Spaced repetition for study and learning

I'm interested that you chose sentences rather than words. That seems super smart now that I think about it because you can pick up idioms and word relationships as well, and it's probably a little less boring too.

Did you use it for kana too? How did that work for you?

I downloaded a nice kana set (with audio) but somehow they just didn't click. Anki eventually classed most of them as leeches and I stopped trying.

I use Anki every day. I think part of the project is in learning how to use it best. I have little interest in learning word-of-the-day or country names. I am more interested in learning new skills, and I shared the concern that it wouldn't work so well for that.

I think it's doing all right though. Here are some of the decks I'm most proud of:

- Using lilypond snippets and a midi-to-wav generator, I wrote a perl script that generates a deck for every (non-accidental) note on a guitar fretboard. It shows the fret position with a question mark, and then when you identify the note, it plays the pitch and shows the note on a treble clef. I'll probably expand it to include accidentals soon.

- Also using lilypond, I wrote a jazz theory deck for major chords. Questions like, "What chord quality and inversion is this?" where it plays a chord, and answer would be m7b5 (half-dim) 2nd inversion. My ear training has improved a ton. And, what is the key scale for bII7/iii in B major? (Plays the chord audio). Answer: B melodic minor or E lydian/mixolydian, playing and showing the scale on treble clef. And an effect like gwern described has happened. I haven't actually memorized the answer to every card in the deck (since the perl script generated about 2500 of them). Instead, I've gotten faster of doing the actual music theory processing in my head to calculate/recognize the right answer almost instantaneously. End result is that it has improved my speed in reading lead sheets. (It has not, however, improved my melodic improvisation abilities. :-) )

The rest of my decks are basically based off of Coursera courses. Unfortunately, I haven't finished any of them yet. I routinely run into the problem where partway through the course, the amount of time I need to spend keeping up with the new cards limits my time available to watch new videos and do new assignments, so I don't finish the course. I am now taking the Scala course again, and I'm hopeful that since I'm fully reviewed up through week 4, I might be able to power through and finish it with a deck that fully reflects the course.

This also means that I am improperly creating a separate deck for each subject matter, when Anki doesn't let you scramble them. I should be putting them all in one deck, but I kinda don't want to before a deck is "complete". I'm also a couple of chapters into "Learn You A Haskell", with the rest of the book on pause.

Finally, I can echo that practicing helps a lot. For instance with the Haskell deck, I got up to fully reviewed, and each card was still kind of hard. Then I spent a couple of hours playing with the first Project Euler problem. After that, the entire deck was much easier and faster. So, retaining familiarity still is somewhat different than learning the concepts. If I have a fully reviewed Anki deck from Odersky's Scala course (on coursera), it won't mean I know Scala. But if I go start a Scala project, the Anki knowledge will help me a ton, and then afterwards, the experience from hacking on the project will make the Anki cards much easier, maybe even to the point that I could delete a bunch of them.

BTW, that's feature I wish I had from the deck - some kind of advice for when it might be appropriate to delete a card. I worry that I'm doing the equivalent of writing pointless unit tests sometimes.

I have been using SRS to learn Mandarin Chinese for the last 2 years now and I can also verify it is extremely effective when used correctly, and when understanding its' advantages and limitations.

I think sentences are also a much better way to learn than learning single vocabulary words, because they show the usage of the word in context. This is very important for speaking naturally and idiomatically.

Once you get beyond a beginner level, choosing a direction of study can be a little difficult. My technique is to find sentences or phrases from conversations I have with people, books/articles I read, and from movies/television shows - and then input it into the SRS. Preferably, each sentence has 1 new novel phrase or vocabulary word. Although this can be time consuming it gives a huge benefit. Let me give an example:

  Question side: “問題是。。。你不覺得這樣，很。。。虛偽嗎？"

  Answer side: 虛偽 (xūwěi - hypocritical, artificial)

So, in this case the second last two characters made up the word that I was unfamiliar with, so I put that on the answer side. The huge benefit is that I found this sentence in a book I am reading - so every time it comes up in the SRS, I not only recall the sentence, I recall the context of the story (in this case a dialogue between two characters), and this has a double reinforcing effect. In the same way, that if a TV or movie character says a sentence over and over again in a video, it will cause you to remember the scene of the sentence, and at which part of the story the movie was in at the time.

The contrast of this method would be to find "pre-made" decks of cards for sentences in the language you are learning, but I find that it is harder to remember the items when the sentences are not as meaningful to you.

A key point for using SRS effectively is to use to review material already learned, not to learn new never before seen material. The article itself even mentions this.

(Also, Mnemosyne is my SRS of choice http://mnemosyne-proj.org/, but Anki is a good choice too.)

I've previously had good experiences with ProVoc (and now iVocabulary, a fork of ProVoc) but stopped using it and instead use Duolingo now because I lacked a good flashcard resource. I didn't have the time to think up new flashcards and learn them on a regular basis. Where do you get your sentences from for Anki? Is there a good repository online that you'd recommend (preferably with some kind of community review)?