But seeing how it's implemented, I think they could totally integrate something like FSRS to at least just replace their scheduling (how long until an item is next shown). The unlocking system can be implemented as a separate gatekeeping mechanism, and the buckets can be coded for certain step thresholds (instead of wanikani's "stage").
Basically, this is their entire srs system: https://docs.api.wanikani.com/20170710/#spaced-repetition-sy...
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.
If you don’t have any of these reasons to motivate you, the question arises of why you’re bothering in the first place.
Now I have several Chinese friends and I'm learning Chinese cooking. I'm motivated to continue learning about Chinese food and Chinese culture, and the important role food plays within it.
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.
As OP points out, SRS is optimized for memory retention. You will almost certainly encounter many more words watching a two hour long video, but you certainly won‘t retain nearly as many words as half an hour of SRS.
Actually you can combine the two. Use the two hour long video to encounter new vocabulary in context, put the new vocabulary in your Anki deck, and review it with optimized SRS. You get the best of both worlds. As a bonus you often remember the source which will help you recall... This is actually common enough pattern that it has a name: Vocabulary mining.
Wait, you're putting yourself in a situation where the first time you see a card, you have no idea what it is?
People will genuinely download top x wordlists for a language and try to learn from them. Hideous, but they do it.
I’ve done that, and I’ve even created a whole SRS app to learn kanji which does that by default (https://shodoku.app).
I think this is common practice for the first 1000 words, and I don’t exactly recommend against it. Unless your target language is close to another language you already know, you are going to have to learn your first 1000 words somehow, and you will not learn them by comprehensible input in any reasonable time, unless you are actually living in the language area, and cannot use other languages.
I actually bought a vocabulary book which has 1000 basic words and example sentences and puts them in categories (e.g. work, travel, food, etc.). I then downloaded an Anki deck from the book and use it. To be fair though, I first read the word in the book, and practice it with a red-sheet (albeit in reverse, i.e. from english and try to recall it in japanese).
As for my kanji learning app. I made it so the first time you see a kanji, it does not hide any information, and it shows you the strokes in order as you write it on first encounter, after that you review it normally.
Edit: It's worth noting I had a nasty head injury that was slowing me down. Optimising my learning was a necessity, and the injury meant I spent more time studying than my peers, in more optimised and less enjoyable ways, to get the same result.
The first part is definitely untrue, you won't learn any vocabulary spending an hour watching an educational video, you'll be lucky if you remember one new word tomorrow. That half hour on Anki will be spread out over six months, and will teach you 20 words.
As for the second part, doing Anki is like doing through any sort of timeline that spits out random rewards and failures. I get a rush whenever I remember stuff, and I get bummed out when I forget; it's basically facebook.
I understand why one wouldn't think that with single-word vocabulary flashcards, because they are horrible to do and unhelpful. You should be running sentences, not words. Words rarely translate well, change form when they are in sentences, and often show up as part of seemingly ungrammatical set phrases.
Boredom?
Feeling like what you're doing is low-quality or superficial?
Doing something artificial for purely external reasons like grades or exams?
Can't speak for anyone else, but for me I would take slower progress over any of these... which makes spaced repetition a hard sell.
Many things. I think HN is a bit of a bubble here, but you'll find a lot of people prefer something enjoyable but slower to something efficient and faster, even if they won't admit it.
See the popularity of Duolingo vs Anki as an example! Or Quizlet vs Anki. Or the scores of students who revise by half-watching dopamine-ified youtube videos rather than doing past papers and flashcards. If you ask people, they'll often say they care for efficiency, but their revealed preferences say otherwise.
Doing large amounts (hours) of Anki day in day out is truly miserable, particularly when the alternatives can be quite enjoyable. And if you burn out before you achieve your goal, is the "efficiency" really worth it vs going slower but eventually getting there?
Plus, a lot of people want to learn e.g. a language because they enjoy the process as well as the end result. Making the process miserable in order to get to the end result faster isn't always a good tradeoff.
Which is what it's about. It's a tradeoff. I'm a big proponent of flashcards, but I think it's important to recognise that you're trading enjoyment for speed in most cases.
I have tried different approaches, including using other people's flashcards (not as good - objectively they were high quality, but you gain a lot from writing your own + tailoring to your own way of looking at things) and learning from them (for my driving theory - terrible idea!). That hybrid approach is the best I've found, and the one I intend to use for my degree.
I confess I'm interested to hear your thoughts re: the usefulness of SRS from a more holistic perspective.
Gwern writes:
>...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.
https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition
My sense is that there are very few facts I will spend more than 5 minutes of my life repeatedly looking up. And even then, many of those are facts that I will naturally end up memorizing regardless of SRS, since I'm using the info so often.
