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Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

apps.ankiweb.net

31–40 of 438 posts

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#31

Long-term user of Anki ~ 13-14 yrs, with mostly language learning focus. It’s good; but out of the box, I find that most users barely tap into its utility. It’s templating engine, ability to shape card content and formatting via JS and CSS put it in a league above most other SRS applications. (With the caveat that it’s easy to waste a lot of time on inconsequential card-tweaking…) A lot of people complain that it use…

I think the issue of inferior SRS algorithm is at least partly alleviated by the existence of FSRS.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#32
post #18

My boy is 11 now. We've used Anki with him every day since he was about 5. Examples of things he's memorized, for fun: * every country, recognized by unlabeled shape on the map * spelling * many body parts, names of bones and organs, from illustration * chemical elements, by symbol (Na, Fe, Zn, etc) * unix filesystem commands * numeracy references (km from here to Japan, earth to sun, meters from home to school) * re…

I swear I have read this exact same comment before

Edit: oh good I’m not crazy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38428309

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#33

I've been using Anki a bit to supplement my language learning. I built an Anki deck generator that makes emoji/tts/word flashcards! It's worked pretty well for me to get some better word recognition. https://flashcards.bpev.me

Nice! My feedback was going to be that I don't even know some of them in English (my native language) because it's just not clear to me what the emoji mix is supposed to mean, but I see that 'from emoji' is sort of the whole point, so that's not really helpful.

I've been wanting to use something like Anki as a general purpose 'knowledge base'/reminder/learning system; if I do use Anki I'll certainly add this, cheers.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#34

In the most bizarre of coincidences I just installed anki now before seeing it on the front page of hackernews

A piece of advice: stick with it. The usefulness of Anki lies in its ability to efficiently schedule flashcards, so it will be of little use if you review cards only occasionally. Review most/all of your due cards everyday. If you find that your workload is too much stop creating new cards or perhaps increase the base multiplier for flashcard intervals (not recommended unless you're really exhausted).

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#35
post #28

Weird, I was actually thinking of a related AskHN, that comments here are obviously now the place for. Is there anything similar people use for sort of general 'knowledge base' type things - like people use one big text file, or Obsidian, or Logseq, or Notion, or whatever - but with some kind of Anki-like reminder/retrieval rather than just deliberate searching to look something up? Or do people successfully use Anki…

There's an Obsidian plugin for Anki -- https://github.com/reuseman/flashcards-obsidian

It connects with your Anki desktop app. You create notes in Obsidian in a specific format, and they get converted to Anki flashcards. This way your flashcard creation process becomes much easier if you already use Obsidian for note-taking.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#36
Spaced repetition, especially when using tools like Anki, is effective for memorizing facts. However, memorization represents the most basic level of learning objectives, see e.g. [1] and [2]. Are there any recommended tools for practicing more advanced levels of knowledge, such as relational analysis, synthesis, and critical evaluation?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_taxonomy

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_observed_learni...

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#37
post #28

Weird, I was actually thinking of a related AskHN, that comments here are obviously now the place for. Is there anything similar people use for sort of general 'knowledge base' type things - like people use one big text file, or Obsidian, or Logseq, or Notion, or whatever - but with some kind of Anki-like reminder/retrieval rather than just deliberate searching to look something up? Or do people successfully use Anki…

I think a related, but often overlooked question is: is there really a need for remembering things off the top of one's head?

Since there was no need to look it up, perhaps it's not relevant to whatever one is doing at the moment.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#38
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…

At least for me this often means, that I just keep on lookin up the stuff over and over again. Takes some deliberate effort to actually store some obscure things in my memory. When I was still active with Anki, I was mostly picking up some random things I knew I would need fairly often and included those in my deck.

But that means you're doing tar flag flashcards more often than you're using those tar flags? Because otherwise, and for me, the CLI usage is the flashcard? Using them is what teaches me and keeps fresh the commands and flags that I most often use.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#39

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…

I had the same experience. I invested a lot of time on Anki and it paid back, but I could never stick to it. There is always a point where I have to skip 2 or 3 days because of life and the huge backlog is too much that I give up.

I recently started to use Supermemo because of some comments on HN, and so far it have been going quite well. I feel less overwhelmed when I have to take a break, I think the algorithm (or maybe it is just good defaults?) is much less punishing. I am still new to it, and I have a baggage of knowledge from my past experiences using SRS, so it is unfair to compare it to Anki at the moment. But it renew my passion for memorizing, so far it has been worth the investment.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#40
post #28

Weird, I was actually thinking of a related AskHN, that comments here are obviously now the place for. Is there anything similar people use for sort of general 'knowledge base' type things - like people use one big text file, or Obsidian, or Logseq, or Notion, or whatever - but with some kind of Anki-like reminder/retrieval rather than just deliberate searching to look something up? Or do people successfully use Anki…

I think a related, but often overlooked question is: is there really a need for remembering things off the top of one's head? Since there was no need to look it up, perhaps it's not relevant to whatever one is doing at the moment.

When learning a language, yes!
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