Anki – Powerful, intelligent flash cards

My boy is 11 now. We've used Anki with him every day since he was about 5.

Examples of things he's memorized, for fun:

* every country, recognized by unlabeled shape on the map

* spelling

* many body parts, names of bones and organs, from illustration

* chemical elements, by symbol (Na, Fe, Zn, etc)

* unix filesystem commands

* numeracy references (km from here to Japan, earth to sun, meters from home to school)

* recognizing/naming photos of places we've been since he was born

* recognizing musical instruments or musical pieces by listening

* notes on a piano

* religious facts (when Judaism began & who started it, when Muslims pray & towards what, where Jesus was born & died, etc)

* names of characters in books he's read

* wise aphorisms

He enjoys it, and dances around while answering, proud of himself. Sometimes when learning something new on YouTube, on his own, he'll say, "Dad can we add this to Anki? I want to remember this."

I swear I have read this exact same comment before

Edit: oh good I’m not crazy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38428309

That's super weird, I wonder if GP just copy-pasted it or if there's some other weird automated business going on.

Yeah sorry, I started writing the comment, then had deja vu, so I looked at my HN history, realized I'd already said it better before, and thought it was worth just pasting the previous one. Not automated.

Damn, that's a really human-like response. This bot game is really getting serious.

Sivers is an OG. Definitely not a bot. I've looked at sivers.org/multiply at least once per year for the last 15 years.

Derek is so cool. I'm a huge ruby nerd and his approach to coding is so refreshing. [1] No libraries except sqlite for instance.

[1] youtube.com/watch?v=No3sUctcAOA

Didn't watch the video, but if I recall correctly it was always PostgreSQL?

That's what they want you to think. He's probably been replaced by a Chinese AI.

Yeah, I mean as far as HN goes, he's kind famous.

Haha no worries, hope you didn't take any offense by it

100% relevant here, and I appreciate you sharing it again. I'm inspired to try this with my 9 year old.

I frequently search my own comments too for the same reasons.

GP is a well known entrepreneur: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CD_Baby

Interestingly this taught me I never look at usernames, thanks for pointing out

We'll find out in a year ... boy should be 12 by then.

That's marketing for you - now with Genuine People Personalities™.

Who's marketing a free app with no profit motive?

He was referencing the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy

I clicked the comments section hoping to see sivers response because I remember him mentioning it before. I’m glad I did.

Reposted story, reposted comment ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Proof for everyone that these programs do work. You have a good memory!

You can put that card at the end of the deck now ;)

Most of these things don't require Anki. It's a tedious waste of time.

every country, recognized by unlabeled shape on the map

That's a stupid thing to memorize, not to mention constantly churning due to political instability.

You really need to gatekeep what you stuff into your noggin.

Most educated people could recognize certain countries by shape, like Italy, Africa, USA. But every country? Come on ...

You really need to gatekeep what you stuff into your noggin.

Pointless self imposed limitations don't help.

Self-imposed limitations are absolutely key to being effective in life. You cannot go everywhere, do everything and memorize everything.

Self-imposed limitations are key to being effective. I was referring to pointless self imposed limitations.

I was reading an interview with Andy Matuschak[1].

One of the things that I think is kind of weird about this memory system stuff, or like memory champions, or something like that is “Oh, if you do these things, will you start to forget other normal human stuff?” And what's weird is, no. I've been doing this memory system stuff for years and I just know more stuff now. This is aligned with the experimental literature, which seems to suggest that, there's probably upper bounds but we're not close to them. Some of these memory champions have memorized maybe two orders of magnitude more things than I have practiced. Certainly people who are multi-lingual have really, really absurd numbers of things memorized. So there isn't a resource management argument.

The notion that stuffing your brain with trivia will be damaging is merely an unwarranted fear.

[1] https://www.dwarkeshpatel.com/p/andy-matuschak

So there isn't a resource management argument.

Time???

You think you know better how to spend Derek Siver's son's time than he does?

If you enjoy it and want to learn it, it's not a waste of time. Or at least, there are likely plenty of things ordinary people do that are bigger wastes of time.

Unless he runs out of memory.

That's what swap is for.

When I stop responding and the wife asks if I'm still listening, sometimes I tell her I'm swapping right at the moment.

A parent is sharing their joy(!) of using Anki to help their child develop curiosity, feel a sense of accomplishment, and learn about the world.

And your response at someone else's joy is to swat it down and call it tedious and stupid?

swat it down

I don't know what you're imagining by "it", but my remarks are only about memorizing all countries by border shape, not the use of spaced repetition as a whole.

That's the "it" I have swatted down.

Memorizing names of countries -> continent, I could swallow. That is useful. Or even latitude and longitude (rounded off to nearest ten degrees, say). Or some general indication: is it to the north, south; landlocked or coastal.

So if someone talks about Venezuela, the kid knows it's a coastal country in South America's north.

If you can't tell me that, what's the use of recognizing the shape of Venezuela and mapping it to a name?

I think you're missing my point.

The OP was a positive story. There could be an interesting discussion to be had around the subject of useful things to remember. But you literally used the words "tedious" and "stupid", and this sort of comment doesn't usually result in good conversation or debate.

You'd do well to heed the downvotes and constructive feedback you're getting :)

Here are some quotes from HN guidelines in case you missed them!

Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."

Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

I’ve found that there is a noticeable correlation between high HN karma and just poor behavior in general. Many of the least insightful and most nitpicky replies I’ve ever received were from people with karma > 10k.

I wonder about why this is.

I wasn’t aware that Africa was a country, seems like I need to do some flashcard learning myself

You got my George W. Bush reference!

"Africa is a nation that suffers from terrible disease ..."

Most of these things don't require Anki. It's a tedious waste of time.

I doubt anything requires Anki; rather it's more efficient than the alternatives.

Interesting, because the creator of Supermemo wrote that Spaced Repetition doesn't work on children because their brain re-arranges and repurposes structures far too much, making children's forgetting curve far too unpredictable, or at least different from adults.

https://supermemo.guru/wiki/SuperMemo_does_not_work_for_kids

Spaced repetition flaschard software is all about scheduling the flashcards around predictions of your forgetting curve, and Anki and Supermemo are designed for the forgetting curves of adults.

It's not perfect, but it's better than not doing it. He enjoys it.

That is important. SRS doesn't work for many people because, in short, they don't really enjoy it.

When I start to dislike opening up Anki, it’s usually because my cards are too complex and take too much time to memorize. Creating multiple cards with single cloze words makes the process much more enjoyable. Anki has helped me so much with memorizing programming language syntax for example.

Can you share some deck?

I showed my son Anki when I was using it to memorise things for an exam I had to do. He has been using it very successfully to memorise things too.

I'm not certain that the research on forgetting curves has nailed down the timelines well. I know the Supermemo creator thinks his algorithm is best, but I suspect there's a lot of wiggle room and individual differences. Who besides Ebbinghaus has published rigorously on it?

I think sometimes statements like this probably apply in aggregate, as in you can’t safely say they work in the general case due to too much response variance. But it’s not unrealistic to think it works well for some.

Genuine question, how will memorizing this info help him?

I’m a parent too, and have prioritized activities that teach my child critical thinking (so they can self-solve problems).

I’m curious if I should be layering in some memorization activities like this, which is why I ask.

(Please don’t take my question as judging, I’m genuinely curious how it’s helped because I might replicate. And I’ve got huge respect for all your writing over the years)

Any interesting links or suggestions on critical thinking activities? Thanks!

Hugely age dependent.

But in general: puzzles, strategy games, building blocks, and asking my kiddo questions that force them to think.

It’s probably more useful for working out the memorization muscle than the information itself.

Passive learning. One can memorize stuff without comprehending its purpose, finding a direct use for it. But having information stored or encoded in long-term memory allows for new experiences or findings to be augmented by stuff one has picked up in the past. I think all kinds of magic can happen when an individual has a 'mind-library' and can combine it with newer learnings.

Often to solve problems you need to have multiple pieces of knowledge at your fingertips (without having to lookup each piece up or reason about it from first principles).

In mathematics that might be related theorems/lemmas. In programming it might be existing functionality of libraries. Problem solving is often chaining a few things together, which you already know.

Children should understand how to derive the quadractic formula but memorizing makes solving equations a lot faster.

https://tabularasaeducation.wordpress.com/2015/06/27/knowled...

During the great internet blackout of 2032 he will be the one that remembers things!

Your boy is precious! He's on his way to becoming a highly intelligent adult.

I've seen a lot of people going like... why remember stuff when you can easily google it? But it doesn't work that way. The more facts reside in your brain, the more avenues it has to connect them together and generate insights (after all, that thing is the OG "neural network").

I highly admire your parenting in this aspect, and I hope to do the same when I have kids of my own.

Edit: I noticed after publishing my comment that you're Derek Sivers! I've been a long time reader of your blog :)

I’ve never remembered anything by memorization. Only at school and university for exams, and only to promptly forget it one week later. The stuff that I have remembered for years I learned organically by using it, as part of some mental process, by embedding it in some larger structure. Be it coding, physics, or history. So I think this is a fairly individual matter

That's spaced repetition in a nutshell.

I highly doubt this is an individual matter. Cramming (massing) for exams is literally the antithesis of SRS.

Look into Andy Matuschaks work: [Dwarkesh Podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmeRQN9z504) [How to write good prompts](https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/)

Yep! This kid has a super power! I don't understand why this sort of learning to learn isn't taught in schools - I only discovered anki and even spaced repetition at age 35, and I could really have used it at school!

I think the workaround that I came up with myself was to work through a large amount of derivations (maths, physics and chemistry) and try to note the common stuff and prepared shorter and shorter versions of the notes from which I could rapidly reconstruct everything else.

In hindsight, I was training an autoencoder.

I think it's even more precious that the boy has learned how to learn and has developed a taste for achievement based on a dopamine loop that doesn't employ sugar or special effects in 4K.

Curious: How many cards are in his deck(s)? Do you do it with him daily? I was wondering when to start with my kid. Any writeup would be great.

My other question: For me a lot of this is trivia (No judgement! That's fine!) Has he found it useful for education (i.e. school), and for anything that he applies on a semi-frequent basis (I suppose UNIX commands could be a good example).?

I personally have used SRS since late 2018, and it's been quite useful - as if releasing a latent superpower. But I haven't applied it for regular schooling.

Thanks!

About 1000 cards now. We do it daily. It's often just a few cards per day, so it takes 1-5 minutes.

Spelling is the biggest category. I record myself saying a word that I've seen him spell wrong. The answer is the written word.

Many of his old life-memories are saved. A picture of a playground he loved, where we used to live. A frame from a movie he liked. Asking for the name of the hero in a book he loved. Anki makes him recognize these things, which keep his memories of them alive. Often ilicits an "Oh yeah!" nostalgia.

Recognizing countries on the map is not trivial. On the playground, he met a kid from Syria. He asked the boy if he lived closer to Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, or Lebanon. My jaw dropped, but the boy was touched and yelled, "Mom! He knows where it is!" and they became friends (for the day). Other times he'll decide out of the blue that he wants to know more about Azerbaijan or some other country that he only knows by shape.

The rest, he's just really proud to know. A kid at school says the moon is a million miles away. He was proud to know the more accurate distance. He wants to know the actual distance to the beach from our house, instead of just "takes forever".

About 1000 cards now. We do it daily. It's often just a few cards per day, so it takes 1-5 minutes.

1000 cards over 5-6 years is 160-200 per year, so on average less than one a day. Did you start out slow and increased the pace as he grew, or is it more of chunking (e.g. add a few cards per day for some days, then just review for days before adding more)?

I'm sure whatever approach you did was organic and not planned the way I'm writing it, but am curious how it actually evolved.

Recognizing countries on the map is not trivial. On the playground, he met a kid from Syria. He asked the boy if he lived closer to Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, or Lebanon.

OK, this is beyond simply recognizing the country from its shape. How did he encode what the neighboring countries are?

