Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

domenic.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

511–520 of 538 posts

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#511

Post by jaredklewis »

amluto wrote: post #353
jaredklewis wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I misunderstood something, but I can't find anything in your comments that identifies a flaw with the underlying data model of Anki. It seems your issues are mostly about Anki's data management? So I would strongly suggest your check out anki-connect ( https://git.sr.ht/~foosoft/anki-connect ) which provides a REST API for CRUD operations on Anki notes, cards, decks, and media attachments. Or maybe if you can s…

Maybe "data model" is the wrong term. The last time I tried to use Anki for real, I wanted to set up some Chinese character cards, to be used by 2-3 different people. I found a couple apparently high-quality decks online and downloaded them, and they had lots of characters, including (mostly) ones that I didn't want to include for the users in question. Removing content from the decks seemed wrong. Trying to make an…

I see. Unfortunately I don't know much about the area of using anki in a classroom setting or in case like yours where you want to manage the cards of other students, as I have only ever used it for self study. However, I know that using it in a teacher/student setup is not unusual, so there may be good information out there. Edit: Maybe checkout https://www.ankicollab.com/

In terms of updating decks, I think the way it works is pretty intuitive: you have one static field (like in your Chinese example, maybe a particular character or word). When re-importing into a deck, as long as that one static identifying field is the same, all the other fields will be updated. If you want to even be able to change the character/word/whatever, you could make that static field an ID or such.

Also, it is a pretty common pattern for shared decks to come with gobs of cards. You then suspend all of them (sometimes they all come pre-suspended) and then unsuspend the ones you want to study, usually using tags. For example you download the 20k JLPT (Japanese Language Proficiency Test) Vocab deck, suspend them all, then unsuspend only the levels you want to study (say level 1 or whatever) or those tagged as being very common, or whatever. So imagine what you want to accomplish is probably possible with suspension and tags. Like assigning a tag for each student name or such.

Anki is definitely a power tool, like Photoshop or Neovim. It is generally confusing to use and requires some investment. And there is plenty about it I don't like (media management stands out). But like I said in my previous post, I've never found another tool that even comes close.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#512

Post by jaredklewis »

fivestones wrote: post #509
amluto wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe "data model" is the wrong term. The last time I tried to use Anki for real, I wanted to set up some Chinese character cards, to be used by 2-3 different people. I found a couple apparently high-quality decks online and downloaded them, and they had lots of characters, including (mostly) ones that I didn't want to include for the users in question. Removing content from the decks seemed wrong. Trying to make an…

@jaredklewis I’d love to know if you have a way to fix the pain points amluto described. I’ve had some of the same struggles with this, in particular when making a deck that I wanted my kids to each be able to use individually, but also be able to keep updating. It seemed like a lot of work every time I wanted to make any change to the deck. This was a few years ago and I don’t remember the details, but it’d be great…

I just replied to the parent, but maybe checkout https://www.ankicollab.com/

Never used it, as I've only ever used anki for self study, but it seems like it might be good for your use case?

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#513

Post by udit99 »

TechDebtDevin wrote: post #499
udit99 wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> f you're using LLMs to learn, create an MCP tool for them to insert Anki cards on topics you're discussing in a csv on google drive, then sync that with you anki decks on your phone. Speaking for myself, I’d love to see a blogpost detailing how this is done. At the very least, I’d love to know: How are you syncing csvs to anki cards and how does the MCP interaction look like for an LLMs response to the CSV creation

If I get time this week, I'll drop a README here that shows how to do it. Not too hard tho, read up how to build mcp with https://github.com/mark3labs/mcp-go AnkiDroid has settings for linking a csv from google drive. Then just look up how to sync a local file/directory with Drive. Its just a matter of making sure the LLM knows the MCP Anki tool is available in every prompt (well I have a learning/Q&A prompt that use…

Thank you!

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#514

Post by latentsea »

domenicd wrote: post #495
latentsea wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I learned 17.5k words comprised of ~3k kanji in around 2 years at about an hour a day of review time. That's reviews + new cards, not including time immersing in order to find the daily quota of new vocab which itself was 2 to 3 hours of study. So, by my calculations for just the Anki time alone it's about 17.5k words split across 730 hours, which comes out to about 23 words and hour or one word every 2.5 minutes. I'…

This resonates with me. I feel like I'm on the slower end. A lot of people on the internet love sentence cards for vocabulary but they take me so much longer than just word/definition cards...

