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Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

domenic.me

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Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#411

Post by SchemaLoad »

sn9 wrote: post #205
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…

You say that but it's completely revolutionized the way medical students study. IIRC the effect was so profound they had to modify the structure of some tests or something to that effect. And polyglots have been using SRS for years. As always, the real problem when people fail to do something that works is psychological, not technical. I'd say anyone who made an Ozempic for motivation would make a killing, but I beli…

>I'd say anyone who made an Ozempic for motivation would make a killing

This is just ADHD meds right? That's why the uni students spend so much buying them.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#412

Post by smeeger »

language learning is 100% memorization. eventually your brain memorizes all the phrases that click into “situation-space,” for every possible situation there is a memorized response. language can be broken down into situational meta-phonemes. using flash cards and grammar is just a way to bootstrap yourself into memorizing all the appropriate responses for any given kind of situation.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#413

Post by pastage »

ragazzina wrote: post #401
pastage wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing anki cards with words two hours every day, and not doing any reading of material is very detrimental for me. I do not study medicin, but for language I have to actually be able to use what I memorize. Knowing how to use words is harder than it sounds, you need context. A common mistake when constructing sentences is getting the tone wrong and choosing the wrong synonyms.

..this is why you usually have whole sentences on Anki cards, not single words.

Does not always help, but I am not picking. You are right it only fails in 1/100 cards.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#414

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

dkarl wrote: post #225
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…

> it turns out its not really a silver bullet One thing that bothers me about SRS is that it doesn't get enough attention from people who understand the difference between memorization and language acquisition. It gets a ton of attention from people who are doing test prep or who get intrinsic reward from their memorization accomplishments. Memorization is not my goal — I want to get better at reading Spanish and Fre…

If I weren't already busy enough using Anki to accomplish my own goals, I would almost certainly look into deeply integrating LLM calls into it so that we could e.g. practice writing and speaking with it in a way that is much closer to the kind of immediate feedback loop you get with a tutor.

For now, I make do by having Gemini Flash 2.5 open in a separate window and checking my short answer writing responses with that.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#415

Post by sandspar »

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've fiddled with a bunch of stuff - macros, standalone programs etc - before finally settling on copy and paste. I just copy and paste a page of PDF into Anki then cloze single words (~6-15 words a page). I've worked through several textbooks this way.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#416

Post by sandspar »

Tomte wrote: post #331
edanm wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never used it, but my understanding is that something that does this is considered a "killer feature" of Supermemo. It has a mode that lets you read text (via a PDF viewer) and lets you create flashcards as you read in some kind of semi-automated way. Or something like that. Like I said, I never used it.

No, not PDF, only HTML. There are community companion programs like SuperMemo Assistant, that enhance SM, but it‘s all fiddly. I paid for two SM versions and went back to Anki. It‘s very idiodyncratic, the user interface is atrocious (in the latest version it finally, finally added thumbs up/down icons for grading the answer —- before that you had to remember whether 1 is good and 5 is bad or vice versa). SM is fasci…

Supermemo is neat but it seems too dependent on the whims of one guy. Same reason I'm hesitant to use LingQ to learn languages.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#417

Post by YawningAngel »

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…

Yomitan (https://yomitan.wiki/) does this

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#418

Post by AlchemistCamp »

MostlyStable wrote: post #241
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ”I realized I was hitting an issue where I theoretically "knew" a word (would get it always correct on the card), but wouldn't always recognize it in a novel context.” Some of the problem is due to the specificity of the training effect. I.e., if you mostly practice something through flash cards then you’re going to be training your ability to work with that on flash cards. With language, there’s an additional chal…

Yeah, I'm trying to spend a lot more of my language learning time just reading/listening to content in my target language, but it's actually pretty difficult to find enough content that is in the right difficulty band where it has some words/grammar etc. that I am still learning but not so much that I just can't understand it at all.

That's a great idea. I was an early Anki contributor and ended up wasting a lot of time with SRS. Basically every language blogger I knew in 2008 was obsessed with it.

If I were to go back and learn Japanese again, (which I may do since I haven't spoken it in 20 years), I'd use Anki for the following:

- drilling the sounds, single syllables, 2-3 syllables, and identifying pitch accents in sentences

- relearning hiragana and katakana

After that initial phase, I'd probably make the core of my practice listening to podcasts for foreign learners while reading the transcripts at home and then re-listening to those same podcasts later while outside for practice. It's way easier and more helpful to recall words in a context you already understand.

I'd also use Anki for learning kanji if I hadn't spent years reading traditional Chinese. Since I have that background and Japanese character simplifications were so modest, I think I'd just read some audio books while listening to the audio and see if I could figure out all the kanji from context. TV series are also great once you can access them because they tend to use similar vocabulary and revisit similar throughout a season arc.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#419

Post by AlchemistCamp »

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…

If you're speaking in the context of language learning, there definitely are some great tools for "mining" audio cards from YT/Netflix and also for getting text from the subtitle tracks. Some are open source, free and easy once you get used to working with them (much like Anki itself). They're not frictionless for first-time users, though. Others are paid and a bit more newbie-friendly.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#420

Post by uselesswords »

pessimizer wrote: post #326
uselesswords wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s amazing how every single point you’ve made here is wrong as the other commenter already dove into. On top of that Anki is one of the best documented pieces of open-source software I’ve messed with. If you’re able to program, ChatGPT can basically handle any task you want it too, I data mine the sqllite database regularly for my own insights.

Actually, every point was right and the data model is terrible. I've been using it for years. The other commenter just mentioned a list of things that the software does do and basically said "isn't that good enough for you" a bunch of times. No, it's not. Anki's concepts of flashcards, and how it stores and manipulates them, are horrible. It's hard to do many, many things in Anki that should be trivial, impossible to…

That’s because the default model is designed for the general user. If you sat down and really worked with the documentation, you would realize you shouldn’t be using decks or collections for management you should be using tags. Decks and collections are a different abstraction for different purposes.

I’m in medical school which has basically mastered Anki. The AnKing deck, used by over a million medical students, has over 35,000 cards, cross-tagged by numerous study resources that exists on a single “deck” which receives regular updates. I regularly run basically instant queries on over 40,000+ cards.

Medical school Anki has basically mastered this workflow and the original commenters complaints are completely wrong/come from a misunderstanding of Anki’s data model.

To be put simply, ignoring subdecks, filtered decks, cards vs notes, etc.: cards can only belong to one deck, but can have multiple tags. What exactly do you want to see differently in the data model?

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