraction behaviour, I'd not just
| answer the question, I'd also visualise a laser going from
| air into water and how the behaviour of the light changed
| as the angle changed.
|
| For history, it's been a while, but if I had a question
| about one factor in a broader crisis (e.g. the Berlin
| Airlift) I'd try to think about the broader context of the
| question - not in my internal monologue, but just vaguely
| considering the various factors involved, the period of
| history, personally I instinctively visualise a map, etc,
| for a second or two before clicking for the answer.
|
| Edit: Oh, and the heatmap extension is great. It gives you
| streaks and a heat map that you really don't want to break!
| sn9 wrote:
| Ali Abdaal's Youtube channel has a bunch of older videos
| you'll probably find useful: https://www.youtube.com/playli
| st?list=PL7BImOT2srcGCCjBBwNvU...
| echelon wrote:
| WaniKani has the best UI for any SRS software I've ever seen,
| but they suffer from the old algorithm. They're guilty of all
| of your points and the article's fourth heading concern:
|
| > And the idea that you'll literally never see a card again
| after the last interval is terrifying, as it means you're
| constantly losing knowledge.
| rendaw wrote:
| I had similar issues... anki would drill me hard while stuff
| was still in short term memory (single session) then push it
| back weeks or months before I had any retention. I'd get to it
| again and it'd be completely gone, queue re-learning it from
| scratch.
|
| I brought it up around the time I tried it and got shouted
| down. Pretty much every spaced repetition app was treating anki
| like a holy emissary, so I gave up on spaced repetition
| entirely.
| Aerroon wrote:
| I had a similar experience. In retrospect I felt like I was
| wasting my time trying to use it. I somehow ended up with
| memorization sessions that were too easy and impossibly hard
| and there seemed to be no way to kind of bridge the gap.
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| There is definitely an aspect of online language learning
| communities where certain sanctioned methods are treated as
| gifts from the gods, while other methods brand you as a no-
| good heretic who doesn't _really_ want to learn the language.
| b0ringdeveloper wrote:
| I like WaniKani because it forces me to type the right answer.
| When I tried Anki, it was too easy for me to "cheat" and press
| space for something I "kinda" remembered.
|
| I do agree with the author's phrase of "...a daily ritual of
| feeling bad about what you've forgotten..." though, and would
| like to try the new algorithm. Is there a way to configure Anki
| to force you to type the correct answer?
| david_allison wrote:
| You can set up Anki to force you to type answers; use Basic
| (type in the answer) when creating cards.
|
| 20 second video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxEqRe1Pp1w
|
| It's possible to batch convert your cards to this format using
| Anki's "Card Templates" feature.
|
| https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/fields.html#checking-your...
| amluto wrote:
| My personal peeve about Anki: I don't like its data model. It
| seems to me that there ought to be collections of notes (which
| might be things one would download or generate with an LLM or
| make yourself or share with friends or students). On top of one
| or more collections of notes are the sets of cards to want to
| learn, and they can derive from the notes. This includes,
| roughly, templates plus some concept of which cards are enabled.
| On top of that is the spaced repetition history and model. There
| also ought to be a way to constrain what cards should be studied
| in a given session. (For example, if learning Chinese or
| Japanese, one might want to have a pencil and paper when
| practicing writing but not reading. When practicing without
| paper, one might want to skip the writing cards.)
|
| Anki doesn't seem to separate these layers at all. Everything is
| a monolithic database. Import is unpleasant. Export is
| unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant. Doing anything other than
| practicing and editing in the UI is unpleasant. And, every time I
| try Anki, I get stuck when I can't manipulate my own data outside
| Anki.
|
| Is there any system out there that doesn't have this issue?
| ape4 wrote:
| Yeah, if you're learning a language, have a group of restaurant
| words and another group about air travel, etc. Then then user
| will associate them.
| runarberg wrote:
| For that I buy a vocabulary book, or a phrase book. As I read
| through it, and if I don't know a word or understand a
| sentence, I try to learn it using various methods, and create
| an Anki card to keep it in memory. Anki is just to retain the
| word.
|
| On a plus side, you can buy specialized vocab/phrase books, I
| have one just for onomonopias. Also my beginner vocab books
| come with recordings from actual native speaker voice actors,
| which I add to the deck. Much better quality than anything an
| LLM or speech synthesizers can give you.
| echelon wrote:
| Seems like a YC business in the making. There's demand for
| improvements, and you already have your pitch.
|
| Sprinkle in AI and you'd be a shoe-in.
| Graziano_M wrote:
| What are you talking about? Anki explicitly has the concept of
| 'notes' from which one or more 'cards' are derived. You can
| absolutely easily make custom decks that only have certain card
| types.
| Ajedi32 wrote:
| Yeah I'm confused too. "I don't like its data model. I wish
| the data model was instead <perfectly describes Anki's data
| model>".
| TheDong wrote:
| > there ought to be collections of notes (which might be things
| one would download or generate with an LLM or make yourself or
| share with friends or students). On top of one or more
| collections of notes are the sets of cards to want to learn
|
| Is that not what anki does? You have a collection of cards,
| each card can be in one or more decks derived from the cards.
|
| > There also ought to be a way to constrain what cards should
| be studied in a given session
|
| That's also decks. You can have your 'Japanese' deck, and then
| the 'Japanese::writing' subdeck for the subset which require
| you to have your writing materials handy.
|
| You can also use "Better Tags" to tag cards, and then create a
| sub-deck with an ad-hoc tag query to only study a subset if you
| want.
|
| Does creating more decks and then studying the subset you want
| to in a session not work for what you want?
|
| > Anki doesn't seem to separate these layers at all. Everything
| is a monolithic database.
|
| Decks are separate files which can be shared, edited, created,
| studied, and reasoned about independently.
|
| The "spaced repetition model" in anki is obviously separate
| from the fact that there are multiple (FSRS and the old one).
|
| > Export is unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant
|
| It's just files (zip files really). What's unpleasant about it?
|
| > And, every time I try Anki, I get stuck when I can't
| manipulate my own data outside Anki.
|
| There's libraries to manipulate anki decks outside of anki for
| practically every programming languages. There are literally
| dozens of tools that can generate and import anki cards, such
| as the large family of japanese "mining" tools which create
| anki cards from media, dictionary entries, etc etc.
|
| It's open source, and the code has clean library abstractions
| you can work with, so it's trivial to nab any of the data out
| of it.
|
| > Is there any system out there that doesn't have this issue?
|
| Every issue you described is something that I experienced in
| other software, but which anki solved for me, so for me "anki"
| is that system.
| amluto wrote:
| > Is that not what anki does? You have a collection of cards,
| each card can be in one or more decks derived from the cards.
|
| Kind of? As far as I can tell (and I haven't spent enormous
| amounts of time digging in), there are decks, and a deck
| contains the notes, the templates (and the cards, which may
| or may not have any sort of independent existence outside the
| notes and templates that generate them?), and a deck also
| contains the scheduling information.
|
| One can export the textual and markup contents of decks, but
| not the media, into a text file, and one can re-import it,
| supposedly losslessly. One can also export a deck minus
| scheduling information for sharing purposes. I'm not sure
| that one can re-import it.
|
| Then there is a collection, which is the whole world: decks
| along with their scheduling info.
|
| > That's also decks. You can have your 'Japanese' deck, and
| then the 'Japanese::writing' subdeck for the subset which
| require you to have your writing materials handy.
|
| I'm guessing that, if I start by importing a Japanese deck
| from some other source (because, for example, there's a
| source with high-quality notes), and then I split it into a
| writing subdeck, and then the original source adds new notes
| for new words or makes changes or whatever, that merging the
| results is basically unsupported.
|
| > > Anki doesn't seem to separate these layers at all.
| Everything is a monolithic database.
|
| > Decks are separate files which can be shared, edited,
| created, studied, and reasoned about independently.
|
| Yes, but only as monoliths (again, as far as I can tell). I
| can export an "Anki Deck Package (.apkg)", but checking that
| into git would result in a bit of nonsense. I can't export my
| scheduling information and templates separately from the
| underlying notes (or, if I can, I failed to find this
| option).
|
| >> Export is unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant
|
| > It's just files (zip files really). What's unpleasant about
| it?
|
| Excel and OpenDocument sheet files are also zip files. But
| the respective tools are less limiting and don't expect the
| users to unzip those zip files. (And their merging and text
| import/export facilities are also weak, and that's
| unfortunate.)
|
| I could be wrong about most of this. But Anki doesn't seem
| friendly to a decomposed workflow in the way that modern
| programming lanuages are.
| jaredklewis wrote:
| Maybe I misunderstood something, but I can't find anything
| in your comments that identifies a flaw with the underlying
| data model of Anki. It seems your issues are mostly about
| Anki's data management?
|
| So I would strongly suggest your check out anki-connect
| (https://git.sr.ht/~foosoft/anki-connect) which provides a
| REST API for CRUD operations on Anki notes, cards, decks,
| and media attachments.
|
| Or maybe if you can share in a little more detail on what
| you are studying, the format of the data, and the exact way
| that your attempted workflow is breaking down with Anki,
| I'd be surprised if no one had suggestions for making it
| work.
|
| Edit: also, to answer a question in your initial post, is
| there a better SRS tool out there? I've never found
| anything. For all its warts and flaws, Anki is good where
| it matters, extensible enough to support pretty much all
| use cases, and has excellent data portability.
| amluto wrote:
| Maybe "data model" is the wrong term.
