I've used spaced repetition to help learn stuff in general. It's one of the most rewarding things I've done. Some general thoughts:
1. A lot of spaced repetition apps don't optimize for fast card creation. I like to make a card as soon as I come across something interesting, but the delay to get Anki started, and to create the card, etc just makes it frustrating. I wound up building my own app for this.
2. Cloze deletion is surprisingly effective. For those who don't know, cloze deletion involves taking a sentence, blanking the interesting parts out e.g. "The moon landing happened on _______", and trying to recall the blank parts. This is effective because it's a quick way to make cards, thus solving the problem of slow card creation.
3. I fared better with lots of small, one-sentence cards. My rule of thumb is that a card should fit in a tweet.
4. Subjectively speaking, using spaced repetition didn't just help me recall stuff in my cards, it also helped me recall stuff in general.
One of the issues Anki has, I find, is that if you end up taking a long break for whatever reason, there's no way to "reset".
I used Anki to study Chinese for a period of about 10 years. At some point I decided that I wanted to memorize the poker "outs" (probabilities of filling out a hand based on what had currently been dealt). Then I went through a time where I was really busy and didn't study the poker deck for a month (but I made time for Chinese). When I came back to the poker deck, the "spaced repetition" system was completely broken: I had a massive long list of cards that had expired, most of which I'd completely forgotten; but it just kept showing them to me in one giant loop, rather than focusing on a few to actually teach me. And I didn't even have a clean way of telling it, "Just pretend I haven't seen any of these cards at all". I ended up just deleting the deck; that discouraged me from doing anything else I wasn't willing to commit to doing every single day.
I've used Anki for about ten years, and I'm going to tell you a huge secret...
There's absolutely no need to "reset". Ever.
If you have only ten minutes to devote to Anki, then only spend ten minutes. If at some later point, you have more time, then spend that time.
Set the maximum reviews per day to something you can do most days -- for me, that's 250 cards. If you're behind, turn off 'new' cards. And eventually, you will catch up.
What if you don't do Anki for a month or two? You still don't need to reset. Anything you remember after that month will have a much longer time until you next see it.
Only use Anki as much as you have time for it. Let it figure out which cards to show you. Resetting messes with the algorithm for which cards to show.
I'm also over ten years on Anki, and I've racked up 2/3 of a million review during that time. I've taken too-long breaks several times over that time period, on a variety of subjects (decks in Anki). Sometimes years.
Each time I've gone back to a deck, I've just slugged out the few days of heavy reviews and let Anki take care of the rest. The stuff that I've forgotten, Anki will nag me with. The stuff that I've retained for years, stays retained.
One thing that I do suggest is to limit the maximum interval to 365 days, and to remove the review limit. I also tend to use the "hard" answer on cards that I've retained in decks that I've ignored for some time.
Having used Anki for 10 years, reset is definitely the best option.you fly through the cards you remember at the start, and don’t get bogged down by cards your ‘supposed’ to remember.
There are a couple ways to do it that I've found. None of them is perfect for every situation I've encountered. I think that part of the reason why there's no clean way to do it is that there are so many specific things someone might want to do:
- If you want to just push cards to the back of the queue, but remember timings and history, there's a built-in command to do that.
- If you want to change the current interval of a card, but keep your history, there's also a built-in command for that.
- If you need to do the above in bulk, the "Reset Card Scheduling" plugin can make this a lot more convenient.
- If you really do want to completely reset a card, forget all history, etc., and treat it as a new card, there's the "Remove Card History" plugin.
Finally, when returning to old decks, I found I usually get the most mileage by leaving all that stuff alone and just suspending the whole thing, and then un-suspending them at a steady pace. I neglected my Kanji deck for months, and I used that approach to get myself back up to speed by doing the catch-up review in the original (RTK) order I originally learned them rather than based on Anki's priority.
User plugins are a cool feature that let users do all sorts of things you couldn't forsee as the app developer nor want to encumber the UI with every possible feature.
But it feels so hacky when you need them for things that seem like rather elementary functionality like resetting a deck.
Calibre feels the same way like needing a plugin just to estimate page count. I feel lucky when a plugin actually works.
For what it's worth, I keep everything in a single deck. I never stop reviewing stuff and "interleaving" makes learning more effective than "blocking" (studying things in blocks). Source: Bjork et al 2013 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231610455_Self-Regu...)
I took a modified approach to this in university, though nowadays I mostly do the same.
For each new class, I would start a new deck, and after the course was over I would move it over to my main (huge) deck, and it's worked surprisingly well.
Typically (now that I'm out), I add small cards from time to time to my deck, but if there's a large quantity of things I am working on learning at any given time (say I'm going to add 50-100 new cards), I'll put them in their own deck for a little bit.
Ultimately, my repetition does end up being a wide array of subjects though.
This is why tagging is useful. Anything cards I added for United had the tag of the class it was from. You can then do a custom study session with just those tagged cards.
I'm kind of new to Anki myself (started a couple of weeks ago) so I might be wrong, but I think you can limit the amount of cards you want to review on a per-deck-basis. The default-number is quite high (200 per day I think?).
If you make that number the same as the "new cards per day"-number, that might be a work around for your issue?
What's the use case for this dumb mode? Does Anki not have a "cram" mode that just goes through all flashcards with none of the fancy interval logic?
