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.
I found flashcards super ineffective for making myself to actually learn. And at times contra productive and brain numbing. I now see them as part of the same weird cultural instinct people today have - feeling like everything needs to be made as dry and uninteresting as possible, else it is not sufficient test or will (or something).
Anki also allows you to take long breaks from learning. If I go a year without learning any new material, provided I keep up my reviews (which significantly diminish in duration the longer you go without new cards), I'll pretty much be able to pick things up again where I left off. That doesn't work so well with other methods because you will forget a lot.
Flashcards are a lot more efficient in terms of number of minutes spent per word. For example, Skritter tells me that I spend an average of 1.78 minute learning how to write a word with Chinese characters. Aside from the fact that I wouldn't practice writing at all if I just consumed books/films, I'd also spend a lot more time that way as I'd constantly be stopping to look characters up in a dictionary and/or googling the grammar points every time I forget.
I take your point that you find Anki boring but that's highly subjective. I actually find it very satisfying and rewarding, almost as if I'm downloading information into my brain Matrix-style (just slower). There's a sense that whatever knowledge I put in Anki is mine to keep forever. In ~10 years of language learning, Anki is the one thing that I've most consistently kept up with. Your claim that it's a "weird cultural instinct [to make everything] as dry and uninteresting as possible" is false consensus bias - you're projecting your own feelings onto others who don't necessarily share those feelings, and therefore assuming everyone else must find it boring too.
Anki is also more suitable for beginners than books/shows. Realistically, you can't read a book or watch a movie when you are just starting. Everything will be so incomprehensible that the effort of having to stop to look things up will be overwhelming and tedious. Anki on the other hand can be started from your very first word or sentence.
For me personally, I neither like to dismiss nor focus too much on any one method. I've always learnt best when I put effort into multiple different methods: Anki, books, audio, apps, TV, real life practice, etc. This also helps to keep things fresh and interesting.
- 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, although creating a card is similar to reviewing it once (in that they will both help you remember it for a while), the former is worth more than the latter as a "unit" of memorisation. This means that you'll likely have longer review intervals, and therefore spend less time on reviews, if you wrote the card yourself, because the memory starts out stronger.
That has to be balanced of course with the amount of time you spend writing the card vs the gains you make in saved review time from having done so.
[1] https://www.whz.de/fileadmin/lehre/hochschuldidaktik/docs/du...
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!
I think the real killer feature here isn't just bulk-generating new cards, but enriching existing, manually-created ones.
My ideal workflow would be:
Manually create a basic card when I encounter a new word (e.g., the word and the sentence I found it in). This preserves that crucial "moment of discovery" and initial learning. Once a week or so, run anki-llm as a batch process on all new cards to add powerful, context-rich fields like: etymology, common collocations, or subtle nuance (vs. a similar word). This way, you get the best of both worlds: the initial learning from manual creation, followed by automated enrichment that would be too tedious to do by hand. Really powerful stuff, great work!
rahimnathwani•3mo 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.