When learning the countries, does the card show only the outline of that country, or is it more like a map with all countries, and the one under review is highlighted? If the latter, then it makes sense.

The rest, he's just really proud to know. A kid at school says the moon is a million miles away. He was proud to know the more accurate distance.

Psst... Everyone knows it's 300,000 km away.

OK, fine. I memorized it wrong as a kid. Need to add it to my Anki deck ;-)

How did he encode what the neighboring countries are?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria#/media/File:Syria_(ortho...

That map of the globe is what we use as the front of the card

He sees that and knows the answer is Syria.

But because we also do that for the other countries around it, he knows Turkey, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, etc. He knows where that country is, in context of its neighbors.

We have some little mnemonics to remember things like, "I packed my bags in Pakistan. After that, Afghanistan. Then Iraaaan all the way til I hit a rock in Iraq."

He might enjoy this: https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

I bet he's really good at it!

Do you have a similar habit? How does one get started making Anki a habit? I've used Anki for studying before exams, but I haven't been able to integrate it into my life.

If you care enough, you'll do it. Every day I brush my teeth, write in my diary, do my Anki, check email, eat something, etc. It's only a few minutes a day.

That's a fair argument. Maybe my problem is that I overestimate how much time it takes every day. It really should be only a few minutes a day, with that effort adding up over enough days/week/months. I guess the bigger time sink comes when authoring decks.

The hard part (in terms of time) for me is creating the content. I cheat. I throw whole paragraphs and sentences in without clozes or refinement.

Then when I review them I think, "Well, that was informative but not answerable, what does 'easy' or 'hard' mean when I'm re-reading a paragraph?" So I spend some time refining them. This is iterative. The first pass on a paragraph of content might just be to split it out into several cards with one sentence each, nothing more. Then when I see the sentence cards (some time later) I turn them into clozes or Q&A cards. Then I realize they need images to really help so I add some. After 2-5 iterations they're useful and effective cards, but the work ends up being distributed over a more reasonable period of time (usually 1-3 weeks). Each refinement step only takes a minute or two per card, if that, especially as you get more comfortable with the editor.

Jesus christ. I often wonder why I can't compete at school and this is why.. you never know how much prep/silver spoon other kids got

Derek Sivers is definitely better off than most of us, but what he's describing is something any engaged parent could do. That's not a "silver spoon". Hell, my family was lower-middle-income (into solid middle-income with both parents working, then down again, these things can cycle) and they would quiz us on things like that. Though not with Anki. It's just good parental engagement.

I'm not taking a side, but I don't think that's a fair comparison. My family was lower income than this. My parents were at work so that we could have shelter, food, and not go into crippling medical debt for even basic care. There wasn't time for this kind of interaction.

How is this silver spoon? I grew up in poverty and my mum taught me to real (and learned herself at the same time) before I started school. She did this so I wouldn’t suffer through school like she did.

I taught my daughter to read and write before she started school. Being part of your children’s education is awesome.

Is he on the autism spectrum?

Who, the commenter or his child?

All of us.

Not at all, and not particularly smart. Just a normal fun-loving kid, and this is something we do just 2-5 minutes a day.

Are these separate decks or a single deck for your son? Do things come out of the deck(s)? What triggers that?

His decks:

* computer

* culture

* English

* math

* music

* nature

* where

I don't think we've ever pulled anything out of the deck. There are some cards that it says, when we mark [easy], that it will ask him again in 6 years. We joke about how at the age of 17 it will be asking him how to spell "sing", or whatever.

Can we get a copy of your deck?

Seconded! At least the countries please.

I’m curious, how did you manage to get a child into Anki and make them self sufficient on it? Kudos to you

We do it together, just 2-5 minutes a day. When I'm away he does it on his own maybe 50/50.

Hope that the kid has time to have fun with friends as well, otherwise will become just a well educated sucker used by others.

I would also recommend sporcle quizzes as a good way of learning and practicing information. Eg flags and countries.

Do you have any particular system in place for creating decks?

* unix filesystem commands

Father of the century, just for that alone.

You're setting your kid up for a bright future, great parenting.

one deck or a different one for each topic ?

when Judaism began & who started it

A bit off topic, but this is a very tricky question to answer. The traditional answer is Moses, ca. 1200 BC. The real answer would take many PhD theses to arrive at. It's really a process that took place between the 10th and 5th centuries BC (and arguably continued even much later than that).

One tip for working with Anki: you will likely learn better - and review cards more regularly - if you write the cards yourself instead of using a preexisting deck.

Going through a course / textbook -> taking notes on paper -> adding key concepts as Anki flashcards -> reviewing them daily: extremely effective

Preexisting decks can work - I used one to successfully study for my Amateur Radio License - but that assumes a specific pool of questions you're memorizing, which isn’t how learning a subject typically works.

ChatGPT is great at taking my notes and turning them into Anki cards. Some tweaks are occasionally needed, but I have done well on numerous exams letting ChatGPT figure out the cards (and the formatting tedium) for me.

This is the opposite of what the commenter is suggesting.

One of the biggest roadblocks to using anki or cards in general is coming up with good cards. Automating that part lets you use anki a lot more, which is a win. If you want to connect with the question you can still manually transcribe the card.

Using Anki is not a goal in itself. It's just a tool to help you cram facts into your brain. Once you have done that, you can and should build associations and knowledge on top of them. Reviews ensure that less-often used facts are not forgotten. Anki is fine for that.

But creating Anki cards is effectively a form of review as well. If you automate that, then you miss out on going through your own notes, engaging with the subject, and subdividing it into self-contained pieces, which is required to come up with good cards.

If you automate that, then you miss out on going through your own notes, engaging with the subject, and subdividing it into self-contained pieces

Why wouldn't you get this? You just don't have to do it in order to make Anki cards.

which is required to come up with good cards

Yes, and ChatGPT does this for you.

This isn't theoretical. I've used this to get As in multiple classes in college. This works.

I would rather get cards that are really well designed ___as cards__ (which chat gpt will do better than me given the time I want to spend) even if there is some loss of "value" from not breaking the material into cards myself, because I will make it up on the back end by studying the cards more, and having cards that are more correctly designed for optimal study. Who cares if I did the work of breaking the material into cards myself if it results in shitty cards that aren't good study aids and thus you never use.

Why would you end up with shitty cards if you did them yourself? And how can you even tell whether ChatGPT made good ones? And how much of a difference do the "better" cards even make?

There is not necessarily a tradeoff here. Sure, you will make some errors, but if you find a card to be so bad that it's useless for SRS (unlikely, unless the answer is very vague or too long to quickly validate) you will just delete it and replace it with a better one.

There is a "skill" to everything, and my card making skill is probably a 3. It takes me some time to identify nuggets that will be long enough not to be trivial but also short enough to make good cards and salient enough to bother with. ChatGPT on the other hand is probably a 7.5-8 in making cards, and it can crank them out. On top of that it can suggest things that you are probably going to be tested on given the stuff in your notes that you might miss if you just created cards from the contents of your notes. If you have a famous teacher at a public university who teaches every semester for a big core class, it can even go far beyond that in ways that will surprise you.

Of course you don't have to create your own cards, but they would work better if you did. You can use ChatGPT to automate onerous tasks, but have to compensate for it by engaging with the material in other ways. I doubt that grinding decks is enough. Depends on the activity and the goal I guess. Acing exams, sure, without doubt.

A concept applies here where you really don't want to spend unbound time studying. It's a great way to burn out. "A" students, when interviewed, frequently reference doing "enough" and then stopping.

Optimizing your study time by taking the "boring" work, e.g. building flashcards of material you organized yourself, cuts down on time spent not doing work that's maximally effective (memorizing flashcards).

If a person had infinite time, making flashcards would be just one more thing on an unbound list of things they could do to learn the material better. But people don't have infinite time, and considering you're already "familiar" with the material since you wrote and organized it, building flashcards is something you can't really afford to spend time on.

When I went back to school to get my undergrad, I focused on optimizing my time, because procrastination was a huge problem for me the first time around. Being efficient and not spending a single second longer than I have to in order to get an "A" is important to me, and using ChatGPT to help me with that has been wildly successful so far.

The biggest failure mode is adding to many notes at once, which leads to non obvious increased future workload. Automating card creation sounds like would worsen this issue unless extreme care is taken.

I’m offering my experience, while agreeing with the larger point that you need to customize your cards to your situation.

If you’re modifying the cards to fit your needs and ChatGPT is basing them off of your personal notes then I’m not sure you understood the commenters suggestion you’re referring to.

I'm not sure it is. Not if chatgpt is operating off of the notes you already took yourself

Would you mind giving an example of the kind of prompt(s) you use to get these card generated?

On a different note, ChatGPT has been making me feel stupid because I fail to come up with many use cases, while it seems like tons of technically unskilled people come up with all kinds of uses...

I'm no good at prompt engineering, so I iterate a lot, rather than trying to come up with the perfect prompt. I start by asking something like,

"please generate a series of short questions and answers that conform to a flashcard format, easy for studying, from these notes"

The responses were too verbose, so I asked:

"Please shorten the answers to short, easily memorizable lines"

That returned pretty good flashcards, so from there I asked it to reformat in a way Anki could consume:

"these are great, please convert these into a code block, where the question and the answer is on the same line, separated by a semicolon and not numbered"

But that put all of the flashcards on the same line, so I added:

"sorry I wasn't clear, each question should be on its own line"

That gave me what I was looking for. The next step is to paste it into Anki, fiddle with the recall and cards-per-day settings, and then get to training!

Very helpful, thank you!

thank you!

Not the person you’re asking, but I wrote a bit about my experiences here: https://neurotechnicians.com/p/generative-ai-and-anki-part-1...

That's great, thank you!

Time to write card: x. Number of times review card: x * big number.

I find in my usage that creating a card can take several minutes (5-10 for a hard card) but reviewing them takes a few seconds per occurrence. To reach the initial creation time would take me decades of reviews.

That said, I still make all my cards myself and some cards are trivial. For the trivial cards, review time can outweigh creation time. But trivial cards take seconds.

Crafting effective prompts is important to getting the value out of an SRS. That sometimes is the bull of the "work". Not the review.

So is your brain.

if you write the cards yourself

I'd go so far to say it's almost an requirement. Unless you have a high quality deck made specifically for the book/course/material you have.

Sadly most of the publicly available Anki are IMHO not of that quality.

Even if they were, writing cards yourself forces you to engage with the material in a way that's highly conducive to learning it. It makes knowledge gaps more visible and forces you to understand it if you want to have any chance breaking the material down into pieces that make good cards.

The positive effects of SRS rely just as much on the repetition as they do on the creation of the cards. I know that not everyone agrees with this, it's certainly been true for me.

Premade decks might work for language learning, but even then I'd be wary.

writing your own cards is very tedious.

It gets easier the more you do it. As you become more comfortable with the software as well as develop an intuition for what makes a good card, the effort shrinks dramatically. Not just because I'm faster at creating cards, I also create fewer cards overall.

True, but I suspect that's due to learning being tedious.

Memorization isn't the same as learning. Using a preexisting deck is memorizing someone else's learning.

I've been studying Chinese with a premade deck for several years and it's working very well.

Of course, ideally one would want to create cards, but I only can devote around 30 minutes per day. Under that restriction, creating cards is not really an option.

Which deck?

Spoonfed Chinese.

Well said, this is the key part for me:

It makes knowledge gaps more visible

It's the same principle behind teaching others. It's easy to think you understand something until you are forced to communicate it beyond the surface level.

I started making the cards, noticed a lot of repetition in what I was doing and then started coding solutions to clusters of cards.

I definitely spent way too long on the "making the cards" phase!

if you write the cards yourself instead of using a preexisting deck

I disagree with this. Anki's power comes from spaced repetition. Spending your time creating cards instead of actually reviewing the material is very inefficient. If high quality decks exist for the topic you're learning, use them instead. I've learned this the hard way.