I understand the utility of SRS for test takers or language learners. When Google is impractical or unavailable, memorization makes sense. But for everything else -- why not just Google it?
I used it for some geography stuff, and that was fine I suppose, I like geography, but I stopped after a while.
I find it easy to remember things if I care about them. Ergo, if I care enough to put it in Anki, Anki is useless.
Particularly with LLMs being a thing, you don't even need to concretely know what you're looking for - just give chatgpt a vague description and let it list out suggestions until it jogs your memory.
When it comes to physics etc, you'll end up memorising everything relevant to the areas you actually use. In areas like "What is the star type of a star with a temperature of 6000K" - something that I memorised using Anki, and which took me a while - if I actually worked in that area of astrophysics I'd obviously learn that quite quickly.
I suppose it could be useful for maintaining knowledge. Had I not been burnt out I would have kept up my flashcards through my gap year, which would've presumably been quite useful - I'm currently going through the slog of relearning how to integrate so I'm not totally embarrassed at uni!
This is so well known that it was covered extensively in the book Make It Stick[1], that you might as well call it the "student fallacy." (And they might have; ironically, I've forgotten if they do or not!)
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learnin...
Anything advertising that you can learn X in Y days isn't addressing that "after" period. Once you've learned the skill, you need motivation toward applying it, which in turn refines your skills. Conversely, becoming hyper fixated can be detrimental to overall skill. "Jack of all trades, master of none" HOWEVER the rest of the quote goes "but often times better than a master of one"
Sometimes you gotta slog through the boring bits to progress.
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!
But when memorization applies, gamification is a really good way to avoiding burnout (as long as you don't overexpose yourself to it). There are many spaced repetition games for children, I don't know why people make so few of them for adults. (But then, fearing the duolingo owl is a popular meme nowadays.)
Do you think targeting a sub-90% difficulty could help reduce burnout? My experience is that working to recall something I'm on the verge of forgetting can be very effortful.
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 almost never see someone talk about free recall so I was too excited to see it mentioned not to comment
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.
Easy statement to make when you're not defining the silver bullet. Kind of like saying dieting turns out not to be a silver bullet.
I've used spaced repairing for over 6 years. It's been transformative for me.
IIRC the effect was so profound they had to modify the structure of some tests or something to that effect.
And polyglots have been using SRS for years.
As always, the real problem when people fail to do something that works is psychological, not technical. I'd say anyone who made an Ozempic for motivation would make a killing, but I believe it's already a scheduled substance. Maybe one without potential for addiction or abuse. Or maybe an Ozempic for conscientiousness.
Perhaps they were relying on LLMs to generate decks?
I do not study medicin, but for language I have to actually be able to use what I memorize. Knowing how to use words is harder than it sounds, you need context. A common mistake when constructing sentences is getting the tone wrong and choosing the wrong synonyms.
One thing that bothers me about SRS is that it doesn't get enough attention from people who understand the difference between memorization and language acquisition. It gets a ton of attention from people who are doing test prep or who get intrinsic reward from their memorization accomplishments.
Memorization is not my goal — I want to get better at reading Spanish and French — but I find that drilling on vocabulary and example sentences helps a lot. I compare it to using scaffolding in construction. Scaffolding is not a building. Scaffolding doesn't serve any of the purposes a building does. But if you need to build, expand, or refurbish a building, sometimes building scaffolding in and around it can speed things up a hell of a lot.
I wish there were better guidance for using memorization to assist in language learning, but the world seems to be split between people who are satisfied with memorization as their goal (for test prep or intrinsic satisfaction) and people who dismiss memorization entirely because it isn't their goal.
You'd probably say silver bullets aren't a silver bullet because you still have to load the gun and shoot it.
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.
A human who had a lot of time to learn during January, because his job workload was easy is not failing anything if his job related workload becomes high in March and April. But, all that January effort will be punished by super high workloads in March and April in Anki.
Source: https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-options.html?highlight=easy%20...
We seem to agree on the substance: that the SRS system should be able to work more humanely with and for the kind of entirely normal situations you describe, by for instance being able to adjust to variations in available time and picking the "best" cards to review rather than assuming the user will get through the whole lot, and in suggesting to them when they should do fewer new items to avoid difficulties in a month or two.
If you could set a study time of say 30 minutes, then when you skip a day, you could just do your usual 30 minutes and maybe only get through 50% of the scheduled cards, but you could slowly catch up over the next few days. And if on the contrary you run out of reviews for today, you could carry on with some scheduled for tomorrow until you've hit your target time.
FSRS can handle off-schedule reviews just fine, I think, so it should be able to accommodate such a rhythm where you don't always review cards on exactly the optimal day.
This reminds me of GTO (game theory optimal) play in poker.
