Spaced repetition systems have gotten better
(domenic.me)1026 points by domenicd 2 months ago
1026 points by domenicd 2 months ago
I made a tool based on this principle!
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.
Looks not bad but a) billing/prices should imho be prominent and not hidden behind trial or get started. And b) not sure if 5/12/20 per month is not too much? The About section is nice. (I use two other paid language services, thus no need/interest in another)
I looked a bit more in detail and I'm impressed. I found: - "with translation costs being the majority of Nuenki's subscription price." Thus my price critic was not very appropriate - https://nuenki.app/blog/llm_translation_comparison (Which LLMs are best at low-latency translation?) Cool table!
I've tried to get into anki a bunch of times but never stick with it. It's an on-and-off thing for me that I end up looking into again every few years, which I've gone through about 5 times now. Here's how it usually goes:
* 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
Yeah, ignore the "defaults are terrible" people. Turn on FSRS, if it isn't on by default (I think it is), and forget about it.
I have seen this opinion offered hundreds of times and each and every time I reflect upon the irony that not one of these commenters having trouble navigating the UI, etc to their liking doesn't just ... Make Anki cards about Anki.
If that sounds silly, it shouldn't. I've made flashcards out of all kinds of other programs, from vim to shell shortcuts to Photoshop. Nobody ever expects an interface built for professionals to be something they can just waltz in on and understand perfectly on day 1.
Given what you've said:
* 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
Thank you, the pass / fail addon will help a lot I think, in addition to the FSRS features included in the article. I'll come back to this comment for setting up my settings before starting up again with Anki.
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?
Your call.
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.
> Use Anki every day
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.
There's a surprising gulf between word recognition and overall sentence comprehension. I'm learning Farsi with a combination of Anki and Youtube videos and sometimes I find myself in the weird state where I recognize every word in a sentence, but yet cannot assemble its overall meaning.
Not buying at all that you learned 18000 words and 5000 kanji in ten minutes per day. Thats 60 hours a year for say five year, or 300 hours. Thats leaves you with about 70 words and/or kanji per hour or less than a minute per word/kanji. A rate which far surpasses native speakers.
Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.
Whoops, sorry if that was confusing.
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.
I learned 17.5k words comprised of ~3k kanji in around 2 years at about an hour a day of review time. That's reviews + new cards, not including time immersing in order to find the daily quota of new vocab which itself was 2 to 3 hours of study.
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.
Sentence cards are great and necessary for learning grammar (during which you will learn some vocab too). After that can just focus on pure vocab.
I did the exact same Korean deck as my wife at the exact same time. It was wild comparing our stats in real-time. It would take me 10 ~ 12 seconds to do the same sentences that it would take her 30 ~ 35 seconds.
That isn't terribly far off. I used Anki throughout my A levels, spending about 250 hours on it in total according to its statistics, and had something like 10k cards that I reviewed 50k times.
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.
What I find interesting about spaced repetition is the underlying thesis that raw memorization, in certain contexts, is playing a more important role for learning than what some modern education ideas would make you assume. In mathematics or programming, for instance, there is this idea that understanding a concept is better than memorizing algorithms or recipes (derivation methods for instance). But spaced repetition challenges that, in a sense.
If you zoom out and look and the shift in educational systems from pre-industrial revolution to modernity, memorization is a key topic. Basically educational reformers wanted a switch from memorization-heavy classics-based education with lots of Latin and Greek – to one with less emphasis on memorizing and more technical focus, more “understanding” and so on.
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.
>But spaced repetition challenges that, in a sense.
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.
The UK and Germany outperform France in average learning outcomes according to Our World in Data:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/average-harmonized-learni...
Most modern programming lives by the idea that you don't need to remember something as long as you remember where to look it up. Of course that's only true for some things: I can look up an API call, but I need a reasonably complete working knowledge of the concepts offered by my chosen programming language and its idiomatic design patterns. In most cases this is maintained through application (practice is unstructured spaced repetition), but if I wanted to get into say C++-based driver development then spaced repetition would definitely help build and maintain the necessary knowledge
It makes sense to memorize elementary operations that are reused frequently because that frees your mind to focus on the "higher level of abstraction" of learning. You probably learned the multiplication tables by heart before you were asked to do more complicated multiplication problems for example.
RemNote (https://www.remnote.com/) solves the problems people are mentioning about
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.