Fields like medicine and language learning (you will still need to create your own deck for sentence mining but that's different as it's not a time sink) have great decks. For actual "niche" topics though, creating your own decks is your only choice.

For people who are going to create their own decks: check the Anking deck to see how to create "great" cards.

I disagree with this strongly. Isolated individual facts don’t give you an overview or macro-structure to place the facts within. It’s very inefficient. Can only speak for medicine but using another persons deck is ‘quicker’ but performance is so much worse. Even in just learning how to summarise the info for yourself you gain a lot.

Not at all, see f. ex.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_effect

It's great when high quality decks exist, but I doubt they do for what I use it for. Also, even when they do exist, chances are still high you'll find pieces of knowledge missing, and will have to create your own card.

I definitely agree that to absolutely maximize learning you should write the cards yourself but I think it really depends on the value of the content, say it may be 2x as effective for learning but take 5x the amount of effort.

For some things where you want to learn but don't want to/have time to put in full effort premade cards are better than nothing. For example, I ended up learning German to B1 level from Duolingo (+ friends/time in germany) because using Duolingo was pretty low effort, even if it wasn't the fastest most effective way of learning.

I think this is probably true for most things you may want to learn about outside of your job, school, or really strong reasoning behind it. Perfect is the enemy of good as they say

(Shameless plug: I made a tool that makes spaced repetition questions for educational YouTube videos/podcasts that you watch, usually I was forgetting everything and wasn't really that invested to spend the time making decks for everything I watch, so I landed on this! https://www.platoedu.org)

Is duolingo actually good for learning languages? i tested it briefly and it seemed more like a minigame of constructing sentences

Even for learning in general. We even had teachers who told us we're allowed to make tiny cheat sheets - about 6x3cm or something - because the mere process of creating the sheet is a good learning strategy, and to fit all you don't know on such a small sheet means you already know almost everything.

Using someone else's decks in Anki === using vim with someone else's .vimrc

I downloaded premade cards for the Security+ exam acronyms[1]. Not only did it save me the time of making over 350 cards, but their selection of cards and explanations gave me more learning that wasn't in my notes. Like you say, it's good for a specific pool of questions.

1. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1553224110

Every few years I use Anki heavily for language stuff (German, more recently Latin and Classical Chinese), up to 90 minutes a day, but I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up.

I still benefit from a year of training, but it seems the long-tail of spaced repetition doesn't work for me at all. But so long as I get to the point where I can read or watch TV, the considerable effort I've invested in making cards (not to mention reviewing them) was worthwhile.

It's also fun to have an extended/time-intensive personal task where it can be worth it to build up a highly personalised system that doesn't need to work for anyone else. It allows for a selfishness that's the polar opposite of accessibility design, but can end up resulting in quite novel/pleasing design decisions. (There've been some other posts about making software just for yourself on hacker news before).

They have a lot of shared decks hosted online, but I guess for hosting costs or copyright reasons delete any decks that aren't regularly downloaded, which results in many niche decks getting deleted. I've uploaded several German-language decks that get deleted because of course they don't get the same traffic as English ones. Bit of a pity - I wonder what the ecosystem would look like if things were otherwise.

These two things are related:

I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up.

to build up a highly personalised system that doesn't need to work for anyone else.

"Anyone else" includes "future you", because humans change over time. A highly personalized system is usually a highly inflexible system.

Hmm. Let me think about your point.

The problem seems not dependent on the specifics of my efforts for me - it seems inherent to Anki for language-learning. That the flash cards have lots of bells and whistles seems unrelated to my giving up because 90 minutes a day wasn't enough to keep things under control.

I haven't had any time that my circumstances have change so much that my accessorising ended up a negative. (And I'm having trouble thinking of situations where that would be the case).

But sure, in general I can think of cases where it's probably more advisable to go with a general purpose solution (stairs rather than a climbing wall for going upstairs) in case personal circumstances change, temporarily or permanently.

90 minutes is a very big ask if you want to be consistent. Maybe you're simply trying to bite off more than you can chew? I think consistency is king, so whatever you have to do to stay consistent will pay dividends, even if that means shaving your working set down to just 10 minutes a day.

The thing with Anki is that you cant control how much workload you have per day. Anki algorithm decides that. Say, you start by doing it little bit every day and you are fine for first three weeks. But then, Anki starts assigning you more and more repetition and that is it.

If you do less one day, Anki gives you those cards the next day on top of the normal workload of that day. There is no way out.

Worst, the less you retain, the more mistakes you make, the more your workload goes up. Anki algorithm never do the "lower workload because this person does not retain" decision. Instead, it will just give you more and more work in such case.

There is a cap on how many cards will get reviewed from a deck each day. Lower it if the default cap is too high.

If you're finding that you reliably do not recall some card Anki will eventually mark it as a leech. Those cards get suspended automatically after some number of lapses. That will reduce your workload because suspended cards are't part of your workload.

https://docs.ankiweb.net/leeches.html

The leech feature can also be dangerous if you're unaware of it, because AIUI Anki does not ask you whether to remove a difficult card or not, it just goes ahead and does it.

That's true, though the stats screen will tell you how many suspended and buried cards you have. If I track that a few times a week I can usually tell when something has been suspended that I didn't suspend myself.

You need to mark that card with lowest recall for leeches to happen. If you mark it with second lowest one, it won't become leech.

If it becomes leech, it will be ignored entirely by anki.

All of that is too much expertise about how to mark cards instead of allowing you to do it intuitively.

Anki can help you identify leeches. Each time a review card 'lapses' (is failed while it is in review mode), a counter increases. When this counter reaches 8, Anki tags the note as a leech and suspends the card. The threshold, and whether to suspend or not, can be adjusted in the deck options.

If you keep failing that card, Anki will continue to alert you about the leech periodically. These warnings occur at half the initial leech threshold. For example, if you set the warning at 8 lapses, future warnings will happen every 4 lapses (at 12, 16, and so on).

Suspend means you never see the card again. So how could you keep failing it after it's been suspended for being a leech?

I really wish something like https://github.com/fasiha/ebisu becomes the norm. That is, the idea of fitting the cards to your time (by prioritising) rather than you having to do everything there software wants.

The only bit missing is some algorithm deciding how often to introduce new cards based on your historical data.

Inessential complexity increases the workload of maintaining a system (like the climbing wall vs. stairs: can't maintain an upstairs floor unless you maintain the ability to use the climbing wall).

Bells and whistles, especially when it comes to making things perfectly tidy, tend to introduce a lot of rules for using and maintaining a system. For example, a color-coding system with too many colors to reasonably recall without daily practice from using the system: any interruption, such as a vacation or even a weekend, will disrupt in some way the ability to use and maintain the color-coding system.

Informal rules also accumulate over time, adding to the complexity of any given action. It doesn't take a major change to topple your flashcard system, but slow, accumulated changes have been enough to do so.

Yeah, I've had the same thing every time I have tried Anki - it's fine for a while, but once you get enough cards added, or just have been memorising a deck for long enough, even missing one session generates a huge unsurmountable backlog. It's bad and consistent enough for me that I just stopped trying to use Anki at all.

Is there no way to skip a day? And simply pause?

You can suspend cards and decks, but also you can skip days.

It'll create a backlog of cards to review, but that's surmountable. The number can become intimidating (I think my worst was around 2k cards), but there are a few ways to clear it. You can "just" get back into the daily habit, it'll take (by the default numbers, if one deck) # cards/100 days to clear out, more or less (some cards may come up for review again in that period so the actual number might be a bit higher). You can also up the daily review limit to clear it faster (I did this when I hit 2k, 200/day was about my personal time limit to spend on it so it took just over 10 days to clear).

I get skipping days is against the algorithm, but wouldn’t it be better to simply freeze the algorithm for a few days opposed to get a backlog at all? A backlog would break the habit for me making me unlikely to return.

Skipping days is not against the algorithm, it accounts for skipped days.

In a simplified system suppose that we just double easy card review times, and reset hard cards back to 1. You have a card up for review today, you last saw it N days ago. Two scenarios:

1. You don't delay. You review the card now. It's either hard and reset to 1 (see it again tomorrow) or easy and you see it again in 2N days.

2. You delay. You review it M days from now. When you finally do it's either hard and reset to 1 (see it again the next day) or easy and you see it again in 2(N + M) days.

That's it. The algorithm has you covered if you delay. It doesn't do something silly like say "This card was supposed to be reviewed after 2 days, but you waited a month. You remembered it, but we're going to show it to you again in 4 days." The algorithms will take the delay into account (maybe not one-for-one) like I illustrated above.

Good point. The real risk in skipping days is that you might forget altogether some of the cards that were due for review. But the Anki default is to review often enough that probability of recall for each card is very high, so if you're only skipping a few days at a time this is not a huge concern. Capping the amount of cards you do per day has a similar effect; Anki will prompt you with the highest-risk cards first, and some will be left unreviewed for the day (hence, practically skipped).

FSRS seems to reduce the amount of reviews required, might be worth enabling it and seeing if it helps.

I had the same experience. I invested a lot of time on Anki and it paid back, but I could never stick to it. There is always a point where I have to skip 2 or 3 days because of life and the huge backlog is too much that I give up.

I recently started to use Supermemo because of some comments on HN, and so far it have been going quite well. I feel less overwhelmed when I have to take a break, I think the algorithm (or maybe it is just good defaults?) is much less punishing. I am still new to it, and I have a baggage of knowledge from my past experiences using SRS, so it is unfair to compare it to Anki at the moment. But it renew my passion for memorizing, so far it has been worth the investment.

Anki algorithm's is extremely punishing, which is awful for language learning.

I think SRS needs to be only a small part of the learning routine, the cherry on the cake. For me that is ~15 minutes / day, and backlog is manageable even if I occasionally take 2-3 days off.

I think Anki was based on an old version of Supermemo. It would make sense if the latter had a better algorithm.

There is always a point where I have to skip 2 or 3 days because of life and the huge backlog is too much that I give up.

Some things I do to manage this:

You can put an upper bound on the number of cards reviewed per day. For me it's 50. After that it says I'm done for the day and I wait till the next day.

If missing only 2-3 days leads to such a huge backlog, you really need to take a break in adding new cards. My aim is to spend no more than 5-10 minutes per day reviewing cards. If it seems I always have too many cards to review, I don't add any new cards until I get only a few cards to review per day (when really busy, I don't add a new card until I have a day with 0 cards).

You can only learn so much per day. You need to limit card additions to ensure you don't exceed that amount.

The other thing I noticed is that I had two types of cards: One where the answer can be instantaneous (e.g. facts). And ones where some thinking is involved (proof sketch of a theorem, details of some algorithm, etc). The latter would kill the experience because of the time involved. So I separated the decks: Simple cards (the majority) go in one deck and this is reviewed daily. Hard cards have their own deck(s) and I'm not as committed to them - I work on them only when I know I have time and am committed to it.

Yeah I've had a similar issue with the Anki-like system Wanikani uses for learning Japanese Kanji. I can keep up for some time, but as soon as I get busy with something else, I get overwhelmed by the piling up reviews. It has been very effective for the ones I learned when I was able to keep up though.

Recently a friend got me into Duolingo with him, I've been managing to maintain a streak on it because if I'm too busy I can atleast just do a quick "lesson" before midnight, but I don't really find it to be very effective for learning unless you're coming from literally zero starting knowledge.

I already know the basic vocabulary (especially phonetically) and sentence structure, so it's too slow. I usually just do the first handful of lessons and have figured out the kanji enough to just jump ahead to the test to unlock the next unit.

Are you using Duolingo for Japanese? If so, please stop. There are better and more efficient ways, as you've probably noticed. Anki (with a Core3k or similar deck, 10-50 new cards a day depending on your daily life) + reading is the way to go in my opinion. You can use jpdb to see your progress relative to the material you want to read.

