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How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

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Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#21

I feel like Anki is not designed to help you succeed. Eventually, you'll start missing your reviews. One day you'll open Anki, see that you have hundreds of cards scheduled, and just quit the app. The author of this article mentions he'll post an article tackling this issue, looking forward to that!

This is a problem with pretty much anything. Just being consistent every day gets you 80% there.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#22
post #17

I feel like Anki is not designed to help you succeed. Eventually, you'll start missing your reviews. One day you'll open Anki, see that you have hundreds of cards scheduled, and just quit the app. The author of this article mentions he'll post an article tackling this issue, looking forward to that!

I found that issue too when I tried Anki. I missed a few days and when I returned there was a pile of cards that needed review. I later wrote my own flashcard app[1] with spaced repetition and ended up hiding the details of what was overdue and instead just let you set up a daily goal of number of cards reviewed. When you do a lesson, it picks up the overdue cards first, but if there aren't any, it pulls in new cards…

Looks great! Is a Windows and/or Linux version on the cards?

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#23

I feel like Anki is not designed to help you succeed. Eventually, you'll start missing your reviews. One day you'll open Anki, see that you have hundreds of cards scheduled, and just quit the app. The author of this article mentions he'll post an article tackling this issue, looking forward to that!

The only thing I’ve found to help here is to make sure the act of reviewing the cards is inherently fun— then you’re less likely to get behind.

My strategy for this was to dump the entire text of some good literature into Anki decks that give me one new paragraph per day. The steady drip of unseen material removes the stigma of pressing the “again” button and gives me a small reward of story progression from each session.

In a separate deck, I use cloze deletion on sheet music to help learn songs. That deck only gets reviewed by actively playing music, which is an inherently enjoyable activity on its own.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#24

I feel like Anki is not designed to help you succeed. Eventually, you'll start missing your reviews. One day you'll open Anki, see that you have hundreds of cards scheduled, and just quit the app. The author of this article mentions he'll post an article tackling this issue, looking forward to that!

Once you get cards to an interval of over a year, you have 'learned' the card pretty much. So if your worry is about eventually quitting Anki, it shouldn't be an issue.

>I feel like Anki is not designed to help you succeed. Eventually, you'll start missing your reviews. One day you'll open Anki, see that you have hundreds of cards scheduled, and just quit the app.

You could also just do it every day, if it's important to you. You're not destined for failure, it's a choice you make.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#25
I would recommend Joshua Foer "Moonwalking with Einstein" for those interested in memory. Spaced repition is effective to an extent, but I find the techniques explored in his book to be much more effective. The tl;dr is that you are much better off constructing "memory palaces" in your head. You pick a place you know extremely well (like your family home), and you imagine yourself navigating that space and "placing" reminders of the things you'd like to remember along the way.

It's like inventing a very surreal dream to help you avoid forgetting things. I use variants of it for things like people's names and ideas I'd like to explore all the time, it's super helpful.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#26
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I found that issue too when I tried Anki. I missed a few days and when I returned there was a pile of cards that needed review. I later wrote my own flashcard app[1] with spaced repetition and ended up hiding the details of what was overdue and instead just let you set up a daily goal of number of cards reviewed. When you do a lesson, it picks up the overdue cards first, but if there aren't any, it pulls in new cards…

Looks great! Is a Windows and/or Linux version on the cards?

Thank you! Unfortunately, no. My professional dev background is in iOS and Mac, so I naturally wrote it for those platforms first.

If there's enough interest, I might try to port it to Android next year as a fun project.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#27
post #4

Any suggestions for what to use Anki to remember in everyday life as a software engineer?

I use it to help me as a cloud engineer. For an example of some of the things I use it for. I have cards that are for

- Emacs Commands

- Emacs Key Strokes

- Greek letters, words and sounds

- The wikipedia List of non-standard dates

- Physic ideas

- General principles of organization

- Learning principles

- Bible verses

- Command line utility options

- Vimium key strokes

Basically anything that I want to learn I end up ankifying. I find that Anki is most effective for remembering things that I don't do all the time, but need to remember two or three times a week/month. Here's a good tip, if you need to DuckDuckGo it more than once it's probably a good idea to throw it in an Anki card.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#29

I feel like Anki is not designed to help you succeed. Eventually, you'll start missing your reviews. One day you'll open Anki, see that you have hundreds of cards scheduled, and just quit the app. The author of this article mentions he'll post an article tackling this issue, looking forward to that!

Solution: You can set a maximum number of reviews per day in the deck settings.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#30
post #17

I feel like Anki is not designed to help you succeed. Eventually, you'll start missing your reviews. One day you'll open Anki, see that you have hundreds of cards scheduled, and just quit the app. The author of this article mentions he'll post an article tackling this issue, looking forward to that!

I found that issue too when I tried Anki. I missed a few days and when I returned there was a pile of cards that needed review. I later wrote my own flashcard app[1] with spaced repetition and ended up hiding the details of what was overdue and instead just let you set up a daily goal of number of cards reviewed. When you do a lesson, it picks up the overdue cards first, but if there aren't any, it pulls in new cards…

just let you set up a daily goal of number of cards reviewed. When you do a lesson, it picks up the overdue cards first, but if there aren't any, it pulls in new cards instead.

Those are features of AnkiDroid, and probably the desktop Anki also.

There is a daily review limit, and you can configure to see review cards before new cards. Anki does not tell you how much is overdue beyond the review limit.

If you're set on writing your own app, you will tend to overlook the configuration details of the original, though.

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