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Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

ankisrs.net

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Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#171

Post by xiaoma »

steveridout wrote: post #51
closed wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I glanced over the site, and was really taken by the simplicity of the approach! I've used Aki in the past, but resorted to scraping the sites I was learning from to create flash cards. This looks like it really takes the pain out of putting material in. As a memory researcher, I'd love to see a good example of how you (or someone else) implemented readlang to learn a language. The site seems good at conveying how re…

Thanks for the feedback! I agree it would be nice to include examples of how Readlang fits into a different people's language learning process. Here are a couple of articles I found online: - http://www.languagesurfer.com/2015/01/14/readlang-review-six... - http://www.alexstrick.com/blog/2015/9/surviving-middlebury-h... To answer your questions... | 1. is there a good way to programmatically pull out flash card infor…

Word boundary detection in Thai is indeed a thorny problem.

With Chinese, though, it should be simple. Just allow users to make flashcards of any number of contiguous characters. Unbound morphemes aren't something you need to worry about and even a single character part of a larger word could reasonably be a vocabulary item.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#172

Post by eginhard »

bravura wrote: post #118
gjcourt wrote: post #55

A friend and I decided to build an Anki replacement a few years ago, it's now located at https://www.memorangapp.com and has a loyal following of 10s of thousands of users. Anki is a great tool and has a wide variety of content on Ankiweb, however the ecosystem doesn't allow for any collaboration or the ability to keep content up to date (aside from manually editing decks, but where for example can you suggest a corr…

How can I browse the different sorts of things I can learn? The different flash card packs available. I don't see it on your site or on Anki's.

Anki's shared decks can be browsed here: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#173

Post by yermierc »

michaelcampbell wrote: post #152
yermierc wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't answer with an exact number until we can do sufficient prospective studies, but I can share some data: We have done some studies where two students were already using Anki and were failing or in the danger zone of failing. After being introduced to Memorang for 6-8 weeks, they all increased their scores by a national standard deviation and had a 100% passing rate. What does this mean? The students said that A…

Could it have been that your students were just bored with what they had been using? (i.e., not "anki" vs. "memorang", but "something I've used" vs "something new" effect?)

It's an interesting thought! Boredom can definitely lead to study fatigue, but the people in this example were medical students preparing for a high-stakes board exam at a top-10 institution. Boredom might be less of an issue at this level - it's more about efficiency and a tremendous feeling of stress and pressure. Indeed, several of these students who were in danger of failing were studying as much as 10-12 hours per day... essentially spinning their wheels in the mud.

That being said, combatting boredom is a really important thing to consider.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#174

Post by yermierc »

xiaoma wrote: post #166
gjcourt wrote: post #55

A friend and I decided to build an Anki replacement a few years ago, it's now located at https://www.memorangapp.com and has a loyal following of 10s of thousands of users. Anki is a great tool and has a wide variety of content on Ankiweb, however the ecosystem doesn't allow for any collaboration or the ability to keep content up to date (aside from manually editing decks, but where for example can you suggest a corr…

Sounds great, got a link to the repo?

It's a private codebase at this time. If you'd like to contribute, we're hiring full-time software engineers. (Python back-end).

https://www.memorangapp.com/jobs

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#175

Post by yermierc »

omgdlight wrote: post #162
yermierc wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Do you offer data export? We have this at the admin level and plan on making this a user-accessible feature as soon as we can. >Does your service offer benefits to people who aren't and don't have the resulting new card review burden or need for cramming? It depends on your goal. In its current iteration, Memorang functions very well for mastering new concepts on a shorter-term scale (e.g. hours, days, or a semester…

Cool, it's much easier to build a system into your routine when you can rely on having your data. What kind of approach will you be taking to long term retention? Do you expect it will differ substantially from the existing srs approach?

We're starting with the assumption that learners will not be able to religiously follow a schedule. That means that whether you're cramming, checking in sporadically, or completing a daily queue - the algorithms should ideally adapt accordingly without making your "to do" list untenable. One component of this is determining whether your long-term retention is bounded to a specific timeframe (e.g. learn content X by future date Y) or unbounded (lifelong learning).

