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

How to Remember More of What You Learn with Spaced Repetition (2016)

collegeinfogeek.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 50 posts

Re: How to Remember More of What You Learn with Spaced Repetition (2016)

#42

Post by ihaveahadron »

New learning drives out old learning when insufficient time intervenes

Study until your learning quota is depleted. Stop, wait for it to replenish 100%. Repeat. With the right study material you can learn anything provided you have the prerequisites to learn it. If you don't, learn the prerequisite to the prerequisite you need.

Re: How to Remember More of What You Learn with Spaced Repetition (2016)

#43

Post by sharun »

rwill128 wrote: post #17
hoodwink wrote: post #11

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 would like to chat for sure. I ran across Anki a few months ago, and thought about all the potentially incredible interactions between spaced repetition and Natural Language Processing techniques. 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 o…

You could call it version 1.0 of the system Neo uses to learn everything about everything in the Matrix :)

I don't think NLP is necessary though.

If you take a look at the stackoverflow data dump sooner or later every possible variation of a question for a particular answer is going to get asked. Ofcourse there are always new topics that haven't been covered but this is a minuscule portion of the entire data set. I think it's a safe bet looking at Q&A happening on sites like Quora\Reddit etc in a couple years the chances that someone is going come up with a question that no one has asked before is going to be very low.

Wikipedia is missing 2 important pieces.

1. Linkage between all these questions and the content on the site. Currently Google provides this link.

2. A system to communicate to the reader what skill level /pre-reqs they need to fully appreciate/understand the content they are looking at. The UI for such a system already exists in most games.

Once these pieces are in place you are ready to create a very useful Anki deck on anything.

What most people don't realize is the entire mass of human knowledge given the size of most wiki/q&a site dump is about 100-150 GB. Throw in all the edu video content being produced on Khan Academy, NPTEL etc and you get to a 1-2TB. This isn't a big amount of data. All it needs is a learning system built on top of it for it all to be put to good use.

Re: How to Remember More of What You Learn with Spaced Repetition (2016)

#45

Post by daveguy »

BeetleB wrote: post #37
hoodwink wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That happened to me. I have maybe 30 books loaded equating to approximately 4000 flashcards. I just set a timer and do 10 minutes worth of reviews each morning or review on my phone when waiting around. The benefits seem to be worth it.

>I just set a timer and do 10 minutes worth of reviews each morning or review on my phone when waiting around. The benefits seem to be worth it. This may be part of why it didn't work for me: 1. I don't want to do 10 minutes - that's a lot. Perhaps 1-3 minutes. 2. There will be times/days I will not or cannot do it. The tool I used to use seemed to not handle that too well. I think it expected the usage to be too reg…

Check out beeminder. The threat of giving money to a company if you fail your goals has been particularly motivating to me. Plus the progress visualization is helpful too.

Edit: maybe not worth it for something you want to spend so little time on. I think it's better than the calendar chain-link apps out there because the visualization/progress doesn't completely break if you miss a day.

Re: How to Remember More of What You Learn with Spaced Repetition (2016)

#47

Post by mrkgnao »

madaxe_again wrote: post #16

I've practiced this for as long as I can recall - not because I was told to, but because I found recalling something and working with it in an appropriate mental context worked to cement seemingly limitless amounts of information in my mind. 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…

From my own org-mode link dumps:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14013310

Re: How to Remember More of What You Learn with Spaced Repetition (2016)

#48

Post by nubbins »

rwill128 wrote: post #17
hoodwink wrote: post #11

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 would like to chat for sure. I ran across Anki a few months ago, and thought about all the potentially incredible interactions between spaced repetition and Natural Language Processing techniques. 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 o…

I've tried stuff like this before and am certainly interested for language learning but there are drawbacks to becoming too efficient at entering flashcards. A huge amount of the benefit comes from seeking out and manually encoding the info into a flashcard. A big caveat on SRS systems that gets overlooked is they are very good at reinforcing knowledge but not great at teaching it to start with.

Re: How to Remember More of What You Learn with Spaced Repetition (2016)

#49

Post by terheyden »

Takizawa1 wrote: post #9

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?

You kinda have to find what works for you, but a good rule of thumb is to double the time - e.g. review after 1 day, then 2 days, then 4, then 8, 16, etc. If you get a card wrong, it goes back to 1 day. Pretty soon, the cards you know will be permanently memorized, and should only get reviewed in 6 months or a year, etc.
Post reply on HN