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Whether to Use Anki or SuperMemo

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Re: Whether to Use Anki or SuperMemo

#61

Post by xkfm »

Scarbutt wrote: post #6

What makes anki not suitable for "incremental reading" ( interleaving between reading and remembering) ?

You can import entire articles into Supermemo and break them down into flashcards without leaving the program. Anki just gives you flashcards. There's an incremental reading plugin for Anki, but it doesn't work very well.

Incremental reading works by breaking down an article into flashcards. Basically, you go: article -> paragraph -> sentences -> flashcards (usually with cloze deletions). But, because the algo manages when you see everything, I don't have to worry about doing all of that in one step.

Polar Bookshelf (getpolarized.io) is more of an open source solution for archiving documents at the moment. You can export annotations/extracts from Polar into Anki, but you don't get the spaced repetition with the actual reading of articles like you do with Supermemo.

I read a bit of the article, decide if making an extract of that portion is worth it, and then click next repetition when I'm done/bored reading it. I'll then get another article/flashcard/extract (of another article).

You also have tools for marking up articles and saving your place.

Every day I review around 30-50 flashcards, and 30-50 articles/extracts of articles.

With Supermemo, I don't have to decide (or rather, I give up the ability to decide) what I'm going to read next; in favor of having everything scheduled by the algo.

I go through about 800-1000 items in my RSS feeds once a day, save them into read it later/polar/bookmarks, and once a week, I throw the ones that still seem interesting into Supermemo.

I probably spend 30min to an hour going through everything once a day, and another hour or so on Supermemo. Most of the items in my RSS feeds are admittedly junk around 95-98% or so (HN and HN comments, reddit rss feeds and comments, lobste.rs and comments, some news sites, a few personal blogs, and some forums), but I do get a few gems throughout the week.

The newer Supermemo algorithm also tolerates breaks better than Anki (the last time I checked). So, for example, not using Supermemo while on holiday isn't an issue.

I also keep aha moments from programming and some documentation in there as well.

Edit:

Here's a demo of incremental reading in Supermemo. He marks up articles much more than I typically do. There's a lot of features and functionality in the program.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoQoeK53bP8&

Re: Whether to Use Anki or SuperMemo

#62

Post by edwardhusarcik »

Latteland wrote: post #49
edwardhusarcik wrote: post #43

I'm a medical student who uses Anki religiously. I'll vouch for it any day. Currently, I see around 300-1,000 flashcards a day and have been doing it for almost a year straight. Without Anki, I am not sure if I'd be doing nearly as well in school. It is really a game changer for my education (at least my medical education). I wish it was more user friendly, but it is free (on Android) so I can't complain. As for Supe…

I've had the idea that a lot of medical training (besides anatomy, chemistry, bio, many other things :-)) was memorizing a big decision tree to evaluate someone, which seems fundamentally different than flash cards. How do you learn that? Family history that pertinent , previous conditions etc.

Hi Latteland! I do both. Anki is about the little facts that I want to retain after I understand the bigger picture. In fact, I never use Anki to learn anything and only for retention.

Example flashcard:

- Front: Which race has a higher prevalence of G6PD Deficiency?

- Back: African Americans

Re: Whether to Use Anki or SuperMemo

#63

Post by [deleted] »

AlexCoventry wrote: post #15

I'm a bit surprised these systems still pay off for people. How many contexts require learning large bodies of unrelated facts, these days? Everything's just a google away. Even in the past, the only context where I would have used a system like this is language acquisition, and it's pretty clear that machine translation is going to surpass me very soon, if it hasn't already. For me, most interesting work involves co…

[deleted]

Re: Whether to Use Anki or SuperMemo

#64

Post by jammygit »

edwardhusarcik wrote: post #43

I'm a medical student who uses Anki religiously. I'll vouch for it any day. Currently, I see around 300-1,000 flashcards a day and have been doing it for almost a year straight. Without Anki, I am not sure if I'd be doing nearly as well in school. It is really a game changer for my education (at least my medical education). I wish it was more user friendly, but it is free (on Android) so I can't complain. As for Supe…

How long does it take you to do those 300-1000 cards per day? I'm finding I'm reviewing at about 9s/card lately

Re: Whether to Use Anki or SuperMemo

#65

Post by edwardhusarcik »

jammygit wrote: post #64
edwardhusarcik wrote: post #43

I'm a medical student who uses Anki religiously. I'll vouch for it any day. Currently, I see around 300-1,000 flashcards a day and have been doing it for almost a year straight. Without Anki, I am not sure if I'd be doing nearly as well in school. It is really a game changer for my education (at least my medical education). I wish it was more user friendly, but it is free (on Android) so I can't complain. As for Supe…

How long does it take you to do those 300-1000 cards per day? I'm finding I'm reviewing at about 9s/card lately

I'm slower than that. It takes up a good portion of my day everyday unfortunately.