What we're borrowing is the concept of memory decay, but I don't think there are many similarities beyond that. Imagine learning spanish in college: you could set a goal for your final exam but also have a lifelong learning goal. Whether you're following your schedule or cramming, your answer events will communicate with the intersecting algorithms so that you're being optimized for several different use cases simultaneously. When we launch the "goal setting" feature, gjcourt may write a blog post about it and post it to HN...

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#177

Post by shobhitverma »

yermierc wrote: post #109
shobhitverma wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you guys think of Knewton (The gorilla in adaptive learning)? They claim to be super adaptive but it is hard to tell. I used their product and was not super impressed with the adaptivity.

Don't have strong opinions one way or the other on Knewton. That being said, I generally feel that enterprise software where you sell to institutions and publishers is fundamentally disconnected from software that's targeted at the users directly. I would greatly prefer to hear students raving about a learning product rather than their instructors. In your case you seem to be a bit underwhelmed by what they offer.

Very good work. I am extremely happy for you! I have no clue why some people expect this all to be either open source or free. I have personally invested a lot of money on building an adaptive learning tool (and two years of salary losses). We are not yet live, but when we are, I hope to have some revenue model as well.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#178

Post by Larrikin »

cblop wrote: post #78
graeme wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Have you ever tried Heisig's remembering the Kanji method? I'm using that for the characters + skritter, and they're sticking fairly well. Though it's only the writing + keyword so far, no drawing. I think Heisig says you will forget eventually though, and need to read some Japanese daily for life to retain them, ultimately. I'm only using Anki to reinforce a Pimsleur course I'm doing, orally. I'm not su…

I used the KanjiDamage method, which is similar to Heisig but available online: http://www.kanjidamage.com/ . The advantage is that the mnemonics also help you remember the on-yomi for each character. It's not for everyone, though: the author has a filthy sense of humour! Personally, I found that made the mnemonics even more effective.

I've found that mnemonics really only help at the very beginning of learning. But once you even get to 100 things you need remember, a completely unrelated extra thing you have to remember on top of what you actually need to learn becomes too much.

For kanji, just remember the radical readings, and memorize vocabulary with the different readings of the kanji you're trying to learn. Knowing that 貢献 sort of kind of sounds like cocaine does nothing to help me remember that it means contribution. But knowing 献血 and 献金 help me memorize that けん is a reading of 献

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#179

Post by tangled_zans »

yermierc wrote: post #150
tangled_zans wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but while the product may or may not be good, every sentence that I read from you sounds like OMG HYPE. "The ultimate goal would be to be perfectly guided to mastery"...? Yeah, and the ultimate goal of every NLP startup is to have 100% natural language understanding by the machine... but that doesn't mean that any of them can promise that in the foreseeable future, or that I won't laugh at them if they do. "I…

I see that you're angry, but I think it's because you misread my comment. When I wrote "I encourage you to learn a subject towards 100% mastery and you'll see exactly what we mean" it was purely meant to encourage you to learn a small subject on Memorang to help answer your questions about the methods you inquired regarding interacting with the learning system. It wasn't, as you seem to believe, a statement that you…

You're right, I'm sorry to have assumed the worst! Looking back I definitely came across rather negative.

I will give it a go, the screenshots look quite nice.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#180

Post by tangled_zans »

sheepmullet wrote: post #148
tangled_zans wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but while the product may or may not be good, every sentence that I read from you sounds like OMG HYPE. "The ultimate goal would be to be perfectly guided to mastery"...? Yeah, and the ultimate goal of every NLP startup is to have 100% natural language understanding by the machine... but that doesn't mean that any of them can promise that in the foreseeable future, or that I won't laugh at them if they do. "I…

> It's patronising of you to assume that I don't, or to claim that your product is the only way to reach that. I'm pretty sure he is saying "use our product to learn a single subject to 100% and you will see what I mean". Often it is hard to explain the benefits of a platform with a few quick comments on hn.

Yeah, I was a bit too negative with my feedback, on second reading you are right.
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