Using Anki and Spaced Repetition | Hacker News Reader

Using Anki and Spaced Repetition

getpolarized.io

152 pointsburtonator52 comments

The data policy of Polar is unacceptable to me. I’d like to be able to read PDF’s without third party connections to multiple sites, which Polar seems to do. I once spent part of an afternoon looking at where I’d need to remove analytics, only to find that there are so many places that it wasn’t worth my time. Further, some of the dependencies have their own google analytics tracking, which makes Polar a minefield of privacy issues.

I think the idea of the software is great in theory, but I just can’t justify constant phoning home when I can easily read PDF’s through any other (privacy-respecting) PDF reader.

Nice, and open source. Bravo and congratulations. Such a nice step beyond bookmarking webpages.

I have created https://idorecall.com/ a web app (soon to work in mobile browsers too). Unlike Polar, you upload your learning files (Word, PPT, PDFs and image files as well as videos on Youtube) into iDoRecall and read them there. If you see a concept that you comprehend or a fact that you want to remember, create a spaced-repetition flashcard (we call our RECALLS) linked to that fact/concept. Then when you practice your RECALLS, if you forget an answer, click a link and the original source file/video opens at the exact linked location where you created the RECALL. Refresh your memory and quickly get back to your practice session. I wrote a few weeks ago about my life experience that led me to create iDoRecall: https://medium.com/better-humans/how-to-unlock-the-amazing-p...

Can you make cloze deletions from the material? I watched the video haphazardly, and was unable to tell.

You can simulate cloze deletions very easily:

Q: Earth is the _____ planet from the Sun. A: Earth is the third planet from the Sun.

Do you have an iphone app? It's really helpful if you can revise the cards from your phone.

We don't have a native app but we'll be releasing iDoRecall as a progressive web app in about 60 days.

Some interesting ideas, but why are question and answer cards better than Cloze cards? A recent blog post (https://senrigan.io/blog/everything-i-know-strategies-tips-a..., https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19831526) suggested Clozes were better. Neither one provided much reason to believe what they said.

In my experience, the first cloze option should be something easy to guess. For example, take the text: The sun rises in the east and sets in the west.

The sun rises in {{c1::the}} {{c2::east}} and sets in the {{c3::west}}.

Since the first card is easy to guess, the cloze card effectively becomes the tutorial. It makes it easy for people to use cards made by others.

To prepare for the FAA instrument written and oral exam component of the checkride, I built an Anki deck (https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2105122272) with the following principles in mind, all of which favored cloze cards.

* Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules

* Anki Guide for Medical Students https://drwillbe.blogspot.com/2011/08/anki-guide-for-medical...

* How to make high quality Anki cards quickly https://managingmedicine.org/2013/05/14/how-to-make-high-qua...

* Anki Tips: What I Learned Making 10,000 Flashcards http://rs.io/anki-tips/

By default, Anki will show you only a few cards per day. Following suggestions from med students who have to absorb a lot of information quickly, I made the following settings changes:

* Options > New Cards

  * Steps (in minutes): 1 360
  * Order: Show new cards in random order
  * New cards/day: 9999
  * Graduating interval: 1 day
  * Easy interval: 2 days
  * Starting ease: 250%
  * Bury related new cards until the next day: UNCHECKED

* Options > Reviews

  * Maximum reviews/day: 9999
  * Easy bonus: 130
  * Interval modifier: 100
  * Maximum interval: 36500
  * Bury related new cards until the next day: CHECKED

I love anki, but I really don't like the code. I wish we could build something modern, but still open, from scratch.

Play with Polar for a bit and let me know what you think.

This is sort of the idea but Anki is still pretty amazing in a lot of ways if you're a power user.

I'm trying to make SR easier for people just getting into it.

For me the frustration was switching back and forth between my document reader and Anki.

I wanted something completely integrated.

Could you be specific? What are the problems with the codebase?

I've found that as a user, there are some really powerful features in Anki. The distinction between notes and cards wasn't clear to me at first, but once I discovered it, it allowed me to create some really useful decks. Being able to create multiple cards, with HTML and CSS styling, testing various elements of the same note is really nice.

