That Supermemo article in Wired hooked me. I still remember where I was when I read it and the feeling of reading it. I still use Supermemo daily, and it's one of the programs keeping on Windows. Anki (and every other SRS program I've tried) just doesn't compare as soon as you move beyond a list of flashcards.
That said, having used Supermemo for over a decade at this point, the hardest thing about SRS is deciding what's actually worth reviewing for a long period of time. I delete (really remove from repetitions) cards from my collection almost on a daily basis.
There's a lot of stuff that seems really important that I just didn't care about after even three months.
Supermemo's incremental reading basically lets you schedule chunks of text or images (alleged video too) like a flashcard from Anki. So, instead of bookmarking articles and never reading them, I can put them into Supermemo and know I'll eventually review it.
It basically counts as a separate type of flashcard, but all your reviews are mixed by default. So on a typical day, I'll have maybe 20 flashcards to review, and then another 10-20 articles.
Supermemo saves where you last were reading, so when I get bored of an article, I just hit next and go to the next one. Eventually, you'll process an article down to individual flashcards like you'd put in Anki, or remove it from your review process altogether. Also, you can just leave the entire article in there if you like rereading it.
What's your use case? In my case, obsidian + anki seems to do very well (I can keep a decent amount of context in my cards) for math/CS topics.
Can you also give an example how you benefit from your workflow, and say a bit more why Anki wouldn't be sufficient? Wouldn't keeping a track of articles and making cards in Anki achieve the same purpose, or is there something else? Of course the implementation matters, and having a system for paper-reading and revising by itself is a nice feature.
According to the wired article, the key to remembering is reviewing the information the moment you’re about to forget. It makes it sound like the scheduled review times are designed to maximize the effect.
Never tried it but all the comments made me curious.
Yeah I agree. Anki has a failure mode for me that I eventually accumulate > 5000 flash cards and a review session can take an hour or more. Knowing what to review is really difficult. I'll give Supermemo a shot, I've always heard of it as the gold standard but never tried it.
> Yeah I agree. Anki has a failure mode for me that I eventually accumulate >5000 flash cards and a review session can take an hour or more.
You don't really need to keep up with Anki's review sessions, even a partial session is very effective when you have lots and lots of cards. The tradeoff is that you might not actually maintain 100% recall of all items, but you'll recall most of them, and the scheduling algorithm will space out the items that you do recall even further.
I'm familiar with that problem, and overcame it by really working at making good cards. Today, I have 6000 cards in my collection, and daily reviews take 15-20 minutes; usually 100-120 cards. (I have been using Anki for a lost time. My collection is almost 10 years old.)
Granted, writing good cards is easy to say and really hard to do. Some specific pointers:
- cards should take less than 10 seconds to answer
- most questions should be 7 words or so
- if your question has multiple clauses, split those up into separate cards
- cloze deletions are great, consider multiple clozes per card
- around 10% of your cards should have images
- good images help a lot, mediocre images make it worse -- when in doubt, don't
- Answer this Question cards should have an opposite Question for this Answer like Jeopardy
In my experience, you really only start to see these problems at the tens of thousands of flashcards level. I have ~70,000 mature flashcards and also have the growing backlog problem, even if I don't add new cards for weeks. My collection is 8 years old.
I agree that making good flashcards helps alot. Another big thing is to make sure the knowledge graph is connected, eg there are no 'orphaned' individual cards / groups of cards. Those tend to suffer seriously from decay for me.
I'm working on a program that solves this problem: we don't have mandatory daily reviews and we also have a Spaced Repetition Algorithm for reviews. Also it's much more flexible than Anki & Supermemo. So you don't have to stress over as to complete the daily grind.
Yo, I've been using SuperMemo for 16 years every single day (Did my cards this morning :), and you're spot on! I would love to chit chat about SM sometime, I've not met many people that use SRS for so long! Send me an e-mail at thesupermemoguy (at) gmail (dot) com
No it's primarily an awful Delphi for Windows desktop application that is extremely fragile.
But once you know how to "hold it correctly" it will be your companion for life.
I run it in a virtual machine with all its legacy dependencies like IE. Forget about running it on Wine, it barely works on any version of Windows (lol)
What's https://www.supermemo.com/ then? I just signed up to give it a go (requires CC #, but free for a month). Still haven't found good spaced repetition vocab learning site that works well for me.
Ah OK, though I'm still curious how there can also be an apparently unrelated online offering at supermemo.com. FWIW, from the very brief experience I've had so far I'm not super impressed, but I'll try sticking with it for at least the month of the free trial.
they are working together. supermemo.com is based on the same algorithm but is designed to be more mainstream (no advanced stuff like incremental reading & hard to make your own cards).You can buy high quality language courses there(no need to make all the cards). I have both since supermemo.com has an app for the phone.
If actually using it has this huge friction, how do you manage to use it every day? I always have a hard time creating habits out things that are hard to "start" doing every time.
That said, having used Supermemo for over a decade at this point, the hardest thing about SRS is deciding what's actually worth reviewing for a long period of time. I delete (really remove from repetitions) cards from my collection almost on a daily basis.
There's a lot of stuff that seems really important that I just didn't care about after even three months.
Supermemo's incremental reading basically lets you schedule chunks of text or images (alleged video too) like a flashcard from Anki. So, instead of bookmarking articles and never reading them, I can put them into Supermemo and know I'll eventually review it.
It basically counts as a separate type of flashcard, but all your reviews are mixed by default. So on a typical day, I'll have maybe 20 flashcards to review, and then another 10-20 articles.
Supermemo saves where you last were reading, so when I get bored of an article, I just hit next and go to the next one. Eventually, you'll process an article down to individual flashcards like you'd put in Anki, or remove it from your review process altogether. Also, you can just leave the entire article in there if you like rereading it.