Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

This article is the best summarization of real, everyday usage of Anki outside of language learning and medical studies which are common uses of Anki. Reviewing flash cards is the highest leverage 10-15 minute habit I have besides planning my day. There's a certain joy and relief from having a reasonable confidence new information will be readily available to you for years to come. Much knowledge is better absorbed through practice, conversation, and writing. If you can distinguish between what you can learn through flash cards, and what you can absorb through other practices and not conflate the two too much—you'll be in a great place.

Some categories of cards I have that may serve as inspiration for others wishing to get into flash cards..

  * Basic information about countries e.g. population
  * Ingredients and dishes from restaurant menus I didn't know
  * Important people and places
  * History facts (typically from Kindle highlights)
  * Conversions between units (e.g. lbs to kg)
  * Season for various vegetables and fruits
  * Keyboard shortcuts for vim, readline, etc.
  * Learning words and terms I don't know from Kindle/Instapaper highlights
  * Useful statistics

org-mode has an implementation of several spaced repetition algorithms, which is what Anki is using under the hood and what was originally invented for SuperMemo. The module is called org-drill.

I'm in the process of turning many knowledge aspects of my life into a personal knowledge base inside org-mode. For books I'm reading, I find it invaluable to create org-mode items. One per concept. Sometimes I don't even bother filling the content. E.g. I just use a title like "Hadamard transform definition" and nothing else. It'd be to time consuming to write up the definition, and it's pointless as that's in the book anyway.

Then, org-drill brings up some of this cards according to the spaced-repetition algorithm. I answer them with pen and paper. Sometimes I need to prove a theorem, or recall a definition like in the example above. I then open up a book to check my reply is correct and grade myself accordingly. It's a great system to systematize learning.

I experimented with anki in law school one semester.

I decided to feed all the concepts of my criminalistics class into the program and only study that way. The class contains a lot of procedures and tidbits you kinda have to memorize (It was a bad class, I think it should've been taught entirely different but that's another subject).

I came out GREAT. I aced the fuck out of that class and I didn't even have to use anki every day.

The system described here is in many ways similar to Incremental Reading [1], which also uses an algorithm to schedule when to read the URLs provided. (the Anki addon is fairly primitive though, would rather use a browser plugin that remembers how much I read from each webpage instead)

Also worth paying attention when reviewing flashcards, as described in [2]:

  And when I rush through my flashcard reviews, I’m not thinking. I’m focusing on the wrong question: “Do I remember this perfectly?”
  Instead, whether I happen to have perfect recall or not, I should focus on: “This is my time to think about this again.”
  Major paradigm shift.

[1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1081195335 [2] https://yourawesomememory.com/reviewing-as-thinking/

Sounds like the way you use Anki is more of a learning supplementary rather than a singular tool? Like you are learning of words elsewhere and entering them into Anki for memorization once you have learned about them?

I’m just curious. I’d like to use Anki to get better at reading and playing chords (on keyboard / piano) from symbol notation but I haven’t started yet. Would you recommend learning each chord one by one and entering them into Anki as I learn them?

>Delete cards when they give you trouble. Language learning is a marathon, if the word is important you'll see it again. If you keep getting a card wrong then you probably didn't actually learn it in the first place, or the card is written in a confusing way.

Anki has that feature built in actually, they're called leeches. By default I believe it's set to 7 mistakes. The idea is that if it happens, you need to either remake the card or do as you said, and wait for it to come up later.

I would also add:

* When learning languages, create your cards in a way that you must type the answers in Anki. It's way easier to acknowledge how confident you are with them.

* Your Anki cards/decks shouldn't be static: edit and tree-shake them often. It means that you got a deeper understanding of the subject.

I love Anki, but when it comes to language learning imo it is only great for bootstrapping a language and getting the first 250 - 500 words under your belt.

Beyond that it is like trying to learn how to ride a bike by putting facts about balance and motion into your Anki deck.