Some of it has to do with the code base but some the UI.

Anki sync is slow, often requires full re-sync.

I also don't like how a lot of the core functionality has to be implemented via plugins.

This is being too negative though. Anki is great. Nothing is perfect. It has a lot of features that nothing else out there has.

It's kind of like an old and reliable battleship that can't be sunk. (I mean this in a good way).

It's too tightly coupled, doesn't really follow best practices and is barely documented. When I wanted to improve it, it just wasn't very inviting :/

Fully agree with your 2nd paragraph though

The fact that `sudo apt install anki` doesn't work out of the box is enough of a problem for me.

Ok, the install works, but the software never runs.

This is one of the reasons my laptop is booting into Windows more often than into Linux these days.

This has nothing to do with Anki though right? It’s the package maintainers you should be talking to.

Same here, I somehow need any app that I use to have feel like a modern up to date design. Said that, this sound like an interesting exercise to do.

Get to it! The code is open source, so the Anki deck format is as well. You could write new application software that works with the deck format and plug into a large, existing ecosystem of users.

I love Anki but haven't seen the code, but I don't think a rewrite is the answer, and in fact could result in a new code base with the same problem over long enough time. If you're noticing this problem, it would be great if you were able to get in touch with the author (maybe start an issue thread on GitHub) to at least start a dialogue to improve the state of the documentation and code conventions.

I'm not convinced either. But I have some ideas that would change the data representation of the flashcards and that's hard to do with anki

Do you or anyone else have a perspective on how mnemosyne compares in this aspect? https://github.com/mnemosyne-proj/mnemosyne

It doesn't have an app as far as I know. It's a Python/Qt project as well and at a glance the code looks better, but in terms of features I think it just doesn't compare to Anki.

It does have an app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mnemosyne

I can't comment on the feature differences but the community is much much smaller so I wouldn't be surprised.

I've been using https://chessable.com for learning chess openings, tactics, strategy recently. It's spaced repetition forms of chess books and also courses made specifically for the platform. It works quite well.

Polar looks really cool but it looks like there isn’t a self-hosted version? I’m basically done with cloud data i don’t control (as much as possible...)

I'm sympathetic to this and we'll be bringing up a version in the EU and also adding E2E encryption at some point. Just not sure of the schedule at the moment.

Right now though you can use it on a local disk and do a git commit of the whole thing:

https://getpolarized.io/docs/git-sync.html

The downside is that you have to restart every time. I'm not going to do inotify due to scalability issues I've had with it plus Windows/Linux/MacOS differences are going to kill me.

If you're using the cloud version (in the future when we have encryption plus the EU datacenter option) it will also support partial sync which git doesn't support now. This way you can keep just the most recent 500MB on disk.

Also, Polar is OSS so I'm anticipating others writing Filecoin, S3 and other backends in the future.

These are some great tips! Been looking for something similar to this app to help create anki decks directly from documents, kudos.

A sidetrack but are there any good resources on using Anki for learning mathematics? Google brings up a lot of varied and conflicting info. I know nothing is a substitute for working through proofs yourself but surely flashcards can help with memorization of proofs and theorems?

Have an anecdote from me, who spent four years at Cambridge learning maths with Anki.

Anki is peerless for learning large numbers of very small facts. I found it very unsuited for learning relatively small numbers of large facts like entire proofs. The best way I found to use it was to select one or two key, short, intuitive (informal) milestones within each proof, and use Anki to associate the theorem statement with those milestones. Any larger unit of memorisation just didn't work for me - took too long to learn, made it a miserable slog to get through the repetitions, and so on. Convert things to lists, where each element of the list is small, and you have a much better chance. I did once try and learn a proof of the three Sylow theorems by means of a 50-card Anki deck, assembling a linked list of the stages of the proof; but even a single sentence of proof can be more mathematically dense than really lends itself to Anki, and I would probably redo it with fewer cards and more intuitive steps (relying on my mathematical ability to fill in the gaps dynamically).

