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Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

apps.ankiweb.net

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Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#231

Post by sevg »

kazinator wrote: post #212
sevg wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A parent is sharing their joy(!) of using Anki to help their child develop curiosity, feel a sense of accomplishment, and learn about the world. And your response at someone else's joy is to swat it down and call it tedious and stupid?

> swat it down I don't know what you're imagining by "it", but my remarks are only about memorizing all countries by border shape, not the use of spaced repetition as a whole. That's the "it" I have swatted down. Memorizing names of countries -> continent, I could swallow. That is useful. Or even latitude and longitude (rounded off to nearest ten degrees, say). Or some general indication: is it to the north, south; l…

I think you're missing my point.

The OP was a positive story. There could be an interesting discussion to be had around the subject of useful things to remember. But you literally used the words "tedious" and "stupid", and this sort of comment doesn't usually result in good conversation or debate.

You'd do well to heed the downvotes and constructive feedback you're getting :)

Here are some quotes from HN guidelines in case you missed them!

> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#232

Post by Invictus0 »

packetlost wrote: post #171
_teyd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear I have read this exact same comment before Edit: oh good I’m not crazy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38428309

That's super weird, I wonder if GP just copy-pasted it or if there's some other weird automated business going on.

GP is a well known entrepreneur: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Baby

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#233

Post by sivers »

packetlost wrote: post #171
_teyd wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I swear I have read this exact same comment before Edit: oh good I’m not crazy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38428309

That's super weird, I wonder if GP just copy-pasted it or if there's some other weird automated business going on.

Yeah sorry, I started writing the comment, then had deja vu, so I looked at my HN history, realized I'd already said it better before, and thought it was worth just pasting the previous one. Not automated.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#234

Post by afiodorov »

I'm a big fan of spaced repetition, though I've hung up my hat with it for now. My journey with spaced repetition is a bit of a throwback - think pre-smartphone days, armed with SuperMemo on my trusty iPAQ hx4700. Picture this: a 19-year-old me, fresh in England for university studies, diligently working through English lessons on the Tube to and from work. Back then, I was convinced I'd settled in England for good, despite my English being a bit of a work in progress.

In hindsight, I'd tell my younger self to chill out and remember that learning a language is a marathon, not a sprint.

SuperMemo was a game-changer for me, boosting my memory like nothing else. It's like when you're coding in a language you haven't used in ages – things are on the tip of your tongue, but you're not quite sure. Is it len(arr), arr.length, arr.length(), or... darn it, is it size? sizeof? Space repetition solves this problem for good!

For my graduate math exams, SuperMemo was my secret weapon. I'd jot down all the proofs I needed to memorize and challenge myself to write them out. It worked wonders – I aced those exams. But interestingly, it wasn't about memorizing the proofs word for word; it was more about getting the structure and the key tricks down pat. In my practice runs, I'd often take shortcuts because who has the time to write everything out in full detail?

Then came Anki for my Spanish adventures. Nowadays, I'm dabbling in Portuguese but have given Anki and spaced repetition the cold shoulder. Why, you ask? Well, I'm a firm believer that if rapid recall is your goal, spaced repetition is your best friend. But most language learners don't use it. Are they missing a trick, or do they just not fancy efficiency? What stops them from optimizing their learning? I can only guess. As for myself, I've ditched it because, let's face it, reviewing cards over and over can be a snooze-fest. The most fun part about spaced repetition was creating the decks. Now, I'm learning Portuguese purely for the joy of it and don't mind how long it takes. I immerse myself in interesting content in Portuguese, occasionally revisiting something I've learned with a quick Google search. I'm perfectly fine with not reaching fluency quickly. After all, there's more to life than optimizing every bit of it!

