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Comment by tokamak-teapot | Hacker News Reader

I’ve used Anki for months, trying to learn the Greek alphabet. I’ve failed. I don’t think I’ve learned more than one or two of its letters.

Is it possible I’m just not compatible with the way this works? Any tips on alternatives?

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My hunch is that Anki is mostly useful for stopping you from forgetting things you have already learned. The actual learning is better done outside of Anki.

Agreed - I've found that Anki really helps to recall underlying facts, but if I didn't grasp a concept well outside of Anki, it's not helping with A-HA moments.

Using it to learn an alphabet effectively probably requires more upfront work (setting up and improving the cards) than you’d expect. It’s not just 1 letter = 1 card.

You want to memorise the entire alphabet as a sequence not just as individual letters. So you need cards of little overlapping sequences, like ABC, BCD, etc. The supermemo essays cover this scenario. With that work in place you’d learn it quickly.

As just separate letters divorced of any meaning, not hooked up with any other neurons in your brain, you’d struggle to ever recall it quickly.

This is a detail that people overlook and then wonder why it’s not working. (Not picking on you for doing that: I did the same before eventually reading way too much about it)

The supermemo article is here:

https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru...

...by the creator of supermemo who basically formulated the whole idea.

In Point 1 he explains you shouldn’t use spaced repetition to learn. Use it to remember.

In Point 10 he covers how to remember “enumerations” (with an alphabet example)

You have to go back to the classics when you want to do something properly.

Spaced repetition and the learning curve is quite a bit older than supermemo.

Yeh, I hear ya. That’s why I used the word “formulated” rather than “discovered” —- because he really did the work to not just model it, but really implement a system with a very specific formula which he devised and which was the basis of the field we see today.

I think you'd be able to learn the Greek alphabet in at most an hour, just by writing it out and saying it repeatedly. Making it stick long term would be a matter of a couple of minutes a day for a week or so, then every few days. It's small and simple enough that flash cards aren't necessary.

For more involved facts, Anki seems great in principle, but in practice I've found it hard to create and maintain the habit of doing the cards.

How are you using it?

Anki is "just" a tool to prompt you with flash cards. Designing them is up to you and extremely flexible. You're free to add text, images, audio, whatever you want.

Some ideas of how you could use Anki to learn the Greek alphabet:

- Front of the card has the upper- and lower-case glyphs and the back has their sounds, either English, IPA or an actual recording (Wikipedia has them for everything in IPA and the Greek Alphabet page has a mapping from letter to IPA). You should also do this in reverse.

- Front of the card has a Greek word with a missing space, back of the card has the complete word. You can use audio recordings here as well if it helps you (e.g. have the front read the entire word).

There are also a few pre-made decks that people have shared: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/greek%20alphabet

Maybe Anki isn't a tool for you. I personally don't use Anki because it bores me to death. For me it needs to be interesting. I think there are other people out there who even don't use Anki because it's a boring way to learn something.

Spaced repetition really clicked for me when I realized that it isn’t about learning, but about keeping memories fresh. If you don’t have an emotional attachment to each card in the deck, reviews become a terrible slog. Mine is a mix of random insights I’ve had, photos of places I’ve been, summaries of things I’ve learned, etc. The questions are simply there to force me to engage my memory, which drags up the whole web of mental associations— there’s no need to add every detail explicitly; that’s what notes are for.

Yes yes, I agree. The way I tackle the threat of detachment from my cards is to aggressively delete cards as soon as I see boredom creeping in. I switched from Anki to Supermemo, though. Much better for managing context and even keeping organized notes that may or may not be used for active recall at some later point.

Can't reply to child for some reason but the reason that SM is so great for managing content is a feature called incremental reading (https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading). To sum it poorly, it lets you go through hundreds of articles in parallel and slowly convert them to active recall material over time. It sounds terribly complicated in practice, and learning it is indeed a pain, but once you know it there's really no way of learning more enjoyable. I can promise you that.

I don't understand how anki users are able to make cards for non-language things,I personally absolutely hate making cards while reading anything. It's hard to explain the exact process but incremental reading by contrast makes it much easier to take what's really important from an article and make cards from it.

Same. After about a year of using Anki the need to aggressively delete became apparent. With good culling and time to reflect, review can be almost a meditation.

How does Supermemo help you keep keep context?

> keeping organized notes that may or may not be used for active recall

I use a separate notes app (Bear) for this. Is there much advantage in your experience to integrating active recall notes with Evernote-style reference notes?

Absolutely. Keeping it interesting should be one of the first priorities when learning something.

For the record, Anki actually works really well for me. But interest in the subject should come first.

I've tried several times and I agree, it's boring to me. But a lot of people use it daily and see real progress.

If you want to learn the Greek alphabet try leaving Modern or Ancient Greek on Duolingo. If there’s an Anki deck with modern Greek, translation and romanization that would almost certainly work better than trying to associate a sound to an arbitrary symbol with no scaffolding to help it stick.

Writing systems are something you need to sit down and spend at least a few minutes at a time writing out.

Anki is better for inputting vocabulary with definitions and example sentences. That also puts the letters that you spent time writing into practice.

When I went to Greece I learned it in a few days just by trying to read all the signs I could see. I guess the trick is not to learn isolated letters but learn to read common words.

I, too, did this and it’s not effective. More effective is learning Greek words and memorizing the collation order of the alphabet.

Try to just learn one letter per day. Don’t work ahead and don’t try to learn more than one every day.

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