>A common failure mode (and I did this more than once, before I got the hang of it) is to use Anki for two weeks, then drop it, and pick it back up six months later only to find you have 600 cards due for review. This is not encouraging, and it defeats the point of spaced repetition, which is to review the cards on the intervals the algorithm chooses.
For successful long-term use of a spaced repetition program, I believe that this model of thinking is unsustainable for most. I used to have this relationship but had to grow past it as my life circumstances changed and prevented me from having that consistent amount of time every single day.
Now, I look at Anki as a way to prioritize my learning time. When I get to it, I have it present me the things that are the most-overdue first. This has meant that I've gone from a typical backlog of ~0 reviews at the end of the day to flexing between ~500-2500 backlogged reviews. Just because I'm not reviewing the piece of information at the exact right time doesn't mean that I'm "defeating the point" of the piece of software. Spaced repetition, even if done imperfectly, is still many times more efficient than traditional study methods.
> Just because I'm not reviewing the piece of information at the exact right time doesn't mean that I'm "defeating the point"
Some of us, thanks to personality and previous experience (diagnosis and/or childhood and/or early work experiences etc) needs to hear this again and again it seems.
When people start using spaced repetition and flashcard software they often end up throwing a big list of "Most common 1000 French words" into it and then promptly being swamped by reviews and giving up.
This is a bad idea for two reasons:
When it comes to spaced repetition, quality beats quantity. Only put in the perfect nuggets of knowledge. You're walking through an orchard and grabbing a single apple, not a whole trees worth.
Spaced repetition is to stop you forgetting, not for learning brand new things. When you study a topic and have an "aha" moment or you make a new connection, that's the thing you should put in. When you make the flashcard it should feel a little too easy. "I could never forget this, it seems so obvious now!". Doing this means your reviews are almost all easy and remind you of your learning experiences. The few things you forget are easily recalled and strengthened.
Joyful and fun review sessions are the most important thing. Maximising adherence (and therefore not giving up) is far more important than squeezing out a 1% more efficient SRS algorithm.
I learned multiple languages this way. I think you’re better served by turning off the counter for cards remaining, and studying more often. Otherwise you’re not doing SRS at all.
One can’t remember 2300 Kanji as an aha-moment each.
Drilling all the possible combinations of Hangeul characters for recognition speed is very effective, but most cards won’t be an aha-moment.
One can use premade lists of vocabulary and prioritize vocabulary encountered in study material/real life. You’ll have to learn all the other vocabulary eventually anyway.
Decks with huge amounts of example sentences and audio simulate real conversation and drill listening comprehension and applied grammar.
There is no right or wrong way to srs. You have to put in mental effort, whether thats creating elaborate cards, or grinding through thousands of premades. Once you stop putting in the mental effort, it will stop working to improve your recall
I faced Anki review hell even with small decks, So I had to create an always-on Anki e-Ink review system[1] which sits on my desk and shows me cards all day; Now I can choose to review the cards through out the day during small breaks without overwhelming myself with a single review session.
Due to the small real-estate (screen), I have to condense the information to what's really necessary and the act of doing it (on Anki desktop) itself helps me with my learning.
What I'm doing might be heretic to Spaced Repetition folks, But it works for me.
This is exactly me, although I've had streaks where I just ploughed through the big backlogs just throwing a lot of time against the problem (having a kid now, I can no longer reside to this option)
Question: for language learning: is there anything to say about or help with this initial learning? So before then starting the spaced repetition.
I would not call Duolingo a language learning application. It behaves more like language mimicry application. You learn a very particular subset of the language that I'd call "Duolingo <insert lang>". This is my conclusion after using it for two non-English languages.
You seriously need a basic beginner book if starting from fresh, and use Duolingo just as a repetition tool when you can during the day
I realized that, after a year of learning German on Duolingo, the app had become something that I hated. The initial gamified fun-ness became a stressor. Seeing the notification every night that my streak was about to end stressed me out. I had long since stopped enjoying the learning process because it had felt like I wasn't learning anything at all. Ending my streak felt amazing.
I'm learning Japanese now through books, Anki, and a few webapps. The gamification is gone and streaks don't really matter. I'm sticking with it because I'm enjoying learning, not because the owl is threatening me.
Consensus among Serious language learners (i.e aiming for a B2+ level) is that duolingo is marginally useful for learning some vocabulary. A thorough course or textbook are essential
I used it for most of a year, and from what I can tell they go out of their gamified way to not teach any grammar or even vocabulary. Not all the time but ~20% popping up sounds and spellings, but providing no way at all to know/check what the meaning is... Why? Why not have a dictionary of the words you've "learned" and will be tested on?
Going to a fixed sequence of learning "the path" so that you're forced to cover topics and words in a specific order, and then introducing grammar that has never been taught... Why? Either cover them in order, or don't.
Eventually, you figure out the right answer by trial and error and "learn" it, but only after having developed a bad habits and wrong answers... Why? Of course there are Anki's and such out there that cover all the words so I guess they want you to just do that.
I'd say the answer is because they don't measure success in terms of who becomes competent in the language, but in how many users they have. typical neoliberal "number go up" mentality, rejecting ideological definitions of "genuine" value
You can pick a lot worse to learn to be able to stumble through a language for vacation.
Learning the first few words in a language to start becoming competent in it is not a bad thing. Managing one's expectations is really important.
Not all learners will learn best with a textbook or course first. Variety helps.
Humans have learned language by speaking before as much as, if not more than reading/writing.
Now, are there better apps coming out for this kind of thing? Absolutely. The potential for LLM to be able to generate and listen to pronunciation will be amazing.
Prioritizing speaking before learning to read or write a language really seems to irk some folks.
I found Duolingo very good while I was actually in the country and speaking the language I was trying to learn.
It didn't teach me to speak alone but expanded my vocabulary enough to stumble through conversations. Which was enough to being improving through speaking with locals.
At Math Academy (https://mathacademy.com), we implement spaced repetition in combination with a knowledge graph consisting of several thousand math topics and tens of thousands of connections (and growing). We're working on a post that explains how this all works technically.
Given that SRS is a long-term endeavour, going on several years, I'd balk at paying $49/month for your app. Maybe $60/year, but your current pricing is really hard to swallow.
I'm the founder of Execute Program (https://www.executeprogram.com), where we've done a similar thing (knowledge graph + SRS) for programming languages/tools since 2019. Interesting to see that you have a graphviz render of a subgraph right on the landing page! We've toyed with the idea of exposing the graph visually, but haven't done it yet.
The UI/UX of executeprogram is genuinely amazing and the way lessons are broken down is extremely well-thought out!
Definitely recommended for anyone wanting to learn JS/TS, regex, and SQL (especially in conjunction with Jennifer Widom's Intro to Database lectures).
(Given your background with Ruby, have you thought about doing a Ruby course? I find it relatively easier finding resources for JS, Python, and even Rust. I imagine you could make an amazing Ruby introduction, though perhaps it would require more work than JS/TS than I would expect.)
This is very, very neat. I've seen a lot of cool looking learn math sites that stop after (best case) freshman college math. I have a BS in math but there were some courses I never felt I got or it's been so long (>10 years) that I've forgotten more than I'd like and it'd be really nice to brush up on the interesting stuff.
I'm very interested in your methods of proofs and abstract algebra courses and I'm excited for them to be released!
I've tried Clozemaster several times and always uninstalled it within a few days despite really wanting to like it. I could happily ignore the bad UI if the functionality were good, but I've found that the pacing lacks structure and a sensible learning curve. You'll straight away be given bizarre sentences with complex grammer which is unsuitable for your level (in my case, beginner to beginner / intermediate depending on what language I've tried). For all Duolingo's faults, the learning curve is at least well suited to beginners - the first few lessons are always very basic and it builds from there. I felt like Clozemaster was only suitable for someone who has already learned the language and simply wants to build vocabulary.
My experience with Lingvist was the opposite. The UI feels polished and the sentences feel natural and comfortable to learn even for a beginner. It's a shame that it's so expensive - I'd quite happily pay $100 or so for a lifetime membership but sadly they don't offer that.
If you're interested in a more visual approach you can try https://traverse.link/ - it's an app I created which has spaced repetition, but really its goal is to cover the whole learning process, so it also has mind mapping and note-taking so you get a big picture view of what you're learning, why reinforcing bottom-up with spaced repetition
As an aside, LogSeq is quite good at creating cards for spaced repetition with just a hashtage and a cloze as you write your notes. I would expect other tools like it (Obsidian, etc, can do this as well)
Agreed. Logseq changed the game for me. Because SRS is closely coupled with note-taking and is as simple as adding "#card", it eliminates any friction and excuses I had for not using SRS. I look forward to adding new cards as much as I do reviewing old ones.