There’s a perfect way to do things, so we should just try to do something as close to that as possible, right? The reality is that you can’t actually do things in this perfect way. In GTO’s case it’s that it’s too complex for a human to have memorized and in SRS many (not all) people will fail to follow the algorithm for one reason or another.
The problem is these strategies aren’t very resilient. If you miss the implementation by a bit, it can cause big losses. An algorithm that’s less theoretically optimal but more attainable by actual humans can end up much stronger in the real world.
i really wish the UI would just hide number of cards due by default
The other reason I wrote my own system was to integrate SRS with extensive reading. Basically, my algorithm tracks the difficulty of all the words and grammar concepts, like FSRS; but then it gives you content at the right level for learning (either fewer than 5 new concepts, or an average of 95% known material).
And among the things that fits, it balances reviewing older material and learning newer material, based on what would have the largest impact. (Reviewing something you're about to forget has a bigger impact than learning something new, because the new thing you're going to forget much more quickly. So the balance of new / review and spaced repetition falls out naturally.)
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.
This resonated with me. I think the decline in excitement towards learning, that we used to do without thinking about it, happens naturally with aging.
Evolution doesn't reward older humans that much for learning so most of us don't feel that same excitement. Compare this to when we're young and need to learn fast, so the dopamine rewards are off the charts.
Consider all of the retirees who spend hours at slot machines (or virtual ones like Candy Crush) to get that dopamine fix as easily as possible.
Maybe a more tasteful gamification balance can be found.
Does it show you ads in the language you're learning? Because if so, that could be an asset...
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.
It has other oddities too though, like the tab bar in the main window that doesn’t act like a tab bar. It should also really have two button mode (Again and Good only) for the review screen as a built in option, too — the addon that adds this is very popular and it’d be dead simple to implement.
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.
So, by my calculations for just the Anki time alone it's about 17.5k words split across 730 hours, which comes out to about 23 words and hour or one word every 2.5 minutes.
I've seen a pretty wide variety of people do Anki, and I can say there's a distribution in length of time per card for basically the exact same types of cards among people. The slowest people average around 3x slower than the fastest.
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.
* Get interested in memorizing something / multiple things
* Find that the decks available to me are actually not so great
* Get reading online, people say that the real way to benefit from it is to make your own deck (which ups the time commitment significantly)
* Read online about how to get the most out of anki, find out that everyone universally agrees that the default settings are terrible but nobody quite agrees on how to set it for best results
* Try to hit a happy medium, but find that the overhead of 'rating' the difficulty of recall for cards (and how it interacts with the complex settings that I still don't have complete confidence in) adds an incredibly (to me) distracting amount of overhead and never get used to it
* Miss a few days, get overwhelmed with the amount of cards stacked up, don't feel good about my settings (which have implications for what cards show up like, a year + down the line)
* Ultimately fizzle out
I'm probably going to start the cycle over again soon. I really do want it to work out for me. Any tips to avoid this issue? I'm planning to actually pay for some decks this time to see if that gets me to the quality I want, and going to skip the whole 'trying to make my own deck' thing for now
* Make your own cards (unless there's an automated workflow [Japanese, sentence mining], really good shared decks, or you're studying for a standardized exam [USMLE])
* Deck Settings (scheduling): Enable FSRS. Press 'Optimize', then press optimize once per month.
* Deck Settings (workload): Wait 2 weeks before gradually increasing new cards per day (if you want to study for longer). Decrease it immediately if you feel you're getting overwhelmed.
* Deck Settings (backlog): Set max reviews/day to 9999
* App Settings: Disable 'Show next review time above answer buttons'
* Addons: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/876946123 (you seem to have a problem with answer button selection)
* Recommended: Press 'sync', and create an AnkiWeb account. In app settings, set Anki to auto-sync on open/close. This is a free backup.
* Optional: Use a mobile client (AnkiDroid is free on Android, AnkiWeb is free on iOS)
You'll feel like you completed the first day far too quickly, and will want to do more. Avoid overstudying until you build intuition for how it impacts your daily workload.
Use Anki every day
If I'm planning to learn several topics at once (I'm never preparing for anything I will be tested on or hit a deadline for, this is not for a school, work, or travel program), is it better to treat the decks as one big combined review do you think?
Ideally one deck, but add a tag when creating the note, so you can separate things out later if you want to pause learning something/split them out.
I think this is great advice. I have some friends that used Anki that told me "oh yeah I just study once per week" and I just had PTSD of when I forgot to do one day. Sometimes I would miss a day due to traveling and timezone difference and I would instantly panic when I would see 400+ cards to review.
If you don't do it daily, Anki doesn't make any sense to me. My recommendation—to that friend and everyone else—is to study a little bit every day. It's much better for building a strong foundation, especially for languages.
