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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

My friend and I have been using this for years. My friend took it pretty serious this year:

http://rs.io/2014/04/05/anki-10000-cards-later.html

It's really useful for courses in college, especially Language, Biology, Chemistry, and Physics for definitions, pronunciations, systems, etc.

Math and Computer Science is a bit hard since a lot of that requires practice and it takes time to figure out how to structure those cards.

Anyways, highly recommend them.

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I've been using a similar method to learn some German vocabulary for about 8 months now (using Flashcards Deluxe, not Anki, though), and I could specially relate to the "Two-way connections" section of your friend's article.

For example, my deck is currently German to English. As an experiment, once I reversed the deck for a while (making it English to German) and suddenly it became much harder. Maybe the solution is using two-way decks for vocabulary acquiring, so that you can not only read a word in German and understand it, but also want to - for example - search for something in German on Google and know it.

Or, maybe the way to go (for languages, at last) is just set the deck to Source Language* to Destination Language (in my case, English to German). Anyone has experience with that?

The linked article about "Why" questions was also a good find for me (http://rs.io/2014/02/25/why-questions-reveal-structure.html).

* Actually, English is not even my first language, but I'm comfortable with it enough to consider it a strong enough base to build on another language, mostly because there's more material in English than Portuguese about pretty much anything.

I am using memrise.com which works pretty well to learn some vocabulary. You can learn pre-made lists contributed by users, and does not require any set up.

Have a look at Duolingo if you like Memrise, it's a more in depth language learning tool that uses the same kind of ideas.

sadly duolingo has a very limited set of languages, but for thos it had it seemed very nicely done to me.

Duolingo is great, I use it too and know people who got results with it. I don't think it particularly shines on general vocabulary acquiring though¹, so that's where Memrise or a spaced repetition flashcard system like Anki or any other enters the picture.

¹Actually, this is sort of covered by the translation exercises, but since there is not a system to manage the reviewing of new words you learn there, I think it's inferior to a flashcard system.

I really want to use Duolingo, unfortunately I am learning Mandarin, and it is not available yet. It has been announced, a while ago, that it was in their todo list, but I don't know when it will actually be there. It is not even in the beta language section yet.

Memrise is fine too. Do you use decks Source Language -> Destionation Language, the other way around, or both?

Memrise asks you both ways.

One of my favorite techniques for enforcing two-way connections is the "Jeopardy technique". Here's an example for a beginner in python:

  Side A: This library is the de-facto standard for http in python.
  Side B: What is the "requests" library?

This card is easily reversible in Anki, so you only have to write it once and get quizzed both ways.

Edit: formatting

I'm been using Anki in the last couple of years and I got from zero to more than 4000 cards. The best way to effectively learn new words for me it's put the word with the English definition and than the same word with the translation in your original language. Of course not all the words require this.

It's a great tool for memorizing things that need to be rote-memorized. Chinese characters often fall into that category. Arcane Chemistry vocabulary probably do as well.

It's just a flash card system on steroids. If you know how to use a flash card system appropriately then this is a pretty powerful substitute.

Certainly flash card systems shine on things that need to be rote-memorized, but you can "hack" the system by engineering your questions in a certain way, like the "Why" questions mentioned by the author of linked article on parent comment.

It's just a review tool designed for storing Question / Answer pairs to your long-term memory. Nothing else.

If that means using it to review and remember specific answers to WHY questions (Why is the sky blue?) for the rest of your life, all power to you. Keep reviewing. However, I think the moment you start asking these conceptual questions you're no longer just trying to remember - you're trying to understand. That's not what flash-cards are designed for.

Instead, you might actually want to look at the sky. Do experiments. Meet experts.

In the process, you will come up with new questions and new answers to old questions. More importantly, as a result of this adventure you will not only remember, but also learn. I wonder if Newton used flash-cards.

Yes, is is designed for storing QA pairs, but it doesn't mean it can't be used for anything else.

I believe you misunderstood the use I have in mind for the WHY questions. The idea is not to create cards for things you are trying to understand, but for things you already understood.

These things you describe are about learning. Flash cards/Spaced Repetition Systems come AFTER learning. Say, for example, you meet an expert and because of that have a great insight about issue X. Truly, real "insights" take longer to forget than rote memorized facts. But can you say you will remember this insight in 6 months if you don't serendipitously encounter it again? 1 year? 5 years?

That's where a reviewing system comes into place. And it's not because such a system is designed for things that mostly need to be rote memorized that you can't use the "question" as a trigger to revisit something of a different nature.

> But can you say you will remember this insight in 6 months if you don't serendipitously encounter it again? 1 year? 5 years?

Good point. I think I misunderstood your intention behind asking why questions.

It definitely helps a lot for axioms, basic definitions, basic theorems, distribution functions and for things you "get wrong every time" etc., but everything beyond that it's inferior to exercises. As an example: I remember learning set theory and the subset relations of the number sets much faster than anyone else in my class.

One hack I've been using is making cards like "How to solve exercise X on Book Y, page Z?".

For me, doing a lot of exercises only once has worked worse than doing some key exercises more than once, and by using spaced repetition software (Anki, Flashcards Deluxe, etc) you can leverage its systems to get an optimized "schedule" for solving/revisiting exercises for math, physics, etc, so you don't have to worry about timing issues (like how many sessions of studying, and how long/frequent they should be).

What a brilliant idea!

Could you share more about how you've used it for less structured information? I've used Anki for about 3,000 Chinese words, and also some structured information (world capitals / countries). I've been experimenting with Anki for more conceptual knowledge and it's not nearly as easy.

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