61–70 of 233 posts
What kinds of things are useful to learn in this rote way? Except maybe foreign language vocabulary?
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…
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.
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…
Why is it useful? My job at least isn’t bottlenecked by me not memorizing enough things. Or maybe it is! But I’m not convinced
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.
I really like https://readwise.io/ for this purpose regarding all the books I've read and the quotes I like to re-visit here and there. It uses a SRS technique. While this type of article is almost cliche at this point regarding someone coming across the memory limitations and the power of anki for the first time, I really think the case for anki is exaggerated with "important ideas". Anki is great for preparing to g…
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.
A prominent example is when I was working through a deck of japanese hiragana and katakana, I was doing my cards at a moderate pace every day, and I just kept mixing them up, even when I was repeating them in short succession. After a few very frustrating weeks of this i ditched anki and started trying to write out the whole table from memory and checking for mistakes after, this strategy proved so successful I only needed three sessions for perfect recall.
I used anki a few other times with similar results. I know the idea of learning styles is disputed, but this app just doesn't appear to work for me.
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…