Spaced Repetition

If you forgot about it recently and it's coming up a great deal now, then I think the Illuminati have competition.

[Warning: attempt at taking joke seriously]

Surely if this were so, it would mean you'd see fewer mentions of spaced repetition over time, rather than more? (assuming your comment implies having seen more than usual recently)

Spaced repetition is how learning naturally works. In real life, if something is interesting, or it just keeps cropping up, you'll remember it.

The fact that spaced repetition is proving valuable now is because people in general are confused about their motives for learning stuff.

Anyhow, when it comes to learning, motivation is primary, not method.

Joke aside, what you're describing sounds more like the Baader-Meinhof effect[0].

[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader%E2%80%93Meinhof_effect

Can you post your learnings and deck online. Would love to follow your journey.

There isn't much value in memorizing vast amounts of facts like that anymore (you already mentioned two key areas where that's still needed: language and medicine). Nowadays it's better to remember where to find facts and learn quickly than to simply remember facts upfront.

It's fine for you to have a personal goal of using spaced repetition to learn dozens of languages, historical events, etc, but it's really not a tragedy that it's not integrated into our society. It's good that we've moved on.

I've used Pimsleur at length in the past and found it the most suitable way for me to study language. The drawbacks are the limited programs, they develop at a glacial pace, if at all anymore, and each level is very expensive. But the method is wonderful. I had friends offering to help them develop their particular language into a full course 20 years ago and they said "thanks but no thanks" and there is still nothing but a 10 lesson intro program in that language...and those intro courses are a useless waste of money except to learn how to say "I speak a little <language here>" with perfect intonation. For a long time I wished someone would unseat them but it never happened. Even related theory based sites which complimented Pimsleur like Duolingo and Memrise just got worse and worse with time.

> I truly believe that spaced repetition is near-magic and it is a tragedy that it's not integrated into our society and educational system

Spaced repetition is absolutely key to memorizing the Qur'an [0]-- Memorizing through space-repetition is taught at almost all Madrasas (institutes of Islamic learning) [1] to students from a very young age (it isn't uncommon for students as young as 15yrs old to memorize the entire Qur'an [2]). Revisions [3] every now and then helps; and so, that is prevalent, as well.

[0] https://sfjamaat.org/sf/mtb/hifz/A%20practical%20guide%20for...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madrasa

[2] Two key orthogonal parts to memorizing the Qur'an are the rules of recitation (Tajwid) and reading (Qira'at), which prove difficult for non-Arabs.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_preparation

I have been using spaced repetition for roughly 3 years and have seen some amazing personal growth.

I was born in the US, and have now learned 2 languages (Italian B2/C1, French B1/B2, and I just started Spanish but it is so similar to italian its gonna be pretty easy to pick up ).

I remember almost every book I have read in the past three years by using kindle highlights and turning them into flash- cards. I use it for Math, Computer Science, papers, new english vocabulary etc. Starting using Polar Bookshelf for IR

Some general thoughts:

1. Anki is pretty complicate, it is really important to read the manual

2. Create all cards yourself. If possible, always include sounds and images.

3. Follow these steps when creating cards: https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru...

4. Do your reviews every day

I'm actually looking forward to seeing what is possible in say 5-10 years, after i have read 250-700 more books and studied a few more languages. It is the single best learning hack i have ever come across.

It's not a cure-all, especially for language learning. I say this as someone who has done a ton of spaced repetition, language learning and who, in a former life, wrote curriculum for language learners. 95% of the time, if you have the option to choose between ER (extensive reading) and SRS, go with ER. SRS is very useful for certain sub-problems in language learning, though.

> I'm curious if anyone else has used spaced repetition over a long period of time with a deliberately ambitious plan.

An early pioneer, Piotr Wozniak, did exactly that, even to the detriment of the business success of Super Memo. He lived his life by an algorithm, timed swimming workouts to aid his SRS, put his emails through SRS, lived on a > 24 hour schedule... He basically went all in.

If you're interested in SRS and its history, you might enjoy my podcast: https://alchemist.camp/learning-machine/spaced-repetition-sy...

