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Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

apps.ankiweb.net

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Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#311

Post by samus »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #296
redcobra762 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you automate that, then you miss out on going through your own notes, engaging with the subject, and subdividing it into self-contained pieces Why wouldn't you get this? You just don't have to do it in order to make Anki cards. > which is required to come up with good cards Yes, and ChatGPT does this for you. This isn't theoretical. I've used this to get As in multiple classes in college. This works.

I would rather get cards that are really well designed ___as cards__ (which chat gpt will do better than me given the time I want to spend) even if there is some loss of "value" from not breaking the material into cards myself, because I will make it up on the back end by studying the cards more, and having cards that are more correctly designed for optimal study. Who cares if I did the work of breaking the material…

Why would you end up with shitty cards if you did them yourself? And how can you even tell whether ChatGPT made good ones? And how much of a difference do the "better" cards even make?

There is not necessarily a tradeoff here. Sure, you will make some errors, but if you find a card to be so bad that it's useless for SRS (unlikely, unless the answer is very vague or too long to quickly validate) you will just delete it and replace it with a better one.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#312

Post by redcobra762 »

samus wrote: post #287
redcobra762 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you automate that, then you miss out on going through your own notes, engaging with the subject, and subdividing it into self-contained pieces Why wouldn't you get this? You just don't have to do it in order to make Anki cards. > which is required to come up with good cards Yes, and ChatGPT does this for you. This isn't theoretical. I've used this to get As in multiple classes in college. This works.

Of course you don't have to create your own cards, but they would work better if you did . You can use ChatGPT to automate onerous tasks, but have to compensate for it by engaging with the material in other ways. I doubt that grinding decks is enough. Depends on the activity and the goal I guess. Acing exams, sure, without doubt.

A concept applies here where you really don't want to spend unbound time studying. It's a great way to burn out. "A" students, when interviewed, frequently reference doing "enough" and then stopping.

Optimizing your study time by taking the "boring" work, e.g. building flashcards of material you organized yourself, cuts down on time spent not doing work that's maximally effective (memorizing flashcards).

If a person had infinite time, making flashcards would be just one more thing on an unbound list of things they could do to learn the material better. But people don't have infinite time, and considering you're already "familiar" with the material since you wrote and organized it, building flashcards is something you can't really afford to spend time on.

When I went back to school to get my undergrad, I focused on optimizing my time, because procrastination was a huge problem for me the first time around. Being efficient and not spending a single second longer than I have to in order to get an "A" is important to me, and using ChatGPT to help me with that has been wildly successful so far.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#313

Post by shepherdjerred »

sivers wrote: post #258
shepherdjerred wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a similar habit? How does one get started making Anki a habit? I've used Anki for studying before exams, but I haven't been able to integrate it into my life.

If you care enough, you'll do it. Every day I brush my teeth, write in my diary, do my Anki, check email, eat something, etc. It's only a few minutes a day.

That's a fair argument. Maybe my problem is that I overestimate how much time it takes every day. It really should be only a few minutes a day, with that effort adding up over enough days/week/months. I guess the bigger time sink comes when authoring decks.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#314

Post by alberth »

HatchedLake721 wrote: post #308
alberth wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question, how will memorizing this info help him? I’m a parent too, and have prioritized activities that teach my child critical thinking (so they can self-solve problems). I’m curious if I should be layering in some memorization activities like this, which is why I ask. (Please don’t take my question as judging, I’m genuinely curious how it’s helped because I might replicate. And I’ve got huge respect for al…

Any interesting links or suggestions on critical thinking activities? Thanks!

Hugely age dependent.

But in general: puzzles, strategy games, building blocks, and asking my kiddo questions that force them to think.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#316

Post by mabster »

tussa wrote: post #120
SamPatt wrote: post #70

One tip for working with Anki: you will likely learn better - and review cards more regularly - if you write the cards yourself instead of using a preexisting deck. Going through a course / textbook -> taking notes on paper -> adding key concepts as Anki flashcards -> reviewing them daily: extremely effective Preexisting decks can work - I used one to successfully study for my Amateur Radio License - but that assumes…

> if you write the cards yourself I'd go so far to say it's almost an requirement. Unless you have a high quality deck made specifically for the book/course/material you have. Sadly most of the publicly available Anki are IMHO not of that quality.