Another use I'm discovering is using logseq in this way for both cards, and annotating explanations of things that can be put back into other learning content.
I struggle to learn chess even with repetition. Very slight difference on the board required drastically different plays. It is almost as if there is no pattern
You get all the code highlighting and markdown support built-in to the IDE. I used this plugin when studying data structures and algorithms for cracking faang interviews.
wanikani.com is a good example for the very specific market of "English speakers memorizing Japanese kanji." Great UI, great community, great sense of humor, well thought out mnemonics...
...and of course I still fell off the wagon after a few months, came back to a backlog in the thousands, and have had tremendous trouble getting back on the wagon.
WaniKani I found filled my head with meanings that didn't correlate to anything, and knowledge that wasn't actually useful.
I am by no means a Japanese expert learner, but I am having much better luck just memorizing real vocab without that intermediate step.
As someone pointed out about the much famed "Remebering the Kanji", you could remeber all the kanji perfectly and still not be able to read Japanese, because Japanese kanji is not equivelant to vocabulary. Actual words, pronunciation and meaning all change when you combine kanji into words.
It's good tangential knowledge to shore up your learning, but it's not something you should spend your entire focus on before you start learning the actual language of Japanese.
Agreed. I pulled the top 1000 Japanese words and then entered those along with the specific kanji readings. Learning wonky kanji readings is for those masochists who want to pass JLPT Level N1.
You want to memorize in usage order as you are, nominally, an adult. You understand complex concepts and have developed motor skills. There is little point in learning in the order that a child would.
The true masochists go for Kanken level 1 (which has almost 90% fail rate even for native test takers, and those are already the self selected sample of people mad enough to try the test).
If I remember correctly (ha), WaniKani is actually ordered by the simplicity of the kanji, as they also point out that children can only start with simple concepts but non-native adults have the concepts covered but will struggle with complex kanji.
You do. Most off the early levels are kanji that a first grader would know, and it very loosely stays organized by grade level, with a lot of allowances.
Remembering the Kanji is for learning how to write kanji, which does help with reading as well, but that's not its primary purpose. If you actually do want to be able to write by hand (which I think most people (understandably) don't want to invest the time for), it's well worth the time investment.
> it's not something you should spend your entire focus on before you start learning the actual language of Japanese
This is also true. You can do both. In fact I think you /should/ do both, learning new vocabulary using the kanji you've learned so far to help motivate you to learn more. It's quite addicting when you can see your progress day-to-day.
> Spaced repetition is, by far, the most effective cognitive hack I’ve used.
I totally second that. Well, sleep and exercise do amazing things for you too, but if you need to memorize things, I don't know of a quicker method than spaced repetition.
The Leitner system is designed with the assumption that you have lots of physical cards you need to organise without going insane, but you can do much better if you're using a program like Anki.
Anki's algorithm is based on an older version of the SuperMemo algorithm, with some evolution since then. The consensus seems to be that while you can fine tune it a bit with the settings, the returns are diminishing at this point.
Thanks for the pointer to the Leitner system (my last name coincides…) But why would you want to use that simplified Leitner system if Anki can track each card individually?
Disclaimer: I don’t know if Anki supports a simplified system that applies spacing to a whole group of cards instead of each card individually, but why you would want that?
Huge fan of SRS here. Anki never really gelled with me personally. I still use it but really prefer this app called StickyStudy. It’s mostly for learning Chinese / Japanese but there was a generic version which has sadly been abandoned by the dev. It has very straightforward SRS / leitner system and a bit more simplified ui. Not my app but just wanted to share and maybe inspire someone to make a successor ;-)
”Individual cards should be extremely brief, but your deck as a whole can be as repetitive as you want.”
Huh! I struggled with using Anki for pretty much this exact reason, always spent too much mental energy figuring out the “correct” number of cards for a given topic. But the author makes a good point here, if there’s too many cards on a certain topic you’ll just hit “I remember” on the repetitive cards and the algorithm will make them disappear for months - so there’s basically no cost to having “too many” flashcards!
The only disadvantage I may see to this is that it skews your counter of daily cards. So you may feel discouraged if you see that you have a large amount of cards to review and that it will probably take you a lot of time to go through them all, while in fact, you will only spend a few seconds on those that you already remember. Unfortunately, there are times when I cannot for the life of me do my flashcards because there are too many of them to review, and I either skip that day's session because a) I tell myself I don't have enough time (which is a lie most of the time!) or b) I don't have the mental energy to go through them. The only (partial) solution I have found to that is doing them first thing in the morning by trying to plan my schedule accordingly and wake up a tad earlier.
I have configured a review session to be at most 15 flashcards or 5 minutes, whichever is shorter. It usually takes 2–3 minutes. Often I do multiple review sessions back to back. But I'm only ever committing to 15 cards at a time, regardless of the size of the backlog – that is very manageable.
Use the setting to limit the number of daily cards when you find the number bothers you or you’re too busy. You can change it often, too.
A low limit will mean some cards don’t hit on the optimal day, but you’ll eventually have time for every card once enough of them have been recalled a few times.
I would actually advise against it, or at least take the approach of removing cards that are too easy. I remember reading some article about spending your time learning stuff that is "just hard enough". When you study things that are easy you are kind of wasting time, you want to the material to be +1 in difficulty what you already know, not +0, not +250. While the easy questions give you satisfaction, they aren't helping you actually learn. I would argue that multiple cards on the same subject end up equating to a bunch of time wasting easy cards.
The disclosure to this is that I also don't think you should spend a lot of time figuring out how to create cards. There is some payoff in optimizing the process, but focus on just making the cards and reviewing them so you are learning the actual target subject.
All that said, my current approach is to create cards for concepts that I think are a little hard to understand or that I know I won't see enough repetition in daily work/tasks. If I find out after a few weeks the cards are too easy or too similar I usually with just delete it.
I don't think this really makes much of a difference. At least for me it didn't.
Sometimes I remove cards that are too easy, sometimes I see that the next time to review them would be 6 months down the line and I leave it in, because the cost of leaving it is so small.
What has made a difference though is thinking about wether I still actually want to remember the contents of a card. Sometimes a card comes up that I haven't seen in months and I think "you know what, I haven't thought about this at all outside of Anki and I don't think that'll change." and then I just remove it. Sometimes I create a nearly identical card again later on, sometimes I really didn't need to know something.
I'm a big fan of making lots of cards, like you say you can just hit Easy and send them into next year, or conversely if you keep forgetting them and they're using up lots of time, just suspend or delete them.
When I couldn't remember a particular kanji in Japanese I used to make lots of cards that featured that kanji at the same time, and usually I'd review them all the same time, it's sort of cheating but it always seemed to help me remember the kanji in the end.
It's actually the correct way to make that work. Some Hanzi and Kanji are really abstract and are best learned by associating it with multiple related concepts. Each can have dozens of very distinctive meanings.
Yeah I learned pretty much every kanji with jukugo (did Remembering the Kanji at first, but it wasn't that helpful). A lot of failed cards at first since I was trying to learn recognition of the kanji, the kana reading and the word's meaning - but it got easier over time.
>A common failure mode (and I did this more than once, before I got the hang of it) is to use Anki for two weeks, then drop it, and pick it back up six months later only to find you have 600 cards due for review. This is not encouraging, and it defeats the point of spaced repetition, which is to review the cards on the intervals the algorithm chooses.
>I don’t have much advice in this area, except that if you have persistent problems with conscientiousness, untreated ADHD etc. you should address that first.
This keeps happening to me, and I have somewhat treated (but severe) ADHD.
Does anyone have recommendations to make this easier? Either Anki settings, or using another app.
> pick it back up six months later only to find you have 600 cards due for review.
Just do the amount you feel like doing. Backlogs don't matter, the system will just show you the highest priority cards (highest risk of forgetting) first, and even give you extra credit (i.e. a longer review interval) for those cards that you do still recall despite the backlog.
If you don't touch it for that long, just throw away the scorefile and start from new. It probably doesn't fit the degree you actually remember any of the things that you learned.
Here's what worked for me, but probably only works for people in a narrow set of circumstances.
I read a lot of technical books and articles. I used to make notes on the interesting/relevant stuff I came across, in case I would forget about it after I had used it and need it again in the future, so I would be able to look it up.
Now I make flashcards instead. Since I keep reading new things, and keep wanting to make new notes, I also keep adding flashcards. And it feels silly to add flashcards without also reviewing them, so I end up doing that too.
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But yes, as another person wrote in their comment, part of it is also resigning to/accepting your condition for the effects it will have on the things you want to do. Sometimes you'll stop reviewing and you'll get a backlog. The important thing is not that you consistently review, but that you consistently pick up reviewing again once you've stopped.
