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Using Anki to remember what you read

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Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#81

Post by bigfudge »

LeonB wrote: post #43
LeonB wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using it to learn an alphabet effectively probably requires more upfront work (setting up and improving the cards) than you’d expect. It’s not just 1 letter = 1 card. You want to memorise the entire alphabet as a sequence not just as individual letters. So you need cards of little overlapping sequences, like ABC, BCD, etc. The supermemo essays cover this scenario. With that work in place you’d learn it quickly. As ju…

The supermemo article is here: https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru... ...by the creator of supermemo who basically formulated the whole idea. In Point 1 he explains you shouldn’t use spaced repetition to learn. Use it to remember. In Point 10 he covers how to remember “enumerations” (with an alphabet example) You have to go back to the classics when you want to do something properly.

Spaced repetition and the learning curve is quite a bit older than supermemo.

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#82

Post by kendallpark »

Was just taking a break from my Anki session to check HN.

I'm a regular user, though I'm terrible at consistent, daily reviews. I somehow manage to keep on top of it, even after skipping weekends or entire weeks. You can tweak the settings to make it easier for less-than-perfect users.

Lifehack: Anki + exercise. Combining Anki with an elliptical or stationary bike improves both my review and exercise frequency and duration.

I've made my peace with the terrible UI/UX. Like many folks here I tried to roll my own SRS app at one point. But my review sessions would always get derailed with brainstorming new features or dealing with bugs. Personally, I'm not sure that the productivity gains from improving the UI/UX are worth the development time (especially when the whole point of using Anki is efficiency).

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#83

Post by rajlego »

supersrdjan wrote: post #12
kd5bjo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spaced repetition really clicked for me when I realized that it isn’t about learning, but about keeping memories fresh. If you don’t have an emotional attachment to each card in the deck, reviews become a terrible slog. Mine is a mix of random insights I’ve had, photos of places I’ve been, summaries of things I’ve learned, etc. The questions are simply there to force me to engage my memory, which drags up the whole w…

Yes yes, I agree. The way I tackle the threat of detachment from my cards is to aggressively delete cards as soon as I see boredom creeping in. I switched from Anki to Supermemo, though. Much better for managing context and even keeping organized notes that may or may not be used for active recall at some later point.

Can't reply to child for some reason but the reason that SM is so great for managing content is a feature called incremental reading (https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading). To sum it poorly, it lets you go through hundreds of articles in parallel and slowly convert them to active recall material over time. It sounds terribly complicated in practice, and learning it is indeed a pain, but once you know it there's really no way of learning more enjoyable. I can promise you that.

I don't understand how anki users are able to make cards for non-language things,I personally absolutely hate making cards while reading anything. It's hard to explain the exact process but incremental reading by contrast makes it much easier to take what's really important from an article and make cards from it.

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#84

Post by SamBam »

oweiler wrote: post #3

I sometimes wonder if tools like Anki aren't just another form of procrastination. The time invested could probably be better spent.

I think that many people could think that fair assessment, but really it's just about what you value in the world.

Is becoming more knowledgable just "procrastination?" Is reading non-fiction outside your specialty procrastination?

I feel like for much of human history we've held people who have read an entire library's-worth of books in high esteem. Were they just procrastinating?

I still see where you're coming from. I used to think that people who meditated, or hiked the Appalachian Trail were "selfish," because they were doing something that benefitted only them. And I still find it hard to understand someone who decides to learn Mandarin at the age of 93. But people should be allowed to enlighten and actualize themselves however they wish, and it seems absurd to think that a planet full of more knowledgable people would be a bad thing.

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#85

Post by qwerty456127 »

One anti-feature makes me go away every time I return to give Anki another try: lack of a "dismiss once and forever" button. Many decks I'd like to study contain too many cards I already know. Yet I can only choose how easy it was so it would decide how often to repeat it, it won't let me choose "it's easier than saying my own name, don't repeat it ever".

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#86

Post by Sirupsen »

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…

(co-author of the article) I wrote a longer list of categories [1] a while ago (some of which aren't mentioned in the article), here's the list:

  * Basic information about countries e.g. population
  * Ingredients and dishes from restaurant menus I didn't know
  * Important people and places
  * History facts (typically from Kindle highlights)
  * Conversions between units (e.g. lbs to kg)
  * Season for various vegetables and fruits
  * Keyboard shortcuts for vim, readline, etc.
  * Learning words and terms I don't know from Kindle/Instapaper highlights
  * Useful statistics
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17847031

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#87

Post by tentboy »

wahnfrieden wrote: post #49

For Japanese learners, I built two iOS apps that cater to the special needs of the language. Manabi [0] is a flashcard app with the same algorithm as Anki but nicer UI. Manabi Reader [1] collects a bunch of short-form reading materials, lets you tap words to look them up, and tap to add a flashcard. It tracks the individual words you read and charts your progress word by word and kanji by kanji. This app has gotten p…

I will check these out! I use Anki for Japanese right now - mainly because I found Anki decks for each chapter of Genki 1 which I am working through right now.

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#89

Post by JoeAltmaier »

anticodon wrote: post #88

Is it a sane thing to do (cram every bit of knowledge in your head)? I have a feeling that it's futile and could even be a bad thing for mental health and sanity.

Hey kids in school memorize baseball scores, league position, all the characters in Star Wars. It's very normal for people to remember/memorize things. A trick to do it more efficiently isn't going to drive anybody crazy.

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#90

Post by contr-error »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #85

One anti-feature makes me go away every time I return to give Anki another try: lack of a "dismiss once and forever" button. Many decks I'd like to study contain too many cards I already know . Yet I can only choose how easy it was so it would decide how often to repeat it, it won't let me choose "it's easier than saying my own name, don't repeat it ever".

It's been a while since I used Anki, but I'd suggest marking or suspending the notes you don't want to ever see again. Then you can keep them suspended, or if you marked them, you can delete them completely. Should do the trick?
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