Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 74 posts

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#61

Post by laurieg »

I've spent many years using Anki and I have thousands of cards. I love it but I notice a few very common failure modes:

1. Putting far too many cards in a deck.

2. Putting in information that you want to learn rather than information you have already learned.

3. Using large pre-made decks (which is really just 1 and 2 together).

If you're planning on using Anki longterm (such as for language learning) then keep the number of new cards low. Something in the range of 3-5 a day is totally fine.

You should put things into Anki after you have learnt them. In general I suggest putting in information at the end of a study session when you feel like you know it so well you couldn't possibly forget it. Cards should feel a bit too easy when you create them. By the time you come to review you will have forgotten a little and the difficulty will be perfect.

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#63

Post by [deleted] »

andrewzah wrote: post #58
kazinator wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course the purpose of "hard" is to reduce the interval. When I hit "hard", I'm saying that I don't remember this well enough and need to see it more often. If you hit "hard" on a card, and then months later it re-appears, at which point you now remember it well and hit "good", doesn't it reset the state of that card back to normal?

No. Anki permanently modifies the ease value of the card. “Good” just grades it with no changes. You would have to hit “easy” or manually modify it. This is why people who use Anki long term recommend not hitting the Easy button: it’s a permanent +15% modifier. This algorithm -does- show you certain cards sooner or later but it does it in a nonintuitive way. Cards marked “Hard” like this will end up being seen way to…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#64

Post by rudnek »

jlelonm wrote: post #48

Oooh, neat! Reminds me of this addon: LaTeX Note Importer: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1199027445 I'm almost sold on downloading this, but I have a question. Let's say I create notes.md with 2 cards: ## hey hi ## hello howdy But, then I modify card #2: ## hello modified howdy modified and recreate the deck. Does the 2nd card that has now been modified get treated as a whole new card? (In other words, if I've been…

MDAnki produces a file with a deck for importing to Anki. Every new import will generate new cards. I don't know anything if it's possible to make updating cards during the import. I'll try to investigate it. Thanks for this note!

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#65

Post by jeffshek »

tunesmith wrote: post #11

I basically ruined myself for Anki. I started like gangbusters, and also created some really cool jazz music theory decks for myself that have lilypond notation snippets and sound samples of various chord qualities and advanced jazz modes. And this is on top of other subjects like ML, scala, logarithms, etc. And then... I hit this mathematical limit where I just couldn't keep up. You can't add 20 new cards a day for…

How large is your deck? I'm at 14k (which is considered a reasonable size). I definitely do average about 30 minutes + a day, but the productivity at work has helped me much more.

I've thought about this quite a bit and written about strategies and tips here: https://senrigan.io/blog/everything-i-know-strategies-tips-a...

A large part is also now using the proper visualization techniques (ie. using intensive memories, an anecdotal use case is I've memorized certain ideas behind neural networks by always putting them in a "closet"). This helps. Truncation of dumb cards is useful.

Another really important thing is just to delete an entire deck (which I've done), when I realized I frankly ... just don't care about the subject any more (in this case, music composition).

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#66

Post by zozbot234 »

kazinator wrote: post #52
banana_maker wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of well known that anki has some seriously bad defaults for long term studying. Not to plug myself but I've written about this at length. [0] There are a few big issues, but the easiest one to fix is the reset interval. When you forget a word that you're reviewing (that is, when you hit "Again"), anki resets the interval to 0%, as if it were a totally new card. This is bad for 2 reasons. 1) A lapse is not t…

Of course the purpose of "hard" is to reduce the interval. When I hit "hard", I'm saying that I don't remember this well enough and need to see it more often. If you hit "hard" on a card, and then months later it re-appears, at which point you now remember it well and hit "good", doesn't it reset the state of that card back to normal?

"Good" doesn't change the interval modifier on a card; "Easy" does, however.

