Pro Tip , if you're using LLMs to learn, create an MCP tool for them to insert Anki cards on topics you're discussing in a csv on google drive, then sync that with you anki decks on your phone.
This was a game changer for me and working with LLMS, while I still think they make you dumb, and we essentially use them to offload critical thinking (almost only find myself using them when tired lazy, and just cant), if you must use them use them as a study tool.
LVB · 4m ago
> Thankfully, the leading spaced repetition software, Anki, has incorporated FSRS as its default scheduling algorithm since version 23.10, released in 2023-11
I've used Anki for a long time, but I don't closely track changes. Based on the above, I figured I'd be using FSRS, but I'm not. All of my decks have that setting turned off. Fair enough (no silent updates to existing data), but even when I create a new deck, I have to turn the FSRS setting on manually. What aspect about this is "default"? Is there a global setting I'm missing?
I'm glad it's available, though, without any plugins!
amluto · 2h ago
My personal peeve about Anki: I don’t like its data model. It seems to me that there ought to be collections of notes (which might be things one would download or generate with an LLM or make yourself or share with friends or students). On top of one or more collections of notes are the sets of cards to want to learn, and they can derive from the notes. This includes, roughly, templates plus some concept of which cards are enabled. On top of that is the spaced repetition history and model. There also ought to be a way to constrain what cards should be studied in a given session. (For example, if learning Chinese or Japanese, one might want to have a pencil and paper when practicing writing but not reading. When practicing without paper, one might want to skip the writing cards.)
Anki doesn’t seem to separate these layers at all. Everything is a monolithic database. Import is unpleasant. Export is unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant. Doing anything other than practicing and editing in the UI is unpleasant. And, every time I try Anki, I get stuck when I can’t manipulate my own data outside Anki.
Is there any system out there that doesn’t have this issue?
TheDong · 2h ago
> there ought to be collections of notes (which might be things one would download or generate with an LLM or make yourself or share with friends or students). On top of one or more collections of notes are the sets of cards to want to learn
Is that not what anki does? You have a collection of cards, each card can be in one or more decks derived from the cards.
> There also ought to be a way to constrain what cards should be studied in a given session
That's also decks. You can have your 'Japanese' deck, and then the 'Japanese::writing' subdeck for the subset which require you to have your writing materials handy.
You can also use "Better Tags" to tag cards, and then create a sub-deck with an ad-hoc tag query to only study a subset if you want.
Does creating more decks and then studying the subset you want to in a session not work for what you want?
> Anki doesn’t seem to separate these layers at all. Everything is a monolithic database.
Decks are separate files which can be shared, edited, created, studied, and reasoned about independently.
The "spaced repetition model" in anki is obviously separate from the fact that there are multiple (FSRS and the old one).
> Export is unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant
It's just files (zip files really). What's unpleasant about it?
> And, every time I try Anki, I get stuck when I can’t manipulate my own data outside Anki.
There's libraries to manipulate anki decks outside of anki for practically every programming languages. There are literally dozens of tools that can generate and import anki cards, such as the large family of japanese "mining" tools which create anki cards from media, dictionary entries, etc etc.
It's open source, and the code has clean library abstractions you can work with, so it's trivial to nab any of the data out of it.
> Is there any system out there that doesn’t have this issue?
Every issue you described is something that I experienced in other software, but which anki solved for me, so for me "anki" is that system.
amluto · 36m ago
> Is that not what anki does? You have a collection of cards, each card can be in one or more decks derived from the cards.
Kind of? As far as I can tell (and I haven't spent enormous amounts of time digging in), there are decks, and a deck contains the notes, the templates (and the cards, which may or may not have any sort of independent existence outside the notes and templates that generate them?), and a deck also contains the scheduling information.
One can export the textual and markup contents of decks, but not the media, into a text file, and one can re-import it, supposedly losslessly. One can also export a deck minus scheduling information for sharing purposes. I'm not sure that one can re-import it.
Then there is a collection, which is the whole world: decks along with their scheduling info.
> That's also decks. You can have your 'Japanese' deck, and then the 'Japanese::writing' subdeck for the subset which require you to have your writing materials handy.
I'm guessing that, if I start by importing a Japanese deck from some other source (because, for example, there's a source with high-quality notes), and then I split it into a writing subdeck, and then the original source adds new notes for new words or makes changes or whatever, that merging the results is basically unsupported.
> > Anki doesn’t seem to separate these layers at all. Everything is a monolithic database.
> Decks are separate files which can be shared, edited, created, studied, and reasoned about independently.
Yes, but only as monoliths (again, as far as I can tell). I can export an "Anki Deck Package (.apkg)", but checking that into git would result in a bit of nonsense. I can't export my scheduling information and templates separately from the underlying notes (or, if I can, I failed to find this option).
>> Export is unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant
> It's just files (zip files really). What's unpleasant about it?
Excel and OpenDocument sheet files are also zip files. But the respective tools are less limiting and don't expect the users to unzip those zip files. (And their merging and text import/export facilities are also weak, and that's unfortunate.)
I could be wrong about most of this. But Anki doesn't seem friendly to a decomposed workflow in the way that modern programming lanuages are.
uselesswords · 1h ago
It’s amazing how every single point you’ve made here is wrong as the other commenter already dove into. On top of that Anki is one of the best documented pieces of open-source software I’ve messed with. If you’re able to program, ChatGPT can basically handle any task you want it too, I data mine the sqllite database regularly for my own insights.
lovestory · 52m ago
My personal workflow with memorizing with Anki using LLMs is as follows: Read textbook material first. It's important that you understand what you are learning.You cannot just breakdown information into atoms and expect to understand how it works together (for example: you can learn that there are monounsaturated fats, polyunsaturated fats,
saturated fats and trans fats. But without reading beforehand about them from a textbook or other source, you will not understand how they differ (in chemical structure, biological function etc). After I understand the material, I feed LLM the documents (textbooks etc) and give it the following prompt:
>I want to generate flashcards from the provided textbook document using the attached PDF. Each flashcard should contain a question and a corresponding answer formatted as pairs in plaintext code block. The structure should be: "Question","Answer"
>Extract key concepts, definitions, and explanations from the textbook. If in the text imperial unit system is used, convert it to metric. For mathematical symbols and equations, format them using inline MathJax syntax because I will be importing the copied text to Anki. Ensure questions are clear and concise while answers provide a direct yet comprehensive response.
After the text is generated, I check out the accuracy (in 95% of cases the cards are accurate) and I import them into my decks. The rest is good old school Anki memorizing.
sn9 · 6m ago
I have been looking for a workflow to do exactly this!
Which LLM do you use?
Do you do anything special to structure the deck by chapter or section?
hiq · 35m ago
I remember trying that a few months back but I was not convinced by the quality of the cards. It's also hard to convey what I think a good card is, I guess there's something about not getting lost in the details while missing the big picture.
You only commented on accuracy, but what's your experience on relevance and how useful LLM-generated flashcards are?
To be clear I've already found myself deleting some flashcards I made myself while reviewing them when I realized they were bad, so I guess one can do that for LLM-generated questions as well, as long as the irrelevance rate is somewhat similar.
lovestory · 23m ago
Well I can give you an output example. This was generated based on chapter from textbook about Vitamin (Vitamin D in this example)
"Which nutrient can be synthesized by the body using sunlight?","Vitamin D"
"What is the primary role of vitamin D in calcium regulation?","Raises blood calcium by enhancing absorption, mobilizing bone stores, and reducing kidney excretion"
"How does vitamin D affect bones?","Supports bone mineralization and integrity"
"What form does vitamin D take before activation?","Inactive precursor synthesized in the skin or consumed in diet"
"Which organs activate vitamin D?","Liver and kidneys"
"What are signs of vitamin D deficiency in children?","Bowed legs and bone deformities (rickets)"
"What is osteomalacia?","Soft, weak bones in adults due to vitamin D deficiency"
"What disease is caused by long-term vitamin D deficiency in adults?","Osteoporosis"
"How does vitamin D deficiency affect older people?","Increases risk of fractures and joint pain"
"What is the toxic effect of too much vitamin D?","Calcification of soft tissues"
You get the idea. How would you rate it's usefulness is subjective but it gets the job done.
ilteris · 56m ago
Where does your SQLite db sit? I have been thinking about creating a local database to save and feed into LLM but i have no experience with it
rahimnathwani · 5m ago
If you export a deck as an .apkg file, you can unzip it to get the SQLite files:
I’m not using LLMs but I scrape open dictionary data to generate (massive) cards for learning kanji. I publish these in a specialized kanji learning app (rather than anki proper). My db just lives temporarily on my local machine, before I publish. Maybe sometime I will streamline the publishing process and create a github action for it.
btw. I didn’t use LLMs to write the app, it was still pretty straight forward.
I think there is an argument to be made about the poor learning curve (ironic) for learning how to organize and use Anki
jamager · 1h ago
For language learning only, but perhaps my own https://thehardway.app model suits you better (flashcards inside markdown-ish notes)
Tijdreiziger · 25m ago
Sorry, but your landing page is really awful. I’m not allowed to learn about your app because I’m on a tablet? And I have to give you my e-mail address, even though I know nothing about your app so far?
Suggestion: Allow me to browse your site and learn about your application, and I’ll decide if it’s interesting enough for me to open it on my desktop later.
jamager · 14m ago
You are right, I will get around that. For what is worth, I do not keep the email address.
Graziano_M · 2h ago
What are you talking about? Anki explicitly has the concept of 'notes' from which one or more 'cards' are derived. You can absolutely easily make custom decks that only have certain card types.
ape4 · 2h ago
Yeah, if you're learning a language, have a group of restaurant words and another group about air travel, etc. Then then user will associate them.
runarberg · 1h ago
For that I buy a vocabulary book, or a phrase book. As I read through it, and if I don‘t know a word or understand a sentence, I try to learn it using various methods, and create an Anki card to keep it in memory. Anki is just to retain the word.