Yeah, as I said, it's not very effective and I'm only really managing to keep it up due to being able to do a quick 15 minute lesson right before bed. I have some workbooks and do often end up perusing and attempting to converse in japanese to practice, but I don't manage to keep it as consistent due to all the other things I have to balance.

Language learning and art practice both tend to quickly get put on the backburner for weeks whenever I get busy with a project or whenever work gets busy.

Every few years I use Anki heavily for language stuff (German, more recently Latin and Classical Chinese), up to 90 minutes a day, but I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up.

Well... yeah? I guess if you're a full time student or something it's fine but IMO if your review times exceed 5 minutes it's time to stop adding cards for a while.

I had the same problem when studying English. I just capped my review/new cards study time to 30 mins per day. Basically if you have too much cards to review your vocabulary hits a "plateau" until your workload becomes manageable again.

I also use anki for german. I use a deck with 1850 cards to learn the nouns' gender.

I just pulled up my stats.I have been studiyng for almost a year and have averaged less than 2 minutes of study a day (with the average review lasting less than 2 seconds). In total it's more or less 10 hours.

It has been insanely effective. I read somewhere on HN that making extremely easy cards helps. It for sure helped me to keep the habit.

The trigger that helps me is Anki on my phone will put little notification badges on itself if I have cards to review, and I hate to see unresolved notifications, so it forces me to study.

They have a lot of shared decks hosted online

I have mixed feelings about shared decks. I’ve tried many, yet always find something about them that irritates me - aesthetics, content accuracy, etc. Or more likely that just doesn’t fit contextually with what I’m learning.

However, the low startup energy with shared decks is certainly a selling point. I can’t even begin to estimate how much time I’ve spent over the years creating 50K+ cards…

highly personalised system that doesn't need to work for anyone else.

My experience exactly.

I have issues keeping up with large language decks, too. In my case the problem usually lies not with Anki but all the other stuff going on in my life — stressors, work, etc. There’s just a cap on what I can be juggling at any point in time and if things aren’t flowing smoothly it’s going to be more difficult to stick to working through a long deck. If I could just hit pause on everything else there would be no problems.

Retention is high so that helps keep progress between periods of deck usage at least.

what the ecosystem would look like

There is a third-party paid exchange here:

https://www.ankihub.net/

(I’ve had a few exchanges with the founder, and wish him luck.)

I wonder what the ecosystem would look like if things were otherwise.

Shameless plug - I'm building https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive which is basically GitHub/Reddit for flashcards. Very much pre-product and a WIP, though the offline client proof of concept is done.

Spaced repetition, especially when using tools like Anki, is effective for memorizing facts. However, memorization represents the most basic level of learning objectives, see e.g. [1] and [2]. Are there any recommended tools for practicing more advanced levels of knowledge, such as relational analysis, synthesis, and critical evaluation?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_taxonomy

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_of_observed_learni...

Initial deck: simple facts. More advanced decks, after simple facts are memorized: concept-based.

Example:

Front: Rotator cuff tear - diagnosis? Why would this make sense?

Back: MRI is generally better for soft tissue; you wouldn't use a CT scan, which is much better for bone. Remember that X-rays / CTs generally work by shooting high-frequency electromagnetic radiation "X-rays" at tissue - if the tissue has dense elements like Ca++ in bone, the X-rays will be reflected back by the dense elements. This is why X-rays and CTs are good for detecting dense things like blood (iron in heme is dense), bone (calcium is dense) or even why we use contrast (things like barium or iodide are dense elements)

Do doctors keep this much in their heads? I would have this in a notes system that I could recover by searching for "rotator cuff" during the appointment. I know I'd never remember it all, but maybe with Anki I would.

I work in a university hospital as a neuroradiologist. I've used Anki extensively during my studies and my specialist training. Now I use it to memorize thousands of image diagnosis patterns and differential diagnosis. 'You can't diagnose (or see) what you don't know', which means using an extensive note system is insufficient. I recommend Anki to all the radiologists (and doctors in general) training in our institute.

If this is your field, it's really not any different from:

Front: Computer noise: top differential diagnosis? How dos this make sense?

Back: Check the fans for dust. Plastic...static electricity...etc

The point is that it's not necessary to review individual facts anymore because the concepts require their utilization, so it's just "common sense" knowledge to physicians. Of course, the knowledge from one physician to the next can vary greatly.

The best tool for that kind of thing is developing good note-taking skills.

When I'm doing language study, for example, the backbone of my memory reinforcement strategy is a plain old pen-and-paper notebook. Anki is only used for specific, targeted reinforcement.

Most my time with Anki these days is learning Chinese characters. That's arguably an ideal use case for brute-forcing with SRS, and that is indeed a very popular way to learn them. But I prefer to start with good note-taking there, too. I keep a notebook where I write down new characters and make some notes about their composition, etymology, and the nature of any relationship they might have with other characters that have a similar appearance or show up as components in this new one. IME even the simple act of physically jotting down a handwritten note to not confuse 买 with 卖 or 找 with 我 is worth some large number of flashcard repetitions all by itself.

I also create cards for hanzi in Anki, but typically only after I've already encountered it a few times in my reading and it's starting to feel familiar. Leech cards are a huge waste of time when tackling a large subject, so I don't really like to add a card to my deck until I'm reasonably confident that I won't be hitting the "again" button on it more than once or twice, if ever.

Is there something that you would personally recommend in order to develop better note taking skills?

Read about different note-taking methods, try them, and decide which one you like best.

I think you are minimizing something that is very important.

Understanding deeply and completely any topic is much easier when you understand deeply and completely the fundamental components and concepts--which starts with memorization.

Yea, i thought that was studied, but perhaps not. Ie the knowledge we retain help us formalize larger more complex thoughts. Perhaps facts are a too small unit? Though i don't see why you couldn't also use Spaced Rep to memorize larger relationships.

I think the closest thing would be concept mapping software or knowledgebase software like Obsidian. But that's more about storing concepts and not so much about learning concepts.

If that software existed, it would be incredible.

Obsidian has a spaced repetition community plugin that I use when I write documentation. I add a flashcard for everything that I want to learn.

So you just put #flashcards inline (or whatever you tell it to look for) at the bottom if your file.

And then:

This is a question::this is the answer. This is another question::this is another answer.

I run through my cards about 30 minutes before I start work. It works very well.

Supermemo (an earlier-established piece of Anki-adjacent software) and its fans are big pushers of something called "Incremental Reading":

https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Incremental_reading

https://www.help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_reading

Going to school.

techniques >> tools

Work on encoding information, understand things deeply, relate concepts, and then create your cards.

For language learning, for instance, this means that if you have 10 new words you want to learn, you create f.ex. 15 sentences so that each sentence contains 2 of those words, and each words appears in 3 sentences. Then you run them eg. by your a tutor to validate them, and add it to your Anki deck.

Now you will only review each sentence 5-8 times, and you can do it very fast.

Doesn't need to be exactly like that, but you get the idea

You can use incremental reading, which is built on top of spaced repetition. Lots of people have invented it independently [1] and it works amazingly! Once you get the hang of it, it changes the way you think about learning stuff.

[1] https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Michael_Nielsen_re-discovers_inc...

Immersion is the only "tool" I know that tries to make the next leap formalized. For language learning at least, saturating yourself with input lets the brain build the deep relational maps it needs to use language, and no amount of rote learning of arbitrary grammar and vocab can replace that process.

You can use Anki to learn subjects more deeply - it's just harder.

Check out this experimental work to learn Quantum Physics using SRS: https://quantum.country/

I LOVE anki!! I’m a heavy user.

Everything goes in my morning flash cards. Knots, geography, language, tar commandline flags, papers, statistics homework. Fill them with things you like, is my advice - it’s fun to say hello to hobbies on the verge of your memory in the morning.

Bird calls! I’m learning sounds of bird calls since I can’t see very well so I can’t learn by sight. I listed eBird’s set of common birds near me and downloaded their calls as mp3s from the Macaulay Library and batch-imported them into my flash cards (for my personal use). It’s always rewarding to hear a bird outside and go “hey I think I know what that is!” Pairs well with Merlin Sound ID.

Another great use is as a mnemonic Rolodex: I frequently forget to reach out and catch up with friends in my life, so I have a deck with just names of people to say hi to. Every time somebody comes up, I say hello, and then answer the card for whichever interval feels appropriate. This way, the SRS itself will make sure that I never forget someone for too long.

Wait a moment. "tar commandline flags"? When I was still learning how to program, the general advice was to avoid memorizing things you can easily look up, like language syntax, framework functionality or commandline flags, and just let it happen. In fact, I recently caught myself skimming Nest.js docs to make cards to learn how to use Nest.js BEFORE I even start working on my project, and almost felt like I'm procrastinating instead of being productive.

I don't disagree with how Anki is effective at memorization, because that would be like disagreeing with the effectiveness of space repetition as a principle. I'm just wondering if it's worth putting stuff like "vim keybinds" in - John Carmack reportedly did that to check what's the fuss about Vim.

At least for me this often means, that I just keep on lookin up the stuff over and over again. Takes some deliberate effort to actually store some obscure things in my memory.

When I was still active with Anki, I was mostly picking up some random things I knew I would need fairly often and included those in my deck.

But that means you're doing tar flag flashcards more often than you're using those tar flags? Because otherwise, and for me, the CLI usage is the flashcard? Using them is what teaches me and keeps fresh the commands and flags that I most often use.

Not necessarily. Hypothetical example, but let's say I use some obscure tar command twice a month. That's too far apart for me to remember it, but often enough that it would annoy me to look it up every time. Chuck it into anki and I have a short time where I repeat it often enough so that it sticks and after that the time between repetitions quickly becomes far longer than the 14 day interval where I actually use the command.

And now I never have to look it up again :)

I think that's the original claim: That you're memorizing something that you use 12-20 times per year. Why not turn that into a script, or make it a memorable alias?

Because I perceive the cost of memorizing it to be almost zero.

There's of course a need for nuance here. I do write scripts to automate stuff and I do have aliases configured for certain commands, directories, etc. I don't try to remember all the things, just so that I never have to look something up again.

If I wasn't a heavy anki user already, then I certainly wouldn't set it up just to remember some commandline stuff. But that's not the situation I'm in. I use it for lots of things already and I have an established habit to review the cards every day. Adding a card to remember specific flags has incredibly low overhead for me.

A different, but similar example is using Anki for learning library/framework syntax. I made heavy use of it when I first learned Pytorch. There are so many different commands to wrangle your data into the shape you need it to be. I frequently mixed them up and got frustrated because it doesn't necessarily result in runtime errors and then it's hard to debug (because I didn't know what I was doing). So everyday I chucked a couple of the new commands I encountered into Anki and by the end of the week I was comfortable doing all kinds transformations. Would I have learned to do that without Anki? Probably. Did it give me an additional opportunity to consolidate that knowledge for very little cost? Also yes.

This is the issue I've found with SRS style memorization in general. It's basically the definition of overfitting.

He should have used Vim instead of memorizing it's keybindings. That makes no sense at all.

I managed to finally switch to using Vim after years of attempts, once I used Anki to help me memorize the common commands. I was less frustrated when using it day to day.

Well, he absolutely should have been using Vim, he instead spent the week learning vi.

As someone who has a had some false starts with SRS, this seems like an interesting approach. Do you add all these disparate topics into one huge deck? What does adding a new topic domain look like?

I think a bit of the problem (for me) when I tried anki before was friction from the overhead of 1.) deciding how to split time among decks and 2.) having to assign a 1-5 value for 'how well I remembered the info'. That second point is huge, I find that kind of task to be incredibly exhausting. Do you have any tips for getting over that?

Bird calls is a great idea! I never thought of it, but it really does align with the medium.

Where did you find a decent flash cards about knots?

(Shameless plug at the end)

During my Erasmus in Germany, I've tried almost all of the top language learning apps (Duolingo, Babel, Seedlang, Anki...) and none of them have really worked me.