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).
At this rate if 2/3rds of their popular media(manhua, games, animation) continues being cultivation fantasy featuring the exact same power system, tropes, character archetypes, often even setting(murim) and content, it never will.
Animanga were always poised to make it big, because for all their shortcomings, they have interesting, exotic(to us) themes/tropes/vibes, and go really hard on hyping scenes up.
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 smart. Me learned Japanse. 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.
It's the next best thing to getting an infinite stream of new problems of a type of problem.
And mathematics and physics, which are (at undergraduate level) even more well-understood than vocabulary.
In general, math is not a subject where memorization is going to get you ahead. The "why" matters much more than the "what".
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.
In the short term (first day), I think it's still better to set your own intervals (typicall 1 minute, then 5, then 10). But after that, the algorithm optimizes for reminding you just before forgetting. Highly recommend giving it a try.
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.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-harmonized-learni...
You can't understand something you can't remember.
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.
"not ... smart", "[only use is to] win stupid games.", "[you will spend] your life doing jobs you hate for money".
My dude, I'm learning Japanese vocabulary, which has helped me to start reading light novels for fun. By your argument: I'm not smart, wasting my time, and hate my life, or soon will?
Thing is I would fully agree with you that memorizing != comprehension, but that doesn't mean than memorizing is without it's use. Do yourself a favor and learn to not be so rude. It is literally the first item in the site guidelines:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky.
You also said reading stuff in English give you less satisfaction than reading in Japanese.
You might want to reflect on why that is the case.
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 recommend separating your rough working during class (e.g. the short essays you write at the end of a lesson) and your organised notes, which I split into separate, interlinked concepts with flashcards at the bottom of the file synced with Anki via an extension.
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 real-world 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 from air into water and how the behaviour of the light changed as the angle changed.
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.
Edit: Oh, and the heatmap extension is great. It gives you streaks and a heat map that you really don't want to break!
> 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?
20 second video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxEqRe1Pp1w
It's possible to batch convert your cards to this format using Anki's "Card Templates" feature.
https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/fields.html#checking-your...
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.
Kind of? As far as I can tell (and I haven't spent enormous amounts of time digging in), there are decks, and a deck contains the notes, the templates (and the cards, which may or may not have any sort of independent existence outside the notes and templates that generate them?), and a deck also contains the scheduling information.
One can export the textual and markup contents of decks, but not the media, into a text file, and one can re-import it, supposedly losslessly. One can also export a deck minus scheduling information for sharing purposes. I'm not sure that one can re-import it.
Then there is a collection, which is the whole world: decks along with their scheduling info.
> 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.
I'm guessing that, if I start by importing a Japanese deck from some other source (because, for example, there's a source with high-quality notes), and then I split it into a writing subdeck, and then the original source adds new notes for new words or makes changes or whatever, that merging the results is basically unsupported.
> > 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.
Yes, but only as monoliths (again, as far as I can tell). I can export an "Anki Deck Package (.apkg)", but checking that into git would result in a bit of nonsense. I can't export my scheduling information and templates separately from the underlying notes (or, if I can, I failed to find this option).
>> Export is unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant
> It's just files (zip files really). What's unpleasant about it?
Excel and OpenDocument sheet files are also zip files. But the respective tools are less limiting and don't expect the users to unzip those zip files. (And their merging and text import/export facilities are also weak, and that's unfortunate.)
I could be wrong about most of this. But Anki doesn't seem friendly to a decomposed workflow in the way that modern programming lanuages are.
So I would strongly suggest your check out anki-connect (https://git.sr.ht/~foosoft/anki-connect) which provides a REST API for CRUD operations on Anki notes, cards, decks, and media attachments.
Or maybe if you can share in a little more detail on what you are studying, the format of the data, and the exact way that your attempted workflow is breaking down with Anki, I'd be surprised if no one had suggestions for making it work.
Edit: also, to answer a question in your initial post, is there a better SRS tool out there? I've never found anything. For all its warts and flaws, Anki is good where it matters, extensible enough to support pretty much all use cases, and has excellent data portability.
The last time I tried to use Anki for real, I wanted to set up some Chinese character cards, to be used by 2-3 different people. I found a couple apparently high-quality decks online and downloaded them, and they had lots of characters, including (mostly) ones that I didn't want to include for the users in question. Removing content from the decks seemed wrong. Trying to make an actual practicable system with just the specific templates I wanted seemed unnecessarily complex (these decks had lots of fields in the notes, which is great, but I didn't want to use all of them). And actually getting the result to work for multiple users seemed like an exercise in poor maintainability -- I wanted to maintain and curate the set of notes and be able to update what each user was studying as needed.
