Examples of things he's memorized, for fun:
* every country, recognized by unlabeled shape on the map
* spelling
* many body parts, names of bones and organs, from illustration
* chemical elements, by symbol (Na, Fe, Zn, etc)
* unix filesystem commands
* numeracy references (km from here to Japan, earth to sun, meters from home to school)
* recognizing/naming photos of places we've been since he was born
* recognizing musical instruments or musical pieces by listening
* notes on a piano
* religious facts (when Judaism began & who started it, when Muslims pray & towards what, where Jesus was born & died, etc)
* names of characters in books he's read
* wise aphorisms
He enjoys it, and dances around while answering, proud of himself. Sometimes when learning something new on YouTube, on his own, he'll say, "Dad can we add this to Anki? I want to remember this."
Edit: oh good I’m not crazy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38428309
https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_does_not_work_for_kids
Spaced repetition flaschard software is all about scheduling the flashcards around predictions of your forgetting curve, and Anki and Supermemo are designed for the forgetting curves of adults.
I've seen a lot of people going like... why remember stuff when you can easily google it? But it doesn't work that way. The more facts reside in your brain, the more avenues it has to connect them together and generate insights (after all, that thing is the OG "neural network").
I highly admire your parenting in this aspect, and I hope to do the same when I have kids of my own.
Edit: I noticed after publishing my comment that you're Derek Sivers! I've been a long time reader of your blog :)
I’m a parent too, and have prioritized activities that teach my child critical thinking (so they can self-solve problems).
I’m curious if I should be layering in some memorization activities like this, which is why I ask.
(Please don’t take my question as judging, I’m genuinely curious how it’s helped because I might replicate. And I’ve got huge respect for all your writing over the years)
My other question: For me a lot of this is trivia (No judgement! That's fine!) Has he found it useful for education (i.e. school), and for anything that he applies on a semi-frequent basis (I suppose UNIX commands could be a good example).?
I personally have used SRS since late 2018, and it's been quite useful - as if releasing a latent superpower. But I haven't applied it for regular schooling.
Thanks!
A bit off topic, but this is a very tricky question to answer. The traditional answer is Moses, ca. 1200 BC. The real answer would take many PhD theses to arrive at. It's really a process that took place between the 10th and 5th centuries BC (and arguably continued even much later than that).
I'm also a long time anki user for the purpose of learning a foreign language. It is one of the core tools that got me to the level that I am today. I like it so much that I am also using it with my son. I'm using it for spellings mostly. But (and here comes the question) I'm also contemplating making him another deck for the foreign language that I'm studying, however, I'm wondering whether to have separate decks or just one big deck of cards. What do you do with your son? Different decks for different topics or just lump them all together in the same singular deck?
Any advice would be most welcome.
Father of the century, just for that alone.
> every country, recognized by unlabeled shape on the map
That's a stupid thing to memorize, not to mention constantly churning due to political instability.
You really need to gatekeep what you stuff into your noggin.
Most educated people could recognize certain countries by shape, like Italy, Africa, USA. But every country? Come on ...
Going through a course / textbook -> taking notes on paper -> adding key concepts as Anki flashcards -> reviewing them daily: extremely effective
Preexisting decks can work - I used one to successfully study for my Amateur Radio License - but that assumes a specific pool of questions you're memorizing, which isn’t how learning a subject typically works.
I disagree with this. Anki's power comes from spaced repetition. Spending your time creating cards instead of actually reviewing the material is very inefficient. If high quality decks exist for the topic you're learning, use them instead. I've learned this the hard way.
Fields like medicine and language learning (you will still need to create your own deck for sentence mining but that's different as it's not a time sink) have great decks. For actual "niche" topics though, creating your own decks is your only choice.
For people who are going to create their own decks: check the Anking deck to see how to create "great" cards.
For some things where you want to learn but don't want to/have time to put in full effort premade cards are better than nothing. For example, I ended up learning German to B1 level from Duolingo (+ friends/time in germany) because using Duolingo was pretty low effort, even if it wasn't the fastest most effective way of learning.
