21–30 of 88 posts
Now 20 years later I run all my infrastructure from my basement, no cloud dependency for me, my OS does not spy on me and all tools I need for day to day life are Free... Freedom!!! See I proved them wrong, they should have gotten into it... Right? Wrong! Nobody cares!
Outside of learning a language are there many times that wrote memorization is useful? I can't think how I would use this in a software development sense. Coding katas come close to this and a useful but I'm not sure flash cards would do the same. Maybe it would be handy to memorize a libraries API but then if I use something enough that memorization would be useful I'll learn it by way of using it.
I say this with all the kindness that I have... this article/guy is really sad. First of all, if you think you've found the world's ultimate fighting technique, don't try to show it to random people for approval. Use it. Anki yourself in secret until you're a super-saiyan, and then unleash your strength on the quivering masses. Hear the lamentation of their women, until they are begging you for mercy and also to teac…
Not having to look up syntax and what not is a far better productivity improvement than editor hacks for example.
Outside of learning a language are there many times that wrote memorization is useful? I can't think how I would use this in a software development sense. Coding katas come close to this and a useful but I'm not sure flash cards would do the same. Maybe it would be handy to memorize a libraries API but then if I use something enough that memorization would be useful I'll learn it by way of using it.
anki itself is not super popular since there are apps like zyzzyva that are specialised for scrabble word study, but the technique is.
I say this with all the kindness that I have... this article/guy is really sad. First of all, if you think you've found the world's ultimate fighting technique, don't try to show it to random people for approval. Use it. Anki yourself in secret until you're a super-saiyan, and then unleash your strength on the quivering masses. Hear the lamentation of their women, until they are begging you for mercy and also to teac…
There’s a reason why this is popular in the “rationalist” community: they’re mostly college kids. I have never seen a coworker or other industry professional use any of these tools.
Why, because doing isn’t the same as remembering. Over time you remember by doing. That’s it.
It’s not remotely useful. Changing hearts and minds is a skill in itself. It’s why people spend 3-5 years in a university to pick up skills on how to do it. Yet here we have some anecdotal story about someone who fails to convince strangers about some method of learning that is described as “99% of people never learn learning, you can be the 1% by doing this...”, and lets be honest, those people aren’t the authors friends, because actual friends don’t just shrug off your interests. I feel like I’ve just read an article on a subreddit about cringe or niceguys/gals about someone socially awkward who don’t understand why people don’t think they are the greatest.
Maybe it’s just me, but I sure wish I hadn’t ever read this.
If you research that question - “how to study?”- a bit, you will immediately be inundated with dozens of resources swearing by spaced repetition. Once you use it for a few weeks, it’s clear that the practice itself is helpful for retention. However, flashcards alone are simply not going to teach you a full language. You need reading exercises, speaking exercises, listening exercises, and writing exercises. These are rarely, if ever, all found in one place, and I quickly found myself following a few different programs, each teaching part of the full puzzle.
People don’t want a tool. They want a silver bullet. Anki is very much just a tool, and like other tools, it requires you to do work with the tool to get a desired output. Making good cards is a time consuming nightmare if you want images and sounds, and getting those cards to sync across devices is non-trivial; you’re lucky when a mobile app supports importing all your media in your decks, or lets you study reversed cards in a sensible way. Proponents will say, “You can just import some great premade decks!” This might be useful for an intermediate, but as a beginner, having a deck full of vocabulary that deviates from the words I’m being taught in my other lessons is nearly useless.
I can see how it’s tempting to tell the world - “You could learn so much faster with this one weird trick!” And the author knows that sale works; it’s easy to get someone to try Anki. Those users quickly realize that there are barriers to reaching the point where they have a net productivity increase, so why would they change what was working just fine for them already?
SRS is the classic technical user situation. Anki looks like it’s from 1995 and has a massive initial learning curve with specialized vocabulary to learn (Cloze, decks, etc.) When it’s advertised, the copy is overly technical and confusing to the average person. Just look at SuperMemo’s home page, for an example: https://www.supermemo.com/en To get widespread SRS adoption, two things need to happen: 1. The primary so…
I use Anki a lot, so I’m not in the best position to judge its first-hand impression. But, what would you say should change? Both in terms of visuals and interaction?
Genuinely asking.
I say this with all the kindness that I have... this article/guy is really sad. First of all, if you think you've found the world's ultimate fighting technique, don't try to show it to random people for approval. Use it. Anki yourself in secret until you're a super-saiyan, and then unleash your strength on the quivering masses. Hear the lamentation of their women, until they are begging you for mercy and also to teac…
Outside of learning a language are there many times that wrote memorization is useful? I can't think how I would use this in a software development sense. Coding katas come close to this and a useful but I'm not sure flash cards would do the same. Maybe it would be handy to memorize a libraries API but then if I use something enough that memorization would be useful I'll learn it by way of using it.
I basically settled on an Anki-like system for cramming for tests in college. But this was a situation where I largely didn't attend class, but knew what formulas I'd need to know to pass each exam. Like clockwork, about 48 hours before an exam I'd lock myself away and make a bunch of flashcards, then spend hours rote memorizing them. It worked, and it got me through the tests, but I'd didn't really learn much.