Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet.
There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just that people tend to fall off the same way they do on any other education pattern.
A couple years ago I was thinking "If Google and Apple really cared about kids they would make a spaced repetition unlock system", where by you have to make note cards every week and then have to answer correctly to get into your phone. (obviously requires some bypass system, other rules, etc)
You could probably jury rig it with a popup that comes up after you unlock, but people would never install it anyway.
You still have to do the work.
It's a lever or a pulley, nothing more.
Spaced repetition is doing the work.
And a gigantic amount right with it.
This is a strange comment because it shrugs off something that has been transformative and hugely useful to a lot of people because it doesn’t fix all conceivable problems.
I remember reading some stats from WaniKani (Japanese SRS app) a while back...
WaniKani has 60 "levels" to learn 2000+ kanji. Each level takes about a week (there's no skipping ahead), so the material takes about a year of study to complete -- that's if you're going at breakneck pace, which most people aren't.
According to the numbers I saw on the WK forums, ~8% of users reach level 30 and less than 1% reach level 60... and that's just to learn as much kanji as a 9th grader. That's to say nothing of the grammar and the 20,000+ vocab words you'll need to SRS to truly learn the language, or the thousands of hours you'll have to spend speaking/listening/reading, immersing yourself in native content, etc.
People give up very easily. The language learning community often gives year estimates to reach "near-native level" in a language based on frequency of study. In reality, the process takes a lifetime. I don't know if people truly know what they're signing up for when install those apps and begin studying. It's a lifelong commitment. It's just something you do now, every day.
You can stop at any time of course, and most people do (more than 99% of them apparently).
The problem with spaced repetition systems is that it doesn't supply that extra motivation. You're still just memorizing things in a vacuum. If you truly want to learn a language you need to use it to communicate. That means making friends, travelling, reading books, and consuming other media in that language.
I credit Anki to my success at GCSEs and A Levels despite having a head injury, and I also credit it to me burning out so hard I took a gap year!
And I'm enjoying the gap year, but Anki made it a near necessity.
Keep that up every day and you'll burn out much faster with option 1 than option 2. Now, maybe you have enough motivation for that not to matter, or the self-discipline to keep going - as I did in my A levels - but don't be surprised if it kills your interest in the subject.
It’s centered around your performance and review times, to make sure you aren’t struggling to much; no due dates to avoid Anki slogs; gamified with some internal mechanics; dopaminergically influenced with aspects of randomness.
Spaced Repetition is just an equation (SM2 is laughable simple), but a lot of applications just slap a UI on it and call it a day, but that’s not the only way to use it!
More fundamentally, SRS isn't a superpower because it's just very specific to creating a direct prompt retrieval. Generalization is poor. Even creating a graph of knowledge, is a chain of edges between bits of knowledge, isn't done very well here.
And I suspect there's a very deep, fundamental difference between recollection knowledge and logical-modeling knowledge. Recollection seems very similar to a dictionary access, and if you recorded the time to recall in humans I suspect they'd all be constant. But learning the knowledge of a logical model, like of a mathematical concept, appears to be vastly different and have very different time to compute.
Proponents of SRS will point out logical models need facts as well, like formulas, lemmas, etc. Which is true. But if you already grasped it before you'd grasp it faster the second time. So the practical use of SRS is a significant step above having a very well sorted and labeled notebook, but still way below becoming a genius.
There's 2 solutions I've thought of but haven't tried implementing:
1. A free-recall based approach. Free recall allows you to operate at a higher level of organization and connect concepts at lower levels. However, how you would schedule SRS with free recall is not clear.
2. Have an LLM generate questions on-the-fly so that you don't overtrain on prompts. You might also instruct the LLM to create questions that connect multiple concepts together. The problem with this approach is that LLMs are still not so good at creating good test questions.
I mean, you say that, but I did mandarin for maybe 6 months, I did reviews for maybe a year or two on and off, I haven't done a review of mandarin for 8, 9 years now and I can still recall quite a bit of it. So for me it's worked quite well.
Which is really a shame, as the spacing effect itself is such an underrated aspect of human learning that it almost feels like cheating.
It’s powerful, with a lot of depth to its features - but it’s also hideous, clunky and unintuitive, and it takes a long time to figure out how to use it effectively.
An HN-reading tech nerd can probably figure it out, but your average Duolingomaxxing normie? No chance.
Is there not enough useless whitespace around every button?
Another example until recently was the extremely useful image occlusion enhanced add-on. Can you easily tell the difference between overlapping and nonoverlapping? At least they renamed those settings to the much more intuitive "Hide One , Reveal All" and "Hide All, Reveal One."