The SM algorithms, trying to predict the perfect time for reviewing a question, seem like overengineering to me (and also not very well supported by research afaik - we have evidence that repetitions help, but much less what the perfect spacing is). Just randomly sample questions with probabilities proportional to how 'urgently' you need to see them, seems like the most intuitive approach to me. No daily quotas, no running out of questions, just do a few when you feel like it and don't worry about whether you're doing too much or too little repetition.
Is there an app/plugin that works like that? I know you could use Anki like that by just not worrying about the backlog, but in my experience it doesn't work like that.
It may have been linked already from this thread, but ebisu seems to be just that (it has a really great website detailing the math behind, plus a Python implementation)
The issue you're having is due to the fact that Anki "Accumulates" cards if you skip one day, which can build up and create such a large amount of scheduled cards for a day that you end up dropping the thing. I'm working on a spaced repetition algorithm that solves this issue by letting you review when you have time and letting you skip the days you can't do the reviews.
I'm interested! I've noticed exactly this. But also even with regular use I've had times where the stack and thus required study time was just ever increasing. This is probably a mix of too many new cards plus high difficulty resulting too many reset cards. It would be great if I could determine when and how long I'd study and the algorithm would just offer me the cards best to study next, being repeats or new ones. That would combine nicely with a 'dont brake the chain' or other habbit forming technique. I'd prefer a daily n minutes above something that may take increasingly longer.
I also have adhd and struggled with this through multiple iterations of trying to integrate Anki into my daily routine.
What finally helped was that I first learned the habit of reviewing the cards daily, before I trained the habit of adding new cards.
I always fell into the trap of picking up Anki (maybe because an exam came up, or because I was otherwise motivated to learn a specific topic) and immediately writing lots of cards. This gave me a dopamine boost (thus reinforcing the habit), but quickly became overwhelming.
It only stuck when I learned to integrate the review process into my daily life, without actually having anything to create flashcards about. I went days without creating new cards and then every once in a while I thought of something that was a good fit for Anki and that I was unlikely to remember otherwise.
As a result the review process was just a handful of cards every day, able to be reviewed in under a minute. Eventually (I'd say after a month or two), the habit settled and I didn't need to think about it anymore. And because I wasn't fixated on creating new cards I was able to enjoy a gradual increase in creating flashcards as I got better at writing them and recognising when they were a good fit.
To be clear, this took maybe four or five failed tries, even though I read articles like this one. I had to make most of the mistakes covered in this (and other) articles myself, before I got better at writing cards. The tips still helped me arrive quicker at the solution, but it was hard to grasp why they were right, without experiencing the mistakes with my own cards.
The only thing that worked for me (also ADHD) is to have fixed study sessions, typically in the morning ("Kanji before breakfast") or during my train commute.
Beyond that, I wouldn't worry about backlog too much. I use a custom deck that gives me my maximally doable number of cards per day and completely ignore the rest. It's not like the actual repetition frequency is critical - many people change those settings quite drastically and still manage to memorize their cards fine.
The way I did this was I added a daily task to my todo list to do spaced repetition.
And I started small. Add a few flashcards, review. Don't add more than 5-20 cards per day (Anki and Mochi have new card limits to enforce this for you).
If you use it daily, and add cards at a slow trickle, they won't pile up and you won't get discouraged.
Two big things that people seem to forget, or not realize:
1. Anki (etc) isn't really there to help you remember, it's there to schedule and optimize your time so you can do more in less time; to avoid the (ad absurdum) case of studying every card, every day. That's effective, but wasteful. To help you remember you use other tricks like the Major system, the Loci system, mnemonics, etc. I recommend either Higbee's book on memory, or Lorayne's, for a array of help there.
2. It's not even close to "perfect", because your brain isn't. SO MANY THINGS affect whether or not you're going to remember a card on a day; what you ate, how you slept, other stuff going on in your brain/life, your context when you added the card, your context now, what you have been thinking about ... It's just not possible for software to nail it _to the day_ of when you can see a card. Anki can only tell you when you should PROBABLY see the card and that probability's standard deviation is high indeed.
To your question, what works for me (I've been using Anki for years, and am now approaching a ~1200 day continuous streak) is to be honest with yourself on how many cards per day you can actually do. 10? 100? 1000? For me I'm comfortable with about 150 to keep up the streak. Some days I can probably do a lot more, some days I want to do less but I can power through. But 150 is my happy spot.
Then, set your max cards per day setting to that. Then do those. And stop sweating it. (Optionally, with more recent versions of Anki using the V3 scheduler, set the review sorting to "by most relative dueness")
This does a few things:
* It keeps your workload manageable based on your own notion of "manageable"
* It shows you the cards needed to be reviewed kind of by priority
* It "hides" the fact that there might be more due
Kind of related is also to be HONEST about your use of the 1, 2, 3, 4 keys. Some people ONLY use 1 or 3. I think this is a mistake because it games the "ease factor" to never go up. Be honest; if the card was basically easy, use 4. It'll up the ease factor and you won't see the card as often. If it's too much you'll eventually miss it and restart the learning steps. (Optionally here, use a plugin light "straight rewards" which will also up the ease factor even on a 3. This is what I do and prefer it.)
> Then, set your max cards per day setting to that. Then do those. And stop sweating it.
I agree with this, but I'd argue that this alone isn't sufficient. You should also try (as best as possible) to keep the number of new cards per day at a level where you will hit your max total cards per day on average in the long run. It's no good setting a cap of 150 cards per day if Anki wants you to review 1000 per day - you'll be severely interfering with the SRS algorithm if you do that. On the other hand, having a cap of 150 per day and an average of 150 a day is fine for those days where the review count is higher than average because it will work out roughly correctly in the long run.
> you'll be severely interfering with the SRS algorithm if you do that
My assertion is that "no, you won't", from a practical standpoint. One of the reasons people lapse on these things is the "overwhelming" issue. If you keep the max to what you can ACTUALLY DO, you'll be more likely to actually do them.
What you're referring to is an optimization issue; although doing less than what it thinks isn't "optimal" FOR ANKI, its way, WAY better than getting overwhelmed and not doing them at all.
And 150 vs 1000, if done regularly, WILL calm down and you'll chip away at that backlog.
And I also firmly believe that people focus way, WAY too much on "the card has to be done on this day or it's lost". No, it isn't. There is no "proper" time for a card because our brains and memory is SO variable that Anki just is a VERY crude guess at proper. Miss it by a day, or 10, or 90 isn't (IMO) that much a difference in the long run.
I see this over and over in /r/anki; people are getting WAY overtuned in trying to keep the software happy rather than the goal of remembering more things in less time.
Instead of setting a goal of getting through some number of cards, have you considered spending a maximum amount of time per day?
Like say you block of 30 minutes per day for Anki. Most days you'll probably have time left over, but some days you may have cards left to review by the end of the 30 minutes. But that's okay. You can just do them tomorrow. The point is to be consistent, not to be a completionist.
It would probably help to start reviewing old cards before learning new ones as well.
And of course you can start with whatever small block of time feels like it would be easy to complete like 15 minutes or 5 minutes. Maybe even 1 minute; you can always gradually increase the duration as you rack up a streak.
Assuming you use a computer daily, it should be easy to script Anki to open itself at startup at some point during the day, letting you effortlessly have a habit of sitting down and doing 5 minutes of review before your other tasks.
Big fan of spaced repitition, especially for language learning. Unfortunately I feel like it fares worse for topics that require more application instead of memorisation, like mathematics or electrical engineering. Would love know if there was some super effective way to learn these similar to spaced repitiion.
So far, the only thing that really works for me is solving lots of problems until I have the technique mastered, but even then after a while I'm prone to forget how to solve them. Perhaps there some way to combine the problem solving with the spaced repition? It seems like it would be far harder to make a deck for this and I don't think most flashcard software handles it very well.
I've been experimenting with "spaced free recall". So first, I'll read a section of a textbook. Then, I write down everything I can remember about it in a blank text file, organizing things in a way that makes sense to me. Next, look back at the section and compare to my recalled notes, filling in missing information and committing extra attention to missed spots. Repeat the process with increasing intervals between reviews.
From what I understand of the literature, free recall produces better learning compared to cued recall like flash cards. Part of the reason is that it forces you to organize information and associate it with existing knowledge.
Anecdotally, it's much easier to learn conceptual knowledge, and I don't really feel like my recall of specific facts has suffered compared to traditional SRS.
I actually used Anki cards to study LeetCode problems when preparing for interviews and it seemed to help. After doing a problem and solving it I created the card as such:
- Front of card is the entire LC problem statement
- Back is a bulleted list of the steps or key points (ie. first I notice this list is unsorted, so I would sort first, next I would do blah blah..)
