Ask HN: Anyone using Anki/Spaced-repetition successfully?

What has been your experiences with using Anki or other spaced repetition software to improve your long term recall? Has it impacted your practice, day to day life positively? If yes, what are the best practices with spaced repetition worked for you?

I never managed to get any benefit from spaced repetition. I tried paper and anki.

I found I remembered more creating the cards than reviewing them. Creating the cards made me think about the information and understand it so I could create the card (back and front) in a beneficial way. Reviewing them was a waste of time for me, but the act of creating something with the information I was trying to learn worked wonders.

To be honest I found this with mind maps, concept maps, and nearly every single other way of presenting information in a way that is touted as a good way to learn.

Using Anki for about four years on and off, 1.5 years consistently while learning Chinese, my advice is:

1. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Some months I review 10-20 new cards a day; this month, I was busier than usual, so I changed it to 1 new card a day. There’s no rush.

2. For languages, sentences are drastically more helpful to have as cards than single words. I find it much easier to learn a whole sentence than just a word.

3. I have a mix of my cards and pre-made ones (e.g., Vocab from my textbook).

4. It's OK to let a card be a leech and to forget about it. If a card was a leech, I’d just let it go. It's not school, the goal isn’t to get 100%, its just to use as another resource.

5. I use Anki along with 2-3 other apps AND a private teacher. I treat it like an additional resource, not the end all be all.

This inspires me to start creating cards as well.

> Today, my Anki has 4415 cards and grows everyday. I have spent 186 hours studying, I have made around 35K card reviews.

Do you have any personal reflections on what sort of cards worked for you, and how you'd chunk the information or any other tips in using it?

I’ve been using SuperMemo for 16 years, do my cards every day (just finished today’s cards about 20 mins ago). Super useful for obvious stuff like languages, but also very useful for more subtle stuff you want to keep in your brain; you basically have a “remember forever” button in your life, which you can use for useful information you encounter online, facts about loved ones, jokes, scientific concepts, cognitive biases you are prone to, basically a little bit of everything. Spaced repetition is a very effective tool, but it’s overall usefulness depends on the self discipline and willingness of the user to recognize their own memory related shortcomings. You can live an entire life without spaced repetition and be just fine, but once it clicked in my head how effective spaced repetition was, I couldn’t not be obsessed with it. The feeling of being able to know what you know, and to rely on that knowledge being there, it feels like when Thor reaches out his hand and Mjölnir just flies into it with no effort on Thor’s part. It feels so great!