Those are awesome tips. Could you give a bit more detail into the actual process you follow, beyond those tips? What is your process / do you have a specific routine you follow with the cards?

> poor substitute for time spent reading material that uses the vocabulary

You can't effectively read material without having enough vocabulary to cover at least some 80% of it.

My most recent language learning experience is Japanese. The difference between trying to read before cramming on an ~8000 word vocabulary and after is night and day.

And the comparison basis here is not reading hardcopy, but electronic text with the help of an instant dictionary lookup tool (hover the mouse over anything to get to the reading and meanings instantly). That is to say, even with that tool, which eliminates some of the barriers of the writing system, trying to read is still like pulling teeth compared to the experience when you're crammed on a decent chunk of vocab.

Vocab gets you to that point where you can guess the meanings of unknown words from context, as well as their readings. You can start using mono-lingual dictionaries and other resources.

Now if you're coming from, say, one European language to another, you may be able to get away without using spaced repetition, because of a lot of shared vocabulary (cognates) and concepts.

In any case, brute force reading is spaced repetition. It's just inefficient spaced repetition that fails to schedule the appearance of a word based on your recall performance for that specific word.

I've been using Anki for a few years, here are my thoughts on your questions:

> I have never really found that memorization was ever an obstacle to my ability to learn something.

I think it depends what you are learning, for example when learning languages I find a lot of the difficulty is just in retaining the words.

Another place where I've found it useful is for memorizing definitions in (pure) mathematics. To be able to read the later parts of a book you need a good working knowledge of earlier definitions. You could look back for the definitions every time, but that breaks the flow of reading.

> I've always found that retention proceeds from understanding.

Yeah, I find that too. But this is something that I do after understanding something to help retain it better and for longer.

> Time spent flicking through flashcards for vocabulary or formulae or chemical paths or whatever seems like a poor substitute for time spent reading material that uses the vocabulary ...

The time I spend on memorization is very small, less than 5 minutes a day, and I usually do it on my phone while I'm waiting for something. It replaces checking reddit or playing phone games rather than deep reading of interesting material.

General guidelines for spaced repetition tell you not to memorize things you don't understand anyway, and say that you only waste your time by doing so.

In general, it helps with indefinite retention. And if you don't do something often, or regularly, any permanent footholds offer some scaffolding to get back up to speed quicker the next time you need to do it.

As a problem approaches looking like learning a language, spaced repetition gets more useful. If you learn a second language, you will probably hit a plateau if you never try to memorize anything, because language has a large set of symbols, some infrequently used, but still critical in some situations.

It probably helps anywhere that "deliberate practice" and "memorization" almost overlap in how they work or in effectiveness, say, in memorizing program hot-keys.

> it's just that I have never really found that memorization was ever an obstacle to my ability to learn something

I mean, taken to an extreme, that's clearly wrong - if you had no working memory (or, say, forgot everything after 10 minutes), you also couldn't learn anything, at least in the sense of being able to use that knowledge long-term. Learning and memorization go hand in hand - learning is, in a sense, the act of getting new things into your memory.

If you mean that there's more to learning than just memorization, you're right! (mostly, see note) In many domains, you need more than just to try and rote memorize a bunch of facts. E.g. when studying math, you need to memorize things like definitions, but also understand them, which is another way of saying "memorize what they really mean". You need to "memorize" how to solve problems. Etc.

You certainly need to have that initial understanding when reading the material the first time, otherwise you can't possibly remember it. But, all of these can reasonably be called memorization, because they are all things that you might know one day, but get lost over time, and are things you can "drill". Therefore spaced repetition is a good way to make sure the stuff you learned once will stay in your memory long term.

Note: some things are pure memorization of facts, in a sense. E.g. I memorized all the locations of countries of the world, then their capitals, and now I'm working on their populations. There is some understanding that goes in here (and one of the reasons I do it is because it forces me to learn more about countries and make interesting connections), but for the large part, this is just brute "practice this fact enough times" learning.