|
| The last time I tried to use Anki for real, I wanted to
| set up some Chinese character cards, to be used by 2-3
| different people. I found a couple apparently high-
| quality decks online and downloaded them, and they had
| lots of characters, including (mostly) ones that I didn't
| want to include for the users in question. Removing
| content from the decks seemed wrong. Trying to make an
| actual practicable system with just the specific
| templates I wanted seemed unnecessarily complex (these
| decks had lots of fields in the notes, which is great,
| but I didn't want to use all of them). And actually
| getting the result to work for multiple users seemed like
| an exercise in poor maintainability -- I wanted to
| maintain and curate the set of notes and be able to
| update what each user was studying as needed.
|
| As the very most basic failure, Anki barely separates the
| concept of a "deck" in the sense of a set of notes from a
| "deck" in the sense of that which a particular person is
| studying. And I found that to be quite limiting.
|
| What I think I wanted was a collection of notes, where
| each note would perhaps have an id and a bunch of fields
| and their associated media. That collection should be
| copyable and ideally version controlled. And I wanted to
| create study sets that would reference the notes, select
| a subset of them and a subset of the possible templated
| cards, and track the study statistics.
| pastage wrote:
| It is a hard problem with too many solutions. Excel most
| certainly is limiting since it is a scary format for
| sharing data. Sharing highly structured info is a hard
| problem, sharing collections of the same is even harder.
|
| Programming has a similar issue code, docs, resources,
| discussions and issue tracking are not handled easily.
| uselesswords wrote:
| It's amazing how every single point you've made here is wrong
| as the other commenter already dove into. On top of that Anki
| is one of the best documented pieces of open-source software
| I've messed with. If you're able to program, ChatGPT can
| basically handle any task you want it too, I data mine the
| sqllite database regularly for my own insights.
| ilteris wrote:
| Where does your SQLite db sit? I have been thinking about
| creating a local database to save and feed into LLM but i
| have no experience with it
| runarberg wrote:
| I'm not using LLMs but I scrape open dictionary data to
| generate (massive) cards for learning kanji. I publish
| these in a specialized kanji learning app (rather than anki
| proper). My db just lives temporarily on my local machine,
| before I publish. Maybe sometime I will streamline the
| publishing process and create a github action for it.
|
| btw. I didn't use LLMs to write the app, it was still
| pretty straight forward.
|
| https://github.com/runarberg/shodoku/tree/main/scripts
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| If you export a deck as an .apkg file, you can unzip it to
| get the SQLite files:
|
| https://www.encona.com/posts/custom-statistics-for-anki-
| flas...
| yorwba wrote:
| The SQLite database file is called "collection.anki2". Its
| path varies depending on the operating system: https://docs
| .ankiweb.net/files.html?highlight=collection.ank...
| ummonk wrote:
| I think there is an argument to be made about the poor
| learning curve (ironic) for learning how to organize and use
| Anki
| lovestory wrote:
| My personal workflow with memorizing with Anki using LLMs is
| as follows: Read textbook material first. It's important that
| you understand what you are learning.You cannot just
| breakdown information into atoms and expect to understand how
| it works together (for example: you can learn that there are
| monounsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats, saturated fats
| and trans fats. But without reading beforehand about them
| from a textbook or other source, you will not understand how
| they differ (in chemical structure, biological function etc).
| After I understand the material, I feed LLM the documents
| (textbooks etc) and give it the following prompt: >I want to
| generate flashcards from the provided textbook document using
| the attached PDF. Each flashcard should contain a question
| and a corresponding answer formatted as pairs in plaintext
| code block. The structure should be: "Question","Answer"
| >Extract key concepts, definitions, and explanations from the
| textbook. If in the text imperial unit system is used,
| convert it to metric. For mathematical symbols and equations,
| format them using inline MathJax syntax because I will be
| importing the copied text to Anki. Ensure questions are clear
| and concise while answers provide a direct yet comprehensive
| response.
|
| After the text is generated, I check out the accuracy (in 95%
| of cases the cards are accurate) and I import them into my
| decks. The rest is good old school Anki memorizing.
| hiq wrote:
| I remember trying that a few months back but I was not
| convinced by the quality of the cards. It's also hard to
| convey what I think a good card is, I guess there's
| something about not getting lost in the details while
| missing the big picture.
|
| You only commented on accuracy, but what's your experience
| on relevance and how useful LLM-generated flashcards are?
|
| To be clear I've already found myself deleting some
| flashcards I made myself while reviewing them when I
| realized they were bad, so I guess one can do that for LLM-
| generated questions as well, as long as the irrelevance
| rate is somewhat similar.
| lovestory wrote:
| Well I can give you an output example. This was generated
| based on chapter from textbook about Vitamin (Vitamin D
| in this example)
|
| "Which nutrient can be synthesized by the body using
| sunlight?","Vitamin D" "What is the primary role of
| vitamin D in calcium regulation?","Raises blood calcium
| by enhancing absorption, mobilizing bone stores, and
| reducing kidney excretion" "How does vitamin D affect
| bones?","Supports bone mineralization and integrity"
| "What form does vitamin D take before
| activation?","Inactive precursor synthesized in the skin
| or consumed in diet" "Which organs activate vitamin
| D?","Liver and kidneys" "What are signs of vitamin D
| deficiency in children?","Bowed legs and bone deformities
| (rickets)" "What is osteomalacia?","Soft, weak bones in
| adults due to vitamin D deficiency" "What disease is
| caused by long-term vitamin D deficiency in
| adults?","Osteoporosis" "How does vitamin D deficiency
| affect older people?","Increases risk of fractures and
| joint pain" "What is the toxic effect of too much vitamin
| D?","Calcification of soft tissues"
|
| You get the idea. How would you rate it's usefulness is
| subjective but it gets the job done.
| sn9 wrote:
| I have been looking for a workflow to do exactly this!
|
| Which LLM do you use?
|
| Do you do anything special to structure the deck by chapter
| or section?
| lovestory wrote:
| Yes I use tags and then I display the tag using CSS at
| the bottom of each question. You can find out how to do
| this from anki manual. EDIT: this is useful because
| sometimes different chapters will contain similar
| questions but with the focus on different answer (for
| example: when studying trigonometry and when studying
| derivative of a function, similar questions will be
| present so you will need tags to guide you towards the
| answer).
| pessimizer wrote:
| Actually, every point was right and the data model is
| terrible. I've been using it for years. The other commenter
| just mentioned a list of things that the software _does do_
| and basically said "isn't that good enough for you" a bunch
| of times. No, it's not. Anki's concepts of flashcards, and
| how it stores and manipulates them, are horrible.
|
| It's hard to do many, many things in Anki that should be
| trivial, impossible to do many, many things that should be
| possible, and the things you can do involve the types of
| queries being run over your entire collection that causes the
| app to slow to a crawl after you add about a dozen decks. And
| in general: I can adjust far too many things that I don't
| even care to adjust and probably shouldn't be adjusting, and
| things that should be trivial to do are impossible.
|
| It's bad. Ankidroid is a little better, but they're also
| stuck with the data model.
| jamager wrote:
| For language learning only, but perhaps my own
| https://thehardway.app model suits you better (flashcards
| inside markdown-ish notes)
| Tijdreiziger wrote:
| Sorry, but your landing page is really awful. I'm not allowed
| to learn about your app because I'm on a tablet? And I have
| to give you my e-mail address, even though I know nothing
| about your app so far?
|
| Suggestion: Allow me to browse your site and learn about your
| application, and I'll decide if it's interesting enough for
| me to open it on my desktop later.
| jamager wrote:
| You are right, I will get around that. For what is worth, I
| do not keep the email address.
| smnplk wrote:
| How much will you be charging for the app? Is it using LLM ?
| allenu wrote:
| You're right about the data model. I built my own flashcard app
| [1], so I've had to understand the database schema that Anki
| uses and a lot of it seems very inelegant, but on the other
| hand, I can see how it was purpose-built and probably grew over
| time and things were tacked on. (For instance, there's one
| table that has a single row, where several fields are simply
| JSON dictionaries.)
|
| On the other hand, how templates work and how cloze deletions
| work are really nice. With the flashcard app I built, I didn't
| have templates, but did have a very basic cloze deletion system
| where you could mark text to be "hidden" on the front. It was
| very limited in that you'd only ever get one front/back
| combination. You could hide multiple bits of text, but they'd
| all be hidden at the same time. With Anki, you can create
| multiple groups of hidden text, so that you end up with
| multiple flashcards from the same note (i.e. you hid three
| separate groups of text, so you now have three different cards
| to test with).
|
| I've been working on an update to my app to incorporate
| templates and cloze deletions like how Anki does it, so now I
| appreciate that aspect to it.
|
| For my own database, at least in the new version I'm working
| on, I've ended up creating a schema where the individual
| attributes for each card are thrown into their own tables, but
| this is mostly because I needed to support updating individual
| attributes separately since I use a very simple journaling
| system to sync across devices. With Anki's schema, I can see
| why sync was complicated (at least in earlier versions) since
| it wasn't really built for it.
|
| [1] https://www.freshcardsapp.com/
| the_arun wrote:
| Makes sense. But is it same as "by heart"? If not, what is the
| difference?
| jwrallie wrote:
| I wonder how it compares with the current SuperMemo.
|
| I experimented with SuperMemo around 18 months ago, and it made
| me fall in love with SRS again. The main reason being the
| algorithm is less punishing when I skip a day. Maybe it has
| better defaults?
|
| I once skipped a whole week and could get back on track in the
| next week, in Anki that feels unbearable.
|
| Another thing I really liked about it is that you can edit a card
| as you are studying without having to open a separate window,
| helps me stay in the flow when studying.
|
| But... With a better algorithm I might give it a try in the
| future... Being FOSS is the real advantage here.
| david_allison wrote:
| Currently under debate. FSRS is likely better than SM-17. No
| data on SM-18
|
| Q&A/discussion:
| https://supermemopedia.com/wiki/SuperMemo_dethroned_by_FSRS
|
| Repo: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-vs-sm17
|
| Discussion: https://discord.gg/qjzcRTx =>
| https://discord.com/channels/368267295601983490/136895216717...