On a plus side, you can buy specialized vocab/phrase books, I have one just for onomonopias. Also my beginner vocab books come with recordings from actual native speaker voice actors, which I add to the deck. Much better quality than anything an LLM or speech synthesizers can give you.
echelon · 2h ago
Seems like a YC business in the making. There's demand for improvements, and you already have your pitch.
Sprinkle in AI and you'd be a shoe-in.
joshdavham · 39m ago
If anyone's interested in experimenting with FSRS, we at Open Spaced Repetition provide official packages in Python, Typescript and Rust
Currently ts-fsrs and rs-fsrs support FSRS 6 and py-fsrs should also support FSRS 6 in the next day or so. Also, both py-fsrs and fsrs-rs include the ability to optimize the FSRS model from your past reviews!
marcusbuffett · 11m ago
I used this for spaced repetition for opening training on Chessbook, can vouch that the Rust package is excellent. Easy to use and immediately lowered the training load on our users while keeping retention high. FSRS is awesome.
Knork-and-Fife · 56m ago
I used basically this algorithm in college with the following setup:
Make a word document that lists all the keys to memorize vertically. Save as PDF
Open the PDF in a viewer with annotation tools. Make a clickable note in the margin just next to each key. Write out the value to memorize in the note field.
Cycle through the clickable notes. When you get one right easily, drag the note more to the left in the margin. As you cycle, focus on the ones furthest to the right. If you get one wrong, move it a bit further to the right.
In general the notes will move to the left until you're comfortable with all of them. And the balancing of which ones you need to see and focus on plays out very naturally and you feel in control the whole time.
There are many downsides with this compared to a tool like anki (e.g. I only used it on a laptop), but there was also something about it that just worked really well for me, so I never ended up switching to a different tool. But this was before anki had the similar algorithm described here. Maybe my experience would be different today
bearjaws · 3h ago
Spaced repetition has been all the rage for 20 years now.
Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet.
There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just that people tend to fall off the same way they do on any other education pattern.
A couple years ago I was thinking "If Google and Apple really cared about kids they would make a spaced repetition unlock system", where by you have to make note cards every week and then have to answer correctly to get into your phone. (obviously requires some bypass system, other rules, etc)
You could probably jury rig it with a popup that comes up after you unlock, but people would never install it anyway.
sn9 · 41s ago
You say that but it's completely revolutionized the way medical students study.
IIRC the effect was so profound they had to modify the structure of some tests or something to that effect.
And polyglots have been using SRS for years.
As always, the real problem when people fail to do something that works is psychological, not technical. I'd say anyone who made an Ozempic for motivation would make a killing, but I believe it's already a scheduled substance. Maybe one without potential for addiction or abuse.
BeetleB · 5m ago
> Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet.
Easy statement to make when you're not defining the silver bullet. Kind of like saying dieting turns out not to be a silver bullet.
I've used spaced repairing for over 6 years. It's been transformative for me.
Alex-Programs · 2h ago
Spaced repetition is time-optimised, but it isn't self-discipline optimised, nor motivation-optimised. If you're limited by time, it's very efficient, but it drains motivation. If you're anywhere close to being limited by motivation (or, failing that, self-discipline), it just causes burnout and failure.
I credit Anki to my success at GCSEs and A Levels despite having a head injury, and I also credit it to me burning out so hard I took a gap year!
And I'm enjoying the gap year, but Anki made it a near necessity.
InkCanon · 2h ago
There was an interesting post here awhile back about autonomy and motivation. The gist was people's motivation is proportional to their autonomy. This is quite intuitive, you can see people are really motivated when they have autonomy (think kids with Minecraft, musicians with instruments). One terrible thing about Anki is that it probably is horrible for autonomy. Quite possibly using anki actually has a negative effect on motivation.
maximus-decimus · 2h ago
I don't understand, wouldn't it be worse for motivation to take longer to achieve the same results?
avemuri · 1h ago
Motivation is some combination of real and perceived effort Vs expected reward. Shorter isn't always better. For eg. Counting every single calorie is the shorter way to lose weight, but for most people, eating approximately healthy is more optimal from an effort /motivation poi t of view.
Alex-Programs · 58m ago
Spending half an hour mind-numbingly learning words through flashcards will teach you about as much vocabulary as an hour watching educational videos, but it'll be far less fun and you'll feel like it actually took two hours.
Keep that up every day and you'll burn out much faster with option 1 than option 2. Now, maybe you have enough motivation for that not to matter, or the self-discipline to keep going - as I did in my A levels - but don't be surprised if it kills your interest in the subject.
runarberg · 33m ago
I‘m not super well versed in the literature but I know this has been researched, and—unless you are being hyperbolic—it completely fails the sniff test.
As OP points out, SRS is optimized for memory retention. You will almost certainly encounter many more words watching a two hour long video, but you certainly won‘t retain nearly as many words as half an hour of SRS.
Actually you can combine the two. Use the two hour long video to encounter new vocabulary in context, put the new vocabulary in your Anki deck, and review it with optimized SRS. You get the best of both worlds. As a bonus you often remember the source which will help you recall... This is actually common enough pattern that it has a name: Vocabulary mining.
tikhonj · 46m ago
What's worse for motivation than taking longer?
Boredom?
Feeling like what you're doing is low-quality or superficial?
Doing something artificial for purely external reasons like grades or exams?
Can't speak for anyone else, but for me I would take slower progress over any of these... which makes spaced repetition a hard sell.
barrell · 1h ago
I would say the implementations are time optimized, over the others. I’m building a language learning application, and have put in a lot of effort to make sure that the Spaced Repeition is motivation-optimized.
It’s centered around your performance and review times, to make sure you aren’t struggling to much; no due dates to avoid Anki slogs; gamified with some internal mechanics; dopaminergically influenced with aspects of randomness.
Spaced Repetition is just an equation (SM2 is laughable simple), but a lot of applications just slap a UI on it and call it a day, but that’s not the only way to use it!
huhkerrf · 3h ago
If you're expecting it to be a silver bullet, then you're in for a bad time.
You still have to do the work.
It's a lever or a pulley, nothing more.
jgalt212 · 2h ago
> You still have to do the work
Spaced repetition is doing the work.
antasvara · 2h ago
The "work" is actively trying to recall the information on the card. Spaced repetition is just a more efficient way of doing this than (for example) cycling through every single card, every single day.
InkCanon · 2h ago
There's some UX problems of SRS (that I'm working on) that makes it high friction
1) Time taken to create cards
2) Need for self marking
3) Creates a one to one mapping of prompt-answer
4) If you're an autodidact, you have to teach yourself first (alternatively called understanding, scaffolding, etc)
More fundamentally, SRS isn't a superpower because it's just very specific to creating a direct prompt retrieval. Generalization is poor. Even creating a graph of knowledge, is a chain of edges between bits of knowledge, isn't done very well here.
And I suspect there's a very deep, fundamental difference between recollection knowledge and logical-modeling knowledge. Recollection seems very similar to a dictionary access, and if you recorded the time to recall in humans I suspect they'd all be constant. But learning the knowledge of a logical model, like of a mathematical concept, appears to be vastly different and have very different time to compute.
Proponents of SRS will point out logical models need facts as well, like formulas, lemmas, etc. Which is true. But if you already grasped it before you'd grasp it faster the second time. So the practical use of SRS is a significant step above having a very well sorted and labeled notebook, but still way below becoming a genius.
nomadpenguin · 1h ago
Poor generalization (overtraining on prompts) and loss of context over time are the biggest issues I've found with them. Slow card creation workflows and needing to rate your own reviews are merely UX issues -- losing context and losing generalization make SRS actively harmful when used for some topics.
There's 2 solutions I've thought of but haven't tried implementing:
1. A free-recall based approach. Free recall allows you to operate at a higher level of organization and connect concepts at lower levels. However, how you would schedule SRS with free recall is not clear.
2. Have an LLM generate questions on-the-fly so that you don't overtrain on prompts. You might also instruct the LLM to create questions that connect multiple concepts together. The problem with this approach is that LLMs are still not so good at creating good test questions.
barrell · 1h ago
Where do we find more about what you’re working on? :)
hiatus · 2h ago
I would expect the flashcards produced under this regime to be utterly useless, like a flashcard with "A" and the answer is "B", or simple math problems. In other words, Goodhart's law.
InkCanon · 2h ago
This is a very big problem. Virtually all the results from research here comes from some form of simple word recall. Direct recall occupies some part of real world tasks, but IRL if you're stopped by doing something it's people not because you can't remember it (and you could look it up if you forgot).
petesergeant · 3h ago
> There's nothing really wrong with it
And a gigantic amount right with it.
This is a strange comment because it shrugs off something that has been transformative and hugely useful to a lot of people because it doesn’t fix all conceivable problems.
chjj · 2h ago
I don't think it's a strange comment. He's mostly right (and so are you, but I think you're talking past each other). There's nothing wrong with SRS, and I agree with you that it's basically like cheat codes for memorization, but there is a limit to what most people can do. i.e. most people do tend to drop off.
I remember reading some stats from WaniKani (Japanese SRS app) a while back...
WaniKani has 60 "levels" to learn 2000+ kanji. Each level takes about a week (there's no skipping ahead), so the material takes about a year of study to complete -- that's if you're going at breakneck pace, which most people aren't.
According to the numbers I saw on the WK forums, ~8% of users reach level 30 and less than 1% reach level 60... and that's just to learn as much kanji as a 9th grader. That's to say nothing of the grammar and the 20,000+ vocab words you'll need to SRS to truly learn the language, or the thousands of hours you'll have to spend speaking/listening/reading, immersing yourself in native content, etc.
People give up very easily. The language learning community often gives year estimates to reach "near-native level" in a language based on frequency of study. In reality, the process takes a lifetime. I don't know if people truly know what they're signing up for when install those apps and begin studying. It's a lifelong commitment. It's just something you do now, every day.
You can stop at any time of course, and most people do (more than 99% of them apparently).
chongli · 1h ago
Learning a language as a hobby is tough. If you don't need the language to communicate and survive in your environment then you have essentially zero real motivation to learn it.