If you want to learn long formulae, I got some success out of setting them to music. I learned the various differential operators in polar coordinates this way, to avoid having to rederive them every time I needed them. (As an aside, I learned Hard 'n Phirm's "Pi" song almost by accident, which got me nearly 150 digits of pi.)

My experience attempting math with Anki was similar even though it was just a few undergrad papers. It can still have its place, just it won't get you nearly as far as it gets you when learning a language or history or other more easily digestible things.

It's exactly as you say. Small, quick to review facts. Anything else makes reviews unbearable.

In a somewhat related experiment I'm trying to use it to learn codebases. Important classes, outline of code paths etc. It's challenging. It sort of works and sort of doesn't. I'm finding a similar thing to how you mention learning milestones in a proof. Kind of memorizing hints that can help you rather than full sequences of things.

I really wish the Anki Ubuntu package was working out of the box. The Anki deb package in the Ubuntu repositories is useless in Ubuntu 19.04.

So far the developer only supports his .tgz distribution and there's no Snap or similar in the plans.

> For a given word you should have the definition and the forward and reverse translation.

Perhaps for simple/beginner words. But for more advanced words, it's important to realize that our active vocabulary is necessarily much smaller than our passive vocabulary. There are many words we can recognize but can't immediately synthesize ourselves on demand just from an idea or concept (or a translation, even). For anything beyond the most simple words, I think that having the reverse translation doesn't make a whole lot of sense and can be pretty counterproductive in developing one's passive vocabulary.

In fact, the opposite is true. Something that is harder to deal with paradoxically is learned faster long term. Look for papers on "desirable difficulties". Best to memorize from L1 to L2, although neither provides an opportunity to acquire the language so make sure that you are only using it as a bridge to help you comprehend native input. Get as much native input as you can. Free reading is usually the easiest way to do that.

What does free reading mean in this context? I tried a Google search but got ebook marketing spam.

Reading arbitrary text, out of interest (books, magazines, newspapers), as opposed to reading for the explicit purpose of studying the language, in a language class

IF it's too easy the ease will keep backing it off...

For listening comprehension, radio and podcasts are great. Some state broadcasters even produce dumbed-down content (such as news broadcasts with simpler vocab, read slowly and clearly) in their country's language, specifically for non-native speakers.

In addition, reverse translation is a 1:N problem.

Many cards from the foreign language to yours have recurring words on the back: if you reverse that, you will often have to remember many different foreign words for one card. Then how do you judge whether you know the card? 4+ out of 5 is good?, 3 is "hard", 1-2 fail?

> if you reverse that, you will often have to remember many different foreign words for one card.

This is one of many, many reasons why spaced-repetition systems should support dependencies - as in, "delay card X until after cards A, B, C have been solidly learned." Then you'd just gradually learn a sequence of reverse cards for that one word: most common first, then second-most common (prompted as: "<word> (2)"), third most-common and so forth. With each "depending" on the previous cases in the sequence.

The Wanikani (paid) spaced repetition software does exactly this for learning Kanji. It's exceptionally well thought out, both in order of dependency and frequency. I'm currently using it, and I love it. I still use Anki for vocabulary, but wish there was something as polished as Wanikani instead.

I made a (paid, freemium) program (for Windows) called Tankan for memorizing kanji that is very efficient. Much more so than spaced repetition.

http://www.kylheku.com/tankan/

In Tankan, instead of viewing flashcards, you take batch tests, typing answers into blanks, tabbing from one field to the next. The machine grades your answers as a batch, and you can take a new test immediately over just the unanswered/incorrect items.

As you gain proficiency, a "pipeline" process takes over: your eyes can read ahead two or three kanji while your fingers basically don't stop.

I've been able to review some 1200 characters in the space of about 40 minutes of furious typing, when my accuracy on those characters hit around 96%.

Instead of spaced repetition, once you're proficient, you can just fire this up once every few months, and just review every kanji you know in one short, sweet little session and be done with it.

> ...instead of viewing flashcards, you take batch tests, typing answers into blanks, tabbing from one field to the next. The machine grades your answers as a batch, and you can take a new test immediately over just the unanswered/incorrect items.

