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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

#81
“You can get a good deal from rehearsal,

If it just has the proper dispersal.

You would just be an ass,

To do it en masse,

Your remembering would turn out much worsal.”

Ulrich Neisser, Retrieval Practice and The Maintenance of Knowledge

https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/1988-bjork.pdf

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#82

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"…

I put my memory palaces in Anki.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#83

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"…

I put my memory palaces in Anki.

This seems like the Holy Grail. Is it?

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#84
post #74
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 checkin…

Interesting. Do you have an automated way of breaking books down, or are you doing it manually?

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#85
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wor…

I think you have to do the flash cards multiple times to be effective. I've manually written out 1000 hindi flash cards. I would go through them a few times each day. I usually add a few of the older cards randomly, and I've had good progress over the course of a year. I think it was better for me to use that than Anki since I had to learn to write the devegnari.

I also heard finnish is a really hard language, so maybe it's that.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#87
I never managed to use Anki for long. Maybe the interface is just too clunky.

Sets that can be downloaded are also often low quality, or at least there is no way to tell in advance.

I think some day there may be a unicorn startup doing the flash card thing right.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#88
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…

Do you have a sample deck

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#89
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…

I think a good way would be to only ankify things that would save one 5 or so minutes of one's time.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#90
post #84
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 checkin…

Interesting. Do you have an automated way of breaking books down, or are you doing it manually?

Semi-automated: I have a hacky Python script that will break up the main text and pick the cloze words, but the other metadata on my cards has to be entered manually (Title, Author, Chapter)

I did the first one manually. In addition to being a lot of work, there were major spoiler hazards— If I wasn’t already familiar with the general shape of the plot, the process would have revealed secrets too early.

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