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#235

Post by mustaflex »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #81
jan_Inkepa wrote: post #3

Every few years I use Anki heavily for language stuff (German, more recently Latin and Classical Chinese), up to 90 minutes a day, but I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up. I still benefit from a year of training, but it seems the long-tail of spaced repetition doesn't work for me at all. But so long as I get to the point where I can read or watch TV, the considerable effor…

> Every few years I use Anki heavily for language stuff (German, more recently Latin and Classical Chinese), up to 90 minutes a day, but I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up. Well... yeah? I guess if you're a full time student or something it's fine but IMO if your review times exceed 5 minutes it's time to stop adding cards for a while.

I had the same problem when studying English. I just capped my review/new cards study time to 30 mins per day. Basically if you have too much cards to review your vocabulary hits a "plateau" until your workload becomes manageable again.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#236

Post by guytv »

I've been using Anki for around two years to learn Arabic vocabulary. It's an excellent tool that has helped me remember and continuously recall thousands of words. Some strategies I've found particularly effective are:

- Focusing on memorizing short sentences or phrases instead of isolated words. - Regularly adding new words, at least weekly, to keep the learning process engaging and not monotonous. - Including only words that I actually come across and learn in my daily life, which significantly aids in retention—possibly because I can recall the context in which I first heard them. - Installing AnkiDroid on my phone to make the most of idle times like commuting or waiting in lines for practice.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#237

Post by Swalden123 »

aoanla wrote: post #90
jan_Inkepa wrote: post #3

Every few years I use Anki heavily for language stuff (German, more recently Latin and Classical Chinese), up to 90 minutes a day, but I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up. I still benefit from a year of training, but it seems the long-tail of spaced repetition doesn't work for me at all. But so long as I get to the point where I can read or watch TV, the considerable effor…

Yeah, I've had the same thing every time I have tried Anki - it's fine for a while, but once you get enough cards added, or just have been memorising a deck for long enough, even missing one session generates a huge unsurmountable backlog. It's bad and consistent enough for me that I just stopped trying to use Anki at all.

Is there no way to skip a day? And simply pause?

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#238

Post by Jtsummers »

peter_d_sherman wrote: post #209

Looks really cool! You know what I would like to see? First, I'd love Anki / Anki Flashcards to work as a smartphone Android app. Second, I'd love to see some way to for users to globally share their flash card decks with other users. Third, I'd love to see a site where someone could search for the decks created by other users. Forth, it should be permissible for users to charge very smallish amounts of money for the…

AnkiDroid for Android works well, I used it for a while when I didn't have an iPad (old one had died, had an Android tablet collecting dust so switched to it).

bbno4 already pointed you to the shared decks.

Some people do sell decks. The main issue with that business model is it's entirely trust-based. The decks have no form of DRM or anything, they're just sets of cards and media that get imported so can be freely passed around once purchased. But some people do sell them.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#239

Post by Swalden123 »

alabhyajindal wrote: post #113
Arisaka1 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait a moment. "tar commandline flags"? When I was still learning how to program, the general advice was to avoid memorizing things you can easily look up, like language syntax, framework functionality or commandline flags, and just let it happen. In fact, I recently caught myself skimming Nest.js docs to make cards to learn how to use Nest.js BEFORE I even start working on my project, and almost felt like I'm procra…

He should have used Vim instead of memorizing it's keybindings. That makes no sense at all.

I managed to finally switch to using Vim after years of attempts, once I used Anki to help me memorize the common commands. I was less frustrated when using it day to day.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#240

Post by kebsup »

clbrmbr wrote: post #225
kebsup wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks! My design is the one on the website. The neo-brutalism was done by a junior designer who was looking for her first project and she did extremely good job!

The real delight point for me was how painless it was to mark 700 words as already known and pickup a bunch of fairly common words i am not comfortable using (like “allerdings” and “eigentlich”) using that scroll-to-set-learned control.

That one took 3 completely different iterations and bunch of tweaking to get right. For example, when you open in, it scrolls a bit to the first word. When it did not scroll, a friend of mine was looking at it helplessly, trying to scroll on the left side with no success. UX is so difficult.
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