Show HN: Make spaced-repetition flashcards
zorbi.cards
zorbi.cards
I see that you wrote a page that ostensibly compares it to Anki[1], but it doesn't tell me anything. You say that it's easy to use, but does it also support all of the features that Anki has? You say that "you won't have to worry about settings or addons", but settings are there for a reason (because people have different needs), and does your tool subsume all of the functionality of all of the Anki addons that people made? You say that "we release new features every week", but where's the list of features that have been recently added, and how does the feature-set compare with Anki?
I want a better tool than Anki, but you have to show me that it's actually better. Otherwise, you're not going to win over either the Anki users or the Quizlet users.
For now, we're focusing on helping students learn more effectively through spaced-repetition. Hence our Chrome Extension + Notion Integration. Hope that gives you an idea on where we fit into the "Spaced-Repetition" space.
Also, here is our changelog: https://zorbiapp.notion.site/zorbiapp/What-s-New-a7c0b5d9241...
It looks like a very well-done app and I agree that Anki can be clunky but I don’t worry about it disappearing and taking years of work with it. I really do wish you luck but for me at least it’s a high bar to cross.
Can you speak about how you use the 25k cards? Do you feel you retain them all?
At first glance i suspect you're using your 25k cards the way i envision my ideal knowledge base setup. A store of information which exceeds my brains capacity, but which i can choose a slice at which i want to transfer to my brain. Ie choose a deck of cards and working on that to transfer (learn) the material again.
I use my decks to keep topics in mind for years until I choose to forget them. But these cards are things I always have memorized -- they're not something that I restudy when I need them.
25k cards hardly exceed your brain's capacity! That's about the same amount of information as 12,000 words in a second language -- plenty of people are bilingual.
Do I retain them all? Errrr... not really. My retention of cards I haven't seen for a while is about 85%. Further, 1,354 of the cards are "suspended" -- that is, I've gotten them wrong enough times that Anki won't show them to me again unless I un-suspend them.
The most important questions to ask any one who's using a flashcard system are:
- What do you get out of it? - What are your costs?
For me, I get years' worth of material I no longer need to look up and a good foundation in Spanish, even though I only travel every few years. But my costs are an hour a day, every day, trying to remember things that are just about to be forgotten.
Good luck!
Another ~10,000 cards are work-related (computer science). I add to this frequently, mostly consuming research papers and turning them into cards.
The last ~5000 cards are an assortment of topics I've been interested in over the years.
I don't think that I use it the way you're describing--I more or less know all of the things that come up in my reviews each day, though I certainly miss things from time to time, and sometimes I go through and purge a bunch of cards related to topics that I don't have any interest in. It's much less than my total capacity (I know plenty of things that I haven't encoded as flashcards). More than anything it's a way to artificially engage pathways I'm not actively using, in the hope that when I need them they'll be there. It feels much less costly to maintain knowledge than to forget and relearn it, though there's always the danger that you are wasting cycles maintaining things you'll never need again.
I would emphatically not want to publish my flashcards publicly. Many of them are internal to where I work, and simply aren't interesting outside my workspace.
(Does any one outside my company want to memorize the class names for the eight steps my company uses to do on-the-fly scoring of open opportunities? I didn't think so...)
I also believe firmly that the act of creating flashcards is part of what encodes them in your brain. I've never had any luck with prepared decks.
Meet Zorbi - a spaced-repetition tool built for exam study.
Zorbi helps you create flashcards straight from PDFs and Websites or from our Notion integration.
Creating flashcards with Zorbi is crazy fast and crazy easy.
Zorbi is a web-app so you'll be able to study from any device (but we have an Android app & an iOS app coming soon!)
Our mission is to build a full-featured exam study tool that people ACTUALLY want to use
(Combining the power of Anki with the simplicity and flexibility of Notion)
Let me know if you have any questions!
I do not agree with the way you are marketing yourself (critisizing Anki) you should be good on your own terms. From you website. « ZORBI IS THE TOOL THAT ANKI SHOULD HAVE BEEN Anki was built in 2006 for lifelong learning, and it was good for a while.
But let's get real. Anki is a clunky tool that people tolerate. You have to worry about optimizing settings, downloading addons, and updates that might corrupt your data.
Zorbi is easy to use, you won't have to worry about settings or addons, and we release new features every week.»
Also, is not clear at what point you will be asking for money.
Best of luck!
- What is the business model?
- any (detailed) info about the "data exporting" functions?
- Offline use is possible?
- Any API expected? ( creating 3rd party tools )
Thanks!
Freemium might happen in the future for niche features (e.g. Improved TTS / GPT-3 Flashcard Generation).
No data exporting yet. We plan to add CSV/PDF exports in the next month.
Offline mode is not possible yet - it will be within a couple of months.
Public API + Extendability is 100% planned. If you're interested in developing anything custom then get in touch with us! Might be able to set something up for you.
I would be likely to sign up if I knew there was an option to export to a more established free flashcard engine (e.g. Anki), or at least to csv, say, for no other reasons than peace of mind and flexibility. I see in your FAQ that that is on the cards (hah!) so I will keep my eye on it and I think you will definitely get more buy-in when that is a working feature.
Excellent work and best wishes going forward!
