Anki-fy your life • Hacker News Board

Re: Anki-fy your life

#91

Post by PartiallyTyped » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 8:04 PM UTC

watwut wrote: post #84

PartiallyTyped wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 leetco…

> Otoh, certain stuff that are not particularly important need frequent repetition, eg learning a foreign language that you are not actively using. In that use case, you are much better off reading content in that language and watching content in that language. Vocabulary memorization as isolated activity makes sense only as additional activity if you have additional time on top of that.

I mainly use anki with cards that involve the vocab in some context. I found that the context enabled me to eventually understand without translating to any other language, I am still quite limited though. I think that falls into your suggestion of learning within some kind of broader context, which I agree.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#92

Post by rg111 » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 8:05 PM UTC

Jensson wrote: post #36

zora_goron wrote: post #15

I also had a similar thought process regarding understanding vs memorizing facts while transitioning from studying CS (where I emphasized understanding the underlying concepts rather than trying to memorize atomic facts that I could derive) to medicine (where having facts memorized is also a key component). Interestingly, I found that committing to memorizing facts actually helped me gain a deeper understanding of th…

> Interestingly, I found that committing to memorizing facts actually helped me gain a deeper understanding of the topics themselves, which was not what I originally expected Be careful with this, perceived self understanding doesn't reflect real understanding.

There is only one real way to test, and the subject being CS, it is even more real: building things using those concepts.

For other subjects (and CS, too): demonstrate mastery with teaching others, producing something with the concepts learned and get feedback.

This way one can test true learning. And, even when tested this way, Spaced Repeatition really helps. I am speaking from experience.

When you are in a place where you can immerse yourself in a proper environment, like a college or work- where you hear terms and their usage regularly, learning becomes easier.

But when your environment is cut-off from the buzzing world, or everyone is doing ML and you want to do Cybersecurity, you can fake immersion using Anki. A good part of physical immersion can be replaced with using Anki.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#93

Post by TwentyPosts » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 8:10 PM UTC

bluquark wrote: post #87

TwentyPosts wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also what I'd call the classic issue with Duolingo. Or rather, one of them, considering that the app has all sorts of issues. If you use nothing but Duolingo you'll plateau very quickly. It's probably "okay" as a casual side spaced-repetition learning tool—when you're learning languages you generally want to pull from several different resources, and learn with different tools anyway. But don't make the mista…

> Or rather, one of them, considering that [Duolingo] has all sorts of issues. Yep. I agree with measured criticisms of Anki even while feeling the app is really useful if you use it well. Whereas Duolingo isn't worth bothering with at all. It's purely optimized to maximize engagement/revenue.

As someone who didn't like the idea of learning a language at all but has to, I'm glad that Duolingo gave me a very, very easy way to get started with literally anything at all. It's simple and streamlined, meaning that it's easy to start and stick with it instead of getting hung up on how to find a good textbook, or figuring out how to use Anki "properly".

This also applies to practicing every single day: I find it easy to do a few Duolingo "lessons" as warm-up before delving into more in-depth practice.

Nowadays I would not use it for real "practice" at all. I use it to check my understanding for 5-15 minutes a day. If I make mistakes in Duolingo (eg. forming the plural, remembering the dative for a given grammatical gender) then I look these things up and study them.

I might drop Duolingo completely at some point, but for now I'm getting a non-zero amount of value out of it—I am increasingly looking into better options, though. I'm already looking Anki, and I'm sure there are some other language learning apps out there.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#94

Post by watwut » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 8:10 PM UTC

nohaydeprobleme wrote: post #86

watwut wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Several excellent physics and math students I worked with have never used spaced repetition software, but were excellent at their studies because they consistently solved textbook problems. Isn't it the case that only minority of students uses this software or flashcards in general anyway? I mean, of course it is possible to succeed without it, because overwhelming majority of students/learners are not using it.

The idea gets more interesting depending on your idea of success. If success just means passing the course, you definitely don't need spaced repetition (but then again, you can also maybe get by via cramming two or three days before each test and rushing assignments, though this wouldn't be a good experience). If you define success as doing very well in the course (and remembering what you learn in the long-term), th…

That is the thing ... I don't recall best students doing flashcards all that much in cs, math and physics. I actually associated this more with groups of students who don't understand, so they memorize without understanding. When you understand the concept, it is also much easier to remember the thing.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#95

Post by fluidcruft » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 8:10 PM UTC

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…

But the arbitrary-factual isn't they way people recommend using Anki. I really struggle to understand exactly what people are actually using it to learn. There are a lot of medical students and that makes sense, but that is... arbitrary-factual.