You could integrate this with spaced repetition as well, though it would only be more efficient than the flashcard format when the answer really is incredibly easy to type in. OTOH, it introduces a verification aspect that makes this applicable to adversarial scenarios. The Khan Academy does this already, btw - once you make an account on the site, it has a "Review" feature that operates on SRS principles.

There is no way I'm working with cards like discussion 7 which would require me to recall this deck's #7 way of saying "discussion" in Japanese.

There is also no way I'm working with a single card that requires recall of seven different translations.

I.e., there is no way I'm working with English -> Japanese cards, period. It's a waste of time. I don't want to speak or write Japanese by thinking of English words and then translating, so why train that way.

English is just a crutch to help connect the Japanese words to meaning. Once they are connected to meaning, the original English loses importance.

When I'm answering J -> E cards, I don't always use the exact words that appear on the back. I think of the meaning and proceed from there.

New cards I add are often J -> J. If I look up a word or phrase using a Japanese source, I just write the card in Japanese.

Also, like grandparent said, there is the active versus passive vocab distinction. Why would I learn translations of large numbers of English words, which I don't actually use? Knowing how to translate words I don't use is not going to help speak the other language even if I translate from English, because I simply won't think of the words that I don't use.

My English vocab might have, say, 25000 words in it. But actively use maybe, say, 6000 of that. If I had a list of which 6000 that is, then drilling on translating those specific ones to anther language might be helpful. In those situations when I'm stuck thinking in English, whatever I think of using a combination of my personal 6000 words would have a translation from having drilled on that.

I did just over ~ 17,000 vocab all J -> E. Worked like an absolute charm. Active vocab comes through output. Your method sounds right on point.

> This is one of many, many reasons why spaced-repetition systems should support dependencies - as in, "delay card X until after cards A, B, C have been solidly learned.

I half agree, but I think it works as is. You just manage the dependencies yourself. It's kind of an art, but you get a feel for how to do it. I find in practice it works without having to have the delay, though perhaps a delay would eek out marginally better performance. It's mostly just up to you figuring out the total set of things you need to be able to recall and whether to include any bi-directional facts or any meta-facts to aid the recall.

As for the L1 -> L2 vs. L2 -> L1 debate:

L2 -> L1 all day, every day.

How do software developers use these kinds of tools? What are you putting into them? Surely not things like names of specific functions. How would a tool like this help me learn python vs just coding in python?

Pretty much, yes. I do put the names of specific functions in my Anki. And concepts.

Instead of just describing what questions I put into Anki, here's a curated selection of the for the Java language: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/647806244

With all this talk of Polar, I want to mention the tool Weava as a great annotation tool. I use it all the time as a way of annotating web content and PDFs. It has a beautiful aesthetic. No integrations with Anki yet as far as I'm aware. (I have no vested interest in the software, I'm just a big fan.) http://weavatools.com

> If I’m reading an important Wikipedia page I save it to Polar...

So sick of seeing this pdf annotation software. You're never safe on this site, you'll be reading a comment or blog post then bam it's a polar ad.

You're complaining that a blog post on the site for the Polar software contains ads for the Polar software?

No, he’s complaining about how frequently Polar ads show up on the HN front page. The blog post being an ad.

I don't understand. To my knowledge HN does not have ads. Are you saying users posting polar news repeatedly is being considered as ads ?

I ... surprisingly agree.

I generally am in favor of creators on HN sharing a new product with Show HN, or in threads when it’s relevant to what’s being discussed. Hell, when I’m happy with a product, I’ll be the first to chime into the thread and share my satisfaction.

I have different feelings about Polar. Maybe because it repeatedly gets front page every time Anki/SRS comes up, which isn’t rare. Or maybe it’s just because when I tried to use it to expand my Anki deck with peer reviewed papers, I found it unbearably inconvenient / difficult, -plus- it insists on being yet another privacy-invading cloud offering for a product for which cloud involvement feels forcibly tacked on. Quite disappointing, since this product really solves a problem for me.

I guess the combination of “how badly I wanted to like and use this product” + “how disappointing it was in use” + “how frequently it’s on the front page” adds up to seriously being sick of seeing Polar ads.

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