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Comment by bibelo | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the article, I've read though.

I've been using Anki quite successfully to learn things about wines in french, especially about the wine domains in Bordeaux and Bourgogne. It's easy to create, as a flash card. One side shows the map, the other shows the name.

Now, I'm keen on learning the list of the main french authors of each century, but I don't know how to proceed.

Let's say a list of 20 names, how would you do it?

You would not create one flash card with 19th century on one side, and the 20 names on the other side. I've been struggling with that issue.

Maybe using the cloze type?

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Piotr Woznaik recommends turning lists into enumerations. You can see more here: https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru...

In general you want to reduce the amount of things you have to retrieve from memory in one go, and attempting to retrieve a 20 person list is just going to give you problems.

The cloze solution is certainly better than the full list (and does follow the minimum information principle because you just have to retrieve a single name) but the problem is that it doesn't give you any handles. If you have 19 names and Flaubert is hidden, how would you know it's Flaubert that's missing? Long-term you're bound to fail those cards.

But I would also question the premise of the card. Do you expect to have to come up with the 20 names each time you want to talk about 19th century French literature? As in, each time the context is "19th century French literature" is the appropriate knowledge to retrieve "* list of 20 authors *"?

Instead a better approach might be to flip it around and ask yourself, "In which century did Flaubert write Madame Bovary?" or something along those lines. You can both reconstruct the list from that and if you're writing about Flaubert the knowledge that he wrote during the 19th century will come more fluidly to you.

Thank you.

Your answer and your link (especially the paragraph about sets) help me a lot

Anki is great for learning individual arbitrary facts, ie vocab words that would otherwise be difficult to encounter frequently enough in the wild. Learning to reproduce a list doesn’t fit well as you observed because there is no 1:1 prompt for each author, unless you come up with one like “Author of Madame Bovary”, and 20 things is too much for one card. This is more like memory palace territory which I rarely find useful in real life but fits exactly your task.

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