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Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

domenic.me

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Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#151

Post by Muromec »

arrowsmith wrote: post #15
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…

I love Anki but it’s an archetypal example of “designed by an engineer”. It’s powerful, with a lot of depth to its features - but it’s also hideous, clunky and unintuitive, and it takes a long time to figure out how to use it effectively. An HN-reading tech nerd can probably figure it out, but your average Duolingomaxxing normie? No chance.

>An HN-reading tech nerd can probably figure it out, but your average Duolingomaxxing normie? No chance.

Me, the person who reversengineered obfuscated code doing weird crypto primitives and submitted patches to linux kernel can't figure it out either. Maybe I'm not HN nerd enough, so I had to do the duolingo to pass my citizenship exams.

Anki seems like it works for a lot of people with a very specific flow, but I don't know what the flow is and why it doesn't work for me. It's weird.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#152

Post by ix101 »

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.

It's surprising how much easier to translate a foreign when it's given in a sentence. Also helps when there are multiple translations for a word depending on context.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#153

Post by Muromec »

brightball wrote: post #78
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…

I’ve been reading about spaced repetition and Anki for years. Never got around to actually trying it on anything. I wonder if there are any good recommendations for something to try it on?

Try to learn a different writing system, alphabet or not. Arabic, Cyrillic, Hangul, whatever. It has finite number of cards and you don't need large context to understand them.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#154

Post by _Algernon_ »

arrowsmith wrote: post #15
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…

I love Anki but it’s an archetypal example of “designed by an engineer”. It’s powerful, with a lot of depth to its features - but it’s also hideous, clunky and unintuitive, and it takes a long time to figure out how to use it effectively. An HN-reading tech nerd can probably figure it out, but your average Duolingomaxxing normie? No chance.

Those reasons are why I love Anki. I'd rather have a program that exposes every mechanism of how it works and allows me to access it than a program that doesn't and the program appears to appear to work by magic. Give me visible cogs that I can tune and a good manual any day of the week.

Anki is refreshing function over form design. It's beautiful.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#155

Post by jamager »

amluto wrote: post #85

My personal peeve about Anki: I don’t like its data model. It seems to me that there ought to be collections of notes (which might be things one would download or generate with an LLM or make yourself or share with friends or students). On top of one or more collections of notes are the sets of cards to want to learn, and they can derive from the notes. This includes, roughly, templates plus some concept of which car…

For language learning only, but perhaps my own https://thehardway.app model suits you better (flashcards inside markdown-ish notes)

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#156

Post by _Algernon_ »

pm215 wrote: post #119
felipeerias wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been trying to use Anki for years. Every time it is the same story: I keep it up for a few months until I miss a couple days, then due cards accumulate far beyond what can be reasonably managed, and I end up spending more time trying to fix the app than actually learning anything.

This is an area where I feel like there's scope for improvement in the SRS space. All the SRS systems I've seen essentially assume the user is a perfect robot who will do their reviews every day without fail. But most people will have off days or go on holiday for a week and not look at the app, or whatever -- and as you note, the user experience in that case is awful: you come back to a huge number of reviews which…

>- let you pick a "max daily reviews" and then keep you from putting in too many new items up front, rather than letting you accidentally give yourself a huge daily workload after a few months

Anki allows you to do that. It's in the deck preset options under deck limits. Nowadays you can also set weekday workloads, to reduce workload eg. during the weekend.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#157

Post by Alex-Programs »

scalingpilled wrote: post #89
Alex-Programs wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I switched to FSRS via the extension partway through my A levels. I also used the little google collab notebook to custom fit it to my learning patterns - I'm not sure if that's in the version that was merged into the main version. It about halved the amount of reviews I needed to do, and they didn't come up in bursts, so they were a lot more pleasant. I didn't quite believe it at first, and worried that it would be…

I’m doing my A-levels at the moment with economics and geography still to go, do you have any tips or advice for leveraging FSRS / tailoring it to my learning style that is more specific to A-levels, based on your experience?

Good luck!

I personally used Anki the whole time, so if you're currently doing your exams some of my advice might not be super useful. I did maths, physics, and computer science. I didn't use flashcards much for maths - just for the irritating stats equations - but used it extensively for physics, and a little for compsci (I barely studied for compsci).

During my GCSEs I extensively used them for history, which is probably the closest analogue to the wordy questions you'll get in geography. I used it for facts, order of events, etc. I found that the process of organising history into a well-organised Obsidian database, then distilling it into flashcards, was as useful as the flashcard reviews itself. I recommend separating your rough working during class (e.g. the short essays you write at the end of a lesson) and your organised notes, which I split into separate, interlinked concepts with flashcards at the bottom of the file synced with Anki via an extension.

I suppose the advice I'd have is

- Cloze cards are excellent, and you should use them

- You can't flashcard your way to mental models. Absolutely don't rely on them alone, and you need to do practice questions for every separate question type you'll get until you're confident with the mental model itself.

- That said, it's easy to get into the trap of remembering the answers to flashcards as words. While this lets you "learn" quicker, and speed up reviews, I found that I had much better real-world results when I tried to actually "load in" the mental model into my head. So for example, if I had a flashcard about refraction behaviour, I'd not just answer the question, I'd also visualise a laser going from air into water and how the behaviour of the light changed as the angle changed.

For history, it's been a while, but if I had a question about one factor in a broader crisis (e.g. the Berlin Airlift) I'd try to think about the broader context of the question - not in my internal monologue, but just vaguely considering the various factors involved, the period of history, personally I instinctively visualise a map, etc, for a second or two before clicking for the answer.

Edit: Oh, and the heatmap extension is great. It gives you streaks and a heat map that you really don't want to break!

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#158

Post by jamager »

JackDanMeier wrote: post #108

I was working on a product which has FSRS implemented, and is heavily inspired by anki. The change we made was that rather than rate yourself, you have to type your answer and its graded by an LLM. It also has a button to explain the concept to you as if you are 5 (eli5) and you get feedback on your answer. You can also create the flashcards by uploading a pdf and then generate them from it. I've stopped working on i…

Rating yourself is an important trait of SRS, it forces you to think how you are doing, what is good enough and what not, what is more or less important, etc.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#159

Post by entropie »

criddell wrote: post #131
entropie wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then you should be able to link me to some docs.

Have you looked into any of the open source clients to see how they are communicating with the server?

I did that. The consens is like, just an example, yanki-connect:

> Anki desktop app auto-launch > Perhaps the most precarious aspect of the Anki-Connect add-on is that the Anki desktop application must be running for any of the API calls to work. Yanki Connect tries to sand down this rough edge by (optionally) automatically launching the Anki desktop app if it's not running already.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#160

Post by Alex-Programs »

maximus-decimus wrote: post #111
Alex-Programs wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 burnin…

I don't understand, wouldn't it be worse for motivation to take longer to achieve the same results?

Spending half an hour mind-numbingly learning words through flashcards will teach you about as much vocabulary as an hour watching educational videos, but it'll be far less fun and you'll feel like it actually took two hours.

Keep that up every day and you'll burn out much faster with option 1 than option 2. Now, maybe you have enough motivation for that not to matter, or the self-discipline to keep going - as I did in my A levels - but don't be surprised if it kills your interest in the subject.

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