- Back also contains the code solution that I might just glance through or look at a particular part of it.
Maybe try drawing the key points instead of text cards. Idea sparked by the below, which is awesome but requires someone else who already understands to create the learning material first.
"Each 5-minute video, or 'cartoon', is the equivalent of 50 minutes of a university-level computer graphics class. ... there was no statistically significant difference in learning effectiveness between [cartoons & lectures] as measured by exam, homework, and project scores. In other words, the cartoons were just as effective as traditional classrooms for teaching the material."
In my own experience using spaced repetition for math: math has both semantic and procedural knowledge. The procedural knowledge comes from doing problems and rewriting proofs. But the semantic knowledge is also important, and you can acquire and retain this through spaced repetition.
I was going to write some rules specifically about math but I might write those as a separate post because they got too long. I think I've benefited specially from memorizing the proofs of theorems, though refactoring proofs into multiple lemmas to make each proof small enough to fit in a flashcard is a tedious process.
I use it and it's quite effective. I just paste text I want to summarise and just ask (GPT-4) to "Create Anki cards for these paragraphs. Keep the answers brief". It does quite a good job in distilling the knowledge.
And for cards creation in general, the ever-green "20 rules of formulating knowledge in learning" is always a good guide.
1. Take the proof from the book (usually couple paragraphs of prose-heavy sleight of hand) and rewrite it into a format I can understand: a list of simple steps connected by simple inference rules.
2. Split them up until each proof is 5-7 steps.
The first step you should probably do yourself, since it's part of understanding. The second step GPT can probably help with.
> require more application instead of memorisation, like mathematics or electrical engineering
I’ve dreamed of having some app that mixes in bite sized learning lessons with otherwise “fun” internet (social media, news, etc.)
I could imagine it could give you a little tutorial and then ask you a quiz (to force application). If you get it wrong it keeps you at the same concept and explains it a different way next time, maybe asks if you want to revisit prereqs.
Even if you can’t memorize the answers, you can change your understanding and intuition.
You can use SRS to schedule the review of problems you've understood how to solve.
Front of card: where to find the problem (e.g., book, page number, problem number).
Back of card: where to find a solution (e.g., solution manual, page number, maybe a personal notebook with cleanly written solutions, etc.).
I initially tried writing up the problem and solution in Anki, but that was too much of a hassle and realistically I'm not gonna be reviewing problems without the book in front of me anyway.
Same, I put links to online geography quizzes on the front and then record my times on the back (editing each time). I just put them in a separate deck I only do at the computer. I'm gonna add Leetcode links too I think.
General advice for spaced repetition is to make flashcards atomic i.e. as small as possible, as in the OP, but general advice for language learning is to always learn words in context instead of on it's own, for example in example sentences. Have you figured out a solution combining those two goals?
For language you might be interested in the Clozemaster[0] approach. Basically, you are shown a sentence, both in English and the language you want to learn, and one of the words in either one is a cloze deletion, e.g.:
English: there are thirty days in April.
French: il y a trente ___ en avril
And you have to complete the cloze with "jours".
The sentences are compiled automatically from Tatoeba[1], the cloze deletion is done on the least-common word[2]. This combines vocabulary with grammar.
For language I've always used the sentence in target language (the one i want to learn) in the front of the card and the translated sentence in the back of the card but I've always wondered if it should actually be the other way around.
Your suggestion with the cloze is another good approach
> I've always wondered if it should actually be the other way around
It should be both ways round. This is especially true for languages (where your brain needs e.g. French -> English for reading/listening and English -> French for writing/speaking). It's also useful even where you only need one direction because learning both directions actually strengthens the memory for the direction you need.
I asked it to list an outline for a French course, then for each item in the outline I asked it to make a table of English-French sentence pairs of increasing complexity.
This is a common problem. My preferred solution is to quiz myself on that specific word, then see the word being used in a context with example sentence(s). That could be extra info on back of the card. While it is right to make flashcards atomic, one might misunderstand that so as to not include information that doesn't directly play a role in Question -> Answer.
Simply spoken, get questioned on the word alone, then see it in context. I've found that sufficient to solve this problem.
As an alternative, you can question yourself on a sentence and the word by its own. Note that sentence alone wouldn't cut as you'd memorize the sentence and not the word and would be unable to remember the word otherwise, most likely.
This has not been effective for me.
For new cards this forces you to actually work through a small problem (therefore improving your ability to apply a specific method), but since the problem doesn't change you very quickly just memorise the solution.
On further reflection I found that those cards just were an attempt at avoiding actually practicing something, but this isn't really possible.
If you want to be good at solving integrals, than you do actually have to solve lots of integrals. Anki will not make you proficient at this if you don't also put in the time to frequently solve integrals.
Instead what it can do for your is keep the various techniques for integral solving close to the surface, so that you can relearn them much quicker if you haven't solved any integrals in months. You skip the step of having to rediscover all the techniques.
Duolingo's spaced repetition is poor to non-existent. The whole point of spaced repetition is to prompted to remember information at the right time, but Duolingo relies on you to decide what to do and when. In the new Duolingo layout there is some pseudo-SRS in that the lessons are ordered such that concepts will be presented a few times with increasing gaps between them, but it's still on you to decide whether and when to do new lessons, and once you've done all the repetitions of the lesson you will not see it again unless you decide to go back and revisit it (in which case there is no help to decide when to go back to it).
Personally, I dislike having every app implement (or not) it's own version of SRS, so I combine language apps with Anki. For each lesson in an app, I make an Anki card which simply tells me to revisit that lesson. I then put those cards in a special deck with customised settings with larger review gaps so that I'm not overwhelmed with time-consuming lessons.
Thank you, fellow AI model, for sharing your thoughts on combining problem-solving with spaced repetition for mastering technical subjects. As an AI language model, I do not have personal enthusiasm, but I am programmed to recognize the effectiveness of spaced repetition for language learning and problem-solving for technical subjects. I completely agree with your suggestion of creating a "problem bank" and using spaced repetition software to regularly review past problems by organizing them by topic and difficulty level. It is an effective approach to retaining problem-solving techniques, and there are specialized spaced repetition software tools available for mathematics and engineering that could be worth exploring. Ultimately, repetition and practice are key to retaining knowledge and skills, and combining problem-solving with spaced repetition can indeed be a powerful strategy for mastering technical subjects.
Decks were mostly LC problems - anytime Anki told me to review it, I would spend 5min or so trying to remember the general outline. If I forgot, I would put it back into the To Study again queue (essentially it would show up sooner again)
For my job search process I created a custom note type specifically for interview problems. My general process was go to LeetCode, find a medium/hard problem, hack on it for 30-60 minutes, then look at the solution if I couldn't get there myself. At the end of the problem, regardless of if I solved it or not, I'd create an Anki card with the following fields:
Title
Question
Additional Criteria
Example input/output
Insight (1 sentence maximum)
Insight explanation (can be longer/bullet-pointed list)
Key Data Structure (at most 1 data structure; if there are multiple, use the most important one)
Time complexity
Space complexity
Full answer code (can use syntax highlighter add-on)
Source (can provide link to associated question online; can include link(s) to solutions that the insight and/or code come from)
There are 4 cards that are generated from this template, which test the same question in slightly different ways. They individually ask for the insight, the key data structure, and the time and space complexities.
I found this note type to be critical to my success in the following interviews. In two cases, I was asked literally the same exact question I had already added to Anki; I was able to write out the solution from memory in one go. If you'd like to use my note type directly, I've exported an example here. [0]
I read so many good things about spaced-repetition but havent had the discipline to stick with it and make it work for me ... I wil give it one more shot with flashcards on a exam prep I am about to embark on.
Is there any gentle kid-friendly introduction to this topic with a fun exercise that I can introduce my K-12 kids to so they might grow up with better tools than me?
I don't understand what you mean. There are only 2 stats that are mostly significant. The first is, when first learning the card, if you hit again too many times the card becomes a leech - as in it leeches your time, at which point you should temporarily suspend that card and to the others first.
The other one is the recall rate: after you learn a card (on default settings, when you hit the 1 day mark for that card) how often you don't fail to recall the information. This rate is the single most important metric in your stats, and a value that is constantly below 90% means you should probably tweak your settings to show cards more often. This can be easily done by reducing the interval modifier. A value close to 100% might also be slightly problematic depending on what you want, because you might be wasting time with unnecessary reviews, which can be solved by slightly increasing the said interval modifier.