An SRS system which took more account of the human failings of the user might:
- let you pick a "max daily reviews" and then keep you from putting in too many new items up front, rather than letting you accidentally give yourself a huge daily workload after a few months
- let you tell it "I'm going to be on holiday in a month's time" and have it figure out what to do with reviews and new items to minimise disruption
- when you do come back after a break, pick the most useful reviews to offer the user up to the daily limit (e.g. something whose review interval is six months can wait a few more days, something the user added very recently and has seen only once could be put back into the "new items" bucket to relearn later, so if the user is only going to do 100 of their 300 due cards, other cards are more important to review today)
Anki allows you to do that. It's in the deck preset options under deck limits. Nowadays you can also set weekday workloads, to reduce workload eg. during the weekend.
i really wish the UI would just hide number of cards due by default
Second thing, control over workload should not be that hard. Anki requires too much tweaking to work reasonably.
Third thing, both old and new algorithm have a notion of "you are pressing the buttons wrong". If you are pressing the buttons wrong, you will end up with absurd intervals - like 4 months interval on something you just learned.
Me, the person who reversengineered obfuscated code doing weird crypto primitives and submitted patches to linux kernel can't figure it out either. Maybe I'm not HN nerd enough, so I had to do the duolingo to pass my citizenship exams.
Anki seems like it works for a lot of people with a very specific flow, but I don't know what the flow is and why it doesn't work for me. It's weird.
Anki is refreshing function over form design. It's beautiful.
I think it just needs a fresh minimal design, a tutorial, and some premade decks that aren’t just the half-baked free ones.
And the daily emotion-tugging streak reminders started to actually piss me off.
On top of that, at one point they were changing the icon regularly and made it really ugly. Despite a ton of complaints, they left it that way for a long time.
So I canceled my subscription and I'm done with them. I'll find another way to study that I like (I've already tried Anki and it works, but I don't like it) and isn't mentally abusive.
My kids loved it. I did not cared. So, the likely explanation is that many people like that icon changes or dont mind it.
I used to not care for gamification because I knew that my brain is resistant to it in activities that aren't otherwise rewarding on their own. Like, I quickly realize I'm just tricking myself, and then it stops working. But somewhere over the years, I must have burned out of my dopamine reserves or something, because apps like Anki feel now actively off-putting, in the sense that I lose all energy just looking at them. Memorizing cards gets tricky when your eyes just glaze over them and nothing is loaded even to short-term memory, much less long-term. So at this point I'd appreciate even a little bit of immediate feedback and some progress tracker that evokes ever so slightly positive feelings.
You do anki because you feel like you must and you have very little control over it.
I wonder if there are any good recommendations for something to try it on?
Probably the simplest use case to get started is improving your English vocabulary. (Assuming English is your first language.) I try to add a card for any word I come across that I don’t know the meaning of, and it works very well.
I don't think any of us are satisfied with how most things look, but we're severely under-resourced.
Feel free to email me if you'd be interested in getting involved with the Android side of things.
people that are motivated and will succeed with Anki regardless of design will power through an annoying UI. so with better design, you'll increase top of funnel but radically decrease conversion.
I just don't use an app. I will challenge myself to remember things or practice things manually.
It's probably sub optimal compared to structured spaced repetition, but it works well enough for me.
Every time i did repetition, i've made a shorter note about the subject.
Then next repetition cycle, i'm reading the note, and making shorter note based on it. and so on.
once few cycles i'm re-reading the main starting note i made.
I tried it for a while with my eldest child (then aged 3) to help her remember numbers, letters, etc. She didn't find it very fun past the first couple of times, so I figured I wasn't going to hoist it on her.
• Memorizing Geoguessr metas. Made it to Master I rank this way.
• Memorizing new words. When I come across a word I don't know, I make a new flashcard for it.
• Memorizing things about people. My wife's favorite ice cream flavors, which spices each of my children dislikes, etc.
Anything I want to memorize but wouldn't be exposed to frequently enough in my day to day life. Flashcard review takes only a few minutes each day.
I got introduced to this idea a few years ago from AJATT [1] and my personal experience is that it works very well.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100406173634/http://www.alljap...
I downloaded an existing deck and modified it so that only the correct answer is shown instead of multiple choices.
I still can remember some of the content even though I deleted the deck short after receiving my license.
I've used Anki for multiple years and learned around 18'000 Japanese words. It's difficult to say but I'd say I've learned how to read around 5'000 kanji. When I studied in Japan, my kanji reading—don't mix that up with comprehension!—was way above everyone else's. And most of my classmates were either Korean or Chinese.
