Effective Spaced Repetition
borretti.me
borretti.me
For successful long-term use of a spaced repetition program, I believe that this model of thinking is unsustainable for most. I used to have this relationship but had to grow past it as my life circumstances changed and prevented me from having that consistent amount of time every single day.
Now, I look at Anki as a way to prioritize my learning time. When I get to it, I have it present me the things that are the most-overdue first. This has meant that I've gone from a typical backlog of ~0 reviews at the end of the day to flexing between ~500-2500 backlogged reviews. Just because I'm not reviewing the piece of information at the exact right time doesn't mean that I'm "defeating the point" of the piece of software. Spaced repetition, even if done imperfectly, is still many times more efficient than traditional study methods.
Some of us, thanks to personality and previous experience (diagnosis and/or childhood and/or early work experiences etc) needs to hear this again and again it seems.
This is a bad idea for two reasons:
When it comes to spaced repetition, quality beats quantity. Only put in the perfect nuggets of knowledge. You're walking through an orchard and grabbing a single apple, not a whole trees worth.
Spaced repetition is to stop you forgetting, not for learning brand new things. When you study a topic and have an "aha" moment or you make a new connection, that's the thing you should put in. When you make the flashcard it should feel a little too easy. "I could never forget this, it seems so obvious now!". Doing this means your reviews are almost all easy and remind you of your learning experiences. The few things you forget are easily recalled and strengthened.
Joyful and fun review sessions are the most important thing. Maximising adherence (and therefore not giving up) is far more important than squeezing out a 1% more efficient SRS algorithm.
I learned multiple languages this way. I think you’re better served by turning off the counter for cards remaining, and studying more often. Otherwise you’re not doing SRS at all.
One can’t remember 2300 Kanji as an aha-moment each.
Drilling all the possible combinations of Hangeul characters for recognition speed is very effective, but most cards won’t be an aha-moment.
One can use premade lists of vocabulary and prioritize vocabulary encountered in study material/real life. You’ll have to learn all the other vocabulary eventually anyway.
Decks with huge amounts of example sentences and audio simulate real conversation and drill listening comprehension and applied grammar.
There is no right or wrong way to srs. You have to put in mental effort, whether thats creating elaborate cards, or grinding through thousands of premades. Once you stop putting in the mental effort, it will stop working to improve your recall
> promptly being swamped by reviews and giving up
I faced Anki review hell even with small decks, So I had to create an always-on Anki e-Ink review system[1] which sits on my desk and shows me cards all day; Now I can choose to review the cards through out the day during small breaks without overwhelming myself with a single review session.
Due to the small real-estate (screen), I have to condense the information to what's really necessary and the act of doing it (on Anki desktop) itself helps me with my learning.
What I'm doing might be heretic to Spaced Repetition folks, But it works for me.
Question: for language learning: is there anything to say about or help with this initial learning? So before then starting the spaced repetition.
- https://www.duolingo.com/ (language learninig)
- https://www.chessable.com/ (chess)
- https://readwise.io/ (book highlights)
- https://examarly.com/ (test prep)
- https://app.bestudious.io/login (certifications - CFA)
- https://magoosh.com/ (vocabulary)
You seriously need a basic beginner book if starting from fresh, and use Duolingo just as a repetition tool when you can during the day
I'm learning Japanese now through books, Anki, and a few webapps. The gamification is gone and streaks don't really matter. I'm sticking with it because I'm enjoying learning, not because the owl is threatening me.
Going to a fixed sequence of learning "the path" so that you're forced to cover topics and words in a specific order, and then introducing grammar that has never been taught... Why? Either cover them in order, or don't.
Eventually, you figure out the right answer by trial and error and "learn" it, but only after having developed a bad habits and wrong answers... Why? Of course there are Anki's and such out there that cover all the words so I guess they want you to just do that.
You can pick a lot worse to learn to be able to stumble through a language for vacation.
Learning the first few words in a language to start becoming competent in it is not a bad thing. Managing one's expectations is really important.
Not all learners will learn best with a textbook or course first. Variety helps.
Humans have learned language by speaking before as much as, if not more than reading/writing.
Now, are there better apps coming out for this kind of thing? Absolutely. The potential for LLM to be able to generate and listen to pronunciation will be amazing.
Prioritizing speaking before learning to read or write a language really seems to irk some folks.
It didn't teach me to speak alone but expanded my vocabulary enough to stumble through conversations. Which was enough to being improving through speaking with locals.
What Anki provides:
- Open source guarantees your data won't be gone and/or unusable when the company goes bankrupt in a few years
- General purpose, fully customizable card creation
- Tunable scheduler, recently also fully tunable scheduling systems like FSRS.
We have a Linear Algebra course (https://mathacademy.com/courses/linear-algebra) that some of you might find interesting given how often that topic shows up on HN, and we just finished our Math for Machine Learning course (https://mathacademy.com/courses/mathematics-for-machine-lear...) for anyone who might be interested in giving that a look.
I'm the founder if anyone has any questions.
Sorry about the shameless plug.;)
Given that SRS is a long-term endeavour, going on several years, I'd balk at paying $49/month for your app. Maybe $60/year, but your current pricing is really hard to swallow.
Definitely recommended for anyone wanting to learn JS/TS, regex, and SQL (especially in conjunction with Jennifer Widom's Intro to Database lectures).
(Given your background with Ruby, have you thought about doing a Ruby course? I find it relatively easier finding resources for JS, Python, and even Rust. I imagine you could make an amazing Ruby introduction, though perhaps it would require more work than JS/TS than I would expect.)
