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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

#121

Post by sammorrowdrums »

mynameisash wrote: post #80
MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 boo…

The "sell cards to others thing" isn't correct. The locked down Anki (for highly purpose specific and optimised interface for SRS language learning is what his app is).

I've tried his new app. Built in image search, pronunciation trainers, many included sentences with audio of varying difficulty. Now you can finally add custom words... It's at least gradually honing his vision into an app.

They are also going to have community supported languages, rather than simply not have more rare languages.

Granted, it's a premium app. Currently not got a freemium offering, and certainly not open source, so will put many off.

But at the same time, I know so many people who couldn't work with Anki, but could easily work with the app, so it does at least offer the system to a much broader audience.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#122

Post by HumanReadable »

asab wrote: post #96
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…

I believe this to be the case for any competitive endeavor.

Go players practice life and death, basketball players practice shooting hoops, football players practice dribbling.

I designed macro exercises to give my students when I taught Starcraft.

The problem with these exercises is they are rarely very fun. To be great at something, you have to put in the hours. You won't if you aren't enjoying the time spent.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#123

Post by leke »

navait wrote: post #85
leke wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 may…

For speakers of European based languages with Latin character sets, learning to read and write Finnish isn't so hard IMO. It's phonetically spelled, and the character sounds are more or less the same as other European languages. The grammar is tricky, but literacy is simple. Or at least it should be.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#124

Post by piva00 »

leke wrote: post #72
Evan_Hellmuth wrote: post #56

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…

How have you been making these flashcards? Finnish word in front -> English word on the back?

I have used the technique from "Fluent Forever" [1] to create my flashcards using images, not only translations for learning Swedish the past years and it works surprisingly well. Much easier to fixated words when you have a more personal connection to it, finding the right image for them is part of the process and it's worked for me, personally.

Of course, using the language and having reasons to learn a specific word help even more. I've used my deck to learn words that I came across in newspapers, in government articles and so on, to expose myself to words outside of the daily conversation usage.

Another technique from "Fluent Forever" that I think helped me a lot was listening to minimal pairs to train my ears to the sound of Swedish and intuitively know how words sound when spoken.

[1] https://blog.fluent-forever.com/simple-word-flashcards/

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#125

Post by edylemond »

asab wrote: post #100

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 association…

That's exactly my idea of a lifelong learning journey, spaced repetition where you build connections as you gain deeper understanding. I've built Traverse.link to do this natively (ie connected notes with spaced repetition), let me know if you find it helpful

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#126

Post by edylemond »

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…

I've been doing something similar for reading, mainly articles but also want to try this with books. I'll split them in paragraphs and then turn every paragraph into a note. The ones I want to remember become flashcards. I've actually developed https://traverse.link/ to streamline this process

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#127

Post by edylemond »

samiulg3 wrote: post #113
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 built a Chrome extension that is basically Anki. It doesn't schedule anything but you can set intervals for how often you want cards to be shown on the website you're surfing. Check it out: https://yeerodite.com It currently doesn't support importing Anki decks like it says but I'm still working on it!

Hi your addon seems to be doing something very similar to what we want to achieve with https://traverse.link/. It's a webapp and it doesn't have a chrome extension yet but I was wondering if you were interested on working together on an integration? (It has anki import already so that could help you)

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#128

Post by edylemond »

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…

Some other alternatives already mentioned but there's also https://traverse.link/ for spaced repetition on connected notes

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#129

Post by varjolintu »

leke wrote: post #72
Evan_Hellmuth wrote: post #56

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'd love some flashcard with native language. For example, I'm from Finland and I've been using Anki to leard Japanese, but there's no Japanese to Finnish sets available. So, the only way to learn using Anki is to translate Japanese -> English -> Finnish. And there's often new English words for me which will need a translation. I guess this kind of double learning is effective, but sometimes a little frustrating. I have decided to write some Finnish explanations to each kanji, which takes time.

Still, I think Anki is great for remembering new words. You'll just have to use it daily.

Re: How to Use Anki to Improve Your Memory

#130

Post by tra3 »

kd5bjo wrote: post #90
tra3 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are you able to share your script or your deck? Would love to experiment with that.
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