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Am I reading this right, did users go through >10k
| repetitions on average?
| david_allison wrote:
| Given users were self-selected SuperMemo users who needed
| to use GitHub to upload exported stats, it feels a low
| (FSRS benchmarks average ~70k per user, filtered to a
| random selection of users with > 10k reps).
|
| I wasn't involved in the benchmark, and don't know whether
| `SM16-v-SM17.csv` is a full export. Didn't see any reviews
| before 2020, and it may only be an export of a subset of
| reviews.
|
| https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/srs-
| benchmark/#dat...
| Llamamoe wrote:
| I really wish there was a FOSS equivalent to SuperMemo. Spaced
| Repetition is cool and all, but Incremental Reading that uses
| principles similar to SRS to augment learning novel content and
| then retain pieces of it through more standard spaced
| repetition is really next level.
| JackDanMeier wrote:
| I was working on a product which has FSRS implemented, and is
| heavily inspired by anki. The change we made was that rather than
| rate yourself, you have to type your answer and its graded by an
| LLM. It also has a button to explain the concept to you as if you
| are 5 (eli5) and you get feedback on your answer. You can also
| create the flashcards by uploading a pdf and then generate them
| from it.
|
| I've stopped working on it and am now building something highly
| similar aimed towards high school students, but any feedback is
| welcome. This version was built for uni students
|
| mimair.com - I never got around to adding any payment option so
| its completely free
| TheDong wrote:
| > graded by an LLM
|
| This seems impossible to me. In anki, there's "hard", "good",
| and "easy" which are all for "I got this right".
|
| For my usage, "hard" is "I got it right, but I was only like
| 60% sure", "good" is "I had to actively think", and "easy" is
| "effortlessly correct, no real thought required".
|
| There's no way for an AI to tell if my identical input is the
| result of a 50/50 guess, or a little thought, or effortless
| recall. "delay to answer" also isn't a good approximation, I
| have a habit of alt-tabbing and chatting with a friend on
| random cards of any difficulty.
|
| I find distinguishing those levels of easy for totally
| identical answers ends up making SRS more effective, and AI
| just can't know my inner thoughts. Maybe once we have brain
| implants.
| JackDanMeier wrote:
| Yes, this is also something I have been thinking about, can
| an LLM really know how well I know something. There is the
| issue with the grading with again, hard, good and easy that I
| can cut myself some slack and say "I knew that" even when I
| didn't(and I have a strong memory of having done this
| myself). And there is the possibility of bullshitting the LLM
| and just all you know about the subject rather than the exact
| definition of the flashcard. I'm leaning towards any
| knowledge rather than specifying that the exact answer should
| be graded. Whats your take?
| TheDong wrote:
| Bullshitting the AI maliciously doesn't matter, if you
| don't want to study effectively, you won't study
| effectively, and that's not a problem for the app.
|
| > any knowledge rather than specifying that the exact
| answer should be graded
|
| I don't understand what you mean. The important thing is to
| feed back into the SRS algorithm "How much does this card
| need to be studied", and if you mean "any knowledge means
| we can study it less often", then I doubt the SRS will be
| able to be effective.
|
| What are you suggesting to feed back into SRS? How will you
| ensure cards the user knows very well quickly get pushed
| way back (so the user isn't overwhelmed with a boring
| slog), and cards they only sorta know bubble up more
| quickly to start to cement the knowledge?
| JackDanMeier wrote:
| My understanding of what is important to feedback into
| the SRS is, was I able to retrieve the memory, and does
| the representation in my memory align with what I
| recalled.
|
| As an example Term: "What is the capital of France and
| how many inhabitants does it have?" Correct definition:
| "Paris, which has 2 000 000 inhabitants."
|
| For me there is a difference in not having the answer at
| all, which falls into "again". But what about if I'm able
| to retrieve that Paris is the capital, but I remember
| that the population is 1 500 000. This is where the gray
| zone begins
| TheDong wrote:
| If you want to remember the population correctly, then
| that isn't a gray zone, that's an "again". That's
| entirely unambiguous to me, and if you let yourself slide
| on that, you're hurting yourself.
|
| There's a lot more room for gray zones in language
| learning, where you might have the french card "doubler"
| and answer it as "to pass", and then see the actual
| answer is "1. to overtake, 2. to double", in which case
| you have to read your heart and decide whether missing
| the second definition was careless because it's so
| obvious, or if it merits an "again"
|
| An AI also can't really know, btw, if your answer of "to
| pass" was "to pass (overtake)" (correct), or "to pass
| (like a note in class)" (incorrect).
|
| That's not the best example, but there are a ton of
| ambiguous english words, and you only know in your own
| heart which meaning you meant.
| ix101 wrote:
| One way it could grade you automatically is by the speed of
| flipping the card (or entering the correct answer). If it
| took less than a second to confirm then evidently it was
| easy.
| TheDong wrote:
| But conversely, if I alt-tabbed to chat with a friend, or
| paused studying because the person sitting next to me asked
| a question, or I took a sip from my coffee mug, that
| doesn't mean it's hard necessarily. Even though all of
| those take at least as much time as answering a hard card
| un-interrupted would.
|
| The AI cannot read my mind, there is no approximation that
| will work reasonably accurately here for "how confident was
| I in my answer", unless I input that myself.
| JackDanMeier wrote:
| It should definitely be added as a variable within the
| calculation, but the current FSRS predicts how likely you
| are to access the memory (if it's sufficiently available
| which is defined by its retrieval strength) and speed of
| retrieval isn't really a factor in this version. The
| different grades are more to define how well all parts of
| the memory is retrieved.
|
| Not to say that how quickly you can access it doesn't play
| a role in real life.
| Muromec wrote:
| Whenever I try to use anki I can't figure what those four
| buttons actually mean, so I end up with 40 cards that I
| still can't recall and then the thing happily drops another
| 10 on top and I just delete the deck or the app. Haven't
| learned the thing I was trying to learn with it ever.
|
| Either I don't understand the algorithm or it doesn't
| understand me.
| TheDong wrote:
| My tip is to map the 1-4 difficulties as "wrong, or <60%
| confidence", "60-80% confidence, thought required", "90%+
| confidence, thought required", and "90%+ confidence, no
| serious thought".
|
| Depending on what you're learning, you might vary those.
| For language learning, that works well imo.
|
| Also, make sure to switch to FSRS. The old algorithm
| defaulted to "again" resetting a card to 0, while "again"
| in FSRS does show it again, but doesn't reset it back to
| being effectively new.
|
| If you want to understand the algorithm, read this:
| https://github.com/open-spaced-
| repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/ABC...
| runarberg wrote:
| Me too. I made a specialized Kanji learning app. My different
| approach is in the cards. I used free dictionary data to create
| a card for each kanji with all the relevant data in a single
| card. So a common kanji might have dozens (and even hundreds)
| of words (each word with 0-2 example sentences) to help you
| remember.
|
| I like the anki way of self rating, so I kept it. I want to be
| able to say: "hey, I know I screwed up the stroke order this
| time, but it won't happen again, promise" and hit "Good".
|
| https://github.com/runarberg/shodoku
|
| https://shodoku.app/
| jamager wrote:
| Rating yourself is an important trait of SRS, it forces you to
| think how you are doing, what is good enough and what not, what
| is more or less important, etc.
| Hardwired8976 wrote:
| How are people using Anki for maths? Any nice decks you could
| share?
| theodorewiles wrote:
| Has anyone tried to use an LLM to test questions / concepts in a
| broader way via spaced repetition instead of just memorization?
| Just wondering.
| covertcorvid wrote:
| RemNote (https://www.remnote.com/) solves the problems people are
| mentioning about
|
| 1) The time it takes to make cards. RemNote allows you to take
| Notion-style block notes and quickly turn bullet points into
| flashcards using symbols. For example, you might be in class and
| make a bullet point in the format
|
| _- The quick brown fox jumps over >> the lazy dog_
|
| which you can later review as a flashcard that is automatically
| separated front/back by the >>.
|
| 2) The old and unintuitive UI - again, basically just Notion with
| flashcards. You can easily view all your notes in a bullet
| hierarchy and then switch over to SR flashcard practice. Even has
| rich code blocks, image occlusion, tables etc. A much better
| implementation of Anki's notes/cards metaphor in my opinion.
|
| I am not sponsored by RemNote, just a university student who has
| bounced off Anki and really likes the app.
| golly_ned wrote:
| RemNote is incredible.
| myflash13 wrote:
| As a longtime Anki user I just want to say THANK YOU! Just
| downloaded RemNote for the first time and gave it a spin. I've
| been using Anki for years for language learning (Ukrainian and
| Russian and Arabic), but also for poetry memorization. Weird
| coincidence: a few days ago I was looking for an AI-powered
| flashcard creator: I get regular emails from curated sources
| that have lots of useful information, but I am too lazy to
| create the cards to remember the points. I just downloaded
| RemNote and tried the AI-generation feature: fed it an article
| from UkrainianLessons.com and I was amazed at how it gave me a
| list of useful flashcards instantly. This is a game changer.
| The ability to study and create "in context" is also amazing
| since not all information needs to be a flashcard. The Notion-
| like/Workflowy/Roam interface also looks like a joy to work
| with. Really hope this is not a fly-by-night startup, as I am
| really looking forward to a decade of learning with this thing
| after a previous decade with Anki.
| mfranzs wrote:
| RemNote founder here - been building RemNote for the past 8
| years (4 in private for myself, 4 in public), and we're not
| going anywhere! SRS is the future.
| covertcorvid wrote:
| Hey! Thanks for making such a useful app. Saved me hundreds
| of hours.
