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Using Anki to remember what you read

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Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#61

Post by gwd »

yen223 wrote: post #35

I'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…

One of the issues Anki has, I find, is that if you end up taking a long break for whatever reason, there's no way to "reset".

I used Anki to study Chinese for a period of about 10 years. At some point I decided that I wanted to memorize the poker "outs" (probabilities of filling out a hand based on what had currently been dealt). Then I went through a time where I was really busy and didn't study the poker deck for a month (but I made time for Chinese). When I came back to the poker deck, the "spaced repetition" system was completely broken: I had a massive long list of cards that had expired, most of which I'd completely forgotten; but it just kept showing them to me in one giant loop, rather than focusing on a few to actually teach me. And I didn't even have a clean way of telling it, "Just pretend I haven't seen any of these cards at all". I ended up just deleting the deck; that discouraged me from doing anything else I wasn't willing to commit to doing every single day.

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#62

Post by wiz21c »

FTA :

>>> It’s nothing crazy. Here’s an example from a very real non-work day:

Followed by a pretty long list.

How does he do ? There are 23 items on the list. None of which include daily tasks such as : dishes, sport, talking to family, to friends, eating, cooking, washing clothes, having a social life. All of these tasks take a lot of time, esp. if I consider the time to switch between them (which can be quite long since, hey, it's a non work day, so I'm slower...).

We're not equals.

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#63

Post by throwaway9d0291 »

Grue3 wrote: post #25
throwaway9d0291 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends what you're doing. I mainly use it for learning vocabulary. I'm learning German and Anki is nothing short of amazing. I'm easily able to learn ~20 words a day primarily just practicing on my phone during bathroom breaks. 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. I've heard very numerous accounts of it being great for Ja…

>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'…

That's a good idea, I'll give it a try with fewer words. I did notice that I'd just come back to a word I'd seen 30 seconds ago and not recognize it, maybe I need to reduce the number of switches in between so it has more opportunity to stick.

> The noun cases would be completely foreign to non-Slavic language speaker.

Picking those up was actually fairly straightforward. Cases may be completely foreign but the grammatical concepts behind them aren't. For example Russian has nominative, accusative and dative but English has subjects, direct objects and indirect objects and I learned all those in school.

I think somewhat ironically, the biggest grammatical problem I had with Russian was the tenses. English has 12 and Russian has ~5 so it was hard to figure out how to express a given English sentence in Russian.

But I think the biggest problem is phoenetics. On the surface it looks simple (unstressed o -> a) but there are so many extra rules if you want to speak properly (e.g. voiced consonant before a voiceless consonant becomes voiceless).

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#65

Post by galfarragem »

Using Anki is less important than keeping relevant and digested notes. I use Anki daily but I don't really need to memorize everything. It's enough to be able to fast retrieve previous collected info. In the end I just don't want to repeat myself. For that I simply use one searchable text file (and a github public repository - to maintain some quality - for digested notes/cheatsheets).

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#67

Post by lallysingh »

dbriles wrote: post #48

Anki (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…

If I were to guess, it's because Android offers many cheaper phones, so the platform is a proxy for the wealth of the user.

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#68

Post by kd5bjo »

lawtalkinghuman wrote: post #55
kd5bjo wrote: post #21

Earlier 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.

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…

> Language learning is an obvious use case

Memorizing word pairs can certainly be done with spaced repetition, but it’s unclear how much that translates to actual language ability. Second-language acquisition appears to be primarily dependent on reading (or listening to) the target language for content, and most words are learned via seeing them in context instead of being looked up in a dictionary.

I have no experience with law or medicine, but I expect the story is similar: practical knowledge is what you need to hand, and not book knowledge. Book knowledge is what gets you through the exams and into the practical part of your training.

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#69

Post by throwaway9d0291 »

CrazyStat wrote: post #44
Grue3 wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

> 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.

36 isn't that bad but Russian also has 253 irregular verbs [0], each of which adds another set of combinations. A lot of them are just small tweaks and there are some that follow a set of patterns (e.g. идти with its various prefixes) but it still adds a lot of overhead.

[0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Russian_irregular_ve...

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#70

Post by misiti3780 »

wiz21c wrote: post #62

FTA : >>> It’s nothing crazy. Here’s an example from a very real non-work day: Followed by a pretty long list. How does he do ? There are 23 items on the list. None of which include daily tasks such as : dishes, sport, talking to family, to friends, eating, cooking, washing clothes, having a social life. All of these tasks take a lot of time, esp. if I consider the time to switch between them (which can be quite long…

Do do the same thing this guy and do all the things you mentioned. I create cards on sundays only and i do anki every morning before i start working. It can be accomplished easily, sans children.
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