I'm very interested in your methods of proofs and abstract algebra courses and I'm excited for them to be released!
It’s just a standard flashcard tool like Anki, but with a much better user interface and a simpler (IMO superior) SRS algorithm.
My experience with Lingvist was the opposite. The UI feels polished and the sentences feel natural and comfortable to learn even for a beginner. It's a shame that it's so expensive - I'd quite happily pay $100 or so for a lifetime membership but sadly they don't offer that.
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=frenya.v...
You get all the code highlighting and markdown support built-in to the IDE. I used this plugin when studying data structures and algorithms for cracking faang interviews.
...and of course I still fell off the wagon after a few months, came back to a backlog in the thousands, and have had tremendous trouble getting back on the wagon.
I am by no means a Japanese expert learner, but I am having much better luck just memorizing real vocab without that intermediate step.
As someone pointed out about the much famed "Remebering the Kanji", you could remeber all the kanji perfectly and still not be able to read Japanese, because Japanese kanji is not equivelant to vocabulary. Actual words, pronunciation and meaning all change when you combine kanji into words.
It's good tangential knowledge to shore up your learning, but it's not something you should spend your entire focus on before you start learning the actual language of Japanese.
You want to memorize in usage order as you are, nominally, an adult. You understand complex concepts and have developed motor skills. There is little point in learning in the order that a child would.
> it's not something you should spend your entire focus on before you start learning the actual language of Japanese This is also true. You can do both. In fact I think you /should/ do both, learning new vocabulary using the kanji you've learned so far to help motivate you to learn more. It's quite addicting when you can see your progress day-to-day.
I totally second that. Well, sleep and exercise do amazing things for you too, but if you need to memorize things, I don't know of a quicker method than spaced repetition.
Check out Leitner system: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system
Flashcards Deluxe supports Leitner, I don't know about Anki?
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.orangeorap... (I have no relation to that app, I just find it incredibly useful).
Anki's algorithm is based on an older version of the SuperMemo algorithm, with some evolution since then. The consensus seems to be that while you can fine tune it a bit with the settings, the returns are diminishing at this point.
Disclaimer: I don’t know if Anki supports a simplified system that applies spacing to a whole group of cards instead of each card individually, but why you would want that?
https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulatin...
Huh! I struggled with using Anki for pretty much this exact reason, always spent too much mental energy figuring out the “correct” number of cards for a given topic. But the author makes a good point here, if there’s too many cards on a certain topic you’ll just hit “I remember” on the repetitive cards and the algorithm will make them disappear for months - so there’s basically no cost to having “too many” flashcards!
A low limit will mean some cards don’t hit on the optimal day, but you’ll eventually have time for every card once enough of them have been recalled a few times.
The disclosure to this is that I also don't think you should spend a lot of time figuring out how to create cards. There is some payoff in optimizing the process, but focus on just making the cards and reviewing them so you are learning the actual target subject.
All that said, my current approach is to create cards for concepts that I think are a little hard to understand or that I know I won't see enough repetition in daily work/tasks. If I find out after a few weeks the cards are too easy or too similar I usually with just delete it.
What has made a difference though is thinking about wether I still actually want to remember the contents of a card. Sometimes a card comes up that I haven't seen in months and I think "you know what, I haven't thought about this at all outside of Anki and I don't think that'll change." and then I just remove it. Sometimes I create a nearly identical card again later on, sometimes I really didn't need to know something.
When I couldn't remember a particular kanji in Japanese I used to make lots of cards that featured that kanji at the same time, and usually I'd review them all the same time, it's sort of cheating but it always seemed to help me remember the kanji in the end.
This keeps happening to me, and I have somewhat treated (but severe) ADHD.
Does anyone have recommendations to make this easier? Either Anki settings, or using another app.
Just do the amount you feel like doing. Backlogs don't matter, the system will just show you the highest priority cards (highest risk of forgetting) first, and even give you extra credit (i.e. a longer review interval) for those cards that you do still recall despite the backlog.
I read a lot of technical books and articles. I used to make notes on the interesting/relevant stuff I came across, in case I would forget about it after I had used it and need it again in the future, so I would be able to look it up.
Now I make flashcards instead. Since I keep reading new things, and keep wanting to make new notes, I also keep adding flashcards. And it feels silly to add flashcards without also reviewing them, so I end up doing that too.
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But yes, as another person wrote in their comment, part of it is also resigning to/accepting your condition for the effects it will have on the things you want to do. Sometimes you'll stop reviewing and you'll get a backlog. The important thing is not that you consistently review, but that you consistently pick up reviewing again once you've stopped.
Is there an app/plugin that works like that? I know you could use Anki like that by just not worrying about the backlog, but in my experience it doesn't work like that.
What finally helped was that I first learned the habit of reviewing the cards daily, before I trained the habit of adding new cards. I always fell into the trap of picking up Anki (maybe because an exam came up, or because I was otherwise motivated to learn a specific topic) and immediately writing lots of cards. This gave me a dopamine boost (thus reinforcing the habit), but quickly became overwhelming.
It only stuck when I learned to integrate the review process into my daily life, without actually having anything to create flashcards about. I went days without creating new cards and then every once in a while I thought of something that was a good fit for Anki and that I was unlikely to remember otherwise.
