What's the point of memorizing a bunch of facts you could easily look up on the web?
I guess people shouldn’t study history anymore when they can just look up things on the web
Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition
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Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition
#42Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition
#43What's the point of memorizing a bunch of facts you could easily look up on the web?
Competency and efficiency.
Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition
#44Trying to learn Finish vocab, Anki made me realize I had terrible recall. Sometimes, I couldn't even remember what the last freaking card was, and I would forget most things the next day, and everything the day after. After about 3 weeks, I had only remembered 3 or 4 words, so I gave up.
Anki sucks for language learning or general vocabulary adquisition compared to simply reading.
I disagree. Lots of books have quite a few "hapax legomenon", or... words that only appear once. If you're trying to build long-tail vocab, Anki will make sure you get repeated exposure to words that occur infrequently in a particular text. One might argue that these words don't matter as much since they're less common, but once you've mastered all the common vocab in a language, building a broader vocabulary becomes more important.
Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition
#45What's the point of memorizing a bunch of facts you could easily look up on the web?
If the facts are in your head, you can make a connection between them. If they are in different places on the web, unless someone else already linked them for you, they remain separate.
Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition
#46What's the point of memorizing a bunch of facts you could easily look up on the web?
Unknown unknowns.
Knowledge availability is another big one.
I used Anki to learn molecular biology. I work in bioinformatics and understanding molecular pathways means I can more fluently build hypotheses with colleagues. Without having memorized these pathways, unknowns unknowns and lack of knowledge availability would prevent a lot of discovery.
Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition
#47What's the point of memorizing a bunch of facts you could easily look up on the web?
Because it helps you quickly connect those facts together into a larger idea later.
Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anki sucks for language learning or general vocabulary adquisition compared to simply reading.
I disagree. Lots of books have quite a few "hapax legomenon", or... words that only appear once. If you're trying to build long-tail vocab, Anki will make sure you get repeated exposure to words that occur infrequently in a particular text. One might argue that these words don't matter as much since they're less common, but once you've mastered all the common vocab in a language, building a broader vocabulary becomes…
That’s a good insight — long tail vocabulary.
Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition
#49Trying to learn Finish vocab, Anki made me realize I had terrible recall. Sometimes, I couldn't even remember what the last freaking card was, and I would forget most things the next day, and everything the day after. After about 3 weeks, I had only remembered 3 or 4 words, so I gave up.
I had a similar problem with Japanese. It was ok when I kept up with it every day, but at the default settings I was repeating so many cards so often that the time I spent running through the decks was becoming frustrating. I took a camping trip for a few days and came back to several hundred cards per deck waiting for me and it's been hard to get myself back into it.
Re: Anki as Learning Superpower: Computer Science Edition
#50Isn't Anki good only for memorization? Spaced repetition doesn't seem to help learning how something relates to another logically like how to determine when to use what programming patterns.
I think Anki helps build the necessary knowledge base to make such connections, but actually making those connections comes with putting that knowledge into practice.