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Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

domenic.me

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Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#361

Post by mrbombastic »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #274
mrbombastic wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Check out if there are comprehensible input sites for your target language if you haven’t already, for example fo spanish there is: https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ which puts out videos labeled with various difficulties of speaking and listening

How well does this work?

Pretty well in my experience if you are trying to build listening comprehension and pronunciation. But it is just one tool in tool belt would recommend just as augmenting other language learning tools.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#362

Post by ayrtondesozzla »

runarberg wrote: post #184
Alex-Programs wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I‘m not super well versed in the literature but I know this has been researched, and—unless you are being hyperbolic—it completely fails the sniff test. As OP points out, SRS is optimized for memory retention. You will almost certainly encounter many more words watching a two hour long video, but you certainly won‘t retain nearly as many words as half an hour of SRS. Actually you can combine the two. Use the two hour…

Oh thanks, I didn't know there was a name for the thing I've been doing. Vocabulary mining is a nice term.

I agree with your general point too. People are correct to say SRS only helps with memorising and not with learning, but this is only a problem if you haven't developed functional learning techniques or you have to learn something you don't enjoy. Good learning essentially hinges on interest and excitement, and making the thing you're learning relatable or catchy.

If you have exams and deadlines, this can be hard. If you've no exams and no deadlines, just flashcard anything interesting that comes your way, include context and jokes, and focus on enjoying yourself. Delete flashcards with a smile if they annoy you a few repetitions down the line. Make all your own cards. Invent funny stuff, find quirky facts that stand out.

E.g., the area of Ireland is 84,421km^2 - all powers of 2. I never had a "yardstick" for big areas, now I do. Borneo is nearly nine Irelands in size.

Or another example, French Polynesia has 121 islands, 75 of which are inhabited. I found this fact shocking, so I thought I'd put it in to a flashcard. After some quick reflection, I'm sure you too could come up with ways to make those numbers stand out.

Another - the title of Wittgenstein's "Tractatus Logico Philosophicus" - where truth tables were popularised - ends in SOS. No more forgetting the title, or where truth tables are from!

In summary - learn things you like, and make it spicy for you.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#363

Post by maxdarapper »

aaldrick wrote: post #232

I 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…

I built a native flashcard app for mac that includes spaced repetition. You can close the main window, so it is not in the way and just select add flashcard from the top right menu bar in whichever application you are in

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flashcard-max/id1430950704

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#364

Post by milst »

What’s a good way to learn to understand concepts in a spaced-repetition way? I’ve used anki before for remembering facts or answers to specific questions, but is there a standard way to setup spaced repetition flashcards to learn, for example, when to apply a certain software pattern or something?

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#365

Post by aswegs8 »

BeetleB wrote: post #199
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…

> Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet. Easy statement to make when you're not defining the silver bullet. Kind of like saying dieting turns out not to be a silver bullet. I've used spaced repairing for over 6 years. It's been transformative for me.

Would love to hear about how it was transformative for you

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#366

Post by aswegs8 »

antasvara wrote: post #61
jgalt212 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You still have to do the work Spaced repetition is doing the work.

The "work" is actively trying to recall the information on the card. Spaced repetition is just a more efficient way of doing this than (for example) cycling through every single card, every single day.

...and more efficient than reading long-form text or course material

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#367

Post by paulluuk »

kqr wrote: post #318
aaldrick wrote: post #232

I 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…

> There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs I think this is a common misunderstanding. Half the benefit of SRS comes from working out what the flashcards are. You have to circle around a concept, look for similarities, differences, examples, generalisations, properties, etc. Is it hard work? Yes. Does it help understanding? Massively. This is also a very diffi…

> They try, write bad flashcards, don't see results, and give up.

But if that's the case, then wouldn't a program that takes a long text (like a book) and creates GOOD flashcards, be way superior over someone making their own bad flashcards?

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#368

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

grep_name wrote: post #213
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 t…

Yeah, ignore the "defaults are terrible" people. Turn on FSRS, if it isn't on by default (I think it is), and forget about it.

I have seen this opinion offered hundreds of times and each and every time I reflect upon the irony that not one of these commenters having trouble navigating the UI, etc to their liking doesn't just ... Make Anki cards about Anki.

If that sounds silly, it shouldn't. I've made flashcards out of all kinds of other programs, from vim to shell shortcuts to Photoshop. Nobody ever expects an interface built for professionals to be something they can just waltz in on and understand perfectly on day 1.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#369

Post by aswegs8 »

InkCanon wrote: post #98
hiatus wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would expect the flashcards produced under this regime to be utterly useless, like a flashcard with "A" and the answer is "B", or simple math problems. In other words, Goodhart's law.

This is a very big problem. Virtually all the results from research here comes from some form of simple word recall. Direct recall occupies some part of real world tasks, but IRL if you're stopped by doing something it's people not because you can't remember it (and you could look it up if you forgot).

It's just logical that memorization is useful for broad areas like vocabulary and get progressively worse the more depth is involved, e.g. vocabulary>grammar>maths. The first one doesn't require generalization, the last one most certainly does. Even though I find that SRS leads to good generalization if it is used for relatively shallow conceptual knowledge.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#370

Post by [deleted] »

entropie wrote: post #159
criddell wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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