Spaced repetition for study and learning • Hacker News Board

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#41

Post by Danieru » Sat, Sep 28, 2013, 6:41 PM UTC

Sukotto wrote: post #33

Danieru wrote: post #13

I've been using SRS (anki, ankiweb, ankidroid) for almost four years now. I'm up to 4000 Japanese sentence cards and my amazement is constant. When I started I thought I was fooling myself, there was no way I'd be able to read real quantities of Japanese. Instead I can now read the manga for the anime I watched as a kid and enjoy the stories I thought had ended. I've gotten into a rhythm, four new sentences per day w…

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 must admit to not remembering how I handled kana. I know I did not start it until I was a decent way through the heisig book. I only remember even that because my mother was doing a masters in the university's German/Japanese department and one of the Japanese professors mentioned how odd the order was.

Don't worry too much about kana. It feels impossible now but it will become second nature. At some point you will hate it when someone uses romaji since kana is so much easier to read.

I do remember using the "Remembering the Kana" book: http://www.amazon.co.jp/Remembering-Kana-The-Hiragana-Kataka... which I can recommend 100%. The 3 hours claim is accurate from what I remember but do follow the book's suggested breaks.

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#42

Post by tunesmith » Sat, Sep 28, 2013, 6:45 PM UTC

moultano wrote: post #38

tunesmith wrote: post #35

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 scr…

Wow! Have you published those?

No... I got hung up on the idea of whether I wanted to try charging for the music decks, and never fully decided. Plus I want to clean up my git repositories before I consider releasing them. One of those low-priority todo items that nags at me once in a while. :-)

The Coursera decks I would absolutely release but I need to finish a course first, and I need to make sure they don't have assignment answers in them I guess.

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#43

Post by riggins » Sat, Sep 28, 2013, 6:45 PM UTC

jliechti1 wrote: post #37

Danieru wrote: post #13

I've been using SRS (anki, ankiweb, ankidroid) for almost four years now. I'm up to 4000 Japanese sentence cards and my amazement is constant. When I started I thought I was fooling myself, there was no way I'd be able to read real quantities of Japanese. Instead I can now read the manga for the anime I watched as a kid and enjoy the stories I thought had ended. I've gotten into a rhythm, four new sentences per day w…

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…

I'd like to learn Mandarin.

Can you give details on how you're doing this?

Like what you use for initially learning the material and what you use for SRS?

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#44

Post by riggins » Sat, Sep 28, 2013, 6:49 PM UTC

Danieru wrote: post #13

I've been using SRS (anki, ankiweb, ankidroid) for almost four years now. I'm up to 4000 Japanese sentence cards and my amazement is constant. When I started I thought I was fooling myself, there was no way I'd be able to read real quantities of Japanese. Instead I can now read the manga for the anime I watched as a kid and enjoy the stories I thought had ended. I've gotten into a rhythm, four new sentences per day w…

did you make your own cards? or are pre-made cards available?

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#45

Post by jliechti1 » Sat, Sep 28, 2013, 6:51 PM UTC

riggins wrote: post #43

jliechti1 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'd like to learn Mandarin. Can you give details on how you're doing this? Like what you use for initially learning the material and what you use for SRS?

Definitely - contact me at the email in my profile and I can tell you more about my specific approach for Mandarin. (Don't want to sidetrack the thread too much.)

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#46

Post by Danieru » Sat, Sep 28, 2013, 6:52 PM UTC

Osmium wrote: post #39

Danieru wrote: post #13

I've been using SRS (anki, ankiweb, ankidroid) for almost four years now. I'm up to 4000 Japanese sentence cards and my amazement is constant. When I started I thought I was fooling myself, there was no way I'd be able to read real quantities of Japanese. Instead I can now read the manga for the anime I watched as a kid and enjoy the stories I thought had ended. I've gotten into a rhythm, four new sentences per day w…

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)?

I recommend creating your own cards, they just feel more weighty. I did jump start my sentence deck with the 500 card starter deck from AllJapaneseAllTheTime (http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/my-first-sentence-...). Yet those cards feel different. If I were to redo things I would start from zero and build cards as you go.

My process is to add 4 cards everyday. These sentences come from posts in my RSS feed. Over the years I found websites that interest me. Take for instance http://blog.esuteru.com/ which has a very 2ch style of news, not safe for work but often interesting. Or I'll stumble upon people's blogs. For example "KEN's": http://qoqpop.blog123.fc2.com/ He is a phone "otaku" who often travels to china and Mexico for business trips. I found his blog in a N900 related search. The open source community also has plenty of japanese bloggers. For instance http://d.hatena.ne.jp/naruoga/ is the blog of a Debian translator and a journalist who I found through the OpenPrinting working group.

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#47

Post by Danieru » Sat, Sep 28, 2013, 6:54 PM UTC

riggins wrote: post #44

Danieru wrote: post #13

I've been using SRS (anki, ankiweb, ankidroid) for almost four years now. I'm up to 4000 Japanese sentence cards and my amazement is constant. When I started I thought I was fooling myself, there was no way I'd be able to read real quantities of Japanese. Instead I can now read the manga for the anime I watched as a kid and enjoy the stories I thought had ended. I've gotten into a rhythm, four new sentences per day w…

did you make your own cards? or are pre-made cards available?

Just wanted to reply to you so you'll see it: I mentioned my card creation algo in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6462709

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#48

Post by tunesmith » Sat, Sep 28, 2013, 6:56 PM UTC

dxhdr wrote: post #16

Spaced repetition, also known as rote memorization, is a terrible way to "learn" anything. The trouble is, you aren't learning at all, you're hacking your brain to force information into it that has no relevance and really doesn't want to be there. It's not a useful or pleasurable activity. It definitely won't make you smarter. Even Mr. Supermemo himself admitted that after FIVE YEARS of constant daily marathon memor…

That's funny because you can write a deck to help you learn concepts of critical thinking. Necessity, Sufficiency, Contributory Causes; Propositional Logic, Predicate/First-Order, Modal... the deck won't TEACH you critical thinking, but it will make it much easier for you to learn it.

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#49

Post by Danieru » Sat, Sep 28, 2013, 6:58 PM UTC

jamesaguilar wrote: post #31

Danieru wrote: post #13

I've been using SRS (anki, ankiweb, ankidroid) for almost four years now. I'm up to 4000 Japanese sentence cards and my amazement is constant. When I started I thought I was fooling myself, there was no way I'd be able to read real quantities of Japanese. Instead I can now read the manga for the anime I watched as a kid and enjoy the stories I thought had ended. I've gotten into a rhythm, four new sentences per day w…

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.

You're right, it is much more interesting. A few of my cards are a single word and I've found those hard to remember.

Instead sentences also let me remember context. Some cards might be speculation on a video game long since released. Others topical news reports long since over. Others might be internet slang which you would not want to memorize without the context to avoid confusion. I think this is vital since Japanese is so context sensitive.

Re: Spaced repetition for study and learning

#50

Post by Dewie » Sat, Sep 28, 2013, 6:59 PM UTC

steveridout wrote: post #9

I think spaced repetition software, which typically involves flashcards, is great for memorising a large quantity of facts. E.g. for learning foreign language vocabulary, anatomy, etc... For this kind of learning it can really save you time, especially when you have 100s or 1000s of items to remember. Using flashcards to learn mathematics, computer programming, physics, or anything requiring more creative or analytic…

> Using flashcards to learn mathematics, computer programming, physics, or anything requiring more creative or analytical thought is not so useful.

I thought you were wrong for a second, since there are a lot of definitions and theorems that are probably good to know on the fly. But then I thought about learning about the meaning of greek letters; okay, but in what context...