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Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

domenic.me

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Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#271

Post by Alex-Programs »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #252
Alex-Programs wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spaced repetition is time-optimised , but it isn't self-discipline optimised, nor motivation-optimised. If you're limited by time, it's very efficient, but it drains motivation. If you're anywhere close to being limited by motivation (or, failing that, self-discipline), it just causes burnout and failure. I credit Anki to my success at GCSEs and A Levels despite having a head injury, and I also credit it to me burnin…

>I also credit it to me burning out so hard I took a gap year! Do you think targeting a sub-90% difficulty could help reduce burnout? My experience is that working to recall something I'm on the verge of forgetting can be very effortful.

I experimented with this, actually. The default was 0.85 iirc, and I tried pushing it up over time to 0.91, but I ended up reducing it to 0.83. It isn't that many more cards, and it makes it far less laborious.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#272

Post by pm215 »

watwut wrote: post #223
pm215 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an area where I feel like there's scope for improvement in the SRS space. All the SRS systems I've seen essentially assume the user is a perfect robot who will do their reviews every day without fail. But most people will have off days or go on holiday for a week and not look at the app, or whatever -- and as you note, the user experience in that case is awful: you come back to a huge number of reviews which…

It is not a human failing. A human who has huge amount of free time on Sunday, but comes home from work super tired on Monday did not failed anything. And from the other side, there wont be any difference between you revising a card after 89, 90 or even 95 days. A human who had a lot of time to learn during January, because his job workload was easy is not failing anything if his job related workload becomes high in…

You seem to be reading more into the phrase "human failing" than I intended by it. All I meant was the ordinary variations in human behaviour where we sometimes fall a little short of what we hoped we would or could do.

We seem to agree on the substance: that the SRS system should be able to work more humanely with and for the kind of entirely normal situations you describe, by for instance being able to adjust to variations in available time and picking the "best" cards to review rather than assuming the user will get through the whole lot, and in suggesting to them when they should do fewer new items to avoid difficulties in a month or two.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#273

Post by Alex-Programs »

0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #257
Alex-Programs wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's worse for motivation than taking longer? Many things. I think HN is a bit of a bubble here, but you'll find a lot of people prefer something enjoyable but slower to something efficient and faster, even if they won't admit it. See the popularity of Duolingo vs Anki as an example! Or Quizlet vs Anki. Or the scores of students who revise by half-watching dopamine-ified youtube videos rather than doing past pape…

Maybe an 80/20 approach where you only create flashcards for the 20% of knowledge that's most useful? E.g. for a language, you could create 1000 flashcards for the 1000 most common words which allow for basic real-world communication?

My personal approach with A levels was to strictly learn content through classes, then organise things (which teaches you a lot on its own!) and make my own flashcards. Then I used the flashcards to keep it fresh till exam season. It was crazy, during revision lessons everyone else in the class would be going "uhhh I have no clue, that was two years ago" while I'd just know it.

I have tried different approaches, including using other people's flashcards (not as good - objectively they were high quality, but you gain a lot from writing your own + tailoring to your own way of looking at things) and learning from them (for my driving theory - terrible idea!). That hybrid approach is the best I've found, and the one I intend to use for my degree.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#274

Post by TechDebtDevin »

mrbombastic wrote: post #255
MostlyStable wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm trying to spend a lot more of my language learning time just reading/listening to content in my target language, but it's actually pretty difficult to find enough content that is in the right difficulty band where it has some words/grammar etc. that I am still learning but not so much that I just can't understand it at all.

Check out if there are comprehensible input sites for your target language if you haven’t already, for example fo spanish there is: https://www.dreamingspanish.com/ which puts out videos labeled with various difficulties of speaking and listening

How well does this work?

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#275

Post by sasjaws »

MostlyStable wrote: post #241
AlchemistCamp wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ”I realized I was hitting an issue where I theoretically "knew" a word (would get it always correct on the card), but wouldn't always recognize it in a novel context.” Some of the problem is due to the specificity of the training effect. I.e., if you mostly practice something through flash cards then you’re going to be training your ability to work with that on flash cards. With language, there’s an additional chal…

Yeah, I'm trying to spend a lot more of my language learning time just reading/listening to content in my target language, but it's actually pretty difficult to find enough content that is in the right difficulty band where it has some words/grammar etc. that I am still learning but not so much that I just can't understand it at all.

I'm building a reader app that tries to solve this exact problem by providing a range of gradually simplified versions of each article to match your proficiency. So you can stay in the sweet spot, or work your way up version by version.

