Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Anki-fy your life

abouttolearn.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 233 posts

Re: Anki-fy your life

#151

Post by Firther »

watwut wrote: post #72
MichaelNolan wrote: post #41

I'm a huge fan of spaced repetition and Anki. I strongly believe that most people's professional lives would be improved by using it. There is a huge amount of information that falls into the zone of it's needed often enough that not knowing it is a pain, but it's not needed often enough that you would "naturally" remember it. I've yet to find anything else that only takes 10 to 20 minutes a day that has a higher ROI…

It seems to me that pretty much anything has better ROI then 10-20 minutes of pure rote memorization a day. Plus, keeping in 10-20 minutes a day requires separate skill on itself. Anki has a way of taking over and expanding the time it requires.

Would it be better if memorisation could be achieved through distributed practice, vocabulary learned through reading and listening, spaced repetition achieved through well written textbooks, curriculum, mentorship, etc? Absolutely, but these factors aren't always a given and often are often outside of one's own control. If failing to keep good Anki hygiene is considered in the ROI calculations, these issues should be included to.

Maybe your textbooks just don't distribute problems well enough, the curriculum changes drastically such that what you've just learned isn't touched on again before you forget it, or maybe you just don't have the time or material to consistently practice foreign languages for 1-2 hours a day. In these cases, the 10-20 minutes spent reviewing cards serves as a useful crutch in preventing that information being forgotten entirely, which undoes all the time spent trying to learn it in the first place.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#152

Post by hackernewds »

NiloCK wrote: post #124
coffeebeqn wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it useful? My job at least isn’t bottlenecked by me not memorizing enough things. Or maybe it is! But I’m not convinced

People have this weird disdain for memorization. Memorization is the same as knowing. Can you imagine that there have been points in your job that would have gone smoother if you'd known more?

Knowing is not the same as understanding though. For example, I do not see any value of winning the spelling bee in real life applications. This is actually widely accepted as the downrisk in Asian education systems - the emphasis on rote learning vs practical application.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#153

Post by yCombLinks »

hyperbovine wrote: post #142
yCombLinks wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strong disagree. The pivot completely away from rote memorization in public schools is a mistake. Being able to immediately conjure math facts for example without having to use higher level concentration makes the next level of thought easier to access. Rote memorization is currently undervalued.

Oh man I could not disagree more. “Math facts” don’t require any sort of conjuring, in fact cease to seem mystical at all, once you have a deep understanding of the material. Take your favorite math textbook—do you seriously think the author wrote all that down by rote memorization? Of course not: it came naturally as a byproduct of study. Memorization for the sake of memorizing is the worst possible way to learn mat…

The 2 aren't mutually exclusive. If you give 2 middle schoolers a test and one knows all of his time tables by rote, he's going to fly circles around the "kid with deep understanding" that's writing out the multiples manually.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#154

Post by hackernewds »

textninja wrote: post #134
yt-sdb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a TLDR for that article? It's pretty long and wordy.

I asked ChatGPT to summarize the article as Anki cards: What memory type is virtually limitless? Long-term memory What's the bottleneck between working and long-term memory? Speed of transferring memories What is a "schema" in long-term memory? A pattern of knowledge for understanding What happens when long-term memories return to working memory? Memory evolves, updates schema What is Anki commonly used for? Rote lea…

> summarize the article as Anki cards

that's a very clever prompt mechanism you used there

Re: Anki-fy your life

#155

Post by TheDong »

palmy wrote: post #14
LastTrain wrote: post #4

[flagged]

Anki is free on anything but iOS. Don't know why the iOS app is the only one with a fee.

Since there's a mobile-optimized web version, it's also free-ish on iOS.

I know people who have used it on iOS for years for free by just using the web version and never buying the app, and they seem quite happy with that setup.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#156

Post by hackernewds »

textninja wrote: post #138
tastysandwich wrote: post #76

I absolutely love Anki. A lot of software make empty promises around productivity improvements. Especially in education. Anki is one of those rare tools that genuinely 10x's you over your peers. I used it when studying Japanese and it was a massive help. However, having used it for over 12 years to memorise many different things I have noticed one caveat. If you're not also using what you're memorising outside of Ank…

I tried to use Anki a long time ago, but maintaining cards ended up being too toilsome. Now that we have ChatGPT and other AI tech to take some of the pain out of that, I might give it another try for language study. I do however maintain that for many skills it’s better to memorize processes over facts, and develop a more nuanced embedding with natural repetition intervals, rather than overfitting via excessive Anki…

try for any subject

"summarize X as Anki cards". I found a reply above particularly helpful to even summarize anything at all.

perhaps someone could design software that automatically translates the article to the Anki cards as well. I'd love to collaborate with someone on such a project (as a data scientist)

Re: Anki-fy your life

#157

Post by hackernewds »

TwentyPosts wrote: post #93
bluquark wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or rather, one of them, considering that [Duolingo] has all sorts of issues. Yep. I agree with measured criticisms of Anki even while feeling the app is really useful if you use it well. Whereas Duolingo isn't worth bothering with at all. It's purely optimized to maximize engagement/revenue.

As someone who didn't like the idea of learning a language at all but has to, I'm glad that Duolingo gave me a very, very easy way to get started with literally anything at all. It's simple and streamlined, meaning that it's easy to start and stick with it instead of getting hung up on how to find a good textbook, or figuring out how to use Anki "properly". This also applies to practicing every single day: I find it…

what if Duolingo employed Anki?

Re: Anki-fy your life

#158

Post by hackernewds »

TwentyPosts wrote: post #97
wizzwizz4 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Duolingo used to be better: people who are talking about Duolingo might be referencing how it used to be.

I'm not. I'm a new user, and I notice that Duolingo kind of sucks, but I am getting some amount of value out of it. I'm very open to suggestions for better language learning apps, though.

Read this and you'll realize why Duolingo has gone down the wayside

https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-duolingo-reignited-us...

Shows when incentives are aligned to shareholders vs users, that is the outcome you get

Re: Anki-fy your life

#159

Post by hackernewds »

triyambakam wrote: post #6

Anki (or a Leitner box) is the recommended method from the book "Fluent Forever" After learning one language in school and a few others ad hoc on my own I gave this method a try. I quickly gave up, though, once I discovered Dr Krashen's work on comprehensible input, and how boring and time consuming creating and studying Anki is. Dr Krashen's work says that we learn language when we understand it. I.e. when we receiv…

You have used so much jargon in your comment, that as someone who is interested in learning languages but hasn't gone into the rabbit hole for years (90% of HN?), it was tough. Perhaps says what you preach about "receive input at our level".

Re: Anki-fy your life

#160

Post by maphew »

zvmaz wrote: post #59
yt-sdb wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a TLDR for that article? It's pretty long and wordy.

I have found out that I was bad at card making when reviewing the first cards I made after a lapse of time of not using Anki. My then self got frustrated and irritated by how vague and non-specific the cards I made myself were. I certainly learned something about my memory and cognition. The article is long, but it has some insights that resonated with me. I think the quality of the cards one makes is as important, i…

I have made a few runs at adopting spaced repetition learning via Anki into my life. The failure point each time so far has been making cards that are worth anything.
Post reply on HN