As a result the review process was just a handful of cards every day, able to be reviewed in under a minute. Eventually (I'd say after a month or two), the habit settled and I didn't need to think about it anymore. And because I wasn't fixated on creating new cards I was able to enjoy a gradual increase in creating flashcards as I got better at writing them and recognising when they were a good fit.
To be clear, this took maybe four or five failed tries, even though I read articles like this one. I had to make most of the mistakes covered in this (and other) articles myself, before I got better at writing cards. The tips still helped me arrive quicker at the solution, but it was hard to grasp why they were right, without experiencing the mistakes with my own cards.
Beyond that, I wouldn't worry about backlog too much. I use a custom deck that gives me my maximally doable number of cards per day and completely ignore the rest. It's not like the actual repetition frequency is critical - many people change those settings quite drastically and still manage to memorize their cards fine.
And I started small. Add a few flashcards, review. Don't add more than 5-20 cards per day (Anki and Mochi have new card limits to enforce this for you).
If you use it daily, and add cards at a slow trickle, they won't pile up and you won't get discouraged.
Two big things that people seem to forget, or not realize:
1. Anki (etc) isn't really there to help you remember, it's there to schedule and optimize your time so you can do more in less time; to avoid the (ad absurdum) case of studying every card, every day. That's effective, but wasteful. To help you remember you use other tricks like the Major system, the Loci system, mnemonics, etc. I recommend either Higbee's book on memory, or Lorayne's, for a array of help there.
2. It's not even close to "perfect", because your brain isn't. SO MANY THINGS affect whether or not you're going to remember a card on a day; what you ate, how you slept, other stuff going on in your brain/life, your context when you added the card, your context now, what you have been thinking about ... It's just not possible for software to nail it _to the day_ of when you can see a card. Anki can only tell you when you should PROBABLY see the card and that probability's standard deviation is high indeed.
To your question, what works for me (I've been using Anki for years, and am now approaching a ~1200 day continuous streak) is to be honest with yourself on how many cards per day you can actually do. 10? 100? 1000? For me I'm comfortable with about 150 to keep up the streak. Some days I can probably do a lot more, some days I want to do less but I can power through. But 150 is my happy spot.
Then, set your max cards per day setting to that. Then do those. And stop sweating it. (Optionally, with more recent versions of Anki using the V3 scheduler, set the review sorting to "by most relative dueness")
This does a few things:
* It keeps your workload manageable based on your own notion of "manageable" * It shows you the cards needed to be reviewed kind of by priority * It "hides" the fact that there might be more due
Kind of related is also to be HONEST about your use of the 1, 2, 3, 4 keys. Some people ONLY use 1 or 3. I think this is a mistake because it games the "ease factor" to never go up. Be honest; if the card was basically easy, use 4. It'll up the ease factor and you won't see the card as often. If it's too much you'll eventually miss it and restart the learning steps. (Optionally here, use a plugin light "straight rewards" which will also up the ease factor even on a 3. This is what I do and prefer it.)
I agree with this, but I'd argue that this alone isn't sufficient. You should also try (as best as possible) to keep the number of new cards per day at a level where you will hit your max total cards per day on average in the long run. It's no good setting a cap of 150 cards per day if Anki wants you to review 1000 per day - you'll be severely interfering with the SRS algorithm if you do that. On the other hand, having a cap of 150 per day and an average of 150 a day is fine for those days where the review count is higher than average because it will work out roughly correctly in the long run.
My assertion is that "no, you won't", from a practical standpoint. One of the reasons people lapse on these things is the "overwhelming" issue. If you keep the max to what you can ACTUALLY DO, you'll be more likely to actually do them.
What you're referring to is an optimization issue; although doing less than what it thinks isn't "optimal" FOR ANKI, its way, WAY better than getting overwhelmed and not doing them at all.
And 150 vs 1000, if done regularly, WILL calm down and you'll chip away at that backlog.
And I also firmly believe that people focus way, WAY too much on "the card has to be done on this day or it's lost". No, it isn't. There is no "proper" time for a card because our brains and memory is SO variable that Anki just is a VERY crude guess at proper. Miss it by a day, or 10, or 90 isn't (IMO) that much a difference in the long run.
I see this over and over in /r/anki; people are getting WAY overtuned in trying to keep the software happy rather than the goal of remembering more things in less time.
Like say you block of 30 minutes per day for Anki. Most days you'll probably have time left over, but some days you may have cards left to review by the end of the 30 minutes. But that's okay. You can just do them tomorrow. The point is to be consistent, not to be a completionist.
It would probably help to start reviewing old cards before learning new ones as well.
And of course you can start with whatever small block of time feels like it would be easy to complete like 15 minutes or 5 minutes. Maybe even 1 minute; you can always gradually increase the duration as you rack up a streak.
So far, the only thing that really works for me is solving lots of problems until I have the technique mastered, but even then after a while I'm prone to forget how to solve them. Perhaps there some way to combine the problem solving with the spaced repition? It seems like it would be far harder to make a deck for this and I don't think most flashcard software handles it very well.
From what I understand of the literature, free recall produces better learning compared to cued recall like flash cards. Part of the reason is that it forces you to organize information and associate it with existing knowledge.
Anecdotally, it's much easier to learn conceptual knowledge, and I don't really feel like my recall of specific facts has suffered compared to traditional SRS.
- Front of card is the entire LC problem statement
- Back is a bulleted list of the steps or key points (ie. first I notice this list is unsorted, so I would sort first, next I would do blah blah..)
- Back also contains the code solution that I might just glance through or look at a particular part of it.
