Has anyone ever created an anki deck from their college coursework that would have allowed them to pass verbal exams 10 years later?
Using Anki to remember what you read
51–60 of 313 posts
Re: Using Anki to remember what you read
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
>On the other hand I'm also learning Russian and Anki just doesn't work. Words won't stick in my head the way they do with German. Because (for English speakers) Russian is harder than German. You need to reduce the number of words learned per day. Japanese is even harder to learn, but you have to be persistent. I spent more than an hour every single day for several years straight to learn the vocabulary. Also there'…
Just going to be a bit nitpicky here. Noun declension is a feature of various non-slavic languages, including Latin which English speakers have a decent chance of having been exposed to. Modern Russian has 6 cases (with a couple more that pop up very rarely) with 3 genders and singular/plural endings. It's a total of 36 possible combinations, which is not that bad. Masculine and neuter also share most endings so ther…
Right: but one difference (which you sort of hint at) is that German is consistent in why something takes a particular case compared to Slavic languages (e.g. direction vs location), and at least the preposition is consistent. Is it "nad morze" or "nad morzem"? No way to know without the entire sentence. And "morzem" is the "tool case" -- the form you usually use to describe that something happens with the help of a tool even though the sea (morze) is not at all a tool in that sentence. Oh, and you only use "nad" with bodies of water by the way. Sorry!
Another incredibly tricky one for Slavic languages is imperfective vs perfective aspects. In most other languages, perfect vs imperfect is just a standard construction. In Polish (and Russian, though my examples here are Polish), you change the verb itself. How? Well, sometimes you put "po" in front of it, like rozmawiać / porozmawiać. Sometimes it's "z" (jeść / zjeść), sometimes "u", "na" or "wy". And sometimes you just give up, like oglądać (but obejrzeć in the perfective), widzieć (zobaczyć), mowić (powiedzieć).
(For this reason I have found it very hard to progress in Polish without conversation with native speakers who aren't too polite to correct me.)
Re: Using Anki to remember what you read
#53I've used spaced repetition to help learn stuff in general. It's one of the most rewarding things I've done. Some general thoughts: 1. A lot of spaced repetition apps don't optimize for fast card creation. I like to make a card as soon as I come across something interesting, but the delay to get Anki started, and to create the card, etc just makes it frustrating. I wound up building my own app for this. 2. Cloze dele…
For frictionless card-creation I have made an org-capture template for quickly adding cards to an org-mode file via a custom Emacs pop-up frame. This is accessible from everywhere with the keybinding (Super + c + a).
Exporting to Anki from Emacs is done via the anki-editor mode for Emacs.
Re: Using Anki to remember what you read
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just going to be a bit nitpicky here. Noun declension is a feature of various non-slavic languages, including Latin which English speakers have a decent chance of having been exposed to. Modern Russian has 6 cases (with a couple more that pop up very rarely) with 3 genders and singular/plural endings. It's a total of 36 possible combinations, which is not that bad. Masculine and neuter also share most endings so ther…
Right: but one difference (which you sort of hint at) is that German is consistent in why something takes a particular case compared to Slavic languages (e.g. direction vs location), and at least the preposition is consistent. Is it "nad morze" or "nad morzem"? No way to know without the entire sentence. And "morzem" is the "tool case" -- the form you usually use to describe that something happens with the help of a…
Yes, perfective and imperfective aspects are very tricky, particularly how they interact with various other linguistic features: imperatives (and the negative imperative), the subjunctive, and verbs of motion come to mind, each of which modifies the use of the aspects in it's own way.
Re: Using Anki to remember what you read
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? I have a rule with Anki where the question is one line and the answer is no more than 3. No cards take longer than a minute to write, or more than 10 seconds to remember. If it's anything longer, then it's probably not a subject you should be using anki to learn or you're trying to remember too large a bloc of information at once. I have absolutely no idea how this could be a form of procrastination, or how I…
> I have absolutely no idea ... how I could more efficiently memorize information that must be memorized. Outside of a schooling/testing context, memorization alone is rarely beneficial. You need to be able to practically apply the knowledge, which happens through experience; looking details up when you need them forms a natural kind of spaced repetition anyway that’s tuned to what you actually need to know.
For programming, memorisation doesn't matter that much. Not knowing the argument order for a function isn't a big deal. You use an IDE or you get a good offline docs viewer (Dash, DevDocs etc.) or you learn to Google efficiently.
Language learning is an obvious use case.
Also: law and medicine. Having knowledge mentally 'to hand' is pretty important if you've got a patient under general anaesthetic, or a judge asking you a very difficult question.
