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Comment by mbork_pl | Hacker News Reader

Haven't yet seen this tool, but here's a quick answer. A few years ago, after skimming through the docs, I gave up on Anki because it seemed too complicated. I was using SuperMemo back when it was a DOS (and later Windows 3) application, I consider myself a fairly sophisticated user (e.g. I have a good expertise on LaTeX, even coauthored a textbook, I know Emacs very well, also authored a textbook), I've been a hobby programmer for over 3 decades and a professional one for 7 years, earlier I did a PhD in maths, etc., etc. And still Anki looked intimidating. That says something about "good enough". There's definitely space for an easy to use SRS out there.

I am using Anki now, btw, although I use it in a very simple way, but I think the point still stands. (Also, I agree that any new SRS should be somehow Anki-compatible.)

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Rule 1 of Anki, is make good flashcards, and review every day. That's all you need to get started. The defaults are good enough to get started. You don't need fancy image occlusion, add-ons, machine learning tuned custom parameters, etc.

"Make good flashcards" is indeed a difficult problem, but not one that is mitigated by a different tool.

"Review every day" is a question of habit formation, which is difficult, but also not a problem that a different tool will do better.

So the default Anki settings are good enough to get started, and allows itself to be customized as the user gets more familiar and better knows their need.

Without Anki import and export, a new tool simply seems to be a dead end to me, even if it slightly simplifies getting started.

I understand all that (as a long time SuperMemo user). What was intimidating in Anki was the manual. Perhaps if I had tried to use it first there would be no problem...

I can relate to this. I had fond memory of SuperMemo on DOS and wrote a little terminal tool “lrn” inspired by it: https://github.com/krychu/lrn

I acknowledge it’s simple, runs on terminal only and lacks bells and whistles. But this is also probably why I use it so much.

Does it allow you to use Anki decks?

Unfortunately not, “lrn” uses a very simple file format where each entry consists of three lines: question, answer, empty line. But I think it’d be a good idea to look into supporting Anki decks. I should do it some time. It’d be probably limited to decks that use text only.

Yeah, I looked into a little bit. An Anki to Markdown converter would be ideal.

    Question: ...
    Answer: ...

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Apart from LaTeX, I'm the opposite of you and while initially I found Anki to be a little "overcrowded", within a few days I became proficient in using its features and understanding its spaced repetition algorithm. I'm genuinely curious about the factors that contribute to the difference in our experiences.

As I said elsewhere – the manual gave the impression of a very complicated tool. (Also, I lack some things I had in SM back in the day, but that's not a big deal.)

Ugh, Anki is complicated? I would say it's powerful not complicated. It was really easy to start with existing decks and make my own.

This is what the project is intended primarily to address. Tools like Anki are very powerful and accomplish what they set out to do, but they fell prey to feature overload in certain aspects.

All it takes is one quick look at their docs to turn people away to a more mainstream option. Condensing its features into a more bite-sized application can make a world of difference for usability.

Anki is badly designed and inefficient, largely I think because it was the first project for its author. It's also become venerable and battle-tested, and features have been developed through the needs of a very large userbase.

I don't think that anyone denies that Anki could be a lot better if it were completely rewritten with the experience of having had Anki for years and knowing its pain points. You just have to have a plan, best based in analysis of Anki (and SuperMemo) to do that.

> There's definitely space for an easy to use SRS out there.

I think there's definitely even space for a hard to use SRS that's easier to deal with. But it's got to start by covering at least 80% of what Anki does already or it's not worth switching.

> Anki is badly designed

yes

> and inefficient

no. You can tweak every aspect of srs for each deck as you wish, if it’s inefficient for you - adjust the settings.

"inefficient" in what way? (not really used it myself)

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