I've tried many times with other material, but I always get far more out of creating condensed notes and reviewing actual notes than quizzing random factioids in Anki.

I get that probably the idea is that creating prompts could guide me about which notes to review, but it seems easier to just review the notes. I think the people doing Anki are just putting the effort into making cards rather than into making notes. It would probably be nice if it were easy to convert notes into Anki but everything I've tried sucks and it just make taking each hour of taking notes into two hours of making notes and cards. I could have just reviewed notes for that hour. Closures are sort of okay but converting notes into closures is a bigger pain in the ass than it should be.

Maybe someone can make a LLM that takes some corpus of text and generates Anki cards of key points for review. Then I could just feed my notes in. But otherwise it really seems like a huge waste of time.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#96

Post by nearmuse » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 8:12 PM UTC

I am trying this approach right now. It is difficult to do it for big concepts because they take time to recall in their entirety and can't be reduced to one key idea to be recalled quickly. It may also be hard to estimate what interval to use, and bloated repetition sessions are killing the whole idea of spending some 10s of minutes a day, causing a sort of fatigue if not outright burnout.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#97

Post by TwentyPosts » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 8:12 PM UTC

wizzwizz4 wrote: post #88

bluquark wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or rather, one of them, considering that [Duolingo] has all sorts of issues. Yep. I agree with measured criticisms of Anki even while feeling the app is really useful if you use it well. Whereas Duolingo isn't worth bothering with at all. It's purely optimized to maximize engagement/revenue.

Duolingo used to be better: people who are talking about Duolingo might be referencing how it used to be.

I'm not. I'm a new user, and I notice that Duolingo kind of sucks, but I am getting some amount of value out of it. I'm very open to suggestions for better language learning apps, though.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#98

Post by kayo_20211030 » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 8:16 PM UTC

Is there a measure, anywhere, of the bollocks to content ratio on HN on Saturdays? It seems to peak that day. But, this one is so bad, it's not even wrong. Who on earth knows what the future will bring? Who on earth knows, ahead of time, what's worth 10 minutes, or 2 minutes, or no time at all. That's intuition, and that's a gift. All the rest is bollocks, and it seems to turn up on Saturdays too much; that is, the pieces that claim to have identified a "system".

Re: Anki-fy your life

#99

Post by Macha » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 8:44 PM UTC

bluquark wrote: post #85

tastysandwich wrote: post #76

I absolutely love Anki. A lot of software make empty promises around productivity improvements. Especially in education. Anki is one of those rare tools that genuinely 10x's you over your peers. I used it when studying Japanese and it was a massive help. However, having used it for over 12 years to memorise many different things I have noticed one caveat. If you're not also using what you're memorising outside of Ank…

I've noticed this too, I study with Anki J->E cards and it supercharges my reading skill, helps somewhat my listening skill, and basically does nothing at all for my speaking skill. I was wondering how much adding audio cards or "reversed" E->J cards to my routine might help. Are those variations worth the trouble?

My experience is that doing so has had a minor improvement in my J->E recall, but a major improvement in my E->J recall. If you never intend to write/speak Japanese and just want to build to watching anime or something, I guess you could give it a miss, but I think it's pretty worthwhile.

The one caveat with Anki specifically for reversed cards is when you add a bunch of new cards or a new deck and it presents you the reversed card right after the basic card.

e.g. seeing the 幸せ -> shiawase (happy) card then immediately after the happy -> 幸せ card, sure you're going to be telling Anki this was an "easy" card, but that's much more about the immediacy than the level of recall you have.

For my purposes I actually have three sets of cards in my Japanese deck, one each for kana, kanji and english front card and the other two on the reverse cards (unless my textbook omits the kanji because of it being rarely used in the real world, as for some words).

Re: Anki-fy your life

#100

Post by mahathu » Sat, Mar 18, 2023, 8:47 PM UTC

I'm sure taking 10 minutes out of their day to reflect and write a diary entry would increase most peoples wellbeing a lot more than trying to neurotically remember everything you come across.