Ask HN: Anyone using Anki/Spaced-repetition successfully?
What has been your experiences with using Anki or other spaced repetition software to improve your long term recall?
Has it impacted your practice, day to day life positively?
If yes, what are the best practices with spaced repetition worked for you?
13 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 43.0 ms ] threadI found I remembered more creating the cards than reviewing them. Creating the cards made me think about the information and understand it so I could create the card (back and front) in a beneficial way. Reviewing them was a waste of time for me, but the act of creating something with the information I was trying to learn worked wonders.
To be honest I found this with mind maps, concept maps, and nearly every single other way of presenting information in a way that is touted as a good way to learn.
- The brain activity from making a card assists your memory, possibly more than reviewing itself. Reviewing just enforces the memory even more.
- The more vivid/personal the memory, the easier it is to remember. I can still remember the exact moment 20+ years ago some Korean vocab was burned into my permanent memory. For example, Korean has a complex set of words for extended family that's hard for me to remember. After I met my real-life 이모, I never forgot it means "mother's sister."
The book Fluent Forever[1] focuses on efficient language learning, where SRS plays an important role. Gabriel has done a lot of research on learning and the human brain; many of the techniques can be extended beyond language learning.
[1]: https://www.nateliason.com/notes/fluent-forever-gabriel-wein...
1. Don’t be too hard on yourself. Some months I review 10-20 new cards a day; this month, I was busier than usual, so I changed it to 1 new card a day. There’s no rush.
2. For languages, sentences are drastically more helpful to have as cards than single words. I find it much easier to learn a whole sentence than just a word.
3. I have a mix of my cards and pre-made ones (e.g., Vocab from my textbook).
4. It's OK to let a card be a leech and to forget about it. If a card was a leech, I’d just let it go. It's not school, the goal isn’t to get 100%, its just to use as another resource.
5. I use Anki along with 2-3 other apps AND a private teacher. I treat it like an additional resource, not the end all be all.
Anki is great. However I am getting a little bit tired after the years. I now use it more as my knowledge base.
> Today, my Anki has 4415 cards and grows everyday. I have spent 186 hours studying, I have made around 35K card reviews.
Do you have any personal reflections on what sort of cards worked for you, and how you'd chunk the information or any other tips in using it?
I would also suggest to try to create plain text cards. In the future it would be easier to search for material that you know is there but that you don't recall exactly.
When you're doing your daily reps, do you tackle a particular category each time or is it completely randomized?
> useful information you encounter online, facts about loved ones, jokes, scientific concepts, cognitive biases you are prone to
What other topics?
Since then I also started going through the ActivityPub protocol and Ankifying that, too. I'd scanned it a couple of times before and started building an implementation for fun, but I feel like Anki helped me grasp it better. I also don't have to refer back to the doc as much as I used to. Aside from the reviewing itself being useful, writing the actual cards has been very useful as well (but I kind of expected that, since writing/blogging has long been my preferred way of reinforcing new learnings).
I've Ankified different kinds of things so far, all in one deck. From details of auth flows to git commands (so I no longer have to Google each time I need to remember how to delete a remote tag or reset a git author).
[0] http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html