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Effective Spaced Repetition

borretti.me

261–268 of 268 posts

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

School doesn't make people more intelligent. It makes them more educated , which can mean a variety of things depending on the cultural context, such as an understanding of social mores, skills such as reading and writing or arithmetic, and/or ideological indoctrination.

Most other things in the human body seems to be use it or lose it. Sure, innate talent matters a lot, but so does training. You’d never be a track star even with the best genetics if you never left the couch.

that's the problem though, the mind isn't a muscle. lifting weights can make you better in a different but related activity, like a sport. but the research on brain games shows that they only make you better at the specific game they're drilling, not anything else.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Mochi with all settings out of the box. Mochi doesn't even implement the SM-2 algorithm, it just applies a multiplier to the review interval on getting it right/forgetting.

Triggered. I spent so much time and effort comparing the various spaced repetition software before finally, grudgingly, choosing Anki over Mochi. My rationale was that, while Mochi's UX is amazing, the algorithm matters. SuperMemo seems to justify this - SM18+ is a highly refined algorithm and 'seems' to provide much, much better performance than SM2/Anki. So Mochi's incredibly basic 'engine' seems, by this logic, to…

I'm with you. The fact that Anki is FOSS, is still actively developed, and has a SQLite database that is easily queryable are also important considerations for me when selecting tools that will be used over such long periods of time. I've just been burned too often by online services that shut down or change significantly from what I originally wanted to use them for.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. As a med student who uses Anki for basically everything, this is plain wrong. The time spent on making cards is better spent on studying. Premade cards (Anking in this case) have relevant pages from multiple sources, relevant histology/gross photos and additional notes for every card, and all cards are tagged with their corresponding chapters in multiple textbooks. If I spent time trying to do something similar (…

My wife gave up trying to use Anki in med school because it worked against her. There's no way to go through a whole deck in one sitting. Anki might be useful for a few light cards every day but it's useless for the long study sessions demanded by med school.

[deleted]

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#264
post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem is you can't go through a whole deck like you can with real flashcards. You definitely can, just not in a single day which is not something you should do. Anki takes commitment.

For med students, you need to be able to hit a whole deck in a day. There's too much information to ingest to not do that.

you can do that in anki, just not by default.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#265
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Science says otherwise. Saw a study with no significant difference between the people who made decks and people who used premade decks. Too lazy to get source, sorry.

My deck has 10,000 hand-made cards and I know for sure they stick in my brain easier than cards from a premade deck that I have no connection with. I suspect it depends how you make the deck. I intentionally use sentences and images that I care about. It only matters for the first few reviews though, even a premade card can be forced into my mind with enough effort.

probably depends on the type of material too. if it's purely memorization (e.g., I'm learning spanish as an english speaker) then there's probably no difference. If it involves any sort of understanding then I'd be very surprised if there was no difference, at least in speed of learning

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#267
post #86

I am a tournament Scrabble player and the state of the art for studying words is spaced repetition. You quiz on "alphagrams", like ABEISTT, and after a few times you just see BATISTE BISTATE. There are at least 80K words between 2 and 8 letters long though, so it does take many hundreds or thousands of hours to learn them all well. I have very poor studying discipline so I have my own methods of studying that don't u…

This is interesting to me. Do you make many permutations and use those as cards?

No - it's more efficient to just study a single permutation (we call it an alphagram -- the alphabetized letters on your rack). Then, when you are playing, just sort your rack alphabetically and watch spaced repetition at work.

Re: Effective Spaced Repetition

#268

Other software which have nailed spaced repetition (and a much better UI than Anki): - https://www.duolingo.com/ (language learninig) - https://www.chessable.com/ (chess) - https://readwise.io/ (book highlights) - https://examarly.com/ (test prep) - https://app.bestudious.io/login (certifications - CFA) - https://magoosh.com/ (vocabulary)

If you're interested in a more visual approach you can try https://traverse.link/ - it's an app I created which has spaced repetition, but really its goal is to cover the whole learning process, so it also has mind mapping and note-taking so you get a big picture view of what you're learning, why reinforcing bottom-up with spaced repetition
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