As a longtime Anki user I just want to say THANK YOU! Just downloaded RemNote for the first time and gave it a spin. I’ve been using Anki for years for language learning (Ukrainian and Russian and Arabic), but also for poetry memorization. Weird coincidence: a few days ago I was looking for an AI-powered flashcard creator: I get regular emails from curated sources that have lots of useful information, but I am too lazy to create the cards to remember the points. I just downloaded RemNote and tried the AI-generation feature: fed it an article from UkrainianLessons.com and I was amazed at how it gave me a list of useful flashcards instantly. This is a game changer. The ability to study and create “in context” is also amazing since not all information needs to be a flashcard. The Notion-like/Workflowy/Roam interface also looks like a joy to work with. Really hope this is not a fly-by-night startup, as I am really looking forward to a decade of learning with this thing after a previous decade with Anki.
While I have you, I wanted to share with you an idea that I've had for years to improve SRS systems, that is SRS -> Email Inbox Zero as a brain hack. I tried to build a plugin for Anki but could not make it work. Not sure if it can be done with RemNote or I can build a plugin to do this.
The basic idea: SRS is great, but it can be hard to get motivated to start studying your cards every day. On the other hand, most people have a habit/addiction to check their email or social media multiple times a day. The idea is to intersperse random card studying into my email or Telegram inbox, reducing the time to study a single card to a few seconds interspersed across a busy day. So I want to get a few random emails (or texts) with a due flashcard question, and have the ability to answer the flashcard directly in one click from the message. The hard part is that last part: getting the software to work so that I can answer the flashcard in a single click from the email, so that I don't need to open the whole app just to start studying.
Would really help to keep up with my studying even on busy days and hack the brain's addiction to email/social media to do something useful.
I do like this idea of integrating SRS into doom-scrolling streams! I've wanted to prototype something similar, but built completely around your SRS cards.
For email, I think you're right it would need to be frictionless. There are some new email technologies that let you embed dynamic interactions in your email - we might play with that at some point.
So this is probably hard to do as a plugin tbh, but I'd love to explore eventually as a feature.
Hey! Thanks for making such a useful app. Saved me hundreds of hours.
Pretty OT: A few month ago I tried to marry my simple note system with anki. My goal was to be able to send simple front/backside cards to an api and it would get integrated and I can use it immediately. Ofc, when I edit cards via my notes-backend, the cards in anki should update too.
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...
I looked into this before too. Ankiweb (the place where cards created on Anki sync to) does not provide a rest API. The service is free though. It makes sense they may not want automated clients.
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.
If you use Obsidian there's a great plugin which allows me to make flashcards easily within my notes:
Wouldn't AnkiConnect be good enough here?
Anki can import .csv files and if one of the column content is matching an existing item, it will update the contents of the card while keeping the repetition history. Think of it like including a column with unique keys.
I know this is not precisely what you wanted, but yes, Anki can update card contents.
> In Anki, templates are written in HTML, which is the language that web pages are written in. The styling section is CSS, which is the language used for styling web pages.
https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/intro.html
----
But you'd want AnkiConnect, or a Python-based addon for your workflow
SRS is wonderful. The improvements in the linked article are real and laudable.
But they are comparatively narrow and technical compared to the improvements that need to be made in usability and scalability (of content dissemination and navigation).
Shameless: I am working on a FOSS SRS platform / toolkit that I believe can take some substantive steps forward here. Can read some at http://patched.network, or poke around http://github.com/patched-network/vue-skuilder
> Thankfully, the leading spaced repetition software, Anki, has incorporated FSRS as its default scheduling algorithm since version 23.10, released in 2023-11
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!
FSRS is not a default yet: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/issues/3616
I found it a little annoying that SRS is immediately explained to mean Spaced Repetition System, but then the F is added without explaining what it stands for. Most references of the article do neither. Except https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/The... which says the F means Free. Seems a little too easy? I found nothing else. Chatgpt says it means Flexible, which actually makes more sense? Anybody else can chip in?
What does the 'Free' mean in the name?
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...
When "FSRS" is first used it's a clickable link, and the first sentence on that link is:
> 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.
SRS usually means "spaced repetition system", but FSRS stands for "Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler". https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/ABC...
I wonder how it compares with the current SuperMemo.
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.
Currently under debate. FSRS is likely better than SM-17. No data on SM-18
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...
Am I reading this right, did users go through >10k repetitions on average?
Given users were self-selected SuperMemo users who needed to use GitHub to upload exported stats, it feels a low (FSRS benchmarks average ~70k per user, filtered to a random selection of users with > 10k reps).
