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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

#201

Post by such_a_casual »

vehementi wrote: post #198
such_a_casual wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's just that your point of sensitivity is the idea of people ever talking behind your back Exactly, everyone has their own values. I value honesty. OP values dishonesty.

Though you haven't yet been called out for it, in your posts you repeatedly create a false dichotomy: either the boss is honest and must say "fuck you, you are a stupid fucking chef" or the only other choice is to be dishonest and patronise. That is not true. In this post, I am providing you direct feedback about how you are wrong, without calling you an idiot or saying something like "what the fuck do you think this…

It's a range. The exaggerations are there to make you think about things differently. One man's answer to "verbal abuse" is another man's "patronizing dishonesty". You've taken my hyperbole too literally. Statements like, "I value honesty. OP values dishonesty." are meant as a playful jest to make you question the value of honesty in modern society. There is no one going out and complaining that patronizing employees is morally wrong, because the vocal majority on the matter does not represent these people. There is no voice in defense of brutal sincerity. The point of all of this is simply to shed light on different values as was stated in my original post. My thesis does not revolve around the existence of a dichotomy, it revolves around the fact there is more than just the one set of values.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#202

Post by steveridout »

xiaoma wrote: post #171
steveridout wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is exactly how it works now - users drag to select a sequence of contiguous characters. I haven't tried learning Chinese myself so I don't have a good handle on how pleasant this is to use.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#203

Post by steveridout »

titanomachy wrote: post #199
steveridout wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I make software to help language learners generate flashcards for SRS while reading or watching videos: http://readlang.com It works as a browser extension for reading web-pages or you can upload texts and whole novels to read via the web-app. You can then click-to-translate words and phrases that you don't understand, and it generates cloze flashcards for use in it's own flashcards, or for export to apps like Anki.…

I love it! I was looking for something exactly like this a while ago but I didn't find your site. I'm especially impressed by the accuracy of contextual translations. I've just done a few simple texts, but it always provided the correct translation in context even for words with several meanings. How does this work?

It's simpler than you think. It uses Google Translate to translate the word or phrase you select and the context isn't used. This works surprisingly well most of the time. Of course it does fall down, and can be confusing beginners who don't have a good grasp of the basic grammar. For intermediate and advanced users who just need the occasional gap filled it it's great, and they can usually tell when the translation isn't correct and either expand the phrase to add more context, or make use of the additional sidebar dictionary: https://readlang.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/279539...

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#205

Post by Grue3 »

cblop wrote: post #5

I used Anki for 30 minutes to an hour each day for about a year to memorise around 1500 Japanese characters and their readings, with the aid of a mnemonic technique. So long as you have an hour a day to dedicate to the flashcards without fail , you will retain the memorised information. My problem was that a job and location change altered my daily routine entirely, so I stopped reviewing the cards. One year later, I…

Well, the characters are useless by themselves. I made myself a deck that contains both kanji and the words made from these kanji [1]. This way I can learn how to read the characters within various words, although it would take much longer to learn all the kanji. I'm currently only up to the 4th grade level or so after many months of learning, but the ones I did learn, I feel like I know them pretty well and can easily read them in various contexts.

[1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/831167744

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#206

Post by panglott »

zappo2938 wrote: post #97
yermierc wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

After a career of being a chef with employees, I decided to return to school to learn how to write. There is one thing that struck me with the professors in college. While in the kitchen, if a cook made a mistake, the failure and responsibility fell on me whether I was a sous-chef or executive chef. Earlier in my career I was a chef de partie in a two Michelin star restaurant with a team of 4 cooks under me. If a coo…

The "real world" requires "learning" to be so intense and abusive that it routinely pushes people to mental health crises, drug abuse, and violence?

If a professor abused his students in this way, they would rightly be fired.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#207

Post by jeffshek »

yermierc wrote: post #102
erispoe wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> an "adaptive" learning system doesn't just adapt to the spacing effect, but to your study habits, emotional state, learning style, and even the global activity linked to certain concepts That's interesting, how do you assess the marginal benefit of extra adaptation beyond the spacing effect? My understanding is that the spacing big is pretty big to begin with, compared to a blunt read and re-read approach. How bett…

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…

I've played a little with Memorang after reading this yesterday, but I'm struggling to understand what the difference in studying was before and after of Anki.

What was the reason Memorang changed for the students that Anki didn't provide? Better default flash cards? Gamification? Or multi-factors?

I've been using Anki for about a year, and I've read a lot about Anki burnout (missing a few days means I'm going to dedicate 2-3 hours on the weekend to catch up). I don't procrastinate this as much so this becomes less of a fear.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#208

Post by ashleyblackmore »

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…

What anki offers that memorang doesn't is a number of things:

* Thousands of free decks

* An open ecosystem

* Source code

* Doesn't spam your email

* Isn't just a straightforward monetisation of anki's general premise

I could see some value being produced from this, but it just isn't there right now.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#209

Post by xiaoma »

steveridout wrote: post #202
xiaoma wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is exactly how it works now - users drag to select a sequence of contiguous characters. I haven't tried learning Chinese myself so I don't have a good handle on how pleasant this is to use.

Chinese traditionally had no bound morphemes and even now tends not to. I think dragging a sequence of contiguous characters should be good. Most words are two characters, but some are one, three or four. Many four word characters contain words within them.

This system should work.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#210

Post by yermierc »

ashleyblackmore wrote: post #208
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…

What anki offers that memorang doesn't is a number of things: * Thousands of free decks * An open ecosystem * Source code * Doesn't spam your email * Isn't just a straightforward monetisation of anki's general premise I could see some value being produced from this, but it just isn't there right now.

I'm not sure what you are angry about, but please let me try and clarify a few things:

>A better app that doesn't crash as much

Working on it. Worth noting that it's free to download.

>Thousands of free decks

Memorang has about 5 million free flashcards currently as part of the crowdsourced ecosystem. You can get content in 4 ways: creating, importing, searching, and purchasing. You can import from Quizlet, Excel, Anki, StudyBlue, and Cram, or collaborate in groups on common topics.

>An open ecosystem

While I think we could do a better job with content discovery, the collaboration tools on Memorang do not exist on Anki. If you wanted to work together on an Anki deck, it would have to be with some combination of dropbox or git. My opinion is that Anki is pretty antisocial.

>Source code

I think HN readers know more than anyone that there's nothing wrong with not open sourcing your company's code. Developers need to eat too. That being said, we are open to making our API publicly available to build learning applications on top of.

>Doesn't spam your email

I welcome your suggestions regarding email and onboarding. Currently we send a welcome email and account verification. Over the course of 1-2 weeks we give short snippets of how to use certain learning modes on the platform. You can unsubscribe from emails at any time via the unsubscribe link or via your account settings.

>Isn't an obvious monetisation of anki's general premise

It's worth pointing out that the creator of Anki has made tens of millions of dollars off of charging for downloads. I'm not sure what "premise" you are referring to - but ours is that the core learning application should be free and not a paid download.

>How anyone thinks that paywalling a bunch of flashcards is a good idea (when anki offers them free) is beyond me

Crowdsourced content is free on both Anki and Memorang, so I think you may have missed that the "paywalled" flashcards are actually an optional upgrade. As a bit of background, we've spent thousands of dollars on content creation and are committed to continuously upgrading and maintaining that content. For example, our USMLE Step 1 and MCAT content are one-time purchases for lifetime access and we maintain updates to stay current with the latest medical information at no extra charge. Users are happy to pay for that level of trust and security.

I hope the above information helps you better understand what we are doing.

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