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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

#71

Post by simbyotic »

bibelo wrote: post #69

Thanks for the article, I've read though. I've been using Anki quite successfully to learn things about wines in french, especially about the wine domains in Bordeaux and Bourgogne. It's easy to create, as a flash card. One side shows the map, the other shows the name. Now, I'm keen on learning the list of the main french authors of each century, but I don't know how to proceed. Let's say a list of 20 names, how woul…

Piotr Woznaik recommends turning lists into enumerations. You can see more here: https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20ru...

In general you want to reduce the amount of things you have to retrieve from memory in one go, and attempting to retrieve a 20 person list is just going to give you problems.

The cloze solution is certainly better than the full list (and does follow the minimum information principle because you just have to retrieve a single name) but the problem is that it doesn't give you any handles. If you have 19 names and Flaubert is hidden, how would you know it's Flaubert that's missing? Long-term you're bound to fail those cards.

But I would also question the premise of the card. Do you expect to have to come up with the 20 names each time you want to talk about 19th century French literature? As in, each time the context is "19th century French literature" is the appropriate knowledge to retrieve "* list of 20 authors *"?

Instead a better approach might be to flip it around and ask yourself, "In which century did Flaubert write Madame Bovary?" or something along those lines. You can both reconstruct the list from that and if you're writing about Flaubert the knowledge that he wrote during the 19th century will come more fluidly to you.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#72

Post by leke »

Evan_Hellmuth wrote: post #56
jacobsenscott wrote: post #54

I don't find doing things tangential to the thing you want to learn all that effective compared to just doing the thing you want to get better at. Maybe it is just me. If you want to improve your vocabulary read more books. If you want to improve in a programming language program more in that language. If you want to learn chess openings - play more chess. Actually doing things you want to learn is way more fun than…

I agree with your first paragraph. But if your goal is purely to expand your vocabulary, don’t you think reading is more tangential than drilling words with flash cards?

I've never had luck with flash cards for learning Finnish. The time->recall thing has never worked for me in this respect. If, for example I get Perehdytys, then Kuljettajaohje I've forgotten them straight away. After half an hour, I still can't recall how to spell them - at which point I'm going crazy.

However, after a couple of weeks coding a project related to Perehdytykset and Kuljettajaohjeet, I now know the words.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#73

Post by Jtsummers »

iamwil wrote: post #67

I kinda wish there was spaced repetition for interview practice. So that everyday, I have a set number of questions to try, and I don't have to make that decision. And if I don't get it the first time, no problem, I know it'll come up again. And if I do get it, the goal is to get faster. Anyone else study this way, like an Anki for interview questions? If not, how do you pick what questions to practice and what order…

Take a problem set and dump it into Anki. Tune the deck to only give you 2-3 new problems and 2-3 review problems (because these take time). Solve them, rate them, just like any other deck.

If you don't want to practice programming exercises, but rather memorize facts, Anki is fine. Go through the common algorithms/data structures (and the less common ones) and create cards that ask you things about it. "What's the big-O for inserting into a sorted linked list?"

Or do like me, and skip those interviews because they're usually a miserable experience and don't really gauge the quality of the hire.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#74

Post by kd5bjo »

tra3 wrote: post #64
simbyotic wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Agreed. In particular, how do you order these? And how does it fit within spaced repetition paradigm?.. I've been struggling with reading classics. I wonder if it would help.

This is still in the experimental phase, and I want to wait on a full writeup until it’s had sufficient time to prove itself and get the kinks worked out. I’m happy to ramble on about it here for a bit, though.

This idea was actually born to combat review starvation: I haven’t been very active at adding new cards lately, and there was a risk that my daily review count would hit 0 for long enough that I’d stop checking regularly— I needed a source for lots of interesting but low-priority cards to keep the pump primed.

The original paper on cloze deletion [1] uses them as a readability measure: Readers are given an unfamiliar text with blanks and are asked to guess the omitted words; the percentage correct is then a measure of the text’s quality rather than the reader’s knowledge.

Instead of a knowledge quiz, which is how clozes are usually treated in the SRS world, this is an automated reading comprehension test— Just the thing for capturing the intangible benefits of reading literature. In theory, as you become more familiar with the book’s style and subject matter, you should be able to pass the first review of an unseen passage most of the time.

