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I've also hacked together a system, inspired by spaced repetition, for remembering better books I've read. It's turned into so much more. If you have an interest in remembering books better or using technology to get more out of reading, I'd love to chat.
Chalk me up as an Anki user. I couldn't have done as well as I have in my college español class without it. I felt like I had superpowers when I knew vocabulary that some of the native speakers struggled with.
The thing I like most about Anki is that it can show you nice little graphs of your progress. No matter whether that line is curving upwards or downwards, it helps a great deal to motivate myself for regular study.
I love Anki. I use it for 10 minutes a day for retaining math, vocabulary, and programming languages. I've also hacked together a system, inspired by spaced repetition, for remembering better books I've read. It's turned into so much more. If you have an interest in remembering books better or using technology to get more out of reading, I'd love to chat.
I love Anki. I use it for 10 minutes a day for retaining math, vocabulary, and programming languages. I've also hacked together a system, inspired by spaced repetition, for remembering better books I've read. It's turned into so much more. If you have an interest in remembering books better or using technology to get more out of reading, I'd love to chat.
I'm not convinced that an app or any external crutch is required - one simply needs to get in the habit of reflecting on new information, and sporadically testing retention. The first step for me to start the loop is to subvocalise (or vocalise if I'm in private) the pertinent info several times after receipt, which beds the memory of learning something in, and the context, if not the fullness of the information itself. It's enough - it's a hook to trigger recall of the full information - sits in episodic memory as "a thing I said or did", rather than passive "this happened/I heard this" information, and therefore surfaces the entry point easily. If an entertaining association rises at that point, I store that too, as it acts as a mnemonic.
I do find myself sometimes doing this with useless information, however, and end up memorising pretty much every bit of information I only intended to retain for 30 seconds (e.g. a chunk of foreign text, ticket numbers, seating plans) - and find myself doing habitual recall on them until they cement like everything else.
One thing that the article doesn't touch on but I think is important is sleep - I find if I recall immediately before nodding off the information sticks far more firmly, and I resultantly wake up in the middle of the night with fresh insights. Conversely, when I don't get enough sleep for a prolonged period, my recall definitely gets substantially worse - I find I both can't remember things and if I do, they're distorted, or I don't trust the information.
I love Anki. I use it for 10 minutes a day for retaining math, vocabulary, and programming languages. I've also hacked together a system, inspired by spaced repetition, for remembering better books I've read. It's turned into so much more. If you have an interest in remembering books better or using technology to get more out of reading, I'd love to chat.
For a super basic idea, imagine a Chrome plugin that creates an Anki deck out of a Wikipedia article at the click of a button? (Maybe not the most useful application, but pretty neat and a great place for a simple proof of concept.)
And what if you took that a step farther and made an app that does the same thing with text extracted from an image set. So you could take pictures of a textbook page or pages and have it do the same thing with those.
Of course, there are many practical challenges to developing the NLP process in a way that it can identify the most salient parts of a text and capture flash-card-friendly phrases or factual statements, but I think the challenges could be overcome. And it would be an amazing feat to capture the benefits of spaced repetition without the upfront cost of manual deck creation.
The article mentions optimum spacing if you have an exam coming up. Has anyone found useful references in regards to optimum spacing if you want to permanently memorize information?
In the interest of full transparency, I think there are some things missing to make it the best tool it can possibly be. I'm still mulling over how to tweak it so it works better w.r.t. motivation/relevancy and availability/convenience.
Write-up: https://www.oskarth.com/srspractice/