If your target language happens to be Chinese then you can give it a try at https://reader.longyan.io/landing

No login required, love your feedback.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#276

Post by cpburns2009 »

sn9 wrote: post #205
bearjaws wrote: post #6

Spaced repetition has been all the rage for 20 years now. Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet. There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just that people tend to fall off the same way they do on any other education pattern. A couple years ago I was thinking "If Google and Apple really cared about kids they would make a spaced repetition unlock system", where by you…

You say that but it's completely revolutionized the way medical students study. IIRC the effect was so profound they had to modify the structure of some tests or something to that effect. And polyglots have been using SRS for years. As always, the real problem when people fail to do something that works is psychological, not technical. I'd say anyone who made an Ozempic for motivation would make a killing, but I beli…

I'm not so sure. My brother's medical school had to tell students they had to study the actual material rather than Anki decks because so many students were failing tests.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#277

Post by jarrett-ye »

SirHumphrey wrote: post #39

I find with spaced repetition that it works really well for some well-known things like vocabulary (EDIT: well-known meant as "spaced repetition is well-known to work for this use-case, not well-known as "the subject is well understood"), medical etc. but for everything else it becomes a struggle for a long time. I have been trying for years to fined a way to use it for mathematics and physics - with the former being…

Math Academy provided a self-service learning system with a novel spaced repetition algorithm which could take the hierarchical body of math into account.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#278

Post by travisjungroth »

pm215 wrote: post #119
felipeerias wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been trying to use Anki for years. Every time it is the same story: I keep it up for a few months until I miss a couple days, then due cards accumulate far beyond what can be reasonably managed, and I end up spending more time trying to fix the app than actually learning anything.

This is an area where I feel like there's scope for improvement in the SRS space. All the SRS systems I've seen essentially assume the user is a perfect robot who will do their reviews every day without fail. But most people will have off days or go on holiday for a week and not look at the app, or whatever -- and as you note, the user experience in that case is awful: you come back to a huge number of reviews which…

> All the SRS systems I've seen essentially assume the user is a perfect robot who will do their reviews every day without fail.

This reminds me of GTO (game theory optimal) play in poker.

There’s a perfect way to do things, so we should just try to do something as close to that as possible, right? The reality is that you can’t actually do things in this perfect way. In GTO’s case it’s that it’s too complex for a human to have memorized and in SRS many (not all) people will fail to follow the algorithm for one reason or another.

The problem is these strategies aren’t very resilient. If you miss the implementation by a bit, it can cause big losses. An algorithm that’s less theoretically optimal but more attainable by actual humans can end up much stronger in the real world.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#279

Post by aaldrick »

allenu wrote: post #240
aaldrick wrote: post #232

I see a lot of discussion about SRS, and I think most can agree they have improved. What I would like to see covered is a more vague area, but almost more important: It’s the space in between reading/understanding something and the SRS. There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs (web browser, PDF readers etc.) into popular SRS (Anki, Mochi etc.). They should wo…

I've written my own flashcards app (Fresh Cards) and once in a while, users ask if there's a way to import flashcards from things like web pages and PDF files, but to be honest, I still don't know how it would work, so maybe you can help me. From a user standpoint, would it be an interactive process where you highlight things and then click a button to say "turn this into a flashcard", or would it be an automated too…

I've tried Fresh Cards so thank you for developing that app, and trying to add cool new software into the space.

Great question. Here's one way to do it:

The first is how clunky the process of going from X to flashcard feels to the end user. One way to deal with the fact that we are crossing software border is to add an extra step where highlighting something allows you to go into an "inbox" before any cards are made. It is clear what the user has to do. They read something interesting, and add it to the inbox. When they are ready, they can head over and only then use some sort of automation (either via custom prompt for an AI or otherwise) to make the cards. This gives them another step, or interface, at which they can decide whether or not the thing they highlighted (since highlighting is easy) is actually worth something. It segments the process into clear easy sections: highlighting, deciding which highlights to flashcardify (and therefore keep), and flashcard review.

It definitely is an open-ended process, and I appreciate that apps need to have a strong opinion on how to direct users from start to finish; but I feel this is definitely possible now with cheap and quick AI.

I didn't answer every question but hopefully that helps somewhat.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#280

Post by aaldrick »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #268
aaldrick wrote: post #232

I see a lot of discussion about SRS, and I think most can agree they have improved. What I would like to see covered is a more vague area, but almost more important: It’s the space in between reading/understanding something and the SRS. There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs (web browser, PDF readers etc.) into popular SRS (Anki, Mochi etc.). They should wo…

The macOS services model seems like a good fit for this kind of thing. Services are little bits of context-aware functionality that apps expose to enable integration between apps without active developer involvement. An example, in most Mac apps if you select text, right-click to open the context menu, and open the Services submenu you’ll see a number of services that do something with the highlighted text. Ideally t…

I hadn't thought of this; thank you for bringing this up. I will actually read into this. I didn't write it in my original comment, but I almost mentioned the OS because I'm coming round to the idea (albeit slowly) that the OS needs to provide some sort of hook into this capability natively for both maximum adoption and also ease of use (for both developer and end user).

Perhaps Shortcuts are now powerful enough to do this as a PoC, providing the SRS has some sort of open API that Shortcuts can take advantage of.

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