Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

domenic.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 538 posts

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#51

Post by FranzFerdiNaN »

Pooge wrote: post #13

I'm sorry, I didn't read the article but I thought my experience would be a good anecdote. I've used Anki for multiple years and learned around 18'000 Japanese words. It's difficult to say but I'd say I've learned how to read around 5'000 kanji. When I studied in Japan, my kanji reading—don't mix that up with comprehension !—was way above everyone else's. And most of my classmates were either Korean or Chinese. That'…

Not buying at all that you learned 18000 words and 5000 kanji in ten minutes per day. Thats 60 hours a year for say five year, or 300 hours. Thats leaves you with about 70 words and/or kanji per hour or less than a minute per word/kanji. A rate which far surpasses native speakers.

Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#52

Post by Alex-Programs »

Pooge wrote: post #13

I'm sorry, I didn't read the article but I thought my experience would be a good anecdote. I've used Anki for multiple years and learned around 18'000 Japanese words. It's difficult to say but I'd say I've learned how to read around 5'000 kanji. When I studied in Japan, my kanji reading—don't mix that up with comprehension !—was way above everyone else's. And most of my classmates were either Korean or Chinese. That'…

I made a tool based on this principle!

We spend hours a day browsing the web, so I made a browser extension[0] that translates sentences at your knowledge level into the language you're learning, so that you're always learning a little through immersion.

I also used the same "10 minutes a day on Anki" strategy with my A levels, and it made the revision process so so much nicer because stuff I'd learnt two years ago was as fresh as if I'd learnt it a couple of months ago, rather than years.

[0] https://nuenki.app

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#53

Post by Alex-Programs »

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…

Spaced repetition is time-optimised, but it isn't self-discipline optimised, nor motivation-optimised. If you're limited by time, it's very efficient, but it drains motivation. If you're anywhere close to being limited by motivation (or, failing that, self-discipline), it just causes burnout and failure.

I credit Anki to my success at GCSEs and A Levels despite having a head injury, and I also credit it to me burning out so hard I took a gap year!

And I'm enjoying the gap year, but Anki made it a near necessity.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#54

Post by cjauvin »

What I find interesting about spaced repetition is the underlying thesis that raw memorization, in certain contexts, is playing a more important role for learning than what some modern education ideas would make you assume. In mathematics or programming, for instance, there is this idea that understanding a concept is better than memorizing algorithms or recipes (derivation methods for instance). But spaced repetition challenges that, in a sense.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#55

Post by c7b »

Are there any algorithms/plugins that are optimized for an on-/off-review style (ie, potentially months-long gaps between sessions)? I know that the ideal would be to do reviews every day, but I'm doing this for pleasure and I'd rather tweak the algorithm to what works for me than the other way round.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#56

Post by pcl »

petesergeant wrote: post #17
montebicyclelo wrote: post #10

Language vocab seems a good use case. What other things are people here using spaced repition for?

Mine has all sorts of shit in it. Mac keyboard shortcuts. Nautical terms. Cyrillic characters. Credit card verification codes. Phone numbers. Airport codes. Ionic component names. Names of my friends’ kids. A surprising amount of Z Specification. Anything I think it would be useful to remember.

How do you manage the data? Multiple decks or just one with everything? Do you directly use the app to add new phrases, or do you have some sort of automation / tooling on your phone or laptop?

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#57

Post by Alex-Programs »

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's an excellent heat map addon that helps with that. Some people have tried the "dopamine effect" style things (confetti when you answer a question etc), and it didn't work for me, but there are addons for it if you'd like to try it.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#58

Post by jwrallie »

mark38848 wrote: post #22

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

When I was a kid, most of the foreign culture I was exposed from came from the US, and then Japan followed with a small amount.

No wonder my second language was English and third language Japanese.

Never heard a single word of Mandarin in any media I was exposed to. I can understand Spanish very well but I do not count it as a learned language as it is too close to Portuguese (my first language).

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#60

Post by Alex-Programs »

cjauvin wrote: post #45
montebicyclelo wrote: post #10

Language vocab seems a good use case. What other things are people here using spaced repition for?

For language learning I find that using longer phrase fragments is better than single words.

The advice with gendered languages is to always learn the word alongside some context that includes its gender, e.g. "Der Tisch" (The masculine table) rather than merely "Tisch->Table".
Post reply on HN