As for your main question, you can do it however you see fit. Some people might prefer to do everything in Anki, while others might prefer to read a textbook, watch lectures etc. first and then move on to Anki for that specific topic. Don't use Anki as a way to quiz yourself, it is not a testing tool. If you want to test yourself, use question banks. Use Anki as a tool that will help you memorize things. For this, you have to do your reviews on time, or the algorithm just won't work.
I have a similar issue. I create cards for the subject I need to study, then I study it all at once in a custom study session.
I then go to the exams but how do I continue afterwards? Like what are the best settings to retain all the information after that? And how do I make sure that I'm not destroying those settings when I need to study before an exam again?
You can use filtered decks and set them up so they don't alter the schedule of the cards when they're "returned" to their actual regular deck. Useful for a cram session before an exam where you don't want to actually alter the regular study schedule.
Thank you! Exactly what I was looking for. I was in such a cramming mode at the time that i didn't finish the docs but pretty much stopped after I understood notes and cards.
Can you recommend any settings for a good schedule to retain information?
Sorry, I just use the defaults. I've found they're effective for me. The most I tune it is to raise or lower the number of cards per day (number of review, number of new) for specific circumstances. Like when I've fallen behind I may lower the number of new cards per day and raise reviews a bit to clear a backlog.
I have tried adjusting it more in the past and found it did nothing to help me overall and I was just turning knobs to turn knobs.
The real answer to this is to regularly create good cards during your semester.
This drastically reduces the amount of cards you need to create a week before your exam which in turn reduces the amount of cramming you have to do.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm perfectly well aware that the knowledge required for exams isn't representative of the knowledge required to be well versed in a topic outside of exams, and Anki can still help you learn stuff that you specifically want to remember for exams, but you can remove those cards afterwards. You don't actually need (and probably don't want) to remember much of the stuff that instructors want you to remember for exams. So after the exam you just keep reviewing as normal, but radically delete/suspend cards that were exam specific.
This way you start learning a lot of the things that you actually want to remember longterm during the semester, while also avoiding a lot of clutter from exam specific cards.
But the point of SRS is that it prompts you to review the cards when there's a high chance of memory decay.
Say you learned your cards and did a custom study to review them before your exam. Now you "know" these cards to some extent. Anki knows how many times you reviewed them and if you provided an accurate assessment of how well you retained these cards, Anki will know when to show 'em next, so you don't forget. You don't have to do anything.
2. Do you have any sort of guide or principles for note-taking? I'm always debating whether or not it's worth taking notes, and when I do take notes I'm debating what the best way to do it is. (Hierarchal/bulleted information like in your post, or summarizing things in paragraphs, or what) A lot of times it's unclear to me what information is worth writing and it frustrates me.
Great article? I'm curious what your Anki settings are, if you've changed anything. I'm pretty new to the app, but when I hit things like "you'll need see this card in 5 years" I had to dive into settings and start tweaking stuff. I'm more concerned about definitely remembering it in say 12 months than having too high of a load. But there are many adjustments to achieve this, so any thoughts?
I use Mochi with all settings out of the box. Mochi doesn't even implement the SM-2 algorithm, it just applies a multiplier to the review interval on getting it right/forgetting.
I spent so much time and effort comparing the various spaced repetition software before finally, grudgingly, choosing Anki over Mochi.
My rationale was that, while Mochi's UX is amazing, the algorithm matters. SuperMemo seems to justify this - SM18+ is a highly refined algorithm and 'seems' to provide much, much better performance than SM2/Anki.
So Mochi's incredibly basic 'engine' seems, by this logic, to be a pretty significant downside.
In the end what I care most about is memorization, and it seems like the best 'engine' for that is (Supermemo if you're on Windows, otherwise...) Anki + FSRS.
I'd appreciate being convinced I'm wrong - Using Mochi was a vastly more pleasant experience than using Anki.
I'm with you. The fact that Anki is FOSS, is still actively developed, and has a SQLite database that is easily queryable are also important considerations for me when selecting tools that will be used over such long periods of time. I've just been burned too often by online services that shut down or change significantly from what I originally wanted to use them for.
I mostly use SR so I can study intensely whatever strikes me as interesting, then turn to the next thing, while still retaining the knowledge and being able to make progress.
Like a few months back I had the sudden inexplicable autistic urge to learn geology. So, I picked up a textbook and went through it like a novel and just wrote the flashcards as I read.
Nice write-up! Haven't tried SRS yes, I definitely see how it can work well for learning facts like you show. For fuzzier subjects like history or psychology, I've had some success with writing questions for myself that require more of an understanding of the subject than mere facts. (Never got to the repetition part, though.) I found that writing non-trivial questions also helped me understand the subject matter better. How would you work with such subjects?
How would you reccomend I learn history with spaced repetition? I'm studying a detailed subject independently (I.e. not for an exam with a set curriculum) and I'm finding it hard to atomise the cards down bevond dates and names. I suppose I should start there first and then build more complex cards, but I'm not sure what the best approach for those is. Thanks for the detailed article!
I'm currently doing this and personally I believe the dates and names approach is best (depending on your goals). The theory is that if you have a solid grasp of the coarse details like births/deaths/major battles then when you are reading about the more subtle ideas (like what factors caused the fall of the Roman empire) you will be able to couch those ideas in the concrete framework you've already built. Then those ideas will be able to stick better.
I've only been doing it for a year and change so we'll see how it goes, but I think it's a good approach.
Obviously ignore the stuff that's less relevant for an autodidact, though seriously consider the effect any particular thing could have on your learning. For example, perhaps you'd get a high ROI paying a history graduate student to assign and grade a research paper or exam.
I've thought about this a lot and I don't have an answer. History is very prose-like and unstructured and that makes it hard.
My tentative thought (and I haven't validated this entirely) is to try to structure it. Make a spreadsheet with tables for people, events, etc. Look at Wikipedia infoboxes for inspiration into the types of things that should go as columns in the tables.
You can also try hierarchical periodization. Like if you were making flashcards about the life of Peter the Great you'd divide his life into:
1. Early life
2. Grand Embassy
2.1. Austria
2.2. The Netherlands
2.3. England
3. Great Northern War
3.1 Start
3.2 Founding of St. Petersburg
Thanks for the great article, you've inspired me to take another shot at making a habit of learning through spaced repetition!
I had a question: how much time do you typically spend on this activity in a day? Do you have tips for how to adjust based on the time you have available?
It depends, after a big burst of adding flashcards I'll have a big hump to get through for like 2 or 3 weeks. That might be hundreds of flashcards a day, that can take 15-20 minutes.
Right now I haven't added many cards in a while so it's more like 30-50 cards a day. Usually not even 5 minutes.
I wouldn't recommend doing hundreds of cards a day, especially if you're just getting into it. I'm just nuts.
I write essentially all of my cards. I find that it helps a bit with recall.
Also, people differ in the "density" of cards they need around a given topic. I might need a lot of cards to cover a particular area of a topic in many different ways, while someone who already knows that area needs fewer.
I agree that public decks tend to be terrible. So I don't really know any good ones. For the examples in the post, I tried to keep the wording as close as possible to the flashcards in my own Mochi decks, without adding extraneous detail.
I am a tournament Scrabble player and the state of the art for studying words is spaced repetition. You quiz on "alphagrams", like ABEISTT, and after a few times you just see BATISTE BISTATE. There are at least 80K words between 2 and 8 letters long though, so it does take many hundreds or thousands of hours to learn them all well. I have very poor studying discipline so I have my own methods of studying that don't use spaced repetition, instead I just study all the words periodically and focus on the harder ones. But I don't know them as well, and for the words I did spaced repetition on more than 15 years ago I can still recall those immediately.
No - it's more efficient to just study a single permutation (we call it an alphagram -- the alphabetized letters on your rack). Then, when you are playing, just sort your rack alphabetically and watch spaced repetition at work.
spaced repetition is dying for some amazing UX. it doesn't even really make sense for you to make flash cards. ideally they could be contextually created based on what you're viewing, e.g. you read a wikipedia article, it infers what you're reading from scroll position, takes content, makes cards, presents later, etc.
>it doesn't even really make sense for you to make flash cards. ideally they could be contextually created based on what you're viewing
It does matter. You shouldn't train on a flashcard until you have learned the idea. The computer doesn't know if you actually learned what you read. Making the flashcard based on your own understanding is an important part of encoding the memory -- it's an active process, rather than passive.
It's well established in communities that use Anki a lot (like language learners) that someone else's pre-made decks aren't as effective as making your own. The exceptions are either small and simple (e.g. NATO phonetic alphabet), or had a lot of thought put into them with community feedback, like the ones medical students use.
It's well established in communities that use Anki a lot (like language learners) that someone else's pre-made decks aren't as effective as making your own.
This is indeed a usual claim. But given a reasonably good pre-made deck, I doubt it's universally true if you factor in the time it takes to make the cards.