I think this is probably true for most things you may want to learn about outside of your job, school, or really strong reasoning behind it. Perfect is the enemy of good as they say
(Shameless plug: I made a tool that makes spaced repetition questions for educational YouTube videos/podcasts that you watch, usually I was forgetting everything and wasn't really that invested to spend the time making decks for everything I watch, so I landed on this! https://www.platoedu.org)
I'd go so far to say it's almost an requirement. Unless you have a high quality deck made specifically for the book/course/material you have.
Sadly most of the publicly available Anki are IMHO not of that quality.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_taxonomy
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_observed_learni...
Understanding deeply and completely any topic is much easier when you understand deeply and completely the fundamental components and concepts--which starts with memorization.
When I'm doing language study, for example, the backbone of my memory reinforcement strategy is a plain old pen-and-paper notebook. Anki is only used for specific, targeted reinforcement.
Most my time with Anki these days is learning Chinese characters. That's arguably an ideal use case for brute-forcing with SRS, and that is indeed a very popular way to learn them. But I prefer to start with good note-taking there, too. I keep a notebook where I write down new characters and make some notes about their composition, etymology, and the nature of any relationship they might have with other characters that have a similar appearance or show up as components in this new one. IME even the simple act of physically jotting down a handwritten note to not confuse 买 with 卖 or 找 with 我 is worth some large number of flashcard repetitions all by itself.
I also create cards for hanzi in Anki, but typically only after I've already encountered it a few times in my reading and it's starting to feel familiar. Leech cards are a huge waste of time when tackling a large subject, so I don't really like to add a card to my deck until I'm reasonably confident that I won't be hitting the "again" button on it more than once or twice, if ever.
[1] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Michael_Nielsen_re-discovers_inc...
Check out this experimental work to learn Quantum Physics using SRS: https://quantum.country/
Example:
Front: Rotator cuff tear - diagnosis? Why would this make sense?
Back: MRI is generally better for soft tissue; you wouldn't use a CT scan, which is much better for bone. Remember that X-rays / CTs generally work by shooting high-frequency electromagnetic radiation "X-rays" at tissue - if the tissue has dense elements like Ca++ in bone, the X-rays will be reflected back by the dense elements. This is why X-rays and CTs are good for detecting dense things like blood (iron in heme is dense), bone (calcium is dense) or even why we use contrast (things like barium or iodide are dense elements)
If that software existed, it would be incredible.
Work on encoding information, understand things deeply, relate concepts, and then create your cards.
For language learning, for instance, this means that if you have 10 new words you want to learn, you create f.ex. 15 sentences so that each sentence contains 2 of those words, and each words appears in 3 sentences. Then you run them eg. by your a tutor to validate them, and add it to your Anki deck.
Now you will only review each sentence 5-8 times, and you can do it very fast.
Doesn't need to be exactly like that, but you get the idea
I still benefit from a year of training, but it seems the long-tail of spaced repetition doesn't work for me at all. But so long as I get to the point where I can read or watch TV, the considerable effort I've invested in making cards (not to mention reviewing them) was worthwhile.
It's also fun to have an extended/time-intensive personal task where it can be worth it to build up a highly personalised system that doesn't need to work for anyone else. It allows for a selfishness that's the polar opposite of accessibility design, but can end up resulting in quite novel/pleasing design decisions. (There've been some other posts about making software just for yourself on hacker news before).
They have a lot of shared decks hosted online, but I guess for hosting costs or copyright reasons delete any decks that aren't regularly downloaded, which results in many niche decks getting deleted. I've uploaded several German-language decks that get deleted because of course they don't get the same traffic as English ones. Bit of a pity - I wonder what the ecosystem would look like if things were otherwise.
Well... yeah? I guess if you're a full time student or something it's fine but IMO if your review times exceed 5 minutes it's time to stop adding cards for a while.
