Using Anki to remember what you read • Hacker News Board

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#151

Post by DevX101 » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:27 PM UTC

localhost wrote: post #130

kendallpark wrote: post #82

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 du…

I find it difficult to do anything intellectual while exercising at a relatively high intensity. What intensity are your workout sessions? But perhaps review is different than trying to absorb a new concept?

Personal anecdote, but there's some optima for information retention at low intensity exercise. This is around moderate to vigorous walking pace or a very slow jog.

Increase intensity beyond that point and your brain's information processing ability drops below baseline.

I've found this consistently true. At lower intensity cardio for example, I can watch educational youtube videos or follow along a movie. At high intensity, I can't even watch an action movie and follow the plot. I have to switch to music and/or a sports action video (no meaningful dialog).

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#152

Post by wahnfrieden » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

brigandish wrote: post #96

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…

That looks really interesting, I'll definitely give this a try. How did you decide on the reading materials to use? There's obviously so much to choose from, I'm wondering what criteria you might use.

Let me know what you think!

The app is a (very heavily) dressed-up RSS reader. I maintain a list of reading sources and add them so long as they're not going to have overly sensitive material (eg someone suggested an anonymous blog with short and colorful posts from contributors reflecting on their lives, but some of the posts talk about self-harm) or be too niche. I'm most interested in feeds that get regularly updated with new content, or where they have a trove of existing content. Also always looking out for content that's good for absolute beginners.

Some RSS feeds require additional work in the app to transform their content to make them work nicely with the reader mode, so I also take that into account.

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#153

Post by bloopernova » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:31 PM UTC

I'm starting out on a similar Zettelkasten style database/wiki thing using org-roam and org-journal on Emacs. I find the entire concept fascinating and I'm surprised at how enthusiastic I am with this subject.

I'm still refining the workflows and discovering how it interacts with my own idiosyncrasies. The basic setup is:

1) Take daily notes in a hardback A4 sized square dotted journal. Mark shorter tasks/notes as completed when done.

2) Sweep "stuff that needs to be remembered" into org-journal daily entries, once or twice a day. Also add interesting web page links with a short description. And "nice to have" ideas, things like that.

3) Link from those daily notes to other planning or project org-mode notes using org-roam. Write quick outlines of documents.

4) At the beginning of the doc, those planning/project org docs have links to various single-subject docs. Those links are considered "tags" so a taxonomy is slowly being built up.

Org-roam shows you backlinks from docs, daily notes, etc, so you can begin to see what is connected. There's also a graphviz output you can generate to get a more graphical view of the links.

Things I'd like to be able to do, but haven't yet coded or learned the Lisp to do so:

1) Sync/Import bookmarks and their tags from Firefox. I've got a lot of bookmarks that I've tagged, it would be nice to be able to link those 2 sets of tags.

2) Figure out some sort of end-of-week-review process or multi-doc view. Something for me to look at all the stuff I added that week, and a way for me to push stuff into next week.

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#154

Post by southphillyman » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:32 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #146

southphillyman wrote: post #143

I use it for interview prep. I know some people advise against memorizing stuff in programming but it's been effective for me so far. You can spend 3-5 minutes in an interview trying to reason about implementing the partition method of a quicksort or translating 2D array indexes into 1d. With anki you can just regurgitate it out of your deep memory in 30 seconds whether you use it in your day to day or not.

Would an intervier be more likely to pass you if you were clearly recalling a memorized answer? That sounds so worthless... If I was interviewing I would switch to a different question.

In a world where you are expected to solve 2 leetcode medium-hard questions in 30 minutes with no syntax errors and test cases.... I doubt it. The questions come in different forms with optimizations, it's not about memorizing answers it's "pattern matching" and being efficient in implementation.

A partition method would be part of a larger implementation you still have to reason through and talk through. You just remember that the quicksort of the top half starts at pivot+1 instead of pivot, etc. Essentially you eliminate the little mistakes people tend to make when they are nervous

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#155

Post by hablary » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:33 PM UTC

asavadatti wrote: post #137

hablary wrote: post #111

Memorizing anything in the age of Google is damn right foolish.

I disagree. Have you tried learning a new language?

It's funny you asked, I'm actually learning a new foreign language this year, and I'm doing just fine without memorizing anything. Based on my method and goals, I'll be able to speak at least 20 languages before the end of next year.

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#156

Post by wahnfrieden » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:34 PM UTC

mdocode wrote: post #150

wahnfrieden wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love any feedback! The Reader app is really unique - no other app provides that kind of kanji-by-kanji reading progress functionality (probably because it took a tremendous amount of work under the hood to get it right).

This looks really neat. Do you have any plans to make it available on Android or a web app?

It's a native iOS app so I would have to start from scratch on Android. I do plan to port it to macOS via Catalyst sometime after the upcoming WWDC which will help some Android users.

I'll note that this is a big pain point for me: although Android users don't pay as much for apps, they help boost word-of-mouth marketing substantially. I see some similar but (tbh) subpar apps get more word-of-mouth online even in recommendations to iOS users just because of the huge signal boost from Android users.

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#157

Post by smarri » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

Good luck to him and his system. This line amazed me by how underwhelming it was "The core of the system is highlighting."

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#158

Post by bloopernova » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 5:51 PM UTC

komali2 wrote: post #110

Zettelkasten has been making the rounds here this year. His process appears similar to the org-mode process using Jethro Kuan's org-roam. I've started using it and while it can be a bit tricky to set up and there's a couple mildly annoying bugs (with workarounds), for a solo project it filled the niche for me perfectly. I use it for all note taking and reading now and it is very satisfying. https://blog.jethro.dev/po…

Same here, org-roam just kind of "clicked" things into place for me.

I've modified a template for single-subject documents called "tags" so they're stored in ~/Org/tags/. I've also configured org-journal to store files in ~/Org/Journal/

One thing I'll be interested to discover, in the future, is how I archive or age out information. Most work stuff right now is related to a single project, so what happens when that project ends? Will I need to move things outside of ~/Org/ to remove clutter, or will I just get used to it?

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#159

Post by CoryAlexMartin » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 6:01 PM UTC

fraktl wrote: post #128

dangus wrote: post #106

I just...can’t relate to living this way. Maybe you have to be a special type of person, but this whole lifestyle just seems exhausting and over-managed.

I feel exactly like you and when I read stuff like this one - I wonder whether those people understand they're doing stuff wrong and that writing about it won't magically make them better. It's as if they're trying to hack through their own shortcomings by throwing computer applications to the mix and writing an article about it makes it work. To me, this article is just more white noise.

The exact methodology in which he manages his life is probably less important than the fact that he's making a wide-sweeping effort in the first place, and maintaining consistency.

The opposite would be never writing anything down, never knowing what you're going to be doing on any given day, never estimating how long a task is going to take, reading books while making no effort to retain any information, etc.

We all dedicate energy toward transforming the natural chaos of life into order, even if it's just forcing ourselves to work a certain amount of hours per day, or re-reading paragraphs in books because we weren't paying enough attention the first time, or making grocery lists before we go to the store. These are things most of us do deliberately because we believe they make our lives better.

It's likely that there are certain things that he could be doing better, but I have no reason to believe that the structure he's set up isn't better than what he was doing before, and I think it's probably far more effective than the structure (or lack thereof) of most people's lives.

Re: Using Anki to remember what you read

#160

Post by raidicy » Thu, Mar 05, 2020, 6:04 PM UTC

knubie wrote: post #4

If 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'm interested in the longer form note style but it be thing that keeps me in anki-land is the Android app. Is there a way to export to Anki? I hope understand that that question is counter to you the app's model.