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Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

domenic.me

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Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#391

Post by _Algernon_ »

windowshopping wrote: post #384

Hmm, I have Anki and I don't see an option for this algorithm. Anyone know how to enable it? The preferences say I'm on the "V3 scheduler" but have no option for an algorithm. I don't think I'm on the algorithm described in the blog post because whenever I don't know a card it goes back to 1 day as if it was new. Or maybe I am on it and I'm just misunderstanding how this works? I'm on Mac, Version ⁨2.1.66 (70506aeb)⁩…

Go into the deck preset options (any deck is fine). Look for the FSRS section and check if the toggle is enabled. If it's not there you probably are on an old version.

https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-options.html#fsrs

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#392

Post by mfranzs »

jonahhorowitz wrote: post #389
mfranzs wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what we've built RemNote for! You can add your sources (PDFs, websites, YouTube, etc.) and create cards directly from them. Either with AI (click on a sentence => get an AI card), or by highlighting a sentence and writing your own card. It's not at the OS level, but I think a focused standalone all-in-one experience is actually better. We've explored a chrome extension here that does something similar to what…

Does RemNote use the algorithm described in the link or something else?

Yep, you can either use FSRS (the one described in the link), or Anki-SM2.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#393

Post by covertcorvid »

mfranzs wrote: post #379
_1tem wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a longtime Anki user I just want to say THANK YOU! Just downloaded RemNote for the first time and gave it a spin. I’ve been using Anki for years for language learning (Ukrainian and Russian and Arabic), but also for poetry memorization. Weird coincidence: a few days ago I was looking for an AI-powered flashcard creator: I get regular emails from curated sources that have lots of useful information, but I am too la…

RemNote founder here - been building RemNote for the past 8 years (4 in private for myself, 4 in public), and we're not going anywhere! SRS is the future.

Hey! Thanks for making such a useful app. Saved me hundreds of hours.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#394

Post by david_allison »

LVB wrote: post #202

> Thankfully, the leading spaced repetition software, Anki, has incorporated FSRS as its default scheduling algorithm since version 23.10, released in 2023-11 I've used Anki for a long time and apply updates, but I don't closely track changes. Based on the above, I figured I'd be using FSRS, but I'm not. All of my decks have that setting turned off. Fair enough (no silent updates to existing data), but even when I cr…

FSRS is not a default yet: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/issues/3616

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#395

Post by j1elo »

andy12_ wrote: post #383
paulluuk wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They try, write bad flashcards, don't see results, and give up. But if that's the case, then wouldn't a program that takes a long text (like a book) and creates GOOD flashcards, be way superior over someone making their own bad flashcards?

I have just tried this afternoon to create with Gemini 2.5 Pro Anki cards to study for my exams. I've been doing it raw: I just paste the whole material (like 100k worth of tokens) into aistudio and generate the flashcards in txt format. For now it's going great, and I think that the cards are good enough as they are (there might be a couple here and there that I would remove or edit, but they don't get in the way of…

Is there any prompt tips you have learned on that path, that you could share? or the obvious request has been useful already without too much fiddling?

I was thinking to use some study material to test drive Google NotebookLM for this use case.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#396

Post by resonious »

kqr wrote: post #318
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…

> There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs I think this is a common misunderstanding. Half the benefit of SRS comes from working out what the flashcards are. You have to circle around a concept, look for similarities, differences, examples, generalisations, properties, etc. Is it hard work? Yes. Does it help understanding? Massively. This is also a very diffi…

You might be right. I remember when I used SRS seriously for language learning, I got far more out of the cards I created painstakingly than the pre-built ones that I pulled off the shelf. That is - I still remember most if not all of the custom cards verbatim.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#397

Post by andy12_ »

j1elo wrote: post #395
andy12_ wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have just tried this afternoon to create with Gemini 2.5 Pro Anki cards to study for my exams. I've been doing it raw: I just paste the whole material (like 100k worth of tokens) into aistudio and generate the flashcards in txt format. For now it's going great, and I think that the cards are good enough as they are (there might be a couple here and there that I would remove or edit, but they don't get in the way of…

Is there any prompt tips you have learned on that path, that you could share? or the obvious request has been useful already without too much fiddling? I was thinking to use some study material to test drive Google NotebookLM for this use case.

I haven't tried many variations yet because a basic prompt seems to work well, thought it is important to remind Gemini of not using ";" inside the text of the cards if you use it as a separator. I imagine that with better prompts you could get it to generate very nice flash cards, but I'm in a little tight schedule, so I can't play around it for too long.

Another nicer option I think would be using the structured output of the API to generate the cards in JSON format, and the parse it to the Anki format with a script, but I think this approach is fine for me.

The prompt I'm using is this

---

Using the information in these PDFs, make some Anki cards to study for an exam.

The format for Anki cards is

```

front1;back1

front2;back2

front3;back3

```

Remember that you can't use ";" inside a field because it is used to separate the front and back of a card.

If the back of a card is a list of elements, prefer to use "
" to specify a newline.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#398

Post by latentsea »

broast wrote: post #311
latentsea wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ChatGPT isn't a spaced repetition system, so... it's missing the fundamental aspect that makes it "Anki style". This comment doesn't make sense.

As I understand, anki's use of spaced repetition comes from how it presents you cards in increasing or decreasing frequency based on how you have answered it previously. In this way, I prompt chatgpt to ask me questions, and it revisits previous questions or topics for me based on how I've answered previously. I continue the same conversation periodically prompting it for questions to ask me.

It's an LLM, not an SRS.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#399

Post by jjmarr »

Alex-Programs wrote: post #52
Pooge wrote: post #13

I'm sorry, I didn't read the article but I thought my experience would be a good anecdote. I've used Anki for multiple years and learned around 18'000 Japanese words. It's difficult to say but I'd say I've learned how to read around 5'000 kanji. When I studied in Japan, my kanji reading—don't mix that up with comprehension !—was way above everyone else's. And most of my classmates were either Korean or Chinese. That'…

I made a tool based on this principle! We spend hours a day browsing the web, so I made a browser extension[0] that translates sentences at your knowledge level into the language you're learning, so that you're always learning a little through immersion. I also used the same "10 minutes a day on Anki" strategy with my A levels, and it made the revision process so so much nicer because stuff I'd learnt two years ago w…

Fascinating, great app. I wish it automatically adjusted the difficulty based on whether I understood the sentence.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#400

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

Alex-Programs wrote: post #271
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Fellow longtime Anki user, I can say letting myself drop from 0.9 to 0.85 was like letting myself experience the taste of clover honey for the first time. Accepting a slightly worse hit rato in exchange for 2/3rds the workload made life considerably more pleasant.
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