Re: Using Anki to remember what you read
#56Anki (and spaced repetition) is awesome! Some things I've had used it for to great success: 1. Memorizing Japanese vocabulary, pitch-accent, and basic grammar rules. It would probably be useful, at least to some degree, for any language like this. 2. Any certification which required strict memorization. All the basic ComptTIA certs were like this, and the CCNA:R&S cert (unfortunately) required memorizing commands and…
> I also don't agree with Anki's pricing model. The app is free on Android[1] but $25 on iOS[2]. I think I heard (I don't have a source) that the developer's justification was that they needed to make money from the all the time and effort they spent creating Anki, plus hosting costs, etc - so why not do a cheaper price on both Android/iOS, or do a free-to-download app with a subscription model
People with money overwhelmingly buy iPhones. $25 is a pittance for anyone who can afford an iPhone. Anybody who uses Anki seriously gets far, far more value than $25 out of it. I used it for well over 200 hours before I stopped and I know I’ll go back to it again.
The Android version is not maintained by the developer of Anki. The iPhone app is. He chooses to charge for the iPhone app, which enables him to make a living making tens of thousands of people’s lives better.
If you don’t want to spend the price of two pizzas on an app that the modal user will use for over a hundred hours don’t.
Re: Using Anki to remember what you read
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? I have a rule with Anki where the question is one line and the answer is no more than 3. No cards take longer than a minute to write, or more than 10 seconds to remember. If it's anything longer, then it's probably not a subject you should be using anki to learn or you're trying to remember too large a bloc of information at once. I have absolutely no idea how this could be a form of procrastination, or how I…
> I have absolutely no idea ... how I could more efficiently memorize information that must be memorized. Outside of a schooling/testing context, memorization alone is rarely beneficial. You need to be able to practically apply the knowledge, which happens through experience; looking details up when you need them forms a natural kind of spaced repetition anyway that’s tuned to what you actually need to know.
Anki has two benefits: memorization and understanding. Memorization is what comes from going over the cards, which is what you allude to. Understanding comes from the process of creating the cards, where you think hard about the atoms of information in the text, and their interrelationships, and cast them into simple questions. Then memorization gives you a much deeper understanding than if you hadn't ankied the text.
Re: Using Anki to remember what you read
#58If Anki’s UI/UX turns you off, I’ve built an alternative called Mochi ( https://mochi.cards/ ) that uses markdown. Incidentally it also supports Zettelkasten like note taking like described in the article.
I'll try using this for the next weeks but having used it for the last hour, I definitely like the feel of it a lot more than Anki.
Re: Using Anki to remember what you read
#59Anki (and spaced repetition) is awesome! Some things I've had used it for to great success: 1. Memorizing Japanese vocabulary, pitch-accent, and basic grammar rules. It would probably be useful, at least to some degree, for any language like this. 2. Any certification which required strict memorization. All the basic ComptTIA certs were like this, and the CCNA:R&S cert (unfortunately) required memorizing commands and…
> I also don't agree with Anki's pricing model. The app is free on Android[1] but $25 on iOS[2]. I think I heard (I don't have a source) that the developer's justification was that they needed to make money from the all the time and effort they spent creating Anki, plus hosting costs, etc - so why not do a cheaper price on both Android/iOS, or do a free-to-download app with a subscription model People with money over…
> People with money overwhelmingly buy iPhones. $25 is a pittance for anyone who can afford an iPhone. Anybody who uses Anki seriously gets far, far more value than $25 out of it. I used it for well over 200 hours before I stopped and I know I’ll go back to it again.
I used Anki's web interface from my phone for about 6 months before I bought the iOS app. Then about 4 years after using the app almost every day, I sent them another $25 donation. I got way more than $50 worth of value out of it over the 10 years that I used it.
(I've now written my own study tool for Chinese which fixes some of the issues with using flashcards for language learning. Maybe at some point it will show up on "Show HackerNews"; but it's slow going when you've only got a few hours a week.)
Re: Using Anki to remember what you read
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have absolutely no idea ... how I could more efficiently memorize information that must be memorized. Outside of a schooling/testing context, memorization alone is rarely beneficial. You need to be able to practically apply the knowledge, which happens through experience; looking details up when you need them forms a natural kind of spaced repetition anyway that’s tuned to what you actually need to know.
Anki has two benefits: memorization and understanding. Memorization is what comes from going over the cards, which is what you allude to. Understanding comes from the process of creating the cards, where you think hard about the atoms of information in the text, and their interrelationships, and cast them into simple questions. Then memorization gives you a much deeper understanding than if you hadn't ankied the text…
I concur, what you describe is a very effective use of spaced repetition. It is different from what ‘ProstetnicJeltz described, where cards should take less than a minute to write — that describes memorization without first putting in the effort to understand.