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 really wish there was a FOSS equivalent to SuperMemo. Spaced Repetition is cool and all, but Incremental Reading that uses principles similar to SRS to augment learning novel content and then retain pieces of it through more standard spaced repetition is really next level.
They have gotten better and I think it's clear they'll continue to get better :). FSRS is already good (I use it both in Anki and for periplus.app), but looking at the benchmarks [1] there's a lot of room left for improvement.
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).
Yes, we can improve FSRS in that way. But it requires to collect a lot of review data with cards' content, which breaks Anki's privacy policy. And FSRS is my side project which has squeezed all my free time... I'm not very motivated to improve it now.
Unfortunately, the 10k dataset for the benchmark does not include any text/media files, as sharing that publicly would violate Anki's privacy policy. Regarding accuracy, FSRS-6 is pretty good: https://imgur.com/a/calibration-of-different-fsrs-versions-K...
I wish Anki could dynamically adjust the new cards introduced each day, based on whether you get them right or wrong on first viewing.
Getting 10 new cards that I happen to already know is easy. That's very different than getting 10 new cards that I get wrong, and therefore need to memorize.
I'd love to have 2 settings like:
- Max number of new card fails, say 4
- Max number of new cards, say 20
Fancier versions could use a decaying average of new card fails from the last few days. Those recently memorized cards are more challenging during review.
I was working on a product which has FSRS implemented, and is heavily inspired by anki. The change we made was that rather than rate yourself, you have to type your answer and its graded by an LLM. It also has a button to explain the concept to you as if you are 5 (eli5) and you get feedback on your answer. You can also create the flashcards by uploading a pdf and then generate them from it.
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
> graded by an LLM
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.
Yes, this is also something I have been thinking about, can an LLM really know how well I know something. There is the issue with the grading with again, hard, good and easy that I can cut myself some slack and say "I knew that" even when I didn't(and I have a strong memory of having done this myself). And there is the possibility of bullshitting the LLM and just all you know about the subject rather than the exact definition of the flashcard. I'm leaning towards any knowledge rather than specifying that the exact answer should be graded. Whats your take?
Bullshitting the AI maliciously doesn't matter, if you don't want to study effectively, you won't study effectively, and that's not a problem for the app.
> 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?
But conversely, if I alt-tabbed to chat with a friend, or paused studying because the person sitting next to me asked a question, or I took a sip from my coffee mug, that doesn't mean it's hard necessarily. Even though all of those take at least as much time as answering a hard card un-interrupted would.
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.
I would argue that it's harder for me to decide how easily I recalled a word and decide between a few loosely defined levels as to which one I should choose than to apply a simple algorithm.
If the window loses focus it would be able to pause automatically. If you are distracted another way, no big deal you will see that word again soon and unlikely to keep getting distracted on the same word. The benefits would outweigh the odd misfire.
It should definitely be added as a variable within the calculation, but the current FSRS predicts how likely you are to access the memory (if it's sufficiently available which is defined by its retrieval strength) and speed of retrieval isn't really a factor in this version. The different grades are more to define how well all parts of the memory is retrieved.
Not to say that how quickly you can access it doesn't play a role in real life.
Whenever I try to use anki I can't figure what those four buttons actually mean, so I end up with 40 cards that I still can't recall and then the thing happily drops another 10 on top and I just delete the deck or the app. Haven't learned the thing I was trying to learn with it ever.
Either I don't understand the algorithm or it doesn't understand me.
Me too. I made a specialized Kanji learning app. My different approach is in the cards. I used free dictionary data to create a card for each kanji with all the relevant data in a single card. So a common kanji might have dozens (and even hundreds) of words (each word with 0-2 example sentences) to help you remember.
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”.
systemS? There is only one program out there that is viable: AnkiDroid.
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.
A while back I built https://readboost.io/ but so far never advertised for it. The idea: Embed Q&A into your ePubs and optionally download Anki cards for your book. Probably gets buried here, but maybe someone finds some value in it.
This is something I’ve been tackling myself in the language app I’m making https://store.steampowered.com/app/3220820/Bilingual_Crosswo.... Right now, I’ve added a set of front loaded intervals: 2M, 5M, 10M, 20M, 40M, 2H, 6H, 1D, 2D, 4D, 8D, and so on eventually stretching to a full year.
I’ve always felt this setup was a bit arbitrary and considered it a temporary solution. Thanks for saving me some time on research!
