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Comment by maayank | Hacker News Reader

So… anyone used Chatgpt to generate cards for Anki?

It’s certainly an intriguing idea worth investigating. But for me, the process of creating the cards and being forced to distill what I read was critical to the success of using SRS.

Making your own cards is a very important step

Science says otherwise. Saw a study with no significant difference between the people who made decks and people who used premade decks. Too lazy to get source, sorry.

My deck has 10,000 hand-made cards and I know for sure they stick in my brain easier than cards from a premade deck that I have no connection with. I suspect it depends how you make the deck. I intentionally use sentences and images that I care about.

It only matters for the first few reviews though, even a premade card can be forced into my mind with enough effort.

probably depends on the type of material too. if it's purely memorization (e.g., I'm learning spanish as an english speaker) then there's probably no difference. If it involves any sort of understanding then I'd be very surprised if there was no difference, at least in speed of learning

No. As a med student who uses Anki for basically everything, this is plain wrong. The time spent on making cards is better spent on studying. Premade cards (Anking in this case) have relevant pages from multiple sources, relevant histology/gross photos and additional notes for every card, and all cards are tagged with their corresponding chapters in multiple textbooks. If I spent time trying to do something similar (and even without the tags) I'd have no time left to actually study.

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.

yes if you are trying to memorize facts and reference material and maybe even language, then yes, using premade cards are probably chill. especially if all the material is standard.

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.

>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.

>Premade cards (Anking in this case) have relevant pages from multiple sources, relevant histology/gross photos and additional notes for every card, and all cards are tagged with their corresponding chapters in multiple textbooks.

Most premade decks are nowhere near as good as the medical school ones.

Med school is a bit of an outlier, because they have high quality shared decks. Most subjects have very low quality shared decks.

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.

I don't know about other subjects, so I can't comment on that. I use Anki for med school and language learning, and both have high quality decks. I guess I'm lucky.

My wife gave up trying to use Anki in med school because it worked against her. There's no way to go through a whole deck in one sitting. Anki might be useful for a few light cards every day but it's useless for the long study sessions demanded by med school.

You can adjust the number of cards that get pulled into a given review session. You can also do multiple review sessions. I'm confused as to the problem here.

I will admit, reasoning through options is very much harder when you're under a lot of stress.

The problem is you can't go through a whole deck like you can with real flashcards. It becomes a lottery as to what cards you might get. You don't know what cards you didn't see. This was the biggest frustration my wife experienced trying to use it.

>The problem is you can't go through a whole deck like you can with real flashcards.

You definitely can, just not in a single day which is not something you should do. Anki takes commitment.

For med students, you need to be able to hit a whole deck in a day. There's too much information to ingest to not do that.

you can do that in anki, just not by default.

Going through a whole deck in one sitting is not the correct way to do it. Your brain gets tired and it needs some rest. The way I did it is use the tags to filter topics every day by lectures in my school. Once I complete the day and still have energy left, I'd move on the the next day and continue until I'm tired. I'd finish around 3 times quicker than the pace of school lectures.

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.

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.

> 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.

>How can you finish a day without finishing its material? That's what ultimately frustrated my wife.

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.

That depends on topic. It doesn't make sense for medschool students or for people just studying vocabulary. Additionally, if there's a high quality deck such as https://dojgdeck.neocities.org/ , which is a grammar deck for Japanese, it is preferred to use them - if anything, you can extend them with what makes your own cards special, such as mnemonics.

Not Anki, but you can use the AI field in Mochi [0] to generate content for cards [1].

[0] https://mochi.cards/ [1] https://twitter.com/MochiCardsApp/status/1635289548229062657...

Yes, you can also prompt it with the 20 rules of memorization https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulatin... and you've got yourself an agent which create flashcards for you.

I have been using it to do exactly that. However, as GPT is wrong on certain facts, I use it more for generating Anki-formatted text from learning sources that I provide myself.

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}}.

Yes, I'm using for language learning. Usually via tool `https://github.com/sigoden/aichat` with different roles that I've created. For example for grammar ChatGPT generates bunch of examples for specific grammar rules, which I memorize.

Yes, I have trialled this. I've found it works best with this workflow:

  1. Summarise some prose (from a textbook) into bullet points
  2. Convert these to flashcards
  3. Make these flashcards more concise

I then verify they are correct/relevant, only keeping those that are worthwhile.

I used it to write a python script to convert a large json file full of a corpus of japanese business phrases and their english translations into anki card format.

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