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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

#91

Post by bnjms »

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 generally agree with this position an think it’s the better default but I think this position misses the value in a tool like Anki by discounting the value pf rote memorization. Tote is undervalued in American culture.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#92

Post by kd5bjo »

flumpcakes wrote: post #77
tra3 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It’s closely related, but I suspect that Dr. Wozniak would consider my implementation to not be “true” incremental reading: There’s no attempt to progressively distill passages down into more traditional flashcards, and a fixed rate of new material; There are almost certainly other differences as well.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#93

Post by cnasc »

vrperson wrote: post #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.

I’ve heard that for Anki to be very effective you need to make your own cards.

There are software companies doing the spaced repetition thing (like Duolingo).

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#94

Post by bibelo »

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…

Anki is just terrible, even to the point of losing data in my case.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#95

Post by bibelo »

simbyotic wrote: post #71
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 p…

Thank you.

Your answer and your link (especially the paragraph about sets) help me a lot

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#96

Post by asab »

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…

There's certainly truth in this notion - if you have a goal in mind, going directly after it is often the most effective and straightforward choice. What I'm advocating is that the most direct path isn't always obvious.

Many masters say the fastest progress can be made in chess by doing "find the checkmate" exercises on tricky or otherwise interesting positions. This aspect of chess disproportionately contributes to success, compared to how much time is spent on each of these positions in the natural course of play. A bit of meta-knowledge about what makes someone successful at chess lets players play more effectively by focusing most on whatever helps them win.

Similarly, if you're learning a language and find yourself constantly groping for the right word, you might make a connection between your ineffectiveness at communication and lack of a memorized vocabulary, then shore it up by focusing specifically on that.

While there's a very strong correlation, there's no special rule of nature dictating that the best way to learn a thing is the same as doing it.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#97

Post by moralsupply »

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…

There's always Memrise https://www.memrise.com/ which does pretty much the same as Anki, with some interesting extra features

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#99

Post by isbvhodnvemrwvn »

nomad225 wrote: post #4

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

I worked on a relatively narrow part of a complex domain, I had an anki deck to keep track of the various acronyms and remember some of the weirder processes my systems participated in. Most of the questions were one of:

- what does ABC stand for

- describe process X

- how process X differs from Y, and why

- what is the role of system A in process Z

- what is the shape of data that comes from A to B in process Ł

This vastly reduced the number of times I got stumped with something during various high-level meetings (to the point that I routinely pointed out some false assumptions people made). It worked better for me than passive documentation. The domain was unusually complex though.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#100

Post by asab »

Anki was my introduction to spaced repetition and started me down a learning journey that I'm very happy to be taking. That said, Anki didn't end up sticking as the way I do spaced repetition - but it took me a long time to be able to articulate why. These days I am using Roam along with roam-toolkit. Having tried it this way, my biggest realization is that facts are memorable when they have many visceral associations. A corollary of this is that, to remember well, I should practice making lots of different connections between the things I know. Now when I do spaced repetition, I annotate things as I go, forming new connections and associations, then putting them in my knowledge graph forever (forever, knock on wood). By contrast, Anki feels like I am over-training flash cards in a very siloed and narrow way, such that the skill I learn is closer to "answering flash cards" as opposed to the actual thing I want to be good at.
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