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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

#211

Post by yermierc »

jeffshek wrote: post #207
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…

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 ded…

Thank you for the questions. I think it's likely multi-factorial and to be honest there are many features we haven't yet built that Anki has and are in our backlog... there's still much work to be done. It's likely some combination of expert content, multiple learning modes, gamification, friendly UI, and collaborative features. Give or take the importance of one or the other depending on the person. Some struggle with time management, others study fatigue, and others just don't like or trust user-generated content. For my own studying, I'm not a big fan of pure flashcards and prefer other methods of active recall.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#212

Post by sheepmullet »

tedks wrote: post #190
sheepmullet wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> This is because that's the initial learning phase.

> The cards I need to create to learn a concept will be totally different than the cards you create and so on.

I don't use SRS software to learn a concept. I use it to remember concepts I already know. As such creating the cards is just tedium.

For example, I used to do a lot of 3-6 month contracts, and one contract might be all backend Java, and then the next might be all Javascript, and then the third might be in Rails + Javascript.

SRS software allowed me to stay "fresh", at an advanced level, on around 6-8 languages and platforms despite not using them for long periods of time.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#213

Post by capedape »

bigethan wrote: post #59

I'm loving learning Arabic with http://orangeorapple.com/Flashcards/ The website looks underwhelming, but the app is amazing. The more I use it, the more it's flexibility impresses me. There are lots of options to review the cards, and it'll use card data to make quizzes, etc for you.

Yep, I've used Anki for years and moved over to Flashcards deluxe because after a few months on both noticed little difference in its algorithm compared to Anki. I find the mobile interface of Flashcards deluxe to be a whole lot less kludgy than Anki and the developer to be a whole lot more responsive.

http://mnemosyne-proj.org/ is pretty good too.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#214

Post by capedape »

stewbrew wrote: post #85

The problem with every app like this is the lack of good quality material. For language learning, I prefer learning whole sentences as examples of an appropriate context. But creating good lists of sentences & translations is cumbersome and just throwing a tool at the "crowd" doesn't automatically get you quality content. That said from all these tools I prefer anki since it has a web-based UI and an android app.

There is a lot of decent free material on quizlet, you just have to dig. I prefer to import it into Flashcards deluxe http://orangeorapple.com/Flashcards/ because it's easy and even after years of using Anki, I still can't stand it's interface.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#215

Post by tedks »

sheepmullet wrote: post #212
tedks wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> This is because that's the initial learning phase. > The cards I need to create to learn a concept will be totally different than the cards you create and so on. I don't use SRS software to learn a concept. I use it to remember concepts I already know. As such creating the cards is just tedium. For example, I used to do a lot of 3-6 month contracts, and one contract might be all backend Java, and then the next migh…

Ugh. s/learn/remember/ for your use case then. The cards you need to remember a concept will be totally different than the cards I need to remember a concept and so on. Creating the cards isn't "tedium", it's reinforcing the concepts you decide you need to be reinforced while presumably not things that you definitely know and will never forget because you initially overlearned (this is a technical term) them.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#216

Post by sheepmullet »

tedks wrote: post #215
sheepmullet wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is because that's the initial learning phase. > The cards I need to create to learn a concept will be totally different than the cards you create and so on. I don't use SRS software to learn a concept. I use it to remember concepts I already know. As such creating the cards is just tedium. For example, I used to do a lot of 3-6 month contracts, and one contract might be all backend Java, and then the next migh…

Ugh. s/learn/remember/ for your use case then. The cards you need to remember a concept will be totally different than the cards I need to remember a concept and so on. Creating the cards isn't "tedium", it's reinforcing the concepts you decide you need to be reinforced while presumably not things that you definitely know and will never forget because you initially overlearned (this is a technical term) them.

> Ugh. s/learn/remember/ for your use case then.

Learning and remembering are very different processes.

I've had great success sharing cards and decks and haven't found my own cards any more valuable than the cards I've gotten from friends.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#217

Post by tedks »

sheepmullet wrote: post #216
tedks wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ugh. s/learn/remember/ for your use case then. The cards you need to remember a concept will be totally different than the cards I need to remember a concept and so on. Creating the cards isn't "tedium", it's reinforcing the concepts you decide you need to be reinforced while presumably not things that you definitely know and will never forget because you initially overlearned (this is a technical term) them.

> Ugh. s/learn/remember/ for your use case then. Learning and remembering are very different processes. I've had great success sharing cards and decks and haven't found my own cards any more valuable than the cards I've gotten from friends.

I think it's disingenuous because my point is the same.

If you haven't found your own cards more valuable than cards other people made, you're making cards wrong, and could be remembering them MUCH easier.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#218

Post by sheepmullet »

tedks wrote: post #217
sheepmullet wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ugh. s/learn/remember/ for your use case then. Learning and remembering are very different processes. I've had great success sharing cards and decks and haven't found my own cards any more valuable than the cards I've gotten from friends.

I think it's disingenuous because my point is the same. If you haven't found your own cards more valuable than cards other people made, you're making cards wrong, and could be remembering them MUCH easier.

How do I learn to create cards the right way?

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#219

Post by tedks »

sheepmullet wrote: post #218
tedks wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's disingenuous because my point is the same. If you haven't found your own cards more valuable than cards other people made, you're making cards wrong, and could be remembering them MUCH easier.

How do I learn to create cards the right way?

The way you remember is you take your recall context, extract all the recall cues, and associate out from those concepts until you hit the target memory. Obviously this is a gross oversimplification, but it's basically a graph breadth first search. To make things easy to remember, you have to link them to as many other nodes as possible, and you have to link them to nodes that are strongly linked to the rest of your semantic network.

So, the best cards you can make are cards that refer to concepts, internal to you, that are highly associated. What I try to do is encapsulate the statement that originally made me understand the idea, which is usually a metaphor or analogy for another concept I've deeply overlearned. Then I make a few other cards that elaborate on the concept to get away from the metaphorical link and into the specifics.

See also: https://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm . The rules that are related to what I describe here are 11-14. This is written by the godfather of spaced repetition.

Re: Anki – a program which makes remembering things easy

#220

Post by Nadya »

tedks wrote: post #219
sheepmullet wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do I learn to create cards the right way?

The way you remember is you take your recall context, extract all the recall cues, and associate out from those concepts until you hit the target memory. Obviously this is a gross oversimplification, but it's basically a graph breadth first search. To make things easy to remember, you have to link them to as many other nodes as possible, and you have to link them to nodes that are strongly linked to the rest of your…

Thank you for sharing this before. I had seen it before but rather ironically forgotten what it was called and where to find it! :) This time I remembered to bookmark it.

I'm also going to lend my opinion: I agree entirely. If you don't find your own flashcards better than other people's flashcards, you aren't making the right connections or you aren't using mnemonics to aid learning. Personal ones work better a supermajority of the time (unless someone has a particularly clever mnemonic that resonates well with you)

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