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Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

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Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#121
post #108
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you're doing it mostly for fun with a side benefit of recognizing a few characters here and there, go for it. Just know you're choosing to learn in a way that's not really recommended for most.

If your learning goals are mostly focused around reading, it's helpful a bit.

If you want to actually understand and use the language, hiragana, katakana, vocab and grammar have much higher utility.

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#122
post #84

I've used Anki over the past 8 years or so very successfully. I strongly recommend it to anyone learning a language. Here are some tips to get the most out of it: * Only put things you know into Anki. An individual Anki card should feel a little too easy when you make it. * Put in words with a good amount of context. Avoid single words as much as possible. The quickest way to do this is to just input the sentence fro…

Those are awesome tips. Could you give a bit more detail into the actual process you follow, beyond those tips? What is your process / do you have a specific routine you follow with the cards?

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#123
post #84

I've used Anki over the past 8 years or so very successfully. I strongly recommend it to anyone learning a language. Here are some tips to get the most out of it: * Only put things you know into Anki. An individual Anki card should feel a little too easy when you make it. * Put in words with a good amount of context. Avoid single words as much as possible. The quickest way to do this is to just input the sentence fro…

>Delete cards when they give you trouble. Language learning is a marathon, if the word is important you'll see it again. If you keep getting a card wrong then you probably didn't actually learn it in the first place, or the card is written in a confusing way.

Anki has that feature built in actually, they're called leeches. By default I believe it's set to 7 mistakes. The idea is that if it happens, you need to either remake the card or do as you said, and wait for it to come up later.

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#124
It seems there's a lot of evidence spaced repetition is an effective learning aid. Two things come to mind:

First, some times I see ppl calling spaced repetition a "trick" or "hack" (I read "shortcut"), but the truth is, using SRS actually entails a lot of work! [0] It seems a pretty important part of the process is to formulate your own cards, which also puts more emphasis in understanding first and memorizing later [1]. SRS is a hack to memorize as much as going to the gym is a hack to gain muscles...

Second some ppl object that "memorizing is not understanding", but I think better recall aids in faster learning, so one feeds the other. [1], again, talks about this: one should only strive to remember what one has already understood. OTOH, a lot of types of knowledge requires mostly memorization. For instance: irregular verb conjugations.

0: I tried SRS and failed to keep up a bunch of times... and I want to give it a sec^H^Hthird chance at some point!

1: https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

I'm running a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with the latest Raspbian image (Stretch dated 2018-06-27). I used apt to install Anki version 2.0.32. Starting Anki from the command line results in "Import error: no module named QtWebKit". Apparently, QtWebKit has been unmaintained for quite some time, and has been removed from the latest version of PyQt. When I get the time I'm going to load Jessie onto a spare micro-sd card and see…

Anki 2.1 was released 3 weeks ago, and is the current stable release. It depends on newer versions of QT. It might work better than the one from apt.

If you really want to install the one from apt, e.g. because your favourite plugins haven't been updated to work with 2.1, then perhaps this approach will be easier than re-installing the OS:

https://github.com/gnprice/anki-jessie

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#127

It seems there's a lot of evidence spaced repetition is an effective learning aid. Two things come to mind: First, some times I see ppl calling spaced repetition a "trick" or "hack" (I read "shortcut"), but the truth is, using SRS actually entails a lot of work! [0] It seems a pretty important part of the process is to formulate your own cards, which also puts more emphasis in understanding first and memorizing later…

It works well. I recommend not making too many flashcards at once, and using the mobile Anki apps to get repetitions in throughout the day.

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#128
post #84

I've used Anki over the past 8 years or so very successfully. I strongly recommend it to anyone learning a language. Here are some tips to get the most out of it: * Only put things you know into Anki. An individual Anki card should feel a little too easy when you make it. * Put in words with a good amount of context. Avoid single words as much as possible. The quickest way to do this is to just input the sentence fro…

Those are awesome tips. Could you give a bit more detail into the actual process you follow, beyond those tips? What is your process / do you have a specific routine you follow with the cards?

The basic process is:

1. Read an article.

2. Encounter a word or phrase you don't know.

3. Keep reading!

4. If the meaning of the word or phrase "clicks" for you, put it into Anki. If not, look it up in a dictionary. For words you have to look up, think very carefully about putting them into a dictionary. There are no hard and fast rules but err on the side of leaving them out.

Review the cards whenever you have time. If you have so many cards that "Review anki cards" is something you have to schedule time for then imo you have too many.

Let's imagine I'm learning English and I read a BBC article and I see this sentence:

> They often have to get creative when "cashing out" or laundering the money they have stolen, according to a security expert.

Hmmm. I don't know what "cashing out" or "laundering" means. Let's keep reading.

> "They can try to sell the card, which is not big money because they only get a few dollars for each one," he said.

Aha! "Cashing out" must mean getting money from what they did. Now that I've learnt "cashing out" I'll put the original sentence into Anki. The back of the card will be an explanation of "cashing out". When you start you can use a translation into your native language. Then when you get better you can use a dictionary definition in English or even write your own definition. Anything that helps you remember the phrase that you already learnt.

After I finish reading the article maybe I check "laundering" in a dictionary or maybe I just leave it. Don't worry that you'll "miss" a word. If it's common you'll see it again. If it's extremely rare then you won't see it again and won't need to know it.

Learning a language is like walking through an orchard. Pick the ripe fruit and leave the rest. If you try to grab everything you won't be able to carry them.

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#129
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind sharing the script? Because the company I work for has grown at an insane rate - and there are a good 300+ coworkers I don't know. It'd be nice to know peoples' faces for when I see them walking around the building.

https://github.com/philsnow/slanki

Thank you very much!

Re: Anki: Memorization with Spaced Learning

#130

Not to be an ass, but is there some new feature of Anki I'm missing? Or is this kind of like posting "Google: A Search Engine Worth Checking Out"?

I would absolutely read "Google: A Search Engine Worth Checking Out". For the past few years, one can be longer do verbatim searches with operators, and every short search is filled with movie and pop music results even though I consume neither.

If there is anything worth checking it about Google's search engine today, I would want to know.

Rant off: I'm sure that those in the HN crowd who don't yet know what Anki is, would like to. It is the whole secret to my career success.

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