"Each 5-minute video, or 'cartoon', is the equivalent of 50 minutes of a university-level computer graphics class. ... there was no statistically significant difference in learning effectiveness between [cartoons & lectures] as measured by exam, homework, and project scores. In other words, the cartoons were just as effective as traditional classrooms for teaching the material."
https://g5m.cs.washington.edu/
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWfDJ5nla8UpwShx-lzLJqcp5...
I was going to write some rules specifically about math but I might write those as a separate post because they got too long. I think I've benefited specially from memorizing the proofs of theorems, though refactoring proofs into multiple lemmas to make each proof small enough to fit in a flashcard is a tedious process.
Can GPT/chatGPT help here ? If yes, how ?
And for cards creation in general, the ever-green "20 rules of formulating knowledge in learning" is always a good guide.
1. Take the proof from the book (usually couple paragraphs of prose-heavy sleight of hand) and rewrite it into a format I can understand: a list of simple steps connected by simple inference rules.
2. Split them up until each proof is 5-7 steps.
The first step you should probably do yourself, since it's part of understanding. The second step GPT can probably help with.
I’ve dreamed of having some app that mixes in bite sized learning lessons with otherwise “fun” internet (social media, news, etc.)
I could imagine it could give you a little tutorial and then ask you a quiz (to force application). If you get it wrong it keeps you at the same concept and explains it a different way next time, maybe asks if you want to revisit prereqs.
Even if you can’t memorize the answers, you can change your understanding and intuition.
Front of card: where to find the problem (e.g., book, page number, problem number).
Back of card: where to find a solution (e.g., solution manual, page number, maybe a personal notebook with cleanly written solutions, etc.).
I initially tried writing up the problem and solution in Anki, but that was too much of a hassle and realistically I'm not gonna be reviewing problems without the book in front of me anyway.
English: there are thirty days in April.
French: il y a trente ___ en avril
The sentences are compiled automatically from Tatoeba[1], the cloze deletion is done on the least-common word[2]. This combines vocabulary with grammar.
I didn't like the Clozemaster UI so I wrote a script to make the clozes myself: https://borretti.me/article/building-diy-clozemaster
But automatic approaches are not great. Later I asked GPT-4 to make these flashcards for me, that gave me much better/more meaningful results.
[0]: https://www.clozemaster.com/
[2]: https://www.clozemaster.com/faq#how-are-the-blanks-in-the-se...
For language I've always used the sentence in target language (the one i want to learn) in the front of the card and the translated sentence in the back of the card but I've always wondered if it should actually be the other way around.
Your suggestion with the cloze is another good approach
It should be both ways round. This is especially true for languages (where your brain needs e.g. French -> English for reading/listening and English -> French for writing/speaking). It's also useful even where you only need one direction because learning both directions actually strengthens the memory for the direction you need.
I was wanting to get back into French and thought about using chatgpt, but I'm worried about it's hallucinations and teaching me wrong.
Simply spoken, get questioned on the word alone, then see it in context. I've found that sufficient to solve this problem.
As an alternative, you can question yourself on a sentence and the word by its own. Note that sentence alone wouldn't cut as you'd memorize the sentence and not the word and would be unable to remember the word otherwise, most likely.
On further reflection I found that those cards just were an attempt at avoiding actually practicing something, but this isn't really possible. If you want to be good at solving integrals, than you do actually have to solve lots of integrals. Anki will not make you proficient at this if you don't also put in the time to frequently solve integrals. Instead what it can do for your is keep the various techniques for integral solving close to the surface, so that you can relearn them much quicker if you haven't solved any integrals in months. You skip the step of having to rediscover all the techniques.
Personally, I dislike having every app implement (or not) it's own version of SRS, so I combine language apps with Anki. For each lesson in an app, I make an Anki card which simply tells me to revisit that lesson. I then put those cards in a special deck with customised settings with larger review gaps so that I'm not overwhelmed with time-consuming lessons.
It does require an intense amount of discipline though, so wonder how well it will work for me in execution for hobby learning.
Title
Question
Additional Criteria
Example input/output
Insight (1 sentence maximum)
Insight explanation (can be longer/bullet-pointed list)
Key Data Structure (at most 1 data structure; if there are multiple, use the most important one)
Time complexity
Space complexity
Full answer code (can use syntax highlighter add-on)
Source (can provide link to associated question online; can include link(s) to solutions that the insight and/or code come from)
There are 4 cards that are generated from this template, which test the same question in slightly different ways. They individually ask for the insight, the key data structure, and the time and space complexities.
I found this note type to be critical to my success in the following interviews. In two cases, I was asked literally the same exact question I had already added to Anki; I was able to write out the solution from memory in one go. If you'd like to use my note type directly, I've exported an example here. [0]
[0] https://drive.google.com/file/d/12NsYNIBjIPI1Nhq5wE1xPljr9rH...
Is there any gentle kid-friendly introduction to this topic with a fun exercise that I can introduce my K-12 kids to so they might grow up with better tools than me?
The recommendation is to learn before you memorize.
Many times I hack the infos (from an article) right into Anki. Now if it‘d want to review the infos in the Anki app, that totally destroys my stats.
What are some of you doing? Extract the info into some other tool, review the infos there and then quiz yourself in Aki?
I don't understand what you mean. There are only 2 stats that are mostly significant. The first is, when first learning the card, if you hit again too many times the card becomes a leech - as in it leeches your time, at which point you should temporarily suspend that card and to the others first.
