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Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

domenic.me

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Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#211

Post by sn9 »

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?

A quick and easy one is learning the NATO phonetic alphabet. You can find premade decks for it.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#212

Post by maxwellg »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #204

Pro Tip , if you're using LLMs to learn, create an MCP tool for them to insert Anki cards on topics you're discussing in a csv on google drive, then sync that with you anki decks on your phone. This was a game changer for me and working with LLMS, while I still think they make you dumb, and we essentially use them to offload critical thinking (almost only find myself using them when tired lazy, and just cant), if you…

ChatGPT 4o's voice mode has been mindblowing for me for learning basic Mandarin. I'm sure I will hit the limits of the model sooner or later, but it has been so much fun bouncing around my apartment and asking what various objects are called / if words are related to other words. It is phenomenal for putting together short little sentences and getting immediate validation on grammar too.

No MCP on ChatGPT yet, but I can ask chat to generate an output of what we reviewed in a structured format.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#213

Post by grep_name »

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've tried to get into anki a bunch of times but never stick with it. It's an on-and-off thing for me that I end up looking into again every few years, which I've gone through about 5 times now. Here's how it usually goes:

* Get interested in memorizing something / multiple things

* Find that the decks available to me are actually not so great

* Get reading online, people say that the real way to benefit from it is to make your own deck (which ups the time commitment significantly)

* Read online about how to get the most out of anki, find out that everyone universally agrees that the default settings are terrible but nobody quite agrees on how to set it for best results

* Try to hit a happy medium, but find that the overhead of 'rating' the difficulty of recall for cards (and how it interacts with the complex settings that I still don't have complete confidence in) adds an incredibly (to me) distracting amount of overhead and never get used to it

* Miss a few days, get overwhelmed with the amount of cards stacked up, don't feel good about my settings (which have implications for what cards show up like, a year + down the line)

* Ultimately fizzle out

I'm probably going to start the cycle over again soon. I really do want it to work out for me. Any tips to avoid this issue? I'm planning to actually pay for some decks this time to see if that gets me to the quality I want, and going to skip the whole 'trying to make my own deck' thing for now

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#214

Post by bawolff »

InkCanon wrote: post #102
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…

It's someone I wondered, what is the point of memorizing a proof if it only ever proves something you already know. The answer is you hope it generalises. There is a possible way you can do it in SRS, being inspired by RL training. Instead of cards you'd show options within a game or simulation. But this would need a lot of expert knowledge for a single concept.

Sure, but if you are memorizing the proof instead of understanding it, you aren't going to be able to generalize it.

In general, math is not a subject where memorization is going to get you ahead. The "why" matters much more than the "what".

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#215

Post by marcosdumay »

Alex-Programs wrote: post #53
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 burnin…

IMO, the most limiting feature is that spaced repetition is a method for memorization, but memorization is only one part of learning and it's very often not the most prevalent part.

But when memorization applies, gamification is a really good way to avoiding burnout (as long as you don't overexpose yourself to it). There are many spaced repetition games for children, I don't know why people make so few of them for adults. (But then, fearing the duolingo owl is a popular meme nowadays.)

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#216

Post by sn9 »

cjauvin wrote: post #54

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 repetitio…

Memory is a prerequisite for understanding.

You can't understand something you can't remember.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#217

Post by sn9 »

Muvasa wrote: post #47
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.

Yeah you're basically just using the algorithm to schedule review, just like going through old problem sets.

It's the next best thing to getting an infinite stream of new problems of a type of problem.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#218

Post by url00 »

InkCanon wrote: post #104
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…

There was an interesting post here awhile back about autonomy and motivation. The gist was people's motivation is proportional to their autonomy. This is quite intuitive, you can see people are really motivated when they have autonomy (think kids with Minecraft, musicians with instruments). One terrible thing about Anki is that it probably is horrible for autonomy. Quite possibly using anki actually has a negative ef…

That sounds very interesting! Do you still have a link to that post?

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#219

Post by yCombLinks »

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?

Leetcode patterns, and common problem types to apply those patterns to.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#220

Post by jaredklewis »

amluto wrote: post #181
TheDong wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 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. > There also ought to be a way to constrain what cards s…

> 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…

Maybe I misunderstood something, but I can't find anything in your comments that identifies a flaw with the underlying data model of Anki. It seems your issues are mostly about Anki's data management?

So I would strongly suggest your check out anki-connect (https://git.sr.ht/~foosoft/anki-connect) which provides a REST API for CRUD operations on Anki notes, cards, decks, and media attachments.

Or maybe if you can share in a little more detail on what you are studying, the format of the data, and the exact way that your attempted workflow is breaking down with Anki, I'd be surprised if no one had suggestions for making it work.

Edit: also, to answer a question in your initial post, is there a better SRS tool out there? I've never found anything. For all its warts and flaws, Anki is good where it matters, extensible enough to support pretty much all use cases, and has excellent data portability.

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