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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

#41

Post by andrewzah »

s_m_t wrote: post #19
elliotec wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ideally this is how cards should be made. Most anki word decks neglect to have meaningful context, making them much less useful. Especially once you begin to study more advanced vocabulary.

What I ended up doing was modifying a pre-made deck to have more fields, and I edit a card as it pops up into my new queue. This takes more time, but it makes it easier for me to learn a word seeing example sentences and other information.

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

#42

Post by kazinator »

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…

> You can't add 20 new cards a day for any length of time without the review cycle getting overwhelming.

1. You have to take breaks from adding cards, and just be in review mode sometimes.

2. You have to tweak the settings. The defaults are bad. For instance, you probably want to adjust the percentage by which a lapsed card's interval shortens. If you lapse on a ten month card, you don't want it resetting to just several days, but say to 50%: five months. Another thing is to tweak the custom intervals to reduce the number of initial reviews for newly added cards, and also tweak the interval steps for lapsed cards to control how many times a card is reviewed before being returned into the deck.

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

#43

Post by andrewzah »

rudnek wrote: post #26
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…

I've been using Anki for learning foreign language words for at least 2 years during my commute. At the start of using flashcards I could learn near 20 words for a day, but now, based on my experience, the number of learned cards decreases. At the same time repeat learning helps me do not forget words which were learned a year or so ago and rarely used. I also noticed, for me, the best approach for better remembering…

I was the most consistent with anki when I had a 30 min commute by train every day. Once I started working from home it became much harder to consciously allocate 30-40 minutes for anki every day.

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

#44

Post by iudqnolq »

troydavis wrote: post #24
iudqnolq wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any plans for a mobile app?

(not OP, just a new paying customer) FWIW, the mobile-optimized version of Mochi’s Web site is excellent on both phones and tablets.

How do you get to it? The version of the site I got on my phone was completely unusable (buggy even if I had my mobile browser view it as a desktop site and zoomed completely out)

Edit: I was unfair. Just tested in Chrome Android and it worked fine, and Firefox Android and it worked mostly fine with some minor bugs (mainly clicking on menu icon does a text selection). The complete failure was in Firefox Previous, which is incomplete and completely reasonable not to test with.

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

#45

Post by andrewzah »

abruzzi wrote: post #31
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…

I had the same response, so i googled it. The home page that came up for the Anki application ( https://apps.ankiweb.net ) doesn't really explain what it is either (it has a lot of fluff about how its useful and where its useful, but no actual information on what it does and how it does it.) I had to go to the docs link and read a good way into the user manual to get a sense of what it actually does. Still I'm not 10…

Anki specifically is a spaced repetition [0] [1] flashcards app, similar to supermemo.

When you review a card, you can mark it as "Again", "Hard", "Good", or "Easy". The new interval of a card will depend on the grade, so it might be like 1day -> 2days / 3days / 4days, and so on. "Again" resets the interval to 0, like a new card.

The documentation is "open source tier", because anki is open source. It should be better, I agree, but something something you get what you pay for. Anki is free on pc/mac and android, but not on ios.

As someone who has used it for the last 2.5 years, I can wholeheartedly recommend it. In fact, I've written at length about it [2]. However I think the manual is pretty good [3] (for anyone who's curious).

Feel free to ask if you have any specific questions.

[0]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/andrewzah.com/studies/Pashler.Rohre...

[1]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/andrewzah.com/studies/Bahrick-et-al...

[2]: https://andrewzah.com/tags/anki/

[3]: https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html

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

#46

Post by banana_maker »

zozbot234 wrote: post #32
retrac wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using Anki to memorize Chinese characters. It's near-ideal for the task. It's a pretty memory-hard task, and I find a sustainable average is only 2 - 3 new cards a day. I've done stretches where I've done 20 new characters and I pay for it in the reviews for weeks and weeks. It feels frustrating too since you keep reviewing the same 5 or 10 items that won't "stick". I find SRS software like Anki is best tak…

> It feels frustrating too since you keep reviewing the same 5 or 10 items that won't "stick". I think the idea is that eventually you'll be recalling even those "leech" items, due to the sheer exposure you're getting in the meantime. Frustration is part of the game.

> due to the sheer exposure you're getting in the meantime.

This helps less than you'd think. Many of my leeches are due to word similarities. Sometimes I'd have an issue of erroneously swapping two similar words, and my brain would get "stuck" following that circuit. If that makes sense?

The fix that I found was suspending one or both of the words and making up a lot of sentences for them. And physically writing them.

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

#47

Post by iudqnolq »

knubie wrote: post #27
iudqnolq wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any plans for a mobile app?

Yep, working on it now, should be out by the end of March. I'll start calling for beta testers soon on Twitter.

Awesome! I'm not on Twitter, but would like to be a beta tester. Do you by any chance have a mailing list or RSS feed? If I buy a subscription will you email subscribers when the beta comes out?

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

#48

Post by jlelonm »

Oooh, neat! Reminds me of this addon:

LaTeX Note Importer: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1199027445

I'm almost sold on downloading this, but I have a question.

Let's say I create notes.md with 2 cards:

## hey

hi

## hello

howdy

But, then I modify card #2:

## hello modified

howdy modified

and recreate the deck.

Does the 2nd card that has now been modified get treated as a whole new card? (In other words, if I've been using card 2 to study, do I have to start all over?)

If this is NOT the case, I am absolutely sold.

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

#50

Post by animalnewbie »

banana_maker wrote: post #36
jldugger wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's probably a masterclass in the making regarding this, but the Anki defaults can and probably should be tuned. In particular, the multiplier for time between reviews should be tuned until you're hitting about 80 percent successful reviews. I've doubled mine and it really helped. I think there's also a setting to limit new cards based on review size, and that also helps avoid review hell. I imagine it's not the…

It's kind of well known that anki has some seriously bad defaults for long term studying. Not to plug myself but I've written about this at length. [0] There are a few big issues, but the easiest one to fix is the reset interval. When you forget a word that you're reviewing (that is, when you hit "Again"), anki resets the interval to 0%, as if it were a totally new card. This is bad for 2 reasons. 1) A lapse is not t…

Yet another person who majorly agrees with the first point made here.

Everybody I would urge you to read this comment if you are an Anki user.

The point about Anki is not the sw but the intervals and if you haven't got them right, there's not much point.

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