The other one is the recall rate: after you learn a card (on default settings, when you hit the 1 day mark for that card) how often you don't fail to recall the information. This rate is the single most important metric in your stats, and a value that is constantly below 90% means you should probably tweak your settings to show cards more often. This can be easily done by reducing the interval modifier. A value close to 100% might also be slightly problematic depending on what you want, because you might be wasting time with unnecessary reviews, which can be solved by slightly increasing the said interval modifier.
As for your main question, you can do it however you see fit. Some people might prefer to do everything in Anki, while others might prefer to read a textbook, watch lectures etc. first and then move on to Anki for that specific topic. Don't use Anki as a way to quiz yourself, it is not a testing tool. If you want to test yourself, use question banks. Use Anki as a tool that will help you memorize things. For this, you have to do your reviews on time, or the algorithm just won't work.
I then go to the exams but how do I continue afterwards? Like what are the best settings to retain all the information after that? And how do I make sure that I'm not destroying those settings when I need to study before an exam again?
You can use filtered decks and set them up so they don't alter the schedule of the cards when they're "returned" to their actual regular deck. Useful for a cram session before an exam where you don't want to actually alter the regular study schedule.
I have tried adjusting it more in the past and found it did nothing to help me overall and I was just turning knobs to turn knobs.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly well aware that the knowledge required for exams isn't representative of the knowledge required to be well versed in a topic outside of exams, and Anki can still help you learn stuff that you specifically want to remember for exams, but you can remove those cards afterwards. You don't actually need (and probably don't want) to remember much of the stuff that instructors want you to remember for exams. So after the exam you just keep reviewing as normal, but radically delete/suspend cards that were exam specific.
This way you start learning a lot of the things that you actually want to remember longterm during the semester, while also avoiding a lot of clutter from exam specific cards.
Say you learned your cards and did a custom study to review them before your exam. Now you "know" these cards to some extent. Anki knows how many times you reviewed them and if you provided an accurate assessment of how well you retained these cards, Anki will know when to show 'em next, so you don't forget. You don't have to do anything.
2. Do you have any sort of guide or principles for note-taking? I'm always debating whether or not it's worth taking notes, and when I do take notes I'm debating what the best way to do it is. (Hierarchal/bulleted information like in your post, or summarizing things in paragraphs, or what) A lot of times it's unclear to me what information is worth writing and it frustrates me.
I spent so much time and effort comparing the various spaced repetition software before finally, grudgingly, choosing Anki over Mochi.
My rationale was that, while Mochi's UX is amazing, the algorithm matters. SuperMemo seems to justify this - SM18+ is a highly refined algorithm and 'seems' to provide much, much better performance than SM2/Anki.
So Mochi's incredibly basic 'engine' seems, by this logic, to be a pretty significant downside.
In the end what I care most about is memorization, and it seems like the best 'engine' for that is (Supermemo if you're on Windows, otherwise...) Anki + FSRS.
I'd appreciate being convinced I'm wrong - Using Mochi was a vastly more pleasant experience than using Anki.
Could you share with us how you’re applying this knowledge in your work?
Like a few months back I had the sudden inexplicable autistic urge to learn geology. So, I picked up a textbook and went through it like a novel and just wrote the flashcards as I read.
I think of it as checkpointing for learning: https://borretti.me/article/spaced-repetition-checkpointing-...
Currently going through Jaynes' Probability Theory: The Logic of Science.
I've only been doing it for a year and change so we'll see how it goes, but I think it's a good approach.
For example, read this and follow the links: https://calnewport.com/case-study-how-i-plan-to-study-for-my...
Obviously ignore the stuff that's less relevant for an autodidact, though seriously consider the effect any particular thing could have on your learning. For example, perhaps you'd get a high ROI paying a history graduate student to assign and grade a research paper or exam.
Ali Abdaal also has great suggestions that should be useful: https://aliabdaal.com/the-essay-memorisation-framework/
My tentative thought (and I haven't validated this entirely) is to try to structure it. Make a spreadsheet with tables for people, events, etc. Look at Wikipedia infoboxes for inspiration into the types of things that should go as columns in the tables.
You can also try hierarchical periodization. Like if you were making flashcards about the life of Peter the Great you'd divide his life into:
1. Early life
2. Grand Embassy
2.1. Austria
2.2. The Netherlands
2.3. England
3. Great Northern War
3.1 Start
3.2 Founding of St. Petersburg
I had a question: how much time do you typically spend on this activity in a day? Do you have tips for how to adjust based on the time you have available?
Right now I haven't added many cards in a while so it's more like 30-50 cards a day. Usually not even 5 minutes.
I wouldn't recommend doing hundreds of cards a day, especially if you're just getting into it. I'm just nuts.
Could you link to some good quality decks for inspiration please?
Also, people differ in the "density" of cards they need around a given topic. I might need a lot of cards to cover a particular area of a topic in many different ways, while someone who already knows that area needs fewer.
I agree that public decks tend to be terrible. So I don't really know any good ones. For the examples in the post, I tried to keep the wording as close as possible to the flashcards in my own Mochi decks, without adding extraneous detail.
It does matter. You shouldn't train on a flashcard until you have learned the idea. The computer doesn't know if you actually learned what you read. Making the flashcard based on your own understanding is an important part of encoding the memory -- it's an active process, rather than passive.
It's well established in communities that use Anki a lot (like language learners) that someone else's pre-made decks aren't as effective as making your own. The exceptions are either small and simple (e.g. NATO phonetic alphabet), or had a lot of thought put into them with community feedback, like the ones medical students use.