| sunkcapital wrote:
| This is something I've been tackling myself in the language app
| I'm making
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/3220820/Bilingual_Crosswo....
| Right now, I've added a set of front loaded intervals: 2M, 5M,
| 10M, 20M, 40M, 2H, 6H, 1D, 2D, 4D, 8D, and so on eventually
| stretching to a full year.
|
| I've always felt this setup was a bit arbitrary and considered it
| a temporary solution. Thanks for saving me some time on research!
| david_allison wrote:
| Take a look at https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/
|
| As a quick hack, increase the factor to 2.5 once you reach 1
| day. That's what Anki's SM-2 used to use (if only pressing
| 'good')
| ix101 wrote:
| This looks like a fun app!
| linux2647 wrote:
| The folks at SaySomethingIn, that originally started with Welsh
| and other Celtic languages, have recently expanded to Japanese. I
| haven't tried it myself, but I've found some decent success with
| one of their other courses. It's all about spaced repetition and
| focuses exclusively on listening and speaking.
|
| https://www.saysomethingin.com/en/
| Knork-and-Fife wrote:
| I used basically this algorithm in college with the following
| setup:
|
| Make a word document that lists all the keys to memorize
| vertically. Save as PDF
|
| Open the PDF in a viewer with annotation tools. Make a clickable
| note in the margin just next to each key. Write out the value to
| memorize in the note field.
|
| Cycle through the clickable notes. When you get one right easily,
| drag the note more to the left in the margin. As you cycle, focus
| on the ones furthest to the right. If you get one wrong, move it
| a bit further to the right.
|
| In general the notes will move to the left until you're
| comfortable with all of them. And the balancing of which ones you
| need to see and focus on plays out very naturally and you feel in
| control the whole time.
|
| There are many downsides with this compared to a tool like anki
| (e.g. I only used it on a laptop), but there was also something
| about it that just worked really well for me, so I never ended up
| switching to a different tool. But this was before anki had the
| similar algorithm described here. Maybe my experience would be
| different today
| mandmandam wrote:
| This sounds interesting, but I'm not sure I'm picturing it
| right .. You wouldn't have an example file handy?
| clircle wrote:
| Does anyone have tips for how to use space repetition to be a
| better knowledge worker? I feel like i could use it to have a
| better memory of business processes, but i dont know how to get
| started.
| broast wrote:
| I just let chatgpt quiz me anki style on topics I'm learning
| latentsea wrote:
| ChatGPT isn't a spaced repetition system, so... it's missing
| the fundamental aspect that makes it "Anki style". This comment
| doesn't make sense.
| broast wrote:
| As I understand, anki's use of spaced repetition comes from
| how it presents you cards in increasing or decreasing
| frequency based on how you have answered it previously. In
| this way, I prompt chatgpt to ask me questions, and it
| revisits previous questions or topics for me based on how
| I've answered previously. I continue the same conversation
| periodically prompting it for questions to ask me.
| latentsea wrote:
| It's an LLM, not an SRS.
| 300hoogen wrote:
| how to ace any uni theory course
|
| > download all pdfs
|
| > merge pdfs into one
|
| > compress
|
| > write a very specific prompt for gemini to turn these into anki
| cards separated by a semicolon
|
| > do 50 anki cards a day for 3/4 weeks before exam
|
| not a single lecture attended top of my class (ku leuven). feels
| like cheating honestly
| andy12_ wrote:
| You are so right. I just began doing this today for my exams,
| and it really feels like cheating with how easy it is. That,
| and also creating a podcast with NotebookLM with all the pdfs
| as source and using as a prompt "Make this a long summary for
| studying".
| joshdavham wrote:
| If anyone's interested in experimenting with FSRS, we at Open
| Spaced Repetition provide official packages in Python, Typescript
| and Rust
|
| PY: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/py-fsrs
|
| TS: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/ts-fsrs
|
| RS: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-rs
|
| Currently ts-fsrs and rs-fsrs support FSRS 6 and py-fsrs should
| also support FSRS 6 in the next day or so. Also, both py-fsrs and
| fsrs-rs include the ability to optimize the FSRS model from your
| past reviews!
| marcusbuffett wrote:
| I used this for spaced repetition for opening training on
| Chessbook, can vouch that the Rust package is excellent. Easy
| to use and immediately lowered the training load on our users
| while keeping retention high. FSRS is awesome.
| Oreb wrote:
| I use Chessbook and mostly like it, but I wish there was a
| way to configure the spaced repetition parameters. In
| particular, I find the frequency of reviews too low to retain
| well, especially for recently added moves.
| adangit wrote:
| For Ruby folks -- I've forked the FSRS gem to fix an issue
| where new cards were being spaced 60 days apart instead of 60
| seconds:
|
| https://github.com/arvindang/rb-fsrs
|
| Originally adapted from the Python version linked here.
| kazinator wrote:
| systemS? There is only one program out there that is viable:
| AnkiDroid.
|
| Anki runs on desktop: you have to be chained to a desk rather
| than taking advantage of idle moments when you are on-the-go.
| Even if you have it on a laptop, you still need a place to sit;
| SRS on mobile can be used anywhere, like standing-room-only
| public transit.
|
| The AnkiMobile companion app for iOS is a paid app that is
| somehow chained to the desktop version, whereas AnkiDroid is a
| full-featured clone of Anki that you could use air gapped without
| ever syncing anything to or from another device. It has
| integrated management of decks and note creation/editing.
|
| Every other SRS app out there is just playing very distant catch-
| up to Anki/AnkiDroid. They usually mention Anki in their pitch,
| trying desperately to explain why some very minor and very
| subjective negative point about Anki is worth switching to their
| massively inconvenient solution.
| maxdarapper wrote:
| Just added FSRS to my free mac flashcard app. If interested,
| check it out https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flashcard-
| max/id1430950704
| cubefox wrote:
| > If we step back, we realize that this scheduling system (called
| "SuperMemo-2") is pretty arbitrary. Where does the rule of 1, 6,
| 2.5times correct + 1, reset back on failure come from? It turns
| out it was developed by a college student in 1987 based on his
| personal experiments. Can't we do better?
|
| Note that Anki uses (used) such an old algorithm because it
| derived it from an ancient open source version of SuperMemo, a
| software which started the spaced repetition trend. Anki just
| added a usable GUI instead of the convoluted mess that is
| SuperMemo. Newer versions of SuperMemo improved the algorithm,
| but they are no longer open source. I wonder how FSRS compares to
| current iterations of the SuperMemo algorithm.
| celltalk wrote:
| Super nice, thank you for this post! Based on this I've updated
| the vocabulary learning scheduling in DuoBook
| (https://duobook.co) to FSRS based. We should be up to date with
| the science based learning :)
| LVB wrote:
| > Thankfully, the leading spaced repetition software, Anki, has
| incorporated FSRS as its default scheduling algorithm since
| version 23.10, released in 2023-11
|
| I've used Anki for a long time and apply updates, but I don't
| closely track changes. Based on the above, I figured I'd be using
| FSRS, but I'm not. All of my decks have that setting turned off.
| Fair enough (no silent updates to existing data), but even when I
| create a new deck, I have to turn the FSRS setting on manually. I
| found the same even with a whole new profile. What aspect of this
| is "default"? Is there a global setting I'm missing?
|
| I'm glad it's available, though, without any plugins!
| david_allison wrote:
| FSRS is not a default yet:
| https://github.com/ankitects/anki/issues/3616
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| Pro Tip , if you're using LLMs to learn, create an MCP tool for
| them to insert Anki cards on topics you're discussing in a csv on
| google drive, then sync that with you anki decks on your phone.
|
| This was a game changer for me and working with LLMS, while I
| still think they make you dumb, and we essentially use them to
| offload critical thinking (almost only find myself using them
| when tired lazy, and just cant), if you must use them use them as
| a study tool.
| maxwellg wrote:
| ChatGPT 4o's voice mode has been mindblowing for me for
| learning basic Mandarin. I'm sure I will hit the limits of the
| model sooner or later, but it has been so much fun bouncing
| around my apartment and asking what various objects are called
| / if words are related to other words. It is phenomenal for
| putting together short little sentences and getting immediate
| validation on grammar too.
|
| No MCP on ChatGPT yet, but I can ask chat to generate an output
| of what we reviewed in a structured format.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I created a python script that checks my anki deck for the
| cards that I'm scheduled to review the next day and asks an LLM
| to generate new sentences for the cards, so that every time I
| see them, I see them in a new context.
|
| I did this because I realized I was hitting an issue where I
| theoretically "knew" a word (would get it always correct on the
| card), but wouldn't always recognize it in a novel context.
|
| I'm hoping that having the context be variable when I'm
| learning it will help fix this issue.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| > _"I realized I was hitting an issue where I theoretically
| "knew" a word (would get it always correct on the card), but
| wouldn't always recognize it in a novel context."_
|
| Some of the problem is due to the specificity of the training
| effect. I.e., if you mostly practice something through flash
| cards then you're going to be training your ability to work
| with that on flash cards.
|
| With language, there's an additional challenge--many if not
| most words have different meanings in different contexts.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| Yeah, I'm trying to spend a lot more of my language
| learning time just reading/listening to content in my
| target language, but it's actually pretty difficult to find
| enough content that is in the right difficulty band where
| it has some words/grammar etc. that I am still learning but
| not so much that I just can't understand it at all.
| mrbombastic wrote:
| Check out if there are comprehensible input sites for
| your target language if you haven't already, for example
| fo spanish there is: https://www.dreamingspanish.com/
| which puts out videos labeled with various difficulties
| of speaking and listening
| TechDebtDevin wrote:
| How well does this work?
| mrbombastic wrote:
| Pretty well in my experience if you are trying to build
| listening comprehension and pronunciation. But it is just
| one tool in tool belt would recommend just as augmenting
| other language learning tools.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Very well, but it's very slow compared to what you can do
| if you mix it up with some higher effort activities.
| sasjaws wrote:
| I'm building a reader app that tries to solve this exact
| problem by providing a range of gradually simplified
| versions of each article to match your proficiency. So
| you can stay in the sweet spot, or work your way up
| version by version.
|
| If your target language happens to be Chinese then you
| can give it a try at https://reader.longyan.io/landing
|
| No login required, love your feedback.
| AlchemistCamp wrote:
| Sure. This kind of project seems to be pretty common. I'd
| strongly suggest using traditional characters as a base
| because it's very easy to map multiple characters into
| simplified forms but much harder to disambiguate
| simplified forms into the traditional versions.
|
| Related comment on another app:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43769831
| Llamamoe wrote:
| That sounds like a really useful project!! Have you
| considered publishing it?