I recently started to use Supermemo because of some comments on HN, and so far it have been going quite well. I feel less overwhelmed when I have to take a break, I think the algorithm (or maybe it is just good defaults?) is much less punishing. I am still new to it, and I have a baggage of knowledge from my past experiences using SRS, so it is unfair to compare it to Anki at the moment. But it renew my passion for memorizing, so far it has been worth the investment.
Retention is high so that helps keep progress between periods of deck usage at least.
I just pulled up my stats.I have been studiyng for almost a year and have averaged less than 2 minutes of study a day (with the average review lasting less than 2 seconds). In total it's more or less 10 hours.
It has been insanely effective. I read somewhere on HN that making extremely easy cards helps. It for sure helped me to keep the habit.
This is a problem, but perhaps not the one you think. The goal here is the habit; how much you get through is way secondary. As a multi-year user of Anki, I'd recommend working on the daily habit as an addition to whatever German, etc. you're already doing.
Anki has easy ways to limit your use; set your max-card-per-day to something silly like 5. You can do 5 cards a day, yeah? That'd take less than a minute, typically.
Once you're ok with that, up it a bit. Don't make this the SOLE vector of practice, use it as an adjunct to your normal routine of learning.
A habit done suboptimally is >>>> missing doing it, but perfectly. Frequency is generally better than quality. Once you get the former, ratchet up the latter.
> I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up.
> to build up a highly personalised system that doesn't need to work for anyone else.
"Anyone else" includes "future you", because humans change over time. A highly personalized system is usually a highly inflexible system.
Recently a friend got me into Duolingo with him, I've been managing to maintain a streak on it because if I'm too busy I can atleast just do a quick "lesson" before midnight, but I don't really find it to be very effective for learning unless you're coming from literally zero starting knowledge.
I already know the basic vocabulary (especially phonetically) and sentence structure, so it's too slow. I usually just do the first handful of lessons and have figured out the kanji enough to just jump ahead to the test to unlock the next unit.
There is a third-party paid exchange here:
(I’ve had a few exchanges with the founder, and wish him luck.)
I have mixed feelings about shared decks. I’ve tried many, yet always find something about them that irritates me - aesthetics, content accuracy, etc. Or more likely that just doesn’t fit contextually with what I’m learning.
However, the low startup energy with shared decks is certainly a selling point. I can’t even begin to estimate how much time I’ve spent over the years creating 50K+ cards…
> highly personalised system that doesn't need to work for anyone else.
My experience exactly.
Shameless plug - I'm building https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive which is basically GitHub/Reddit for flashcards. Very much pre-product and a WIP, though the offline client proof of concept is done.
During my Erasmus in Germany, I've tried almost all of the top language learning apps (Duolingo, Babel, Seedlang, Anki...) and none of them have really worked me.
What I wanted was:
* Learning in context --> A lot of German words do not have direct English/Czech translation, so learning the 1:1 word translation did not work well
* Having audio for each card
* Intensive pace --> Going through a lot of cards in one session. Duolingo is the worst in this as you spend a lot of time doing super easy childish exercises. If I want to learn let's say 30 min a day, I want to pack as much content as I can into it.
* Skipping ahead --> My level is around B1/B2, I don't want to do placement tests and then re-learning the words I already know
* Learning from my content --> I like to consume German podcast/youtube videos/websites and in some apps, it was quite difficult or impossible to add words I've just encountered "in the wild".
Anki has worked the best, but generating cards with sentences and audio was quite cumbersome and (a seemingly minor detail) I was loosing flow while thinking whether I knew the card "well", "good", "easy" or whatever the options are. What I like better is a simple knew/didnt know, while still using spaced-repetition.
So for the past year, I'm on-off working on a language learning app, currently only supports German, which helps you extract words from content (youtube, web, text), handles different word forms, and then generates cards with infinitely many sentence examples through GPT4, with a nice audio (latest GCP model).