What I wanted was:

* Learning in context --> A lot of German words do not have direct English/Czech translation, so learning the 1:1 word translation did not work well

* Having audio for each card

* Intensive pace --> Going through a lot of cards in one session. Duolingo is the worst in this as you spend a lot of time doing super easy childish exercises. If I want to learn let's say 30 min a day, I want to pack as much content as I can into it.

* Skipping ahead --> My level is around B1/B2, I don't want to do placement tests and then re-learning the words I already know

* Learning from my content --> I like to consume German podcast/youtube videos/websites and in some apps, it was quite difficult or impossible to add words I've just encountered "in the wild".

Anki has worked the best, but generating cards with sentences and audio was quite cumbersome and (a seemingly minor detail) I was loosing flow while thinking whether I knew the card "well", "good", "easy" or whatever the options are. What I like better is a simple knew/didnt know, while still using spaced-repetition.

So for the past year, I'm on-off working on a language learning app, currently only supports German, which helps you extract words from content (youtube, web, text), handles different word forms, and then generates cards with infinitely many sentence examples through GPT4, with a nice audio (latest GCP model).

The project website with Android and iOS links: https://vokabeln.io/ (web design is old, app looks very different now)

Dude. You rock at UX design. This is amazing…

Only trouble I have tbh is figuring out what I want to read in German! But I’ve signed up and will give this a spin, and send what feedback I can.

Thanks! My design is the one on the website. The neo-brutalism was done by a junior designer who was looking for her first project and she did extremely good job!

The real delight point for me was how painless it was to mark 700 words as already known and pickup a bunch of fairly common words i am not comfortable using (like “allerdings” and “eigentlich”) using that scroll-to-set-learned control.

That one took 3 completely different iterations and bunch of tweaking to get right. For example, when you open in, it scrolls a bit to the first word. When it did not scroll, a friend of mine was looking at it helplessly, trying to scroll on the left side with no success. UX is so difficult.

FWIW the one on the website is much cleaner, self-consistent and overall more pleasant to look at it. The one in the app (at least the iOS one) is a clear step down. Just 2c.

It doesn’t cover all of your requirements but you might find Clozemaster interesting

Yes, I've tried that one as well, but text input is too difficult and slow, whereas multiple choice is too easy. A lot of the time, I would be able to click correct option elimination method.

I’d recommend using GPT4 to generate English sentences and then Google Translate to get the German. Harder to get example sentences for a specific German word, but may improve the quality of the German. (I had this issue when generating specialized language learning podcasts in Swedish and Polish. Lots of English-isms in GPT4’s output).

I can recommend this too, although I use DeepL instead of Google Translate, and I also use DeepL Write to identify issues in my grammar

If you are really overwhelmed by the answers, then you could stick to just one or two of them. I agree that having too many can be overwhelming. The SRS algorithm should still work. I don't recommend to use "well", as you won't see the cards again for a very long time.

Also if you are going to give this a try, two features that are missing and frequently requested: - articles and plurals for nouns - wordlist with A1, A2, B1 words for people doing certificates I'm hoping to implement them next month.

What I like better is a simple knew/didnt know, while still using spaced-repetition.

Could you just click on the two ends, 1min Vs the scaled max time? I.e. ignore the two middle buttons.

Weird, I was actually thinking of a related AskHN, that comments here are obviously now the place for.

Is there anything similar people use for sort of general 'knowledge base' type things - like people use one big text file, or Obsidian, or Logseq, or Notion, or whatever - but with some kind of Anki-like reminder/retrieval rather than just deliberate searching to look something up?

Or do people successfully use Anki itself in that way? (Maybe I'm wrong to associate it with focussed studying/cramming on a specific topic for an exam say?)

The closest I could think of was a Zettlekasten system, where though you wouldn't have the automated reminder prompts, you would (if you'd done a good job linking things) have a rabbit hole to fall down once you opened something.

I think a related, but often overlooked question is: is there really a need for remembering things off the top of one's head?

Since there was no need to look it up, perhaps it's not relevant to whatever one is doing at the moment.

When learning a language, yes!

I'm studying data structures and algorithms, out of interest, and to pass technical interviews. I can't fire up ChatGPT during interviews.

Anki has definitely helped me. It's surprising how well it works if you do it daily.

I also add new cards when I come across a word I don't know. If I keep this up for years or decades, my vocabulary should be extraordinary.

There are things I used to understand while studying that I no longer do, but wish I did. I can look them up and understand if I want to intentionally use them, but they're not sort of available in my mind for me to draw on; information that might apply to something without me knowing in order to look it up, if that makes sense?

And also as a sibling comment says, language. In particular vocabulary - I've learnt a decent amount of Hindi grammar by self-study, in fact I think totally sufficient for casual or even professional conversation, but my vocabulary's really lacking, and it holds me back from speaking, which means even when I do have the opportunity to practice speaking with others, I can only say stupid basic things, I lack the vocabulary to say what I want most of the time. (And casual Hindi's way more forgiving than most languages, because 'Hinglish' is so common. But I don't get any better by just using Hindi connectives and ancillary words in an otherwise English sentence!)

Actually Logseq comes with built-in flash cards. That's why I love it.

https://unofficial-logseq-docs.gitbook.io/unofficial-logseq-...

Interesting, maybe I should try it out again. I wanted to like it, but I just kept hitting bugs even just for basic things as I was getting started. I think the big showstopper one for me was something like link a page and then rename it, and the link's broken; I found an issue for it and the response was like unfortunately due to implementation detail this is really hard and probably won't-fix. At which point I just thought ok nope that's table stakes as far as I'm concerned.

Edit: found it: github.com/logseq/logseq#7519 (maybe there's another way of a basic page link that isn't a query so it's not quite as bad as I described above, but still)

There's an Obsidian plugin for Anki -- https://github.com/reuseman/flashcards-obsidian

It connects with your Anki desktop app. You create notes in Obsidian in a specific format, and they get converted to Anki flashcards. This way your flashcard creation process becomes much easier if you already use Obsidian for note-taking.

Unfortunately, while super useful, that plugin is quite out-of-date. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't depending on what Obsidian/Anki version combination you use. If one of them updates, it breaks. I think I had to pin Obsidian to some older version to keep it working.

RemNote seems like a close match to what you're describing: https://www.remnote.com

What is rem note?

For all you people who have used Anki or other SRS for many years: how do you get over the problem of being bored by it? Or does that not happen to you?

Though I have not used Anki, I used a similar SRS for learning Chinese - the flashcards built in Pleco, but no matter how often I try to use it, I never last longer than 5-10 days, I just get bored by it. Also, no matter how I try to adjust the algo, I have the feeling that I am constantly over- or underwhelmed, no flow for me.

In the meanwhile I love learning, no matter if flashy (e.g. Duolingo) or traditional (from books) or something in between (a class), but I just never got the hang of SRS, though so many people recommend it.

I’ve used it for 4 years now to learn Japanese. It might be a simple matter of lowering the max # of review cards or the max # of new cards.

Also, given that you mentioned enjoying duolingo more, there are browser extensions/repos out there to enhance the Anki experience. I have some that help me make cards based on material I’m reading for fun.

I was having the same issue as you, and I had to fix it by making it more engaging and personal. Now all of my words concern material I’m interested in, and have some context.

there are browser extensions/repos out there to enhance the Anki experience

Any specific ones you wanna give a shout out to?

I use yomichan and mokuro for my system, which I believe are Japanese focused. But I’m sure there are equivalents for other popular languages

I love Pleco, especially the OCR, but I had the same experience. Learning from flash cards is boring to me and, no matter how well I drill it, I eventually forget the material. Probably it works better for people who will be using Mandarin/HSK vocabulary in the near future and for a long duration.

This is quite subjective, but for me being in control of what I learn in SRS means I don't get bored. I am only adding things that I am interested in learning, and if I become bored of something, I just delete it.

It might sound counter-intuitive with the "remember things forever" side of SRS, but it is better to forget boring things than not use SRS at all.

User of Supermemo, then Mnemosyne, then Anki for about 11 years. I use them for all kinds of stuff, language learning (Finnish) being one of them over the last few years.

If I'm bored by it one day, I just don't do it that day. Or week, like this one, where I was too entrancee by playing FTL.

Then I let myself get back into it. It comes and goes in waves. That's fine. The only person keeping score is yourself.

I've noticed that sticking exclusively to words I already know results in boredom, leading me to skip several days. This typically ends with me needing to catch up in a lengthy session (40 minutes to an hour), which seems less effective for memory retention.

Now, I make it a point to introduce new words at least weekly, which maintains my interest and reduces boredom. The challenge of new words, balanced with the familiarity of known ones, creates an engaging experience, much like a well-designed game with a mix of easy and challenging elements. This approach keeps me motivated.

Additionally, actively using the language by conversing with native speakers greatly enhances my motivation. The positive feedback and tangible understanding of its value significantly boost my commitment to learning.

So I have never actually used Anki for languages specifically, but I use it heavily for almost everything I deem important enough that I want to remember.

There are two very common reasons why people lose interest/motivation after trying out Anki. The first one is creating too many cards when you first start out. People get excited by SRS and then start creating cards for a lot of things, especially for stuff they don't actually care to remember. This is understandable, since you can't do SRS when you have nothing to repeat. But that gets overwhelming quickly, because it's hard to be motivated if you don't actually care about the material.

The solution for this is to only create flashcards when an opportunity arises organically. This has the additional benefit of your review sessions being extremely short in the beginning, which makes it easier to establish the habit of reviewing.

The second problem that often leads to people quickly giving up is not knowing what makes a good card. It's actually not as easy as one might think. Especially not when you want to get more out of SRS than just rote memorization of trivia. There's an excellent article from Andy Matuschak on this topic that explains it way better than I ever could https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/

If you specifically want to do language learning, then you might be tempted to download premade decks. This might work a little bit better than for everything that's not languages, but in my experience making a card is at least as important as the repetition itself. It forces you to distill the knowledge down into good cards, which is only possible if you engage with the material and also helps you find gaps in your knowledge. So I'd recommend against it.

Regarding your comment on adjusting the repetition algorithm... don't. It's highly unlikely that you'd be able to improve on the defaults if you don't have a good feel for how slow/fast you forget things. Even then, it's pretty difficult to make good adjustments. It's much more likely that the flow you're missing is just from not doing it long enough.

Hope that helps :)

I'm using a competitor on Android since both Anki apps (AnkiMobile and AnkiDroid) really aren't good enough for my language learning activity. They aren't as good as the desktop Anki app.

I'm actually thinking of building my own app for a while since the all the flashcard apps on mobile don't really work for me. Not sure I'll find the motivation to do it though, I'm just using the least bad option I've found.

Specifically, I want to always auto-play cards with TTS and there doesn't seem to be an option with the apps to do that.

Hi, my app which I've mentioned in my previous comment does that. Is there anything else that you're looking for in a flashcards language learning app that Anki misses?

It seems pretty good but your app is only targetting German right? I'm learning another language.

Right now I'm using this one : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=flashcards.wor...

Which seems the only one I found supporting auto-TTS in lots of languages which you can toggle in the settings.

The UI is truly awful though and the space repetition algorithm is kind of borked.

Ah, unfortunate. I will be adding more languages, but it will take some time. I prefer to have really figured out how to make the app great for German and then expanding, rather then doing everything at once.

Yeah that makes sense, the UI seems pretty good though, we are very far from what I'm using now. I could see myself using it if I was learning German.

Hi, I've recently integrated TTS into the AnkiDroid alpha series, could you give it a whirl when you have time?

TTS instructions: https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/fields.html#text-to-speec...

Installing the alpha alongside stable: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/pQZT9jNF6MU

Thanks, I'll give it a go again!

That would be a cool extension of the project.

I’ve always wanted a hands free version of Dualingo because if I’m driving or walking somewhere I don’t want to use my hands for obvious reasons.

