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Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

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Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#121

Post by kouteiheika »

allenu wrote: post #112
zozbot234 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think memorizing a smaller set of facts consistently is better In general, existing SRS does a very bad job of supporting priority and prerequisites between items. There's no way of saying "learn A, B, C, then learn X, Y, Z once you know the former well enough." This limits the domains where SRS can be applied most effectively to ones with very little structure, such as raw language vocabulary.

> In general, existing SRS does a very bad job of supporting priority and prerequisites between items. This is a feature I've wanted to implement for a while, but I think it would be hard from a user's perspective to set up the dependencies. Specifically, I mean marking a card unlearnable until another card (or cards) is learned. It's something that I think requires a good UI so you can see at a glance which cards de…

> My dream is being able to create a deck where you have both vocab and then sentences that use the vocab. You'd make sentences that use the vocab dependent on the vocab being learned first, so that over time you'd gradually unlock more material that uses your base knowledge.

You can also go the other way. Have a huge database of sentences, and pick example sentences for new cards which only use vocabulary which you already know (besides the new word which you want to learn through that card, of course). I do that for my Japanese SRS app, and it works decently well from the feedback I get from my users.

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#122

Post by brightball »

qumpis wrote: post #84
xkfm wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Supermemo article in Wired hooked me. I still remember where I was when I read it and the feeling of reading it. I still use Supermemo daily, and it's one of the programs keeping on Windows. Anki (and every other SRS program I've tried) just doesn't compare as soon as you move beyond a list of flashcards. That said, having used Supermemo for over a decade at this point, the hardest thing about SRS is deciding wh…

What's your use case? In my case, obsidian + anki seems to do very well (I can keep a decent amount of context in my cards) for math/CS topics. Can you also give an example how you benefit from your workflow, and say a bit more why Anki wouldn't be sufficient? Wouldn't keeping a track of articles and making cards in Anki achieve the same purpose, or is there something else? Of course the implementation matters, and h…

According to the wired article, the key to remembering is reviewing the information the moment you’re about to forget. It makes it sound like the scheduled review times are designed to maximize the effect.

Never tried it but all the comments made me curious.

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#123

Post by zinclozenge »

dls2016 wrote: post #17

I was anti-memorization until I went back to graduate school for mathematics. I had forgotten (or never learned) a lot of things needed to pass qualifying exams. At some point I ran across the spaced repetition idea (maybe from the Wired SuperMemo article [0]) and I gave it a try. I ended up using it to memorize large portions of baby Rudin and Munkres' Topology, as well as some algebra and a bunch of qualifying exam…

> but on the other hand the best researchers/engineers I know have a huge number of facts and examples memorized and ready at their fingertips

The US is staunchly anti-memorization. It wasn't until I did a year abroad in a French university where the power of memorization was so obvious. One of the math students I spent time with told me it's the French tradition to "carry everything around in your head". They were studying symplectic geometry in their sophomore year of their bachelor's!

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#124

Post by barking_biscuit »

ceeplusplus wrote: post #58
barking_biscuit wrote: post #26

I mean sure. The trouble is in order to keep the review time per day fixed you need to vary the rate at which you introduce new facts, and as time goes on the interval between when you can afford to introduce new facts will grow to be infinite. The model also doesn't account for how you feel about doing this activity. This includes the pain of not doing reviews for several days and then having to catch up. The probab…

Not quite. The review intervals increase exponentially, so if you stop adding new cards the workload quickly goes to single digits per day in a few months. 35 a day is excessive for sure. Even with foreign language stuff which is the lowest time to solve per card, I limit myself to 10 new cards/day. Math problems 2 new/day. Daily workload ends up around 50-100 cards, which is very manageable. You do need to be consis…

35 a day was my magic number. The method to the madness was that I'd allow for only having to hit it at least 80% of the time. In a given month if I managed it every day it meant 1000 cards a month. Every 3 months I leveled up pretty hard.

In my first year studying Japanese I first did Remembering The Kanji, which was a slow to get through and I didn't manage that pace really due to several periods of starting / stopping. After I got through it though I knew bugger all Japanese functionally speaking but the language became extremely accessible due to having a solid command of recognizing Kanji and being able to look them up easily when needing to read stuff, so I decided to front load grammar after that. At the time the JLPT was about 4 months away and I wouldn't have even passed JLPT5 (well, JLPT4 back then) at that time. I found a really amazing Anki deck that I don't know if you can find anymore called Kanji Oddysee 2001. It contained 2000 sentences which covered up to I would say around about JLPT2 grammar as well as teaching vocab + readings for the 2000~ Joyou Kanji (hence the name). The cards also had audio as well. So given 4 months and 2000 cards with 2 card types I smashed out 4000 cards and sat the JLPT2 after just under a year of study. I think I needed 60% to pass at the time and got like 55%? So, not a pass but I took it more as an impossible challenge than anything, and was stunningly happy with the result.

After that I had a vocab of around a couple thousand words, a decent command of grammar, and some limited ability to converse. I just turned my efforts towards building a vocab deck at 35 words a day. I managed to add another 10k vocab in that second year after which point conversation was fluid and I was reading novels (still needed a dictionary for that, but it was huge at the time). I got in some Japanese room mates too and we had loads of parties.

Hands down one of the fondest times of my life.

