Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards
apps.ankiweb.net
Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards
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Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards
#2I LOVE anki!! I’m a heavy user.
Everything goes in my morning flash cards. Knots, geography, language, tar commandline flags, papers, statistics homework. Fill them with things you like, is my advice - it’s fun to say hello to hobbies on the verge of your memory in the morning.
Bird calls! I’m learning sounds of bird calls since I can’t see very well so I can’t learn by sight. I listed eBird’s set of common birds near me and downloaded their calls as mp3s from the Macaulay Library and batch-imported them into my flash cards (for my personal use). It’s always rewarding to hear a bird outside and go “hey I think I know what that is!” Pairs well with Merlin Sound ID.
Another great use is as a mnemonic Rolodex: I frequently forget to reach out and catch up with friends in my life, so I have a deck with just names of people to say hi to. Every time somebody comes up, I say hello, and then answer the card for whichever interval feels appropriate. This way, the SRS itself will make sure that I never forget someone for too long.
Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards
#3Every few years I use Anki heavily for language stuff (German, more recently Latin and Classical Chinese), up to 90 minutes a day, but I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up.
I still benefit from a year of training, but it seems the long-tail of spaced repetition doesn't work for me at all. But so long as I get to the point where I can read or watch TV, the considerable effort I've invested in making cards (not to mention reviewing them) was worthwhile.
It's also fun to have an extended/time-intensive personal task where it can be worth it to build up a highly personalised system that doesn't need to work for anyone else. It allows for a selfishness that's the polar opposite of accessibility design, but can end up resulting in quite novel/pleasing design decisions. (There've been some other posts about making software just for yourself on hacker news before).
They have a lot of shared decks hosted online, but I guess for hosting costs or copyright reasons delete any decks that aren't regularly downloaded, which results in many niche decks getting deleted. I've uploaded several German-language decks that get deleted because of course they don't get the same traffic as English ones. Bit of a pity - I wonder what the ecosystem would look like if things were otherwise.
Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards
#4I LOVE anki!! I’m a heavy user. Everything goes in my morning flash cards. Knots, geography, language, tar commandline flags, papers, statistics homework. Fill them with things you like, is my advice - it’s fun to say hello to hobbies on the verge of your memory in the morning. Bird calls! I’m learning sounds of bird calls since I can’t see very well so I can’t learn by sight. I listed eBird’s set of common birds nea…
Wait a moment. "tar commandline flags"? When I was still learning how to program, the general advice was to avoid memorizing things you can easily look up, like language syntax, framework functionality or commandline flags, and just let it happen. In fact, I recently caught myself skimming Nest.js docs to make cards to learn how to use Nest.js BEFORE I even start working on my project, and almost felt like I'm procrastinating instead of being productive.
I don't disagree with how Anki is effective at memorization, because that would be like disagreeing with the effectiveness of space repetition as a principle. I'm just wondering if it's worth putting stuff like "vim keybinds" in - John Carmack reportedly did that to check what's the fuss about Vim.
Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards
#5Used Anki quite a bit in my final years of university. Using it now as well for AWS certification prep. Can’t recommend enough!
Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards
#6Long-term user of Anki ~ 13-14 yrs, with mostly language learning focus. It’s good; but out of the box, I find that most users barely tap into its utility. It’s templating engine, ability to shape card content and formatting via JS and CSS put it in a league above most other SRS applications. (With the caveat that it’s easy to waste a lot of time on inconsequential card-tweaking…)
A lot of people complain that it uses an inferior SRS algorithm. Other algorithms can be patched in; but I’ve never bothered because it seems like a hyper-optimization without known real-world outcomes. (i.e. Will I speak better {L2} if I use alternate SRS algorithm?)
Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards
#7Every few years I use Anki heavily for language stuff (German, more recently Latin and Classical Chinese), up to 90 minutes a day, but I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up. I still benefit from a year of training, but it seems the long-tail of spaced repetition doesn't work for me at all. But so long as I get to the point where I can read or watch TV, the considerable effor…
> They have a lot of shared decks hosted online
I have mixed feelings about shared decks. I’ve tried many, yet always find something about them that irritates me - aesthetics, content accuracy, etc. Or more likely that just doesn’t fit contextually with what I’m learning.
However, the low startup energy with shared decks is certainly a selling point. I can’t even begin to estimate how much time I’ve spent over the years creating 50K+ cards…
> highly personalised system that doesn't need to work for anyone else.
My experience exactly.
Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards
#8I LOVE anki!! I’m a heavy user. Everything goes in my morning flash cards. Knots, geography, language, tar commandline flags, papers, statistics homework. Fill them with things you like, is my advice - it’s fun to say hello to hobbies on the verge of your memory in the morning. Bird calls! I’m learning sounds of bird calls since I can’t see very well so I can’t learn by sight. I listed eBird’s set of common birds nea…
Wait a moment. "tar commandline flags"? When I was still learning how to program, the general advice was to avoid memorizing things you can easily look up, like language syntax, framework functionality or commandline flags, and just let it happen. In fact, I recently caught myself skimming Nest.js docs to make cards to learn how to use Nest.js BEFORE I even start working on my project, and almost felt like I'm procra…
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.
Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards
#9Sitting down with Michael W. Lucas's Networking for System Administrators and making Anki flashcards out of them was probably the highest impact thing I did for my career last spring. It's an incredible tool, truly.
Anyone else who wants to learn just enough networking to never be 100% stumped by it again, I recommend both tools.
Re: Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards
#10Every few years I use Anki heavily for language stuff (German, more recently Latin and Classical Chinese), up to 90 minutes a day, but I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up. I still benefit from a year of training, but it seems the long-tail of spaced repetition doesn't work for me at all. But so long as I get to the point where I can read or watch TV, the considerable effor…
> what the ecosystem would look like
There is a third-party paid exchange here:
(I’ve had a few exchanges with the founder, and wish him luck.)