Take a look at https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/
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')
That tutorial guy on YouTube, Derek Banas, swears by Anki. He's quite the voracious learner as well as being a pretty good contractor. I've used it myself (sparingly, when taking on new projects with new technology stacks), and never really committed to it because of the somewhat static and predictable nature of the learning session (as described in the article; the algorithm). However, from learning about the upgrade (well, 2023 upgrade), I will try it out again: high hopes.
Anki is a good piece of software. But I couldn't come up with a worse scheduling algorithm if I tried (old and new one). It's like "here's the thing you just added one second ago. Here it's again immediately after. Ok you got it, you'll see it once again in a month or so lol".
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.
When was the last time you tried? Anki used a static algorithm (SuperMemo 2) before the new FSRS - which is dramatically different.
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.
I try Anki every couple of years because it has an app and can sync. I also tried fsrs and rage quitted after a few tests. These people can get high and mighty on their algos and research. If they'd just add a manual interval mode they'd contribute a lot more to humanity.
I guess what you need is Set Due Date, which allows you manually schedule cards in Anki.
I have been using Supermemo daily (except for when I miss a day or two, vacations with no desktop, etc) since about 2010. I have found the newer algos to be pretty good. I have not had any bugs or a messed up collection. Its one of the pieces of software that is keeping me on Windows. There is still no foss replacement for incremental reading/writing [1]. Also, Supermemo has two modes that lets you skip a few days without being overloaded [2][3]. So you don't go from 20-30 cards to 200 if you skip a day.
That being said, its just another tool in the toolkit for learning stuff. I don't think I'm that much smarter or better at anything just because I have used Supermemo often for awhile. Honestly, I just like making cards and throwing articles I want to read later into Supermemo for processing. Most of what I use Supermemo for is incremental reading, which I have never been able to find a good replacement for. I like being reminded of cool stuff I have read and ideas that I have had. I would recommend also learning and practicing various mnemonic techniques alongside spaced repetition.
Most of the other algos/apps I have tried have been okay, I have not tried FSRS because I don't really use Anki anymore. I used Anki when I was in college for about 2-3 years because I would do flashcards using the mobile app. I was still using Supermemo daily during the same time period though.
I also use Clozemaster for language vocab with Supermemo. I put the sentences and some explanations into Supermemo after I do them in Clozemaster. I do not really consider myself to be a language learner or learning a language. I pick up new vocab very slowly and do not do anything else to practice the languages I am learning vocab from. I have also been using Math Academy almost daily for about seven months which is nice, but definitely not a full replacement for learning math. Using Math Academy actually made me start working with math textbooks and online resources again.
[1] https://www.help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_reading [2] https://www.help.supermemo.org/wiki/Postpone [3] https://www.help.supermemo.org/wiki/Mercy
I think it’s important to note that the original SRS algorithms are not for learning. They or for remembering or “not forgetting”.
The system assumes you have already learned the fact (for some unclear to me definition of learned)
Most users inserts new words in the hope that repeating them in anki will help them learn. It does to some extend, but it is not quite the right tool.
So for example, in Japanese, simply remembering how to read a word out loud is a task in and of itself. If you put words in context (which in language learning makes sense) the learner will quickly start to recall the meaning of the word based on the look of a sentence.
For a learning system this open up a lot of issues to solve. The best attempt I’ve seen was a web app that gave you full sentences and you clicked the characters word you didn’t understand and based on that it would give you different sentences.
There are two problems with that website: I don’t remember what it was called and it used google translate from 10 years ago. The second could be improved by expanding the corpus and use LLM to form sentences for the learner.
I gave up on spaced repetition systems, even my paid memrise subscription, because I couldn't find good flashcard sets. To create good flashcards, you need some domain knowledge. An AI can pick facts from wikipedia and quiz you on them, but it takes a real human to identify what knowledge is relevant and worth learning.
I find with spaced repetition that it works really well for some well-known things like vocabulary (EDIT: well-known meant as "spaced repetition is well-known to work for this use-case, not well-known as "the subject is well understood"), medical etc. but for everything else it becomes a struggle for a long time.
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.
Math Academy provided a self-service learning system with a novel spaced repetition algorithm which could take the hierarchical body of math into account.
It's someone I wondered, what is the point of memorizing a proof if it only ever proves something you already know. The answer is you hope it generalises. There is a possible way you can do it in SRS, being inspired by RL training. Instead of cards you'd show options within a game or simulation. But this would need a lot of expert knowledge for a single concept.
Are there any algorithms/plugins that are optimized for an on-/off-review style (ie, potentially months-long gaps between sessions)? I know that the ideal would be to do reviews every day, but I'm doing this for pleasure and I'd rather tweak the algorithm to what works for me than the other way round.