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#125

Post by martindbp »

orangepurple wrote: post #41
martindbp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've got 9000 reviews waiting for me in my old Chinese Anki deck, at some point you always fall off the wagon. I've changed my mind several times on SRS going back and forth, and my conclusion is that, for language, I think it's better to split your time with 90% on consuming meaningful input and 10% SRS, because learning in context with real content that you're interested in allows you to encode your memories…

A prioritized queue of stuff to learn may be a better solution than staring at "over 9000" things to review. Such a queue would mean you simply bite off as much as you can chew every day and don't perpetually fall behind, assuming the priority queue has a small degree of randomness and is recomputed daily based on the decay rate of all modeled facts. Do you agree?

I think it can help to keep things less overwhelming.

But what I'm trying now is to ruthlessly suspend any card that I get wrong even once after the learning phase (i.e. the day after). I've noticed that some words stick much easier than others, there might be an 80/20 kind of distribution where 20% of the words are responsible for 80% of the time spent. In that case it might be better to add a bunch of words every day and then suspend the ones that don't stick very easily. The idea being that they'll stick more easily at a later point, at least this has been my experience with Chinese.

Actually I'm going to dig through my Anki database and see if my hunch is right.

Edit: it's more like 25% of the cards are responsible for close to 45% of reps. But 25% of the cards are responsible for 58% of review time, and then it's 36/70. That indicates to me that dropping the something like 30% hardest cards would save you a disproportionate amount of time. Of course there's some nuance here where I should probably do this per card type, otherwise you'd just drop the hardest card types.

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#126

Post by [deleted] »

zinclozenge wrote: post #123
dls2016 wrote: post #17

I was anti-memorization until I went back to graduate school for mathematics. I had forgotten (or never learned) a lot of things needed to pass qualifying exams. At some point I ran across the spaced repetition idea (maybe from the Wired SuperMemo article [0]) and I gave it a try. I ended up using it to memorize large portions of baby Rudin and Munkres' Topology, as well as some algebra and a bunch of qualifying exam…

> but on the other hand the best researchers/engineers I know have a huge number of facts and examples memorized and ready at their fingertips The US is staunchly anti-memorization. It wasn't until I did a year abroad in a French university where the power of memorization was so obvious. One of the math students I spent time with told me it's the French tradition to "carry everything around in your head". They were s…

[deleted]

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#127

Post by ctchocula »

dls2016 wrote: post #17

I was anti-memorization until I went back to graduate school for mathematics. I had forgotten (or never learned) a lot of things needed to pass qualifying exams. At some point I ran across the spaced repetition idea (maybe from the Wired SuperMemo article [0]) and I gave it a try. I ended up using it to memorize large portions of baby Rudin and Munkres' Topology, as well as some algebra and a bunch of qualifying exam…

I found this post fascinating. It makes me wonder is there an equivalent superpower that's more software engineering focused rather than coding focused like leetcode questions? I know everyone here likes to dump on Gang of Four, but perhaps design patterns and their usecases?

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#128

Post by martindbp »

barking_biscuit wrote: post #120
martindbp wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I've got 9000 reviews waiting for me in my old Chinese Anki deck, at some point you always fall off the wagon. I've changed my mind several times on SRS going back and forth, and my conclusion is that, for language, I think it's better to split your time with 90% on consuming meaningful input and 10% SRS, because learning in context with real content that you're interested in allows you to encode your memories…

I did the AJATT method way back in the day when it was relatively new. So heavily leaned on Anki, whilst also consuming loads of natural Japanese through music, shows, games, conversation etc. In my experience doing both in tandem was the magic combination. Anki without native media is mildly pointless. Native media without Anki is super inefficient. Used in equal measure you find your access and understanding of nat…

That's essentially what I tried with Chinese, and I could sort of keep up with it before I had a kid but then I just can't find the time/energy to keep the backlog down AND watch new content, so for several years I stopped learning completely.

I also want to minimize time spent in Anki because it's just not fun, you know? I know common wisdom says it _should_ be painful, that means you're learning, but I'm not so sure. Me and everyone I know learned English without much pain or Spaced Repetition Systems after all. It's a much easier language to learn than Japanese/Chinese though, but it makes me feel it shouldn't have to be this difficult.

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#129

Post by kouteiheika »

barking_biscuit wrote: post #26

I mean sure. The trouble is in order to keep the review time per day fixed you need to vary the rate at which you introduce new facts, and as time goes on the interval between when you can afford to introduce new facts will grow to be infinite. The model also doesn't account for how you feel about doing this activity. This includes the pain of not doing reviews for several days and then having to catch up. The probab…

> Source: input 35 new vocab a day into Anki while learning Japanese a decade ago and grew my vocab deck to 18000+ cards. Reviews would take several hours a day, and at one point I stopped adding new words to try and wait for the daily review load to go down. When it never did despite this, I just deleted the entire thing and say fuck it.

Yeah, but that isn't really inherent to the concept of SRS; it's just an unfortunate consequence of Anki's geriatric SRS algorithm.

For reference, for my Japanese SRS app (which is using my own custom SRS algorithm) I have a user who currently maintains ~18k known words, with a consistent ~23 new cards per day for months, and they don't take that long with only something like ~20 minutes spent per day reviewing.

Re: Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall

#130

Post by rg111 »

dls2016 wrote: post #17

I was anti-memorization until I went back to graduate school for mathematics. I had forgotten (or never learned) a lot of things needed to pass qualifying exams. At some point I ran across the spaced repetition idea (maybe from the Wired SuperMemo article [0]) and I gave it a try. I ended up using it to memorize large portions of baby Rudin and Munkres' Topology, as well as some algebra and a bunch of qualifying exam…

Hi, can you please show me some of your cards?

Do you create cards with full proofs or do you write parts of proof? Or do you write down definitions?

Can you please give me an idea how you used spaced repeatition for grad school math?

Thanks.

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