The project website with Android and iOS links: https://vokabeln.io/ (web design is old, app looks very different now)
Der Fußballspieler schießt auf das _____.
Should be “Tor”. Nobody would say “Ziel”.
Could you just click on the two ends, 1min Vs the scaled max time? I.e. ignore the two middle buttons.
Only trouble I have tbh is figuring out what I want to read in German! But I’ve signed up and will give this a spin, and send what feedback I can.
Today, I have one deck, which has a flashcard for each set of tricky bars from all the pieces I've worked on. Now when I sit down to practice the piano, I just load up that deck, and those bars are what I practice, and I grade myself on each flashcard to indicate how quickly I need to re-practise those particular tricky bars.
I've done this 5+ year now, and I'm impressed at how good the default algorithm seems to be at effectively ordering my piano practice sessions.
There’s something there. Physical skills learned with spaced repetition.
Everything goes in my morning flash cards. Knots, geography, language, tar commandline flags, papers, statistics homework. Fill them with things you like, is my advice - it’s fun to say hello to hobbies on the verge of your memory in the morning.
Bird calls! I’m learning sounds of bird calls since I can’t see very well so I can’t learn by sight. I listed eBird’s set of common birds near me and downloaded their calls as mp3s from the Macaulay Library and batch-imported them into my flash cards (for my personal use). It’s always rewarding to hear a bird outside and go “hey I think I know what that is!” Pairs well with Merlin Sound ID.
Another great use is as a mnemonic Rolodex: I frequently forget to reach out and catch up with friends in my life, so I have a deck with just names of people to say hi to. Every time somebody comes up, I say hello, and then answer the card for whichever interval feels appropriate. This way, the SRS itself will make sure that I never forget someone for too long.
I don't disagree with how Anki is effective at memorization, because that would be like disagreeing with the effectiveness of space repetition as a principle. I'm just wondering if it's worth putting stuff like "vim keybinds" in - John Carmack reportedly did that to check what's the fuss about Vim.
I think a bit of the problem (for me) when I tried anki before was friction from the overhead of 1.) deciding how to split time among decks and 2.) having to assign a 1-5 value for 'how well I remembered the info'. That second point is huge, I find that kind of task to be incredibly exhausting. Do you have any tips for getting over that?
After using it for a while though, I began to value how the quick recall encouraged by the system actually seemed to /enhance/ my deeper understanding of concepts, rather than replace it (I wrote a short post about this a couple years ago [0]).
[0] https://samrawal.substack.com/p/on-the-relationship-between-...
1) Import/export is limited when I want to create a batch of flashcards from the list (from ChatGPT for example)
2) It's hard to stick to it and do it everyday. I wish it showed some progress in motivating way. This is why we use TODO lists after all. We human beings love to see the progress. I wish it also included some sticky effect of Pop It Game or Bubble Wrap.
So I just created an Airtable table with few fields: Word, Translation, Days, Repeat (function field "DATEADD(Edited, Days, 'days')"), - used for filtering, Attachment, Edited_at (automatic field).
"Days" is "Single select": 1, 4, 10, 25, 55, 90, 200 days. I set this field with number of days I want to repeat flashcard in.
Sounds cumbersome but it's not. I see the progress - less rows in the table after every click. It's far from ideal anyway and it's not an actual SSR of course but it works for me. And because of some reason it's easier to stick to.
Anyway, Anki is great for most of the cases.
There is a very popular plugin called Heatmap which essentially shows you a github-style graph in anki. Instead of commit frequency it counts reviews.
A lot of people complain that it uses an inferior SRS algorithm. Other algorithms can be patched in; but I’ve never bothered because it seems like a hyper-optimization without known real-world outcomes. (i.e. Will I speak better {L2} if I use alternate SRS algorithm?)
Though I have not used Anki, I used a similar SRS for learning Chinese - the flashcards built in Pleco, but no matter how often I try to use it, I never last longer than 5-10 days, I just get bored by it. Also, no matter how I try to adjust the algo, I have the feeling that I am constantly over- or underwhelmed, no flow for me.