This is indeed a usual claim. But given a reasonably good pre-made deck, I doubt it's universally true if you factor in the time it takes to make the cards.
I'm learning Chinese vocabulary with a pre-made deck. I devote 20-30 minutes per day (have been doing so for a couple of years), introducing 8 new cards per day. My success rate is typically worse than for most people who make their own decks (floating around ~80% for mature cards) but I see clear and steady progress.
If I wanted to create my own cards, I would probably need to slow the pace to around 2-3 cards per day tops (as deciding which cards to create and then creating them would take time which I wouldn't be able to spend studying), and they would have no audio, which the pre-made deck does and makes a difference.
For pre-clinical rotations, a few nerdy peers and I collaborated on a shared deck of a couple thousand slides -- many of them pathology images -- synced via Dropbox.
For the Step exams, I mostly used practice test questions. Any question I missed prompted me to read up on the topic to determine what piece of knowledge would have helped me come to the right answer, and then figure out how to make a decent card for that principle. Every morning I would start by reviewing all my SRS cards, then do a few hours of practice tests. It was really nice being able to be able to take a core component m of my study material on the road by just bringing my phone! A few of the practice question apps had protections in place to prevent copying text (copy and paste saved a fair bit of time, even if there was also a lot of rewriting) -- but figuring out workarounds like running in a VM or screenshotting from the iOS app was never too hard, and I would just queue up the screenshots to batch process toward the end of the day.
I used a similar technique to pass the tech, general, and extra exams for amateur radio with near perfect scores (the verbatim questions and answers are freely available -- I did try to learn the concepts behind most questions, though a few were admittedly memorization without understanding). Unfortunately my small town is too rural to have a local club, and I have too many hobbies to shell out $1k for a HF rig, so I have yet to make a single QSO. I'll eventually find time to put together the QRP CW kit I got for my birthday :)
Takes a lot of effort to commit my notes from a book into my head, but a tiny amount of resources to store them on my computer.
>The most difficult task, beyond that of just persisting until the benefits become clear, is deciding what’s valuable enough to add in. In a 3 year period, one can expect to spend “30–40 seconds” on any given item. The long run theoretical predictions are a little hairier. Given a single item, the formula for daily time spent on it is Time = 1⁄500 × nthYear−1.5 + 1⁄30000. During our 20th year, we would spend t = 1⁄500 × 20−1.5 + 1⁄3000, or 3.557e-4 minutes a day. This is the average daily time, so to recover the annual time spent, we simply multiply by 365. Suppose we were interested in how much time a flashcard would cost us over 20 years. The average daily time changes every year (the graph looks like an exponential decay, remember), so we have to run the formula for each year and sum them all; in Haskell:
sum $ map (\year -> ((1/500 * year**(-(1.5))) + 1/30000) * 365.25) [1..20]
# 1.8291
Another good use case is country flags, because you can't easily look those up (other than pulling up an image of ALL the country flags)
1) test word -> meaning, not word -> word in other language
2) I don't test reverse most of the time, unless I really want to remember how to say something - output tends to emerge by itself given enough input
3) When a word has multiple meanings I add context (usually a related word or colocation as a hint - whole sentences can cause you to associate the sentence with the word but not recall it in other situations). Words with lots of meanings (in Japanese I guess that would be stuff like 引く or in English 'run'?) tend to be very common words so you don't need to use flash cards so much anyway.
After a while I realised I was visually learning the flashcards, i.e. when reading the prompt side I would see a photographic memory of the answer and get it right, but not necessarily think about the meaning of the contents. After a 15-20 min session I would remember very little of what I had just studied. Then I quit.
It reminded me of how trained chess players visualise the game as patterns instead of a collection of pieces.
Anyone with a similar experience?
I surmised that it was a result of my deck being too small. It may be different with a larger deck and a greater variety of cards, but I never got my deck to that point.
Good in theory. Sometimes time crunches don't allow that, and to be honest after having used Anki for many years there are quite a lot of times where I rote-memorized a card and as I learned more about the subject the understanding came later.
Usually this is when there are several cards hitting different aspects of a given topic; as I gain understanding in one area, it comes in another.
So this is very much a "nice to have" rule of thumb.
For me, people vary. But I'd rather have the card and come to understanding than not have it.
Recently I launched a website [2] where I try to blend a markdown-based knowledge manager with spaced repetition. It's not an easy task and there's a long way to go, but after adding and maintaining > 400 cards, I already
My basic approach to implementing it in Notion (my preferred knowledge manager) is:
1. build some block template in notion that lets me structure the block such that it’s easy for Mochi to ingest it 2. reads new pages from Notion 3. uses Mochi to generate cards for them 4. build a habit of reviewing Mochi cards, then I will actually learn from the things I write in Notion
It looks like you've implemented the core functionality in retaind. How come you decided to go with a separate knowledge base, rather than try to use one that already has strong network effects, like Notion?
As an aside, Notion would completely disrupt the flashcard app space (Quizlet, etc) if it had a feature to create flashcards from a Notion database with spaced repetition. I really don't think it would be that difficult for them to implement that feature. Hopefully they will soon.
He's wrong on this one. The problem with making extremely atomic flashcards is that many times it's impossible to prevent slight amounts of overlap between the cards. What this means is that answering card A might contain information that allows you to answer some subsequent card B.
As a result you end up effectively getting a hint for some dependent cards, as opposed to if you had to recall all that information from scratch.