I’ve found it to be immensely helpful in medical school. I only add cards after I understand a particular concept—read about a concept first, then add cards to make sure I retain it. The most popular decks on r/medicalschoolAnki have many thousands of premade cards; with additional cards for microbiology and pharmacology, people may have as many as 20K Anki cards by the time they take Step 1 (standardized national exam of basic medical knowledge) after 2 years of medical school.

With this approach, Anki is much more about retention than learning. Books and lectures are good for learning, but Anki is ideal for ensuring I can remember side effects of a particular heart medication months or years after cardiovascular lectures ended.

It’s certainly useful for passing tests too, but the main value is in retaining knowledge long after a particular test has been taken.

> Time spent flicking through flashcards for vocabulary ... seems like a poor substitute for time spent reading

I've been using Anki decks in tandem with native reading material to study Japanese. Whenever I encounter a word I don't know, I add it (along with a sample sentence demonstrating usage) to my Anki deck. Whenever I don't do this I get frustrated by having to look up the same words multiple times (often times a new word is used infrequently enough that I forget it even if I look it up every time I encounter it).

Also, when learning Japanese, there are a lot of things where memorization is very useful like learning to map between English words and kanji and learning the readings of place names and people's names.

> Another problem (with the algorithm, not Anki itself)

My main gripe with the algorithm is you can't take weekends off. I used Anki a lot in College, and Mondays where terrible, due to the backlog built-up over the weekend.

One could also say, one shouldn't be drinking the weekend away ...

> Another problem (with the algorithm, not Anki itself) is that it's very easy to forget what you've just learned if you don't keep using the app. It's super easy to learn hundreds of vocabulary within a short period of time and pass the exam, but you need to keep reviewing the deck for at least a year, otherwise you'll forget it as quickly as you've learned it.

Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that this is a problem with human memory in general?

There's a plugin for Anki for incremental reading: https://github.com/luoliyan/incremental-reading

(Though I'm not sure how the internal database structure works with that, I think you can't save the whole text along with a deck instead of individual notes―but maybe addons can change that.)

What was your list of the most common ~1k words? Do you have a link?

>I had to learn Coptic in a month

What kind of job do you do?

Have you tried just going to the website https://ankiweb.net/decks/ and reviewing your cards there? It should work on any device with a browser including your RasberryPi.

If you have access to a smartphone or tablet, there are some great apps for this available...

"running Anki on Raspberry Pi"

It's a bit hard to help without knowing:

- what OS you're using

- what exactly you mean by "I cannot get Anki working", i.e. the standard stuff in a bug report: what did you do, what did you expect to happen, and what actually happened

- what peripherals you're trying to use (e.g. some people using treadmills control their PI using an Xbox controller; perhaps your problem is related to getting that working?

There's a third-party web client mentioned elsewhere in this thread: https://ankimono.com/

I haven't tried it so not sure if it syncs with AnkiWeb and really works as a full-fledged client, but it sounds like a fitting solution for your stack.

---

By the way, there are bluetooth remotes/joypads for one hand, e.g. Zeemote or mini gaming pads [0] — they may be more comfortable to use with Anki and the TV while exercising, compared to the keyboard and mouse. Afaik people are using them with Anki in text-to-speech mode on phones. And media server apps like Kodi have “big picture” interfaces suited for such remotes.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/EM8HQr4.jpg

Your answer doesn't answer the question. You ask what type erasure is and then answer with some very specific information on Java's generics. Nothing in your question indicates that it's about Java or generics.

> Maybe using it for precise definitions is the wrong way, as that might be more like remembering 20 things in a row.

This is exactly what it can be like. The 20 rules from SuperMemo are really useful for trying to formulate and transform the cards.

https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules

> Going through and remembering the answers was always a struggle.

