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Anki-fy your life

abouttolearn.substack.com

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Re: Anki-fy your life

#201

Post by Kelamir »

bigbluesax wrote: post #68

I actually really strugle to retain anything I learned with anki and I was wondering if this affects anyone else. 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…

As the other responder said, don't use Anki for memorization, only for reviewing what you already remember. I recommend using mnemonics for memorizing words. For katakana hiragana, refer to https://www.tofugu.com/japanese/learn-hiragana/

Re: Anki-fy your life

#202

Post by Kelamir »

s1mon wrote: post #122

Every time I see something about Anki, I think it's about toy robots. https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/5/21050378/anki-vector-saved... https://www.digitaldreamlabs.com

Etymology of Anki is the Japanese word which means memorization :)

Re: Anki-fy your life

#203

Post by siva7 »

Kelamir wrote: post #199
siva7 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Word of caution to other readers: Don't use Anki for cramming. Especially not if you didn't learn and understand the material before cramming.

Could you explain why that might not be a good thing to do, siva7?

I've used anki for over a decade and done that mistake several times. Anki is designed to reinforce knowledge you've already learned, not to introduce new information. The cards shown in a SRS alogrithm don't follow an order which makes it suited from a pedagogic POV for acquiring new knowledge. Cramming tends to be done when knowledge hasn't been yet learned or understood sufficiently.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#204

Post by maCDzP »

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…

I agree. I believe that it’s one of the things that sets apart great books. Lately I see this more often and think “Neat, they make me practice this old idea and make me build this new thing”. It makes an appreciate the work and thought that went into writhing the text much more.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#205

Post by karatinversion »

glenngillen wrote: post #149
MichaelNolan wrote: post #41

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…

Could you share some examples of the type of stuff you’ve added to this system that’s had that kind of professional pay off? I’m familiar with the approach, but I suspect part of the reason I’ve not been able to maintain a long term habit is I’ve always used it for things like learning a language. Which is great, but doesn’t have the kind of process re-enforcing payoff given I rarely get to apply it. And I’m drawn a…

Some examples from my life:

- Where are the log files for $service stored?

- What do the values of $one_letter_code in this message format/log line mean?

- What do I grep for to diagnose $problem?

More generally, when I find that I have memorised how to look something up (search slack for $foo to find the instructions, type $bar in the browser address bar to bring up the wiki page with the host name I need), I try to just memorise the fact directly, to reduce friction.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#207

Post by sph »

Volrath89 wrote: post #185
NiloCK wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People have this weird disdain for memorization. Memorization is the same as knowing. Can you imagine that there have been points in your job that would have gone smoother if you'd known more?

Completely agree here. Memorization is actually quite important. Try learning Spanish from scratch with a "bad memory" and let me know how it goes.

Nonsense. Memory is a necessary component to acquire knowledge and mastery. But knowledge is not memory.

I am fluent in three languages. Learning words is the easy part, fluency unlocks when you are able to think, or feel, in that language. When you have thoughts that you cannot losslessly translate back to your native language.

Knowing Spanish words is not knowing Spanish. Memorization is the first and easiest 5% of the whole process.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#208

Post by yCombLinks »

watwut wrote: post #180
yCombLinks wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 2 aren't mutually exclusive. If you give 2 middle schoolers a test and one knows all of his time tables by rote, he's going to fly circles around the "kid with deep understanding" that's writing out the multiples manually.

If the test is purely about multiplying small numbers and the other kid don't know multiply, maybe. If the test is designed to test understanding, then the kid with deep understanding will win. By your definition, multiplying kid is faster at multiplying, but don't really know what he is doing outside of memorized situation. And at other is better at everything else.

This applies to lots of areas though, the multiples is just one tiny example. Like rote memorization of an api for a language. It's far easier to see and plan ahead when you don't have to constantly stop to figure out something else. More of your mental energy can go toward higher level thinking when you don't have to continually downshift to figure out the low level pieces.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#209

Post by emsign »

Anyone ever measured how much time it costs to create all those Anki cards? It seems it would considereably more time coming up with the questions than reading the new information. Prep time > learning?

Re: Anki-fy your life

#210

Post by trane_project »

graboid wrote: post #176
trane_project wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been working on https://github.com/trane-project/trane for the past year or so, mostly to get around these limitations. I tried to find a way to use Anki or another existing software to aid my music practice, but I couldn't get it to work. Some ways in which it's different: - Dependencies are core to the system. For example, if I am learning a music piece, I want to start by learning small sections and only move…

Cool project! A quick question that I could not answer from reading the Github page: How married is the learning process to those "courses" you describe? If I have a topic X and start with 0 knowledge about it, could I use trane to learn it if there is no premade course yet? I assume to create a course about it, I would have to have quite some knowledge about the topic already, to be able to think of exercises and ra…

You are correct. Some domain knowledge is needed if you want to get the correct dependencies.

They can be changed without affecting the exercises so it's not set on stone. So you could try to make a lesson for the initial topics and try to adjust the dependencies as you go along.

But the best way is to get help from someone who knows them.

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