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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

#181

Post by tangled_zans »

Steuard wrote: post #145
tangled_zans wrote: post #139

Ask HN: What's the coolest thing you've used Anki for?

It's not "cool", but I'm a professor who's always struggled to learn my students' names. A few years ago, I started to populate an Anki deck with their photos from the college lookbook paired with their names and a few other details. Now I usually recognize most people on the first day of class and just about everyone within the first couple of weeks. (I had trouble that year when I had identical twins in the class.)…

That's a great idea. It makes a massive difference too when the prof remembers your name, I bet your students appreciate it.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#182

Post by yermierc »

shobhitverma wrote: post #177
yermierc wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thank you, it really means a lot since we've been working on this for over 3 years now (finally hiring employees this past month!). I wish the best of success to you too.

In reference to people wanting freebies - that's just human behavior. If they see sufficient value in a product (e.g. iPhones), then they will happily pay for it.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#183

Post by EvanL »

Someone please create a browser extension that automatically adds every word you "Look Up" to an Anki stack. My vocabulary would be vastly improved if I had this, I always find myself looking up the definition of the same complex words over and over again that are for whatever reason slippery for me to remember.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#184

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#185

Post by sandGorgon »

pzzz wrote: post #70
sandGorgon wrote: post #18

Anki is great - the original Supermemo algorithm on which Anki is based[2], makes for fascinating reading [1] However, I daresay that this is a usecase that is tailormade for the mobile rather than the desktop in any which way. I wonder why the core team is spending effort behind a desktop app, rather than go full mobile. [1] https://archive.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_w... [2] https://www.supermemo.co…

It is much easier to create large numbers of cards on desktop than mobile. There are also a large number of third party add-ons available for desktop https://ankiweb.net/shared/addons/

It is actually much easier to use a desktop browser as well. Yet, most traffic now is mobile. Flashcards are a mobile usecase, I actually think a desktop version is actually limiting for them...maybe that's why Supermemo never became a roaring success.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#186

Post by [deleted] »

pzzz wrote: post #70
sandGorgon wrote: post #18

Anki is great - the original Supermemo algorithm on which Anki is based[2], makes for fascinating reading [1] However, I daresay that this is a usecase that is tailormade for the mobile rather than the desktop in any which way. I wonder why the core team is spending effort behind a desktop app, rather than go full mobile. [1] https://archive.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_w... [2] https://www.supermemo.co…

It is much easier to create large numbers of cards on desktop than mobile. There are also a large number of third party add-ons available for desktop https://ankiweb.net/shared/addons/

[deleted]

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#187

Post by tryitnow »

yermierc wrote: post #73
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…

"A friend" reporting in... While many people may love Anki, you can count me out. I used it extensively during my first 2 years of medical school along with trying physical cards, Quizlet, and even my own custom batch files and macros. I think that it works for a very particular use case, and you need to fully commit to it to get the intended benefits. My personal belief is that an "adaptive" learning system doesn't…

This looks great! I would totally shell out money for a premium card set - if only my professional area was represented.

Could you please create a mailing list for different professions/subject areas so potential customers could be alerted when relevant premium study sets are released?

For example, have a sign up list for people interested in accounting, one for law, one for technology exams etc. I would totally give you guys my email address so I can be alerted when relevant expert card sets are released.

As it is, I'll probably just forget about memorang.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#188

Post by tedks »

tunesmith wrote: post #94
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…

One of the things I realized after using Anki for a while is that school education isn't really even designed for retention - it seems built for cramming and forgetting. I'm just concluding that off of basic scale. After using Anki for a couple of coursera courses and being overwhelmed with cards for months until it calmed down, I realized there was no way I would have been able to keep up with retaining all learned…

This was never my experience using Anki. I wrote a markup language that compiled to Anki cards in college because manually making cards was too tedious, and it was never "overwhelming." The exponential backoff means you rarely see cards after you first learn them.

You also learn to be smarter about what you actually Ankify -- this isn't something you think about, because the best way to succeed in a cram model is to spend a few extra minutes that one time on something that might not be on the test, but it might be. With Anki, you can focus on actually learning the core material and cultivating a deep understanding.

Another thing I would do is just delete cards that weren't interesting to me after the course was over. There are some things I want to remember forever, and there are some things that aren't worth it.

It also helps to use the mobile app to review a few cards whenever you get the chance throughout the day rather than batching them all up. This is better for remembering them as well. This also fits very nicely with pomodoro-style working.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#189

Post by tedks »

reinhardt1053 wrote: post #74

I would like to recommend Memrise [1] as alternative to Anki. [1] http://www.memrise.com/

Memrise is fun, and certainly much better designed than Anki, but at the end of the day it's just another startup that will either fail or get acquired and shut down. All your content will be destroyed, or maybe, if they're generous, given to you in some crappy export format that won't be interoperable with anything else.

I use Memrise, but Anki is my extended memory. Anything I want to actually remember is there.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#190

Post by tedks »

sheepmullet wrote: post #153
such_a_casual wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're attempting to own the user's learning experience. Rather than attempting to build something which puts the user first, your product puts you, the owners, first. And when you say words that don't mean anything like, "it's not that we don't support or respect privacy" when you just made it very clear that you do not, it just insults the people who were listening and trying to give you the benefit of the doubt in…

> Rather than attempting to build something which puts the user first, your product puts you, the owners, first. Actually, it sounds like he is trying to put the community and the product first. A collaborative learning system works so much better with forced sharing. The hardest and most time consuming part of using standard SRS software is building your deck. A collaborative system helps share this load across all…

>The hardest and most time consuming part of using standard SRS software is building your deck.

This is because that's the initial learning phase. You can't just download a spaced repetition deck and run it though any program and learn it in any meaningful sense. The cards I need to create to learn a concept will be totally different than the cards you create and so on.

Connecting your cards to the relevant nodes in your personal semantic network isn't just the most effective way to learn, it's the only way human brains encode information. If you're not doing this purposefully, you're just trying to glue someone else's relevant retrieval cues into your own semantic network.

There are other ways the comment parent's site could avoid this, but inevitably in my experience this leads to FALSE learning, where you have very sparse retrieval cues, basically limited to what you see on the screen in the learning app. This gives you a feeling of progress, because you really can recall the information in the app, but very little practical use.

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