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Anki-fy your life

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Re: Anki-fy your life

#221

Post by fasterik »

travisjungroth wrote: post #217
fasterik wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The post I was responding to said "Memorization is the same as knowing". I specifically chose a counterexample to suggest that knowledge is deeper than memorizing some facts about the world. In fact, I would argue that most of the forms of knowledge that are truly valuable are exactly the kinds that aren't amenable to memorization. Think about any skill that's in high demand and takes decades to master. You're not go…

Do you think it's possible that knowing more information that is amenable to memorization will help you cultivate knowledge that isn't amenable to memorization better or faster?

At some point in our education we have to memorize the rules for manipulating algebraic formulas, trigonometric identities, etc. It would be hard to learn calculus without being able to do these things unconsciously.

On the other hand, what a professional mathematician does is create new tools for proving theorems. This can't be memorized because, by definition, the knowledge didn't exist. It's true that they draw on previous experience having solved similar problems. But it's not clear to me that this knowledge is most efficiently gotten by drilling the same problems over and over.

I think this idea of using Anki for learning everything is misguided because it attempts to reduce complex topics and pragmatic know-how to a set of trivia questions. An example from the article: the author wanted to understand the AlphaGo paper, and some example flashcards were "who plays first in Go" and "where did AlphaGo get its training data". They probably could have acquired a much deeper understanding by playing a few games of Go and implementing a reinforcement learning algorithm for tic-tac-toe. Incidentally, that also sounds a lot more fun and motivating to me than studying flashcards.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#222

Post by Hayarotle »

lmpdev wrote: post #181
bcrosby95 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Understanding is the structure of knowing. Memorization is the paint on top. It ain't gonna hold your house up.

Memorisation is adding nodes to your existing network of knowledge Understanding is efficiently arranging and coordinating those nodes in an efficient path for most situations Wisdom is knowing in which contexts to actually apply that path of nodes Tacit knowledge is similar to wisdom just it generally lacks memorisation There's not a perfect mapping in English between Memorisation, Understanding and Wisdom and their…

> Memorisation is adding nodes to your existing network of knowledge

Adding nodes to your existing network of knowledge is learning facts. Memorization is making the nodes persistent. Both are important, but they're not equivalent. You need to do both.

You can learn without memorization (you can learn a lot and forget everything you've learned by the next day). You can memorize without learning the subject matter (for example, you can memorize a counting song in Mandarin Chinese without knowing that what you've memorized are numbers).

Flashcards can be used for learning, but they are optimized for memorization. We shouldn't expect them to be the best tool for learning, because that's not what they're designed for. One might get better results learning from another resource, and then using flashcards to memorize the concepts they've learned.

Learning facts, understanding how they correlate and memorizing both the facts and the correlations are all different steps. Memorization is useful and necessary, but it's not equivalent to learning and to understanding. Each step helps with the other steps. They can happen at the same time, but not necessarily.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#223

Post by qrck13 »

Anki is great. In the last 12 month, I've learned Ukrainian to the level where I can read & listen news with full comprehension, as well as truck driver theory test (to the level where examiner was blown away with my knowledge of theory on the day of the driving test) - all with much help from Anki.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#224

Post by somsak2 »

liendolucas wrote: post #115
vector_spaces wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a Python library called genanki that has a minor learning curve but isn't terrible to figure out. My process is to maintain a gsheet with data I use to generate my flashcards, then manually download the CSV data, and run a Python script to convert everything into the Anki format. If I'm not mistaken it's also possible to import CSV data directly into anki without the intermediate Python script

Yes, this is the one I previously found (thanks for sharing). Found it ridiculously complex for what an anki card seems to be... I mean from the docs I found this: > "...You need to pass a model_id so that Anki can keep track of your model." At that time I wondered myself: "Why on earth do I need to keep track of a model id for an anki card?" then quickly move forward on the docs without paying too much attention and…

Sounds like you got tripped up by digging too much into the specifics of models. While a powerful concept, they're not necessary to understand if you just want to generate basic front-back cards. Simply create a `MODEL_ID` static constant in your file and never touch it again.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#225

Post by somsak2 »

CGamesPlay wrote: post #50
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.)

You can kind-of achieve this by setting it up such that new cards always appear after all reviews are completed. You can use the timebox time limit to cap based on time instead of card count -- https://docs.ankiweb.net/preferences.html#scheduler

Re: Anki-fy your life

#226

Post by somsak2 »

emsign wrote: post #209

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?

Many people consider the prep time to be valuable itself as it usually involves you gaining understanding. That said, I don't really buy that argument and the vast majority of my cards these days are auto-generated using https://github.com/kerrickstaley/genanki.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#227

Post by somsak2 »

thrown123098 wrote: post #69

Using the pigeon hole principle on these systems tells me that if I don't eventually drop all cards completely I will reach a point where the only thing I'm doing is reviewing old material. None of the algorithms I've looked into seem to acknowledge this. Is there one which throws out a card after you get it right n times?

You can do it based on how many times you got it right, but I think a more sensible approach is to do it based on how many times you've go it wrong. Anki does this through its concept of leeches and the way that it's explained makes alot of sense to me. So much so that I've cut my leech threshold in half to 4. If my brain is having a hard time remembering something, it's probably not the best usage of my time to just mindlessly keep drilling.

https://docs.ankiweb.net/leeches.html

Re: Anki-fy your life

#228

Post by jodrellblank »

fluidcruft wrote: post #95
crazygringo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Quoting myself from four years ago: Dr Ali Abdaal runs a YouTube channel (about studying medicine at Cambridge University) and one of his videos is on "Evidence-based revision tips", with citations for the studies he's working from - here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukLnPbIffxE it's about 20 minutes.

He says that spaced repetition is effective, but basic repetition of re-reading, re-watching, re-listening is not effective.

Spaced repetition with "active recall" comes out significantly more effective - instead of exposing yourself to the same material over and over, challenge yourself to recall the material at the time when you're on the edge of forgetting it; the active mental effort of doing that appears to fix information in memory much more effectively than reading or hearing it again.

A consequence of that is his suggestion that notes and review material should not be facts you want to remember, but questions that will prompt you to think and recall what you want to remember. "Writing questions for yourself makes you engage in cognitive effort, and the more brainpower it takes to recall a fact, the better strengthened that connection seems to get, according to the evidence at least".

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18711834

Re: Anki-fy your life

#229

Post by mock-possum »

TwentyPosts wrote: post #80
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…

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…

Yep, my entire takeaway from six months of doing Duolingo is that ‘stark’ means ‘strong’ in German.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#230

Post by tomjen3 »

yCombLinks wrote: post #153
hyperbovine wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man I could not disagree more. “Math facts” don’t require any sort of conjuring, in fact cease to seem mystical at all, once you have a deep understanding of the material. Take your favorite math textbook—do you seriously think the author wrote all that down by rote memorization? Of course not: it came naturally as a byproduct of study. Memorization for the sake of memorizing is the worst possible way to learn mat…

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 you give them a typical school tests designed to test a typical school scenario, then the kid best at school will get the highest score.

But the question is, if school tests are at all related to reality. I don't think so.

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