In the meanwhile I love learning, no matter if flashy (e.g. Duolingo) or traditional (from books) or something in between (a class), but I just never got the hang of SRS, though so many people recommend it.
Also, given that you mentioned enjoying duolingo more, there are browser extensions/repos out there to enhance the Anki experience. I have some that help me make cards based on material I’m reading for fun.
I was having the same issue as you, and I had to fix it by making it more engaging and personal. Now all of my words concern material I’m interested in, and have some context.
Now, I make it a point to introduce new words at least weekly, which maintains my interest and reduces boredom. The challenge of new words, balanced with the familiarity of known ones, creates an engaging experience, much like a well-designed game with a mix of easy and challenging elements. This approach keeps me motivated.
Additionally, actively using the language by conversing with native speakers greatly enhances my motivation. The positive feedback and tangible understanding of its value significantly boost my commitment to learning.
There are two very common reasons why people lose interest/motivation after trying out Anki. The first one is creating too many cards when you first start out. People get excited by SRS and then start creating cards for a lot of things, especially for stuff they don't actually care to remember. This is understandable, since you can't do SRS when you have nothing to repeat. But that gets overwhelming quickly, because it's hard to be motivated if you don't actually care about the material.
The solution for this is to only create flashcards when an opportunity arises organically. This has the additional benefit of your review sessions being extremely short in the beginning, which makes it easier to establish the habit of reviewing.
The second problem that often leads to people quickly giving up is not knowing what makes a good card. It's actually not as easy as one might think. Especially not when you want to get more out of SRS than just rote memorization of trivia. There's an excellent article from Andy Matuschak on this topic that explains it way better than I ever could https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/
If you specifically want to do language learning, then you might be tempted to download premade decks. This might work a little bit better than for everything that's not languages, but in my experience making a card is at least as important as the repetition itself. It forces you to distill the knowledge down into good cards, which is only possible if you engage with the material and also helps you find gaps in your knowledge. So I'd recommend against it.
Regarding your comment on adjusting the repetition algorithm... don't. It's highly unlikely that you'd be able to improve on the defaults if you don't have a good feel for how slow/fast you forget things. Even then, it's pretty difficult to make good adjustments. It's much more likely that the flow you're missing is just from not doing it long enough.
Hope that helps :)
It might sound counter-intuitive with the "remember things forever" side of SRS, but it is better to forget boring things than not use SRS at all.
If I'm bored by it one day, I just don't do it that day. Or week, like this one, where I was too entrancee by playing FTL.
Then I let myself get back into it. It comes and goes in waves. That's fine. The only person keeping score is yourself.
Much prettier than Anki, has a simpler algorithm that doesn't require rating difficulty, and has lots of the same features. I'm a subscriber just because of the cloud sync - wish I could self-host but I'm happy to support the developer.
Nowadays, the Anki version in Ubuntu is from 2019! The snaps are also hopelessly outdated.
Not as nice as having an updated version in apt, but it’s a trivial amount of work for something I personally get so much value out of.
I had been using GNOME on my little “study pod” ThinkPad X1 Nano (which has a screen that requires 1.5x UI scale) but Anki was a real pain under that and so started using KDE instead. Anki runs well there but KDE isn’t quite my cup of tea. Wish it were more DE-agnostic.
Some addons seem to be not installable due to obsolete deps (like PyQt5), but a lot of stuff work without any problems.
I personally use org-drill on Emacs.
As much as I don’t like Reddit, I still find it better than Discord. Purely because it’s discoverable by the search engine
I've found that writing about the things that interest me, giving presentations, and talking about stuff with people with similar interests, is much more effective.
Is there anything similar people use for sort of general 'knowledge base' type things - like people use one big text file, or Obsidian, or Logseq, or Notion, or whatever - but with some kind of Anki-like reminder/retrieval rather than just deliberate searching to look something up?
