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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

#31

Post by kazinator »

ApolloFortyNine wrote: post #24
johnny_b wrote: post #11

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 importan…

That is not a given. Just several days ago I lapsed on a 4.5 year card. The interval went down to 2.2 years or so; hopefully I will get it that time around.

You will forget stuff over time. What was the leading actor's name in that movie? Aaargh, it was practically a household word in the early 90's ....

> You could also just do it every day.

Even people who stick with it 7 days a week for 50 weeks could use a 2 week vacation.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#33

Post by tra3 »

kd5bjo wrote: post #23
johnny_b wrote: post #11

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 ses…

Are you saying you’re reading through anki? If so, what?

Brilliant strategy.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#34

Post by simbyotic »

nomad225 wrote: post #4

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

Author of the piece here.

My number one recommendation is to not get overly excited about it. One of the first things that happen when you start using Anki and realize the superpower that it is being in charge of your memory is that you want to include EVERYTHING in it.

You start creating cards with obscure bash one-liners, little-used git commands, or Javascript functions you read about in a random article. You add all of it to Anki. After all, you might use them in the future right? And it doesn't cost you anything to create a card with them so why not.

What happens is that because you don't have a clear picture of why those cards are valuable to you - you just added them because they might be useful, one of these days - you will have trouble retaining their knowledge, meaning that you will keep failing to successfully review those cards.

And because of the way spaced repetition algorithms work, those cards will be constantly appearing in your reviews, and you will keep failing them. And they will keep appearing. And so on and so forth until you lose all motivation to use Anki because it's becoming a frustrating experience to do your reviews.

The most important thing about using Anki is to keep using it. That's how you get the benefits of it, so be more selective about what you add to Anki instead of profligately adding cards that you gain nothing from.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#35

Post by masterofmisc »

chrisandchips wrote: post #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"…

That's all very well and good but what happens if you move house? /s

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#36

Post by simbyotic »

kazinator wrote: post #19
johnny_b wrote: post #11

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've hardly missed a day since starting AnkiDroid some four or five years ago? The reviews have dwindled down to single digits per day in all decks where I do not add new material. (I don't use the desktop Anki, by the way; I used it briefly for doing some editing on decks.) Tha said, AnkiDroid could use a vacation feature. How vacation mode could work would be simply by rescheduling all cards, delaying them by the v…

Not what you have in mind, but you can use the Load Balanced Scheduler to ease the pain of missing a few days: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/208879074

But the vacation idea is great, I'm sure someone could make an add-on to implement it.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#37

Post by johnny_b »

kd5bjo wrote: post #23
johnny_b wrote: post #11

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 ses…

Interesting! So that's a separate deck with paragraphs as cards? And that's gets "mixed in" into whatever else that you are learning?

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#38

Post by kd5bjo »

tra3 wrote: post #33
kd5bjo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ses…

Are you saying you’re reading through anki? If so, what? Brilliant strategy.

Yes. At the moment, I’m working through Frankenstein, Alice in Wonderland, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and the Rust book.

This is still a fairly new strategy for me, so I don’t yet know how many parallel threads I can keep straight at the same time— So far, it doesn’t feel like I’m anywhere near the limit.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#39

Post by wonder_er »

nomad225 wrote: post #4

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

I use it to remember the names of persons I encounter in my day-to-day.

Coworkers, neighbors (like that neighbor 3 blocks away that I talked with for a few minutes about {such-and-such}, but don't see that often), restaurant employees/proprietors, delivery people, maintenance workers, friends-of-friends I've met.

Without Anki I have an abysmal memory for names. I have aphantasia[0] which might relate to my difficulty with names.

Now, with Anki, (if I'm using it regularly) I have a freakishly good memory for names. :)

Goes a long way to helping others feel welcome and appreciated, which in turn means _I_ end up feeling welcome and appreciated. A very virtuous cycle.

Edit: I'm a software engineer, but most of my Anki usage is not focused on software engineering directly. To create new Anki cards, I follow the "20 rules for formulating knowledge"[1], so it takes a bit of work before I can take some new bit of information and "process" it to something ready for Anki.

[0] https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...

[1]: https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru...

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#40

Post by allenu »

kazinator wrote: post #30
allenu wrote: 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…

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 o…

I wrote my own app as a fun project and as a way to look at how I could make a flashcard a better user experience overall. The daily overdue experience was just one thing that I didn't like.

I think Anki is powerful and has a lot of configuration settings and add-ons to support new scenarios, but I think for a lot of average non-technical users, they may be overwhelmed by that and not interested in learning it. My goal was to write an app for those people (and for me).

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