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Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

apps.ankiweb.net

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Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#21

Post by growingkittens »

jan_Inkepa wrote: post #3

Every few years I use Anki heavily for language stuff (German, more recently Latin and Classical Chinese), up to 90 minutes a day, but I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up. I still benefit from a year of training, but it seems the long-tail of spaced repetition doesn't work for me at all. But so long as I get to the point where I can read or watch TV, the considerable effor…

These two things are related:

> I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up.

> to build up a highly personalised system that doesn't need to work for anyone else.

"Anyone else" includes "future you", because humans change over time. A highly personalized system is usually a highly inflexible system.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#22

Post by l3x4ur1n »

sivers wrote: post #18

My boy is 11 now. We've used Anki with him every day since he was about 5. Examples of things he's memorized, for fun: * every country, recognized by unlabeled shape on the map * spelling * many body parts, names of bones and organs, from illustration * chemical elements, by symbol (Na, Fe, Zn, etc) * unix filesystem commands * numeracy references (km from here to Japan, earth to sun, meters from home to school) * re…

Do you have any particular system in place for creating decks?

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#25

Post by itsrajju »

sivers wrote: post #18

My boy is 11 now. We've used Anki with him every day since he was about 5. Examples of things he's memorized, for fun: * every country, recognized by unlabeled shape on the map * spelling * many body parts, names of bones and organs, from illustration * chemical elements, by symbol (Na, Fe, Zn, etc) * unix filesystem commands * numeracy references (km from here to Japan, earth to sun, meters from home to school) * re…

Your boy is precious! He's on his way to becoming a highly intelligent adult.

I've seen a lot of people going like... why remember stuff when you can easily google it? But it doesn't work that way. The more facts reside in your brain, the more avenues it has to connect them together and generate insights (after all, that thing is the OG "neural network").

I highly admire your parenting in this aspect, and I hope to do the same when I have kids of my own.

Edit: I noticed after publishing my comment that you're Derek Sivers! I've been a long time reader of your blog :)

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#26

Post by Tarrosion »

Anyone have suggestions for the lowest friction / best UX way to generate and study Anki cards? (my smartphone is Android, if that matters.)

I know spaced repetition is super helpful and I should be making and study cards to help with language learning and other topics I'm studying, but it always feels like a slog to try to find a deck (which won't end up being what you want) or manually make a bunch of cards, the UI is a little meh, etc.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#27

Post by g-w1 »

Anki has literally changed the way I think. It's insane how I can just choose to remember anything and how I have gotten really good at creating flashcards to the point where I predict how I'm going to learn when making flashcards. It is the one thing that has easily changed my life.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#28

Post by OJFord »

Weird, I was actually thinking of a related AskHN, that comments here are obviously now the place for.

Is there anything similar people use for sort of general 'knowledge base' type things - like people use one big text file, or Obsidian, or Logseq, or Notion, or whatever - but with some kind of Anki-like reminder/retrieval rather than just deliberate searching to look something up?

Or do people successfully use Anki itself in that way? (Maybe I'm wrong to associate it with focussed studying/cramming on a specific topic for an exam say?)

The closest I could think of was a Zettlekasten system, where though you wouldn't have the automated reminder prompts, you would (if you'd done a good job linking things) have a rabbit hole to fall down once you opened something.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#30

Post by itsrajju »

1f60c wrote: post #20

Is there a good iOS app to create or review Anki flash cards?

Yup -- https://apps.apple.com/in/app/ankimobile-flashcards/id373493...

It's expensive, but it's the only paid app by the creator of ankiweb (web, android, and desktop versions made by them are all free).

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