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Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

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Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#231

Post by yeutterg »

semicolonandson wrote: post #136
yeutterg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey Jack, I've always found your Anki guides to be some of the best. I'm curious, are you still using it all these years later?

As someone who is now over a decade into their programming career, today I find more value in doing analytical breakdowns of my various success and mistakes. What were my oversights on a project? How could I have communicated better? What made one particular library a success, etc.? Therefore, after years of Anki, I've stopped adding new cards and doing repetition; instead I now focus on keeping a code diary. I've pu…

Great update. This seems to be very much in line with the note-taking and review techniques of Tiago Forte and Ali Abdaal, but for code.

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#232

Post by eska »

Smaug123 wrote: post #221
eska wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in science there is a lot of knowledge that doesn't need to be understood. For math subjects that would be all the definitions for example.

Well, there can be a lot to be understood in why something is defined the way it is. For example, a red-black tree is defined the way it is because it's a pretty simple structural way to force the tree to be "pretty well balanced". Why does it force that?

You're going for too big cards again. A single card doesn't need to answer absolutely everything there is about a red black tree. You want to ask about a single aspect of it per card.

The definition is "what is it?". There is nothing to understand here. It could be taught to a parrot or child to repeat this information.

What you're mentioning is a bunch of cards on top of that: how does a red black tree stay balanced on insertions? When is the self-balancing property of red black trees useful? When is it not? Etc etc. You cannot answer this if you mistake a red black tree for another tree for example. It's essentially vocabulary.

Another one would be notations: what's the symbol for a cross product? Again, nothing to understand, but you must know it to work on actual math problems involving cross products.

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#233

Post by wendyshu »

Smaug123 wrote: post #219
wendyshu wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for providing these details. For your Python example I'd just use a snippet. On the other hand, Google's pretty fast and always updated. It's all a personal trade-off I guess. I wouldn't say it's common for me to forget I knew something. But maybe the cost of creating, maintaining, and reviewing card decks is worth it for you.

If I may ask, how do you know it's uncommon for you to forget you knew something?

E.g. when looking over old notes I remember most stuff.

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#234

Post by nullsense »

coconut08 wrote: post #191
nullsense wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: when learning Japanese a decade ago I did 35 new cards a day for 2 years. I hit 400 reviews a day and review sessions were several hours. One day I just stopped and deleted it all.

well, yeah. you shouldn't be doing 35 new cards a day. it's not anki's fault that you had several hours worth of reviews. it's your fault. anki scales to take up as much time as you tell it to. if you had done 5-10 cards a day you could have easily had it take like 20 minutes. also you should have cards set to leech suspend. there is no reason to having certain cards that you clearly aren't going to learn taking up a…

My fault? More like my consciously made trade-off of time vs speed.

And it worked stunningly well. You see, I figured that whatever I targeted I'd do about 80% of the time. So, 35 a day is about ~1000 a month, and I reckoned I could hit that 10 months in a given year.

My first year of Japanese was basically RTK + KO2001 and JLPT2 grammar study. I was a few points off passing JLPT2 inside 1 year of study. At the time it say I had around 2 to 3 thousand vocab, and could read all Jyoyou kanji, plus understand almost all sentence structure used in daily life.

My 2nd year of Japanese I acquired an additional 10k vocab. I passed JLPT2 and came a few points short of passing JLPT1.

6 months into my 3rd year of study I passed JLPT1 and never touched studying Japanese again.

It has always been a big part of my life since then, and I credit that brutal effort with me really turning my life around. It was an absolutely epic adventure.

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#235

Post by nullsense »

ipsum2 wrote: post #162
nullsense wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: when learning Japanese a decade ago I did 35 new cards a day for 2 years. I hit 400 reviews a day and review sessions were several hours. One day I just stopped and deleted it all.

How's your Japanese now?

See another reply in this thread for how that strategy worked out.

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#236

Post by Smaug123 »

eska wrote: post #232
Smaug123 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there can be a lot to be understood in why something is defined the way it is. For example, a red-black tree is defined the way it is because it's a pretty simple structural way to force the tree to be "pretty well balanced". Why does it force that?

You're going for too big cards again. A single card doesn't need to answer absolutely everything there is about a red black tree. You want to ask about a single aspect of it per card. The definition is "what is it?". There is nothing to understand here. It could be taught to a parrot or child to repeat this information. What you're mentioning is a bunch of cards on top of that: how does a red black tree stay balanced…

I know that - I wrote the article which is the subject of this thread ;) I took you to be arguing that Anki should be used to learn without understanding.

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#237

Post by Smaug123 »

krosaen wrote: post #224
eska wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But by keeping those things together you're essentially cheating. You won't be able to remember these things in isolation as well. Also if it's easy for you to remember the rank of the matrix, but not the subspaces, you will be asked about the rank too often, since you connected it to subspaces.

In the example of the fundamental theorem of LA, the key point is the relationship between the subspaces (there are other ones just about the definition of a nullspace for example) - agree if every card was like this it would not be ideal. I think my more important point was about problem sets, for instance: Construct a matrix with the required property, or explain why you can't. - left nullspace contains [1 3]^T - r…

Sure - for me, the cards slightly don't match the mental structure that is actually stored in my mind. In fact I remember the two steps "together", as this spatial move-and-squash. Perhaps I should rejig the cards.

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#238

Post by Valakas »

I've used Anki for language learning but didn't find it that useful. A problem I encountered was that while I could remember words and expressions in the Anki environment, I couldn't do it outside of it. Or I could memorize an expression exactly as it was written down, but if I saw a little variation then it was useless.

For language learning I found it works way better to use another technique: ridiculous imagery and word association. Higher initial time investment (have to spend some time for each new word in the first time I see) but after that I don't EVER need to recall it again. It just sticks. I also used that to memorize different alphabets and it's WAY easier and does feel like a superpower as opposed to just brute force memorize something by repetition and recall with no other brain connections between what we're memorizing and what we already know.

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#239

Post by gcoladon »

BeetleB wrote: post #121
amelius wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't it be easier if you could just pop up a help screen with a good search option whenever you needed to know a certain key combination?

Ha! I used flashcards to memorize a fair number of Emacs shortcuts. It's not always that easy to find - even with C-h a or C-h m, etc. But the bigger benefit is even knowing that feature X exists and there is a key combination for it. I found flash cards useful because I would get an occasional "reminder" that X exists and I should use it more often! A trivial example: flush-lines and keep-lines. I never knew these e…

Wow! I have tried to figure out how to grep buffers many times over the last 30 years. Now I know, thanks! And it's going right into Anki :)

Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition

#240

Post by solarmist »

nullsense wrote: post #155
kixiQu wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It costs money to publish an iOS app in a way that it does not for Android. In addition, the Android app was able to leverage the fact that Anki's desktop app is written in Java. It has nothing to do with an idea that "iOS users are rich". It is easy to recommend Ankiweb instead since it works well enough for mobile. (I also question whether there are really a significant number of people who type -- at least Latin c…

I thought the desktop app was written in Python?

It is
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