Or do people successfully use Anki itself in that way? (Maybe I'm wrong to associate it with focussed studying/cramming on a specific topic for an exam say?)
The closest I could think of was a Zettlekasten system, where though you wouldn't have the automated reminder prompts, you would (if you'd done a good job linking things) have a rabbit hole to fall down once you opened something.
It connects with your Anki desktop app. You create notes in Obsidian in a specific format, and they get converted to Anki flashcards. This way your flashcard creation process becomes much easier if you already use Obsidian for note-taking.
https://unofficial-logseq-docs.gitbook.io/unofficial-logseq-...
Since there was no need to look it up, perhaps it's not relevant to whatever one is doing at the moment.
shameless self-plug:
On macos and iOS we found Anki a bit out of place so we build a competitor explicitly for language learning (https://wokabulary.com/).
For example, if you have time or are bored today and do some extra cards, your workload month later goes up. Except that month later you might be tired and not have time. And if you skip a day or dont do everything, the next day your workload goes up by twice ... and a week later too and a month later too for the same batch of cards.
I've used Anki and found it amazing, but it got to the point where making flashcards was too time consuming and couldn't keep up with them.
Mid-last year I found my brother having the same problem and realised after playing with GPT how effective it was at generating flashcards. Not perfect, but good enough to save many hours of writing them.
Now with Flashka we have started re-thinking the medium a bit more and try to make a great study-tool out of it
I've been using it recently to remember recipes and cooking facts, such as the time it takes to boil X vegetable, or the ingredients for some dish.
Apart from language learning and medicine, there's a lack of pre-built decks that you can use to learn topics. I'm building Python.cards [3] to apply spaced repetition to learn Python with pre-built decks, daily reminders, etc. to make it the most convenient.
[1] https://www.thediligentdeveloper.com/spaced-repetition-reall...
[2] https://www.esquire.com/es/tecnologia/a36913467/pasapalabra-...
It has completely changed how I approach the topic of learning. I've used it to study Spanish, Italian, Network engineering, AI, Art history, world history, and US history. It's made me much smarter than I was before using it.
Unfortunately it can be time consuming. A big part of it is not just studying cards, but creating cards that are actually well-crafted.
It's also key to understand that it isn't for learning things that you don't know, but rather for memorizing things that you've already learned.
I'm actually thinking of building my own app for a while since the all the flashcard apps on mobile don't really work for me. Not sure I'll find the motivation to do it though, I'm just using the least bad option I've found.
Specifically, I want to always auto-play cards with TTS and there doesn't seem to be an option with the apps to do that.
TTS instructions: https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/fields.html#text-to-speec...
Installing the alpha alongside stable: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pQZT9jNF6MU
I’ve always wanted a hands free version of Dualingo because if I’m driving or walking somewhere I don’t want to use my hands for obvious reasons.
Maybe biology had good reasons to not evolve us with perfect memory. I found that over time I only remember the big picture and forget the details that make it up. And mostly that's fine! Usually, I only need the big picture. Like a math theorem, where once you understood it it's fine to forget the details of the proof since going forward you'll only need the big picture of the theorem.
Of course, sometimes life is not a simple straight line and might circle back to ask again for previous details. But then, how many details, how often does it happen? Maybe it's fine to forget and look it up again in those few cases?
Personally, I found little need for active memorization in real life. If something is worth remembering, it usually comes up multiple times, and after looking it up repeatedly, it tends to get remembered automatically.
Sure, sometimes real life poses constraints in time or exposure that hinder natural memorization (e.g. educational exams, remembering names, etc.) in which case active memorization may be useful. But these occasions seem to happen rather rarely over the whole course of a life.
For these reasons, I don't use Anki personally. Instead, I try to accept having to look things up again when it happens, if necessary repeatedly. No, it's not easy to not be disappointed at myself that I forgot again. But we can't avoid the pain - it's always there in some form. Either in the forgetting, or in the work to not forget.
In hindsight, I'd tell my younger self to chill out and remember that learning a language is a marathon, not a sprint.