Anki is a great software, but unfortunately it is quite difficult to install on Linux systems. Almost all packages on major distros are by now years out of date or kicked out, because Anki changed its build systems so many times, that the existing package maintainers simply dropped it: https://github.com/ankitects/anki/issues/1378

Nowadays, the Anki version in Ubuntu is from 2019! The snaps are also hopelessly outdated.

There is no Anki package for Debian 12, and the binaries on the Anki website are only 64bit, so on my 32bit system I use the online version on ankiweb.net, which actually works pretty well.

I just installed the Flathub version on Fedora. No problem at all!

Some addons seem to be not installable due to obsolete deps (like PyQt5), but a lot of stuff work without any problems.

The package on Flathub[1] seems to incorporate the most recent version.

[1] https://flathub.org/apps/net.ankiweb.Anki

Just to add another perspective, I use the anki package on apt/ubuntu and yum/fedora, and both repos work for me. I ran into one small issue on fedora that was really annoying, but it was fixable. The sync from the cloud worked on both

It’s also a pain to get working right with fractional scaling on non-GTK desktops.

I had been using GNOME on my little “study pod” ThinkPad X1 Nano (which has a screen that requires 1.5x UI scale) but Anki was a real pain under that and so started using KDE instead. Anki runs well there but KDE isn’t quite my cup of tea. Wish it were more DE-agnostic.

I’ve used their tarballed installer, which is straightforward. The app itself then checks for updates, and displays a reminder when there’s a new version.

Not as nice as having an updated version in apt, but it’s a trivial amount of work for something I personally get so much value out of.

Use Mnemosyne instead.

I personally use org-drill on Emacs.

I have weekly Portuguese classes in Skype. During the lesson, when there's a word I don't know, the teacher explains and writes it in the chat.

After each class, I take these words and put them in Anki. However, I feel that this is not a great system, a lot of times I need the context of the conversation, the word needs to be in a sentence or sometimes I would prefer the reverse card (English and Portuguese on the back)

Any recommendations for using Anki for learning languages that is not the basic word-translation pair ? I thought about incorporating Chatgpt in the process, and dump the chat history but I am not sure what would be a good system.

Yes, just writing down the word-translation pair is not useful at all. To add a little context helps, for example use app , like Linguee or similar ,that adds phrases when then context makes sense.

Nice site, I will try and see if I can integrate it into my flow somehow and give it words and get back sentences to put in Anki

You can ask Anki to also generate reverse cards.

But yes, word only cards are good in the beginning when you are learning only the most basic nouns and verbs but you quickly need sentences.

I’m sure there are plenty of online dictionary services which can do some sort of Portuguese sentence search for you.

My prompt to ChatGPT is to give me the 50 most common words for a given topic with translation and an example sentence (plus translation) in CSV format. Which quickly gives me a handful of usable flash cards.

Cloze cards also work well for this sort of thing, I think. Though they're easy to mass produce and create an overwhelming amount of revision, so be careful.

You may not have noticed, but there's also a reverse card type that only requires one note but adds two cards to your deck.

There are lots of people who have a similar intuition on the ChatGPT thing but none that I've seen create cards as good as the ones you could make yourself. Using ChatGPT as a dynamic pen pal is probably the better way to incorporate it into your language learning.

Long-term user of Anki ~ 13-14 yrs, with mostly language learning focus. It’s good; but out of the box, I find that most users barely tap into its utility. It’s templating engine, ability to shape card content and formatting via JS and CSS put it in a league above most other SRS applications. (With the caveat that it’s easy to waste a lot of time on inconsequential card-tweaking…)

A lot of people complain that it uses an inferior SRS algorithm. Other algorithms can be patched in; but I’ve never bothered because it seems like a hyper-optimization without known real-world outcomes. (i.e. Will I speak better {L2} if I use alternate SRS algorithm?)

I think the issue of inferior SRS algorithm is at least partly alleviated by the existence of FSRS.

... https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/The... ...

I'm not sure I believe we understand our own learning/memory anything like enough for this not to be total pseudoscience? Reminds me of A Beautiful Mind.

It doesn't matter whether this actually models how memory works in reality, as long as it has actual predictive capabilities which correlate to how it works in practice.

And this can be easily verified with data and simulations. The algorithm predicts how likely it is that you'll remember a given piece of information (e.g. in three days you'll remember this card with 80% probability), so if you can get a big dataset of reviews and run it through the algorithm you can easily check how accurate it is, e.g by calculating a brier score, or by comparing predicted vs actual recall curves.

Source: I've developed an even better algorithm than FSRS (I've directly compared them in the past, although that was quite a while ago so it might have been for one of the older versions of FSRS, so I'm not sure how the newest one compares), and now I'm working on an even better one.

It's welcome to compare your algorithm with FSRS. Here is the benchmark of FSRS: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-benchmark

I'm not really sure what you mean? It's been empirically validated to predict how you remember better than alternatives (or equal to SM-17) (essentially when it predicts that your % recall is below a certain threshold, it just shows you the card)

I used Anki to learn to recognize the top 300 plant species (and top mushroom species) in my area by sight. Totally changed my perception of nature.

How did you find out what the top species in your area are? Did you start by taking pictures of random plants and then researching what they could be, or did you use something like a guidebook? And what did your Anki cards look like?

I used iNaturalist website to list 500 most observed plant species in Eastern USA and Canada, and used a script to scrape the species names (scientific and common) and the URL of the title photo.

I used another script to download the images and build the anki deck.

My decks have just the photo on the front, then scientific name + common name + notes on back.

I’ve made many notes in my decks, mostly about the etymology of the scientific names to help remember them.

I’ve also added extra photos to the front to show other parts of the plant needed to distinguish from look-alikes, with notes on these features.

My reference is usually The Flora of Virginia and/or Sam Thayer’s recent field guide (which is a major new contribution through all his field observations).

I have not shared because the photos are mostly ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, but I’ve been considering redoing the photos using CC0/CC-BY (and asking some authors for permission but this is hard as iNat is pseudonymous).

What did you use for creating the deck?

I've done something similar in the past, scraping images + info and then used genanki I think to make the deck. Works fine for my basic cards at least.

Though I'd prefer to be able to use normal bash tools to manipulate markdown cards.

I think there are solutions to generate anki decks from markdown or anki alternatives that use markdown cards directly, but using genanki ended up being sufficient and giving me enough flexibility, considering I wouldn't be editing the deck much after.

Honestly, I think what worked best for me was CSV import. The downside of course is that I cannot easily edit or add to the deck in this way.

I should emphasize that in the process of going through the deck I was able to improve quality significantly. I changed many of the photos and added helpful notes so the script was really just a means to get the initial deck. A lot of the creation process occurred as I was reviewing and editing.

Wow. This is a very cool idea. I occasionally get discouraged that I don’t know what trees are around me - because it reflects a disconnect from nature. This may be a great trick!

Is there a good iOS app to create or review Anki flash cards?

I recommend the iOS app by the original app develop for reviewing but the desktop version for creation.

That’s what I do. Creation is difficult on mobile, easy on desktop and review is easy on mobile but difficult on desktop.

There is an official app, made by the same devs.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ankimobile-flashcards/id373493...

I was hesitant to pay $25 for an iOS app but after doing reviews for 180 days I’m at $0.14 a day and it will only get cheaper… one of the best investments I’ve made for sure

Yup -- https://apps.apple.com/in/app/ankimobile-flashcards/id373493...

It's expensive, but it's the only paid app by the creator of ankiweb (web, android, and desktop versions made by them are all free).

A lot of people seem to like shared card decks but creating your own cards is part of the learning process, you spent time with the material you want to learn, which is the main thing that helps you learning.

shameless self-plug:

On macos and iOS we found Anki a bit out of place so we build a competitor explicitly for language learning (https://wokabulary.com/).

Looks like a cool app, but a monthly subscription for a content free flash card App is asking too much. (Personally I prefer my learning tools to stay around without monthly payments)

We plan to introduce a lifetime purchase.

Initially, and for many years, we also tried to not have a subscription but steady development needs to paid somehow, same goes for customer support. If Apple would allow for paid upgrades…

Were conservative pundits outraged that you were pushing wokabulary?

Haha, at least it hurts our Google score. When we came up with the name it was just an innocent wordplay.

I've found Anki useful for focusing piano practice. Each piece of music I have worked on over the years has a few tricky bars in it. Before Anki, I was really bad at remembering which bars I was bad at in each piece, and would tend to practice the bars I already know how to play, which is pleasant to do.

Today, I have one deck, which has a flashcard for each set of tricky bars from all the pieces I've worked on. Now when I sit down to practice the piano, I just load up that deck, and those bars are what I practice, and I grade myself on each flashcard to indicate how quickly I need to re-practise those particular tricky bars.

I've done this 5+ year now, and I'm impressed at how good the default algorithm seems to be at effectively ordering my piano practice sessions.

I was just wondering how to apply anki for learning guitar tabs. Can you please share a sample of one of your piano cards?

For the "front", I give a title like "Sonata K.545 - The turn". And then the "back" is a screenshot of a few bars (usually between 2 and 5 bars). If those bars happen to be towards the end of a line, I'll also include a screen shot of the clef (left-hand side), so I know the key!

When I am using the deck, on each card, I immediately hit the "space" key to show the back (because I am not using the deck to "memorize"). I practice the few bars on the screenshot, and then when I am bored (usually after a minute or two), I grade myself, by hitting the most relevant button (Again, Hard, Good, Easy), which gives the algorithm the info it needs to know when it should show me those bars to me again.

The deck works great on a PC, iPad or phone. Piano Practice in your pocket at all times!

Wow nice, thanks for the tip! I'd never have thought of using spaced repetition for piano practice, sounds like great advice.

I saw someone saying the exact same thing for practicing tying knots.

There’s something there. Physical skills learned with spaced repetition.

Flash card may be good for memorizing lots of stuff in a short time, but I find using flash card is incredibly boring. If we manage to learn things in long term, and we always should, there's always a more fun, more effective, and more efficient way to remember than paced reminder with flash card. For instance,

  - A new language: Comprehensive Input. Basically immersive studying with tons of reading, watching, and interaction. Given youtube and streaming services and low-cost online tutoring, immersive studying is so affordable now. Language is all about the right intuition in the right context, which flash card can't offer any way.  

  - STEM. This is an easy one. God forbid one should rely on flash card to memorize any STEM topic. STEM is all about intuition and understanding why and making connections. Solving problems, real or designed, is the most effective way. 

  - History and etc. Reading novels and biographies to learn a great deal of historical context, reading engaging books written by scholars to get accessible yet rigorous treatment of a specific topic. Anecdotally, I find alternative-history novels particularly engaging

Language is all about the right intuition in the right context

Huh? How about the tens of thousands of words you need to be able to recall and recognise in both directions in text and speech? You can't reason past irregular verbs and inconsistent rules about gender.

If you're learning a language like Chinese, you need to memorise the characters. If you're learning a romance language, you need to memorise the conjugation and genders.

Immersion doesn't replace dedicated study. The words that appear the least - which you're most likely to miss - are the ones with the highest entropy.

I agree with you that one needs dedicated study. I just don’t think Anki card is necessary — it’s great if it works for you, of course. The repetition comes from tons of reading, writing, and listening, and speaking, all intense and dedicated.

Essentially, I’m advocating learning like natives. There is an interesting contrast too: Chinese schools used to teach Chinese kids English with an emphasis on mechanical repetition: grammars, memorizing words with Anki-like mechanisms, and etc. The result? Generations of students knew no more than 4000 words after 10 years of learning English, let alone writing or speaking fluently. In the past 20 years or so, though, their elite schools changed course, trying to teach their kids English like teaching them Chinese. The result has been astonishing. For the first time, a generation of Chinese students in even elementary school can use English fluently.

I’m also speaking from my experience: I’m fluent in English, Chinese. Can read novels like Project Hail Mary in Spanish, and N3 in Japanese. I can attest that remembering words has never been a problem with intensive reading. Listening and speaking can be a problem precisely because I don’t do them often enough.

