Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

> Is that not what anki does? You have a collection of cards, each card can be in one or more decks derived from the cards.

Kind of? As far as I can tell (and I haven't spent enormous amounts of time digging in), there are decks, and a deck contains the notes, the templates (and the cards, which may or may not have any sort of independent existence outside the notes and templates that generate them?), and a deck also contains the scheduling information.

One can export the textual and markup contents of decks, but not the media, into a text file, and one can re-import it, supposedly losslessly. One can also export a deck minus scheduling information for sharing purposes. I'm not sure that one can re-import it.

Then there is a collection, which is the whole world: decks along with their scheduling info.

> That's also decks. You can have your 'Japanese' deck, and then the 'Japanese::writing' subdeck for the subset which require you to have your writing materials handy.

I'm guessing that, if I start by importing a Japanese deck from some other source (because, for example, there's a source with high-quality notes), and then I split it into a writing subdeck, and then the original source adds new notes for new words or makes changes or whatever, that merging the results is basically unsupported.

> > Anki doesn’t seem to separate these layers at all. Everything is a monolithic database.

> Decks are separate files which can be shared, edited, created, studied, and reasoned about independently.

Yes, but only as monoliths (again, as far as I can tell). I can export an "Anki Deck Package (.apkg)", but checking that into git would result in a bit of nonsense. I can't export my scheduling information and templates separately from the underlying notes (or, if I can, I failed to find this option).

>> Export is unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant

> It's just files (zip files really). What's unpleasant about it?

Excel and OpenDocument sheet files are also zip files. But the respective tools are less limiting and don't expect the users to unzip those zip files. (And their merging and text import/export facilities are also weak, and that's unfortunate.)

I could be wrong about most of this. But Anki doesn't seem friendly to a decomposed workflow in the way that modern programming lanuages are.

So I haven't integrated FSRS, and of these two, I've only used Wanikani, and have been playing with a reimplemention for Chinese hanzi: https://hanzi.bpev.me

But seeing how it's implemented, I think they could totally integrate something like FSRS to at least just replace their scheduling (how long until an item is next shown). The unlocking system can be implemented as a separate gatekeeping mechanism, and the buckets can be coded for certain step thresholds (instead of wanikani's "stage").

Basically, this is their entire srs system: https://docs.api.wanikani.com/20170710/#spaced-repetition-sy...

systemS? There is only one program out there that is viable: AnkiDroid.

Anki runs on desktop: you have to be chained to a desk rather than taking advantage of idle moments when you are on-the-go. Even if you have it on a laptop, you still need a place to sit; SRS on mobile can be used anywhere, like standing-room-only public transit.

The AnkiMobile companion app for iOS is a paid app that is somehow chained to the desktop version, whereas AnkiDroid is a full-featured clone of Anki that you could use air gapped without ever syncing anything to or from another device. It has integrated management of decks and note creation/editing.

Every other SRS app out there is just playing very distant catch-up to Anki/AnkiDroid. They usually mention Anki in their pitch, trying desperately to explain why some very minor and very subjective negative point about Anki is worth switching to their massively inconvenient solution.

> If we step back, we realize that this scheduling system (called “SuperMemo-2”) is pretty arbitrary. Where does the rule of 1, 6, 2.5times correct + 1, reset back on failure come from? It turns out it was developed by a college student in 1987 based on his personal experiments. Can’t we do better?

Note that Anki uses (used) such an old algorithm because it derived it from an ancient open source version of SuperMemo, a software which started the spaced repetition trend. Anki just added a usable GUI instead of the convoluted mess that is SuperMemo. Newer versions of SuperMemo improved the algorithm, but they are no longer open source. I wonder how FSRS compares to current iterations of the SuperMemo algorithm.

I learned 17.5k words comprised of ~3k kanji in around 2 years at about an hour a day of review time. That's reviews + new cards, not including time immersing in order to find the daily quota of new vocab which itself was 2 to 3 hours of study.

So, by my calculations for just the Anki time alone it's about 17.5k words split across 730 hours, which comes out to about 23 words and hour or one word every 2.5 minutes.

I've seen a pretty wide variety of people do Anki, and I can say there's a distribution in length of time per card for basically the exact same types of cards among people. The slowest people average around 3x slower than the fastest.