If you don't mind my asking, how easy is it to export and import data with Anki? What sorts of formats does it use?

Is the repetition algorithm superior or inferior than Anki in your experience?

Too bad there is no mobile app. That + cloud sync is Anki's killer feature IMO.

Could be difficult to put in lot of latex or even diagrams. We need something which can auto-generate the notes for us.

Michael Nielsen (The author of the popular free online book Neural Networks and Deep Learning) has a great long form essay on using Anki titled "Augmenting Long-term memory": http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

Very cool site! I always wondered how you were supposed to schedule Leitner boxes manually.

Somewhat related, https://kanji.koohii.com/ uses online Leitner boxes to learn how to write all the 2000+ official commonly-used Kanji in Japanese. But I believe the timing of when the cards come due is based on when they go into a box + a certain amount of time, instead of reviewing an entire box in one day (which it can do easily since it's software). It's nice to see the stacks in each (virtual) box progress over time.

I'm not sure if this is exactly what you're looking for, but I've been working on a spaced repetition app[0] recently that supports markdown for cards, as well as the ability to convert markdown notes into cards.

[0] https://mochi.cards

> But it helps very little (not surprisingly) when I need to learn a concept and a model

It helps in keeping the memory fresh. The concept you understand today may have little nuances which you will not recall if don't have some kind of revisions with some intervals.

I find it less useful for learning complex things, but more useful for retaining them. So I learn something, but then I make cards for key points so that I'll be able to remember the whole thing later. Otherwise I find that after a while I don't always recall the whole concept.

This is exactly what i've been looking for for a while now. signing up! have been using readwise for books, but this will be great for things beyond books! thanks!

This looks great. Do you have plans to support an offline version?

Wow, that's a lot of flashcard time.

According to Anki, I'm averaging 10 minutes a day on my language vocabulary deck. It does happen in a series of short, 1-2 minute bursts when I'm sitting on the toilet or whatever.

To that end, another useful thing I've discovered: Reviewing flashcards (and, spaced repetition) is not a good way to learn. It's a good way to reinforce your memory of things you've already learned. The real learning happens when you make the flashcards. The time spent focused on each concept so that you can decide how to break it into a series of smaller factoids that are right-sized for a flashcard, and coming up with whatever mnemonic devices you'll be using to help you remember this concept, is where the learning happens, because that whole process involves a fair amount of turning it over in your head.

Meaning you really shouldn't ever use a pre-made deck. It may not seem like it at first, but it really is normally more efficient to make your own from scratch.

It might be helpful to put in some sample questions so people can try it out without having to enter their own data.

While ex. Anki supports community decks (I assume others support such features, of course), part of the resistance is that making your own cards significantly contributes to learning; using premade cards is convenient, but impedes learning them.

It doesn't work great for language learning, speaking a language is way more than just remembering words. Similarly, being a great programmer is not about how much syntax you can remember.

Getting better at speaking a language means speaking in it all the time. Same thing for programming - if you want to improve, your time is better spent doing actual programming rather than memorizing syntax.

I honestly wouldn't bother for programming, per se.

It's great for learning facts, so, if you wanted to, I suppose you could use it for something like memorizing a pile of library functions. But I'm having a hard time seeing that as an efficient thing to do in the age of Google and Stack Overflow and editors with auto-suggestion.

Or if you're a low-level programmer, and want to memorize a new architecture's assembly language, maybe.

Even on the language side: SRS is great for shoehorning a basic vocabulary into your head when you're first getting started with a language. It kind of sucks for learning anything but the most basic grammar, and for getting a feel for how to actually express yourself in a language, or comprehend the language as it would be spoken by a competent speaker. Comprehensible input is still the go-to method for that side of language learning. And once you get to the intermediate or high intermediate stage, SRS isn't even all that great for learning the vocabulary anymore, because it's hard to really internalize the nuances of more advanced vocabulary that way. You'll go farther faster by just watching a lot of TV and reading a lot of books, where you get to encounter the words living in their natural habitat instead of dead and dried and pinned to a notecard.

I once made anki flashcards while reading a book on linux. I think I was able to memorize a lot of useful CLI utilities because of that. It also helped me stay motivated to get through a very dry book.