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I don't think what I wrote would be very generally useful,
| other than the basic idea of it. I wrote it with some
| pretty narrow assumptions about card layout etc that work
| for my exact deck, and it's not designed to be flexible. It
| wouldn't be hard to adjust it I don't think, but also it's
| such a simple script, that once you have gotten to the
| point of changing it, you aren't much beyond writing it
| from scratch either.
| bspammer wrote:
| That's a really clever use for LLMs, I have the exact same
| problem with my Anki deck. Do you store all the historical
| sentences for each card or is it just a destructive overwrite
| each time?
| udit99 wrote:
| > f you're using LLMs to learn, create an MCP tool for them to
| insert Anki cards on topics you're discussing in a csv on
| google drive, then sync that with you anki decks on your phone.
|
| Speaking for myself, I'd love to see a blogpost detailing how
| this is done. At the very least, I'd love to know: How are you
| syncing csvs to anki cards and how does the MCP interaction
| look like for an LLMs response to the CSV creation
| ouija wrote:
| Interesting. I was never really happy with any spaced repetition
| algorithm, so I recently implemented my own dumb system which
| simply asks you for the number of days after which the card shall
| be shown again: https://github.com/kldtz/vmn
|
| Usually my intuition about how well I know something is not too
| far off. If you don't specify anything, it doubles the time since
| the last review.
| qrobit wrote:
| I had a similar problem where I can't remember the answer to
| the card, but after revealing it, it seemed too easy to make it
| due in a few days, so I would lie to the program and press
| Hard/Good. Later I removed scheduling times on top of buttons
| and decided to trust the algorithm. I believe it helped me to
| stop caring about schedule times and loosing progress on a
| certain card. After all, these algorithms were made for
| ordinary people with ordinary memory behavior.
| ouija wrote:
| I think my problem is that I'm not using the system as
| intended. I learn new vocabulary mainly by reading texts or
| watching videos in the target language and use spaced
| repetition to keep track of my progress. If I can't remember
| a word (as indicated by SR), I'll reread the text/rewatch the
| video where I've first encountered it. I don't want to keep
| reviewing the same word in my spaced repetition program,
| especially not in the same session.
| tootyskooty wrote:
| They have gotten better and I think it's clear they'll continue
| to get better :). FSRS is already good (I use it both in Anki and
| for periplus.app), but looking at the benchmarks [1] there's a
| lot of room left for improvement.
|
| One direction could be to incorporate semantics, which afair FSRS
| doesn't do at all yet. A good flashcard deck will have a lot of
| semantic overlap, e.g., a card for the vocab word itself, that
| word in a sentence, etc. Struggling with one component is a
| strong signal you'll struggle with another.
|
| The same thing could be done for just better spacing, so you
| don't "cheat" by having too closely-related cards next to
| eachother in a review (the review signal will be less noisy).
|
| [1] https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/srs-benchmark
| jarrett-ye wrote:
| Yes, we can improve FSRS in that way. But it requires to
| collect a lot of review data with cards' content, which breaks
| Anki's privacy policy. And FSRS is my side project which has
| squeezed all my free time... I'm not very motivated to improve
| it now.
| aaldrick wrote:
| I see a lot of discussion about SRS, and I think most can agree
| they have improved.
|
| What I would like to see covered is a more vague area, but almost
| more important:
|
| It's the space in between reading/understanding something and the
| SRS. There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating
| flashcards easily from existing programs (web browser, PDF
| readers etc.) into popular SRS (Anki, Mochi etc.). They should
| work almost as OS additions to make everything feel native and
| frictionless; I don't need another standalone tool that does X Y
| and Z, I just need some sort of pipe into an SRS that is Mac
| friendly and does the job whilst not being in the way.
|
| If someone knows of such a tool, I would love to hear about it.
| myflash13 wrote:
| Just tried RemNote with their AI-generated cards features and
| so far looks amazing. They can generate cards from PDFs,
| webpages and notes.
| aaldrick wrote:
| Thank you - I'll give it a try!
| aaldrick wrote:
| Okay on first try, this seems promising, I'll try the pro
| sub tomorrow properly and take it for a proper spin, but:
|
| - I read a lot of PDFs. I can click a sentence and have it
| suggest cards, or fill my own.
|
| That's already a great start on the "space in between".
| allenu wrote:
| I've written my own flashcards app (Fresh Cards) and once in a
| while, users ask if there's a way to import flashcards from
| things like web pages and PDF files, but to be honest, I still
| don't know how it would work, so maybe you can help me.
|
| From a user standpoint, would it be an interactive process
| where you highlight things and then click a button to say "turn
| this into a flashcard", or would it be an automated tool that
| would scan the content and come up with a list of questions and
| answers t hat would test the material for you? What criteria
| would be used to determine what's worth turning into a question
| and answer? And how granular should the question be? I've seen
| demos of things that pick out specific facts, like dates or
| names, from the text to turn into questions, but that might not
| be that useful to quiz for some material. It seems like a very
| open-ended process to me, so it would be hard to get right for
| everyone's needs.
| aaldrick wrote:
| I've tried Fresh Cards so thank you for developing that app,
| and trying to add cool new software into the space.
|
| Great question. Here's one way to do it:
|
| The first is how clunky the process of going from X to
| flashcard feels to the end user. One way to deal with the
| fact that we are crossing software border is to add an extra
| step where highlighting something allows you to go into an
| "inbox" before any cards are made. It is clear what the user
| has to do. They read something interesting, and add it to the
| inbox. When they are ready, they can head over and _only
| then_ use some sort of automation (either via custom prompt
| for an AI or otherwise) to make the cards. This gives them
| another step, or interface, at which they can decide whether
| or not the thing they highlighted (since highlighting is
| easy) is actually worth something. It segments the process
| into clear easy sections: highlighting, deciding which
| highlights to flashcardify (and therefore keep), and
| flashcard review.
|
| It definitely is an open-ended process, and I appreciate that
| apps need to have a strong opinion on how to direct users
| from start to finish; but I feel this is definitely possible
| now with cheap and quick AI.
|
| I didn't answer every question but hopefully that helps
| somewhat.
| allenu wrote:
| I appreciate the detailed answer. That's a really good
| point about the software boundary and how that adds
| friction to just creating cards in the first place.
|
| I like the idea of an inbox where you just toss things you
| think are worth remembering and maybe having a browser
| plugin or OS shortcut to save highlighted bits of info, but
| not necessarily creating a flashcard immediately from it.
| There's definitely some concrete things I can prototype
| here to try to make that workflow easier. And I can see how
| taking those tidbits of info and passing them to AI to
| create flashcards is doable too.
| aaldrick wrote:
| No problem - I'm happy to help. I spend way too much time
| thinking about this type of stuff.
|
| I'm glad this has resonated, good luck with the
| prototypes. Let me know if you ever want more feedback.
| jkmcf wrote:
| The INBOX idea would be a great improvement! That plus a
| reminder to process your INBOX after N time or size.
|
| The hardest part of any system is making it a habit.
| aaldrick wrote:
| I agree, we need something with a caring UX which
| encourages habit-forming. I feel like this space is very
| underexplored, especially considering the 1000s of note-
| taking adjacent apps made in the last decade.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| Isn't there a Netflix and browser tool where it'll grab
| subtitles for shows you're watching and create flashcards
| or something?
| jkmcf wrote:
| I was an early user of FreshCards, and it's a beautiful app,
| but creating cards was too much work. No share sheet or
| similar integration.
|
| The easiest thing, which I believe I suggested, was
| highlight->action to create a new card front, and
| highlight->action to creat the back or a new front. It needs
| to work well casually in general, and easy when focused.
|
| I'm sure AI could theoretically help but not sure it's
| necessary. Part of the benefits of most cards is creating
| them yourself.
| allenu wrote:
| Thanks for the feedback! I'm currently working on a big
| rewrite of the app, so it's good to know I should work on
| reducing the friction of creating cards, such as with the
| share sheet or some other integration.
|
| Like I said in the other comment, I'm going to play around
| with some ideas regarding an inbox. I think that on its own
| would help a ton for just recording things to be converted
| to flashcards later. There's probably a good in-app UI that
| can be made to go through the inbox and easily convert the
| notes created into the front and back sides as well.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| The macOS services model seems like a good fit for this kind of
| thing. Services are little bits of context-aware functionality
| that apps expose to enable integration between apps without
| active developer involvement. An example, in most Mac apps if
| you select text, right-click to open the context menu, and open
| the Services submenu you'll see a number of services that do
| something with the highlighted text.
|
| Ideally the SRS app would make services available to facilitate
| quick creation of new cards, so for example one might highlight
| some text, right-click, and select Services - New SRS Card...
| which then opens an in-place lightweight card creator dialog.