That's a definite hint to adjust the procedure, e.g. change the schedule. There are plenty of variables: some cards are better learned together because they are too similar, and you'd have trouble recalling them among other ones (I have this when going over geography, with countries that are in busy regions like Oceania or the Caribbean) ― you can pull them into a "filtered deck" by a tag and study them separately. Or, you do the opposite and put several decks into a grouping deck so you have to remember different kinds of facts in mixture instead of drills on specific topics.

Some answers are poor fit for one's memory, so you change them until you feel comfortable and retain the knowledge. E.g. I can't remember population of countries and cities with good precision, so I allow myself some slack with the answers.

Regarding the schedule, I found that I have to have a tighter schedule than the default, and I also employ the "bury" feature to repeat some cards. Plus, I have different limits on the numbers of new and reviewed cards for different decks.

If you find that you need more context to retain the knowledge, I'd think it suggests that you should have more cards, not fewer, and they should have closely related information, even partially duplicating each other. Maybe also have more info on each card, such as code examples. It can be time-consuming to create the cards yourself, but there are ready-made decks, including plenty on programming, and it's also possible to convert cards made for other apps. (Might be also fruitful to see how others make cards, and borrow some ideas.)

Generally, IMO spaced repetition simply "automates" the natural need of the memory to have the facts repeated to remember them―and other tricks, such as addition of more context, would also help. But, of course, for some people the right approach might be to abandon flash cards altogether and employ something else, such as practical exercises.

Not that I know of, but I recommend making your own decks. Two reasons: you only add what you're interested in learning as you're reviewing material and figuring out how to make the cards for your material helps learning.

> Not everyone uses it, but pretty much everyone that does and sticks to it sees impressive results.

This is another way of say "everyone that it works for gets good results"

Interesting, I just tried it for Japanese. But too often I could fill in a word without understanding it (there's often only one grammatical form that fits). Also each sentence is accompanied by English translation which feels a little bit like cheating ;) Does the method still works even with the translation available?

I see SRS as simply automation of the natural need of the memory: facts have to be repeated to be remembered. It's not like one can just dismiss that neuronal connections get stronger on repetition.

Then, a computerized approach allows for fine control of many variables in the scheduling of individual cards.

Some people use mnemonics to boost memorization, essentially supplying context and associations where there's none—hijacking another natural tendency of memory. But you can't invent many mnemonics e.g. for geographic facts, and rote memorization is the primary approach there. (And IMO mnemonics are fragile and unreliable due to their nature of being invented out of thin air.)

It works well. I recommend not making too many flashcards at once, and using the mobile Anki apps to get repetitions in throughout the day.

wow this is a great tool, I have been searching for something like this.

If only there was a way to quickly add cards that would be nice.

I want to learn Spanish. I have a basic vocabulary and understanding. What’s the fastest way forward in your opinion?

The iphone app costs like $25 tho.

I'd say one of the main benefits with Anki or SuperMemo is that the automation of the algorithm allows for many more variables than you could track manually. For each card, the history of its reviews can be remembered and taken into account―e.g. both Anki and SM have several possible answers for how well you remember the card instead of just "yes/no," varying the next interval relative to the previous one. You can tune parameters for each set of cards, allocating more or less attention to them depending on how easily you remember different kinds of information. This control, IMO, optimizes the schedule over the course of months. (Though it does make tweaking the params rather complicated sometimes.)

I also just use a leitner box. Or rather a pair of business card file boxes.

Wikipedia actually has a great explanation, the labels are pretty ingenious.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system

I would absolutely read "Google: A Search Engine Worth Checking Out". For the past few years, one can be longer do verbatim searches with operators, and every short search is filled with movie and pop music results even though I consume neither.

If there is anything worth checking it about Google's search engine today, I would want to know.

Rant off: I'm sure that those in the HN crowd who don't yet know what Anki is, would like to. It is the whole secret to my career success.

It does, but many of the decks on memrise are horribly made, so I stopped using it. Clozemaster is much better in my opinion.

It uses a similar algorithm, yes.

Take my advice, as a somewhat advanced learner: don’t do this. RTK is this weird honeypot for beginning learners, but it’s nearly always a mistake. The “discouraged RTK user” is almost a comic meme in Japanese language study.