I made this a long time ago, it uses embeddings to prioritize diversity: https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/AnnA_Anki_neuronal_A...
I’m solo-building a free Anki alternative using the Ruby FSRS gem: http://cadence.cards/welcome
Would love any feedback—I’m aiming for a more focused, restful take on what I like most about Anki. Styling is done with Tailwind.
The benefit of Anki for me has been the decks that I have downloaded more than the app (I have downloaded 3 or 4 for learning Spainsh and some are a lot better thought out than others). If you are going to gain any traction I would suggest trying to convert some popular Anki decks to your app.Otherwise it will be like the Ubuntu phone I bought a few years ago. Nice product, but next to no content / apps, making it a lot less useful than it could have been.
I probably need to go read the studies but of SRS is so great, why aren't all schools just SRS farms (or are they?)
Especially for language study, as a friend put it, speaking a language is like learning a musical instrument, no amount of book studying will teach you how to play the instrument. The way you learn to play is to play. And similarly, the way you learn to speak is to speak. Sure, you can fill your vocabulary, but I question a little how much it helps in context. Obviously it's not zero. I'm sure curious, if there are better methods than SRS for language learning given that hearing, creating, understanding, and speaking whole sentences is the goal, not individual words. I can generally learn a new word in my native language with one exposure, no SRS needed.
This is why they added more and more exams into class. Basically, a test for content from the last class is a type of SRS.
Super nice, thank you for this post! Based on this I've updated the vocabulary learning scheduling in DuoBook (https://duobook.co) to FSRS based. We should be up to date with the science based learning :)
Do any of these algorithms use vector embeddings to determine the semantic similarity between cards? Seems like that might be a useful parameter for tuning the algorithm, since you’re likely to forget something similar on a topic you’ve forgotten things about.
That was actually my very first python project, I made this to go through medical school: https://github.com/thiswillbeyourgithub/AnnA_Anki_neuronal_A...
> If we step back, we realize that this scheduling system (called “SuperMemo-2”) is pretty arbitrary. Where does the rule of 1, 6, 2.5times correct + 1, reset back on failure come from? It turns out it was developed by a college student in 1987 based on his personal experiments. Can’t we do better?
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.
There is an ongoing discussion with the creator of SuperMemo about the comparison: https://supermemopedia.com/wiki/SuperMemo_dethroned_by_FSRS
I'm building a language app based on using LLMs and spaced-repetition.
We generate cards that respond to speech to evaluate card recall and pronounciation (via speech recognition). We don't market it as AI but behind the scenes we use LLMs to explain the context behind every word and phrase, offer additional usage examples and cultural notes, and also generate roleplays based on specific topics & scenarios.
Happy to pass along invite codes to anybody who wants to check it out. https://getdangerous.app
I’m sure the algorithm can play a huge role in the effectiveness of learning but for me the difficult part was always creating the cards and actually opening the app to practice.
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
Cool idea. I’ll check it out. It would be cool to do something like this for single word highlights on an e reader. If I have highlighted a singe word it is because I want to add it to my vocabulary.
I found this: https://developer.apple.com/forums/thread/762784
Looks like share extensions are not generally available inside the Books app, which is why my app is not showing up.
Thank you for making me aware of the issue!
I haven't seen it mentioned yet with CTRL-f and I haven't used Anki in a while, but has there been work put into modifications in Anki or other programs using spaced repetition along with interleaved practice to also see if that improves studying.
Interleaved practice explainer: https://openlearning.mit.edu/mit-faculty/research-based-lear...
The current version of the supermemo algorithm is SM-18. The author thinks SRS has gotten way better since the author was previously using an out of date version of the algorithm, SM-2.
SM-17 is linked from the benchmark repo: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-vs-sm17, though I get the impression those numbers come with a dash of subjectivity. It seems fair to compare to older versions of the algorithm though because SM-17 is only used in the SuperMemo software (and Anki) and isn't widespread.
Language vocab seems a good use case. What other things are people here using spaced repition for?
Mine has all sorts of shit in it. Mac keyboard shortcuts. Nautical terms. Cyrillic characters. Credit card verification codes. Phone numbers. Airport codes. Ionic component names. Names of my friends’ kids. A surprising amount of Z Specification. Anything I think it would be useful to remember.
Multiple decks, although honestly I could probably get away with just one and tags. Almost always just use the app although I’ve used CSV import once or twice, and I grab the occasional pre-made deck too.
