131–140 of 150 posts
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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).
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> Then you'll need the discipline to do ~10x your normal daily volume when you get back I've seen curious comments like this in various past forum discussions on the topic of Anki vacation ideas. A vacation is not a period of rest followed by double the amount of work to catch up. A vacation is a pause in work, which delays all subsequent work by that much time. > not doing new cards ever day makes it not a clean 14x…
>You can't do new cards everyday; eventually you will have seen all new cards of a deck. I'm still working decks whose new cards ran out years ago. The presence and scheduling of new cards is a temporary condition with little long-term significance. My new cards comment was to explain why it's not 14x when you go on vacation. >I've seen curious comments like this in various past forum discussions on the topic of Anki…
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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.
The script will ask you for a text file to process and the pop up a Tkinter window with a single button. Each time you press the button, it copies the next card's body text to the clipboard, ready to be pasted into Anki's Add window.
The text file needs to be already split into reasonable-length lines, like the ones you get from gutenberg.org
Card template: https://pastebin.com/BFJxW1jC
Cloze splitting script: https://pastebin.com/4Jek0G7u
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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/arti…
The advantage of reading is seeing a word in different contexts, and grasping the many nuances.
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> Then you'll need the discipline to do ~10x your normal daily volume when you get back I've seen curious comments like this in various past forum discussions on the topic of Anki vacation ideas. A vacation is not a period of rest followed by double the amount of work to catch up. A vacation is a pause in work, which delays all subsequent work by that much time. > not doing new cards ever day makes it not a clean 14x…
>You can't do new cards everyday; eventually you will have seen all new cards of a deck. I'm still working decks whose new cards ran out years ago. The presence and scheduling of new cards is a temporary condition with little long-term significance. My new cards comment was to explain why it's not 14x when you go on vacation. >I've seen curious comments like this in various past forum discussions on the topic of Anki…
One particular comment I remember was about the Anki feature of reviewing ahead. The poster said that you shouldn't do it because it will "mess up your stats". But, think about how idiotic that is. According to that reasoning, you should not read any native language material. Because if you read, you will encounter some of the words which are scheduled in your Anki, and recall them prematurely. And that will cause your Anki progress to deviate from what the SRS algorithm predicts, making it seem like you're doing better. Hence, reading native material is cheating: sticking to the algorithm is the goal, not learning the language!
SRS is just a tool; it's not a master to be served, but the servant. It's based on soft science, and is self-correcting. Any user behavior which leads to increased forgetting will result in more lapses, and an increased workload to make up for it.
Mature grown-ups with busy lives adopt the tool to best suit them, rather than to adopt themselves to serve the tool.
If the only way you can use the tool is less optimal, so that learning takes longer, well maybe that's the best it can be, in relation to everything else you have going on in your life!
The SRS implementation in Anki has a large number of parameters. The defaults are poor and don't work well for people. Good parameters are a matter of opinion. Someone taking a vacation according to a regular pattern, like one week every four months, is effectively just tuning another parameter.
You're making a mistake of inference. Someone getting a card right after 44 days, but getting only 30 days of "credit" for it in he program does not have a reason to feel good, other than to feel good about remembering the card after 44 days. You raise a good point there though. In fact, a correct implementation of vacation mode should not literally just make time stop; it should somehow give the user credit for recalling cards beyond their scheduled interval. The recalled cards should perhaps get a bit of a boost in their next interval.
The point of a vacation feature is simply to feel rested, not to feel gleeful about somehow "cheating". If someone misuses the feature to take a one week vacation after every week of studying, that's their problem, and not a reason why a reasonable user shouldn't be able to take a break.
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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…
That looks great, I will definitely try that out. How well does the time-to-response work as a proxy for how difficult it was to remember something? Is there an option to specify that manually instead?
I found with Anki that it was sometimes difficult to self report precisely how well I remembered something. It also added an extra cognitive step on each card to have to consider it, which over time was an annoyance.
I don't have any scientific proof that judging response time is better than self-reporting, but my thinking is self-reporting accuracy is low enough and forgetting curve is approximate enough for each card that in aggregate it doesn't make a huge difference. It would be interesting to have real scientific tests, but I think it would be difficult to set up.
I considered adding a way to self-report your score, but it didn't make the MVP and I'm really trying to target less technical users and not people who are already familiar with Anki. I might add it one day as an option since the underlying design of app can handle it.
Any suggestions for what to use Anki to remember in everyday life as a software engineer?
I've been using them to remember specific things I look up commonly. The rule is if I look things up 3 times, I add a card. If I can remember these things, I won't have to break my flow to look things up on Stackoverflow. It's usually simple things, like what's the method signature for slice? Or how do I run bash inside of a docker container? The tough part for me is sticking to reviewing. There, I'm trying to figure…
I've started reviewing a question or three in the rest breaks during my workouts.
Not all exercises or routines work great for that, but it works surprisingly well for things like bodyweight HIIT.
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 is an interesting take on Anki. I always saw Anki as an implementation of spaced repetition. What is your process? How do you codify connections and associations into spaced repetition?
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!
1. Never set a maximum number of reviews. It will create an unstoppable backlog no matter what you do.
2. If you have a huge backlog of like 500 cards then just hit "HARD" on 50% of them until the backlog is spread out over multiple days and you have a manageable number reviews.
3. Don't have too many young cards at once. Stop adding new cards after you have 500 young cards (exact number depends on how easy the cards are).
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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 work…
It's been a while since I Used Anki, so my memory is a bit fuzzy. If I remember correctly I tried it with both text and images. I also remember using TinyCards, which had multiple choice and I had more success getting correct answers with that, because I didn't have to pull the word out of my head and remember how it sounded/looked. However, even though I could guess correctly, I still had problems with recall.