You will spend months “learning kanji”, only to discover that knowing kanji meanings, in isolation, is unhelpful in most situations. You can get all of the same benefits, with more immediate utility, by just learning words.

While searching the AUR for Anki I just found this extension for Firefox which has some Anki integration. Looks promising for people who want to learn Japanese:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/yomichan/

Looks super useful, thanks! May try it for German.

The system I'm doing isn't s reading one though. Instead, you associate each of the 2200 Kanji with an English keyword. You break down the kanji into component primitives, and then you remember how to draw each one by visualizing a phrase associated with that keyword.

For example, Seedling:

苗

The top part is flower: 艹

The bottom part is rixe field: 田

You can make a story like: if you plant seedlings in a field, they will flower. And you imagine it visually. (Note, I have terrible visualization, but can do it well enough for it to work)

This is a really simple example, but you can get more complex stuff. The system generally sticks to Japanese etymology, but sometimes will make up new primitives where it's more convenient for learning.

have you tried readlang? I'm really happy with it, but I'm studying German. Not sure if it works with asian languages.

The website doesn't emphasize it, but readlang has a spaced repetition vocab tool. With multiple (at least for romance languages) built in dictionaries.

Honest question, what is so hard about writing Chinese to create carss? I find at least typing in pinyin on windows and android isn't so bad, or did you mean specifically in the context of vim?

For Anki, I'd grab the complete article from Wikipedia/textbook/[good source], and then write a few examples. The flashcards would be a number of cloze deletions, and then I'd have a separate deck with a practice question to recall from a blank state. For example [1], I'd take this Wikipedia article, and break it down like so:

In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements, with two principal operations: pop and push.

This sentence would become a number of flashcards that look like ([...] is a cloze deletion where you have to insert the missing word, each cloze is a flashcard):

In computer science, a [...] is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements, with two principal operations: pop and push.

In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a [...] of elements, with two principal operations: pop and push.

In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of [...], with two principal operations: pop and push.

In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements, with [...] principal operations: pop and push.

In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements, with two principal operations: [...] and push.

In computer science, a stack is an abstract data type that serves as a collection of elements, with two principal operations: pop and [...].

You'd do that for most of the article. Find a few examples of a stack, do the same thing from cloze deletions, and then in a separate card, make a few questions to have you write from scratch, parts of a stack.

The separate deck would be so your regular reviews don't take forever, when you get a question asking you to write out a stack. The other deck would be done say 3-4 days a week, and have many fewer cards, because they're going to take awhile to answer. You could even use the index card method for this part as it's closer to actual practice than recall.

In another deck, I'd also have short answer questions. For example, what's the difference between a stack and a queue, or stack and array, etc. This would also be more for practice sessions, rather than daily repetitions, as the questions could take awhile to answer.

Note that you'll have a ton of flashcards this way for each algo, but they'll be extremely easy to answer (a good thing). Five flashcards you can answer in 2-10 seconds each, is much better than one flashcard that takes you a minute to answer.

Assuming five seconds to answer a flashcard, you could easily do 120 repetitions through the day. The nice thing about Anki is the mobile clients, so you can do a few cards while you have some downtime. When I was in school, I was usually doing flashcards while I was waiting for class to start or going to the bathroom etc.

That's a clozed-source knockoff of Anki. With SRS it's important that you choose a solution that will still be working in 5, 10, or even 20 years. Anki being open-source and sporting an open format fits that bill. Also, it has a proper desktop app, so you never need to worry about losing access to your data ahead of an important exam, etc.

It's a lot better for the desktop app and the add-ons make it more powerful.

The desktop version is free and open source. You'll want to start with the desktop version anyway, because it's easier to make your cards on a computer than a phone.

After a while you'll know if it's for you or not. Then you can buy the iOS version.

The Android version is made by a different set of people, and it's completely free as well. It's called AnkiDroid.