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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

#41

Post by CGamesPlay »

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 have my decks capped at 100 reviews/day. If there's a backlog, it'll still be there tomorrow. I think Anki suffers from poor defaults, and sure "this isn't the optimal repetition scheme for optimal retention" but I did already miss my reviews, so that went out the window.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#42

Post by kd5bjo »

johnny_b wrote: post #37
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…

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

Right; each book is a subdeck of my main one with a new card limit of 1/day and a lengthened repetition schedule.

Because paragraphs are so variable, my Project Gutenberg import script makes 25-line cards with a 5-line overlap between adjacent cards (for context). It also blanks out a random word on the 15th line as a cloze deletion test, to ensure I have some understanding of what’s going on.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#43

Post by johnny_b »

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…

Default settings matter, when you start out it's hard to know what's better - new cards first, or review cards first. I wish I spent some time on configuring that when I first started with Anki.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#44

Post by edjrage »

Am I the only one who finds Anki's UI/UX to be absolutely atrocious? I know it's petty, but it's literally the only reason that's always made me not use it for more than just a few days at a time.

Is anyone working on improving the UI? Or are there alternative "frontends" out there? Does anyone know how hard it would be do it? (I assume it might not be trivial since Anki has a plugin system, but I don't know to what extent they can modify the UI)

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#45

Post by kazinator »

simbyotic wrote: post #36
kazinator wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The vacation idea needs to be in the core application.

A simple toggle: "pause Anki". Here are my requirements:

- in the paused state, the review UI is entirely disabled. You cannot review anything.

- when you toggle out of the paused state, Anki calculates the number of days since the pause, and delays all cards in all decks by that many days.

- pausing and resuming on the same day has no effect since the days delta is zero; the UI just becomes enabled.

- For the purposes of the delta calculation, a day is the study day (e.g. 7 a.m to 7 a.m), not the midnight-to-midnight calendar day. If you pause at 11:45 p.m. and resume at 1:15 a.m., that's a no-op since that's the same study day.

- since resuming is potentially a time-consuming operation that destructively manipulates the database, unpausing comes with some yes/cancel prompt, except in the no-op case.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#46

Post by RootReducer »

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 done my daily reviews now for over 1000 days without missing one. It's really just up to you to make time for it if it's something you want to do.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#47

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

edjrage wrote: post #44

Am I the only one who finds Anki's UI/UX to be absolutely atrocious? I know it's petty, but it's literally the only reason that's always made me not use it for more than just a few days at a time. Is anyone working on improving the UI? Or are there alternative "frontends" out there? Does anyone know how hard it would be do it? (I assume it might not be trivial since Anki has a plugin system, but I don't know to what…

I know it's not perfect, but imo it's design was more focused on additional functionality and it working fine.

It's by no means pretty and definitely has a learning curve. That's what makes it such a useful tool though. Otherwise you end up with duolingo...

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#48

Post by MeinBlutIstBlau »

RootReducer wrote: post #9

I've been using Anki for about 3 years to learn Korean and it's been tremendously successful. In that time I've learned around 3000 new words (both English -> Korean and Korean -> English with reversed cards) and a ton of grammar (using Cloze cards). I couldn't imagine trying to memorize this amount of information any other way now.

How do you do it? I've been torn on learning sentences or just words as both are difficult in their own right. One helps with speaking, another expands your vocab. It almost feels like to me they're both necessary to stay good at this.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#49

Post by simbyotic »

kd5bjo wrote: post #38
tra3 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You should definitely write something about this, seems very interesting.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#50

Post by simbyotic »

kazinator wrote: post #45
simbyotic wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The vacation idea needs to be in the core application. A simple toggle: "pause Anki". Here are my requirements: - in the paused state, the review UI is entirely disabled. You cannot review anything. - when you toggle out of the paused state, Anki calculates the number of days since the pause, and delays all cards in all decks by that many days. - pausing and resuming on the same day has no effect since the days delta…

There's a lot of things that should be in the core app but aren't I'm afraid.

I've started to think of it like node: A slim core with an expansive userland in the form of add-ons.

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