| aaldrick wrote:
| I hadn't thought of this; thank you for bringing this up. I
| will actually read into this. I didn't write it in my
| original comment, but I almost mentioned the OS because I'm
| coming round to the idea (albeit slowly) that the OS needs to
| provide some sort of hook into this capability natively for
| both maximum adoption and also ease of use (for both
| developer and end user).
|
| Perhaps Shortcuts are now powerful enough to do this as a
| PoC, providing the SRS has some sort of open API that
| Shortcuts can take advantage of.
| cosmic_cheese wrote:
| > the OS needs to provide some sort of hook into this
| capability natively for both maximum adoption and also ease
| of use (for both developer and end user)
|
| I'm absolutely of this mind, but unfortunately it also
| depends on developers' willingness to make use of these
| hooks, and it's becoming increasingly uncommon for third
| party apps to have any integration or automation
| affordances, especially any specific to any particular
| platform. It's become the norm to ship the absolute bare
| minimum, which is the lowest common denominator "it runs".
| aaldrick wrote:
| A great shame, I see your point. I guess it comes down to
| the developer treating their product as something that
| could "help people" or something that "pays the bills".
| Hopefully the former would lead them to caring enough to
| spend the extra time for these significant QoL
| improvements.
| tylorr wrote:
| This reminds me of the share feature on mobile phones
| which gets plenty of use by developers. Seems quite
| possible to make something like this on a standard OS
| KPGv2 wrote:
| Anki has AnkiConnect which is exactly this, I think
|
| https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2055492159
|
| IIRC Yomichan (been a long time since I needed tools like
| that) is a Chrome extension that lets you mouseover words
| and it'll show you the meaning. I _think_ you can invoke
| something in Chrome that will trigger the Anki Connect
| API and send the info to Anki to create a card.
|
| I've never bothered with this, but I think that's what
| you're looking for.
| xdfgh1112 wrote:
| This is how anki already works on Android, using a custom
| intent.
| leephillips wrote:
| I have anki on Android and I never see options to use it
| from another app. Do I need to set something up?
| fplonka wrote:
| This mostly works with Mochi - you can paste PDFs etc into
| ChatGPT and the Mochi markdown format is simple, so it can
| generate flashcards for you (I have the format explained in my
| system prompt so I don't have to re-explain it every time).
| This synergizes nicely with the fact that you really want to
| understand something before you make flashcards from it.
|
| If you pay for Mochi you also get API access, so one could make
| a ChatGPT wrapper which adds the cards for you. But since I
| like to review the cards manually before adding I don't mind
| the copy paste step.
| aaldrick wrote:
| Yes, I do something like this now. It definitely does do the
| job. I just wonder if there could be something more,
| something smoother perhaps, and the API access could do the
| trick.
| gwd wrote:
| > It's the space in between reading/understanding something and
| the SRS. ...If someone knows of such a tool, I would love to
| hear about it.
|
| I have a slightly different system I'm developing:
|
| Rather than reviewing with flashcards, review with actual
| content:
|
| 1. Tag the content with the words and grammar concepts
|
| 2. Estimate the difficulty [1] _for you_ of each word or
| grammar concept -- the difficulty being essentially the inverse
| of your familiarity graphs in this article.
|
| 3. Choose content to read which balances difficulty and the
| impact on learning.
|
| Since reviewing something you're about to forget has more
| impact than learning something new, "spaced repetition" falls
| naturally.
|
| And instead of spending your review time going through flash
| cards, you spend your review time reading content in the target
| language.
|
| [1] If you know the details of the FSRS algorithm, I'm using
| "difficulty" here differently than they do in their algorithm.
| aaldrick wrote:
| Not sure I understood the gist, but let me try summarise what
| you do generally (i.e. not just for language learning).
|
| - Instead of flashcards, you read content/write notes. - You
| tag said content in some way which allows you to understand
| how difficult it is. - When in "review" mode, you essentially
| choose what to reread based on the difficulty you are feeling
| has the most impact right now.
| Macha wrote:
| Some examples I'm aware of (mostly in the language learning and
| especially Japanese learning space)
|
| - subs2srs MPV script: create srs cards from subtitled videos,
| if you have subtitles tracks for source and target language it
| will fill them both in (though that sometimes has caveats,
| different languages may distribute the meaning of a line of
| dialogue over different subtitle lines)
|
| - asbplayer chrome extension: inject extra subtitle languages
| into streaming services and create flashcards from them similar
| to subs2srs
|
| - yomitan: browser dictionary lookup, primarily for bilingual
| dictionaries for Japanese and Chinese but also has custom
| dictionary support.
| hiAndrewQuinn wrote:
| You can add my https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/audio2anki
| script to the space, in a similar position to subs2srs.
|
| The big thing my script does differently is run Whisper
| locally to actually generate the subtitles from the video
| themselves. Most videos out in the real world don't come with
| convenient little SRT files bundled with them.
|
| It doesn't yet shell out anywhere to automatically provide a
| translation, but that's more because I was already past that
| stage for most of its output reading-wise. It's explicitly
| tuned to make _listening_ practice SRSable.
|
| (I originally built this for learning Finnish. For the other
| 2 people here on that journey, https://finbug.xyz/ is where
| I've collected the other software I've built over the years
| for this.)
| HSO wrote:
| On Mac, you could make a little Shortcut that accepts your text
| selection or maybe even a screenshot and sends it to
| AnkiConnect to make a new note. Add this Shortcut to your share
| sheet and you can create new notes from any app. Later, go over
| the notes in Anki and add questions or if really lazy send the
| backsides to an LLM to create those questions.
| aaldrick wrote:
| Thank you - I hadn't considered this.
| HSO wrote:
| Now I wanted it for myself and just made it. So at least I
| can confirm this works.
|
| Only difference is I don't actually use the sharesheet much
| so I do it with clipboard content: Step 1. Take screenshot
| or copy text. Step 2. Make a request to AnkiConnect and
| have it create a new card with clipboard in Anki.
|
| Works flawlessly on Mac/Desktop but if you want to do it
| from mobile devices, you have to muck around with network
| permissions. Too much for this evening but this alone opens
| up possibilities.
|
| Thanks for the stimulating question! :)
| kqr wrote:
| > There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating
| flashcards easily from existing programs
|
| I think this is a common misunderstanding. Half the benefit of
| SRS comes from working out what the flashcards are. You have to
| circle around a concept, look for similarities, differences,
| examples, generalisations, properties, etc.
|
| Is it hard work? Yes. Does it help understanding? Massively.
|
| This is also a very difficult skill which, I believe, is why
| many people fail to appreciate SRS. They try, write bad
| flashcards, don't see results, and give up.
|
| EDIT: This also leads to another common misunderstanding, that
| SRS is only good for memorising facts. With proper elaboration
| (thanks child comment), it can be used to build understanding
| of complex subjects too.
| indolering wrote:
| The technical term is "elaboration" and it is key to long
| term retention.
| aaldrick wrote:
| Fair point, please see my comment in response to allenu, in
| this same thread, for a detailed view.
|
| I did not mean to glaze over this aspect, I am aware this is
| very important. I can not and do not use AI for automating
| flashcards for this reason alone. But, I think my point still
| stands, getting information from one disparate app into
| another adds a lot of friction (saving it somewhere, copy and
| pasting and yada yada) to something that (I believe) should
| be as easy as possible. We have 1 click instant payment, but
| I can't have 1 click get this into some sort of inbox in Anki
| ready to flashcard-ify?
|
| To be honest, I have a whole frustration with apps and
| windows that I'm still trying to word, but fundamentally all
| we are doing when we are "computing" is moving information
| around. I wish that information was a first class citizen at
| the OS level that could be leveraged by any app immediately.
| Utopian view but this stuff ain't gonna think about itself.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| That's usually done by writing and elaborating notes. I think
| it's not clear to most people how flash cards improve this.
| The original idea of flash cards is rote memorization of
| facts that need fast (automatic) retrieval.
| paulluuk wrote:
| > They try, write bad flashcards, don't see results, and give
| up.
|
| But if that's the case, then wouldn't a program that takes a
| long text (like a book) and creates GOOD flashcards, be way
| superior over someone making their own bad flashcards?
| tdeck wrote:
| The quality of a card isn't absolute, it's personalized to
| the learner. There are ways to make an almost universally
| bad card (e.g. putting way too much information or a
| misleading image), but a really "good" card comes from the
| learner engaging with the material first before making the
| card.
|
| The program doesn't know what's in the learner's head and
| what associations the learner will make. That's the benefit
| of making your own card.
| prolyxis wrote:
| Or a person could have the program either critique their
| flashcards as they write them, or suggest new sorts of
| flashcards to create without doing the work for them by
| automatically generating them.
| gloomyday wrote:
| I can see that helping a beginner to get a lay of the land,
| but I see that as no more than training wheels.
|
| I created bad flashcards for a long time. In the end, I
| just figured, constantly editing cards when I noticed
| issues was the best way to learn how to use flashcards
| properly.
| andy12_ wrote:
| I have just tried this afternoon to create with Gemini 2.5
| Pro Anki cards to study for my exams. I've been doing it
| raw: I just paste the whole material (like 100k worth of
| tokens) into aistudio and generate the flashcards in txt
| format.
|
| For now it's going great, and I think that the cards are
| good enough as they are (there might be a couple here and
| there that I would remove or edit, but they don't get in
| the way of learning).
| j1elo wrote:
| Is there any prompt tips you have learned on that path,
| that you could share? or the obvious request has been
| useful already without too much fiddling?
|
| I was thinking to use some study material to test drive
| Google NotebookLM for this use case.
| andy12_ wrote:
| I haven't tried many variations yet because a basic
| prompt seems to work well, thought it is important to
| remind Gemini of not using ";" inside the text of the
| cards if you use it as a separator. I imagine that with
| better prompts you could get it to generate very nice
| flash cards, but I'm in a little tight schedule, so I
| can't play around it for too long.
