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Comment by frankzander | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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