Spaced repetition is underrated. I still remember a lot from my cards despite not having studied them for years
They say if a card is ending up as a leech, it's a "problem" card and you should somehow improve it. But I'm not sure how to improve this: Side A: name. Side B: birthday. (Cards are also shown reversed.)
Arguably I could add some kind of mnemonics, or learn the Mnemonic Major System for remembering numbers. (On that note, does anyone have specific advice for remembering birthdays? The Dutch among you will say "hang a birthday calendar in your toilet", which was probably the correct solution all along...)
Instead of Name -> Birthday, try "X's birthday is in {month}", or "Y's birthday is the {N}th of January" or "Z's birthday is just before {some notable date, like Christmas}" or "A's birthday is just after {B ... someone whos birthday you remember}". e.g. I remember my best friend's wife's birthday because it occurs shortly after mine. I remember a girl who I used to live across from 25 years ago because her birthday was just before mine.
This way, you have multiple different ways of relating to the information. If the related key date is coming up, you can think "oh...Z's birthday is around now"...which should be enough for you to functionally act on it.
Try to avoid the mindset of single cards. If you _really_ want the information, break it down in different ways.
Wrestling with the information in this way is a good way to find patterns and relations to it in the first place (put the information IN your brain well)...then use spaced repetition to practice getting the information OUT of your brain well.
That probably depends on what and how much you are trying to memorize with Anki. It is easy to learn a few words in a foreign language, but try to learn three to five new words per day for a year straight and suddenly you realize how far spaced repetition can bring you.
For leeches, what helps is to create more cards with the same concept (and do not suspend the leech, you are right that is not a good idea). If I struggle learning a word, I create more sentences using that word, or connect it with synonyms and antonyms. For birthdays, maybe try to add some memories related to that birthday: some particular gift, a happy moment during that day, the weather or location where you celebrated... Just see what sticks :)
"Because I want to" is obviously fine, but it still reminds me of the infamous "capitals of the world" flashcards that spaced repetition practitioners warn against.
Why remember something that can be looked up? Latency; it's super useful to have things appear in your brain so you can immediately do something useful with them instead of slowing down and looking something up and potentially losing context.
So what I'd actually need is "what are all the birthdays that occur this month", and then have a ritual habit installed that at the first day of the month I would spend a few minutes pondering this list in my mind.
(Again, the birthday wall calendar would probably work better here...)
Similarly, I struggle with understanding/remembering the structure of my family tree, at least for the family members that I never met (I am often told stories about ancestors, and am shamed for my inability/unwillingness to naturally and automatically memorize them). So I broke the family tree up into individual relations and made Anki cards of them.
That worked a little better than the birthdays, but still a struggle, because it is "meaningless information" as far as my own brain is concerned. I might consciously think it's important to have knowledge of your ancestry, but my neurology apparently disagrees... Alas!
I'm bad at it too and my wife is not, so she can figure out my own family tree better than I can; it makes for good party banter.
I have a "Roman Emperors" Anki deck. It serves absolutely no purpose except making me feel good about it, but it works well (except maybe for the final few emperors, those tend to be leeches).
I admit birthdays of acquaintances don't quite fit under "random trivia", but I'll still maintain that learning random birthdays seems useless, when the calendar works so well.
> Eliminating 10% of the most difficult items in a generic material may produce an increase in the speed of learning of up to 300%.
(Though the digital one does become useful due to the automatic reminders.)
[month] -> [list of important birthdays]
I'm a casual tourist, who likes to pick up some rudimentary language skills before travel. There are many of us; we understand the importance of smiling at our hosts and getting the words out while more formal learners are stalled in self-induced aphasia.
For us, the design of spaced-repetition systems misses a crucial point: We don't care about measurable process while stockpiling some language skills before a trip, and we certainly don't have time to sit around studying once we're on a trip. The goal is to ingest as much content as we can, in some form that sticks, to recall more flexibly as we struggle to speak in-country.
For this purpose, memorizing a radio play as if one is an actor is more effective than spaced repetition. For example, just the Pimsleur dialogs, edited from audio files one owns. The words are there, slow to access but quicker than opening up a phrase book. Within a week traveling, one's mind reorganizes access to the language one actually uses.
The dig on learning a radio play is one doesn't know the words out of sequence. Yeah, that's why one can learn them so efficiently. For those of us of a certain age, it's the "next song on the album" effect. What did Knuth say about premature optimization? Learn the words one actually needs out of sequence, on the ground, in use.
(On the other hand, Pimsleur is great, and taking a systematic approach to "100%ing" the "core" of a language is probably a great idea.)