21–30 of 115 posts
I often feel like learning things with Anki puts memories into the wrong part of the brain. It happens way too often that I can perfectly recall something from Anki (on a PC or phone), but have a lot of trouble recalling it 'in action'.
I wish anki supports better import-from-text-files, i.e. I can write the cards in a text editor(e.g. vim), then import it to anki easily with syntax highlighting etc just works, I failed to find one does that, use anki's own interface to input a large amount of info is difficult for me. it will be nice if anki has a pre-defined format/template so we can edit(add/delete/change) the cards using better editors.
With how often I've seen spaced repetition mentioned online recently, I'm starting to assume there's a grand conspiracy that's trying to use spaced repetition to trick me into remembering about spaced repetition.
[Warning: attempt at taking joke seriously] Surely if this were so, it would mean you'd see fewer mentions of spaced repetition over time, rather than more? (assuming your comment implies having seen more than usual recently)
As an aside, I love doing this sort of thing. In conversation, someone makes a joke about X doing something impossible, and then all of us who analyze everything to death start playing the scenario in our head to understand ramifications or limitations in the fictional and often impossible scenario. Drives my wife nuts, but I enjoy it so much :)
Recommend using Anki for this: https://apps.ankiweb.net/ I try to add new words/concepts/things etc. I learn into Anki. IMO, it greatly helps me with memorising various and more obscure terms, that I used to always forget.
I often feel like learning things with Anki puts memories into the wrong part of the brain. It happens way too often that I can perfectly recall something from Anki (on a PC or phone), but have a lot of trouble recalling it 'in action'.
I use Anki to study Russian, with great results, following Gabriel Werner's Fluent Forever.
In the book, he teaches how to learn the words and the grammar of a language using Anki. One of the fundamental ideas is to both create recognition and production cards.
The recognition cards are the ones with a word in your target language, of which you have to remember the meaning. This is what most people use SRSs for.
The production cards instead show you an image, or a sentence with blanks, and you have to come up with the correct word by yourself.
Before reading the book, I have never seen anyone using the latter, but it makes sense. You have to train your brain not only to recognize the information, but also to take it out when needed, and those are two separate paths.
[Update: fixed the book's author name]
Seems like spaced repetition works great for language learning and remembering new terms. I wonder how it could help to get better as a programmer. Any tips?
Getting better at speaking a language means speaking in it all the time. Same thing for programming - if you want to improve, your time is better spent doing actual programming rather than memorizing syntax.
I often feel like learning things with Anki puts memories into the wrong part of the brain. It happens way too often that I can perfectly recall something from Anki (on a PC or phone), but have a lot of trouble recalling it 'in action'.
I often feel like learning things with Anki puts memories into the wrong part of the brain. It happens way too often that I can perfectly recall something from Anki (on a PC or phone), but have a lot of trouble recalling it 'in action'.
Seems like spaced repetition works great for language learning and remembering new terms. I wonder how it could help to get better as a programmer. Any tips?
It's great for learning facts, so, if you wanted to, I suppose you could use it for something like memorizing a pile of library functions. But I'm having a hard time seeing that as an efficient thing to do in the age of Google and Stack Overflow and editors with auto-suggestion.
Or if you're a low-level programmer, and want to memorize a new architecture's assembly language, maybe.
Even on the language side: SRS is great for shoehorning a basic vocabulary into your head when you're first getting started with a language. It kind of sucks for learning anything but the most basic grammar, and for getting a feel for how to actually express yourself in a language, or comprehend the language as it would be spoken by a competent speaker. Comprehensible input is still the go-to method for that side of language learning. And once you get to the intermediate or high intermediate stage, SRS isn't even all that great for learning the vocabulary anymore, because it's hard to really internalize the nuances of more advanced vocabulary that way. You'll go farther faster by just watching a lot of TV and reading a lot of books, where you get to encounter the words living in their natural habitat instead of dead and dried and pinned to a notecard.