That's what 10 minutes of free time—I did that during my daily train rides—can get you! Keep practicing. Being ignorant is the first step towards becoming more knowledgeable.
Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.
...Maybe the poster meant "«10 minutes» per ride"? («That's what 10 minutes of free time - I did that during my daily train rides»)
Now, those cards weren't alone - they were reinforcing content that I'd learnt in lessons. But if they were doing it for 10 minutes a day a few times a day, it seems quite plausible to me.
Actually, it took me 20 minutes of time per day to do my reviews + new words. I had, on average, 200 cards to go through daily (180 review + 20 new cards).[1] Going through 18'000 words took me around 5 years. 5×365×20=36'500
> A rate which far surpasses native speakers.
Are you comparing me to babies? It took me 2 weekends to learn all kana, but it takes years for a toddler to learn just hiragana. It's not a fair comparison.
> Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.
I wonder why you think it's unrealistic. It's not like I'm a genius or anything.[2]
[1] Two cards is one word; one for English -> Japanese, one for Japanese -> English.
[2] Some teachers definitely thought I was a genius because of my memory, but it was all thanks to Anki. And proof is that I was absolutely bad at text comprehension. Anki doesn't make you practice that.
We spend hours a day browsing the web, so I made a browser extension[0] that translates sentences at your knowledge level into the language you're learning, so that you're always learning a little through immersion.
I also used the same "10 minutes a day on Anki" strategy with my A levels, and it made the revision process so so much nicer because stuff I'd learnt two years ago was as fresh as if I'd learnt it a couple of months ago, rather than years.
I've learned Japanese and part of the reason is that I thought kanji were attractive. I remember watching anime on TV when I was a kid and seeing the opening credits with Japanese characters looked soo cool.
I'm not at all interested in anything I've seen in other non-English languages, except possibly Korean now, since they seem to be producing a lot of stuff.
However, almost everything that I'd enjoy gets translated to English for both Japanese and Korean now, so there's a lot less incentive to learn them.
No wonder my second language was English and third language Japanese.
Never heard a single word of Mandarin in any media I was exposed to. I can understand Spanish very well but I do not count it as a learned language as it is too close to Portuguese (my first language).
Chinese evil. Communist. Bad. Bad Chinese. Bad bad. Cheap products.
Japanese. exotic. mystical. Samurai. Ninja. Anime. Good. Sony. Good. Good cars. Zen. Good.
Me good. Me learn Japanese. Me exotic and mystical. Super power. Me good. Me great.
Me me me. Me me me. Me me me.
2. Japanese is becoming one of the most popular languages for foreign media, probably even surpassing English at this point. Anime is really huge now, particularly in the US. It has shifted from being a nerd thing to being of interest for the "cool kids" (if there is even such a thing now). Japan also had a huge and very interesting media industry in the 80s and 90s including some very novel video game concepts, most of which has not been translated
Accordingly, the stereotypical CS major is attracted to Japanese and Klingon, the stereotypical Business major to Chinese. Even though few follow through because of the amount of work and perseverance required
I have been trying for years to fined a way to use it for mathematics and physics - with the former being more of a focus and didn't really get anywhere. For definitions it works, but it's quite hard to write proofs in a way where there is a short obvious memorization based answer. Either you spend far too much time on a card or the card gives you too much information so you don't really test the knowledge.
I also tried it for computer shortcuts - it seems to me that they are really useful only when part of the muscle memory - so practicing them works better then memorization.
And mathematics and physics, which are (at undergraduate level) even more well-understood than vocabulary.
It makes it unusable and every time I tried I went back to my own self written program that just lets me set/adjust the intervals myself.
Like other big cultural shifts from the time, the correction was necessary but also probably went too far in the opposite direction.
Which is a long way of saying that memorization is underrated and it mostly has a bad reputation from anti-Victorian reformers.
Common sense challenges this honestly. Education systems that traditionally have put a strong focus on repetition, memorization and what you could call neuromuscular training (e.g China, the USSR, France) in particluar in STEM far outperform anyone else. Vietnam outperforms most rich countries.
In programming circles it's a cultural cliche because our profession is full of people who go by: "I am a genius, I work smart, not hard", probably the most damaging idea ever uttered in education, and in the humanities it's seen as culturally unsophisticated.
In reality, 95% of everything is mechanics. Starcraft, math, even literature and acting. Creative freedom is enabled only by a large body of effortless recollection.
Ofocurse it does help you win stupid games.
Like scoring good marks in exams.
So that you can spend the next 30 years of your life doing jobs you hate for money to just end up dead for infinity.