As the very most basic failure, Anki barely separates the concept of a "deck" in the sense of a set of notes from a "deck" in the sense of that which a particular person is studying. And I found that to be quite limiting.
Programming has a similar issue code, docs, resources, discussions and issue tracking are not handled easily.
btw. I didn’t use LLMs to write the app, it was still pretty straight forward.
https://www.encona.com/posts/custom-statistics-for-anki-flas...
After the text is generated, I check out the accuracy (in 95% of cases the cards are accurate) and I import them into my decks. The rest is good old school Anki memorizing.
You only commented on accuracy, but what's your experience on relevance and how useful LLM-generated flashcards are?
To be clear I've already found myself deleting some flashcards I made myself while reviewing them when I realized they were bad, so I guess one can do that for LLM-generated questions as well, as long as the irrelevance rate is somewhat similar.
"Which nutrient can be synthesized by the body using sunlight?","Vitamin D" "What is the primary role of vitamin D in calcium regulation?","Raises blood calcium by enhancing absorption, mobilizing bone stores, and reducing kidney excretion" "How does vitamin D affect bones?","Supports bone mineralization and integrity" "What form does vitamin D take before activation?","Inactive precursor synthesized in the skin or consumed in diet" "Which organs activate vitamin D?","Liver and kidneys" "What are signs of vitamin D deficiency in children?","Bowed legs and bone deformities (rickets)" "What is osteomalacia?","Soft, weak bones in adults due to vitamin D deficiency" "What disease is caused by long-term vitamin D deficiency in adults?","Osteoporosis" "How does vitamin D deficiency affect older people?","Increases risk of fractures and joint pain" "What is the toxic effect of too much vitamin D?","Calcification of soft tissues"
You get the idea. How would you rate it's usefulness is subjective but it gets the job done.
Which LLM do you use?
Do you do anything special to structure the deck by chapter or section?
It's hard to do many, many things in Anki that should be trivial, impossible to do many, many things that should be possible, and the things you can do involve the types of queries being run over your entire collection that causes the app to slow to a crawl after you add about a dozen decks. And in general: I can adjust far too many things that I don't even care to adjust and probably shouldn't be adjusting, and things that should be trivial to do are impossible.
It's bad. Ankidroid is a little better, but they're also stuck with the data model.
Suggestion: Allow me to browse your site and learn about your application, and I’ll decide if it’s interesting enough for me to open it on my desktop later.
On the other hand, how templates work and how cloze deletions work are really nice. With the flashcard app I built, I didn't have templates, but did have a very basic cloze deletion system where you could mark text to be "hidden" on the front. It was very limited in that you'd only ever get one front/back combination. You could hide multiple bits of text, but they'd all be hidden at the same time. With Anki, you can create multiple groups of hidden text, so that you end up with multiple flashcards from the same note (i.e. you hid three separate groups of text, so you now have three different cards to test with).
I've been working on an update to my app to incorporate templates and cloze deletions like how Anki does it, so now I appreciate that aspect to it.
For my own database, at least in the new version I'm working on, I've ended up creating a schema where the individual attributes for each card are thrown into their own tables, but this is mostly because I needed to support updating individual attributes separately since I use a very simple journaling system to sync across devices. With Anki's schema, I can see why sync was complicated (at least in earlier versions) since it wasn't really built for it.
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 wasn't involved in the benchmark, and don't know whether `SM16-v-SM17.csv` is a full export. Didn't see any reviews before 2020, and it may only be an export of a subset of reviews.
https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/srs-benchmark/#dat...
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
There's a lot more room for gray zones in language learning, where you might have the french card "doubler" and answer it as "to pass", and then see the actual answer is "1. to overtake, 2. to double", in which case you have to read your heart and decide whether missing the second definition was careless because it's so obvious, or if it merits an "again"
An AI also can't really know, btw, if your answer of "to pass" was "to pass (overtake)" (correct), or "to pass (like a note in class)" (incorrect).
That's not the best example, but there are a ton of ambiguous english words, and you only know in your own heart which meaning you meant.
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.
Depending on what you're learning, you might vary those. For language learning, that works well imo.
Also, make sure to switch to FSRS. The old algorithm defaulted to "again" resetting a card to 0, while "again" in FSRS does show it again, but doesn't reset it back to being effectively new.
If you want to understand the algorithm, read this: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/ABC...
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')
Make a word document that lists all the keys to memorize vertically. Save as PDF
Open the PDF in a viewer with annotation tools. Make a clickable note in the margin just next to each key. Write out the value to memorize in the note field.
Cycle through the clickable notes. When you get one right easily, drag the note more to the left in the margin. As you cycle, focus on the ones furthest to the right. If you get one wrong, move it a bit further to the right.
In general the notes will move to the left until you're comfortable with all of them. And the balancing of which ones you need to see and focus on plays out very naturally and you feel in control the whole time.