I didn't try Zorbi yet but I tried Anki a few times and I simply hate its interface. Yes, it has all the features but it is far too clunky and bothersome to use for me. Zorbi in contrast looks like it has a easy, beautiful UI that I can actually use with joy.
Yes, features aren't the only reason why people use a product, but some people (me, and many others here) do mainly use a product for its features. The lack of a comparison is somewhat of an oversight.
For that matter, there's no UI comparison either - no video showing a side-by-side diff between Zorbi and other tools (Anki, Mnemosyne, Quizlet, etc) - which, all in all, makes it a hard sell for most people who are already using an SRS, and I'm pretty sure that Quizlet has much more momentum and can acquire new-to-SRS users faster than Zorbi can.
Creating a card is not just writing down some text (or, worse, copy-and-pasting it so that you remove all your agency entirely); rather, it's focusing a spotlight on a specific small aspect of your enormous mental model, determining how you can remember that particular aspect, and then writing down a card that will trigger you to illuminate that same spotlight in the future. Reviewing a card is not just dredging some detail from your memory; rather, it's remembering the reason you remember that card, and then re-activating the spotlight.
Writing and reviewing flashcards is a much more active process than many people think, and I am very wary of anything that purports to remove some of that activity, because the activity is what helps you remember!
It's mostly the convenience of always having the ability to create a spaced-repetition flashcard there in your browser.
Our primary use cases are studying for exams and language learning. Hopefully that sheds some more light on how the Chrome extension / Notion integration are used.
Of course it's hard to know whether other alternatives could have worked even better, but this way I devote 30 minutes a day which can be on the bus, in bed, etc. and make progress. If I had to spend the time and involvement of making the cards myself (which requires not only more time, but in practice a more dedicated setting with a PC and keyboard, etc., as I'm not going to make flashcards with my phone on the bus even if it's technically possible) I would probably have quit a long time ago.
So work on making the creation of flashcards easier seems like something that could be of interest at least to some people.
Do you have any support for cloze-deletion? I find that is the number one way to improve your output in a foreign language.
How are you going to stop people making hundreds and hundreds of cards and being unable to review them? I find that people often start of using SRS systems by putting in way too much information and then getting overwhelmed by reviews.
Final question: any plans for teacher/student models. Quizlet has a few nice features for this but there isn't any spaced repetition as far as I'm aware.
Yes. We have cloze deletions. Hit Ctrl + Shift + C for cloze deletions (or hit the "Eye" that says "Hide Text")
RE: the issue with reviews piling up.
- We have some modifications planned for the algorithm that will make this easier. See the Load Balancer addon in Anki + algorithms like Half-life Regression which are making this easier to deal with.
Also we could all do with a "let me take weekends off" feature :)
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Yes - we're working on some features for teachers. If you're a teacher you should get in touch - keen to learn more about what you need.
(I haven't used that one, I only use Anki for Japanese and therefore use Yomichan for the same thing).
I appreciate this tool being free at the moment (the world doesn't need another SAAS), but I've seen nothing on this page that really makes me want to use it. To me, I see a cloud-based Anki alternative with less control over your data/freedom.
Also closed source isn't always bad. It's no secret that Duolingo has the world's best spaced-repetition algorithm - they will IPO for 2.4 billion soon.
From scanning your product's landing page, it seems you focus a lot on the time-savings during card creation, by relying on copy-and-paste. I'm not sure this is the best way to learn more complex topics, but may work fine for very clear things that are already bite-sized in the source material (e.g. chemical formulas, or language vocabulary). Are you focusing on these use cases?
[1] https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24878171
e.g. we have tooltips+hotkeys that let you append the highlighted text to the front/back.
One-click card creation for language vocab is on our roadmap and will be a focus-area soon. We're focusing on students / teachers right now.
Edit: You may like our guide too: https://zorbi.cards/making-good-flashcards (based on SuperMemo's original article - but summarised for the average K-12 student)
Will let you know when we have reversable cards.
For example, rule four here https://zorbi.cards/making-good-flashcards/ tells you not to make difficult to answer flashcards. And then the rest of the examples all over the site are all difficult to answer cards. Maybe not now, but in a year or two from now.
While I applaud the creator of this app, I’ve found the analog way most effective and fulfilling. I find it develops my brain instead of developing something or someone else.
I opt for the hard way. The slow way. Paper and pen and, a lot of whiteout rollers.
But I don’t recommend you read the Wikipedia entry.
Read this instead:
I've built my own sort of Anki/SRS app but specifically for language learning. Extra features like dictionary lookups and generated audio for each card. Not as super customizable as Anki, but many language learners arrive at similar configurations (e.g., Refold). I've seen more and more language learning apps are starting to have SRS as a foundation
Congrats on the launch!
Also anki3 is the replacement. Its rather modern and python base is well written and documented.
I don't see any tags or branches on the github repo that indicate anki v3.
I had created this website few months back to teach html, css, js to a newbie. Though this doesn't have spaced repetitions and saving stuff. But if you want to print your flash cards, then you can use this.
For the most part, I found that flashcards only help when they are crafted with care, and it's a skill that needs to be learnt [2]. But what I found particularly useful about my hacked-up setup is that every card is contextualized: if I need a refresher for the content of a card, I can revisit the location (website/pdf) for it.
[1]: https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/taking_srs_seriously/ [2]: https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/