It about halved the amount of reviews I needed to do, and they didn't come up in bursts, so they were a lot more pleasant. I didn't quite believe it at first, and worried that it would be less effective, but it worked just as well if not better.
I really recommend giving it another try!
I personally used Anki the whole time, so if you're currently doing your exams some of my advice might not be super useful. I did maths, physics, and computer science. I didn't use flashcards much for maths - just for the irritating stats equations - but used it extensively for physics, and a little for compsci (I barely studied for compsci).
During my GCSEs I extensively used them for history, which is probably the closest analogue to the wordy questions you'll get in geography. I used it for facts, order of events, etc. I found that the process of organising history into a well-organised Obsidian database, then distilling it into flashcards, was as useful as the flashcard reviews itself.
I suppose the advice I'd have is
- Cloze cards are excellent, and you should use them
- You can't flashcard your way to mental models. Absolutely don't rely on them alone, and you need to do practice questions for every separate question type you'll get until you're confident with the mental model itself.
- That said, it's easy to get into the trap of remembering the answers to flashcards as words. While this lets you "learn" quicker, and speed up reviews, I found that I had much better results when I tried to actually "load in" the mental model into my head. So for example, if I had a flashcard about refraction behaviour, I'd not just answer the question, I'd also visualise a laser going into a water and how the behaviour of the light changed as the angle changed - and vice versa, with a laser in a fibre optic cable or leaving some water.
For history, it's been a while, but if I had a question about one factor in a broader crisis (e.g. the Berlin Airlift) I'd try to think about the broader context of the question - not in my internal monologue, but just vaguely considering the various factors involved, the period of history, personally I instinctively visualise a map, etc, for a second or two before clicking for the answer.
> And the idea that you’ll literally never see a card again after the last interval is terrifying, as it means you’re constantly losing knowledge.
I brought it up around the time I tried it and got shouted down. Pretty much every spaced repetition app was treating anki like a holy emissary, so I gave up on spaced repetition entirely.
I do agree with the author's phrase of "...a daily ritual of feeling bad about what you’ve forgotten..." though, and would like to try the new algorithm. Is there a way to configure Anki to force you to type the correct answer?
Anki doesn’t seem to separate these layers at all. Everything is a monolithic database. Import is unpleasant. Export is unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant. Doing anything other than practicing and editing in the UI is unpleasant. And, every time I try Anki, I get stuck when I can’t manipulate my own data outside Anki.
Is there any system out there that doesn’t have this issue?
On a plus side, you can buy specialized vocab/phrase books, I have one just for onomonopias. Also my beginner vocab books come with recordings from actual native speaker voice actors, which I add to the deck. Much better quality than anything an LLM or speech synthesizers can give you.
Sprinkle in AI and you'd be a shoe-in.
Is that not what anki does? You have a collection of cards, each card can be in one or more decks derived from the cards.
> There also ought to be a way to constrain what cards should be studied in a given session
That's also decks. You can have your 'Japanese' deck, and then the 'Japanese::writing' subdeck for the subset which require you to have your writing materials handy.
You can also use "Better Tags" to tag cards, and then create a sub-deck with an ad-hoc tag query to only study a subset if you want.
Does creating more decks and then studying the subset you want to in a session not work for what you want?
> Anki doesn’t seem to separate these layers at all. Everything is a monolithic database.
Decks are separate files which can be shared, edited, created, studied, and reasoned about independently.
The "spaced repetition model" in anki is obviously separate from the fact that there are multiple (FSRS and the old one).
> Export is unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant
It's just files (zip files really). What's unpleasant about it?
> And, every time I try Anki, I get stuck when I can’t manipulate my own data outside Anki.
There's libraries to manipulate anki decks outside of anki for practically every programming languages. There are literally dozens of tools that can generate and import anki cards, such as the large family of japanese "mining" tools which create anki cards from media, dictionary entries, etc etc.
It's open source, and the code has clean library abstractions you can work with, so it's trivial to nab any of the data out of it.
> Is there any system out there that doesn’t have this issue?
Every issue you described is something that I experienced in other software, but which anki solved for me, so for me "anki" is that system.
I experimented with SuperMemo around 18 months ago, and it made me fall in love with SRS again. The main reason being the algorithm is less punishing when I skip a day. Maybe it has better defaults?
I once skipped a whole week and could get back on track in the next week, in Anki that feels unbearable.
Another thing I really liked about it is that you can edit a card as you are studying without having to open a separate window, helps me stay in the flow when studying.
But… With a better algorithm I might give it a try in the future… Being FOSS is the real advantage here.
