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Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

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Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#101

Post by purerandomness »

drivers99 wrote: post #96
baxtr wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to learn Spanish. I have a basic vocabulary and understanding. What’s the fastest way forward in your opinion?

"Fluent Forever" has a suggestion of putting a picture (from, say, google image search) on the front of the card, and the foreign word as the answer. That way you test yourself by producing the correct word without translating it from language 1 to language 2. Example for Spanish: Front: picture of a "gatito" from google image search. Back: gatito The word "kitten" is not used at all. No translations! The reason you…

What you say makes sense.

In that particular case however, there might be a simple mistake: девушка doesn't mean "girl" in russian - it means "young woman". A "girl" would be девочка.

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#102

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

kristofferR wrote: post #98
dylanbyte wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a convenient workflow for kindle highlights - > flashcards?

https://github.com/neingeist/kindle-to-anki

that's a webscraper not an official api though, reading through it uses beautifulsoup.

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#103

Post by xkfm »

jamesbvaughan wrote: post #83
edwintorok wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The system described here is in many ways similar to Incremental Reading [1], which also uses an algorithm to schedule when to read the URLs provided. (the Anki addon is fairly primitive though, would rather use a browser plugin that remembers how much I read from each webpage instead) Also worth paying attention when reviewing flashcards, as described in [2]: And when I rush through my flashcard reviews, I’m not thi…

Have you found any good tools other than Anki for Incremental Reading?

Supermemo has the best implementation of incremental reading and somewhat pioneered it. It's only downside is it's heavily tied into windows. [1]

[1] https://www.supermemo.com/help/read.htm

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#104

Post by kazinator »

jameshart wrote: post #91

I'm always a little confused when I see articles on the internet extolling the virtues of spaced repetition learning. I don't doubt that it's a good way to memorize things; it's just that I have never really found that memorization was ever an obstacle to my ability to learn something. I've always found that retention proceeds from understanding . Time spent flicking through flashcards for vocabulary or formulae or c…

> poor substitute for time spent reading material that uses the vocabulary

You can't effectively read material without having enough vocabulary to cover at least some 80% of it.

My most recent language learning experience is Japanese. The difference between trying to read before cramming on an ~8000 word vocabulary and after is night and day.

And the comparison basis here is not reading hardcopy, but electronic text with the help of an instant dictionary lookup tool (hover the mouse over anything to get to the reading and meanings instantly). That is to say, even with that tool, which eliminates some of the barriers of the writing system, trying to read is still like pulling teeth compared to the experience when you're crammed on a decent chunk of vocab.

Vocab gets you to that point where you can guess the meanings of unknown words from context, as well as their readings. You can start using mono-lingual dictionaries and other resources.

Now if you're coming from, say, one European language to another, you may be able to get away without using spaced repetition, because of a lot of shared vocabulary (cognates) and concepts.

In any case, brute force reading is spaced repetition. It's just inefficient spaced repetition that fails to schedule the appearance of a word based on your recall performance for that specific word.

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#105

Post by nextos »

nextos wrote: post #43
tushartyagi wrote: post #4

Also worth reading is the excellent (and pretty extensive) article by Michael Nielsen[1] showcasing how he used Anki to create an in-depth knowledge about AlphaGo. Personally, I've used Anki to keep remembering/revisiting the concepts that I use for a while and then move onto something else. Common APIs of programming languages and their standard libraries is one such area. I've found that while it's not really diffi…

org-mode has an implementation of several spaced repetition algorithms, which is what Anki is using under the hood and what was originally invented for SuperMemo. The module is called org-drill. I'm in the process of turning many knowledge aspects of my life into a personal knowledge base inside org-mode. For books I'm reading, I find it invaluable to create org-mode items. One per concept. Sometimes I don't even bot…

What I've written also has a connection with productivity systems like GTD (which I don't use personally but serves to illustrate my point).

Many if not most people on HN are knowledge workers. For us especially, many tasks in our inboxes are non-actionable. E.g. a link you stored that teaches a great trick to use your editor, or an elusive shell one-liner you came up with.