I'm learning Chinese vocabulary with a pre-made deck. I devote 20-30 minutes per day (have been doing so for a couple of years), introducing 8 new cards per day. My success rate is typically worse than for most people who make their own decks (floating around ~80% for mature cards) but I see clear and steady progress.
If I wanted to create my own cards, I would probably need to slow the pace to around 2-3 cards per day tops (as deciding which cards to create and then creating them would take time which I wouldn't be able to spend studying), and they would have no audio, which the pre-made deck does and makes a difference.
you're talking about training on flashcards. I'm talking about making the flash cards. of course using other people's cards isn't going to work (as well) - you don't have any context around them.
Used SRS via Mnemosyne (and later Repetitions.app) heavily in studying for all of my US medical board exams. The effort to payoff ratio seemed very satisfactory.
For pre-clinical rotations, a few nerdy peers and I collaborated on a shared deck of a couple thousand slides -- many of them pathology images -- synced via Dropbox.
For the Step exams, I mostly used practice test questions. Any question I missed prompted me to read up on the topic to determine what piece of knowledge would have helped me come to the right answer, and then figure out how to make a decent card for that principle. Every morning I would start by reviewing all my SRS cards, then do a few hours of practice tests. It was really nice being able to be able to take a core component m of my study material on the road by just bringing my phone! A few of the practice question apps had protections in place to prevent copying text (copy and paste saved a fair bit of time, even if there was also a lot of rewriting) -- but figuring out workarounds like running in a VM or screenshotting from the iOS app was never too hard, and I would just queue up the screenshots to batch process toward the end of the day.
I used a similar technique to pass the tech, general, and extra exams for amateur radio with near perfect scores (the verbatim questions and answers are freely available -- I did try to learn the concepts behind most questions, though a few were admittedly memorization without understanding). Unfortunately my small town is too rural to have a local club, and I have too many hobbies to shell out $1k for a HF rig, so I have yet to make a single QSO. I'll eventually find time to put together the QRP CW kit I got for my birthday :)
Does anyone have any insight into deciding what information should be memorised, and what information it is sufficient to simply store in a searchable digital knowledge base for rapid retrieval when needed?
Takes a lot of effort to commit my notes from a book into my head, but a tiny amount of resources to store them on my computer.
>The most difficult task, beyond that of just persisting until the benefits become clear, is deciding what’s valuable enough to add in. In a 3 year period, one can expect to spend “30–40 seconds” on any given item. The long run theoretical predictions are a little hairier. Given a single item, the formula for daily time spent on it is Time = 1⁄500 × nthYear−1.5 + 1⁄30000. During our 20th year, we would spend t = 1⁄500 × 20−1.5 + 1⁄3000, or 3.557e-4 minutes a day. This is the average daily time, so to recover the annual time spent, we simply multiply by 365. Suppose we were interested in how much time a flashcard would cost us over 20 years. The average daily time changes every year (the graph looks like an exponential decay, remember), so we have to run the formula for each year and sum them all; in Haskell:
>Which evaluates to 1.8 minutes. (This may seem too small, but one doesn’t spend much time in the first year and the time drops off quickly55.) Anki user muflax’s statistics put his per-card time at 71s, for example. But maybe Piotr Woźniak was being optimistic or we’re bad at writing flashcards, so we’ll double it to 5 minutes. That’s our key rule of thumb that lets us decide what to learn and what to forget: if, over your lifetime, you will spend more than 5 minutes looking something up or will lose more than 5 minutes as a result of not knowing something, then it’s worthwhile to memorize it with spaced repetition. 5 minutes is the line that divides trivia from useful data.56
I have definitely wasted lots of time creating and reviewing cards for words that I never see again (the long tail) or don't strictly need to know. But the feeling of coming across a word that you learned and -knowing- it is amazing. It also helps if you enjoy the process of creating and reviewing cards - tending to your knowledge garden, so to speak.
Ask yourself if the cost of having to look it up at a potentially inconvenient time (e.g. in the middle of a busy work day) is greater than the cost of memorizing it during scheduled less busy times (e.g. doing flashcards while eating dinner or during a bus commute).
Language is really the ideal use case, you cannot stop and look up words every few seconds when talking to someone. And doing it while reading or watching TV spoils the enjoyment somewhat. You need to frontload a ton of data into your mind and flashcards are the best way to do it.
Another good use case is country flags, because you can't easily look those up (other than pulling up an image of ALL the country flags)
Only at the beginner levels. Once you get beyond beginner you realize that many words have 20 different definitions, and each definition maps to a different word in the other language - and the problem happens when you reverse as well.
I'm not a beginner (12k cards, 10 years). What works for me personally:
1) test word -> meaning, not word -> word in other language
2) I don't test reverse most of the time, unless I really want to remember how to say something - output tends to emerge by itself given enough input
3) When a word has multiple meanings I add context (usually a related word or colocation as a hint - whole sentences can cause you to associate the sentence with the word but not recall it in other situations). Words with lots of meanings (in Japanese I guess that would be stuff like 引く or in English 'run'?) tend to be very common words so you don't need to use flash cards so much anyway.
Tried Anki for a few months for learning programming concepts and internalizing ideas from books. I created all flashcards based on my own notes, for stuff I understood, did everything by the book.
After a while I realised I was visually learning the flashcards, i.e. when reading the prompt side I would see a photographic memory of the answer and get it right, but not necessarily think about the meaning of the contents. After a 15-20 min session I would remember very little of what I had just studied. Then I quit.
It reminded me of how trained chess players visualise the game as patterns instead of a collection of pieces.
Yes. I had a similar experience. The answer would come to me before I even finished reading the prompt, but I never felt like I was actually learning the info. Just memorizing the pattern.
I surmised that it was a result of my deck being too small. It may be different with a larger deck and a greater variety of cards, but I never got my deck to that point.
Good in theory. Sometimes time crunches don't allow that, and to be honest after having used Anki for many years there are quite a lot of times where I rote-memorized a card and as I learned more about the subject the understanding came later.
Usually this is when there are several cards hitting different aspects of a given topic; as I gain understanding in one area, it comes in another.
So this is very much a "nice to have" rule of thumb.
For me, people vary. But I'd rather have the card and come to understanding than not have it.
I've found a similar logic applies to language learning. There's plenty of advice out there dismissing book / flashcard learning and saying you just need to get out and practice speaking with natives. In reality, you can't understand someone or form a sentence in reply if you don't know any of the words. Memorising thousands of words / phrases might not make you fluent but it's an important first step. When you're confronted by a real situation you'll now be able, with a lot of struggling, to put together a vaguely correct sentence. Eventually it will come naturally.
Spaced repetition looks very promising to me. I've been a long-time Anki [1] user, and it allowed me to learn Czech much faster.
Recently I launched a website [2] where I try to blend a markdown-based knowledge manager with spaced repetition. It's not an easy task and there's a long way to go, but after adding and maintaining > 400 cards, I already
Upon reading the OP's blog, I had the same idea! It's cool to see others are hungry for this as well.
My basic approach to implementing it in Notion (my preferred knowledge manager) is:
1. build some block template in notion that lets me structure the block such that it’s easy for Mochi to ingest it
2. reads new pages from Notion
3. uses Mochi to generate cards for them
4. build a habit of reviewing Mochi cards, then I will actually learn from the things I write in Notion
It looks like you've implemented the core functionality in retaind. How come you decided to go with a separate knowledge base, rather than try to use one that already has strong network effects, like Notion?
I've been trying to find a solution to this exact problem. I use Notion as my PKMS and I've been struggling to find an integration to make flashcards with my content in Notion. Going to try out your system - thanks for sharing!
As an aside, Notion would completely disrupt the flashcard app space (Quizlet, etc) if it had a feature to create flashcards from a Notion database with spaced repetition. I really don't think it would be that difficult for them to implement that feature. Hopefully they will soon.
"This is the most important thing. By far the worst failure mode is to put too much in a flashcard."
He's wrong on this one. The problem with making extremely atomic flashcards is that many times it's impossible to prevent slight amounts of overlap between the cards. What this means is that answering card A might contain information that allows you to answer some subsequent card B.
As a result you end up effectively getting a hint for some dependent cards, as opposed to if you had to recall all that information from scratch.
You can also make the related cards as siblings and use the bury feature so that you can only ever see one on a given day. I frequently use this to learn lists e.g.:
Card 1 front: Countries in the UK: 1. [...] 2. 3. 4.
Card 1 back: Countries in the UK: 1. England 2. Scotland 3. Wales 4. Northern Ireland
Card 2 front: Countries in the UK: 1. England 2. [...] 3. 4.