|
| Another nicer option I think would be using the
| structured output of the API to generate the cards in
| JSON format, and the parse it to the Anki format with a
| script, but I think this approach is fine for me.
|
| The prompt I'm using is this
|
| ---
|
| Using the information in these PDFs, make some Anki cards
| to study for an exam.
|
| The format for Anki cards is
|
| ```
|
| front1;back1
|
| front2;back2
|
| front3;back3
|
| ```
|
| Remember that you can't use ";" inside a field because it
| is used to separate the front and back of a card.
|
| If the back of a card is a list of elements, prefer to
| use "<br>" to specify a newline.
| KPGv2 wrote:
| I do this with my kids' "exam review" materials. I'll take
| a photo of the pages marked "study this for test" and send
| to Gemini and say "make a test out of this" and it'll
| create an exam with questions, answers, multiple choice,
| true/false, fill in the blank, etc.
|
| It's really impressive. So I just tried it to do what you
| were asking:
|
| > Give me the first three paragraphs of Genji Monogatari in
| Japanese (I've only done this for an initial seed text;
| you'd probably instead use your own source text)
|
| Here are the first three paragraphs of Genji Monogatari
| (Yuan Shi Wu Yu ) in Japanese:
|
| idurenoYu Shi nika, [snip]
|
| > Create spaced learning repetition of those three
| paragraphs using cloze detection for any word that is not
| in the top 5000 most common Japanese words
|
| Okay, I can help you create a spaced repetition exercise
| for those three paragraphs from Genji Monogatari. This will
| use cloze deletion (fill-in-the-blanks) for words that are
| generally less common in modern Japanese or are
| characteristic of classical Japanese. Since I don't have a
| real-time tool to check against a specific "top 5000 words"
| list, I'll select words based on common knowledge of
| Japanese vocabulary and classical forms that would
| typically be targeted for study.
|
| Please note that the third paragraph you provided contained
| "trevoshiki", which appears to be a transcription error.
| [This is true. Gemini's first three paras of this novel did
| contain this transcription error.] I will substitute it
| with "asamashiki" (asamashiki), meaning "shocking" or
| "deplorable," which fits the context of referencing Yang
| Guifei and potential societal disruption. If you believe
| another word was intended, let me know!
|
| What I received was a canvas I can export to Docs, and it
| begins with:
|
| Genji Monogatari - Spaced Repetition Cloze Exercise This
| exercise is designed to help you learn and recall less
| common vocabulary and classical expressions from the
| beginning of Genji Monogatari.
|
| Paragraph 1 - Cloze Test idureno ______ nika, ______ ,
| ______ amata ______ tamahikerunakani, ito ______ kiJi
| nihaaranuga, sugurete ______ tamahuari ______ .
| hazimeyoriWo hato ______ tamaheru ______ , ______ mononi
| ______ sonemitamahu. Tong zihodo, soreyori ______ noGeng Yi
| tachiha, mashiteyasukarazu.
|
| Paragraph 1 - Answer Key idureno Yu Shi (ontoki)nika, Nu Yu
| (niyougo), Geng Yi (koui)amata saburahitamahikerunakani,
| ito yamugotonaki(yangotonaki)Ji nihaaranuga, sugurete Shi
| meki(tokimeki)tamahuarikeri. hazimeyoriWo hato Si
| hiagari(omoiagari)tamaheru Yu Fang "(onkatagata),
| mezamashikimononi otoshime sonemitamahu. Tong zihodo,
| soreyori Xia [?] (gerou)noGeng Yi tachiha,
| mashiteyasukarazu.
|
| Paragraph 1 - Vocabulary Yu Shi (ontoki): reign, era
| (honorific) Nu Yu (niyougo): Imperial consort of high rank
| Geng Yi (koui): Imperial consort of lower rank than Nyogo
| amata (amata): many, much (classical) saburahi (saburahi):
| (archaic form of Shi u - saburau) to serve, to be in
| attendance (humble) yamugotonaki
| (yamugotonaki/yangotonaki): exalted, of very high rank,
| distinguished (classical)
|
| [it continues the same way with para 2, 3]
| mfranzs wrote:
| Agree - making cards yourself is like programming yourself
| for how you want to understand and remember an idea.
| resonious wrote:
| You might be right. I remember when I used SRS seriously for
| language learning, I got far more out of the cards I created
| painstakingly than the pre-built ones that I pulled off the
| shelf. That is - I still remember most if not all of the
| custom cards verbatim.
| vjerancrnjak wrote:
| I'd say a missing thing is figuring out the order in which
| cards have to be shown.
|
| Showing schlafen before ausschlafen, or contextually simpler
| cards before more complex ones.
|
| Optimizing blindly easy medium hard and next time to show a
| card is probably very far away from efficient learning.
|
| If the process is inspected, most of the forever knowledge that
| I acquired I heard once and internalized.
| edanm wrote:
| I've never used it, but my understanding is that something that
| does this is considered a "killer feature" of Supermemo. It has
| a mode that lets you read text (via a PDF viewer) and lets you
| create flashcards as you read in some kind of semi-automated
| way. Or something like that. Like I said, I never used it.
| Tomte wrote:
| No, not PDF, only HTML. There are community companion
| programs like SuperMemo Assistant, that enhance SM, but it's
| all fiddly.
|
| I paid for two SM versions and went back to Anki. It's very
| idiodyncratic, the user interface is atrocious (in the latest
| version it finally, finally added thumbs up/down icons for
| grading the answer --- before that you had to remember
| whether 1 is good and 5 is bad or vice versa).
|
| SM is fascinating (including task management, sleep cycle
| tracker etc.), but it's held back by its technological
| choices (only support for Edge or IE, and Edge only in the
| newest version), and for incremental reading you'll be mostly
| ingesting Wikipedia articles, because PDF isn't supported.
| aaldrick wrote:
| +1 SM is really interesting. Supermemo.guru (URL) is a
| fascinating resource written by a fascinating person (the
| creator of Supermemo), but the software is so unusable that
| it immediately shoots itself in the foot (or head). I don't
| think anyone should ever use it, but people should take
| away from it interesting concepts that they can use when
| writing new software.
| MarceColl wrote:
| It's tricky I think, I think it comes down to specialized tools
| for different systems. I'm building a tool for Japanese in this
| direction. But of course it doesn't generalize to everything
| since the content and context extraction is very objective
| dependent.
| aaldrick wrote:
| I agree, it is tricky. But I believe it is possible, see my
| response in this thread to the user allenu as a middle
| ground.
| MarceColl wrote:
| AI definitely helps here (and it's the direction I'm
| going), although to start exploring the space in a way that
| makes sense to me (and because it's a problem I have), I've
| reduced the space into these steps: * I
| wanna be able to watch X in Y language * I know these
| words * Help me
| christiangenco wrote:
| I solve this problem with a system prompt in my LLMs[1].
|
| ChatGPT is the main spot where I'm going to be trying to
| understand a new concept, so after groking it I'll ask it to
| make flashcards which I can then just copy and paste into
| Mochi.
|
| An improvement would be some sort of MCP integration between
| the LLM and Mochi so it can just add the card directly. I'm
| sure we'll get there soon.
|
| 1.
| https://gist.github.com/christiangenco/db4b61c315b93fc2a404a...
| maxdarapper wrote:
| I built a native flashcard app for mac that includes spaced
| repetition. You can close the main window, so it is not in the
| way and just select add flashcard from the top right menu bar
| in whichever application you are in
|
| https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flashcard-max/id1430950704
| mfranzs wrote:
| This is what we've built RemNote for! You can add your sources
| (PDFs, websites, YouTube, etc.) and create cards directly from
| them. Either with AI (click on a sentence => get an AI card),
| or by highlighting a sentence and writing your own card.
|
| It's not at the OS level, but I think a focused standalone all-
| in-one experience is actually better. We've explored a chrome
| extension here that does something similar to what you suggest,
| but it somehow hasn't proven useful in practice. I always keep
| coming back to just doing everything directly in the tool
| (upload PDF, take notes, make cards), as it helps me focus
| deeply on what I'm learning.
| arvindh-manian wrote:
| Love RemNote -- ability to take notes and create SRS cards
| within the notes is so sick
| jonahhorowitz wrote:
| Does RemNote use the algorithm described in the link or
| something else?
| mfranzs wrote:
| Yep, you can either use FSRS (the one described in the
| link), or Anki-SM2.
| prezjordan wrote:
| I just loaded Hacker News after a WaniKani session.
|
| Any recs for moving this into Anki? I already use Anki for cards
| I created while going through Genki with my tutor, and world
| capitals.
| caturopath wrote:
| What is everyone using spaced repetition to memorize?
| Gys wrote:
| I found it a little annoying that SRS is immediately explained to
| mean Spaced Repetition System, but then the F is added without
| explaining what it stands for. Most references of the article do
| neither. Except https://github.com/open-spaced-
| repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/The... which says the F means Free.
| Seems a little too easy? I found nothing else. Chatgpt says it
| means Flexible, which actually makes more sense? Anybody else can
| chip in?
| jarrett-ye wrote:
| What does the 'Free' mean in the name?
|
| The algorithm (FSRS) supports reviewing in advance or delay.
| It's free for users to decide the time of review. And it will
| adapt to the user's memory.
|
| Meanwhile, spaced repetition is one essential technology to
| achieve free learning.
|
| FSRS runs entirely locally and has no risk under others'
| control.
|
| source: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/free-spaced-
| repeti...
| ayrtondesozzla wrote:
| When "FSRS" is first used it's a clickable link, and the first
| sentence on that link is:
|
| > FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler) is a modern spaced
| repetition algorithm that was developed by Jarrett Ye.
