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Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

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Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#11

Post by tunesmith »

I basically ruined myself for Anki. I started like gangbusters, and also created some really cool jazz music theory decks for myself that have lilypond notation snippets and sound samples of various chord qualities and advanced jazz modes. And this is on top of other subjects like ML, scala, logarithms, etc.

And then... I hit this mathematical limit where I just couldn't keep up. You can't add 20 new cards a day for any length of time without the review cycle getting overwhelming. I'm not sure it's even physically possible to Anki full recall of everything learned in a college course - each class would need to be much longer than a term to keep up with the review.

One solution is to just keep plugging away, reviewing what you can and hoping the things you answer correctly will relieve the pressure as they come up less frequently. But since you're late on many card, recall sucks and I never really made much headway.

I also have a really hard time retiring cards. It's like deciding to cross things off your TODO list that you'll never do, you always want to keep it on thinking you might do it someday. Same with a not very relevant piece of info, it's right in front of you, it still feels like it might be useful to know...

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#12

Post by deckar01 »

thrownaway954 wrote: post #9

maybe i'm just a jerk, but it bothers me when someone posts a project and doesn't link to an example of give a full description. i have no idea what anki cards are so i googled it and it's a pretty cool little open source flash card program. most people aren't going to do the research so it's best to have an explanation what all the components are. you don't have to be overly verbose, just a one liner explanation is…

Technical writing is a skill. Little things like linking related topics requires foresight into the range of knowledge your audience could have. It is easy to assume everyone shares the same knowledge you do.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#13

Post by alanbernstein »

deckar01 wrote: post #12
thrownaway954 wrote: post #9

maybe i'm just a jerk, but it bothers me when someone posts a project and doesn't link to an example of give a full description. i have no idea what anki cards are so i googled it and it's a pretty cool little open source flash card program. most people aren't going to do the research so it's best to have an explanation what all the components are. you don't have to be overly verbose, just a one liner explanation is…

Technical writing is a skill. Little things like linking related topics requires foresight into the range of knowledge your audience could have. It is easy to assume everyone shares the same knowledge you do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

This is absolutely true, but you can seldom go wrong assuming that proper nouns (like Anki) should be accompanied by links.

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#14

Post by thrownaway954 »

deckar01 wrote: post #12
thrownaway954 wrote: post #9

maybe i'm just a jerk, but it bothers me when someone posts a project and doesn't link to an example of give a full description. i have no idea what anki cards are so i googled it and it's a pretty cool little open source flash card program. most people aren't going to do the research so it's best to have an explanation what all the components are. you don't have to be overly verbose, just a one liner explanation is…

Technical writing is a skill. Little things like linking related topics requires foresight into the range of knowledge your audience could have. It is easy to assume everyone shares the same knowledge you do. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

which is why i always follow the "assume nothing" rule. when writing something, assume you have to explain everything. again though, it doesn't have to be verbose, just a one liner is more than enough.

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#15

Post by alanbernstein »

eindiran wrote: post #6
echelon wrote: post #2

This is neat! I did a similar thing to manage my Japanese vocabulary. I encoded it in TOML and compiled it to Anki decks. [1] There is a lot of room for utilities like this. Managing decks in the Anki interface and persisting them as zipped sqlite is a headache. [1] http://github.com/echelon/nihongo (It's a bit of a mess, sorry.)

I did something similar, but to handle orgmode files: https://github.com/eindiran/orgmode-to-anki

Ooh, neat. How is image support?

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#16

Post by s_m_t »

tunesmith wrote: post #11

I basically ruined myself for Anki. I started like gangbusters, and also created some really cool jazz music theory decks for myself that have lilypond notation snippets and sound samples of various chord qualities and advanced jazz modes. And this is on top of other subjects like ML, scala, logarithms, etc. And then... I hit this mathematical limit where I just couldn't keep up. You can't add 20 new cards a day for…

Why were you adding 20 new cards a day? IMO its better to adjust your new card rate based on your retention rate. Your ideal retention rate probably depends on how you react to the "stress" of missing cards. Personally it would majorly stress me out if my retention rate was below 80%, I ideally liked to keep it around 90-95% because for me this was where it went from feeling like work to actually being fun and exciting.

I might go for a couple of days without adding anything, do a couple days adding 5, add 10, 15, 20, or even 30 depending on the circumstances.

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#17

Post by elliotec »

s_m_t wrote: post #16
tunesmith wrote: post #11

I basically ruined myself for Anki. I started like gangbusters, and also created some really cool jazz music theory decks for myself that have lilypond notation snippets and sound samples of various chord qualities and advanced jazz modes. And this is on top of other subjects like ML, scala, logarithms, etc. And then... I hit this mathematical limit where I just couldn't keep up. You can't add 20 new cards a day for…

Why were you adding 20 new cards a day? IMO its better to adjust your new card rate based on your retention rate. Your ideal retention rate probably depends on how you react to the "stress" of missing cards. Personally it would majorly stress me out if my retention rate was below 80%, I ideally liked to keep it around 90-95% because for me this was where it went from feeling like work to actually being fun and exciti…

20 new cards per day to review is the default. You can add as many or as few as you want but if you didn't change the default it will put 20 in your review queue daily.

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#18

Post by tptacek »

fudged71 wrote: post #5
knubie wrote: post #4

If this interests you I built an entire SRS app around this idea: https://mochi.cards/

How long has this been around? Surprised I haven't seen it before! Fantastic work. I would love if I could use this with Roam Research somehow

Seconded. This looks really nicely done.

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#19

Post by s_m_t »

elliotec wrote: post #17
s_m_t wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why were you adding 20 new cards a day? IMO its better to adjust your new card rate based on your retention rate. Your ideal retention rate probably depends on how you react to the "stress" of missing cards. Personally it would majorly stress me out if my retention rate was below 80%, I ideally liked to keep it around 90-95% because for me this was where it went from feeling like work to actually being fun and exciti…

20 new cards per day to review is the default. You can add as many or as few as you want but if you didn't change the default it will put 20 in your review queue daily.

Ah yeah, I'd typically create cards "just in time", so to speak, because I found that my retention would drop significantly without the context of what I was learning fresh in my mind.

Re: Show HN: MDAnki – convert Markdown to Anki cards

#20

Post by troydavis »

knubie wrote: post #4

If this interests you I built an entire SRS app around this idea: https://mochi.cards/

I just signed up as a paying customer about 3 hours before this HN thread. Mochi has been fantastic so far - it has most (all?) of the power of Anki, but a much more thoughtful UI. Although Mochi imported my Anki decks seamlessly, I prefer Mochi’s native Markdown support.

Thanks for making it!

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