A few uses for me:
• 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'm using it to memorize all of the Paris métro stops and study for the French drivers license test. It was also a huge boon when I prepared for my citizenship interview.
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.
I used it to get my Amateur Radio license, since a superset of the questions that can be in the test are public.
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.
HamStudy.org is exactly this, an SRS site/app that already has the questions and some explanations to go with it (the site is free, but they also have an app which is a couple bucks and almost the same but in my opinion slightly better). I used that a couple months ago I studied for the technician class license and got a perfect score when I took the test. Then I studied the general class license and got one wrong (34 out of 35 = 97%. You only need 26/35 = 74% to pass.) I could probably go for the third one next but maybe it would be more useful if I actually go get a radio and start using it first.
I used it whenever i studied anything, but with a 'recursive' twist.
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.
My "Daily Life" deck is pretty small. But I fill it with things whenever I try to recall something and am embarrassed to not know it. Now I know them!
- Population of Tokyo / Tokyo metro area / Japan (where I live)
- Japan emergency numbers (like 911/411 in the US)
- kg <-> lb and km <-> mi conversion ratios
- My Japanese phone number (and my wife's)
- Number of neurons / synapses in a typical human brain
- Number of parameters in SOTA language models
- How many people work in my office
- Last 4 digits of a couple important credit cards, so I can identify them when UIs present me a choice of pre-saved CCs.
I’ve been meaning to build a unix shell deck for a while. There are so many tools that are so powerful but I just don’t use them regularly enough to remember how they work when I need them.
Everything, I use it to memorize anything that doesn't stick the first time.
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.
The advice with gendered languages is to always learn the word alongside some context that includes its gender, e.g. "Der Tisch" (The masculine table) rather than merely "Tisch->Table".
If the phrases are found by yourself in context from your own exposure to the language, it is even better.
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...
There's an anki deck built from the jeopardy archive with 400,000 questions, so I'm studying trivia that way. I enjoy trivia.
I would love to get my hands on this, please share if you can :)
I'm not ready to share a link to my actual implementation yet, but I've been working on an SRS system for Chinese and been using it as my daily driver for about 3-4 years now, after previously using Anki and getting frustrated with how reviews pile up after a couple of days off.
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.
The folks at SaySomethingIn, that originally started with Welsh and other Celtic languages, have recently expanded to Japanese. I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve found some decent success with one of their other courses. It’s all about spaced repetition and focuses exclusively on listening and speaking.
Interesting. Learning a language means speaking it.
What’s a good way to learn to understand concepts in a spaced-repetition way? I’ve used anki before for remembering facts or answers to specific questions, but is there a standard way to setup spaced repetition flashcards to learn, for example, when to apply a certain software pattern or something?
Point of feedback: I know it says it in the link, but it would be nice if an article almost entirely about FSRS actually spelled out what it stood for even once in the body of the article.
(Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler, in case anyone was wondering)
For anyone looking to read more about spaced repetition, Gwern's Spaced Repetition for Efficient Learning is worth checking out.
I would pay for an e-ink tablet dedicated to notes and spaced repetition. (I know there are e-ink note taking tablets, but none of them have spaced repetition.)
I'd like to be able to take freehand notes, and then be able to block out, or blur, certain sections and each blocked or blurred area becomes a spaced repetition entry.
Or, in more detail. I'd like to look at a page of notes and loop select a certain area. That selected area becomes a spaced repetition item. After the initial loop selection I can do another loop selection to blur one or more areas that would be blurred. Etc, etc.
There's a number of happy Onyx Boox users using AnkiDroid.
You can probably do what you want with the in-built image occlusion feature. Might be worth downloading an Android emulator and seeing if we meet your workflow requirements.
I've been looking into FSRS since I'm building a language learning app[1], but I haven't implemented it yet. Can FSRS work if I don't want to have 4 choices - bad, good, hard...? I have found myself to get into a decision paralysis so just bad/good works better for me. Plus I can swipe the cards tinder style! :D
My second reason is that I'm worried about the complexity - both from non-nerdy users perspective and me having to debug it.
According to the FSRS author [1], it will adapt to two buttons.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/16t2lva/comment/k2cor...
Yes. Some months ago, I forget whether it was v5 or maybe before, the 2 button grading approach meant that it actually performed better for users (ie. it performed better for users that explicitly only used two grading buttons).
I don't know if this is replicable with v6, or not. I would be interested to find out!
