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Anki-fy your life

abouttolearn.substack.com

21–30 of 233 posts

Re: Anki-fy your life

#21

I'm trying to get into Anki, but it's difficult to get started. Here's what I'd like: while I'm reading a (PDF) book, I want to highlight some text (and maybe manually tweak it a little) and have it converted into some "Anki card" format so when I want to review the contents of the book later, I can use Anki for it. Any ideas?

Maybe you could use some app to pull out highlights but you still need to think carefully about how to make each text chunk into a card or multiple cards (otherwise you'll waste more time than you save)

You also don't normally use an srs flashcard program like anki just when you want to review a book, you use it every day.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#22
I'll just throw out I've used Anki ever since I started it and haven't failed a knowledge test since I started doing it. Including passing my HAM test with only using Anki and the questions for 72 hours.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#23

I'm trying to get into Anki, but it's difficult to get started. Here's what I'd like: while I'm reading a (PDF) book, I want to highlight some text (and maybe manually tweak it a little) and have it converted into some "Anki card" format so when I want to review the contents of the book later, I can use Anki for it. Any ideas?

Check out AnkiConnect for getting things into Anki. Not sure about reader software that will call out after a highlight though.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#24
I find there's a sweet spot for Anki when the daily review of already-existing cards takes 20 minutes. If the daily review takes more than 25 minutes, I try not to add any cards that day.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#25

A major limitation exists for spaced repetition software (e.g. Anki, SuperMemo, or other flashcard-style systems), in my experience using them for several years for long-term memory: it's neither necessary nor sufficient to use this software to learn certain topics. Several excellent physics and math students I worked with have never used spaced repetition software, but were excellent at their studies because they co…

I've found the sweet spot.for Anki is the things that I need only occasionally but not never.

Things I use frequently I already pick up through repeated use, things that I never use eventually falls out.

But things that are somewhat relevant about that I find myself googling more than twice is a good candidate to Anki.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#26

Anki (or a Leitner box) is the recommended method from the book "Fluent Forever" After learning one language in school and a few others ad hoc on my own I gave this method a try. I quickly gave up, though, once I discovered Dr Krashen's work on comprehensible input, and how boring and time consuming creating and studying Anki is. Dr Krashen's work says that we learn language when we understand it. I.e. when we receiv…

Personally, as an intermediate Japanese learner, I have been careful to choose the right input just as Krashen advocates, but I also find Anki indispensable. I found to my surprise that I have been improving about equally quickly using Anki+Animebook+Yomichan for 1-2 hours a day while living the US as I did during an earlier period when I was living in Japan (but without access to computerized methods beyond a basic pocket e-dict).

As a beginner, appropriate input was enough to care of "spaced repetition" on its own, since children's media constantly rotates over the same small set of vocabulary. But after I improved past the ~2000 most common words or so, it happened more and more that a word I recently learned didn't appear again in my input until it had already been flushed. The probability that I would actually learn a new word for good progressively decreased as I picked the lower-hanging fruit, which is the cause of the dreaded "intermediate plateau".

I gather Anki pushes out the plateau much further: I have heard that it starts to feel Sisyphean to learn new words with it around the 15000-20000 word mark instead.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#27

Unless you want to compete in Jeopardy or something, why bother with ""uploading"" static chunks of information to your wetware? Language learning aside. When categorizing notes to be remembered, I think it's good to think in terms of memory retreival, not memory storage. In other words, not to become an "archiever", because you probably want to evolve your ideas by linking them together in your own unique way -- uni…

I find a good way to link together ideas is to have them easily at hand i.e. memorized. Having a motivating problem is probably a better way to do this, but I've found that motivating problems which require concepts I would like to learn are not as readily available as I'd want.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#28

I'm trying to get into Anki, but it's difficult to get started. Here's what I'd like: while I'm reading a (PDF) book, I want to highlight some text (and maybe manually tweak it a little) and have it converted into some "Anki card" format so when I want to review the contents of the book later, I can use Anki for it. Any ideas?

This is a common use case and many reader / annotation apps either support it natively (polarized and marginnote 3 are two that I have first hand experience with) or have third party tools available to copy annotations into anki.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#29

[flagged]

I literally just typed in Anki on Google and the first link to their homepage very obviously explains that it's free to use even with synchronization across multiple devices. The only cost I can think of is that they charge a one time fee for the mobile app for iOS, but the clients for android and desktop apps for computers are completely free. I have no idea where you got your information from but perhaps next time do a basic cursory search on the internet instead of querying ChatGPT.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#30
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anki is an open source app: https://github.com/ankitects/anki Only the iOS version costs money, which is probably their only revenue stream.

Hey I don't fault them for that, at all, I just get annoyed when I am dumb enough to click on ads disguised as blog posts.

Do you also get annoyed when you're dumb enough to think Anki isn't free?
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