Card 1 front: Countries in the UK: 1. [...] 2. 3. 4. Card 1 back: Countries in the UK: 1. England 2. Scotland 3. Wales 4. Northern Ireland
Card 2 front: Countries in the UK: 1. England 2. [...] 3. 4. Card 2 back: Countries in the UK: 1. England 2. Scotland 3. Wales 4. Northern Ireland
Card 3 front: Countries in the UK: 1. 2. Scotland 3. [...] 4. Card 3 back: Countries in the UK: 1. England 2. Scotland 3. Wales 4. Northern Ireland
Card 4 front: Countries in the UK: 1. 2. 3. Wales 4. [...] Card 4 back: Countries in the UK: 1. England 2. Scotland 3. Wales 4. Northern Ireland
Because the cards are siblings, I'll only ever be tested on one in a given day. Each item in the list (aside from the first) is prompted by the preceding item, so that your brain learns to generate the entire list from memory sequentially. The same technique can be used to memorise a long quote by breaking it down into a list of chunks.
I also have a note type that consists of multiple cloze fields so that I can capture related information as siblings.
Basically, I wanted a flashcard app mashed together with repl.it. At first I thought I'd just have the python interpreter built in, but I slowly realized that correctly implemented flashcard is a programming template and a correct answer, and that your choice of interpreter should produce the correct answer given your input.
---
So now I've come to the general formulation of the app:
Question -> Some application specific file. For Python it might be the boilerplate into which you insert a nested list comprehension. For C# it could be a whole project boilerplate into which you insert your LINQ statement.
Answer -> The expected output when your program is done executing. Probably on STDIO? Maybe something else. There are lots of IO options in an Linux OS.
Card -> Question, Answer, Executable (we could probably infer this from the "question" card)
---
Everything after this would be pretty much like Anki as it is now. You could have a script that listens to you play a song and then scores your performance. You could take touch/writing input and score penmanship. And so on.
The possibilities here are limited by your imagination.
Unfortunately, I got derailed trying to sort out the review algorithm. If anyone has any ideas on this front, I'm all ears. I know Anki's algorithm punishes skipping review days, and I'm one who skips review days frequently. Which leads to me quitting altogether because the review load becomes boring and unbearable.
I am working on a learning app/system. The reason for that is, that it is very difficult for me to remember staff. I tried some apps and systems like spaced repetition/leitner, but they didn't work well for me, especially when there are a lot of cards. Supermemo is the closest thing that has worked for me.
After that I gave up and experimented with plain paper based maps and probably found the best way for me to learn. Then I implemented an improved version of it, mainly because the computer can store more historical information. At its core, the system measures the difficulty of each card and creates appropriate learning batches.
I have a working prototype, and so far I have gotten amazing feedback on it. I have introduced a version for people who have even more difficulties to learn.
It has a long way to go, but if anyone is interested in trying it out when it goes public next year, please let me know.
* You are effectively memorizing. Memorizing something takes a long time compared to other learning techniques like learning concepts and looking up details as needed. I find it works best if I'm selective about what to memorize since memorizing everything limits the breadth of what I can learn in general.
* Mnemonic devices, even ones that seem silly, are incredibly valuable for things that are hard to remember. It may take time to find or think up a mnemonic, but it's worth the up-front effort.
* If you naturally have unavoidable life interruptions every week/month that require you to skip learning days, you may be happier with more forgiving algorithms. Algorithms like the supermemo algorithm used by Anki try to push you right up to the edge of you ability to remember it. I still maintain old flashcards in those systems, but I'm much happier since I started tracking my learning in a custom spreadsheet where I control the algorithm.
It is timely for me, because I am finding memory is probably the limiting factor for me learning about machine learning. So many concepts and names of things to remember. Once you get past 1-2 lectures the short term memory becomes overloaded and it gets muddled.
I also worry that chatgpt is going to make my memory worse, because I no longer have to remember stuff, and I can just remember what they asked chat gpt. I think there is value to even remembering APIs and syntax from heart.
So this post is counter "just get the computer to do it" which is a good thing.
I can imagine that just like people didn't need gyms when they had to hunt, gather and survive, but now we do, we will need mental gyms to make up for what technology has made too easy.
The better I know a subject, the less atomic it feels. I don’t think and talk about the topic in discrete facts but in interconnected knowledge. This is why the complete independence between cards seems more like a weakness than a strength. The argument from the spaced repetition community is that purposeful linkages between cards builds in a contextual dependency. And that dependency makes the resulting memory contingent. But in some knowledge domains that seems more of a feature than a bug.
My approach to making cards is actually to take long-form notes on the topic at hand, then apply close deletions to key parts, like equations, key ideas, and definitions.
This makes it so that the piece I need to actively recall is small(ish), but I still have the context
Have you seen this done anywhere?
Is this a good fit for this technique? I'm not sure how to decompose it further than "G Dorian." I'm also not sure if the time would be better spent just playing them more.
Here you have F, G, A, B(flat), C , D, & E. The full alphabet in the key of F.
Each pattern actually goes up the entire neck but for teaching it looks like this site emphasizes the notes that are more common between these different modes.
You could look at it like a guideline to help you hit the right notes during improvisation or composition.
Alternatively it could be just as useful to avoid hitting the wrong notes.
Instead of having targets for the fingers, you could just as logically have patterns of notes to avoid.
Either way when you go up the entire neck you're covering a lot more ground.
One objective might be to develop the ear simultaneously with the conventional modes, so that eventually just hearing the key the tune is played in will instinctlively lead your hand to a favorable position to begin with, making it easier to go from there into whatever modes might be appropriate.