Hmm, I have Anki and I don't see an option for this algorithm. Anyone know how to enable it? The preferences say I'm on the "V3 scheduler" but have no option for an algorithm. I don't think I'm on the algorithm described in the blog post because whenever I don't know a card it goes back to 1 day as if it was new. Or maybe I am on it and I'm just misunderstanding how this works? I'm on Mac, Version 2.1.66 (70506aeb).
Go into the deck preset options (any deck is fine). Look for the FSRS section and check if the toggle is enabled. If it's not there you probably are on an old version.
You're on an old version of Anki.
Once you upgrade, FSRS is available under the deck options.
I just loaded Hacker News after a WaniKani session.
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.
I've thought about this problem myself a lot. I don't have a great answer.
The easiest thing I can think of is just grab https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/369908962 , and schedule everything you've already seen in WaniKani for immediate review, heavily relying on pressing easy to try to get things into a longer interval if you already feel you know them. This probably works best if you're relatively low-level on WaniKani. You might be able to use the WaniKani and Anki APIs to automate this to some extent.
Googling around, it seems others have run into this, e.g. https://community.wanikani.com/t/export-wanikani-srs-progres... and https://community.wanikani.com/t/userscript-wani-kani-export... look promising. https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/n1pihp/why_y... also seems good.
Interesting. I was never really happy with any spaced repetition algorithm, so I recently implemented my own dumb system which simply asks you for the number of days after which the card shall be shown again: https://github.com/kldtz/vmn
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.
I had a similar problem where I can't remember the answer to the card, but after revealing it, it seemed too easy to make it due in a few days, so I would lie to the program and press Hard/Good. Later I removed scheduling times on top of buttons and decided to trust the algorithm. I believe it helped me to stop caring about schedule times and loosing progress on a certain card. After all, these algorithms were made for ordinary people with ordinary memory behavior.
I think my problem is that I'm not using the system as intended. I learn new vocabulary mainly by reading texts or watching videos in the target language and use spaced repetition to keep track of my progress. If I can't remember a word (as indicated by SR), I'll reread the text/rewatch the video where I've first encountered it. I don't want to keep reviewing the same word in my spaced repetition program, especially not in the same session.
I like WaniKani because it forces me to type the right answer. When I tried Anki, it was too easy for me to "cheat" and press space for something I "kinda" remembered.
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?
You can set up Anki to force you to type answers; use Basic (type in the answer) when creating cards.
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...
language learning is 100% memorization. eventually your brain memorizes all the phrases that click into “situation-space,” for every possible situation there is a memorized response. language can be broken down into situational meta-phonemes. using flash cards and grammar is just a way to bootstrap yourself into memorizing all the appropriate responses for any given kind of situation.
Has anyone tried to use an LLM to test questions / concepts in a broader way via spaced repetition instead of just memorization? Just wondering.
I do think that Wanikani and Bunpro are kind of in a catch-22 on this compared to Anki. They've built their gamification features and UI on the idea that cards have specific buckets that they're in and something like FSRS is a lot more varied than that. Especially Wanikani, which has a system of unlocking more items based on your current items reaching a specific stage.
So I haven't integrated FSRS, and of these two, I've only used Wanikani, and have been playing with a reimplemention for Chinese hanzi: https://hanzi.bpev.me
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...
Sooooo.... ehe... I got a little inspired yesterday, and got a head start on that 10%:
https://github.com/inro-digital/simple-tools/tree/main/packa...
YMMV though, since I haven't user-tested it in my app yet haha.
TBH though, I think for a true WaniKani competitor, need to reserve a decent % of work for building the dataset. Putting together all those mnemonics, cleaning up definitions, defining the order of introduction of characters and choosing words... is a lot of effort. There's a reason that WaniKani's so generous with pretty much their entire platform, but specifically states in their docs that the mnemonics/hints data doesn't belong to you... it's a large part of the effort.
Although, I guess could be integrated into the 90% work if you make sharing mnemonics into a community effort.
The author bashes other algorithms for being "arbitrary", but I don't see how FSRS is any less arbitrary.
Why does everybody want to learn Japanese? What makes Japanese so enticing? Why not Mandarin or at lead Spanish?
Japanese media is quite popular, and many fans want to watch/read their favourite thing in its original language. This is probably the reason most people learn a language, and a huge reason why so many kids around the world speak English. Chinese culture doesn't have the same impact, yet. As to Spanish, most kids who want to learn Spanish can do so at school so there is no need to go above and beyond to learn Spanish on your own.
> Chinese culture doesn't have the same impact, yet.