One of the wonderful things about software assisting with spaced repetition is that it automatically selects and remembers efficient intervals. It's crazy how little time is spent per flashcard with this automation.
I don't know. I just tried to briefly check it out again. I'm sure I could be giving it a fairer chance.
Clearly, millions of people are benefiting from this app.
I'm just finding the features and interface very bombarding. And, the sheer number of screen taps just to study the flash cards in the manner that I'd like (and even then, not fully within my perceived control) is pretty repelling.
Thank you for pointing that out that feature. It might help eventually with conversion.
I don't see that there's any difference in responding "Again" to an expired card vs reclassing that card as new. When I'm catching back up on an old deck I just turn new card off and limit my reviews until I've worked through the backlog this way.
Suppose you have 50 unseen cards, and you have it set to show you 5 new cards every day, and energy for about 10 reviews.
Then on day 1 it will want to show you cards 1-5; day two it will show you 1-5 again and also 6-10; day three it will show you 6-10 again and also 7-15 (to simplify somewhat). So you're having some cards you know and some that are new.
If you have 50 cards you've forgotten, then on day 1 it will show you 1-10; on day 2 it will show you 11-20; day 3 it will show you 21-30, and so on -- all completely new. That makes it far more of a grind.
For frictionless card-creation I have made an org-capture template for quickly adding cards to an org-mode file via a custom Emacs pop-up frame. This is accessible from everywhere with the keybinding (Super + c + a).
Exporting to Anki from Emacs is done via the anki-editor mode for Emacs.
I think org-drill is just better overall since it's all stored as plain-text at the end of the day and each card is really editable and accessible. Anki in my experience has a clunky, slow GUI. It can't beat the creation and editing speed from vim keybindings and macros.
The thing I miss with org-drill is being able to do it on the phone. I have considered trying to integrate it into Orgzly but it does seem like a big project, unfortunately.
This sounds like an issue with something else you have installed in Emacs. I suggest running the profiler to see what is actually taking time. Org-drill itself on an otherwise vanilla config is fast, so it could be that you have hooks that are slow or something.
> 3. I fared better with lots of small, one-sentence cards. My rule of thumb is that a card should fit in a tweet.
Can someone tell me if this is a crazy good idea? Social network + spaced repetition. Why should you build all your own cards? Taking a class with classmates? Create a group & create cards during lecture, review/curate cards afterwards during study session, then rate which ones were most useful after the exam (or homework).
I've head a similar idea, except not in context of a group project but of a wiki. So there's a wider audience for any particular topic and more people to create and improve the exercises: cards, cloze deletion tests, etc.
I think it's important that exercises are tightly linked to the source material, like to a specific paragraph of an article, etc. So these materials should probably be added to the system as well.
* With the same starting point it should be easier to have a proper discussion.
* A new person can read the source and understand cards more easily with context.
* Later if they've forgotten the topic completely they can reread it and hopefully remember faster.
I also had some ideas about being able to discuss and alter every paragraph in the source. Allow it to evolve to be more clear as people come and discuss confusing points.
The actual act of creating the cards is also useful to the learning process. Even if you are copying someone else's cards, copying them by hand will lead to better retention than having a computer import them.
Since you've made you're own app, and have noticed that a good card is a good tweet: I want an app that puts my cards in my twitter feed. I check twitter way too much and don't like opening Anki to review my cards. Not sure exactly how it would work, maybe I see a few tweets, and then there's a 'card' tweet, and I interact with it as usual and then get more tweets. Just an idea.
For speeding up the card creation I've recently made a CLI application [1]. It generates cards from Markdown files.
I'd recommend having its own repository with Markdown files grouped by target domain using tags for every card. It'd help to search quickly relevant cards even in the same domain.
Nice! I made a similar thing for myself, but without nearly as much polish as your project [1].
I use a custom text file format to allow creation of cloze deletions and reversible cards as well as basic cards. I also annotate text files on export so that I can export the file again without creating duplicate cards.
The big shortcoming of my script is that it generates .tsv files and Anki only allows .tsv files to contain one note type. They also do not incorporate media.
I'd like to be able to sync edits made in Anki back to the text files and vice versa. It'd be really cool to integrate a text file parser and alternative card editing mode into Anki with a plugin.
Perhaps I'll send some PR's your way instead of duplicating effort.
I have some cool decks, but I am terrible about reviewing them frequently. It just becomes another chore. Maybe I should really embrace it. I spent a few months brushing up on biology and that was really amusing but I fell out of the habit :/
Using the reminder aka notifications feature of the android app got the habit to stick for me. Total pita to figure out how to get it turned on though :)
1. A lot of spaced repetition apps don't optimize for fast card creation. I like to make a card as soon as I come across something interesting, but the delay to get Anki started, and to create the card, etc just makes it frustrating. I wound up building my own app for this.
2. Cloze deletion is surprisingly effective. For those who don't know, cloze deletion involves taking a sentence, blanking the interesting parts out e.g. "The moon landing happened on _______", and trying to recall the blank parts. This is effective because it's a quick way to make cards, thus solving the problem of slow card creation.
3. I fared better with lots of small, one-sentence cards. My rule of thumb is that a card should fit in a tweet.
4. Subjectively speaking, using spaced repetition didn't just help me recall stuff in my cards, it also helped me recall stuff in general.