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#67

Post by kfoley »

rudnek wrote: post #64
jlelonm wrote: post #48

Oooh, neat! Reminds me of this addon: LaTeX Note Importer: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1199027445 I'm almost sold on downloading this, but I have a question. Let's say I create notes.md with 2 cards: ## hey hi ## hello howdy But, then I modify card #2: ## hello modified howdy modified and recreate the deck. Does the 2nd card that has now been modified get treated as a whole new card? (In other words, if I've been…

MDAnki produces a file with a deck for importing to Anki. Every new import will generate new cards. I don't know anything if it's possible to make updating cards during the import. I'll try to investigate it. Thanks for this note!

This would change a lot of the current design but one option is to use AnkiConnect[0], it provides a network interface for interacting with Anki and creating/updating cards.

There's a somewhat similar project[1] that lets you use Org mode to make cards. It uses Emacs so there may not be too much you can apply but could be useful to take a look at.

[0] https://github.com/FooSoft/anki-connect [1] https://github.com/louietan/anki-editor

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#68

Post by musically_ut »

Shameless self-plug: I created [anki-slides-import](https://github.com/musically-ut/anki-slides-import) to convert slides into Anki decks.

The program requires notes (written in Markdown, with one section for each slide) along with the pdf slides and it produces a deck which can be practised in Anki. It may prove to be useful for someone here.

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#69

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

banana_maker wrote: post #36
jldugger wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's probably a masterclass in the making regarding this, but the Anki defaults can and probably should be tuned. In particular, the multiplier for time between reviews should be tuned until you're hitting about 80 percent successful reviews. I've doubled mine and it really helped. I think there's also a setting to limit new cards based on review size, and that also helps avoid review hell. I imagine it's not the…

It's kind of well known that anki has some seriously bad defaults for long term studying. Not to plug myself but I've written about this at length. [0] There are a few big issues, but the easiest one to fix is the reset interval. When you forget a word that you're reviewing (that is, when you hit "Again"), anki resets the interval to 0%, as if it were a totally new card. This is bad for 2 reasons. 1) A lapse is not t…

It's a pity that they don't pay more attention to the defaults.

I have been using Anki for Chinese with a premade deck (Spoonfed Chinese, if anyone is curious) for around 1.5 years and reviewing time has crept up too much. I have lowered the number of new cards per day several times (started at 20, now at 12, thinking about going to 10) but I am very averse to change the rest of the defaults since they are very technical things and it's hard for a layperson to know the optimal settings. I trust the Anki devs to have more data on, e.g., the typical rate at which we forget things than I, a random language learner, can have; what do I know about that? So I fear that changing something may harm my learning (currently I get more work than I would like, but I do learn).

You seem to know what you're talking about so I'll try your advice (thanks a lot for it!). But if any Anki dev is reading, please, pay attention to the defaults. I'm sure the overwhelming majority of users are going to use them, out of lack of information and/or fear of tweaking things that we don't know much about. It's a pity to have such an awesome software not live up to its potential due to bad defaults.

Would it be hard to ask the user a small questionnaire, like "how long are you planning to study this subject?", "do you have a specific goal (learning X cards by date Y)?" and "what is the average and maximum time you are willing to devote per day?", and use that to set reasonable options for that user?

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#70

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

banana_maker wrote: post #46
zozbot234 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It feels frustrating too since you keep reviewing the same 5 or 10 items that won't "stick". I think the idea is that eventually you'll be recalling even those "leech" items, due to the sheer exposure you're getting in the meantime. Frustration is part of the game.

> due to the sheer exposure you're getting in the meantime. This helps less than you'd think. Many of my leeches are due to word similarities. Sometimes I'd have an issue of erroneously swapping two similar words, and my brain would get "stuck" following that circuit. If that makes sense? The fix that I found was suspending one or both of the words and making up a lot of sentences for them. And physically writing the…

I can relate, more than half of my leeches are due to word similarities as well. In particular, they tend to happen if two similar words start appearing at roughly the same time (if a word has had enough time to "consolidate" well in my memory before a similar word appears, I tend to be OK).

When this happens, I find the Anki "leech" feature to be useful. I just let it remove (suspend is the word, I guess?) those words automatically. Flashcards are not my sole learning method, so I will probably learn them anyway by other means at some point, so spending lots of time on repetitions to get them right is not worth it.

Post reply on HN