The problem with spaced repetition systems is that it doesn't supply that extra motivation. You're still just memorizing things in a vacuum. If you truly want to learn a language you need to use it to communicate. That means making friends, travelling, reading books, and consuming other media in that language.
Tijdreiziger · 12m ago
You can also be motivated because you like to consume media in the language (relevant for English and Japanese), because you think it will be useful for a job (English) or for travel (French, Spanish, etc.), or simply because you like the language.
If you don’t have any of these reasons to motivate you, the question arises of why you’re bothering in the first place.
oliwary · 2h ago
I think this is a brilliant idea! Surprised nobody has built it yet. I would definitely use it.
fao_ · 2h ago
> Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet.
I mean, you say that, but I did mandarin for maybe 6 months, I did reviews for maybe a year or two on and off, I haven't done a review of mandarin for 8, 9 years now and I can still recall quite a bit of it. So for me it's worked quite well.
keiferski · 3h ago
I’ve been using Anki for about a decade now, and as far as I’m concerned, the only real improvements needed are design/UI based. It is functionally irrelevant if the algorithm is optimized or not when the actual user interface seems boring to potential users. While I do like that Anki has power user options, it’s also very unintuitive to the average person just looking into it.
Which is really a shame, as the spacing effect itself is such an underrated aspect of human learning that it almost feels like cheating.
arrowsmith · 3h ago
I love Anki but it’s an archetypal example of “designed by an engineer”.
It’s powerful, with a lot of depth to its features - but it’s also hideous, clunky and unintuitive, and it takes a long time to figure out how to use it effectively.
An HN-reading tech nerd can probably figure it out, but your average Duolingomaxxing normie? No chance.
Muromec · 1h ago
>An HN-reading tech nerd can probably figure it out, but your average Duolingomaxxing normie? No chance.
Me, the person who reversengineered obfuscated code doing weird crypto primitives and submitted patches to linux kernel can't figure it out either. Maybe I'm not HN nerd enough, so I had to do the duolingo to pass my citizenship exams.
Anki seems like it works for a lot of people with a very specific flow, but I don't know what the flow is and why it doesn't work for me. It's weird.
federicotdn · 2h ago
Reminds me of how I'm using Anki on iOS to learn German, and my phone's configured language is German, except for the Anki app, which is ironically the only app I've configured to be in English because I couldn't understand what 80% of the buttons meant.
_Algernon_ · 1h ago
Those reasons are why I love Anki. I'd rather have a program that exposes every mechanism of how it works and allows me to access it than a program that doesn't and the program appears to appear to work by magic. Give me visible cogs that I can tune and a good manual any day of the week.
Anki is refreshing function over form design. It's beautiful.
Pooge · 3h ago
I think the default settings are fine for 99% of the users. I've used them to "master" a language and I've been more than fine. Actually, I'd argue I was more effective than people who didn't use SRS.
cenamus · 3h ago
Sorry, but what's clunky about it? All buttons in reach of your thumb on the mobile app and usable keybindings on desktop?
Is there not enough useless whitespace around every button?
felipeerias · 2h ago
I have been trying to use Anki for years. Every time it is the same story: I keep it up for a few months until I miss a couple days, then due cards accumulate far beyond what can be reasonably managed, and I end up spending more time trying to fix the app than actually learning anything.
pm215 · 1h ago
This is an area where I feel like there's scope for improvement in the SRS space. All the SRS systems I've seen essentially assume the user is a perfect robot who will do their reviews every day without fail. But most people will have off days or go on holiday for a week and not look at the app, or whatever -- and as you note, the user experience in that case is awful: you come back to a huge number of reviews which is pretty discouraging to even start, you probably get more of them wrong than usual, so you likely do fewer reviews than you normally would, and the situation tends to get worse instead of better.
An SRS system which took more account of the human failings of the user might:
- let you pick a "max daily reviews" and then keep you from putting in too many new items up front, rather than letting you accidentally give yourself a huge daily workload after a few months
- let you tell it "I'm going to be on holiday in a month's time" and have it figure out what to do with reviews and new items to minimise disruption
- when you do come back after a break, pick the most useful reviews to offer the user up to the daily limit (e.g. something whose review interval is six months can wait a few more days, something the user added very recently and has seen only once could be put back into the "new items" bucket to relearn later, so if the user is only going to do 100 of their 300 due cards, other cards are more important to review today)
_Algernon_ · 1h ago
>- let you pick a "max daily reviews" and then keep you from putting in too many new items up front, rather than letting you accidentally give yourself a huge daily workload after a few months
Anki allows you to do that. It's in the deck preset options under deck limits. Nowadays you can also set weekday workloads, to reduce workload eg. during the weekend.
pm215 · 36m ago
Looking at the manual, Anki seems to let you manually set a new card limit, and also to set a review limit (after which it won't show more reviews even if they exist), but I didn't see anything for "given that I want a daily workload of this many reviews, limit my new cards automatically to try to not exceed that in future".
rsanek · 1h ago
biggest insight for me as a decade+ user: ignore the due count. just plug away at reviews when you have time. I've come back multiple times from backlogs of thousands of cards.
i really wish the UI would just hide number of cards due by default
dustincoates · 2h ago
I'll give you one example. Occasionally, I come across something that needs to be not be shown anymore. I realize that the question wasn't a good one, or my template spit out something empty. Now, do I suspend card or suspend note? Every single time, I have to go search for which is the right one. (Okay, okay, maybe user error, but still.)
Another example until recently was the extremely useful image occlusion enhanced add-on. Can you easily tell the difference between overlapping and nonoverlapping? At least they renamed those settings to the much more intuitive "Hide One , Reveal All" and "Hide All, Reveal One."
watwut · 2h ago
First thing that comes to my mind is that it is basically impossible to make it show you both sides of all the cards you are about to see for the first time today at the same time. So that you can actually try to learn it in more effective and less frustrating way then flashing cards on you in random order.
Second thing, control over workload should not be that hard. Anki requires too much tweaking to work reasonably.
Third thing, both old and new algorithm have a notion of "you are pressing the buttons wrong". If you are pressing the buttons wrong, you will end up with absurd intervals - like 4 months interval on something you just learned.
david_allison · 2h ago
AnkiDroid maintainer here: we're actively working on a new design for the reviewer (currently available in the Developer Options in the production app).
I don't think any of us are satisfied with how most things look, but we're severely under-resourced.
Feel free to email me if you'd be interested in getting involved with the Android side of things.
cosmic_cheese · 40m ago
My biggest gripe with it is how clunky the editor window is. That’s the main part that’s due for a redesign in my opinion.
It has other oddities too though, like the tab bar in the main window that doesn’t act like a tab bar. It should also really have two button mode (Again and Good only) for the review screen as a built in option, too — the addon that adds this is very popular and it’d be dead simple to implement.
brightball · 2h ago
I’ve been reading about spaced repetition and Anki for years. Never got around to actually trying it on anything.
I wonder if there are any good recommendations for something to try it on?
Muromec · 1h ago
Try to learn a different writing system, alphabet or not. Arabic, Cyrillic, Hangul, whatever. It has finite number of cards and you don't need large context to understand them.
keiferski · 2h ago
Language learning is the classic use case, but I also use it from everything from historical facts to encyclopedia entries on a subject I’m trying to master.
Probably the simplest use case to get started is improving your English vocabulary. (Assuming English is your first language.) I try to add a card for any word I come across that I don’t know the meaning of, and it works very well.
rsanek · 1h ago
it'd be nice to have a better UI. but the reason people don't use Anki isn't because it's hard to use. it's because the time to value is high, and the value really only comes from long term discipline and motivation.
people that are motivated and will succeed with Anki regardless of design will power through an annoying UI. so with better design, you'll increase top of funnel but radically decrease conversion.
yellow_lead · 3h ago
Compared to i.e Duolingo, the app is quite boring. I still have been using it for years. But I sometimes wonder if adding a bit of gamification may help. For instance, streaks, sound effects, etc. Obviously, those should be optional
wccrawford · 2h ago
I've quit Duolingo because of the gamification. It's far, far too much, and it puts me in the wrong mindset for learning. Instead of concentrating on the knowledge, I'm gaming the system to improve my score the most. There were times I would stop learning because I knew if I saved it for later, I could use a multiplier for a higher score.
And the daily emotion-tugging streak reminders started to actually piss me off.
On top of that, at one point they were changing the icon regularly and made it really ugly. Despite a ton of complaints, they left it that way for a long time.
So I canceled my subscription and I'm done with them. I'll find another way to study that I like (I've already tried Anki and it works, but I don't like it) and isn't mentally abusive.
TeMPOraL · 1h ago
I'm of two minds about it. Duolingo is off-putting for me, not because of gamification as a concept, but rather because of their particular implementation - with tons of clearly user-abusive bullshit with gems and chests and watching ads and shit.
I used to not care for gamification because I knew that my brain is resistant to it in activities that aren't otherwise rewarding on their own. Like, I quickly realize I'm just tricking myself, and then it stops working. But somewhere over the years, I must have burned out of my dopamine reserves or something, because apps like Anki feel now actively off-putting, in the sense that I lose all energy just looking at them. Memorizing cards gets tricky when your eyes just glaze over them and nothing is loaded even to short-term memory, much less long-term. So at this point I'd appreciate even a little bit of immediate feedback and some progress tracker that evokes ever so slightly positive feelings.
watwut · 2h ago
> On top of that, at one point they were changing the icon regularly and made it really ugly. Despite a ton of complaints, they left it that way for a long time.
My kids loved it. I did not cared. So, the likely explanation is that many people like that icon changes or dont mind it.
keiferski · 2h ago
I used to be something of an Anki evangelist and recommended it to anyone that would listen. But the minute I showed it to someone that isn’t already technically-minded, their eyes glazed over and they lost interest immediately.
I think it just needs a fresh minimal design, a tutorial, and some premade decks that aren’t just the half-baked free ones.