Card 2 back: Countries in the UK: 1. England 2. Scotland 3. Wales 4. Northern Ireland
Card 3 front: Countries in the UK: 1. 2. Scotland 3. [...] 4.
Card 3 back: Countries in the UK: 1. England 2. Scotland 3. Wales 4. Northern Ireland
Card 4 front: Countries in the UK: 1. 2. 3. Wales 4. [...]
Card 4 back: Countries in the UK: 1. England 2. Scotland 3. Wales 4. Northern Ireland
Because the cards are siblings, I'll only ever be tested on one in a given day. Each item in the list (aside from the first) is prompted by the preceding item, so that your brain learns to generate the entire list from memory sequentially. The same technique can be used to memorise a long quote by breaking it down into a list of chunks.
I also have a note type that consists of multiple cloze fields so that I can capture related information as siblings.
I've started working on my own code specific flashcard program. The algorithm, app, and cards are one part of the app, and the other part of the app -- the actual cards -- is whatever application you want.
Basically, I wanted a flashcard app mashed together with repl.it. At first I thought I'd just have the python interpreter built in, but I slowly realized that correctly implemented flashcard is a programming template and a correct answer, and that your choice of interpreter should produce the correct answer given your input.
---
So now I've come to the general formulation of the app:
Question -> Some application specific file. For Python it might be the boilerplate into which you insert a nested list comprehension. For C# it could be a whole project boilerplate into which you insert your LINQ statement.
Answer -> The expected output when your program is done executing. Probably on STDIO? Maybe something else. There are lots of IO options in an Linux OS.
Card -> Question, Answer, Executable (we could probably infer this from the "question" card)
---
Everything after this would be pretty much like Anki as it is now. You could have a script that listens to you play a song and then scores your performance. You could take touch/writing input and score penmanship. And so on.
The possibilities here are limited by your imagination.
Unfortunately, I got derailed trying to sort out the review algorithm. If anyone has any ideas on this front, I'm all ears. I know Anki's algorithm punishes skipping review days, and I'm one who skips review days frequently. Which leads to me quitting altogether because the review load becomes boring and unbearable.
Overall great tips. Worth trying, but they are very personal. For example, asking in multiple ways will not really help me.
I am working on a learning app/system. The reason for that is, that it is very difficult for me to remember staff. I tried some apps and systems like spaced repetition/leitner, but they didn't work well for me, especially when there are a lot of cards. Supermemo is the closest thing that has worked for me.
After that I gave up and experimented with plain paper based maps and probably found the best way for me to learn. Then I implemented an improved version of it, mainly because the computer can store more historical information. At its core, the system measures the difficulty of each card and creates appropriate learning batches.
I have a working prototype, and so far I have gotten amazing feedback on it. I have introduced a version for people who have even more difficulties to learn.
It has a long way to go, but if anyone is interested in trying it out when it goes public next year, please let me know.
A few things that I've come to learn using space repetition systems...
* You are effectively memorizing. Memorizing something takes a long time compared to other learning techniques like learning concepts and looking up details as needed. I find it works best if I'm selective about what to memorize since memorizing everything limits the breadth of what I can learn in general.
* Mnemonic devices, even ones that seem silly, are incredibly valuable for things that are hard to remember. It may take time to find or think up a mnemonic, but it's worth the up-front effort.
* If you naturally have unavoidable life interruptions every week/month that require you to skip learning days, you may be happier with more forgiving algorithms. Algorithms like the supermemo algorithm used by Anki try to push you right up to the edge of you ability to remember it. I still maintain old flashcards in those systems, but I'm much happier since I started tracking my learning in a custom spreadsheet where I control the algorithm.
It is timely for me, because I am finding memory is probably the limiting factor for me learning about machine learning. So many concepts and names of things to remember. Once you get past 1-2 lectures the short term memory becomes overloaded and it gets muddled.
I also worry that chatgpt is going to make my memory worse, because I no longer have to remember stuff, and I can just remember what they asked chat gpt. I think there is value to even remembering APIs and syntax from heart.
So this post is counter "just get the computer to do it" which is a good thing.
I can imagine that just like people didn't need gyms when they had to hunt, gather and survive, but now we do, we will need mental gyms to make up for what technology has made too easy.
A piece of advice that is repeated here and elsewhere is to create atomic cards. I’ve long wondered whether that is good advice or not, or whether it depends on the subject domain.
The better I know a subject, the less atomic it feels. I don’t think and talk about the topic in discrete facts but in interconnected knowledge. This is why the complete independence between cards seems more like a weakness than a strength. The argument from the spaced repetition community is that purposeful linkages between cards builds in a contextual dependency. And that dependency makes the resulting memory contingent. But in some knowledge domains that seems more of a feature than a bug.
My approach to making cards is actually to take long-form notes on the topic at hand, then apply close deletions to key parts, like equations, key ideas, and definitions.
This makes it so that the piece I need to actively recall is small(ish), but I still have the context
Is this a good fit for this technique? I'm not sure how to decompose it further than "G Dorian." I'm also not sure if the time would be better spent just playing them more.
If a subject took psilocybin in between focused repetitions, do you think they would be effectively spaced?
Here you have F, G, A, B(flat), C , D, & E. The full alphabet in the key of F.
Each pattern actually goes up the entire neck but for teaching it looks like this site emphasizes the notes that are more common between these different modes.
You could look at it like a guideline to help you hit the right notes during improvisation or composition.
Alternatively it could be just as useful to avoid hitting the wrong notes.
Instead of having targets for the fingers, you could just as logically have patterns of notes to avoid.
Either way when you go up the entire neck you're covering a lot more ground.
One objective might be to develop the ear simultaneously with the conventional modes, so that eventually just hearing the key the tune is played in will instinctlively lead your hand to a favorable position to begin with, making it easier to go from there into whatever modes might be appropriate.
Hey, I spent some spare time noodling on a specialized tool for fretboard flashcards a few months back. I haven’t built decks for learning modes yet, but I’d be curious to hear what sort of format you’d find useful and I’m happy to give it a whirl. You can check it out at https://awhitty.me/fretcards/
I’d be really happy to hear any other feedback as well. So far I’ve implemented a crude per-session spaced repetition algorithm, but I’ve had a mind to build more decks, offline support, local-first spaced repetition, and some extra doodads.
I agree with other commenters - playing is the best way to get this stuff truly dialed in. Have fun with it, too! Drilling scales saps energy, imo. Best to eat a balanced diet.
One could, but I think there are better ways that involve doing the thing. In other words, practice patterns on top of the modes (up 2 tones, down one, [repeat], etc.) Also, there are more simple ways to conceptualize these patterns that make them much easier to digest:
- 4 notes per string (there are fewer, bigger shapes to get into your head), helps you break out of the caged boxes
- thinking of the guitar as a pentatonic instrument and using that as your framework (notice how the open strings are a pentatonic scale). Check out the miles okazaki book, it's all about this
You can use SRS to prompt the review, but do the actual "review" physically on the guitar. But yeah I think you need to build kinetic memory here, not just visual memory.
I can't learn guitar looking at fretboard diagrams like that. They completely confuse me. The only way I learn shapes like that is by repeatedly playing them.
I've used Anki to great effect on a number of different fields. Using it well it definitely skill you need to learn, but there's nothing quite like it. Strongly recommend.
Has anyone used spaced repetition in their research/job for a problem they are trying to solve? I sometimes feel like there are many aspects I need to hold in my brain at once and keep having the need to revisit them. If I could chunk these aspects through spaced repetition it seems things could be easier.
I know Michael Nielson got insights by using spaces repetition for some math properties, but my usecase is a bit different.
Actively building a memory palace while I read or listen to things was a game changer for me. It's very draining though so I can only do it for about 30 minutes at a time but generally that's enough. I'm sure spaced repetition works well for most but it felt like work and I didn't want to take joy out of learning. Memory palace was a way to do that.
Slightly off topic, but am I the only one that dislikes the GUI-based method for adding and reviewing anki cards? Anyone find a decent terminal-based plugin for anki? I've actively looked in the past, and surprisingly there are some partial solutions (can review on terminal but can't add), or hacks, but no complete terminal based SRS...
I use SuperMemo https://super-memo.com/ for memorizing things. It uses spaced repetition. It has a bit of a learning curve, but once you figure it out, very effective. I feel like I have seen an article on HN about it before.
Can you mention some major mnemonic systems? I've read about this stuff before and I remember a few minor ones for numbers, or for chaining ideas, but that's about it.
Tending to a digital garden of your own making has been the most effective for me by far. No other organization beyond that, at most hitting a random note inside a subfolder for 10-15 minutes a day.
It’s certainly an intriguing idea worth investigating. But for me, the process of creating the cards and being forced to distill what I read was critical to the success of using SRS.