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.
You learn Japanese for the media and culture; Mandarin for the financial opportunities; Russian for the reverse-engineering community; Spanish, French or Arabic to be able to speak with large diverse groups of people, typically for travel; Klingon, Na'vi, Esperanto or Elvish to fit in certain communities
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
Online everyone learns Japanese, in real life i have never encountered anyone learning it, while i know multiple people learning French.
1. Generally people using such systems to learn language only need to do so if they aren't immersed in the country where it is being spoken. I stopped using Anki for German after a while of living here, even though I'm still learning. Therefore, most language learners are doing so not because they want to live in the country but because they want to consume media written in that language
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
For me, it's about the media. I'm interested in Japanese anime and manga, and now light novels.
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.
I'd say it's confirmation bias. In my personal circle, not a lot of people are interested in the Japanese language, but I know a few who took at least a few lessons on Mandarin or Spanish.
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.
When I was a kid, most of the foreign culture I was exposed from came from the US, and then Japan followed with a small amount.
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).
Ego.
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.
Just added FSRS to my free mac flashcard app. If interested, check it out https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flashcard-max/id1430950704
Super insightful. FSRS sounds like the upgrade I didn’t know I needed for my Anki habit!
How are people using Anki for maths? Any nice decks you could share?
As I understand, anki's use of spaced repetition comes from how it presents you cards in increasing or decreasing frequency based on how you have answered it previously. In this way, I prompt chatgpt to ask me questions, and it revisits previous questions or topics for me based on how I've answered previously. I continue the same conversation periodically prompting it for questions to ask me.
how to ace any uni theory course
> 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
You are so right. I just began doing this today for my exams, and it really feels like cheating with how easy it is. That, and also creating a podcast with NotebookLM with all the pdfs as source and using as a prompt "Make this a long summary for studying".
> 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.
This and other stuff I read on the article makes me thing that this person is maybe over-using the SRS. In my opinion, although OP is clearly way smarter than me, at some point we need to graduate from SRS, read native material, in Wanikani probably at first 100% of time needs to be dedicated to SRS and gradually time on SRS needs to be reduced and increased on reading native material, once on a reading level which is good enough so new vocabulary appears sparsely enough, what is the point on grinding an SRS? Most people don't even reach level 60, I don't see the point on being on lvl60 and still stay there grinding leeches. In the end SRS is not an end, it just gives you a mapping, an automatic translation from A to B without context. It is just a temporary bootstrap so you end up fixing it through real material afterwards. However, I think Wanikani should allow to suspend leeches, for sure.
Regarding Bunpro, I bought it, but I'm more convinced with time that SRSing grammar is probably not the best idea, and I think they could do a lot better if they had better exercises, like "not exactly an SRS", just selecting varied exercises for you every day.
PS: I remember seeing an expert in languages recommending that all cards you add to Anki need to be deleted after 2 months. If you didn't learn it by that time and it is important it will come up again and you will re-add it. Not sure if I agree with this either, but between this, and having a word forever there must be an intermediate point.
This should be a first class feature in iOS. Hey Siri teach me what elide means.
What is everyone using spaced repetition to memorize?
LLMs should only be used where hallucinations can be tolerated (either low stakes, like a video game; or where competent human review exists). What you describe is neither of these scenarios. You may be trying to memorize something that's not low stakes (and if it's low stakes why bother memorizing? Just make it up as you go), and if you're using study tools you're probably not (yet) competent enough to check for mistakes.
Yeah, my immediate thought when reading this was that it's great they've replaced a formula with a better formula, but couldn't it be replaced by something smart? An LLM could in theory be content-aware, taking into account that this card reinforces these associations, which makes this other card easier to recall but this third card harder to recall. And it may even be able to say, this card is related to a more central concept, it should get priority because that will help in the longer run.
In the long run, the appeal of machine learning to me is that we can move up the stack of what we optimize for, so instead of targeting a proxy metric, say a certain recall ratio, we might actually be able to target directly the thing we care about, say ability to use these things in practice. Moving upwards in the teleological hierarchy.
You're free to choose not to memorise things, but please don't be an arsehole about people who do want to do so for whatever reason. Having said that, you seem to misunderstand the point of spaced repetition, which is that you don't memorise the same thing over and over again; instead, you memorise it enough times to learn it, and not many more.
Reality check incoming. Yes you are an asshole. Your word choice matters, and you picked a large number of insulting terms.
"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.
I'm sorry, I didn't read the article but I thought my experience would be a good anecdote.
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.