There are many downsides with this compared to a tool like anki (e.g. I only used it on a laptop), but there was also something about it that just worked really well for me, so I never ended up switching to a different tool. But this was before anki had the similar algorithm described here. Maybe my experience would be different today
> download all pdfs
> merge pdfs into one
> compress
> write a very specific prompt for gemini to turn these into anki cards separated by a semicolon
> do 50 anki cards a day for 3/4 weeks before exam
not a single lecture attended top of my class (ku leuven). feels like cheating honestly
PY: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/py-fsrs
TS: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/ts-fsrs
RS: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-rs
Currently ts-fsrs and rs-fsrs support FSRS 6 and py-fsrs should also support FSRS 6 in the next day or so. Also, both py-fsrs and fsrs-rs include the ability to optimize the FSRS model from your past reviews!
https://github.com/arvindang/rb-fsrs
Originally adapted from the Python version linked here.
Anki runs on desktop: you have to be chained to a desk rather than taking advantage of idle moments when you are on-the-go. Even if you have it on a laptop, you still need a place to sit; SRS on mobile can be used anywhere, like standing-room-only public transit.
The AnkiMobile companion app for iOS is a paid app that is somehow chained to the desktop version, whereas AnkiDroid is a full-featured clone of Anki that you could use air gapped without ever syncing anything to or from another device. It has integrated management of decks and note creation/editing.
Every other SRS app out there is just playing very distant catch-up to Anki/AnkiDroid. They usually mention Anki in their pitch, trying desperately to explain why some very minor and very subjective negative point about Anki is worth switching to their massively inconvenient solution.
Note that Anki uses (used) such an old algorithm because it derived it from an ancient open source version of SuperMemo, a software which started the spaced repetition trend. Anki just added a usable GUI instead of the convoluted mess that is SuperMemo. Newer versions of SuperMemo improved the algorithm, but they are no longer open source. I wonder how FSRS compares to current iterations of the SuperMemo algorithm.
I've used Anki for a long time and apply updates, but I don't closely track changes. Based on the above, I figured I'd be using FSRS, but I'm not. All of my decks have that setting turned off. Fair enough (no silent updates to existing data), but even when I create a new deck, I have to turn the FSRS setting on manually. I found the same even with a whole new profile. What aspect of this is "default"? Is there a global setting I'm missing?
I'm glad it's available, though, without any plugins!
This was a game changer for me and working with LLMS, while I still think they make you dumb, and we essentially use them to offload critical thinking (almost only find myself using them when tired lazy, and just cant), if you must use them use them as a study tool.
No MCP on ChatGPT yet, but I can ask chat to generate an output of what we reviewed in a structured format.
I did this because I realized I was hitting an issue where I theoretically "knew" a word (would get it always correct on the card), but wouldn't always recognize it in a novel context.
I'm hoping that having the context be variable when I'm learning it will help fix this issue.
Some of the problem is due to the specificity of the training effect. I.e., if you mostly practice something through flash cards then you’re going to be training your ability to work with that on flash cards.
With language, there’s an additional challenge—many if not most words have different meanings in different contexts.
If your target language happens to be Chinese then you can give it a try at https://reader.longyan.io/landing
No login required, love your feedback.
Speaking for myself, I’d love to see a blogpost detailing how this is done. At the very least, I’d love to know: How are you syncing csvs to anki cards and how does the MCP interaction look like for an LLMs response to the CSV creation
Usually my intuition about how well I know something is not too far off. If you don't specify anything, it doubles the time since the last review.
One direction could be to incorporate semantics, which afair FSRS doesn't do at all yet. A good flashcard deck will have a lot of semantic overlap, e.g., a card for the vocab word itself, that word in a sentence, etc. Struggling with one component is a strong signal you'll struggle with another.
The same thing could be done for just better spacing, so you don't "cheat" by having too closely-related cards next to eachother in a review (the review signal will be less noisy).
What I would like to see covered is a more vague area, but almost more important:
It’s the space in between reading/understanding something and the SRS. There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs (web browser, PDF readers etc.) into popular SRS (Anki, Mochi etc.). They should work almost as OS additions to make everything feel native and frictionless; I don’t need another standalone tool that does X Y and Z, I just need some sort of pipe into an SRS that is Mac friendly and does the job whilst not being in the way.
If someone knows of such a tool, I would love to hear about it.
From a user standpoint, would it be an interactive process where you highlight things and then click a button to say "turn this into a flashcard", or would it be an automated tool that would scan the content and come up with a list of questions and answers t hat would test the material for you? What criteria would be used to determine what's worth turning into a question and answer? And how granular should the question be? I've seen demos of things that pick out specific facts, like dates or names, from the text to turn into questions, but that might not be that useful to quiz for some material. It seems like a very open-ended process to me, so it would be hard to get right for everyone's needs.