What to do with these? A good productivity system should also include a knowledge base, so that those non-actionable bits of information that have future value can be easily stored and later retrieved. Here they explain it better than I do: https://praxis.fortelabs.co/gtd-x-pkm-8ff720ef6939/

A further tweak is to force spaced repetition on those knowledge bits you want to be able to learn by heart. In Emacs, you can achieve this by simply tagging them for later org-drill (spaced-repetition) sessions.

As a student I used to do this with pen & paper. I would patiently deconstruct books into extremely long lists of items that included definitions, theorems, corollaries, demonstrations, and whatever concepts in the right order. Then I recalled them during repetition sessions. Doing this with a spaced-repetition algorithm is a much more efficient way, as you focus your effort on hard stuff and you time sessions appropriately to maximize the chances of learning it.

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#106

Post by PowerfulWizard »

dylanbyte wrote: post #87
Sirupsen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article is the best summarization of real, everyday usage of Anki outside of language learning and medical studies which are common uses of Anki. Reviewing flash cards is the highest leverage 10-15 minute habit I have besides planning my day. There's a certain joy and relief from having a reasonable confidence new information will be readily available to you for years to come. Much knowledge is better absorbed t…

Is there a convenient workflow for kindle highlights - > flashcards?

The best way I know to get highlights from kindle (I only use iPhone) is to click the "My Notebook" icon (looks like a letter paper page), click the export button, and then send to email. There is a notecard option there as well but I haven't tried it. Not exactly a solution but I'm mentioning it because it took me a while to notice.

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#107

Post by glass_of_water »

jameshart wrote: post #91

I'm always a little confused when I see articles on the internet extolling the virtues of spaced repetition learning. I don't doubt that it's a good way to memorize things; it's just that I have never really found that memorization was ever an obstacle to my ability to learn something. I've always found that retention proceeds from understanding . Time spent flicking through flashcards for vocabulary or formulae or c…

> Time spent flicking through flashcards for vocabulary ... seems like a poor substitute for time spent reading

I've been using Anki decks in tandem with native reading material to study Japanese. Whenever I encounter a word I don't know, I add it (along with a sample sentence demonstrating usage) to my Anki deck. Whenever I don't do this I get frustrated by having to look up the same words multiple times (often times a new word is used infrequently enough that I forget it even if I look it up every time I encounter it).

Also, when learning Japanese, there are a lot of things where memorization is very useful like learning to map between English words and kanji and learning the readings of place names and people's names.

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#108

Post by graeme »

irq11 wrote: post #99
graeme wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I could see that happening. I'm not expecting it to be a panacea, just a mild accelerant I can actually do while waiting to finish with German. What do you think of that plan? My assumption is that I'll better be able to learn the words in the Pimsleur course the second time around when I can see the writing, and that this will make the overall process easier. It felt like too much, cognitively, the last time.…

To be honest, I think you’d be better off just studying words. Studying kanji really doesn’t help you.

Right, but zero? I can’t study Japanese words at the moment without interfering with German.

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#109

Post by vaughnegut »

cheunste wrote: post #60

It has been a while since I used Anki and I vaguely recall I have a horrible experience with creating cards. I really wish there is a way I can create cards in vim or something, but that sounds really limited when it comes to things like Chinese where you need to somehow write out the character or find an image of it on the Internet.

Honest question, what is so hard about writing Chinese to create carss? I find at least typing in pinyin on windows and android isn't so bad, or did you mean specifically in the context of vim?

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#110

Post by rahimnathwani »

inetsee wrote: post #51

I really like the idea of spaced repetition learning, but it's the little details that are driving me crazy. I cannot get Anki working on Raspberry Pi. (I have a Raspberry Pi connected to a TV in front of my rowing machine so I can study while I'm exercising.) I tried Mnemosyne but I can't get the sync server working, and I'm disappointed in the formatting options provided. I tried org-drill but adding images to card…

"running Anki on Raspberry Pi"

It's a bit hard to help without knowing:

- what OS you're using

- what exactly you mean by "I cannot get Anki working", i.e. the standard stuff in a bug report: what did you do, what did you expect to happen, and what actually happened

- what peripherals you're trying to use (e.g. some people using treadmills control their PI using an Xbox controller; perhaps your problem is related to getting that working?

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