SuperMemo was a game-changer for me, boosting my memory like nothing else. It's like when you're coding in a language you haven't used in ages – things are on the tip of your tongue, but you're not quite sure. Is it len(arr), arr.length, arr.length(), or... darn it, is it size? sizeof? Space repetition solves this problem for good!
For my graduate math exams, SuperMemo was my secret weapon. I'd jot down all the proofs I needed to memorize and challenge myself to write them out. It worked wonders – I aced those exams. But interestingly, it wasn't about memorizing the proofs word for word; it was more about getting the structure and the key tricks down pat. In my practice runs, I'd often take shortcuts because who has the time to write everything out in full detail?
Then came Anki for my Spanish adventures. Nowadays, I'm dabbling in Portuguese but have given Anki and spaced repetition the cold shoulder. Why, you ask? Well, I'm a firm believer that if rapid recall is your goal, spaced repetition is your best friend. But most language learners don't use it. Are they missing a trick, or do they just not fancy efficiency? What stops them from optimizing their learning? I can only guess. As for myself, I've ditched it because, let's face it, reviewing cards over and over can be a snooze-fest. The most fun part about spaced repetition was creating the decks. Now, I'm learning Portuguese purely for the joy of it and don't mind how long it takes. I immerse myself in interesting content in Portuguese, occasionally revisiting something I've learned with a quick Google search. I'm perfectly fine with not reaching fluency quickly. After all, there's more to life than optimizing every bit of it!
Since then, I've branched into many other topics. The latest one that I've started building out is all of the Paris métro lines and stops. The most useful thing ever? No, but I feel happy knowing that I have a better understanding of the system I'm using ever day.
- A new language: Comprehensive Input. Basically immersive studying with tons of reading, watching, and interaction. Given youtube and streaming services and low-cost online tutoring, immersive studying is so affordable now. Language is all about the right intuition in the right context, which flash card can't offer any way.
- STEM. This is an easy one. God forbid one should rely on flash card to memorize any STEM topic. STEM is all about intuition and understanding why and making connections. Solving problems, real or designed, is the most effective way.
- History and etc. Reading novels and biographies to learn a great deal of historical context, reading engaging books written by scholars to get accessible yet rigorous treatment of a specific topic. Anecdotally, I find alternative-history novels particularly engaging[0] And even then I'd risk saying that you can probably get better results creating a personalized ChatGPT-4 tutoring/examination session on any topic except arithmetic/anything involving computation.
Huh? How about the tens of thousands of words you need to be able to recall and recognise in both directions in text and speech? You can't reason past irregular verbs and inconsistent rules about gender.
If you're learning a language like Chinese, you need to memorise the characters. If you're learning a romance language, you need to memorise the conjugation and genders.
Immersion doesn't replace dedicated study. The words that appear the least - which you're most likely to miss - are the ones with the highest entropy.
I've been wanting to use something like Anki as a general purpose 'knowledge base'/reminder/learning system; if I do use Anki I'll certainly add this, cheers.
https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/fields.html#text-to-speec...
- Focusing on memorizing short sentences or phrases instead of isolated words. - Regularly adding new words, at least weekly, to keep the learning process engaging and not monotonous. - Including only words that I actually come across and learn in my daily life, which significantly aids in retention—possibly because I can recall the context in which I first heard them. - Installing AnkiDroid on my phone to make the most of idle times like commuting or waiting in lines for practice.
- line 1
- line 2
- line 3
Some things need work.
The import function is very fickle. Took me a long time to find a format that worked.
By default it will update existing cards when you import a new card with the same front-side text, even when they are in different sets. I feel the default there should be just creating the new card and leave the existing untouched, or else promt for an explicit disambiguating contextualization on both cards.
After each class, I take these words and put them in Anki. However, I feel that this is not a great system, a lot of times I need the context of the conversation, the word needs to be in a sentence or sometimes I would prefer the reverse card (English and Portuguese on the back)
Any recommendations for using Anki for learning languages that is not the basic word-translation pair ? I thought about incorporating Chatgpt in the process, and dump the chat history but I am not sure what would be a good system.