Great question. Here's one way to do it:
The first is how clunky the process of going from X to flashcard feels to the end user. One way to deal with the fact that we are crossing software border is to add an extra step where highlighting something allows you to go into an "inbox" before any cards are made. It is clear what the user has to do. They read something interesting, and add it to the inbox. When they are ready, they can head over and only then use some sort of automation (either via custom prompt for an AI or otherwise) to make the cards. This gives them another step, or interface, at which they can decide whether or not the thing they highlighted (since highlighting is easy) is actually worth something. It segments the process into clear easy sections: highlighting, deciding which highlights to flashcardify (and therefore keep), and flashcard review.
It definitely is an open-ended process, and I appreciate that apps need to have a strong opinion on how to direct users from start to finish; but I feel this is definitely possible now with cheap and quick AI.
I didn't answer every question but hopefully that helps somewhat.
I like the idea of an inbox where you just toss things you think are worth remembering and maybe having a browser plugin or OS shortcut to save highlighted bits of info, but not necessarily creating a flashcard immediately from it. There's definitely some concrete things I can prototype here to try to make that workflow easier. And I can see how taking those tidbits of info and passing them to AI to create flashcards is doable too.
I'm glad this has resonated, good luck with the prototypes. Let me know if you ever want more feedback.
The hardest part of any system is making it a habit.
The easiest thing, which I believe I suggested, was highlight->action to create a new card front, and highlight->action to creat the back or a new front. It needs to work well casually in general, and easy when focused.
I’m sure AI could theoretically help but not sure it’s necessary. Part of the benefits of most cards is creating them yourself.
Like I said in the other comment, I'm going to play around with some ideas regarding an inbox. I think that on its own would help a ton for just recording things to be converted to flashcards later. There's probably a good in-app UI that can be made to go through the inbox and easily convert the notes created into the front and back sides as well.
Ideally the SRS app would make services available to facilitate quick creation of new cards, so for example one might highlight some text, right-click, and select Services → New SRS Card… which then opens an in-place lightweight card creator dialog.
Perhaps Shortcuts are now powerful enough to do this as a PoC, providing the SRS has some sort of open API that Shortcuts can take advantage of.
I’m absolutely of this mind, but unfortunately it also depends on developers’ willingness to make use of these hooks, and it’s becoming increasingly uncommon for third party apps to have any integration or automation affordances, especially any specific to any particular platform. It’s become the norm to ship the absolute bare minimum, which is the lowest common denominator “it runs”.
If you pay for Mochi you also get API access, so one could make a ChatGPT wrapper which adds the cards for you. But since I like to review the cards manually before adding I don't mind the copy paste step.
I have a slightly different system I'm developing:
Rather than reviewing with flashcards, review with actual content:
1. Tag the content with the words and grammar concepts
2. Estimate the difficulty [1] for you of each word or grammar concept -- the difficulty being essentially the inverse of your familiarity graphs in this article.
3. Choose content to read which balances difficulty and the impact on learning.
Since reviewing something you're about to forget has more impact than learning something new, "spaced repetition" falls naturally.
And instead of spending your review time going through flash cards, you spend your review time reading content in the target language.
[1] If you know the details of the FSRS algorithm, I'm using "difficulty" here differently than they do in their algorithm.
- subs2srs MPV script: create srs cards from subtitled videos, if you have subtitles tracks for source and target language it will fill them both in (though that sometimes has caveats, different languages may distribute the meaning of a line of dialogue over different subtitle lines)
- asbplayer chrome extension: inject extra subtitle languages into streaming services and create flashcards from them similar to subs2srs
- yomitan: browser dictionary lookup, primarily for bilingual dictionaries for Japanese and Chinese but also has custom dictionary support.
I think this is a common misunderstanding. Half the benefit of SRS comes from working out what the flashcards are. You have to circle around a concept, look for similarities, differences, examples, generalisations, properties, etc.
Is it hard work? Yes. Does it help understanding? Massively.
This is also a very difficult skill which, I believe, is why many people fail to appreciate SRS. They try, write bad flashcards, don't see results, and give up.
EDIT: This also leads to another common misunderstanding, that SRS is only good for memorising facts. With proper elaboration (thanks child comment), it can be used to build understanding of complex subjects too.
I did not mean to glaze over this aspect, I am aware this is very important. I can not and do not use AI for automating flashcards for this reason alone. But, I think my point still stands, getting information from one disparate app into another adds a lot of friction (saving it somewhere, copy and pasting and yada yada) to something that (I believe) should be as easy as possible. We have 1 click instant payment, but I can't have 1 click get this into some sort of inbox in Anki ready to flashcard-ify?