Re: Whether to Use Anki or SuperMemo

#66

Post by Grue3 »

chongli wrote: post #11

I'm really skeptical of these sorts of memorization systems, not because I think they don't work (I think they do), but because I see it as a brain "hack" that goes against the grain. What do I mean by this? I think of our memories as a kind of most-frequently-used (MFU) cache. We remember best when we use the information all the time. So when we use this sort of spaced repetition we're trying to artificially "warm u…

>If you don't know anyone who speaks the language, what are you learning it for?

I don't know, reading? Consuming content in its original language? These days you can talk to most people in English anyway.

>If you really need to learn the language (for work?) then find somebody who speaks it and arrange to meet them for coffee on a regular basis.

Either you both end up overdosing on caffeine, or you will never learn their language in your lifetime.

Re: Whether to Use Anki or SuperMemo

#67

Post by hnous927 »

Stratoscope wrote: post #7

Note to writers: unless you're writing only for an audience that is already familiar with your terminology, it's helpful to spell out acronyms and initialisms the first time you use them. I skimmed this entire article out of curiosity. It uses the term SRS twenty times but never says what it means. I went back to the top and noticed the "not a prerequisite" link, so I looked at that article too. About six paragraphs…

I’m OP. Thank you very much for the constructive comment. I really appreciate it! I’ve added a quick terminology guide at the top of each article.

Re: Whether to Use Anki or SuperMemo

#68

Post by hnous927 »

hyperpape wrote: post #52
Stratoscope wrote: post #7

Note to writers: unless you're writing only for an audience that is already familiar with your terminology, it's helpful to spell out acronyms and initialisms the first time you use them. I skimmed this entire article out of curiosity. It uses the term SRS twenty times but never says what it means. I went back to the top and noticed the "not a prerequisite" link, so I looked at that article too. About six paragraphs…

It's worse than that, because even for someone who knows about SRS (via Anki), this is circuitous and hard to read. Anyone who's a fan of incremental reading/super memo would do us a favor by writing a new introduction that's more straightforward and credible. The fact that the introductions to incremental reading have this feel of "read these hundred things to grasp the genius of incremental reading" is a huge probl…

I’m OP. Thank you for the feedback!

Could you tell me more what makes it hard to read?

I’ve written about Incremental Reading. Hopefully this could serve as a brief introduction:

https://masterhowtolearn.wordpress.com/2018/10/30/the-signif...

Re: Whether to Use Anki or SuperMemo

#69

Post by hnous927 »

SlowRobotAhead wrote: post #12
Stratoscope wrote: post #7

Note to writers: unless you're writing only for an audience that is already familiar with your terminology, it's helpful to spell out acronyms and initialisms the first time you use them. I skimmed this entire article out of curiosity. It uses the term SRS twenty times but never says what it means. I went back to the top and noticed the "not a prerequisite" link, so I looked at that article too. About six paragraphs…

Exactly. Not only did I not know the terminology, in this case I didn’t know either product/software/service either. I had to find the “in case you missed my earlier post on” then in that the “my initial review” post then still had to figure out what he was talking about. OH.... it’s learning by repetition , updated flash cards, got it in three words. This was written by an engineer for sure! A short statement and pu…

I’m OP. Thank you for the feedback! I have added a quick terminology guide at the top of each article. > A short statement and purpose... I will keep this in mind when writing articles in the future.

Re: Whether to Use Anki or SuperMemo

#70

Post by hnous927 »

keiferski wrote: post #2

The fundamental flaw in the author's argument for using SuperMemo is that there is a ton of value in manually creating the decks yourself. When you write out an item in pencil on paper, then copy it to Anki and create a card, you're creating a memory and physical association with the creation of that card. When you just cloze pre-made selections of reading material, you're skipping this entire process. This is the sa…

I’m OP. Thank you for the feedback!

Yes, I think decks have to be personalized. But I don't agree the argument that "writing out in pencil then transferring back to a Spaced Repetition Software" is better than "pre-made selections of reading material". For Incremental Reading, you have to select the important parts; there's no pre-made selection. It's just like highlighting; the material isn't pre-highlighted. I think the most important thing is the thought process: thinking which part is important and which isn't. The medium, whether you are doing it in paper and pencil is no difference than doing it digitally.

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