Effective Spaced Repetition • Hacker News Board

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#11

Post by mjadobson » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 12:58 PM UTC

maayank wrote: post #2

So… anyone used Chatgpt to generate cards for Anki?

Yes, I have trialled this. I've found it works best with this workflow:

  1. Summarise some prose (from a textbook) into bullet points
  2. Convert these to flashcards
  3. Make these flashcards more concise

I then verify they are correct/relevant, only keeping those that are worthwhile.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#12

Post by keiferski » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 12:58 PM UTC

maayank wrote: post #2

So… anyone used Chatgpt to generate cards for Anki?

I have been using it to do exactly that. However, as GPT is wrong on certain facts, I use it more for generating Anki-formatted text from learning sources that I provide myself.

For example, I’ll give it a paragraph from Wikipedia, then say, “generate 5 questions and answers from this text. Format the answers to be inside brackets like this: {{c1::Answer text}}.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#13

Post by ekkeke » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 1:00 PM UTC

Big fan of spaced repitition, especially for language learning. Unfortunately I feel like it fares worse for topics that require more application instead of memorisation, like mathematics or electrical engineering. Would love know if there was some super effective way to learn these similar to spaced repitiion.

So far, the only thing that really works for me is solving lots of problems until I have the technique mastered, but even then after a while I'm prone to forget how to solve them. Perhaps there some way to combine the problem solving with the spaced repition? It seems like it would be far harder to make a deck for this and I don't think most flashcard software handles it very well.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#14

Post by SpaceManNabs » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 1:01 PM UTC

maayank wrote: post #2

So… anyone used Chatgpt to generate cards for Anki?

Making your own cards is a very important step

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#15

Post by roxgib » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 1:03 PM UTC

I've used Anki to great effect on a number of different fields. Using it well it definitely skill you need to learn, but there's nothing quite like it. Strongly recommend.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#16

Post by rjh29 » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 1:05 PM UTC

fwlr wrote: post #3

”Individual cards should be extremely brief, but your deck as a whole can be as repetitive as you want.” Huh! I struggled with using Anki for pretty much this exact reason, always spent too much mental energy figuring out the “correct” number of cards for a given topic. But the author makes a good point here, if there’s too many cards on a certain topic you’ll just hit “I remember” on the repetitive cards and the alg…

I'm a big fan of making lots of cards, like you say you can just hit Easy and send them into next year, or conversely if you keep forgetting them and they're using up lots of time, just suspend or delete them.

When I couldn't remember a particular kanji in Japanese I used to make lots of cards that featured that kanji at the same time, and usually I'd review them all the same time, it's sort of cheating but it always seemed to help me remember the kanji in the end.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#17

Post by endisneigh » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 1:06 PM UTC

spaced repetition is dying for some amazing UX. it doesn't even really make sense for you to make flash cards. ideally they could be contextually created based on what you're viewing, e.g. you read a wikipedia article, it infers what you're reading from scroll position, takes content, makes cards, presents later, etc.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#18

Post by comfypotato » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 1:07 PM UTC

SpaceManNabs wrote: post #14

maayank wrote: post #2

So… anyone used Chatgpt to generate cards for Anki?

Making your own cards is a very important step

Science says otherwise. Saw a study with no significant difference between the people who made decks and people who used premade decks. Too lazy to get source, sorry.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#19

Post by robertbob » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 1:10 PM UTC

Does anyone have any insight into deciding what information should be memorised, and what information it is sufficient to simply store in a searchable digital knowledge base for rapid retrieval when needed?

Takes a lot of effort to commit my notes from a book into my head, but a tiny amount of resources to store them on my computer.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#20

Post by roxgib » Mon, Apr 10, 2023, 1:10 PM UTC

ranting-moth wrote: post #5

> Spaced repetition is, by far, the most effective cognitive hack I’ve used. I totally second that. Well, sleep and exercise do amazing things for you too, but if you need to memorize things, I don't know of a quicker method than spaced repetition. Check out Leitner system: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system Flashcards Deluxe supports Leitner, I don't know about Anki? https://play.google.com/store/apps/de…

The Leitner system is designed with the assumption that you have lots of physical cards you need to organise without going insane, but you can do much better if you're using a program like Anki.

Anki's algorithm is based on an older version of the SuperMemo algorithm, with some evolution since then. The consensus seems to be that while you can fine tune it a bit with the settings, the returns are diminishing at this point.