201–210 of 313 posts
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I believe the mobile app is limited to just studying. Creating new cards and downloading shared decks must be done using either the desktop app or the web app.
You can definitely create new cards in the official mobile app (for iOS).
This article reminds me of posts about "bullet journalling" on sites like Pinterest: the optimization of the productivity process or tool (or in the case of "bullet journal" posts, the beauty of the tool) is the end itself, not a means to an end. The posts are about/by "productivity" or "journalling" enthusiasts and don't map well to people who are simply seeking a bit of an organization or productivity boost, not an…
I think you can go too deep into it as a form of procrastination, but I think this post is sincere. Spaced repetition is backed by science as an effective way to acquire knowledge (e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3782739/ ). I'm personally more skeptical of the Zettelkasten/Roam/PKB craze as being effective, but that's only because I feel like I've had yet to find a problem where it would have been…
Going back through old notes I've made on books I've read or movies I've watched gives a similar experience, taking me back to how I thought at the time and a window into how I've changed.
I certainly don't want to study everything to death, but I wholly see the appeal of a system to contain things I've known and done.
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you can go too deep into it as a form of procrastination, but I think this post is sincere. Spaced repetition is backed by science as an effective way to acquire knowledge (e.g., https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3782739/ ). I'm personally more skeptical of the Zettelkasten/Roam/PKB craze as being effective, but that's only because I feel like I've had yet to find a problem where it would have been…
A few years ago I was looking through my last.fm scrobbles. Scrobbling is passive and it's widely supported, so I did it pretty regularly. The process of reviewing them was like tapping an area of my memory I didn't know existed. I saw the songs my daughter liked to listen to when she was three and remembered trips we took while listening to those songs, and I mean vivid memories of the drive, including the wrong tur…
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.
Which spacing algorithm are you using?
I sometimes wonder if tools like Anki aren't just another form of procrastination. The time invested could probably be better spent.
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As a recently relapsed biochemistry student, with a wide variety of classes in both biology and chemistry, I use Anki exhaustively. I made at least 10k cards last semester, and that was a relatively light semester in terms of credits. With that said, I can't imagine using such a powerful, and honestly demanding, tool for everyday knowledge and tangential facts (e.g. Greek mythology as a software engineer). It strikes…
How exactly do you end up with ten thousand cards on Anki on a light semester? Are you using it for problem sets?
It's also important to make useful cards, and the most useful cards are almost always very simple and can be answered relatively quickly. So, for example, a complex, multi-step DNA repair mechanism (of which we needed to know quite a few, and they differ for eukaryotes and prokaryotes) for a molecular biology class becomes quite a few individual cards. In the end, there is just a lot of stuff that either just has to be memorized, or that benefits from improving recall speed for taking a 60-90 minute exam.
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For what it's worth, I keep everything in a single deck. I never stop reviewing stuff and "interleaving" makes learning more effective than "blocking" (studying things in blocks). Source: Bjork et al 2013 ( https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231610455_Self-Regu... )
I took a modified approach to this in university, though nowadays I mostly do the same. For each new class, I would start a new deck, and after the course was over I would move it over to my main (huge) deck, and it's worked surprisingly well. Typically (now that I'm out), I add small cards from time to time to my deck, but if there's a large quantity of things I am working on learning at any given time (say I'm goin…
Why would you want to remember everything you read? That sounds like overtraining. It's not clear that managing and drilling on so much information offers a significant improvement over what is likely the most important intervention mentioned: reading widely and with purpose. Sure flashcards can help you remember things you need to memorize. But it's not clear they should become a way of life and an end in their own.
I think you're in agreement with the original article. The individual is reading widely and with purpose. He uses Anki to assist in remembering. And that's the general guidance with Anki (or spaced repetition generally): learn first, recall later. You read, develop an understanding (at least partial), build your deck, and study with the deck while continuing to read the later material and building the deck up further.
And you don't try to remember everything, again from the article:
> When I come across something in a book that seems useful to understand and remember, I will highlight it on my Kindle and add a note to it with the text: “.flash”.
He doesn't highlight everything, just things that seem important. The importance is that many things are outside your particular field of work. But you have to interface with people who work in those domains (or want to), or you just want to have more knowledge to draw on. If you aren't using the information frequently, it won't come to mind when you need it. So with Anki you can have a relatively lightweight way to keep the jargon of another field re-callable, or to have the history of a place or people at hand.