Alex-Programs · 2h ago
There's an excellent heat map addon that helps with that. Some people have tried the "dopamine effect" style things (confetti when you answer a question etc), and it didn't work for me, but there are addons for it if you'd like to try it.
dustincoates · 2h ago
There are streaks, but they're hard to find. There is a heat map add-on that makes them a lot more obvious.
watwut · 2h ago
Yeah, you do Duolingo because you want to. And you control perfectly how much duolingo you do any give day.
You do anki because you feel like you must and you have very little control over it.
iandanforth · 2h ago
I wrote "Why Anki Doesn't Work for Me" (https://medium.com/@iandanforth/why-anki-doesnt-work-for-me-...) six years ago, which means it was before the new algorithm was implemented. While Anki likely still suffers from all the other issues I mentioned, this directly addresses my point (3). I'm going to have to give it another try and see if the other points are still too much friction, or if the frustration caused by the algorithm was a majority of my pain.
rendaw · 1h ago
I had similar issues... anki would drill me hard while stuff was still in short term memory (single session) then push it back weeks or months before I had any retention. I'd get to it again and it'd be completely gone, queue re-learning it from scratch.
I brought it up around the time I tried it and got shouted down. Pretty much every spaced repetition app was treating anki like a holy emissary, so I gave up on spaced repetition entirely.
Tijdreiziger · 4m ago
[delayed]
Aerroon · 51m ago
I had a similar experience. In retrospect I felt like I was wasting my time trying to use it. I somehow ended up with memorization sessions that were too easy and impossibly hard and there seemed to be no way to kind of bridge the gap.
Alex-Programs · 2h ago
I switched to FSRS via the extension partway through my A levels. I also used the little google collab notebook to custom fit it to my learning patterns - I'm not sure if that's in the version that was merged into the main version.
It about halved the amount of reviews I needed to do, and they didn't come up in bursts, so they were a lot more pleasant. I didn't quite believe it at first, and worried that it would be less effective, but it worked just as well if not better.
I really recommend giving it another try!
scalingpilled · 2h ago
I’m doing my A-levels at the moment with economics and geography still to go, do you have any tips or advice for leveraging FSRS / tailoring it to my learning style that is more specific to A-levels, based on your experience?
Alex-Programs · 1h ago
Good luck!
I personally used Anki the whole time, so if you're currently doing your exams some of my advice might not be super useful. I did maths, physics, and computer science. I didn't use flashcards much for maths - just for the irritating stats equations - but used it extensively for physics, and a little for compsci (I barely studied for compsci).
During my GCSEs I extensively used them for history, which is probably the closest analogue to the wordy questions you'll get in geography. I used it for facts, order of events, etc. I found that the process of organising history into a well-organised Obsidian database, then distilling it into flashcards, was as useful as the flashcard reviews itself. I recommend separating your rough working during class (e.g. the short essays you write at the end of a lesson) and your organised notes, which I split into separate, interlinked concepts with flashcards at the bottom of the file synced with Anki via an extension.
I suppose the advice I'd have is
- Cloze cards are excellent, and you should use them
- You can't flashcard your way to mental models. Absolutely don't rely on them alone, and you need to do practice questions for every separate question type you'll get until you're confident with the mental model itself.
- That said, it's easy to get into the trap of remembering the answers to flashcards as words. While this lets you "learn" quicker, and speed up reviews, I found that I had much better real-world results when I tried to actually "load in" the mental model into my head. So for example, if I had a flashcard about refraction behaviour, I'd not just answer the question, I'd also visualise a laser going from air into water and how the behaviour of the light changed as the angle changed.
For history, it's been a while, but if I had a question about one factor in a broader crisis (e.g. the Berlin Airlift) I'd try to think about the broader context of the question - not in my internal monologue, but just vaguely considering the various factors involved, the period of history, personally I instinctively visualise a map, etc, for a second or two before clicking for the answer.
Edit: Oh, and the heatmap extension is great. It gives you streaks and a heat map that you really don't want to break!
echelon · 2h ago
WaniKani has the best UI for any SRS software I've ever seen, but they suffer from the old algorithm. They're guilty of all of your points and the article's fourth heading concern:
> And the idea that you’ll literally never see a card again after the last interval is terrifying, as it means you’re constantly losing knowledge.
celltalk · 11m ago
Super nice, thank you for this post! Based on this I've updated the vocabulary learning scheduling in DuoBook (https://duobook.co) to FSRS based. We should be up to date with the science based learning :)
kazinator · 32m ago
systemS? There is only one program out there that is viable: AnkiDroid.
Anki runs on desktop: you have to be chained to a desk rather than taking advantage of idle moments when you are on-the-go. Even if you have it on a laptop, you still need a place to sit; SRS on mobile can be used anywhere, like standing-room-only public transit.
The AnkiMobile companion app for iOS is a paid app that is somehow chained to the desktop version, whereas AnkiDroid is a full-featured clone of Anki that you could use air gapped without ever syncing anything to or from another device. It has integrated management of decks and note creation/editing.
Every other SRS app out there is just playing very distant catch-up to Anki/AnkiDroid. They usually mention Anki in their pitch, trying desperately to explain why some very minor and very subjective negative point about Anki is worth switching to their massively inconvenient solution.
entropie · 3h ago
Pretty OT: A few month ago I tried to marry my simple note system with anki. My goal was to be able to send simple front/backside cards to an api and it would get integrated and I can use it immediately. Ofc, when I edit cards via my notes-backend, the cards in anki should update too.
Long story short: not possible with anki. It took like an entire day for me to realize its just not possible without diving deep into ankis sqlitedb and having the client installed on my server to interact in a horrible way with decks. I wrote my own space repetition [1] backend in a week and never looked back to anki. Ill intergrate FSRS in my software.
I looked into this before too. Ankiweb (the place where cards created on Anki sync to) does not provide a rest API. The service is free though. It makes sense they may not want automated clients.
There is an implementation of their sync server, which you can self host. And it has a REST API
I think I ran into a blocker with it not supporting something I needed last time I tried to use it though.
jwrallie · 2h ago
Anki can import .csv files and if one of the column content is matching an existing item, it will update the contents of the card while keeping the repetition history.
Think of it like including a column with unique keys.
I know this is not precisely what you wanted, but yes, Anki can update card contents.
rsanek · 1h ago
i use the python package genanki to accomplish this. I've found it to be extremely dependable -- just use the first field as a UUID and you're golden (future imports dedupe and auto update imported cards with the same first field)
Every anki card is just a webview. Its very possible to call an api
entropie · 2h ago
Then you should be able to link me to some docs.
david_allison · 2h ago
> In Anki, templates are written in HTML, which is the language that web pages are written in. The styling section is CSS, which is the language used for styling web pages.
But you'd want AnkiConnect, or a Python-based addon for your workflow
criddell · 1h ago
Have you looked into any of the open source clients to see how they are communicating with the server?
entropie · 59m ago
I did that. The consens is like, just an example, yanki-connect:
> Anki desktop app auto-launch
> Perhaps the most precarious aspect of the Anki-Connect add-on is that the Anki desktop application must be running for any of the API calls to work. Yanki Connect tries to sand down this rough edge by (optionally) automatically launching the Anki desktop app if it's not running already.
welder · 3h ago
Edit: nevermind
entropie · 3h ago
Iam not sure what you are trying to tell me. Do you think I didnt use the original anki software? I think I have never heard of "AnkiApp" before.
Pooge · 3h ago
I'm sorry, I didn't read the article but I thought my experience would be a good anecdote.
I've used Anki for multiple years and learned around 18'000 Japanese words. It's difficult to say but I'd say I've learned how to read around 5'000 kanji. When I studied in Japan, my kanji reading—don't mix that up with comprehension!—was way above everyone else's. And most of my classmates were either Korean or Chinese.
That's what 10 minutes of free time—I did that during my daily train rides—can get you! Keep practicing. Being ignorant is the first step towards becoming more knowledgeable.
Alex-Programs · 2h ago
I made a tool based on this principle!
We spend hours a day browsing the web, so I made a browser extension[0] that translates sentences at your knowledge level into the language you're learning, so that you're always learning a little through immersion.
I also used the same "10 minutes a day on Anki" strategy with my A levels, and it made the revision process so so much nicer because stuff I'd learnt two years ago was as fresh as if I'd learnt it a couple of months ago, rather than years.
Looks not bad but a) billing/prices should imho be prominent and not hidden behind trial or get started. And b) not sure if 5/12/20 per month is not too much? The About section is nice. (I use two other paid language services, thus no need/interest in another)
cjauvin · 2h ago
There's a surprising gulf between word recognition and overall sentence comprehension. I'm learning Farsi with a combination of Anki and Youtube videos and sometimes I find myself in the weird state where I recognize every word in a sentence, but yet cannot assemble its overall meaning.
Pooge · 2h ago
I completely get what you mean and I had the same trouble. But keep at it, it will click.
FranzFerdiNaN · 2h ago
Not buying at all that you learned 18000 words and 5000 kanji in ten minutes per day. Thats 60 hours a year for say five year, or 300 hours. Thats leaves you with about 70 words and/or kanji per hour or less than a minute per word/kanji. A rate which far surpasses native speakers.
Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.
Pooge · 2h ago
Whoops, sorry if that was confusing.
Actually, it took me 20 minutes of time per day to do my reviews + new words. I had, on average, 200 cards to go through daily (180 review + 20 new cards).[1] Going through 18'000 words took me around 5 years. 5×365×20=36'500
> A rate which far surpasses native speakers.
Are you comparing me to babies? It took me 2 weekends to learn all kana, but it takes years for a toddler to learn just hiragana. It's not a fair comparison.
> Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.
I wonder why you think it's unrealistic. It's not like I'm a genius or anything.[2]
[1] Two cards is one word; one for English -> Japanese, one for Japanese -> English.
[2] Some teachers definitely thought I was a genius because of my memory, but it was all thanks to Anki. And proof is that I was absolutely bad at text comprehension. Anki doesn't make you practice that.
latentsea · 25m ago
I learned 17.5k words comprised of ~3k kanji in around 2 years at about an hour a day of review time. That's reviews + new cards, not including time immersing in order to find the daily quota of new vocab which itself was 2 to 3 hours of study.
