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Comment by aasasd | Hacker News Reader

I've been using Anki to learn various kinds of geographic stuff, flags among them—and let me tell you, country flags around Europe sure could use some variation. I mean, I get it that flags were designed to be recognized from afar, with large fields of color, but now I have to memorize the order in all those tricolors like I'm doing middle-school rote learning again. Especially Ireland and Ivory Coast—what's up with that?

Also, colors are actually hard to recognize in bad lighting because retina cones are hungry for photons. On your flag, slap some large contrasting shapes instead. Test it in grayscale, figure out what it's gonna look like on gift pens, all that jazz. The UK flag is awesome and pretty much unbeatable in this regard.

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> Especially Ireland and Ivory Coast—what's up with that?

Presumably it is part of their tactical plan (the dreaded two-I's alliance). If you think you've beaten the Irish and they are retreating, bam, turns out Ivory Coast was actually headed your way.

I've been learning the "Ultimate Geography" Anki deck as well and I'm using a lot of mnemonics. For your specific example: I link Ireland visually to the color "green", so its flag starts with green (from the left), while ivory is a yellow-ish color, so the Ivory Coast starts with orange.

Alas, mnemonics always seemed no-go to me, at least in the usually-advocated ‘use them everywhere’ approach—because I never had any memorable ones pop up in my mind. And if I made up some random ones, I would likely just forget their associations also. IMO Anki is a very different method altogether: it just keeps the info warm in the brain until it's burned into the memory—which is supposedly approximately one the ways memory actually works.

OTOH I just learned that green and orange in the Irish flag stand for Catholics and Protestants respectively, while in the Ivory Coast flag, they symbolize some run-of-the-mill cliches. So now I'll know that when I see Catholics first, it's Ireland, and when I see “color of rich and generous earth”, that's Ivory Coast.

You're missing the main point of mnemonics, which is simply to help recall. Anki is designed to reinforce memories, but any additional context and connections help this recall.

The best way to learn is really to combine both: make once the effort to build a mnemonic for things that you don't remember easily or which you expect might end up confusing - and then use anki to reinforce this memory.

Our brain works with connections, and connections take effort to form, so all you do to form a single personal mnemonic by definition helps you build these connections, with the mnemonic then helping you later to again find this chain of neural connections that means 'flag of ireland'.

I dimly recall trying to learn how to paint the Union flag (UK) for the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1977. I came up with a novel variation that can best be described as "strangely brown". Mind you, it was quite hard to tell the difference between it being the right way up or upside down. Just like the real one!

I had to go recheck and assure myself that Union Jack is still rotationally symmetrical.

A jack is something you fly on the back of a boat or ship (on a jackstaff). There are at least four local jacks that I can think of, eg the Army one which is red with a union flag motif in the upper left next to the staff. The RN has a white background with the union flag motif in the same place. Merk Navy - dark blue, RAF - light blue.

The Union flag is quite odd and in my opinion a masterpiece. It's not a jack.

> Especially Ireland and Ivory Coast—what's up with that

That's far from the worst of it when it comes to national flags. Compare Indonesia and Monaco or Romania and Chad.

Ah, yes, Romania and Chad aka total lottery in Anki in this regard.

As for Indonesia, I learned to distinguish the shade. Still would prefer not to have to do that, of course.

Or Netherlands and Luxembourg...

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