But yes, word only cards are good in the beginning when you are learning only the most basic nouns and verbs but you quickly need sentences.
I’m sure there are plenty of online dictionary services which can do some sort of Portuguese sentence search for you.
You may not have noticed, but there's also a reverse card type that only requires one note but adds two cards to your deck.
There are lots of people who have a similar intuition on the ChatGPT thing but none that I've seen create cards as good as the ones you could make yourself. Using ChatGPT as a dynamic pen pal is probably the better way to incorporate it into your language learning.
It’s a great tool, but it’s definitely got some oddities, like how its editor has every formatting and templating tool under the sun but is somehow missing spell check, how some features can only be had through fragile extensions, or how for some reason it’s one of the few programs one shouldn’t install from their distro’s package manager.
One of these days I’d like to take a crack at building my own cross-platform subject-agnostic SRS card app. There’s a number of things I’d do differently.
You know what I would like to see?
First, I'd love Anki / Anki Flashcards to work as a smartphone Android app.
Second, I'd love to see some way to for users to globally share their flash card decks with other users.
Third, I'd love to see a site where someone could search for the decks created by other users.
Forth, it should be permissible for users to charge very smallish amounts of money for their flash decks, and/or share them for free. Their choice!
Anyway, looks really cool and I wish Anki a lot of luck!
bbno4 already pointed you to the shared decks.
Some people do sell decks. The main issue with that business model is it's entirely trust-based. The decks have no form of DRM or anything, they're just sets of cards and media that get imported so can be freely passed around once purchased. But some people do sell them.
(1) there are multiple apps on all phones (2) this is already a thing https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks (3) this is the same as (2), are you an AI? (4) it is permissible.
It’s really helped me gain a deeper understanding of the language and feel more confident in conversations.
Anyone else who wants to learn just enough networking to never be 100% stumped by it again, I recommend both tools.
On Android systems, if you use the free Japanese dictionary Japanese Kanji Study (by Chase Colburn) it can generate Anki flash cards directly from the app, so everytime you look up a word you can also generate the card for Ankidroid/Anki.
Is there similar functionality in any Chinese dictionary app for Android?
I believe the wiki[0] lists most of the apps which use our API
https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/wiki/Third-Party-A...
For example, is it possible to create Anki decks and make them available on github so that if there are any mistakes, others might raise a merge request and once merged, everyone else can "pull" the latest deck?
Used it when learning/practicing music theory - generated flash cards with notes and chords (python script that generates LilyPond, iirc), been a huge help, much better than 'specialized' apps that basically do the same.
I know spaced repetition is super helpful and I should be making and study cards to help with language learning and other topics I'm studying, but it always feels like a slog to try to find a deck (which won't end up being what you want) or manually make a bunch of cards, the UI is a little meh, etc.
[1] https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/ [2] https://github.com/themoeway/yomitan
It is a slow process, but for getting new ideas to stick, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
I don't usually bother with preexisting decks. If you’re building your own from your own study, it almost guarantees you actually understand what you're trying to memorize.
AnkiDroid is a separate, compatible implementation of Anki, for Android only, which uses local data.
I like the method. I found the app is still rough on the edges, and now I want to code a small one dedicated to science fields for him :)
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ankimobile-flashcards/id373493...
It's expensive, but it's the only paid app by the creator of ankiweb (web, android, and desktop versions made by them are all free).
I would think that having a web app would be much easier from a single developer point of view: maintain one application that can be accessed from any device. I am biased because I'm a web developer but I'd like to be corrected.
No clue on quality.
instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media during downtime, why not memorize poems and great song lyrics?
The issue is: I'm sick and tired of apps that want your web credentials. I want an app that doesn't share anything about me. Completely local.
I have to admit, I haven't searched on Play Store for one.
yes, kids: we know Anki exists