LineByLine: Memorize Anything | Hacker News Reader

LineByLine: Memorize Anything

linebyline.app

178 pointsTomte40 comments

Cool, some UX tips: Remove fade ins, fade outs. Takes too long. I use Anki daily and would use this app for longer texts to compare to Anki, but everything has to be optimised for minimum amount of clicks with no fancy effects like fade ins. When you are working with 50 texts a day those pause intervals for extra clicking and fade ins add up and burn time. Add keywords shortcuts like in Anki. Clicking with mouse is too toiling. Space should be used to reveal text and 1 and 2 buttons to confirm if you memorised or not. Add push notifications for daily exercise reminders. Good potential though.

Just curios, what do you use Anki for?

I always wanted to use it but I never felt it worth the daily effort.

Contact info of friends in case of an emergency was the most obvious case.

Definitions of rarely but repeatedly encountered terms is the most useful one.

Note that it's only a daily effort the first few days. Over time a single card takes like a dozen repetitions (depending on the complexity).

I have three Anki decks: one for Japanese vocab, one for kanji, and one for the NATO phonetic alphabet.

I use it for all sort of things:

* Vocabulary in different fields

* Concepts in maths, physics, comp.sci.

* Geography

* People I want to remember (both historical and more distant relationsships)

* Some useful numbers (e.g. visa card number)

* Silly things (like the periodic table)

* Programming languages (syntax and similar that I might otherwise forget, and useful standard libraries and third-party libraries)

* Useful tools and ideas/concepts I want to remember

I make my cards atomic. No long answers. And I avoid having a large workload - I add new cards at a rate such that I review about 60 +- 30 cards per day. It takes me ~15-20 minutes, and I find it very much worth the effort!

I can't say enough good things about Anki. It's the best learning tool I've ever used.

I dump in everything I care about: command syntax, architecture, diagrams (image occlusion), Udemy course material, etc.

It's amazed me the difference it makes versus having to pause and Google all the time. You're faster, you're more competent, and you're better prepared to speak persuasively on the topics you study.

I only wish I had found it sooner. Highly recommended.

The hardest part seems to be sitting down to create those flashcards.

Anki is killer for vocabulary (and I've heard health science), since this involves a long tail of terms you might need to recall with somewhat low frequency.

Otherwise, if you use something frequently, you won't need effort to recall it.

In programming, I've found that putting in the effort to make flashcards can help guide understanding. - Understanding some thing is easier if you can recall some basic facts of the domain. And at least, taking the time to break some concept down into basic facts will show what you're familiar with and unfamiliar with.

I use Anki for studying rare words in dictionary, traffic rules, traditions and foreign languages.

Like others in the thread, I use it for foreign-language vocabulary, and this is the large majority of my cards. However, I have also found that when I'm trying to learn a new topic or domain, making 10-20 cards for basic concepts very early on really helps me get over the initial hurdle where nothing is familiar.

Short answer: EVERYTHING.

Ah, this looks like a generalized version of a tool I made specifically to learn The Lusiads (a Portuguese epic poem). It's called MemorizeOnline and you can find it here: http://memorize.online.

Very cool project btw.

Cool.

If I wanted to repurpose this (with your permission) for a similar epic poem (The Bhagavad Gita) for my family -- how would one go about that.

I will find a good-quality open-source and well-formatted text to start with.

The code is open source, you can find it here: https://github.com/jaysonvirissimo/os-lusiadas. Feel free to fork or just use for inspiration. My email is in the footer of the website if you'd like to discuss further.

My card will be charged $5 if I make an account. It does not say what the frequency of billing is $5 a year , month, or minute.

That implies a good old fashioned one-time purchase

Aren't these illegal now? Or at least, frowned upon.

I don't frown upon it! I mostly don't even try subscription apps.

Edit: unless they are crazy well-priced, like this dictionary app https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dict-cc-dictionary/id327732352 (1 euro per year!)

That was definitely a joke

...what?

I imagine this is a joke based on basically how everything is now a subscription fee instead of a one-time payment.

Fantastical comes to mind first. Used to be like 5€ on the App Store, now it's 3.67€/month.

It's a shame the default has become subscription models.

I get it, if you continuously have to keep the servers running. For download and install types I also dislike it.

For Android apps I'm torn. It's actually a continuous effort to keep your app workable on new versions, but Android keeps my purchases from phone to phone.

"Accounts never expire"

This is awesome, I love to see innovation in this space. Just signed up for $5.

Coming from an Anki background, I could really use keyboard shortcuts to speed review. If this site works well, I would forsee scaling out my usage (I usually review Anki for 30-45 minutes per day).

One other thing, there seems to be a large amount of extra vertical space on the review page. It looks like this may be because the rest of the text is using `visibility: hidden`, causing the elements to continue taking up space. Not sure if this is intentional but I think I'd prefer for this to be using something like `display: none` so that it doesn't take up any space at all.

Wow, genius idea! I really really love it.

It does get a little tiresome to keep starting over, so maybe breaking down each text into subtexts that each get memorized separately would work even better.

I wonder how well this would work for math and other technical texts.

Edit: I can memorize some lines very quickly, so it would also be nice to be able to skip all the intermediate steps and just completely hide the line, then increasingly backtrack if I forget it.

Another minor UX feedback: maybe align the "reveal" and "yes" buttons so I can press the buttons faster and without having to look at them.

This is a really cool idea, I do wonder how much of this is memorization and how much of it is typoglycemia (the ability to read misspelled words or words missing vowels etc without any major pause).

I think it uses that phenomenon in service of memorization, but memorization definitely occurs. If you review a text fully, the latter levels don't have any letters and by the time you reach them you have fully memorized the text and only the order of the sentences remains hard to recall.

Super cool! I've wanted something like this for months now.

It would be great to be able to edit texts that I've added. If that threatens to break the SRS model, I'd accept append-only edits.

My use case is that I'd like to memorize the recent Beowulf translation by Maria Dahvana Headley. Afaict the full text isn't floating around anywhere, so I need to transcribe from my physical copy. That's a lot of typing. I'd like to do it, say, 100 lines at a time, and add them into linebyline.app as I go.

Really nice app Tomte

Is it possible to change the font once you log-in?

Your font doesn't do well with other types of character (non-English). The diacritics are messed up.

I could do that on desktop on my own but on mobile it's harder.

I would suggest trying IBM Plex as a basefont. That one does Unicode well for all types of character (including CJK)

Super fun! Spaced repetition is unreasonably effective. For some volunteer community work, I do a lot of memorization of texts with peculiar usages, and nothing quite beats speaking it out loud in a projected voice to get the rhythm of it. Leveraging your ear for rhythm is a huge advantage.

Excellent work! Curious also if there is some reading on how effective this technique is or what made you decide to take this approach to memorisation? It's a little different to what I'm used to (Method of Loci)

Must be the way my brain works, but this did not help in the slightest.

having said that, I did test it with an ITIL4 summary copy and paste which is a remarkably dry and boring subject.

One of my minor life goals has been to learn the Turbo Encabulator text. It's tricky because of the run-on sentences. This might be the tool.

This is remarkably effective.

Great! Finally I can learn "Poema 20" by Neruda.

This makes me want to play IRC trivia, or Lexi-Cross.

No non-alphabet-based language support.

Love it!

I love this.

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