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I’m not trying to say SRS didn’t work very well for parent, but it doesn’t work “matrix style“ well for everyone.

I’ve sunk countless hours into Anki and I don’t feel like I have a lot to show for it.

If I could do it over I would use Anki less and read more out loud, and write notes on paper as if trees didn’t matter.

I feel like we are often met with the biggest success stories on the web with regards to tools and it can feel very discouraging when things don’t work as well for yourself. So my point is just to chime in and say “some of us also fail using these tools”

I don't want to say your wrong about your own experience, but I think sometimes SRS can subjectively feel very unproductive even when it's working great because of the way it constantly surfaces material at the edge of your knowledge. It doesn't often give you the satisfaction of smashing through a series of problems you can answer easily. If it did, it would be wasting your time.

I also think there is a real skill to formulating good flash cards when using SRS that I for one don't think I've yet mastered.

There seems to be a lot of research about SRS but I never see any research about what makes an effective SRS flash card. Maybe it’s different for every person and/or subject. My foreign language skills improved considerably once I stopped putting english on my cards at all and used only the target language + pictures. But, like the person you replied to, using Anki for anything other than language learning has been mostly a waste for me. I do suspect it’s more to do with the decks I’ve created than with the SRS process.

I don't use Anki, but I do use Space Repetition. I've explored different styles of stacks, and found that even for apparently identical underlying information, some formulations of that information work and are acquired easily, and other formulations simply don't work.

The underlying "atoms" you embody in the cards matter, and possibly matters a lot.

Would you mind posting some examples of the kind of cards you have in Anki?

I've experimented with a wealth of homemade and premade decks.

A lot of vocabulary decks based on textbooks used in class, e.g.:

    人 -> person

But I find that for more complex words, I reconize them in Anki, but not in texts.

I also did a large premade deck of example sentences from a grammar book, which I actually found to be very helpful for general language understanding.

I've also failed trying to complete Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, using Anki.

What worked best for me was putting in sentences rather than single words.

So I might put in: ハンバーガーを食べる

Then there's two good ways to practice this. One is just reading/recognition. Can you understand the sentence?

The other way is to make it into a card to practise output: ハンバーガーを_____ (eat)

The part in brackets is a hint to help you get the correct word. Your hints at the start will often be direct translations of words, but you can also use images, emoji, dictionary definitions in the L2. Anything is ok, or combinations.

I often make my output cards very easy:

ハンバーガーをた____ (eat)

While it may look too easy, I still have to remember the word I'm studying.

In general words taken from real books, TV shows, youtube videos tend to stick in my mind a lot better than words from textbooks, wordlists and grammar books. Those tools have their place but they're not the be all and end all.

Good luck! And remember it's a long road. I've made 6000 flashcards over 10 years to learn a second language and I'm still far from "done".

Have you tried using Wanikani? I have been using it for less than half a year and I already know more than 600 Kanji, most of which I can recognise in written text also. Of course, it helps if you reinforce the material through some other means, too, e.g. by working through a textbook.

disclaimer: not affiliated, and WK is not a perfect product (they have some weird quirks), but I've found it to be rather effective. You can also the first three levels for free.

I think this realization is one of the most helpful parts of Anki. Remembering stuff is always harder than we think it is, SRS forces you to face that fact head-on. It doesn’t mean “don’t use SRS”, I think SRS is still worthwhile, it just means you have to be more intentional about what you decide to commit to memory.

Personally, after 10+ years of consistent SRS, I focus only on vocabulary/terminology and fundamentals. Trivia is never worth it.

Correct me if I'm wrong but whilst there is a lot of evidence that reviewing learning material at regular interval is more efficient than doing it all at once, there is nothing that says that flashcard is THE implementation of spaced repetition.

There are some way to get things into long lasting memory that may be less documented academicaly but do work : learning by doing for instance. No one learns Java by putting all the elements of the language into Anki and learning them with Anki. One learns Java by writing Java programs.

I have tried many times using SRS and that's not something for me. I need context and enjoyment. Flashcards are too articial a learning environment for me.

SRS and learning-by-doing aren't mutually exclusive, in fact, I find that doing them together is much more effective than doing either one individually.

The catch is that, in my experience, SRS won't help you learn material you've never seen or used before. For programming, I make Anki cards for a given language/library/algorithm during or after the process of actually implementing something with it; then I can add my own code snippets into the card. For natural languages, I make a card only after I've seen or had to look up a particular grammatical construction or vocab word; then I can add my own example sentence, or the context where I first saw the term, into the card. So long as I'm regularly reviewing, then even for rare idioms or vocab, I can remember things I last saw years ago.

SRS is not as effective if you're studying prebuilt material by rote without any other interaction with the content. Rather it should be one part of a broad portfolio of activities you do to learn. For coding it should complement things like implementing projects, learning new libraries, reading open source code, reading technical books on the subject and so on. For languages it should complement things like talking to native speakers, reading news articles in the target language, listening to podcasts etc. where you use content from your other things and turn them into Anki cards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition

Spaced Repetition

Spaced repetition is an evidence-based learning technique that is usually performed with flashcards. Newly introduced and more difficult flashcards are shown more frequently, while older and less difficult flashcards are shown less frequently in order to exploit the psychological spacing effect. The use of spaced repetition has been proven to increase rate of learning

I am just finding more about this space . Correct me if I am wrong, My understanding is Anki is helpful when you want to remember some extremely detailed information (might even be considered as trivia by some). My usecase isn't like that. I just want to remember the main concepts of everything. Don't want to remember things like who developed that thing or when was it developed.

Have you been able to do this ?

This is only what I use Anki for (main concepts). Just make cards for the concepts. For me, trivia is not worth the effort to remember, concepts + terminology are (terminology helps me understand and talk about the concepts, and search for the trivia when I need it).

Take notes on the main concepts / highlights, then make anki cards (: (I know it's easier said than done)

Shameless plug but I built an app [0] to help with this workflow. You can write note cards in markdown and then review them with spaced repetition.

[0] https://mochi.cards/

Could you give an example of a "main concept" you'd like to remember?