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Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

domenic.me

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Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#41

Post by dustincoates »

yellow_lead wrote: post #23
keiferski wrote: post #8

I’ve been using Anki for about a decade now, and as far as I’m concerned, the only real improvements needed are design/UI based. It is functionally irrelevant if the algorithm is optimized or not when the actual user interface seems boring to potential users. While I do like that Anki has power user options, it’s also very unintuitive to the average person just looking into it. Which is really a shame, as the spacing…

Compared to i.e Duolingo, the app is quite boring. I still have been using it for years. But I sometimes wonder if adding a bit of gamification may help. For instance, streaks, sound effects, etc. Obviously, those should be optional

There are streaks, but they're hard to find. There is a heat map add-on that makes them a lot more obvious.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#42

Post by kartikarti »

entropie wrote: post #2

Pretty OT: A few month ago I tried to marry my simple note system with anki. My goal was to be able to send simple front/backside cards to an api and it would get integrated and I can use it immediately. Ofc, when I edit cards via my notes-backend, the cards in anki should update too. Long story short: not possible with anki. It took like an entire day for me to realize its just not possible without diving deep into…

Wouldn't AnkiConnect be good enough here?

https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2055492159

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#43

Post by wccrawford »

yellow_lead wrote: post #23
keiferski wrote: post #8

I’ve been using Anki for about a decade now, and as far as I’m concerned, the only real improvements needed are design/UI based. It is functionally irrelevant if the algorithm is optimized or not when the actual user interface seems boring to potential users. While I do like that Anki has power user options, it’s also very unintuitive to the average person just looking into it. Which is really a shame, as the spacing…

Compared to i.e Duolingo, the app is quite boring. I still have been using it for years. But I sometimes wonder if adding a bit of gamification may help. For instance, streaks, sound effects, etc. Obviously, those should be optional

I've quit Duolingo because of the gamification. It's far, far too much, and it puts me in the wrong mindset for learning. Instead of concentrating on the knowledge, I'm gaming the system to improve my score the most. There were times I would stop learning because I knew if I saved it for later, I could use a multiplier for a higher score.

And the daily emotion-tugging streak reminders started to actually piss me off.

On top of that, at one point they were changing the icon regularly and made it really ugly. Despite a ton of complaints, they left it that way for a long time.

So I canceled my subscription and I'm done with them. I'll find another way to study that I like (I've already tried Anki and it works, but I don't like it) and isn't mentally abusive.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#44

Post by hiatus »

bearjaws wrote: post #6

Spaced repetition has been all the rage for 20 years now. Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet. There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just that people tend to fall off the same way they do on any other education pattern. A couple years ago I was thinking "If Google and Apple really cared about kids they would make a spaced repetition unlock system", where by you…

I would expect the flashcards produced under this regime to be utterly useless, like a flashcard with "A" and the answer is "B", or simple math problems. In other words, Goodhart's law.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#46

Post by jwrallie »

entropie wrote: post #2

Pretty OT: A few month ago I tried to marry my simple note system with anki. My goal was to be able to send simple front/backside cards to an api and it would get integrated and I can use it immediately. Ofc, when I edit cards via my notes-backend, the cards in anki should update too. Long story short: not possible with anki. It took like an entire day for me to realize its just not possible without diving deep into…

Anki can import .csv files and if one of the column content is matching an existing item, it will update the contents of the card while keeping the repetition history. Think of it like including a column with unique keys.

I know this is not precisely what you wanted, but yes, Anki can update card contents.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#47

Post by Muvasa »

SirHumphrey wrote: post #39

I find with spaced repetition that it works really well for some well-known things like vocabulary (EDIT: well-known meant as "spaced repetition is well-known to work for this use-case, not well-known as "the subject is well understood"), medical etc. but for everything else it becomes a struggle for a long time. I have been trying for years to fined a way to use it for mathematics and physics - with the former being…

i've learned entire math topics calc 1, calc2, calc3, statistics, linear algebra with anki. It's really easy. Just add the parctice problems at the end of the chapter to the front and the answer on the back.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#48

Post by wccrawford »

mark38848 wrote: post #22

Why does everybody want to learn Japanese? What makes Japanese so enticing? Why not Mandarin or at lead Spanish?

For me, it's about the media. I'm interested in Japanese anime and manga, and now light novels.

I'm not at all interested in anything I've seen in other non-English languages, except possibly Korean now, since they seem to be producing a lot of stuff.

However, almost everything that I'd enjoy gets translated to English for both Japanese and Korean now, so there's a lot less incentive to learn them.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#49

Post by on_the_train »

Anki is a good piece of software. But I couldn't come up with a worse scheduling algorithm if I tried (old and new one). It's like "here's the thing you just added one second ago. Here it's again immediately after. Ok you got it, you'll see it once again in a month or so lol".

It makes it unusable and every time I tried I went back to my own self written program that just lets me set/adjust the intervals myself.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#50

Post by npinsker »

charcircuit wrote: post #21

The current version of the supermemo algorithm is SM-18. The author thinks SRS has gotten way better since the author was previously using an out of date version of the algorithm, SM-2.

SM-17 is linked from the benchmark repo: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-vs-sm17, though I get the impression those numbers come with a dash of subjectivity. It seems fair to compare to older versions of the algorithm though because SM-17 is only used in the SuperMemo software (and Anki) and isn't widespread.
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