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Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

apps.ankiweb.net

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Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#61

Post by victorlf »

jwrallie wrote: post #56
victorlf wrote: post #48

Anki is unbeatable for acing any test with a bounded number of questions [1]. It's been successfully used by some top TV show contestants to remember thousands of words [2]. I've been using it recently to remember recipes and cooking facts, such as the time it takes to boil X vegetable, or the ingredients for some dish. Apart from language learning and medicine, there's a lack of pre-built decks that you can use to l…

When Anki is the right tool for the job, it is amazing. I used it to study the questions for the FCC radio amateur license. Pre-made decks were available, so I just loaded it and studied on my phone when I had free time. I had around 2 months before the test, so it was very pleasant to slowly go through all the questions.

It seems the tricky part is motivation. Very few people get excited by card-reviewing itself. The method shines when there is external pressure, such as exams.

I think a sense of community can help provide this motivation (like a group of people all learning at the same time), but it's still tricky.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#62

Post by SamPatt »

naitgacem wrote: post #37
OJFord wrote: post #28

Weird, I was actually thinking of a related AskHN, that comments here are obviously now the place for. Is there anything similar people use for sort of general 'knowledge base' type things - like people use one big text file, or Obsidian, or Logseq, or Notion, or whatever - but with some kind of Anki-like reminder/retrieval rather than just deliberate searching to look something up? Or do people successfully use Anki…

I think a related, but often overlooked question is: is there really a need for remembering things off the top of one's head? Since there was no need to look it up, perhaps it's not relevant to whatever one is doing at the moment.

I'm studying data structures and algorithms, out of interest, and to pass technical interviews. I can't fire up ChatGPT during interviews.

Anki has definitely helped me. It's surprising how well it works if you do it daily.

I also add new cards when I come across a word I don't know. If I keep this up for years or decades, my vocabulary should be extraordinary.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#63

Post by Version467 »

siddbudd wrote: post #41

For all you people who have used Anki or other SRS for many years: how do you get over the problem of being bored by it? Or does that not happen to you? Though I have not used Anki, I used a similar SRS for learning Chinese - the flashcards built in Pleco, but no matter how often I try to use it, I never last longer than 5-10 days, I just get bored by it. Also, no matter how I try to adjust the algo, I have the feeli…

So I have never actually used Anki for languages specifically, but I use it heavily for almost everything I deem important enough that I want to remember.

There are two very common reasons why people lose interest/motivation after trying out Anki. The first one is creating too many cards when you first start out. People get excited by SRS and then start creating cards for a lot of things, especially for stuff they don't actually care to remember. This is understandable, since you can't do SRS when you have nothing to repeat. But that gets overwhelming quickly, because it's hard to be motivated if you don't actually care about the material.

The solution for this is to only create flashcards when an opportunity arises organically. This has the additional benefit of your review sessions being extremely short in the beginning, which makes it easier to establish the habit of reviewing.

The second problem that often leads to people quickly giving up is not knowing what makes a good card. It's actually not as easy as one might think. Especially not when you want to get more out of SRS than just rote memorization of trivia. There's an excellent article from Andy Matuschak on this topic that explains it way better than I ever could https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/

If you specifically want to do language learning, then you might be tempted to download premade decks. This might work a little bit better than for everything that's not languages, but in my experience making a card is at least as important as the repetition itself. It forces you to distill the knowledge down into good cards, which is only possible if you engage with the material and also helps you find gaps in your knowledge. So I'd recommend against it.

Regarding your comment on adjusting the repetition algorithm... don't. It's highly unlikely that you'd be able to improve on the defaults if you don't have a good feel for how slow/fast you forget things. Even then, it's pretty difficult to make good adjustments. It's much more likely that the flow you're missing is just from not doing it long enough.

Hope that helps :)

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#65

Post by tuna74 »

nairboon wrote: post #42

Anki is a great software, but unfortunately it is quite difficult to install on Linux systems. Almost all packages on major distros are by now years out of date or kicked out, because Anki changed its build systems so many times, that the existing package maintainers simply dropped it: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/issues/1378 Nowadays, the Anki version in Ubuntu is from 2019! The snaps are also hopelessly outdat…

I just installed the Flathub version on Fedora. No problem at all!

Some addons seem to be not installable due to obsolete deps (like PyQt5), but a lot of stuff work without any problems.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#66

Post by tempaccount1234 »

tonyjstark wrote: post #57

A lot of people seem to like shared card decks but creating your own cards is part of the learning process, you spent time with the material you want to learn, which is the main thing that helps you learning. shameless self-plug: On macos and iOS we found Anki a bit out of place so we build a competitor explicitly for language learning ( https://wokabulary.com/ ).

Looks like a cool app, but a monthly subscription for a content free flash card App is asking too much. (Personally I prefer my learning tools to stay around without monthly payments)

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#67

Post by gessha »

syngrog66 wrote: post #47

This is like the 20th time the Anki-promoting mafia have posted it on HN yes, kids: we know Anki exists

I see value in different HN-“mafias” posting about their favorite niches from time to time. It’s a reminder of sorts that the niche exists and that people find value in it.

In this case, I like following the spaced repetition algorithm development and integrations into tools like Obsidian and Logseq.

I’m trying to get back into using the tool every now and then to see if it works for the current me.

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#68

Post by nmfisher »

tonyjstark wrote: post #57

A lot of people seem to like shared card decks but creating your own cards is part of the learning process, you spent time with the material you want to learn, which is the main thing that helps you learning. shameless self-plug: On macos and iOS we found Anki a bit out of place so we build a competitor explicitly for language learning ( https://wokabulary.com/ ).

Were conservative pundits outraged that you were pushing wokabulary?

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#69

Post by Version467 »

OJFord wrote: post #38
jpalomaki wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least for me this often means, that I just keep on lookin up the stuff over and over again. Takes some deliberate effort to actually store some obscure things in my memory. When I was still active with Anki, I was mostly picking up some random things I knew I would need fairly often and included those in my deck.

But that means you're doing tar flag flashcards more often than you're using those tar flags? Because otherwise, and for me, the CLI usage is the flashcard? Using them is what teaches me and keeps fresh the commands and flags that I most often use.

Not necessarily. Hypothetical example, but let's say I use some obscure tar command twice a month. That's too far apart for me to remember it, but often enough that it would annoy me to look it up every time. Chuck it into anki and I have a short time where I repeat it often enough so that it sticks and after that the time between repetitions quickly becomes far longer than the 14 day interval where I actually use the command.

And now I never have to look it up again :)

Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

#70

Post by SamPatt »

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 a specific pool of questions you're memorizing, which isn’t how learning a subject typically works.

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