Knowing what to learn is really important. The field of competitive programming probably has some good answers to your question about being a better programmer.

For anything you read that you want to remember spaced repetition is helpful. If I'm reading a book without putting questions into anki, I forget 90% of what I read. Where as with anki, I can at least keep all the basic concepts in my mind. For example, if you are reading about different types of approaches to programming, you might create a question like, "What are the aspects of Agile?"

I'm not a programmer. I work in security. Today I was on a job interview where someone asked me if I was familiar with Agile. I was able to give him the bare bones explanation of it. This is something I studied over a year ago and haven't touched since.

It can absolutely help here! I've been using Anki for about 7 years, and most of my cards (~9000) are CS-related.

I've found that focusing on the fundamentals helps for me. E.g. most programming languages have a few fundamental ideas that they're built around--memorizing those is usually good enough to quickly hop around programming languages and be productive. Algorithms, operating systems, networks, compilers, machine learning, math, etc...I grabbed some textbooks for those and just focused on the first few chapters, which lay out the fundamentals, and being able to recall and think about those in my head has helped me immensely.

Trivia is occasionally useful but it's hard to transfer to real life: e.g. even though I can answer questions about CLI command arguments when studying, I still have a hard time recalling them when sitting at a computer. Memorizing how to find the answers I need is way more useful (and a lot of this is knowing the right terminology and fundamental concepts...which are easier to recall out-of-context).

I also focus on different formulations of the same concept. Backwards and forwards retrieval: recognizing the concept from its description, and being able to describe the concept. I make separate cards for those. I also put "generative" cards for the same concept, which force me to practice using the concepts, and recognizing when to use them. And also recognizing concepts from code or other contexts. Usually just having one card for a concept isn't enough for me, unless it's really simple or is just trivia. For a hard concept, I might create 5-10 cards to help me practice recalling and using the concept in different contexts.

That's what the "past" link below the submission title is for.

Interesting - have you had any thoughts as to how to improve this? Eg, to get the items into the correct part of your brain?

This is why multi modal learning is often recommended (learn in different forms to not over optimise for one method).

It might be becasue you are just training recognition and not production.

I use Anki to study Russian, with great results, following Gabriel Werner's Fluent Forever.

In the book, he teaches how to learn the words and the grammar of a language using Anki. One of the fundamental ideas is to both create recognition and production cards.

The recognition cards are the ones with a word in your target language, of which you have to remember the meaning. This is what most people use SRSs for.

The production cards instead show you an image, or a sentence with blanks, and you have to come up with the correct word by yourself.

Before reading the book, I have never seen anyone using the latter, but it makes sense. You have to train your brain not only to recognize the information, but also to take it out when needed, and those are two separate paths.

[Update: fixed the book's author name]

I also experience this phenomenon. In learning a language, I like to think of Anki as the primer stage in learning a word. I have to encounter and recognize that word in the wild for the memory to be fully solidified. I'll often go back to my Anki card and add a note of where I encountered it IRL, and that usually makes that card stick for good.

After trying to learn a few different languages the best cycle for me seems to be, remember the word in anki, then in more controlled real word setting like a class or language exchange try to use that word in conversation. If you're not willing to do that last step, I wouldn't even bother with anki if you're using it for languages

Memory in the brain is very connection based. Spaced repetition is a good technique for strengthening connections, but not for structuring it usefully.

I find the best thing is to make as many connections as possible to and amongst the things you want to learn. For vocabulary: find patterns in the spelling of the word, draw the word, use the word in a rhyme, make a joke about the word, etc. Also, connect the words together such that you can traverse a network of them in your head.

It's definitely "learned" in a very specific context. For example, I learned all US states and their capitals for a Pub Quiz. That means cards with state/capital. Then at some point there was a quiz question called "Which state capital is the last if sorted alphabetically?" And I couldn't answer it because it didn't fit my learning pattern.

That's due to encoding specificity. You aren't just learning the 'thing' but the context in which you learned the thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encoding_specificity_principle

It's better to learn things in or close to the contexts in which you will use them. That's the heart of situated learning / problem-based learning / simulations, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Situated_learning