So, by my calculations for just the Anki time alone it's about 17.5k words split across 730 hours, which comes out to about 23 words and hour or one word every 2.5 minutes.
I've seen a pretty wide variety of people do Anki, and I can say there's a distribution in length of time per card for basically the exact same types of cards among people. The slowest people average around 3x slower than the fastest.
Alex-Programs · 2h ago
That isn't terribly far off. I used Anki throughout my A levels, spending about 250 hours on it in total according to its statistics, and had something like 10k cards that I reviewed 50k times.
Now, those cards weren't alone - they were reinforcing content that I'd learnt in lessons. But if they were doing it for 10 minutes a day a few times a day, it seems quite plausible to me.
iamben · 2h ago
Sure, but I didn't read it as 10 minutes a day. The comment says ten minutes of free time. So could be 4 train rides, 10 mins after you finish your sandwich at lunch, 10 mins with your coffee in the morning, etc etc.
mdp2021 · 2h ago
> ten minutes per day
...Maybe the poster meant "«10 minutes» per ride"? («That's what 10 minutes of free time - I did that during my daily train rides»)
cjauvin · 2h ago
What I find interesting about spaced repetition is the underlying thesis that raw memorization, in certain contexts, is playing a more important role for learning than what some modern education ideas would make you assume. In mathematics or programming, for instance, there is this idea that understanding a concept is better than memorizing algorithms or recipes (derivation methods for instance). But spaced repetition challenges that, in a sense.
keiferski · 2h ago
If you zoom out and look and the shift in educational systems from pre-industrial revolution to modernity, memorization is a key topic. Basically educational reformers wanted a switch from memorization-heavy classics-based education with lots of Latin and Greek – to one with less emphasis on memorizing and more technical focus, more “understanding” and so on.
Like other big cultural shifts from the time, the correction was necessary but also probably went too far in the opposite direction.
Which is a long way of saying that memorization is underrated and it mostly has a bad reputation from anti-Victorian reformers.
wongarsu · 2h ago
Most modern programming lives by the idea that you don't need to remember something as long as you remember where to look it up. Of course that's only true for some things: I can look up an API call, but I need a reasonably complete working knowledge of the concepts offered by my chosen programming language and its idiomatic design patterns. In most cases this is maintained through application (practice is unstructured spaced repetition), but if I wanted to get into say C++-based driver development then spaced repetition would definitely help build and maintain the necessary knowledge
InkCanon · 2h ago
I think the difference in recall- knowledgeable and logical-model-knowledge will be really interesting. LLMs appear to strongly be the first. But this is very hopeless on mathematics.
Barrin92 · 1h ago
>But spaced repetition challenges that, in a sense.
Common sense challenges this honestly. Education systems that traditionally have put a strong focus on repetition, memorization and what you could call neuromuscular training (e.g China, the USSR, France) in particluar in STEM far outperform anyone else. Vietnam outperforms most rich countries.
In programming circles it's a cultural cliche because our profession is full of people who go by: "I am a genius, I work smart, not hard", probably the most damaging idea ever uttered in education, and in the humanities it's seen as culturally unsophisticated.
In reality, 95% of everything is mechanics. Starcraft, math, even literature and acting. Creative freedom is enabled only by a large body of effortless recollection.
I was working on a product which has FSRS implemented, and is heavily inspired by anki. The change we made was that rather than rate yourself, you have to type your answer and its graded by an LLM. It also has a button to explain the concept to you as if you are 5 (eli5) and you get feedback on your answer.
You can also create the flashcards by uploading a pdf and then generate them from it.
I've stopped working on it and am now building something highly similar aimed towards high school students, but any feedback is welcome. This version was built for uni students
mimair.com - I never got around to adding any payment option so its completely free
TheDong · 1h ago
> graded by an LLM
This seems impossible to me. In anki, there's "hard", "good", and "easy" which are all for "I got this right".
For my usage, "hard" is "I got it right, but I was only like 60% sure", "good" is "I had to actively think", and "easy" is "effortlessly correct, no real thought required".
There's no way for an AI to tell if my identical input is the result of a 50/50 guess, or a little thought, or effortless recall. "delay to answer" also isn't a good approximation, I have a habit of alt-tabbing and chatting with a friend on random cards of any difficulty.
I find distinguishing those levels of easy for totally identical answers ends up making SRS more effective, and AI just can't know my inner thoughts. Maybe once we have brain implants.
JackDanMeier · 1h ago
Yes, this is also something I have been thinking about, can an LLM really know how well I know something. There is the issue with the grading with again, hard, good and easy that I can cut myself some slack and say "I knew that" even when I didn't(and I have a strong memory of having done this myself). And there is the possibility of bullshitting the LLM and just all you know about the subject rather than the exact definition of the flashcard. I'm leaning towards any knowledge rather than specifying that the exact answer should be graded. Whats your take?
TheDong · 1h ago
Bullshitting the AI maliciously doesn't matter, if you don't want to study effectively, you won't study effectively, and that's not a problem for the app.
> any knowledge rather than specifying that the exact answer should be graded
I don't understand what you mean. The important thing is to feed back into the SRS algorithm "How much does this card need to be studied", and if you mean "any knowledge means we can study it less often", then I doubt the SRS will be able to be effective.
What are you suggesting to feed back into SRS? How will you ensure cards the user knows very well quickly get pushed way back (so the user isn't overwhelmed with a boring slog), and cards they only sorta know bubble up more quickly to start to cement the knowledge?
JackDanMeier · 1h ago
My understanding of what is important to feedback into the SRS is, was I able to retrieve the memory, and does the representation in my memory align with what I recalled.
As an example Term: "What is the capital of France and how many inhabitants does it have?" Correct definition: "Paris, which has 2 000 000 inhabitants."
For me there is a difference in not having the answer at all, which falls into "again". But what about if I'm able to retrieve that Paris is the capital, but I remember that the population is 1 500 000. This is where the gray zone begins
TheDong · 45m ago
If you want to remember the population correctly, then that isn't a gray zone, that's an "again". That's entirely unambiguous to me, and if you let yourself slide on that, you're hurting yourself.
There's a lot more room for gray zones in language learning, where you might have the french card "doubler" and answer it as "to pass", and then see the actual answer is "1. to overtake, 2. to double", in which case you have to read your heart and decide whether missing the second definition was careless because it's so obvious, or if it merits an "again"
An AI also can't really know, btw, if your answer of "to pass" was "to pass (overtake)" (correct), or "to pass (like a note in class)" (incorrect).
That's not the best example, but there are a ton of ambiguous english words, and you only know in your own heart which meaning of those homophones you meant.
ix101 · 1h ago
One way it could grade you automatically is by the speed of flipping the card (or entering the correct answer). If it took less than a second to confirm then evidently it was easy.
JackDanMeier · 1h ago
It should definitely be added as a variable within the calculation, but the current FSRS predicts how likely you are to access the memory (if it's sufficiently available which is defined by its retrieval strength) and speed of retrieval isn't really a factor in this version. The different grades are more to define how well all parts of the memory is retrieved.
Not to say that how quickly you can access it doesn't play a role in real life.
TheDong · 1h ago
But conversely, if I alt-tabbed to chat with a friend, or paused studying because the person sitting next to me asked a question, or I took a sip from my coffee mug, that doesn't mean it's hard necessarily. Even though all of those take at least as much time as answering a hard card un-interrupted would.
The AI cannot read my mind, there is no approximation that will work reasonably accurately here for "how confident was I in my answer", unless I input that myself.
Muromec · 1h ago
Whenever I try to use anki I can't figure what those four buttons actually mean, so I end up with 40 cards that I still can't recall and then the thing happily drops another 10 on top and I just delete the deck or the app. Haven't learned the thing I was trying to learn with it ever.
Either I don't understand the algorithm or it doesn't understand me.
TheDong · 52m ago
My tip is to map the 1-4 difficulties as "wrong, or <60% confidence", "60-80% confidence, thought required", "90%+ confidence, thought required", and "90%+ confidence, no serious thought".
Depending on what you're learning, you might vary those. For language learning, that works well imo.
Also, make sure to switch to FSRS. The old algorithm defaulted to "again" resetting a card to 0, while "again" in FSRS does show it again, but doesn't reset it back to being effectively new.
Rating yourself is an important trait of SRS, it forces you to think how you are doing, what is good enough and what not, what is more or less important, etc.
runarberg · 1h ago
Me too. I made a specialized Kanji learning app. My different approach is in the cards. I used free dictionary data to create a card for each kanji with all the relevant data in a single card. So a common kanji might have dozens (and even hundreds) of words (each word with 0-2 example sentences) to help you remember.
I like the anki way of self rating, so I kept it. I want to be able to say: “hey, I know I screwed up the stroke order this time, but it won‘t happen again, promise” and hit “Good”.
Are there any algorithms/plugins that are optimized for an on-/off-review style (ie, potentially months-long gaps between sessions)? I know that the ideal would be to do reviews every day, but I'm doing this for pleasure and I'd rather tweak the algorithm to what works for me than the other way round.
linux2647 · 1h ago
The folks at SaySomethingIn, that originally started with Welsh and other Celtic languages, have recently expanded to Japanese. I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve found some decent success with one of their other courses. It’s all about spaced repetition and focuses exclusively on listening and speaking.
Does anyone have tips for how to use space repetition to be a better knowledge worker? I feel like i could use it to have a better memory of business processes, but i dont know how to get started.
SirHumphrey · 2h ago
I find with spaced repetition that it works really well for some well-known things like vocabulary (EDIT: well-known meant as "spaced repetition is well-known to work for this use-case, not well-known as "the subject is well understood"), medical etc. but for everything else it becomes a struggle for a long time.
I have been trying for years to fined a way to use it for mathematics and physics - with the former being more of a focus and didn't really get anywhere. For definitions it works, but it's quite hard to write proofs in a way where there is a short obvious memorization based answer. Either you spend far too much time on a card or the card gives you too much information so you don't really test the knowledge.
I also tried it for computer shortcuts - it seems to me that they are really useful only when part of the muscle memory - so practicing them works better then memorization.
