I wish there was some SRS-like tool but for learning music.
Spaced repetition systems have gotten better
261–270 of 538 posts
Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It is not a human failing. A human who has huge amount of free time on Sunday, but comes home from work super tired on Monday did not failed anything. And from the other side, there wont be any difference between you revising a card after 89, 90 or even 95 days. A human who had a lot of time to learn during January, because his job workload was easy is not failing anything if his job related workload becomes high in…
Anki has a feature named Easy Days which allows you to spend less time on Anki on some days of the week.
Source: https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-options.html?highlight=easy%20...
Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better
#263Earlier 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…
I feel like from a habit-forming perspective Anki would benefit from a fixed-time mode instead of varying the number of reviews. The default daily maximum is 200 reviews per deck, I think, but it's hard to tell whether that's too little or way too much until you've hit that level.
If you could set a study time of say 30 minutes, then when you skip a day, you could just do your usual 30 minutes and maybe only get through 50% of the scheduled cards, but you could slowly catch up over the next few days. And if on the contrary you run out of reviews for today, you could carry on with some scheduled for tomorrow until you've hit your target time.
FSRS can handle off-schedule reviews just fine, I think, so it should be able to accommodate such a rhythm where you don't always review cards on exactly the optimal day.
Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better
#264Earlier 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…
Anki already has a max. review/day setting and has had it for a long time.
In one of the recent updates, Easy Days were added: https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-options.html#easy-days
Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better
#265> Thankfully, the leading spaced repetition software, Anki, has incorporated FSRS as its default scheduling algorithm since version 23.10, released in 2023-11 I've used Anki for a long time and apply updates, but I don't closely track changes. Based on the above, I figured I'd be using FSRS, but I'm not. All of my decks have that setting turned off. Fair enough (no silent updates to existing data), but even when I cr…
FSRS is not the default, idk why the author phrased it that way. But it will likely become the default this year or next year.
Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.…
I'm of two minds about it. Duolingo is off-putting for me, not because of gamification as a concept, but rather because of their particular implementation - with tons of clearly user-abusive bullshit with gems and chests and watching ads and shit. I used to not care for gamification because I knew that my brain is resistant to it in activities that aren't otherwise rewarding on their own. Like, I quickly realize I'm…
>watching ads
Does it show you ads in the language you're learning? Because if so, that could be an asset...
Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand, wouldn't it be worse for motivation to take longer to achieve the same results?
What's worse for motivation than taking longer? Boredom? Feeling like what you're doing is low-quality or superficial? Doing something artificial for purely external reasons like grades or exams? Can't speak for anyone else, but for me I would take slower progress over any of these... which makes spaced repetition a hard sell.
Mastery by George Leonard touches on some of this; learners can fall into 3 categories during the learning process: Dabblers, Obsessives, and Hackers. Each one has strengths and weaknesses, but the core philosophy is that "mastery takes time". After 2-3 years of practice, you know all the moves in a school of martial arts, or all the chord progressions for an instrument. But its the "after" where you either continue to refine or move on to the next skill.
Anything advertising that you can learn X in Y days isn't addressing that "after" period. Once you've learned the skill, you need motivation toward applying it, which in turn refines your skills. Conversely, becoming hyper fixated can be detrimental to overall skill. "Jack of all trades, master of none" HOWEVER the rest of the quote goes "but often times better than a master of one"
Sometimes you gotta slog through the boring bits to progress.
Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better
#268I see a lot of discussion about SRS, and I think most can agree they have improved. What I would like to see covered is a more vague area, but almost more important: It’s the space in between reading/understanding something and the SRS. There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs (web browser, PDF readers etc.) into popular SRS (Anki, Mochi etc.). They should wo…
The macOS services model seems like a good fit for this kind of thing. Services are little bits of context-aware functionality that apps expose to enable integration between apps without active developer involvement. An example, in most Mac apps if you select text, right-click to open the context menu, and open the Services submenu you’ll see a number of services that do something with the highlighted text.
Ideally the SRS app would make services available to facilitate quick creation of new cards, so for example one might highlight some text, right-click, and select Services → New SRS Card… which then opens an in-place lightweight card creator dialog.
Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better
#269They have gotten better and I think it's clear they'll continue to get better :). FSRS is already good (I use it both in Anki and for periplus.app), but looking at the benchmarks [1] there's a lot of room left for improvement. One direction could be to incorporate semantics, which afair FSRS doesn't do at all yet. A good flashcard deck will have a lot of semantic overlap, e.g., a card for the vocab word itself, that…
Yes, we can improve FSRS in that way. But it requires to collect a lot of review data with cards' content, which breaks Anki's privacy policy. And FSRS is my side project which has squeezed all my free time... I'm not very motivated to improve it now.
Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better
#270Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given what you've said: * Make your own cards (unless there's an automated workflow [Japanese, sentence mining], really good shared decks, or you're studying for a standardized exam [USMLE]) * Deck Settings (scheduling): Enable FSRS. Press 'Optimize', then press optimize once per month. * Deck Settings (workload): Wait 2 weeks before gradually increasing new cards per day (if you want to study for longer). Decrease i…
Thank you, the pass / fail addon will help a lot I think, in addition to the FSRS features included in the article. I'll come back to this comment for setting up my settings before starting up again with Anki. If I'm planning to learn several topics at once (I'm never preparing for anything I will be tested on or hit a deadline for, this is not for a school, work, or travel program), is it better to treat the decks a…
Your call.
Ideally one deck, but add a tag when creating the note, so you can separate things out later if you want to pause learning something/split them out.