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Effective Spaced Repetition

borretti.me

71–80 of 268 posts

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#71

I need to memorize the shapes of seven modes on the guitar. (A mode is kind of like a scale.) The image here shows them starting from F: https://www.anyonecanplayguitar.co.uk/three-note-per-string-... Is this a good fit for this technique? I'm not sure how to decompose it further than "G Dorian." I'm also not sure if the time would be better spent just playing them more.

Having done this myself I recommend two things:

- 4 notes per string (there are fewer, bigger shapes to get into your head), helps you break out of the caged boxes

- thinking of the guitar as a pentatonic instrument and using that as your framework (notice how the open strings are a pentatonic scale). Check out the miles okazaki book, it's all about this

& Anki is a great tool. Good luck!

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#72

I need to memorize the shapes of seven modes on the guitar. (A mode is kind of like a scale.) The image here shows them starting from F: https://www.anyonecanplayguitar.co.uk/three-note-per-string-... Is this a good fit for this technique? I'm not sure how to decompose it further than "G Dorian." I'm also not sure if the time would be better spent just playing them more.

Practice what you want to learn. If that's to use them while playing, develop muscle memory and practice with music.

Maybe you could use Anki to prompt different modes you could then practice over music though.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#73
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 would actually advise against it, or at least take the approach of removing cards that are too easy. I remember reading some article about spending your time learning stuff that is "just hard enough". When you study things that are easy you are kind of wasting time, you want to the material to be +1 in difficulty what you already know, not +0, not +250. While the easy questions give you satisfaction, they aren't helping you actually learn. I would argue that multiple cards on the same subject end up equating to a bunch of time wasting easy cards.

The disclosure to this is that I also don't think you should spend a lot of time figuring out how to create cards. There is some payoff in optimizing the process, but focus on just making the cards and reviewing them so you are learning the actual target subject.

All that said, my current approach is to create cards for concepts that I think are a little hard to understand or that I know I won't see enough repetition in daily work/tasks. If I find out after a few weeks the cards are too easy or too similar I usually with just delete it.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#74
post #13

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 mast…

I actually used Anki cards to study LeetCode problems when preparing for interviews and it seemed to help. After doing a problem and solving it I created the card as such:

- Front of card is the entire LC problem statement

- Back is a bulleted list of the steps or key points (ie. first I notice this list is unsorted, so I would sort first, next I would do blah blah..)

- Back also contains the code solution that I might just glance through or look at a particular part of it.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#75
I read so many good things about spaced-repetition but havent had the discipline to stick with it and make it work for me ... I wil give it one more shot with flashcards on a exam prep I am about to embark on.

Is there any gentle kid-friendly introduction to this topic with a fun exercise that I can introduce my K-12 kids to so they might grow up with better tools than me?

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#77
A question to the experienced Anki users:

The recommendation is to learn before you memorize.

Many times I hack the infos (from an article) right into Anki. Now if it‘d want to review the infos in the Anki app, that totally destroys my stats.

What are some of you doing? Extract the info into some other tool, review the infos there and then quiz yourself in Aki?

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#78
post #13

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 mast…

Maybe try drawing the key points instead of text cards. Idea sparked by the below, which is awesome but requires someone else who already understands to create the learning material first.

"Each 5-minute video, or 'cartoon', is the equivalent of 50 minutes of a university-level computer graphics class. ... there was no statistically significant difference in learning effectiveness between [cartoons & lectures] as measured by exam, homework, and project scores. In other words, the cartoons were just as effective as traditional classrooms for teaching the material."

https://g5m.cs.washington.edu/

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWfDJ5nla8UpwShx-lzLJqcp5...

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#79

I wrote this. Ask me anything!

Nice write-up! Haven't tried SRS yes, I definitely see how it can work well for learning facts like you show. For fuzzier subjects like history or psychology, I've had some success with writing questions for myself that require more of an understanding of the subject than mere facts. (Never got to the repetition part, though.) I found that writing non-trivial questions also helped me understand the subject matter better. How would you work with such subjects?

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making your own cards is a very important step

No. As a med student who uses Anki for basically everything, this is plain wrong. The time spent on making cards is better spent on studying. Premade cards (Anking in this case) have relevant pages from multiple sources, relevant histology/gross photos and additional notes for every card, and all cards are tagged with their corresponding chapters in multiple textbooks. If I spent time trying to do something similar (…

yes if you are trying to memorize facts and reference material and maybe even language, then yes, using premade cards are probably chill. especially if all the material is standard.

if you are reading abstract stuff or more novel stuff that people are still understanding, then your own breakdown and understanding used to make cards is incredibly more helpful. If i was learning differential calculus, someone's analogies and metaphors of cards would not be understandable to me at all.

i have to admit i added my own bias here so thank you for expanding.

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