InkCanon · 2h ago
It's someone I wondered, what is the point of memorizing a proof if it only ever proves something you already know. The answer is you hope it generalises. There is a possible way you can do it in SRS, being inspired by RL training. Instead of cards you'd show options within a game or simulation. But this would need a lot of expert knowledge for a single concept.
Muvasa · 2h ago
i've learned entire math topics calc 1, calc2, calc3, statistics, linear algebra with anki. It's really easy. Just add the parctice problems at the end of the chapter to the front and the answer on the back.
raincole · 2h ago
> it works really well for some well-known things like vocabulary
And mathematics and physics, which are (at undergraduate level) even more well-understood than vocabulary.
bawolff · 2h ago
I feel like its asking a lot to use flash cards to learn things that aren't about memorization.
Macha · 3h ago
I do think that Wanikani and Bunpro are kind of in a catch-22 on this compared to Anki. They've built their gamification features and UI on the idea that cards have specific buckets that they're in and something like FSRS is a lot more varied than that. Especially Wanikani, which has a system of unlocking more items based on your current items reaching a specific stage.
bpev · 34m ago
So I haven't integrated FSRS, and of these two, I've only used Wanikani, and have been playing with a reimplemention for Chinese hanzi: https://hanzi.bpev.me
But seeing how it's implemented, I think they could totally integrate something like FSRS to at least just replace their scheduling (how long until an item is next shown). The unlocking system can be implemented as a separate gatekeeping mechanism, and the buckets can be coded for certain step thresholds (instead of wanikani's "stage").
I wonder how it compares with the current SuperMemo.
I experimented with SuperMemo around 18 months ago, and it made me fall in love with SRS again. The main reason being the algorithm is less punishing when I skip a day. Maybe it has better defaults?
I once skipped a whole week and could get back on track in the next week, in Anki that feels unbearable.
Another thing I really liked about it is that you can edit a card as you are studying without having to open a separate window, helps me stay in the flow when studying.
But… With a better algorithm I might give it a try in the future… Being FOSS is the real advantage here.
david_allison · 1h ago
Currently under debate. FSRS is likely better than SM-17. No data on SM-18
1) The time it takes to make cards. RemNote allows you to take Notion-style block notes and quickly turn bullet points into flashcards using symbols. For example, you might be in class and make a bullet point in the format
- The quick brown fox jumps over >> the lazy dog
which you can later review as a flashcard that is automatically separated front/back by the >>.
2) The old and unintuitive UI - again, basically just Notion with flashcards. You can easily view all your notes in a bullet hierarchy and then switch over to SR flashcard practice. Even has rich code blocks, image occlusion, tables etc. A much better implementation of Anki's notes/cards metaphor in my opinion.
I am not sponsored by RemNote, just a university student who has bounced off Anki and really likes the app.
b0ringdeveloper · 2h ago
I like WaniKani because it forces me to type the right answer. When I tried Anki, it was too easy for me to "cheat" and press space for something I "kinda" remembered.
I do agree with the author's phrase of "...a daily ritual of feeling bad about what you’ve forgotten..." though, and would like to try the new algorithm. Is there a way to configure Anki to force you to type the correct answer?
david_allison · 25m ago
You can set up Anki to force you to type answers; use Basic (type in the answer) when creating cards.
I just let chatgpt quiz me anki style on topics I'm learning
latentsea · 39m ago
ChatGPT isn't a spaced repetition system, so... it's missing the fundamental aspect that makes it "Anki style". This comment doesn't make sense.
sunkcapital · 1h ago
This is something I’ve been tackling myself in the language app I’m making https://store.steampowered.com/app/3220820/Bilingual_Crosswo.... Right now, I’ve added a set of front loaded intervals: 2M, 5M, 10M, 20M, 40M, 2H, 6H, 1D, 2D, 4D, 8D, and so on eventually stretching to a full year.
I’ve always felt this setup was a bit arbitrary and considered it a temporary solution. Thanks for saving me some time on research!
As a quick hack, increase the factor to 2.5 once you reach 1 day. That's what Anki's SM-2 used to use (if only pressing 'good')
ix101 · 1h ago
This looks like a fun app!
theodorewiles · 1h ago
Has anyone tried to use an LLM to test questions / concepts in a broader way via spaced repetition instead of just memorization? Just wondering.
No comments yet
300hoogen · 40m ago
how to ace any uni theory course
> download all pdfs
> merge pdfs into one
> compress
> write a very specific prompt for gemini to turn these into anki cards separated by a semicolon
> do 50 anki cards a day for 3/4 weeks before exam
not a single lecture attended top of my class (ku leuven). feels like cheating honestly
montebicyclelo · 3h ago
Language vocab seems a good use case. What other things are people here using spaced repition for?
SamPatt · 2h ago
A few uses for me:
• Memorizing Geoguessr metas. Made it to Master I rank this way.
• Memorizing new words. When I come across a word I don't know, I make a new flashcard for it.
• Memorizing things about people. My wife's favorite ice cream flavors, which spices each of my children dislikes, etc.
Anything I want to memorize but wouldn't be exposed to frequently enough in my day to day life. Flashcard review takes only a few minutes each day.
johanyc · 2h ago
Anything you wanna the retain the knowledge of. Basic usage is remebering shortcuts, names of people, apis, you name it. More advanced usage is you can break down complex concepts into atomic cards, which helps you remember how things work.
Xelbair · 3h ago
I used it whenever i studied anything, but with a 'recursive' twist.
Every time i did repetition, i've made a shorter note about the subject.
Then next repetition cycle, i'm reading the note, and making shorter note based on it. and so on.
once few cycles i'm re-reading the main starting note i made.
jwrallie · 2h ago
I used it to get my Amateur Radio license, since a superset of the questions that can be in the test are public.
I downloaded an existing deck and modified it so that only the correct answer is shown instead of multiple choices.
I still can remember some of the content even though I deleted the deck short after receiving my license.
drivers99 · 2h ago
HamStudy.org is exactly this, an SRS site/app that already has the questions and some explanations to go with it (the site is free, but they also have an app which is a couple bucks and almost the same but in my opinion slightly better). I used that a couple months ago I studied for the technician class license and got a perfect score when I took the test. Then I studied the general class license and got one wrong (34 out of 35 = 97%. You only need 26/35 = 74% to pass.) I could probably go for the third one next but maybe it would be more useful if I actually go get a radio and start using it first.
dustincoates · 2h ago
I'm using it to memorize all of the Paris métro stops and study for the French drivers license test. It was also a huge boon when I prepared for my citizenship interview.
I tried it for a while with my eldest child (then aged 3) to help her remember numbers, letters, etc. She didn't find it very fun past the first couple of times, so I figured I wasn't going to hoist it on her.
nanoxide · 2h ago
Used to use it in university (CS) for cramming before tests, mostly when there were lots of definitions to memorize. Also summarizing stuff and writing your own cards for it helps already with learning itself.
cjauvin · 2h ago
For language learning I find that using longer phrase fragments is better than single words.
jwrallie · 2h ago
If the phrases are found by yourself in context from your own exposure to the language, it is even better.
I got introduced to this idea a few years ago from AJATT [1] and my personal experience is that it works very well.
It's surprising how much easier to translate a foreign when it's given in a sentence. Also helps when there are multiple translations for a word depending on context.
Alex-Programs · 2h ago
The advice with gendered languages is to always learn the word alongside some context that includes its gender, e.g. "Der Tisch" (The masculine table) rather than merely "Tisch->Table".
aeonik · 3h ago
Everything, I use it to memorize anything that doesn't stick the first time.
I just don't use an app. I will challenge myself to remember things or practice things manually.
It's probably sub optimal compared to structured spaced repetition, but it works well enough for me.
bryancoxwell · 2h ago
I’ve been meaning to build a unix shell deck for a while. There are so many tools that are so powerful but I just don’t use them regularly enough to remember how they work when I need them.
patapong · 2h ago
I used it all throughout my legal studies, for remembering legal terms, concepts, tests and any other thing I had to learn. It served me very nicely.
kevinmchugh · 3h ago
There's an anki deck built from the jeopardy archive with 400,000 questions, so I'm studying trivia that way. I enjoy trivia.
Pooge · 2h ago
I think I've used that deck for a few weeks. Mind sharing the link so I may take a look at it? :)
kwakubiney · 2h ago
I would love to get my hands on this, please share if you can :)
Used it to memorize the 16 times table in decimal and hexadecimal.
kwakubiney · 2h ago
I use it to practice Leetcode problems
petesergeant · 3h ago
Mine has all sorts of shit in it. Mac keyboard shortcuts. Nautical terms. Cyrillic characters. Credit card verification codes. Phone numbers. Airport codes. Ionic component names. Names of my friends’ kids. A surprising amount of Z Specification. Anything I think it would be useful to remember.
pcl · 2h ago
How do you manage the data? Multiple decks or just one with everything? Do you directly use the app to add new phrases, or do you have some sort of automation / tooling on your phone or laptop?
cubefox · 26m ago
> If we step back, we realize that this scheduling system (called “SuperMemo-2”) is pretty arbitrary. Where does the rule of 1, 6, 2.5times correct + 1, reset back on failure come from? It turns out it was developed by a college student in 1987 based on his personal experiments. Can’t we do better?
Note that Anki uses (used) such an old algorithm because it derived it from an ancient open source version of SuperMemo, a software which started the spaced repetition trend. Anki just added a usable GUI instead of the convoluted mess that is SuperMemo. Newer versions of SuperMemo improved the algorithm, but they are no longer open source. I wonder how FSRS compares to current iterations of the SuperMemo algorithm.