|
| If I do a search of "flexible spaced repetition software" I get
| no results, which strongly suggests the dumb guesser you're
| using guessed something plausible to placate its user. This is
| common behaviour for this type of software.
|
| In summary, I politely suggest you critically review how you
| interact with knowledge on the internet.
| candrewlee wrote:
| Do any of these algorithms use vector embeddings to determine the
| semantic similarity between cards? Seems like that might be a
| useful parameter for tuning the algorithm, since you're likely to
| forget something similar on a topic you've forgotten things
| about.
| Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote:
| That was actually my very first python project, I made this to
| go through medical school:
| https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/AnnA_Anki_neuronal_A...
| babush wrote:
| I wish there was some SRS-like tool but for learning music.
| henning wrote:
| SM-2 is very easy to implement and is still an effective
| memorization tool.
|
| A lot of the difference in that graph seems to come from 70% vs.
| 90% retention.
| colinnordin wrote:
| I'm sure the algorithm can play a huge role in the effectiveness
| of learning but for me the difficult part was always creating the
| cards and actually opening the app to practice.
|
| I've built Komihag [1] to try and combat this: Select any text on
| your iOS device and a flashcard is automatically created for you,
| and the app is then showing you the cards on the Home Screen /
| Lock Screen / Apple Watch Face.
|
| I haven't gotten to implement any sophisticated scheduling
| algorithm yet but will definitely do that eventually.
|
| [1] : https://komihag.com
| wintermutestwin wrote:
| Cool idea. I'll check it out. It would be cool to do something
| like this for single word highlights on an e reader. If I have
| highlighted a singe word it is because I want to add it to my
| vocabulary.
| durkie wrote:
| I was looking to use this with the iOS Books app, but I can't
| share text to your app from there (but something like safari
| works). Any idea why?
| colinnordin wrote:
| I found this:
| https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/762784
|
| Looks like share extensions are not generally available
| inside the Books app, which is why my app is not showing up.
|
| Thank you for making me aware of the issue!
| babuloseo wrote:
| Hi Duolingo.
| matt-attack wrote:
| This should be a first class feature in iOS. Hey Siri teach me
| what elide means.
| justinator wrote:
| What's the go-to SRS app now (I'm still on Anki)
| ralferoo wrote:
| I'm not ready to share a link to my actual implementation yet,
| but I've been working on an SRS system for Chinese and been using
| it as my daily driver for about 3-4 years now, after previously
| using Anki and getting frustrated with how reviews pile up after
| a couple of days off.
|
| I've done lots of tweaking to the algorithm over the years to
| make it feel like I'm less surprised by the scheduling, and less
| like a slave to it. One very stark difference between mine and
| Anki is that I have a large number of "overdue" cards, but the
| system still prioritises when to show me the overdue cards with
| quite a few different metrics based on how overdue it is, how new
| it is, how long the current interval is, etc. So, like Anki, I
| still just double the interval for correct cards, but for
| incorrect cards, the reviews are repeated same day until they're
| correct, and then the interval is reduced a lot more than Anki.
| So, the cards then become overdue sooner, but because the
| scheduling of overdue cards is better, they get pushed later if
| your overdue queue is too large, and sooner if you've not got
| anything more useful to review.
|
| FWIW, my typical session is 40 minutes per day during my daily
| lunchtime walk, and I'll get through about 150 cards in that
| time. If I'm on a long train journey, I'll often clear out double
| that or more, but the disaster situation of being on holiday for
| a month might leave the queue with a couple of thousand extra
| cards, but they never seem unmanageable. Even after a 2 month
| break when I was travelling last year, and only doing reviews on
| flights and trains, I'd definitely forgotten some words from not
| reviewing at the appropriate time, but the percentage of totally
| forgotten cards felt better than I used to experience after just
| missing a few days with Anki.
|
| One thing the article mentions that I don't massively concern
| myself with is desired retention. I'm not sure I'd want to
| express it as a target percentage, but I've definitely been
| thinking about how I want to change things to deprioritise
| stubborn words without just suspending them or deleting them. I
| definitely find that having them keep showing up, so I might see
| a pattern of them wrong twice each day before finally getting
| them right, after a few days of that they do usually suddenly
| stick for good. But sometimes I look at the word and think I
| don't really care if I remember it or not.
| scotty79 wrote:
| I'd love to have a system that shows me what I already know well
| as rarely as possible, because that's the most frustrating part.
| adangit wrote:
| I'm solo-building a free Anki alternative using the Ruby FSRS
| gem: http://cadence.cards/welcome
|
| Would love any feedback--I'm aiming for a more focused, restful
| take on what I like most about Anki. Styling is done with
| Tailwind.
| milst wrote:
| What's a good way to learn to understand concepts in a spaced-
| repetition way? I've used anki before for remembering facts or
| answers to specific questions, but is there a standard way to
| setup spaced repetition flashcards to learn, for example, when to
| apply a certain software pattern or something?
| pillefitz wrote:
| A while back I built https://readboost.io/ but so far never
| advertised for it. The idea: Embed Q&A into your ePubs and
| optionally download Anki cards for your book. Probably gets
| buried here, but maybe someone finds some value in it.
| BlimpSpike wrote:
| The author bashes other algorithms for being "arbitrary", but I
| don't see how FSRS is any less arbitrary.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I gave up on spaced repetition systems, even my paid memrise
| subscription, because I couldn't find good flashcard sets. To
| create good flashcards, you need some domain knowledge. An AI can
| pick facts from wikipedia and quiz you on them, but it takes a
| real human to identify what knowledge is relevant and worth
| learning.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| I would pay for an e-ink tablet dedicated to notes and spaced
| repetition. (I know there are e-ink note taking tablets, but none
| of them have spaced repetition.)
|
| I'd like to be able to take freehand notes, and then be able to
| block out, or blur, certain sections and each blocked or blurred
| area becomes a spaced repetition entry.
|
| Or, in more detail. I'd like to look at a page of notes and loop
| select a certain area. That selected area becomes a spaced
| repetition item. After the initial loop selection I can do
| another loop selection to blur one or more areas that would be
| blurred. Etc, etc.
| david_allison wrote:
| There's a number of happy Onyx Boox users using AnkiDroid.
|
| You can probably do what you want with the in-built image
| occlusion feature. Might be worth downloading an Android
| emulator and seeing if we meet your workflow requirements.
| windowshopping wrote:
| Hmm, I have Anki and I don't see an option for this algorithm.
| Anyone know how to enable it? The preferences say I'm on the "V3
| scheduler" but have no option for an algorithm. I don't think I'm
| on the algorithm described in the blog post because whenever I
| don't know a card it goes back to 1 day as if it was new. Or
| maybe I am on it and I'm just misunderstanding how this works?
| I'm on Mac, Version [?]2.1.66 (70506aeb)[?].
| david_allison wrote:
| You're on an old version of Anki.
|
| Once you upgrade, FSRS is available under the deck options.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| Go into the deck preset options (any deck is fine). Look for
| the FSRS section and check if the toggle is enabled. If it's
| not there you probably are on an old version.
|
| https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-options.html#fsrs
| yearesadpeople wrote:
| That tutorial guy on YouTube, Derek Banas, swears by Anki. He's
| quite the voracious learner as well as being a pretty good
| contractor. I've used it myself (sparingly, when taking on new
| projects with new technology stacks), and never really committed
| to it because of the somewhat static and predictable nature of
| the learning session (as described in the article; the
| algorithm). However, from learning about the upgrade (well, 2023
| upgrade), I will try it out again: high hopes.
| toomanyreps wrote:
| I have been using Supermemo daily (except for when I miss a day
| or two, vacations with no desktop, etc) since about 2010. I have
| found the newer algos to be pretty good. I have not had any bugs
| or a messed up collection. Its one of the pieces of software that
| is keeping me on Windows. There is still no foss replacement for
| incremental reading/writing [1]. Also, Supermemo has two modes
| that lets you skip a few days without being overloaded [2][3]. So
| you don't go from 20-30 cards to 200 if you skip a day.
|
| That being said, its just another tool in the toolkit for
| learning stuff. I don't think I'm that much smarter or better at
| anything just because I have used Supermemo often for awhile.
| Honestly, I just like making cards and throwing articles I want
| to read later into Supermemo for processing. Most of what I use
| Supermemo for is incremental reading, which I have never been
| able to find a good replacement for. I like being reminded of
| cool stuff I have read and ideas that I have had. I would
| recommend also learning and practicing various mnemonic
| techniques alongside spaced repetition.
|
| Most of the other algos/apps I have tried have been okay, I have
| not tried FSRS because I don't really use Anki anymore. I used
| Anki when I was in college for about 2-3 years because I would do
| flashcards using the mobile app. I was still using Supermemo
| daily during the same time period though.
|
| I also use Clozemaster for language vocab with Supermemo. I put
| the sentences and some explanations into Supermemo after I do
| them in Clozemaster. I do not really consider myself to be a
| language learner or learning a language. I pick up new vocab very
| slowly and do not do anything else to practice the languages I am
| learning vocab from. I have also been using Math Academy almost
| daily for about seven months which is nice, but definitely not a
| full replacement for learning math. Using Math Academy actually
| made me start working with math textbooks and online resources
| again.
|
| [1] https://www.help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_reading [2]
| https://www.help.supermemo.org/wiki/Postpone [3]
| https://www.help.supermemo.org/wiki/Mercy
| smeeger wrote:
| language learning is 100% memorization. eventually your brain
| memorizes all the phrases that click into "situation-space," for
| every possible situation there is a memorized response. language
| can be broken down into situational meta-phonemes. using flash
| cards and grammar is just a way to bootstrap yourself into
| memorizing all the appropriate responses for any given kind of
| situation.
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