I’d be really happy to hear any other feedback as well. So far I’ve implemented a crude per-session spaced repetition algorithm, but I’ve had a mind to build more decks, offline support, local-first spaced repetition, and some extra doodads.
I agree with other commenters - playing is the best way to get this stuff truly dialed in. Have fun with it, too! Drilling scales saps energy, imo. Best to eat a balanced diet.
Maybe you could use Anki to prompt different modes you could then practice over music though.
- 4 notes per string (there are fewer, bigger shapes to get into your head), helps you break out of the caged boxes
- thinking of the guitar as a pentatonic instrument and using that as your framework (notice how the open strings are a pentatonic scale). Check out the miles okazaki book, it's all about this
& Anki is a great tool. Good luck!
Edit:
Here is a link to the mentioned add on: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1374772155
Create screenshots of your seven shapes, then redact parts of it.
I know Michael Nielson got insights by using spaces repetition for some math properties, but my usecase is a bit different.
https://github.com/ninja33/sm-20-rules-cn
What I didn't realize is that i can also visualize the cards in a knowledge graph. Thanks for the inspiration.
Even whenever I really need to memorize stuff, I ended up using the memory palace technique, with Anki as "backend repository".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mnemonic_major_system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_system
Both are good.
You can train mnemonics via Anki deck:
The only use case I can think of where making cards yourself would be better is sentence mining while learning a language, because these cards depend on context and creation doesn't take more than a few seconds even when adding images.
if you are reading abstract stuff or more novel stuff that people are still understanding, then your own breakdown and understanding used to make cards is incredibly more helpful. If i was learning differential calculus, someone's analogies and metaphors of cards would not be understandable to me at all.
i have to admit i added my own bias here so thank you for expanding.
Same here, thank you. I don't know much about other topics. I use Anki for med school and language learning, both of which have great premade decks. But I think I can see now why creating your own decks can be more useful for abstract stuff. Kind of like that memorization method where you create stories related to things you are trying to memorize. It only works when you are the one who created the story.
I don’t think any other subject at all has a shared deck that’s of similar quality to what AnKing provides for the medical community. Geography/maps have some good shared decks as well.
Most premade decks are nowhere near as good as the medical school ones.
One thing with Anki or any other SRS is that it only works if you do it on time. Doing a few cards for a short amount of time and claiming "Anki doesn't work" is just nonsense.
>Anki might be useful for a few light cards every day but it's useless for the long study sessions demanded by med school.
This could be one of the most controversial statements for med students. Every classmate I talk to either uses Anki or a local commercial SRS specifically made for my country's med school curriculum/exams. And it's not just my friends or my country either, r/medicalschool shows the same tendencies.
> Once I complete the day and still have energy left, I'd move on the the next day and continue until I'm tired.
How can you finish a day without finishing its material? That's what ultimately frustrated my wife. Anki prevented her from getting through all of the material in the med school decks she got from a classmate. She stoped trying it after a few days because her time was better spent studying directly.
> Every classmate I talk to either uses Anki or a local commercial SRS specifically made for my country's med school curriculum/exams.
My experience with a US med school was some students used Anki. Most didn't.
Well, I don't think anyone can actually finish a day's worth of material in just one day. What Anki does is it helps you plan out how to spread your material so you use your time efficiently. A day's material is spread to multiple days, but you "learn" (the terminology for the card being due in more than a day) all of them the same day, to repeat it the next day and so on, with delays depending on your recall performance. If you make a mistake, your delay for that card is reduced.
>Anki prevented her from getting through all of the material in the med school decks she got from a classmate.
Ah, that might be a problem. If those decks were poorly made, and they probably were if they aren't something like Anking or copied straight from a source like Pathoma, they might even make one want to quit medical school. Ask me how I know.
> I think the problem is Anki is advertized as digital flashcards when it's actually SRS. When you can't use it as digital flashcards, people without copious time to work around its peculiarities will consider it useless.
I don't understand what you mean. Flashcards are SRS, and Anki tries to emulate flashcards.
I will admit, reasoning through options is very much harder when you're under a lot of stress.
You definitely can, just not in a single day which is not something you should do. Anki takes commitment.
It only matters for the first few reviews though, even a premade card can be forced into my mind with enough effort.
[0] https://mochi.cards/ [1] https://twitter.com/MochiCardsApp/status/1635289548229062657...
For example, I’ll give it a paragraph from Wikipedia, then say, “generate 5 questions and answers from this text. Format the answers to be inside brackets like this: {{c1::Answer text}}.
1. Summarise some prose (from a textbook) into bullet points
2. Convert these to flashcards
3. Make these flashcards more concise
Yes, you absolutely will
Of course, there’s the studies, but we’re all capable of looking those up.
Because nothing makes you smarter. There are no means of intelligence enhancement, other than correcting deficiencies (e.g. iodine) in early development.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/blog/the-athletes-way/201...
How is this kind of thing studied, and what kind of outcomes suggest "easier to read"? Speed? Recall? Subjective?
What proportion of the population are we talking about, roughly? Is it even enough that one should consider providing both a serif and a sans version of their content?
Serious question.
For anyone with (partial) dyslexia the serifs are information-murder. https://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/advice/employers/creating-a-d...
But also note that font size and spacing matters a lot: at 16px with 24px line spacing, this is super hard to read. Change that to font-size 20 with the same 24px spacing, and this read perfectly fine.