Hardwired8976 · 1h ago
How are people using Anki for maths? Any nice decks you could share?
mark38848 · 3h ago
Why does everybody want to learn Japanese? What makes Japanese so enticing? Why not Mandarin or at lead Spanish?
dagw · 2h ago
Japanese media is quite popular, and many fans want to watch/read their favourite thing in its original language. This is probably the reason most people learn a language, and a huge reason why so many kids around the world speak English. Chinese culture doesn't have the same impact, yet. As to Spanish, most kids who want to learn Spanish can do so at school so there is no need to go above and beyond to learn Spanish on your own.
wongarsu · 1h ago
You learn Japanese for the media and culture; Mandarin for the financial opportunities; Russian for the reverse-engineering community; Spanish, French or Arabic to be able to speak with large diverse groups of people, typically for travel; Klingon, Na'vi, Esperanto or Elvish to fit in certain communities
Accordingly, the stereotypical CS major is attracted to Japanese and Klingon, the stereotypical Business major to Chinese. Even though few follow through because of the amount of work and perseverance required
wccrawford · 2h ago
For me, it's about the media. I'm interested in Japanese anime and manga, and now light novels.
I'm not at all interested in anything I've seen in other non-English languages, except possibly Korean now, since they seem to be producing a lot of stuff.
However, almost everything that I'd enjoy gets translated to English for both Japanese and Korean now, so there's a lot less incentive to learn them.
jwrallie · 2h ago
When I was a kid, most of the foreign culture I was exposed from came from the US, and then Japan followed with a small amount.
No wonder my second language was English and third language Japanese.
Never heard a single word of Mandarin in any media I was exposed to. I can understand Spanish very well but I do not count it as a learned language as it is too close to Portuguese (my first language).
Pooge · 2h ago
I'd say it's confirmation bias. In my personal circle, not a lot of people are interested in the Japanese language, but I know a few who took at least a few lessons on Mandarin or Spanish.
I've learned Japanese and part of the reason is that I thought kanji were attractive. I remember watching anime on TV when I was a kid and seeing the opening credits with Japanese characters looked soo cool.
bowsamic · 1h ago
1. Generally people using such systems to learn language only need to do so if they aren't immersed in the country where it is being spoken. I stopped using Anki for German after a while of living here, even though I'm still learning. Therefore, most language learners are doing so not because they want to live in the country but because they want to consume media written in that language
2. Japanese is becoming one of the most popular languages for foreign media, probably even surpassing English at this point. Anime is really huge now, particularly in the US. It has shifted from being a nerd thing to being of interest for the "cool kids" (if there is even such a thing now). Japan also had a huge and very interesting media industry in the 80s and 90s including some very novel video game concepts, most of which has not been translated
FranzFerdiNaN · 2h ago
Online everyone learns Japanese, in real life i have never encountered anyone learning it, while i know multiple people learning French.
hshshshshsh · 2h ago
Ego.
Chinese evil. Communist. Bad. Bad Chinese. Bad bad. Cheap products.
Japanese. exotic. mystical. Samurai. Ninja. Anime. Good. Sony. Good. Good cars. Zen. Good.
Me good.
Me learn Japanese.
Me exotic and mystical. Super power. Me good. Me smart. Me learned Japanse. Me great.
Me me me. Me me me.
Me me me.
the_arun · 2h ago
Makes sense. But is it same as “by heart”? If not, what is the difference?
on_the_train · 2h ago
Anki is a good piece of software. But I couldn't come up with a worse scheduling algorithm if I tried (old and new one). It's like "here's the thing you just added one second ago. Here it's again immediately after. Ok you got it, you'll see it once again in a month or so lol".
It makes it unusable and every time I tried I went back to my own self written program that just lets me set/adjust the intervals myself.
charcircuit · 3h ago
The current version of the supermemo algorithm is SM-18. The author thinks SRS has gotten way better since the author was previously using an out of date version of the algorithm, SM-2.
npinsker · 2h ago
SM-17 is linked from the benchmark repo: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-vs-sm17, though I get the impression those numbers come with a dash of subjectivity. It seems fair to compare to older versions of the algorithm though because SM-17 is only used in the SuperMemo software (and Anki) and isn't widespread.
hshshshshsh · 2h ago
Repeatedly memorizing the same thing over and again does not make one smart.
Ofocurse it does help you win stupid games.
Like scoring good marks in exams.
So that you can spend the next 30 years of your life doing jobs you hate for money to just end up dead for infinity.
Smaug123 · 1h ago
You're free to choose not to memorise things, but please don't be an arsehole about people who do want to do so for whatever reason. Having said that, you seem to misunderstand the point of spaced repetition, which is that you don't memorise the same thing over and over again; instead, you memorise it enough times to learn it, and not many more.
hshshshshsh · 1h ago
When was I being an asshole. Your ego took whatever I said personally.
kaklslkd · 42m ago
Reality check incoming. Yes you are an asshole. Your word choice matters, and you picked a large number of insulting terms.
"not ... smart", "[only use is to] win stupid games.", "[you will spend] your life doing jobs you hate for money".
My dude, I'm learning Japanese vocabulary, which has helped me to start reading light novels for fun. By your argument: I'm not smart, wasting my time, and hate my life, or soon will?
Thing is I would fully agree with you that memorizing != comprehension, but that doesn't mean than memorizing is without it's use. Do yourself a favor and learn to not be so rude. It is literally the first item in the site guidelines:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky.
hshshshshsh · 37m ago
You got triggered because I said memorizing something doesn't make one smart. And called me an asshole.
You also said reading stuff in English give you less satisfaction than reading in Japanese.
You might want to reflect on why that is the case.
kaklslkd · 21m ago
Triggered? Nah, I was merely answering your question. It's clear at this point that any more time I spend here would only be feeding a troll, so rather than address any of that nonsense I think I'll do something more productive instead. Maybe I'll do some flashcards.
hshshshshsh · 18m ago
Capable of making any arguments than name calling?
This was a game changer for me and working with LLMS, while I still think they make you dumb, and we essentially use them to offload critical thinking (almost only find myself using them when tired lazy, and just cant), if you must use them use them as a study tool.
I've used Anki for a long time, but I don't closely track changes. Based on the above, I figured I'd be using FSRS, but I'm not. All of my decks have that setting turned off. Fair enough (no silent updates to existing data), but even when I create a new deck, I have to turn the FSRS setting on manually. What aspect about this is "default"? Is there a global setting I'm missing?
I'm glad it's available, though, without any plugins!
Anki doesn’t seem to separate these layers at all. Everything is a monolithic database. Import is unpleasant. Export is unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant. Doing anything other than practicing and editing in the UI is unpleasant. And, every time I try Anki, I get stuck when I can’t manipulate my own data outside Anki.
Is there any system out there that doesn’t have this issue?
Is that not what anki does? You have a collection of cards, each card can be in one or more decks derived from the cards.
> There also ought to be a way to constrain what cards should be studied in a given session
That's also decks. You can have your 'Japanese' deck, and then the 'Japanese::writing' subdeck for the subset which require you to have your writing materials handy.
You can also use "Better Tags" to tag cards, and then create a sub-deck with an ad-hoc tag query to only study a subset if you want.
Does creating more decks and then studying the subset you want to in a session not work for what you want?
> Anki doesn’t seem to separate these layers at all. Everything is a monolithic database.
Decks are separate files which can be shared, edited, created, studied, and reasoned about independently.
The "spaced repetition model" in anki is obviously separate from the fact that there are multiple (FSRS and the old one).
> Export is unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant
It's just files (zip files really). What's unpleasant about it?
> And, every time I try Anki, I get stuck when I can’t manipulate my own data outside Anki.
There's libraries to manipulate anki decks outside of anki for practically every programming languages. There are literally dozens of tools that can generate and import anki cards, such as the large family of japanese "mining" tools which create anki cards from media, dictionary entries, etc etc.
It's open source, and the code has clean library abstractions you can work with, so it's trivial to nab any of the data out of it.
> Is there any system out there that doesn’t have this issue?
Every issue you described is something that I experienced in other software, but which anki solved for me, so for me "anki" is that system.
Kind of? As far as I can tell (and I haven't spent enormous amounts of time digging in), there are decks, and a deck contains the notes, the templates (and the cards, which may or may not have any sort of independent existence outside the notes and templates that generate them?), and a deck also contains the scheduling information.
One can export the textual and markup contents of decks, but not the media, into a text file, and one can re-import it, supposedly losslessly. One can also export a deck minus scheduling information for sharing purposes. I'm not sure that one can re-import it.
Then there is a collection, which is the whole world: decks along with their scheduling info.
> That's also decks. You can have your 'Japanese' deck, and then the 'Japanese::writing' subdeck for the subset which require you to have your writing materials handy.
I'm guessing that, if I start by importing a Japanese deck from some other source (because, for example, there's a source with high-quality notes), and then I split it into a writing subdeck, and then the original source adds new notes for new words or makes changes or whatever, that merging the results is basically unsupported.
> > Anki doesn’t seem to separate these layers at all. Everything is a monolithic database.
> Decks are separate files which can be shared, edited, created, studied, and reasoned about independently.
Yes, but only as monoliths (again, as far as I can tell). I can export an "Anki Deck Package (.apkg)", but checking that into git would result in a bit of nonsense. I can't export my scheduling information and templates separately from the underlying notes (or, if I can, I failed to find this option).
>> Export is unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant
> It's just files (zip files really). What's unpleasant about it?
Excel and OpenDocument sheet files are also zip files. But the respective tools are less limiting and don't expect the users to unzip those zip files. (And their merging and text import/export facilities are also weak, and that's unfortunate.)
I could be wrong about most of this. But Anki doesn't seem friendly to a decomposed workflow in the way that modern programming lanuages are.
After the text is generated, I check out the accuracy (in 95% of cases the cards are accurate) and I import them into my decks. The rest is good old school Anki memorizing.
Which LLM do you use?
Do you do anything special to structure the deck by chapter or section?
You only commented on accuracy, but what's your experience on relevance and how useful LLM-generated flashcards are?
To be clear I've already found myself deleting some flashcards I made myself while reviewing them when I realized they were bad, so I guess one can do that for LLM-generated questions as well, as long as the irrelevance rate is somewhat similar.
