Can anyone help me understand the opposing view better?
On the other hand, hand-generation is very time intensive. Having some kind of Anki card for a topic you need to memorise is better than having nothing at all. If LLMs help you write cards that you wouldn't otherwise get around to writing then it can be worth it.
As an example, I've always found Anki really effective for my language learning. But the bottleneck was always finding the time to find good quality sentences from sources like grammar books and then creating the cards. Now I ask ChatGPT to generate me a whole bunch of example sentences for a particular topic or grammar point that I want to master, and I bulk import them into Anki in one go then use AwesomeTTS to create the audio. These cards feel less personal to me because I've lost the benefit of having put in the hard work of creating them myself from source materials. But that's more than made up for by the fact that I'm now progressing through the topics I need to learn at a much faster speed. I'd rather know 1000 words reasonably well than 200 words very well.
After a few repetitions I don't think there's much difference anyway between a card you generated yourself and one you didn't - the SRS algorithm sorts it out for you in the end. The AI generated one might just need a few more reviews/fails/hards to get to the same level of memorisation.
EDIT: I should add that I don't blindly trust ChatGPT's output. My wife is a native speaker for one of the languages, so I always have her check the cards. For my other language, I run the sentences past several other LLM models and I only keep those that all of them agree are correct and idiomatic.
I solve that bottleneck be seeking better books, documentaries and movies.
Then I skip the flashcards step.
- write down what is important
- present it in a condensed manner
- verify that it does indeed cover only the topic you need
... then ironically enough you probably do not need it anymore.
Personally I need some context in a card to hook it up to other things. Such as the sentence where I first encountered it. Without that I will often fail the card over and over and waste time - it would have been quicker to put some effort upfront making a decent card.
I'm sure some people can knuckle down and learn an LLM deck with random words, but they'd be a minority.
Citation needed.
How is creating a card anything different than reviewing the card once? Anki is a long term tool, writing something down once isn't. The time spent creating cards is better spent on doing more reviews.
So if you wanted to learn the contents of a book without reading it, you're doing it wrong.
If you want to read a book and then test yourself on what you've read, it's totally fine.
That said, what I'd really love is a better card writing UI. If I could simply edit the table when in the browse view instead of opening the form view, that'd be a big step up!
rahimnathwani•11h ago
- the README is extremely detailed and clear: all the commands are explained with examples and the why to use each one
- you're using Anki Connect to edit decks in-place, instead of trying to edit or generate an apkg file. This simplifies things and avoids issues such as needing to create custom note types or avoiding creating two note types with the same field
When my son and I have discussed a topic in response to a question, ideally I would evaluate whether there's something he should remember forever and, if so, I would create one or more Anki notes for that piece of knowledge. But right now it's too much effort, unless I'm at my desk. Even then, I need to copy and paste card fields from a chat interface into the Anki UI. That means I rarely do it.