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Anki-fy your life

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Re: Anki-fy your life

#41

Post by MichaelNolan »

I'm a huge fan of spaced repetition and Anki. I strongly believe that most people's professional lives would be improved by using it. There is a huge amount of information that falls into the zone of it's needed often enough that not knowing it is a pain, but it's not needed often enough that you would "naturally" remember it.

I've yet to find anything else that only takes 10 to 20 minutes a day that has a higher ROI. The amount of "compounding interest" it gives over time is incredible.

Learning to write good cards is skill that takes time and practice. The article from Andy Matuschak [0] is a great guide to learn how to write good cards.

[0] https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/

Re: Anki-fy your life

#43

Post by sowbug »

andersentobias wrote: post #3

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…

It's like exercise. As a software engineer, I'm very unlikely to need to lift heavy things or run long distances. But my body is (probably) healthier long-term if I'm able to do those things.

Disclaimer: going through my Anki decks is one of the 50 things on my 10-item to-do list. I don't get to it often enough. But it does work, and I now know how to memorize things I want to remember.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#44

Post by bluquark »

kneebonian wrote: post #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.

Using Anki for a 72-hour cram session is kind of missing the point though. For me, the main benefit of Anki is to escape the cram->forget cycle and learn things low-stress and for good.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#45

Post by johtso »

doktorhladnjak wrote: post #42

Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t think of anything in my job as a software engineer that I’d benefit from memorizing through flash cards. What are people memorizing exactly?

I've also never used anki for anything related to my work / programming.

What I have used it for:

  Memorising how to identify plants and their latin names
  Memorising the technical terms for different morphological features of plants so that I could efficiently use a vegetative identification key without constantly flicking to the glossary
  Memorising foreign language vocabulary

Re: Anki-fy your life

#46

Post by PartiallyTyped »

crazygringo wrote: post #32
nohaydeprobleme wrote: post #18

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…

Right, there's a big distiction to be made here. Knowledge that is primarily conceptual (like almost all of math) generally does not benefit from spaced repetition. The learning involved is understanding -- a new concept may be hard to understand in the first place, but once you get it, you don't really forget it. Or you just need a super-quick refresher if you haven't touched it for a few months. While knowledge tha…

N=1. I found that conceptual knowledge and eureka moments always result in substantial or at least non trivial changes in the way I parse and understand information, so much so that their integration is seamless, automatic and permanent.

Otoh, certain stuff that are not particularly important need frequent repetition, eg learning a foreign language that you are not actively using.

I am considering using it for leetcode problems and questions.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#47

Post by shusaku »

doktorhladnjak wrote: post #42

Maybe it’s just me, but I can’t think of anything in my job as a software engineer that I’d benefit from memorizing through flash cards. What are people memorizing exactly?

One of these days I need to make flash cards of those makefile automatic variables…

Re: Anki-fy your life

#48

Post by roundandround »

crazygringo wrote: post #32
nohaydeprobleme wrote: post #18

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…

Right, there's a big distiction to be made here. Knowledge that is primarily conceptual (like almost all of math) generally does not benefit from spaced repetition. The learning involved is understanding -- a new concept may be hard to understand in the first place, but once you get it, you don't really forget it. Or you just need a super-quick refresher if you haven't touched it for a few months. While knowledge tha…

It would definitely be hard to use Anki for conceptual learning that requires fresh problems to prevent memorizing answers. One could link to an outside site keyword categorizing problems matching specifics, I suppose..

Really though a lack of spaced repetition on practising conceptual problems is just as noticeable as the lack of spaced repetition on factual learning. Very few fields are so perfectly structured that you get practices on their earliest levels by doing later levels and then working in the field, i.e. plenty of mathematicians admit they no longer do arithmetic well.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#49

Post by keiferski »

I’ve experimented with Anki over the years and currently have a somewhat custom setup that I do every day / nearly every day. I’ll explain below for anyone that might find it useful.

At one point I realized that my capacity for learning new items for a particular topic is limited to a few items per day. Any more than 2 or 3 and I struggle to retain the information. So, for example, trying to learn 20 words in Chinese per day is impossible without spending multiple hours on it.

The trick, however, is that I get around this by having many items from multiple topics, instead of many items from a single topic. Instead of 20 words in Chinese, I learn 1 word each in 20 different languages. Surprisingly, I have a much easier time with this and don’t need to spend much time on it in order to retain the information. I don’t know why this psychologically works, but it does. And while learning 2 or 3 words a day won’t make you fluent anytime soon, it does add up over time, especially for topics that you aren’t in a hurry to learn but would like to know on a slow timeline, in a year or two. For example, learning the Japanese hiragana/katakana or the numbers of all the US presidents.

However, this proved to be somewhat unwieldy logistically as I had to open 20 different PDFs, download audio for each word, then stitch it all together daily. So I created a little web app (stitched together from some WordPress plugins, actually) that allows me to import learning materials and then display 2-3 of them per topic on a single page, each time the page is loaded. I just visit the page once a day and add the items to Anki.

This was all a bit complex to set up, but if you enjoy learning new things and want an efficient system for adding stuff into your brain, I recommend making something similar.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#50

Post by CGamesPlay »

pixelperfect wrote: post #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.

I have mine set to 20 new cards/day and 200 remember cards/day. This seems to steady out at about 20 mins day. That said, I wish Anki had a time-boxed mode, where it measured my speeds and then just chose the right balance of new cards.

(Cards added above the new card limit go into a queue for future days automatically.)

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