Q&A/discussion: https://supermemopedia.com/wiki/SuperMemo_dethroned_by_FSRS
Repo: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-vs-sm17
Discussion: https://discord.gg/qjzcRTx => https://discord.com/channels/368267295601983490/136895216717...
I've stopped working on it and am now building something highly similar aimed towards high school students, but any feedback is welcome. This version was built for uni students
mimair.com - I never got around to adding any payment option so its completely free
This seems impossible to me. In anki, there's "hard", "good", and "easy" which are all for "I got this right".
For my usage, "hard" is "I got it right, but I was only like 60% sure", "good" is "I had to actively think", and "easy" is "effortlessly correct, no real thought required".
There's no way for an AI to tell if my identical input is the result of a 50/50 guess, or a little thought, or effortless recall. "delay to answer" also isn't a good approximation, I have a habit of alt-tabbing and chatting with a friend on random cards of any difficulty.
I find distinguishing those levels of easy for totally identical answers ends up making SRS more effective, and AI just can't know my inner thoughts. Maybe once we have brain implants.
> any knowledge rather than specifying that the exact answer should be graded
I don't understand what you mean. The important thing is to feed back into the SRS algorithm "How much does this card need to be studied", and if you mean "any knowledge means we can study it less often", then I doubt the SRS will be able to be effective.
What are you suggesting to feed back into SRS? How will you ensure cards the user knows very well quickly get pushed way back (so the user isn't overwhelmed with a boring slog), and cards they only sorta know bubble up more quickly to start to cement the knowledge?
As an example Term: "What is the capital of France and how many inhabitants does it have?" Correct definition: "Paris, which has 2 000 000 inhabitants."
For me there is a difference in not having the answer at all, which falls into "again". But what about if I'm able to retrieve that Paris is the capital, but I remember that the population is 1 500 000. This is where the gray zone begins
The AI cannot read my mind, there is no approximation that will work reasonably accurately here for "how confident was I in my answer", unless I input that myself.
Not to say that how quickly you can access it doesn't play a role in real life.
Either I don't understand the algorithm or it doesn't understand me.
I like the anki way of self rating, so I kept it. I want to be able to say: “hey, I know I screwed up the stroke order this time, but it won‘t happen again, promise” and hit “Good”.
1) The time it takes to make cards. RemNote allows you to take Notion-style block notes and quickly turn bullet points into flashcards using symbols. For example, you might be in class and make a bullet point in the format
- The quick brown fox jumps over >> the lazy dog
which you can later review as a flashcard that is automatically separated front/back by the >>.
2) The old and unintuitive UI - again, basically just Notion with flashcards. You can easily view all your notes in a bullet hierarchy and then switch over to SR flashcard practice. Even has rich code blocks, image occlusion, tables etc. A much better implementation of Anki's notes/cards metaphor in my opinion.
I am not sponsored by RemNote, just a university student who has bounced off Anki and really likes the app.
I’ve always felt this setup was a bit arbitrary and considered it a temporary solution. Thanks for saving me some time on research!
As a quick hack, increase the factor to 2.5 once you reach 1 day. That's what Anki's SM-2 used to use (if only pressing 'good')
entropie•2h ago
Long story short: not possible with anki. It took like an entire day for me to realize its just not possible without diving deep into ankis sqlitedb and having the client installed on my server to interact in a horrible way with decks. I wrote my own space repetition [1] backend in a week and never looked back to anki. Ill intergrate FSRS in my software.
1: https://github.com/entropie/ha2itat/tree/main/plugins/entrom...
welder•2h ago
entropie•2h ago
johanyc•2h ago
entropie•2h ago
david_allison•1h ago
https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/intro.html
----
But you'd want AnkiConnect, or a Python-based addon for your workflow
criddell•48m ago
entropie•4m ago
> Anki desktop app auto-launch > Perhaps the most precarious aspect of the Anki-Connect add-on is that the Anki desktop application must be running for any of the API calls to work. Yanki Connect tries to sand down this rough edge by (optionally) automatically launching the Anki desktop app if it's not running already.
yellow_lead•1h ago
There is an implementation of their sync server, which you can self host. And it has a REST API
https://github.com/dsnopek/anki-sync-server
I think I ran into a blocker with it not supporting something I needed last time I tried to use it though.
SamPatt•1h ago
https://www.stephenmwangi.com/obsidian-spaced-repetition/
kartikarti•1h ago
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2055492159
jwrallie•1h ago
I know this is not precisely what you wanted, but yes, Anki can update card contents.
rsanek•35m ago