Comment by uselesswords 12 hours ago
It’s amazing how every single point you’ve made here is wrong as the other commenter already dove into. On top of that Anki is one of the best documented pieces of open-source software I’ve messed with. If you’re able to program, ChatGPT can basically handle any task you want it too, I data mine the sqllite database regularly for my own insights.
I remember trying that a few months back but I was not convinced by the quality of the cards. It's also hard to convey what I think a good card is, I guess there's something about not getting lost in the details while missing the big picture.
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.
Well I can give you an output example. This was generated based on chapter from textbook about Vitamin (Vitamin D in this example)
"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.
Yes I use tags and then I display the tag using CSS at the bottom of each question. You can find out how to do this from anki manual. EDIT: this is useful because sometimes different chapters will contain similar questions but with the focus on different answer (for example: when studying trigonometry and when studying derivative of a function, similar questions will be present so you will need tags to guide you towards the answer).
The SQLite database file is called "collection.anki2". Its path varies depending on the operating system: https://docs.ankiweb.net/files.html?highlight=collection.ank...
If you export a deck as an .apkg file, you can unzip it to get the SQLite files:
https://www.encona.com/posts/custom-statistics-for-anki-flas...
I’m not using LLMs but I scrape open dictionary data to generate (massive) cards for learning kanji. I publish these in a specialized kanji learning app (rather than anki proper). My db just lives temporarily on my local machine, before I publish. Maybe sometime I will streamline the publishing process and create a github action for it.
btw. I didn’t use LLMs to write the app, it was still pretty straight forward.
Actually, every point was right and the data model is terrible. I've been using it for years. The other commenter just mentioned a list of things that the software does do and basically said "isn't that good enough for you" a bunch of times. No, it's not. Anki's concepts of flashcards, and how it stores and manipulates them, are horrible.
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.
That’s because the default model is designed for the general user. If you sat down and really worked with the documentation, you would realize you shouldn’t be using decks or collections for management you should be using tags. Decks and collections are a different abstraction for different purposes.
I’m in medical school which has basically mastered Anki. The AnKing deck, used by over a million medical students, has over 35,000 cards, cross-tagged by numerous study resources that exists on a single “deck” which receives regular updates. I regularly run basically instant queries on over 40,000+ cards.
Medical school Anki has basically mastered this workflow and the original commenters complaints are completely wrong/come from a misunderstanding of Anki’s data model.
To be put simply, ignoring subdecks, filtered decks, cards vs notes, etc.: cards can only belong to one deck, but can have multiple tags. What exactly do you want to see differently in the data model?
This is probably my biggest gripe. It’s so much information to digest at first, it’s a tough ask. And there’s so many rookie mistakes.
I made the mistake of just jumping in and I would say I spent the first 6 months using Anki “wrong” in the sense I would make bad cards, try to make mc questions, not enabling or optimizing FSRS, capping reviews, doing Anki before I knew the material, etc.
I’m someone who loves to learn from scratch/figure it out myself. I would never recommend watching a YouTube tutorial or following a guide for something you can figure out yourself, but I have to make an exception for Anki. Anki is one of those rare things where it’s simply just better to just copy what someone else is doing and figure out adjustments for your own workflow over time.
My personal workflow with memorizing with Anki using LLMs is as follows: Read textbook material first. It's important that you understand what you are learning.You cannot just breakdown information into atoms and expect to understand how it works together (for example: you can learn that there are monounsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats, saturated fats and trans fats. But without reading beforehand about them from a textbook or other source, you will not understand how they differ (in chemical structure, biological function etc). After I understand the material, I feed LLM the documents (textbooks etc) and give it the following prompt: >I want to generate flashcards from the provided textbook document using the attached PDF. Each flashcard should contain a question and a corresponding answer formatted as pairs in plaintext code block. The structure should be: "Question","Answer" >Extract key concepts, definitions, and explanations from the textbook. If in the text imperial unit system is used, convert it to metric. For mathematical symbols and equations, format them using inline MathJax syntax because I will be importing the copied text to Anki. Ensure questions are clear and concise while answers provide a direct yet comprehensive response.
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.