Yeah I agree. Apart from very specific situations like learning for tests[0] flashcards are not the optimal method.

[0] And even then I'd risk saying that you can probably get better results creating a personalized ChatGPT-4 tutoring/examination session on any topic except arithmetic/anything involving computation.

Yeah, even for a test that I need to cram, I’d use Feynman’s method, focus on core concepts, plus solve representative problem sets

I actually looked into Anki recently, my idea being:

instead of mindlessly scrolling through social media during downtime, why not memorize poems and great song lyrics?

The issue is: I'm sick and tired of apps that want your web credentials. I want an app that doesn't share anything about me. Completely local.

I have to admit, I haven't searched on Play Store for one.

The issue is: I'm sick and tired of apps that want your web credentials. I want an app that doesn't share anything about me. Completely local.

Anki does not require your web credentials, so it's very well suited for you!

You can create an account if you want to sync your decks between computers or to your phone. It is not necessary or required.

You can also run your own sync server so you can get the benefit of multi-device syncing without needing to use the free provided service.

https://docs.ankiweb.net/sync-server.html

Excellent. Thanks.

AnkiDroid: https://f-droid.org/packages/com.ichi2.anki/

From the F-Droid description:

Opt-in synchronization uses the non-free AnkiWeb service by default, but this can be changed in the settings to use, for example, an instance of the unofficial Anki Sync Server).

Opt-in / off-by-default crash reporting will send data to a private / AnkiDroid open source team controlled crash reporting server if enabled. This data is only used to help fix crash bugs.

Opt-in / off-by-default analytics will send data to Google Analytics via an an open-source implementation of the analytics API if enabled. This data is only used to focus developer efforts on popular features.

Everyone should be aware that someone hijacked the Anki name, so there is the genuine anki project and some copycat SaaS anki service with mobile apps in the app stores using the same name

I did not know this, and recommended someone recently install from the app store and it was $25. Makes a lot more sense now.

AnkiMobile is legit and is a $25 one-time purchase on iOS.

All other platforms are free, including AnkiWeb, which can be used on iDevices

The $25 one on the app store is probably the actual one. The creator of Anki has only monetized on iOS/iPadOS (one app, works on both) with a $25 one-time purchase. It's free on all other platforms it's available on (AnkiDroid is not his project, but is compatible and is also free), including on the web. His syncing service is free to use.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ankimobile-flashcards/id373493... <- the legitimate one

Anki is unbeatable for acing any test with a bounded number of questions [1]. It's been successfully used by some top TV show contestants to remember thousands of words [2].

I've been using it recently to remember recipes and cooking facts, such as the time it takes to boil X vegetable, or the ingredients for some dish.

Apart from language learning and medicine, there's a lack of pre-built decks that you can use to learn topics. I'm building Python.cards [3] to apply spaced repetition to learn Python with pre-built decks, daily reminders, etc. to make it the most convenient.

[1] https://www.thediligentdeveloper.com/spaced-repetition-reall...

[2] https://www.esquire.com/es/tecnologia/a36913467/pasapalabra-...

[3] https://python.cards

When Anki is the right tool for the job, it is amazing. I used it to study the questions for the FCC radio amateur license. Pre-made decks were available, so I just loaded it and studied on my phone when I had free time. I had around 2 months before the test, so it was very pleasant to slowly go through all the questions.

It seems the tricky part is motivation. Very few people get excited by card-reviewing itself. The method shines when there is external pressure, such as exams.

I think a sense of community can help provide this motivation (like a group of people all learning at the same time), but it's still tricky.

Definitely interested in the Python cards - subscribed

Ankidroid question here:

On Android systems, if you use the free Japanese dictionary Japanese Kanji Study (by Chase Colburn) it can generate Anki flash cards directly from the app, so everytime you look up a word you can also generate the card for Ankidroid/Anki.

Is there similar functionality in any Chinese dictionary app for Android?

Pleco: Settings - Flashcards - Flashcard System - select AnkiDroid

I believe the wiki[0] lists most of the apps which use our API

https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/wiki/Third-Party-A...

I could never get Pleco to work. What settings do you use?

What do you mean 'not work': not adding cards, or AnkiDroid not appearing as an option?

I'm limited in time now, and HN isn't the best place for user support. If you post a reddit thread/on our Discord, I'll likely be able to help further.

Links to Discord/Reddit are inside AnkiDroid: Help - Community

This is like the 20th time the Anki-promoting mafia have posted it on HN

yes, kids: we know Anki exists

I see value in different HN-“mafias” posting about their favorite niches from time to time. It’s a reminder of sorts that the niche exists and that people find value in it.

In this case, I like following the spaced repetition algorithm development and integrations into tools like Obsidian and Logseq.

I’m trying to get back into using the tool every now and then to see if it works for the current me.

So you're saying "easy, 4 days" for the next repetition?

The fact I didn’t know about SRS till I was 30, is a sad one. School and university would have been much easier for me had I known about it. I am very happy for it to be posted constantly!

I love how much attention spaced repetition gets on HN. Does anyone know if there are any communities for researchers or engineers working on spaces repetition and adjacent problems? /r/spacedRepetition is basicly dead. I really wish there was a place where I could discuss space repetition research with technical peers. if such a place does not yet exist and there is interest in creating one, please reach out I am easy to find. Maybe we could start a Discord server.

Maybe try the supermemo discord.

That answers my question. Thank you!

You can check out https://old.reddit.com/r/Anki/

As much as I don’t like Reddit, I still find it better than Discord. Purely because it’s discoverable by the search engine

Can anyone comment on why most people want software like Anki to be a native application? Most people who implemented their own SRS have done so in the form of a mobile app. Why?

I would think that having a web app would be much easier from a single developer point of view: maintain one application that can be accessed from any device. I am biased because I'm a web developer but I'd like to be corrected.

I want a native app for Anki (and similar things) because I don't always have an internet connection. It's pretty much as simple as that. Anki does have a web version which I have used, though.

Progressive web apps[0] are one solution to that. I’m not saying it’s perfect but it is possible to have both I think

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_web_app

With a mobile app like AnkiDroid, you can do SRS where you have no coverage. E.g. waiting in a car, while parked several levels underground.

Anyone have suggestions for the lowest friction / best UX way to generate and study Anki cards? (my smartphone is Android, if that matters.)

I know spaced repetition is super helpful and I should be making and study cards to help with language learning and other topics I'm studying, but it always feels like a slog to try to find a deck (which won't end up being what you want) or manually make a bunch of cards, the UI is a little meh, etc.

To generate: if you're trying to learn Japanese, you can use the Yomichan [1] (or Yomitan now that Yomichan [2] has been sunset) extension for Chrome or Firefox which integrates with Anki so you can create a card for a word you don't know with two key presses.

[1] https://foosoft.net/projects/yomichan/ [2] https://github.com/themoeway/yomitan

For language learning, I tend to watch TV with subtitles, type the new words into a text file, run that through Google translate (and edit a little bit), save as CSV, and import via the desktop app.

I take notes on paper while studying the subject, then when I'm done I put the essential concepts or whatever I want to memorize into cards in Anki via my computer (I usually avoid adding them on my phone, it's slower).

It is a slow process, but for getting new ideas to stick, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

I don't usually bother with preexisting decks. If you’re building your own from your own study, it almost guarantees you actually understand what you're trying to memorize.

I've been using Anki a bit to supplement my language learning. I built an Anki deck generator that makes emoji/tts/word flashcards! It's worked pretty well for me to get some better word recognition.

https://flashcards.bpev.me

Nice! My feedback was going to be that I don't even know some of them in English (my native language) because it's just not clear to me what the emoji mix is supposed to mean, but I see that 'from emoji' is sort of the whole point, so that's not really helpful.

I've been wanting to use something like Anki as a general purpose 'knowledge base'/reminder/learning system; if I do use Anki I'll certainly add this, cheers.

Thanks! Yaya... selecting what emojis to show has been challenging, trying to balance clarity with word usefullness. Also cuz sometimes I miss how different some specific emojis look on different OS; it can muddy the intended meaning for some platforms.

Just to note: Anki supports `{{tts}}`, using the system TTS providers

https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/fields.html#text-to-speec...

I wanted to fire up the AnkiDroid app on my Android device (which I installed a couple of years ago), and all I get is an error saying: "Please grant AnkiDroid storage permission to continue" and there's no way forward.

I suspect that's because it needs to store the cards and media. Are you unable to grant it storage permissions for some reason?

I don't see any "storage permissions" option. Android 14.

https://github.com/ankidroid/Anki-Android/issues/14423

Looks like a bug with AnkiDroid and different Android versions (if the app was installed on a prior version of Android and Android was upgraded). Some workarounds in that thread.

No one has mentioned it yet, so I'll drop this alternative: https://mochi.cards/

Much prettier than Anki, has a simpler algorithm that doesn't require rating difficulty, and has lots of the same features. I'm a subscriber just because of the cloud sync - wish I could self-host but I'm happy to support the developer.

Anki has AnkiWeb for cross device sync and (supposedly, haven't tried) has self-hosting.

I use Mochi too. It's much nicer-looking.

Looks really cool!

You know what I would like to see?

First, I'd love Anki / Anki Flashcards to work as a smartphone Android app.

Second, I'd love to see some way to for users to globally share their flash card decks with other users.

Third, I'd love to see a site where someone could search for the decks created by other users.

Forth, it should be permissible for users to charge very smallish amounts of money for their flash decks, and/or share them for free. Their choice!

Anyway, looks really cool and I wish Anki a lot of luck!

hi bestie...

(1) there are multiple apps on all phones (2) this is already a thing https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks (3) this is the same as (2), are you an AI? (4) it is permissible.

AnkiDroid for Android works well, I used it for a while when I didn't have an iPad (old one had died, had an Android tablet collecting dust so switched to it).

bbno4 already pointed you to the shared decks.

Some people do sell decks. The main issue with that business model is it's entirely trust-based. The decks have no form of DRM or anything, they're just sets of cards and media that get imported so can be freely passed around once purchased. But some people do sell them.

SSR tools and flashcards are amazing for knowledge retention. When I started learning new language, my google sheet with words I wanted memorize grew to hundreds pretty quickly. I wanted the simplest possible app that would let me to import and repeat words from my list anytime I have even a few minutes to spare. And being a developer, of course I decided to write one myself. It’s a bit different than anki and obviously has less features (it’s a pet project after all) but the concept is pretty similar: https://byheart.io/

This looks amazing! Love the design.

Thanks, appreciate feedback! Let me know if you have any questions

Sitting down with Michael W. Lucas's Networking for System Administrators and making Anki flashcards out of them was probably the highest impact thing I did for my career last spring. It's an incredible tool, truly.

Anyone else who wants to learn just enough networking to never be 100% stumped by it again, I recommend both tools.

Can you share what your typical flashcard for the book looks like?

There's a bunch of different subtypes I've used. But one surprisingly high ROI example has been private vs public IP flashcard examples.

E.g. "10.1.0.0 - private or public?" "Private - everything in 10.0.0.0/8 is considered private". "192.169.0.0?" "Public".

Anki deck is one of the first if not the first spaced repetition tool. What do they do to remain relevant after all these years, ain't broke don't fix it, or is there more?

It’s not the first; it’s basically an open-source clone of Supermemo.

Not even close. Anki came out 2006, SuperMemo's first version came out 1987!

I used Anki quite a bit in med school, where it’s extremely popular. Admittedly, it took me a couple years to fully buy in to it as a tool for cramming hundreds of facts, especially coming from an academic background (computer science) where memorizing facts at a high rate was not a huge emphasis at all.

After using it for a while though, I began to value how the quick recall encouraged by the system actually seemed to /enhance/ my deeper understanding of concepts, rather than replace it (I wrote a short post about this a couple years ago [0]).

[0] https://samrawal.substack.com/p/on-the-relationship-between-...

Thank you for sharing your experience. This confirms my bias in the deep value of anki.