I settled on 25 lines of text per card with one omitted word about 2/3 through the passage. Successive cards contain some duplicated lines (5) to provide a sense of continuity between the cards, which are presented in a disjoint manner.

I import each book into its own deck set to show 1 new card per day (in the order added)- I want whatever mental connections are necessary to understand the next passage to end up in long-term rather than short-term memory. The reviews give me an opportunity to spot details that seemed unimportant on a first reading but that foreshadow something that happens later.

Beyond that, it’s driven by Anki’s normal scheduling algorithm; these are subdecks of my general-review deck, so Anki will autumatically mix the new cards and reviews with any other reviews I have due.

Most of the books I’ve imported are 300-400 cards, so it’ll take about a year to work through each of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up doubling the number of books I’m reading at once, which would bring the average to around 1/month.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/writing/1953-taylor.pd...

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#75

Post by Jugurtha »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #54

I don't find doing things tangential to the thing you want to learn all that effective compared to just doing the thing you want to get better at. Maybe it is just me. If you want to improve your vocabulary read more books. If you want to improve in a programming language program more in that language. If you want to learn chess openings - play more chess. Actually doing things you want to learn is way more fun than…

The paper "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance" by K. Anders Ericsson et al[0] goes into more detail. The article was stretched into a book titled "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise".

The gist of it is that there are several types of "practice". "Naive", "purposeful", and "deliberate".

- [0]: https://mrbartonmaths.com/resourcesnew/8.%20Research/Explici...

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#76

Post by andreilys »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #54

I don't find doing things tangential to the thing you want to learn all that effective compared to just doing the thing you want to get better at. Maybe it is just me. If you want to improve your vocabulary read more books. If you want to improve in a programming language program more in that language. If you want to learn chess openings - play more chess. Actually doing things you want to learn is way more fun than…

Who says you can't do both?

At a certain point doing the "fun thing" will lead to stagnation of your skills.

It takes effort to get good at something, and that effort is not always going to be fun.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#77

Post by flumpcakes »

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.

This is called 'incremental reading' and techniques around this have been developed by research/development from the person who wrote supermemo (the closed source anki predecessor).

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#78

Post by justnotworthit »

Evan_Hellmuth wrote: post #56
jacobsenscott wrote: post #54

I don't find doing things tangential to the thing you want to learn all that effective compared to just doing the thing you want to get better at. Maybe it is just me. If you want to improve your vocabulary read more books. If you want to improve in a programming language program more in that language. If you want to learn chess openings - play more chess. Actually doing things you want to learn is way more fun than…

I agree with your first paragraph. But if your goal is purely to expand your vocabulary, don’t you think reading is more tangential than drilling words with flash cards?

I think drilling words will always be more direct than reading but at a higher "cost" (the overhead of building, maintaining and drilling via anki). Ideally, words that are more important will naturally appear more often -- a "natural" anki with little overhead.

But many things are list-like, or maybe just don't stick in your mind via reading, or need to be memorized quickly, or are better memorized in a digital/artificial context, or can only be memorized "naturally" at a high cost (just theorizing here). In this cause Anki is worth the overhead.

If anki were cost free (every interesting thought I heard in a podcast were automatically added to the deck), I'd use it store everything I didn't want to forget.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#79

Post by misiti3780 »

jacobsenscott wrote: post #54

I don't find doing things tangential to the thing you want to learn all that effective compared to just doing the thing you want to get better at. Maybe it is just me. If you want to improve your vocabulary read more books. If you want to improve in a programming language program more in that language. If you want to learn chess openings - play more chess. Actually doing things you want to learn is way more fun than…

i read a lot of books and still use anki to keep my vocabulary by studying them everyday.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#80

Post by mynameisash »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #48
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.

I read Gabriel Wyner's book, _Fluent Forever_, which was pretty decent for giving ideas on how to effectively use SRS for language learning. That would probably be a good place to start.

I disagree with his approach (which I haven't followed since original discussions) to then try to monetize this by basically creating a closed-source, locked-down Anki replacement. As I recall, he wanted to do what he said in his book wouldn't be effective -- to sell his cards to others.

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