To be honest, I have a whole frustration with apps and windows that I'm still trying to word, but fundamentally all we are doing when we are "computing" is moving information around. I wish that information was a first class citizen at the OS level that could be leveraged by any app immediately. Utopian view but this stuff ain't gonna think about itself.
Showing schlafen before ausschlafen, or contextually simpler cards before more complex ones.
Optimizing blindly easy medium hard and next time to show a card is probably very far away from efficient learning.
If the process is inspected, most of the forever knowledge that I acquired I heard once and internalized.
I paid for two SM versions and went back to Anki. It‘s very idiodyncratic, the user interface is atrocious (in the latest version it finally, finally added thumbs up/down icons for grading the answer —- before that you had to remember whether 1 is good and 5 is bad or vice versa).
SM is fascinating (including task management, sleep cycle tracker etc.), but it‘s held back by its technological choices (only support for Edge or IE, and Edge only in the newest version), and for incremental reading you‘ll be mostly ingesting Wikipedia articles, because PDF isn‘t supported.
* I wanna be able to watch X in Y language
* I know these words
* Help meChatGPT is the main spot where I'm going to be trying to understand a new concept, so after groking it I'll ask it to make flashcards which I can then just copy and paste into Mochi.
An improvement would be some sort of MCP integration between the LLM and Mochi so it can just add the card directly. I'm sure we'll get there soon.
1. https://gist.github.com/christiangenco/db4b61c315b93fc2a404a...
Any recs for moving this into Anki? I already use Anki for cards I created while going through Genki with my tutor, and world capitals.
The algorithm (FSRS) supports reviewing in advance or delay. It's free for users to decide the time of review. And it will adapt to the user's memory.
Meanwhile, spaced repetition is one essential technology to achieve free learning.
FSRS runs entirely locally and has no risk under others' control.
source: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/free-spaced-repeti...
> FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler) is a modern spaced repetition algorithm that was developed by Jarrett Ye.
If I do a search of "flexible spaced repetition software" I get no results, which strongly suggests the dumb guesser you're using guessed something plausible to placate its user. This is common behaviour for this type of software.
In summary, I politely suggest you critically review how you interact with knowledge on the internet.
A lot of the difference in that graph seems to come from 70% vs. 90% retention.
I've built Komihåg [1] to try and combat this: Select any text on your iOS device and a flashcard is automatically created for you, and the app is then showing you the cards on the Home Screen / Lock Screen / Apple Watch Face.
I haven't gotten to implement any sophisticated scheduling algorithm yet but will definitely do that eventually.
[1] : https://komihag.com
I've done lots of tweaking to the algorithm over the years to make it feel like I'm less surprised by the scheduling, and less like a slave to it. One very stark difference between mine and Anki is that I have a large number of "overdue" cards, but the system still prioritises when to show me the overdue cards with quite a few different metrics based on how overdue it is, how new it is, how long the current interval is, etc. So, like Anki, I still just double the interval for correct cards, but for incorrect cards, the reviews are repeated same day until they're correct, and then the interval is reduced a lot more than Anki. So, the cards then become overdue sooner, but because the scheduling of overdue cards is better, they get pushed later if your overdue queue is too large, and sooner if you've not got anything more useful to review.
FWIW, my typical session is 40 minutes per day during my daily lunchtime walk, and I'll get through about 150 cards in that time. If I'm on a long train journey, I'll often clear out double that or more, but the disaster situation of being on holiday for a month might leave the queue with a couple of thousand extra cards, but they never seem unmanageable. Even after a 2 month break when I was travelling last year, and only doing reviews on flights and trains, I'd definitely forgotten some words from not reviewing at the appropriate time, but the percentage of totally forgotten cards felt better than I used to experience after just missing a few days with Anki.
One thing the article mentions that I don't massively concern myself with is desired retention. I'm not sure I'd want to express it as a target percentage, but I've definitely been thinking about how I want to change things to deprioritise stubborn words without just suspending them or deleting them. I definitely find that having them keep showing up, so I might see a pattern of them wrong twice each day before finally getting them right, after a few days of that they do usually suddenly stick for good. But sometimes I look at the word and think I don't really care if I remember it or not.
entropie•6h 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•6h ago
entropie•6h ago
johanyc•6h ago
entropie•6h ago
david_allison•5h ago
https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/intro.html
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But you'd want AnkiConnect, or a Python-based addon for your workflow
criddell•5h ago
entropie•4h 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•6h 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•6h ago
https://www.stephenmwangi.com/obsidian-spaced-repetition/
kartikarti•6h ago
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2055492159
jwrallie•6h ago
I know this is not precisely what you wanted, but yes, Anki can update card contents.
rsanek•5h ago