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Anki-fy your life

abouttolearn.substack.com

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Re: Anki-fy your life

#3

Post by andersentobias »

Unless you want to compete in Jeopardy or something, why bother with ""uploading"" static chunks of information to your wetware? Language learning aside.

When categorizing notes to be remembered, I think it's good to think in terms of memory retreival, not memory storage. In other words, not to become an "archiever", because you probably want to evolve your ideas by linking them together in your own unique way -- unique as dicated by your problem at hand plus your own idiosyncratic experiences.

"How to take smart notes" by Sönke Ahrens is a great book on this topic, admittedly more oriented towards a Zettelkasten/Obsidian workflow.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#5

Post by thenerdhead »

I really like https://readwise.io/ for this purpose regarding all the books I've read and the quotes I like to re-visit here and there. It uses a SRS technique.

While this type of article is almost cliche at this point regarding someone coming across the memory limitations and the power of anki for the first time, I really think the case for anki is exaggerated with "important ideas".

Anki is great for preparing to go on jeopardy or being in say med school. It is not really needed for lifelong learning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zettelkasten might be a better approach but even then it is debatable how often you'll ever actually use it once the novelty wears off.

Anki is a tool to be used, not something that needs to be applied to everything.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#6

Post by triyambakam »

Anki (or a Leitner box) is the recommended method from the book "Fluent Forever"

After learning one language in school and a few others ad hoc on my own I gave this method a try.

I quickly gave up, though, once I discovered Dr Krashen's work on comprehensible input, and how boring and time consuming creating and studying Anki is.

Dr Krashen's work says that we learn language when we understand it. I.e. when we receive input at our level. There are quite a number of Youtube channels that claim to teach through this method, but many of them still resort to drills, themed vocabulary, grammar etc that are all pointless in the CI method.

The best one I've seen so far is Dreaming Spanish.

What's so cool about the CI method is that the spaced repetition is built in, implicit - if you're getting input at your level you will be getting repetition.

Children's shows are a great way to get input. Many countries have TV apps on iPad and can be viewed free with a VPN.

As an experiment I had my daughter only consume German media (living in Sweden) för a few years and she can now speak better German than I can, and I have never corrected her. She has broader and more modern vocabulary, naturally.

Re: Anki-fy your life

#7

Post by thenerdhead »

andersentobias wrote: post #3

Unless you want to compete in Jeopardy or something, why bother with ""uploading"" static chunks of information to your wetware? Language learning aside. When categorizing notes to be remembered, I think it's good to think in terms of memory retreival, not memory storage. In other words, not to become an "archiever", because you probably want to evolve your ideas by linking them together in your own unique way -- uni…

We wrote pretty much the same comment. That's funny.
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