I started making the cards, noticed a lot of repetition in what I was doing and then started coding solutions to clusters of cards.

I definitely spent way too long on the "making the cards" phase!

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#317

Post by redcobra762 »

burntwater wrote: post #307
redcobra762 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT is great at taking my notes and turning them into Anki cards. Some tweaks are occasionally needed, but I have done well on numerous exams letting ChatGPT figure out the cards (and the formatting tedium) for me.

Would you mind giving an example of the kind of prompt(s) you use to get these card generated? On a different note, ChatGPT has been making me feel stupid because I fail to come up with many use cases, while it seems like tons of technically unskilled people come up with all kinds of uses...

I'm no good at prompt engineering, so I iterate a lot, rather than trying to come up with the perfect prompt. I start by asking something like,

"please generate a series of short questions and answers that conform to a flashcard format, easy for studying, from these notes"

The responses were too verbose, so I asked:

"Please shorten the answers to short, easily memorizable lines"

That returned pretty good flashcards, so from there I asked it to reformat in a way Anki could consume:

"these are great, please convert these into a code block, where the question and the answer is on the same line, separated by a semicolon and not numbered"

But that put all of the flashcards on the same line, so I added:

"sorry I wasn't clear, each question should be on its own line"

That gave me what I was looking for. The next step is to paste it into Anki, fiddle with the recall and cards-per-day settings, and then get to training!

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#318

Post by mabster »

watwut wrote: post #146
xedrac wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

90 minutes is a very big ask if you want to be consistent. Maybe you're simply trying to bite off more than you can chew? I think consistency is king, so whatever you have to do to stay consistent will pay dividends, even if that means shaving your working set down to just 10 minutes a day.

The thing with Anki is that you cant control how much workload you have per day. Anki algorithm decides that. Say, you start by doing it little bit every day and you are fine for first three weeks. But then, Anki starts assigning you more and more repetition and that is it. If you do less one day, Anki gives you those cards the next day on top of the normal workload of that day. There is no way out. Worst, the less y…

I really wish something like https://github.com/fasiha/ebisu becomes the norm. That is, the idea of fitting the cards to your time (by prioritising) rather than you having to do everything there software wants.

The only bit missing is some algorithm deciding how often to introduce new cards based on your historical data.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#319

Post by smohare »

exe34 wrote: post #92
itsrajju wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your boy is precious! He's on his way to becoming a highly intelligent adult. I've seen a lot of people going like... why remember stuff when you can easily google it? But it doesn't work that way. The more facts reside in your brain, the more avenues it has to connect them together and generate insights (after all, that thing is the OG "neural network"). I highly admire your parenting in this aspect, and I hope to d…

Yep! This kid has a super power! I don't understand why this sort of learning to learn isn't taught in schools - I only discovered anki and even spaced repetition at age 35, and I could really have used it at school! I think the workaround that I came up with myself was to work through a large amount of derivations (maths, physics and chemistry) and try to note the common stuff and prepared shorter and shorter versio…

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Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#320

Post by Jtsummers »

shepherdjerred wrote: post #313
sivers wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you care enough, you'll do it. Every day I brush my teeth, write in my diary, do my Anki, check email, eat something, etc. It's only a few minutes a day.

That's a fair argument. Maybe my problem is that I overestimate how much time it takes every day. It really should be only a few minutes a day, with that effort adding up over enough days/week/months. I guess the bigger time sink comes when authoring decks.

The hard part (in terms of time) for me is creating the content. I cheat. I throw whole paragraphs and sentences in without clozes or refinement.

Then when I review them I think, "Well, that was informative but not answerable, what does 'easy' or 'hard' mean when I'm re-reading a paragraph?" So I spend some time refining them. This is iterative. The first pass on a paragraph of content might just be to split it out into several cards with one sentence each, nothing more. Then when I see the sentence cards (some time later) I turn them into clozes or Q&A cards. Then I realize they need images to really help so I add some. After 2-5 iterations they're useful and effective cards, but the work ends up being distributed over a more reasonable period of time (usually 1-3 weeks). Each refinement step only takes a minute or two per card, if that, especially as you get more comfortable with the editor.

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