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Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

domenic.me

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Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#481

Post by gwd »

aaldrick wrote: post #359
gwd wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s the space in between reading/understanding something and the SRS. ...If someone knows of such a tool, I would love to hear about it. I have a slightly different system I'm developing: Rather than reviewing with flashcards, review with actual content: 1. Tag the content with the words and grammar concepts 2. Estimate the difficulty [1] for you of each word or grammar concept -- the difficulty being essentially…

Not sure I understood the gist, but let me try summarise what you do generally (i.e. not just for language learning). - Instead of flashcards, you read content/write notes. - You tag said content in some way which allows you to understand how difficult it is. - When in "review" mode, you essentially choose what to reread based on the difficulty you are feeling has the most impact right now.

One of the frustrating things I experienced trying to do self-study using Anki and self-created "extensive reading" was that I found I was spending a huge amount of my time doing things to enable me to study, rather than actually studying.

So my ideal vision for what the interaction looks like is this:

1. You ask for something to read / watch.

2. It gives you something

3. You read / watch it, looking up words you don't know, going on whatever rabbit trails you need to to understand what it's given you.

4. Repeat.

IOW, I want the algorithm to do the "look for stuff to study" and "decide what to review", so I can just focus on the "study" part.

It would have a huge library of content ("corpus" in the jargon) -- news articles, Wikipedia, stories, social media posts, movies, TV episodes, whatever. The algorithm would select something for you that's at the right difficulty level -- hard enough that you're learning, but not so hard that you get frustrated. The algorithm would arrange for words that you need review on to just appear in the content you happened to be reading.

Maybe you give it parameters (something long / short / fiction / news), maybe not. Maybe you give it feedback about which words were harder or easier than it expected, maybe not.

Certainly a useful feature would be to say, "I want to be able to read this", and give it a link to a webpage or YT video, or a PDF; it could then focus your learning / review towards being able to read that particular content.

But the common case would be that you just come to it and be given a feed, as you would with Facebook and Youtube -- except the algorithm would be trying to teach you a language, rather than trying to get you to watch ads.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#482

Post by fivestones »

echan00 wrote: post #445
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…

Shameless plug of my language app, dangerous. Our language app is largely based on using LLMs and spaced-repetition. We explain the context behind every word and phrase, provide additional usage examples and cultural notes, and also use speech recognition to test recall and pronunciation. We're invite-only at the moment, but happy to pass along invite codes to anybody who may find it useful. https://apps.apple.com/us…

Sounds very interesting. I’d love an invite. I’d love to be able to navigate conversations better next time I’m in China.

I’m also working on learning Nepali which is hard as far as language apps go because none of the apps take on smaller languages like this. I’m hoping this will change with LLMs in the mix. My experience (and that of my Nepali friends) is that ChatGPT’s written and spoken Nepali language skill is too-notch.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#483

Post by tostr »

BeetleB wrote: post #425
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What info did you memorize?

Basic undergrad statistics. This doesn't make me better at doing statistics, but now I can understand things I read. Whereas prior to SR, I had learned the material three separate times - always forgot because of lack of use. SR made it stick. Algorithms and data structures. Basics of HTML/CSS/JS. I'm not a frontend developer, but this was enough for me to (mostly) understand colleagues' JS code. And often I would in…

> Probably a whole lot more random miscellany I can't recall right now.

That made me laugh ;)

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#484

Post by kebsup »

I've been looking into FSRS since I'm building a language learning app[1], but I haven't implemented it yet. Can FSRS work if I don't want to have 4 choices - bad, good, hard...? I have found myself to get into a decision paralysis so just bad/good works better for me. Plus I can swipe the cards tinder style! :D

My second reason is that I'm worried about the complexity - both from non-nerdy users perspective and me having to debug it.

[1] https://vocabuo.com

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#485

Post by prennaidd »

kebsup wrote: post #484

I've been looking into FSRS since I'm building a language learning app[1], but I haven't implemented it yet. Can FSRS work if I don't want to have 4 choices - bad, good, hard...? I have found myself to get into a decision paralysis so just bad/good works better for me. Plus I can swipe the cards tinder style! :D My second reason is that I'm worried about the complexity - both from non-nerdy users perspective and me h…

Yes. Some months ago, I forget whether it was v5 or maybe before, the 2 button grading approach meant that it actually performed better for users (ie. it performed better for users that explicitly only used two grading buttons).

I don't know if this is replicable with v6, or not. I would be interested to find out!

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#486

Post by farresito »

kebsup wrote: post #484

I've been looking into FSRS since I'm building a language learning app[1], but I haven't implemented it yet. Can FSRS work if I don't want to have 4 choices - bad, good, hard...? I have found myself to get into a decision paralysis so just bad/good works better for me. Plus I can swipe the cards tinder style! :D My second reason is that I'm worried about the complexity - both from non-nerdy users perspective and me h…

According to the FSRS author [1], it will adapt to two buttons.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/16t2lva/comment/k2cor...

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#487

Post by fastasucan »

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…

>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.

Yes. I really get the urge to automate stuff, but imo half of the benefit is from doing the leg work.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#488

Post by pjc50 »

KPGv2 wrote: post #407
paulluuk wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I do this with my kids' "exam review" materials. I'll take a photo of the pages marked "study this for test" and send to Gemini and say "make a test out of this" and it'll create an exam with questions, answers, multiple choice, true/false, fill in the blank, etc. It's really impressive. So I just tried it to do what you were asking: > Give me the first three paragraphs of Genji Monogatari in Japanese (I've only done…

How many errors were there in the final result?

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#489

Post by _Algernon_ »

JackDanMeier wrote: post #150
TheDong wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bullshitting the AI maliciously doesn't matter, if you don't want to study effectively, you won't study effectively, and that's not a problem for the app. > any knowledge rather than specifying that the exact answer should be graded I don't understand what you mean. The important thing is to feed back into the SRS algorithm "How much does this card need to be studied", and if you mean "any knowledge means we can stud…

My understanding of what is important to feedback into the SRS is, was I able to retrieve the memory, and does the representation in my memory align with what I recalled. As an example Term: "What is the capital of France and how many inhabitants does it have?" Correct definition: "Paris, which has 2 000 000 inhabitants." For me there is a difference in not having the answer at all, which falls into "again". But what…

That example should be two distinct cards, one for capital of France and one for population of Paris.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#490

Post by NiloCK »

fivestones wrote: post #469
NiloCK wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is at least half true, but among SRS folks it's overstated. The same argument stands for any creative endeavor. Debussy had a greater experience than I did with Claire de Lune, because he composed it. In turn, my experience…

This looks amazing. I love your description > …the FOSS lovechild of anki, duolingo, wikipedia, and MathAcadamy, with a more generalized surface area… I haven’t read much in your blog and the answers are probably there, but what’s the current state? It looks like you’ve done a lot of work on it. Is it in a usable state at this point?

Wow, thanks!

The app's been 'in production' for myself and my daughters for years, but no public access or polished working demos yet. I hope to have exemplar static-site builds using very soon.

I'm also working on these guys for my in-development early literacy course: https://patched-network.github.io/letterpeople/

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