Does anyone know of a card set for FAA pilot's license? Seems like a near-ideal use...

https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks?search=faa

No clue on quality.

I tried to make it work for me many times. Several people in my circle recommend it, I understand the concept of spaced repetition, I wanted it to be useful. Still, it always feels off somehow, and mechanical, and never seems to click for me. I guess memorization is just not the bottleneck in anything I do.

Yes. I've tried it various times too. But there is something that just doesn't seem right about it. It's memorisation for the sake of it.

I've found that writing about the things that interest me, giving presentations, and talking about stuff with people with similar interests, is much more effective.

We are probably just a few years away until everyone carries some LLM on their body that sees and hears everything and it will give us contextual information about everything via some AR glasses. Humans will forget how to memorize things, most likely. I already have lost this till a long time ago. It got replaced with a skill of vaguely remembering where I can find that information again (A book? Google? Some social media platform? Somewhere on my disk? Some USB stick?)

You will be unproductive (including when using an LLM as an assistant) and less capable of solving complex problems if you don't memorize stuff in a technical field like SWE.

How to create "community curated" Anki decks?

For example, is it possible to create Anki decks and make them available on github so that if there are any mistakes, others might raise a merge request and once merged, everyone else can "pull" the latest deck?

I've seen a community-managed Anki Shared deck, I think the "Ultimate Geography" deck is community-shared.

Been using Anki on and off for years for learning Japanese and more recently, have been using it for studying for university courses.

It’s a great tool, but it’s definitely got some oddities, like how its editor has every formatting and templating tool under the sun but is somehow missing spell check, how some features can only be had through fragile extensions, or how for some reason it’s one of the few programs one shouldn’t install from their distro’s package manager.

One of these days I’d like to take a crack at building my own cross-platform subject-agnostic SRS card app. There’s a number of things I’d do differently.

Check out Mochi if you’re looking for an alternative. It probably ticks most of your boxes already.

https://mochi.cards/

This is massively popular in the medical student scene. They can't get enough of it, but also complain about it's restrictiveness at the same time. I wonder if there are any other platforms / if this is a space for disruption...

What's restrictive about Anki?

I've been using Anki for around two years to learn Arabic vocabulary. It's an excellent tool that has helped me remember and continuously recall thousands of words. Some strategies I've found particularly effective are:

- Focusing on memorizing short sentences or phrases instead of isolated words. - Regularly adding new words, at least weekly, to keep the learning process engaging and not monotonous. - Including only words that I actually come across and learn in my daily life, which significantly aids in retention—possibly because I can recall the context in which I first heard them. - Installing AnkiDroid on my phone to make the most of idle times like commuting or waiting in lines for practice.

if you want to make a list you need to add an empty line between each "-"

- line 1

- line 2

- line 3

Anki has literally changed the way I think. It's insane how I can just choose to remember anything and how I have gotten really good at creating flashcards to the point where I predict how I'm going to learn when making flashcards. It is the one thing that has easily changed my life.

I see it as a commitment, this is something I will remember for as long as I choose to. If it becomes irrelevant, I can delete the card. If it's too hard, I'll break it down into simpler things, or sometimes I even just write stuff out on paper cards that I review throughout the day. But once it's in anki, I'm committing to remembering it.

In the most bizarre of coincidences I just installed anki now before seeing it on the front page of hackernews

A piece of advice: stick with it. The usefulness of Anki lies in its ability to efficiently schedule flashcards, so it will be of little use if you review cards only occasionally. Review most/all of your due cards everyday. If you find that your workload is too much stop creating new cards or perhaps increase the base multiplier for flashcard intervals (not recommended unless you're really exhausted).

love anki! i use it for japanese. although i wish i could donate to the devs at least, they dont take donations

If you really want, buy AnkiMobile [0] as a gift for someone (the only monetisation for the dev)

AnkiDroid has an Open Collective [1] https://opencollective.com/ankidroid

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ankimobile-flashcards/id373493...

[1] https://opencollective.com/ankidroid

https://faqs.ankiweb.net/how-can-i-donate.html

Anki is great.

Used it when learning/practicing music theory - generated flash cards with notes and chords (python script that generates LilyPond, iirc), been a huge help, much better than 'specialized' apps that basically do the same.

How did you do it? Can you share an example?

I tried to use Anki a while ago, but stopped. I felt like Anki is trying to control my life while I could not control it. It was too easy to make strategic mistake that would affect your workload in an uncontrollable way a week or month later.

For example, if you have time or are bored today and do some extra cards, your workload month later goes up. Except that month later you might be tired and not have time. And if you skip a day or dont do everything, the next day your workload goes up by twice ... and a week later too and a month later too for the same batch of cards.

Anki is awesome. I used it for a couple of years to improve my English vocabulary but I ended up using spreadsheets like airtable because of few reasons:

1) Import/export is limited when I want to create a batch of flashcards from the list (from ChatGPT for example)

2) It's hard to stick to it and do it everyday. I wish it showed some progress in motivating way. This is why we use TODO lists after all. We human beings love to see the progress. I wish it also included some sticky effect of Pop It Game or Bubble Wrap.

So I just created an Airtable table with few fields: Word, Translation, Days, Repeat (function field "DATEADD(Edited, Days, 'days')"), - used for filtering, Attachment, Edited_at (automatic field).

"Days" is "Single select": 1, 4, 10, 25, 55, 90, 200 days. I set this field with number of days I want to repeat flashcard in.

Sounds cumbersome but it's not. I see the progress - less rows in the table after every click. It's far from ideal anyway and it's not an actual SSR of course but it works for me. And because of some reason it's easier to stick to.

Anyway, Anki is great for most of the cases.

Shameless plug: I'm working on www.flashka.ai , a platform that solves a bunch of painpoints I and many others have had with flashcards.

I've used Anki and found it amazing, but it got to the point where making flashcards was too time consuming and couldn't keep up with them.

Mid-last year I found my brother having the same problem and realised after playing with GPT how effective it was at generating flashcards. Not perfect, but good enough to save many hours of writing them.

Now with Flashka we have started re-thinking the medium a bit more and try to make a great study-tool out of it

Anki is commonly used by Rubik's Cube enthusiasts who want to memorize lots of algorithms. You can do basic methods with just a few algorithms, but people use Anki when you want to memorize hundreds.

I love anki, I've used it from everything to Japanese to my college lectures, but my only issue is that it's UI/UX is a bit subpar, there's quite a learning curve to figure out all the little bits and details of the program, and it's easy to waste your time tweaking flashcard layout settings instead of actually studying. Then again, for me, I found often times for college lectures I rarely actually used the flashcards in traditional anki format - I found the act of cultivating all my notes, homework, organizing questions, creating layouts, creating the flashcards - that alone was 50% of the review that I needed to study the material.

Anki is a great tool for learning.

Does good memory actually helps you advance in life? Or does it only make life more fun/interesting. I feel like remmbering things has never been an obstacle to my professional growth.

Shamelessly plugging my org-mode extension to sync org entries as Anki notes https://github.com/eyeinsky/org-anki ;)

I have heard many times of this, I even have it installed. Need to start using this now, seeing the benefits in this thread makes me excited.

Been using Anki for years for more advanced language learning. I usually keep notes of words or phrases that come up during my day to day living in France that are new to me (or used a way I’m less familiar with). I research their construction/uses and throw them in an ongoing study deck I review every morning.

It’s really helped me gain a deeper understanding of the language and feel more confident in conversations.

I've only ever used Anki for some heavy editing of decks for use with AnkiDroid.

AnkiDroid is a separate, compatible implementation of Anki, for Android only, which uses local data.

Is there an SRS app or Anki feature that takes into account your reaction time when answering a card? I've wanted to use Anki for things like speeding up mental arithmetic but Anki doesn't seem to have a feature for measuring and plotting progress on response times.

I'm an Anki fanatic. I use it about 1.5-2 hours per day.

It has completely changed how I approach the topic of learning. I've used it to study Spanish, Italian, Network engineering, AI, Art history, world history, and US history. It's made me much smarter than I was before using it.

Unfortunately it can be time consuming. A big part of it is not just studying cards, but creating cards that are actually well-crafted.

It's also key to understand that it isn't for learning things that you don't know, but rather for memorizing things that you've already learned.

How does this app compare to Mnemosyne?

I have used anki for 4-5 years now, ~50% of days. I have a tiny worry that there is a "google effect"¹ of sorts associated with Anki. Before, in high school, I used to just read the chapter in the course book and then do well enough on the exam. In university, I also do well enough on the exams, however, I feel like I'm not learning the material/the bigger picture as well. For one, reading the book chapters takes so much more time when you're adding cards in between, watching a lecture video takes about twice the time of the video length. It's easy that the task becomes "creating cards" instead of "learning". I might be doing it wrong, adding too many cards, not reading the chapter and then summarizing it by adding cards. Still, the thought has struck me a couple of times, if I was braver I would stop using Anki and just do a lot of the practical stuff the knowledge would be useful for and let my brain do the filtering

¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_effect

I have Anki to thank for helping me study a language I now speak in every day. What an insanely well scoped, well made, simple tool.

I used it with my 10 years old boy for spelling.

I like the method. I found the app is still rough on the edges, and now I want to code a small one dedicated to science fields for him :)

Like many people, I started using Anki for language learning, and it has been wildly useful for that. I'm always told that I have a good vocabulary, which was precisely my problem last time I tried to learn a language.

Since then, I've branched into many other topics. The latest one that I've started building out is all of the Paris métro lines and stops. The most useful thing ever? No, but I feel happy knowing that I have a better understanding of the system I'm using ever day.

Used Anki quite a bit in my final years of university. Using it now as well for AWS certification prep. Can’t recommend enough!

I've put cards into Anki on several occasions and somehow when I come back after a few months they've disappeared in one way or another. Fool me once.

Is there an Anki alternative with better UI/UX?

I've always been too lazy to compose flashcards. I ended up using Clozemaster for Spanish studying.

I'm a big fan of spaced repetition, though I've hung up my hat with it for now. My journey with spaced repetition is a bit of a throwback - think pre-smartphone days, armed with SuperMemo on my trusty iPAQ hx4700. Picture this: a 19-year-old me, fresh in England for university studies, diligently working through English lessons on the Tube to and from work. Back then, I was convinced I'd settled in England for good, despite my English being a bit of a work in progress.

In hindsight, I'd tell my younger self to chill out and remember that learning a language is a marathon, not a sprint.

SuperMemo was a game-changer for me, boosting my memory like nothing else. It's like when you're coding in a language you haven't used in ages – things are on the tip of your tongue, but you're not quite sure. Is it len(arr), arr.length, arr.length(), or... darn it, is it size? sizeof? Space repetition solves this problem for good!

For my graduate math exams, SuperMemo was my secret weapon. I'd jot down all the proofs I needed to memorize and challenge myself to write them out. It worked wonders – I aced those exams. But interestingly, it wasn't about memorizing the proofs word for word; it was more about getting the structure and the key tricks down pat. In my practice runs, I'd often take shortcuts because who has the time to write everything out in full detail?

Then came Anki for my Spanish adventures. Nowadays, I'm dabbling in Portuguese but have given Anki and spaced repetition the cold shoulder. Why, you ask? Well, I'm a firm believer that if rapid recall is your goal, spaced repetition is your best friend. But most language learners don't use it. Are they missing a trick, or do they just not fancy efficiency? What stops them from optimizing their learning? I can only guess. As for myself, I've ditched it because, let's face it, reviewing cards over and over can be a snooze-fest. The most fun part about spaced repetition was creating the decks. Now, I'm learning Portuguese purely for the joy of it and don't mind how long it takes. I immerse myself in interesting content in Portuguese, occasionally revisiting something I've learned with a quick Google search. I'm perfectly fine with not reaching fluency quickly. After all, there's more to life than optimizing every bit of it!

Any Anki power users here have any anecdotes with FSRS?