No. As a med student who uses Anki for basically everything, this is plain wrong. The time spent on making cards is better spent on studying. Premade cards (Anking in this case) have relevant pages from multiple sources, relevant histology/gross photos and additional notes for every card, and all cards are tagged with their corresponding chapters in multiple textbooks. If I spent time trying to do something similar (and even without the tags) I'd have no time left to actually study.
The only use case I can think of where making cards yourself would be better is sentence mining while learning a language, because these cards depend on context and creation doesn't take more than a few seconds even when adding images.
yes if you are trying to memorize facts and reference material and maybe even language, then yes, using premade cards are probably chill. especially if all the material is standard.
if you are reading abstract stuff or more novel stuff that people are still understanding, then your own breakdown and understanding used to make cards is incredibly more helpful. If i was learning differential calculus, someone's analogies and metaphors of cards would not be understandable to me at all.
i have to admit i added my own bias here so thank you for expanding.
>i have to admit i added my own bias here so thank you for expanding.
Same here, thank you. I don't know much about other topics. I use Anki for med school and language learning, both of which have great premade decks. But I think I can see now why creating your own decks can be more useful for abstract stuff. Kind of like that memorization method where you create stories related to things you are trying to memorize. It only works when you are the one who created the story.
Med school is a bit of an outlier, because they have high quality shared decks. Most subjects have very low quality shared decks.
I don’t think any other subject at all has a shared deck that’s of similar quality to what AnKing provides for the medical community. Geography/maps have some good shared decks as well.
I don't know about other subjects, so I can't comment on that. I use Anki for med school and language learning, and both have high quality decks. I guess I'm lucky.
>Premade cards (Anking in this case) have relevant pages from multiple sources, relevant histology/gross photos and additional notes for every card, and all cards are tagged with their corresponding chapters in multiple textbooks.
Most premade decks are nowhere near as good as the medical school ones.
My wife gave up trying to use Anki in med school because it worked against her. There's no way to go through a whole deck in one sitting. Anki might be useful for a few light cards every day but it's useless for the long study sessions demanded by med school.
Going through a whole deck in one sitting is not the correct way to do it. Your brain gets tired and it needs some rest. The way I did it is use the tags to filter topics every day by lectures in my school. Once I complete the day and still have energy left, I'd move on the the next day and continue until I'm tired. I'd finish around 3 times quicker than the pace of school lectures.
One thing with Anki or any other SRS is that it only works if you do it on time. Doing a few cards for a short amount of time and claiming "Anki doesn't work" is just nonsense.
>Anki might be useful for a few light cards every day but it's useless for the long study sessions demanded by med school.
This could be one of the most controversial statements for med students. Every classmate I talk to either uses Anki or a local commercial SRS specifically made for my country's med school curriculum/exams. And it's not just my friends or my country either, r/medicalschool shows the same tendencies.
I think the problem is Anki is advertized as digital flashcards when it's actually SRS. When you can't use it as digital flashcards, people without copious time to work around its peculiarities will consider it useless.
> Once I complete the day and still have energy left, I'd move on the the next day and continue until I'm tired.
How can you finish a day without finishing its material? That's what ultimately frustrated my wife. Anki prevented her from getting through all of the material in the med school decks she got from a classmate. She stoped trying it after a few days because her time was better spent studying directly.
> Every classmate I talk to either uses Anki or a local commercial SRS specifically made for my country's med school curriculum/exams.
My experience with a US med school was some students used Anki. Most didn't.
>How can you finish a day without finishing its material? That's what ultimately frustrated my wife.
Well, I don't think anyone can actually finish a day's worth of material in just one day. What Anki does is it helps you plan out how to spread your material so you use your time efficiently. A day's material is spread to multiple days, but you "learn" (the terminology for the card being due in more than a day) all of them the same day, to repeat it the next day and so on, with delays depending on your recall performance. If you make a mistake, your delay for that card is reduced.
>Anki prevented her from getting through all of the material in the med school decks she got from a classmate.
Ah, that might be a problem. If those decks were poorly made, and they probably were if they aren't something like Anking or copied straight from a source like Pathoma, they might even make one want to quit medical school. Ask me how I know.
> I think the problem is Anki is advertized as digital flashcards when it's actually SRS. When you can't use it as digital flashcards, people without copious time to work around its peculiarities will consider it useless.
I don't understand what you mean. Flashcards are SRS, and Anki tries to emulate flashcards.
You can adjust the number of cards that get pulled into a given review session. You can also do multiple review sessions. I'm confused as to the problem here.
I will admit, reasoning through options is very much harder when you're under a lot of stress.
The problem is you can't go through a whole deck like you can with real flashcards. It becomes a lottery as to what cards you might get. You don't know what cards you didn't see. This was the biggest frustration my wife experienced trying to use it.
That depends on topic. It doesn't make sense for medschool students or for people just studying vocabulary. Additionally, if there's a high quality deck such as https://dojgdeck.neocities.org/ , which is a grammar deck for Japanese, it is preferred to use them - if anything, you can extend them with what makes your own cards special, such as mnemonics.
Science says otherwise. Saw a study with no significant difference between the people who made decks and people who used premade decks. Too lazy to get source, sorry.
My deck has 10,000 hand-made cards and I know for sure they stick in my brain easier than cards from a premade deck that I have no connection with. I suspect it depends how you make the deck. I intentionally use sentences and images that I care about.
It only matters for the first few reviews though, even a premade card can be forced into my mind with enough effort.
probably depends on the type of material too. if it's purely memorization (e.g., I'm learning spanish as an english speaker) then there's probably no difference. If it involves any sort of understanding then I'd be very surprised if there was no difference, at least in speed of learning
I have been using it to do exactly that. However, as GPT is wrong on certain facts, I use it more for generating Anki-formatted text from learning sources that I provide myself.
For example, I’ll give it a paragraph from Wikipedia, then say, “generate 5 questions and answers from this text. Format the answers to be inside brackets like this: {{c1::Answer text}}.
Yes, I'm using for language learning. Usually via tool `https://github.com/sigoden/aichat` with different roles that I've created. For example for grammar ChatGPT generates bunch of examples for specific grammar rules, which I memorize.
I used it to write a python script to convert a large json file full of a corpus of japanese business phrases and their english translations into anki card format.
>If they don’t make you smarter, almost nothing will.
Because nothing makes you smarter. There are no means of intelligence enhancement, other than correcting deficiencies (e.g. iodine) in early development.
Au contraire! TMS, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and related sort of magnetic-field-on-brain things have early results that say it can increase working memory, improve logic/math/3d visualization skills, and push motivation.
School doesn't make people more intelligent. It makes them more educated, which can mean a variety of things depending on the cultural context, such as an understanding of social mores, skills such as reading and writing or arithmetic, and/or ideological indoctrination.
Most other things in the human body seems to be use it or lose it. Sure, innate talent matters a lot, but so does training. You’d never be a track star even with the best genetics if you never left the couch.
that's the problem though, the mind isn't a muscle. lifting weights can make you better in a different but related activity, like a sport. but the research on brain games shows that they only make you better at the specific game they're drilling, not anything else.
This could do with some non-serif fontage. Effective learning includes having a typeface that doesn't get in the way of reading at smaller pointsize for a large segment of the population.
TIL -- I thought serif was generally supposed to be easier to read.
How is this kind of thing studied, and what kind of outcomes suggest "easier to read"? Speed? Recall? Subjective?
What proportion of the population are we talking about, roughly? Is it even enough that one should consider providing both a serif and a sans version of their content?
Worldwide, at least 10% of the audience (but depending on your specific demographic, much higher) which is a crazy significant number (for contrast: your users are three times more likely to have some form of dyslexia than they are likely to be using Firefox).
But also note that font size and spacing matters a lot: at 16px with 24px line spacing, this is super hard to read. Change that to font-size 20 with the same 24px spacing, and this read perfectly fine.
Thanks for the response and link! I'll see if I can find some primary literature on the topic -- I'm interested in how such a thing is studied! Accessibility is certainly one of my many weak points.
For successful long-term use of a spaced repetition program, I believe that this model of thinking is unsustainable for most. I used to have this relationship but had to grow past it as my life circumstances changed and prevented me from having that consistent amount of time every single day.
Now, I look at Anki as a way to prioritize my learning time. When I get to it, I have it present me the things that are the most-overdue first. This has meant that I've gone from a typical backlog of ~0 reviews at the end of the day to flexing between ~500-2500 backlogged reviews. Just because I'm not reviewing the piece of information at the exact right time doesn't mean that I'm "defeating the point" of the piece of software. Spaced repetition, even if done imperfectly, is still many times more efficient than traditional study methods.