I don't find doing things tangential to the thing you want to learn all that effective compared to just doing the thing you want to get better at. Maybe it is just me.<p>If you want to improve your vocabulary read more books. If you want to improve in a programming language program more in that language. If you want to learn chess openings - play more chess.<p>Actually doing things you want to learn is way more fun than rote memorization so you are more likely to stick with it.
Anki was my introduction to spaced repetition and started me down a learning journey that I'm very happy to be taking. That said, Anki didn't end up sticking as the way I do spaced repetition - but it took me a long time to be able to articulate why. These days I am using Roam along with roam-toolkit. Having tried it this way, my biggest realization is that facts are memorable when they have many visceral associations. A corollary of this is that, to remember well, I should practice making lots of different connections between the things I know. Now when I do spaced repetition, I annotate things as I go, forming new connections and associations, then putting them in my knowledge graph forever (forever, knock on wood). By contrast, Anki feels like I am over-training flash cards in a very siloed and narrow way, such that the skill I learn is closer to "answering flash cards" as opposed to the actual thing I want to be good at.
I've been using Anki for about 3 years to learn Korean and it's been tremendously successful. In that time I've learned around 3000 new words (both English -> Korean and Korean -> English with reversed cards) and a ton of grammar (using Cloze cards). I couldn't imagine trying to memorize this amount of information any other way now.
“You can get a good deal from rehearsal,<p>If it just has the proper dispersal.<p>You would just be an ass,<p>To do it en masse,<p>Your remembering would turn out much worsal.”<p>Ulrich Neisser, Retrieval Practice and The Maintenance of Knowledge<p><a href="https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/1988-bjork.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.gwern.net/docs/spacedrepetition/1988-bjork.pdf</a>
I feel like Anki is not designed to help you succeed. Eventually, you'll start missing your reviews. One day you'll open Anki, see that you have hundreds of cards scheduled, and just quit the app.<p>The author of this article mentions he'll post an article tackling this issue, looking forward to that!
One way I've successfully used Anki is learning new technology. It can't directly teach you the concepts, but it's much easier to learn and and retain the concepts when you're drilling the building blocks.
Thanks for the article, I've read though.<p>I've been using Anki quite successfully to learn things about wines in french, especially about the wine domains in Bordeaux and Bourgogne. It's easy to create, as a flash card. One side shows the map, the other shows the name.<p>Now, I'm keen on learning the list of the main french authors of each century, but I don't know how to proceed.<p>Let's say a list of 20 names, how would you do it?<p>You would not create one flash card with 19th century on one side, and the 20 names on the other side. I've been struggling with that issue.<p>Maybe using the cloze type?
I kinda wish there was spaced repetition for interview practice. So that everyday, I have a set number of questions to try, and I don't have to make that decision. And if I don't get it the first time, no problem, I know it'll come up again. And if I do get it, the goal is to get faster.<p>Anyone else study this way, like an Anki for interview questions? If not, how do you pick what questions to practice and what order do them in when studying for interviews?
I have heard a lots of good stuff about Anki. The adoption of it is wider than expected, and people really enjoy it. Up to a point when they are requesting to offer Anki for Summon The JSON, what seems to be an interesting idea
I would recommend Joshua Foer "Moonwalking with Einstein" for those interested in memory. Spaced repition is effective to an extent, but I find the techniques explored in his book to be much more effective. The tl;dr is that you are much better off constructing "memory palaces" in your head. You pick a place you know extremely well (like your family home), and you imagine yourself navigating that space and "placing" reminders of the things you'd like to remember along the way.<p>It's like inventing a very surreal dream to help you avoid forgetting things. I use variants of it for things like people's names and ideas I'd like to explore all the time, it's super helpful.
I find the spaces repetition approach good for learning new Japanese words I don’t often use. I made an app that lets you look up a word and get a reminder a few days later: <a href="https://shirabe.app/" rel="nofollow">https://shirabe.app/</a>
Pretty useless for code and math. Making my concise own notes in Latex/Asciidoc which I review at regular intervals helps me far more and I don't need to fight the interface.
Am I the only one who finds Anki's UI/UX to be absolutely atrocious? I know it's petty, but it's literally the only reason that's always made me not use it for more than just a few days at a time.<p>Is anyone working on improving the UI? Or are there alternative "frontends" out there? Does anyone know how hard it would be do it? (I assume it might not be trivial since Anki has a plugin system, but I don't know to what extent they can modify the UI)
> <i>Instead of turning in your bed unable to sleep terrified of the exam coming the next day, you would soundly sleep with the knowledge that you know everything you need to know to ace the exam.</i><p>What? If you can ace the exam by memorizing, it must mean that awarding of merit in your field of study requires little more than the mere regurgitation of facts.<p>In a typical engineering exam, you can bring a sheet of formulas and facts, and a programmable calculator. This is so that the exam is less about rote memorization and more about application.
I never managed to use Anki for long. Maybe the interface is just too clunky.<p>Sets that can be downloaded are also often low quality, or at least there is no way to tell in advance.<p>I think some day there may be a unicorn startup doing the flash card thing right.