Sentence cards are great and necessary for learning grammar (during which you will learn some vocab too). After that can just focus on pure vocab.

I did the exact same Korean deck as my wife at the exact same time. It was wild comparing our stats in real-time. It would take me 10 ~ 12 seconds to do the same sentences that it would take her 30 ~ 35 seconds.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#515

Post by ix101 »

TheDong wrote: post #141
ix101 wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way it could grade you automatically is by the speed of flipping the card (or entering the correct answer). If it took less than a second to confirm then evidently it was easy.

But conversely, if I alt-tabbed to chat with a friend, or paused studying because the person sitting next to me asked a question, or I took a sip from my coffee mug, that doesn't mean it's hard necessarily. Even though all of those take at least as much time as answering a hard card un-interrupted would. The AI cannot read my mind, there is no approximation that will work reasonably accurately here for "how confident…

I would argue that it's harder for me to decide how easily I recalled a word and decide between a few loosely defined levels as to which one I should choose than to apply a simple algorithm.

If the window loses focus it would be able to pause automatically. If you are distracted another way, no big deal you will see that word again soon and unlikely to keep getting distracted on the same word. The benefits would outweigh the odd misfire.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#516

Post by desert_rue »

collyw wrote: post #465
kqr wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I grabbed a set of flashcard for Spanish verb conjugations. The guy had put in a lot of work to get them in the most frequent order, over 3000 lines of python. It been a massive help to me and I am not sure that writing the code to generate the list would really have helped my Spanish too much. https://www.asiteaboutnothing.net/w_ultimate_spanish_conjuga...

I’m pretty sure the others are suggesting that you don’t generate the word list through coding but when you encounter words you don’t know. What helps us remember is context (“I saw that in the Doctor Who episode where the big bad is-“) where a word list doesn’t give that context.

Yes, you can crank through and memorize things without context. It is more painful and less effective overall.

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#517

Post by Expertium »

prennaidd wrote: post #485
kebsup wrote: post #484

I've been looking into FSRS since I'm building a language learning app[1], but I haven't implemented it yet. Can FSRS work if I don't want to have 4 choices - bad, good, hard...? I have found myself to get into a decision paralysis so just bad/good works better for me. Plus I can swipe the cards tinder style! :D My second reason is that I'm worried about the complexity - both from non-nerdy users perspective and me h…

Yes. Some months ago, I forget whether it was v5 or maybe before, the 2 button grading approach meant that it actually performed better for users (ie. it performed better for users that explicitly only used two grading buttons). I don't know if this is replicable with v6, or not. I would be interested to find out!

[dead]

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#518

Post by Expertium »

farresito wrote: post #486
kebsup wrote: post #484

I've been looking into FSRS since I'm building a language learning app[1], but I haven't implemented it yet. Can FSRS work if I don't want to have 4 choices - bad, good, hard...? I have found myself to get into a decision paralysis so just bad/good works better for me. Plus I can swipe the cards tinder style! :D My second reason is that I'm worried about the complexity - both from non-nerdy users perspective and me h…

According to the FSRS author [1], it will adapt to two buttons. [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/16t2lva/comment/k2cor...

[dead]

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#519

Post by candrewlee »

Ey7NFZ3P0nzAe wrote: post #288
candrewlee wrote: post #256

Do any of these algorithms use vector embeddings to determine the semantic similarity between cards? Seems like that might be a useful parameter for tuning the algorithm, since you’re likely to forget something similar on a topic you’ve forgotten things about.

That was actually my very first python project, I made this to go through medical school: https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/AnnA_Anki_neuronal_A...

Very cool, same wavelength!

Re: Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

#520

Post by xenostar »

echan00 wrote: post #445
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…

Shameless plug of my language app, dangerous. Our language app is largely based on using LLMs and spaced-repetition. We explain the context behind every word and phrase, provide additional usage examples and cultural notes, and also use speech recognition to test recall and pronunciation. We're invite-only at the moment, but happy to pass along invite codes to anybody who may find it useful. https://apps.apple.com/us…

I’m also very interested in an invite, this sounds like a very novel concept!
Post reply on HN