"Which nutrient can be synthesized by the body using sunlight?","Vitamin D" "What is the primary role of vitamin D in calcium regulation?","Raises blood calcium by enhancing absorption, mobilizing bone stores, and reducing kidney excretion" "How does vitamin D affect bones?","Supports bone mineralization and integrity" "What form does vitamin D take before activation?","Inactive precursor synthesized in the skin or consumed in diet" "Which organs activate vitamin D?","Liver and kidneys" "What are signs of vitamin D deficiency in children?","Bowed legs and bone deformities (rickets)" "What is osteomalacia?","Soft, weak bones in adults due to vitamin D deficiency" "What disease is caused by long-term vitamin D deficiency in adults?","Osteoporosis" "How does vitamin D deficiency affect older people?","Increases risk of fractures and joint pain" "What is the toxic effect of too much vitamin D?","Calcification of soft tissues"
You get the idea. How would you rate it's usefulness is subjective but it gets the job done.
https://www.encona.com/posts/custom-statistics-for-anki-flas...
btw. I didn’t use LLMs to write the app, it was still pretty straight forward.
https://github.com/runarberg/shodoku/tree/main/scripts
Suggestion: Allow me to browse your site and learn about your application, and I’ll decide if it’s interesting enough for me to open it on my desktop later.
On a plus side, you can buy specialized vocab/phrase books, I have one just for onomonopias. Also my beginner vocab books come with recordings from actual native speaker voice actors, which I add to the deck. Much better quality than anything an LLM or speech synthesizers can give you.
Sprinkle in AI and you'd be a shoe-in.
PY: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/py-fsrs
TS: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/ts-fsrs
RS: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-rs
Currently ts-fsrs and rs-fsrs support FSRS 6 and py-fsrs should also support FSRS 6 in the next day or so. Also, both py-fsrs and fsrs-rs include the ability to optimize the FSRS model from your past reviews!
Make a word document that lists all the keys to memorize vertically. Save as PDF
Open the PDF in a viewer with annotation tools. Make a clickable note in the margin just next to each key. Write out the value to memorize in the note field.
Cycle through the clickable notes. When you get one right easily, drag the note more to the left in the margin. As you cycle, focus on the ones furthest to the right. If you get one wrong, move it a bit further to the right.
In general the notes will move to the left until you're comfortable with all of them. And the balancing of which ones you need to see and focus on plays out very naturally and you feel in control the whole time.
There are many downsides with this compared to a tool like anki (e.g. I only used it on a laptop), but there was also something about it that just worked really well for me, so I never ended up switching to a different tool. But this was before anki had the similar algorithm described here. Maybe my experience would be different today
Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet.
There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just that people tend to fall off the same way they do on any other education pattern.
A couple years ago I was thinking "If Google and Apple really cared about kids they would make a spaced repetition unlock system", where by you have to make note cards every week and then have to answer correctly to get into your phone. (obviously requires some bypass system, other rules, etc)
You could probably jury rig it with a popup that comes up after you unlock, but people would never install it anyway.
IIRC the effect was so profound they had to modify the structure of some tests or something to that effect.
And polyglots have been using SRS for years.
As always, the real problem when people fail to do something that works is psychological, not technical. I'd say anyone who made an Ozempic for motivation would make a killing, but I believe it's already a scheduled substance. Maybe one without potential for addiction or abuse.
Easy statement to make when you're not defining the silver bullet. Kind of like saying dieting turns out not to be a silver bullet.
I've used spaced repairing for over 6 years. It's been transformative for me.
I credit Anki to my success at GCSEs and A Levels despite having a head injury, and I also credit it to me burning out so hard I took a gap year!
And I'm enjoying the gap year, but Anki made it a near necessity.
Keep that up every day and you'll burn out much faster with option 1 than option 2. Now, maybe you have enough motivation for that not to matter, or the self-discipline to keep going - as I did in my A levels - but don't be surprised if it kills your interest in the subject.
As OP points out, SRS is optimized for memory retention. You will almost certainly encounter many more words watching a two hour long video, but you certainly won‘t retain nearly as many words as half an hour of SRS.
Actually you can combine the two. Use the two hour long video to encounter new vocabulary in context, put the new vocabulary in your Anki deck, and review it with optimized SRS. You get the best of both worlds. As a bonus you often remember the source which will help you recall... This is actually common enough pattern that it has a name: Vocabulary mining.
Boredom?
Feeling like what you're doing is low-quality or superficial?
Doing something artificial for purely external reasons like grades or exams?
Can't speak for anyone else, but for me I would take slower progress over any of these... which makes spaced repetition a hard sell.
It’s centered around your performance and review times, to make sure you aren’t struggling to much; no due dates to avoid Anki slogs; gamified with some internal mechanics; dopaminergically influenced with aspects of randomness.
Spaced Repetition is just an equation (SM2 is laughable simple), but a lot of applications just slap a UI on it and call it a day, but that’s not the only way to use it!
You still have to do the work.
It's a lever or a pulley, nothing more.
Spaced repetition is doing the work.
More fundamentally, SRS isn't a superpower because it's just very specific to creating a direct prompt retrieval. Generalization is poor. Even creating a graph of knowledge, is a chain of edges between bits of knowledge, isn't done very well here.
And I suspect there's a very deep, fundamental difference between recollection knowledge and logical-modeling knowledge. Recollection seems very similar to a dictionary access, and if you recorded the time to recall in humans I suspect they'd all be constant. But learning the knowledge of a logical model, like of a mathematical concept, appears to be vastly different and have very different time to compute.
Proponents of SRS will point out logical models need facts as well, like formulas, lemmas, etc. Which is true. But if you already grasped it before you'd grasp it faster the second time. So the practical use of SRS is a significant step above having a very well sorted and labeled notebook, but still way below becoming a genius.
There's 2 solutions I've thought of but haven't tried implementing:
1. A free-recall based approach. Free recall allows you to operate at a higher level of organization and connect concepts at lower levels. However, how you would schedule SRS with free recall is not clear.
2. Have an LLM generate questions on-the-fly so that you don't overtrain on prompts. You might also instruct the LLM to create questions that connect multiple concepts together. The problem with this approach is that LLMs are still not so good at creating good test questions.
And a gigantic amount right with it.
This is a strange comment because it shrugs off something that has been transformative and hugely useful to a lot of people because it doesn’t fix all conceivable problems.
I remember reading some stats from WaniKani (Japanese SRS app) a while back...
WaniKani has 60 "levels" to learn 2000+ kanji. Each level takes about a week (there's no skipping ahead), so the material takes about a year of study to complete -- that's if you're going at breakneck pace, which most people aren't.
According to the numbers I saw on the WK forums, ~8% of users reach level 30 and less than 1% reach level 60... and that's just to learn as much kanji as a 9th grader. That's to say nothing of the grammar and the 20,000+ vocab words you'll need to SRS to truly learn the language, or the thousands of hours you'll have to spend speaking/listening/reading, immersing yourself in native content, etc.
People give up very easily. The language learning community often gives year estimates to reach "near-native level" in a language based on frequency of study. In reality, the process takes a lifetime. I don't know if people truly know what they're signing up for when install those apps and begin studying. It's a lifelong commitment. It's just something you do now, every day.
You can stop at any time of course, and most people do (more than 99% of them apparently).
The problem with spaced repetition systems is that it doesn't supply that extra motivation. You're still just memorizing things in a vacuum. If you truly want to learn a language you need to use it to communicate. That means making friends, travelling, reading books, and consuming other media in that language.
If you don’t have any of these reasons to motivate you, the question arises of why you’re bothering in the first place.
I mean, you say that, but I did mandarin for maybe 6 months, I did reviews for maybe a year or two on and off, I haven't done a review of mandarin for 8, 9 years now and I can still recall quite a bit of it. So for me it's worked quite well.
Which is really a shame, as the spacing effect itself is such an underrated aspect of human learning that it almost feels like cheating.
It’s powerful, with a lot of depth to its features - but it’s also hideous, clunky and unintuitive, and it takes a long time to figure out how to use it effectively.
An HN-reading tech nerd can probably figure it out, but your average Duolingomaxxing normie? No chance.
Me, the person who reversengineered obfuscated code doing weird crypto primitives and submitted patches to linux kernel can't figure it out either. Maybe I'm not HN nerd enough, so I had to do the duolingo to pass my citizenship exams.
Anki seems like it works for a lot of people with a very specific flow, but I don't know what the flow is and why it doesn't work for me. It's weird.
Anki is refreshing function over form design. It's beautiful.
Is there not enough useless whitespace around every button?
An SRS system which took more account of the human failings of the user might:
- let you pick a "max daily reviews" and then keep you from putting in too many new items up front, rather than letting you accidentally give yourself a huge daily workload after a few months
- let you tell it "I'm going to be on holiday in a month's time" and have it figure out what to do with reviews and new items to minimise disruption
- when you do come back after a break, pick the most useful reviews to offer the user up to the daily limit (e.g. something whose review interval is six months can wait a few more days, something the user added very recently and has seen only once could be put back into the "new items" bucket to relearn later, so if the user is only going to do 100 of their 300 due cards, other cards are more important to review today)
Anki allows you to do that. It's in the deck preset options under deck limits. Nowadays you can also set weekday workloads, to reduce workload eg. during the weekend.
i really wish the UI would just hide number of cards due by default
Another example until recently was the extremely useful image occlusion enhanced add-on. Can you easily tell the difference between overlapping and nonoverlapping? At least they renamed those settings to the much more intuitive "Hide One , Reveal All" and "Hide All, Reveal One."
Second thing, control over workload should not be that hard. Anki requires too much tweaking to work reasonably.
Third thing, both old and new algorithm have a notion of "you are pressing the buttons wrong". If you are pressing the buttons wrong, you will end up with absurd intervals - like 4 months interval on something you just learned.
I don't think any of us are satisfied with how most things look, but we're severely under-resourced.
Feel free to email me if you'd be interested in getting involved with the Android side of things.
It has other oddities too though, like the tab bar in the main window that doesn’t act like a tab bar. It should also really have two button mode (Again and Good only) for the review screen as a built in option, too — the addon that adds this is very popular and it’d be dead simple to implement.
I wonder if there are any good recommendations for something to try it on?
Probably the simplest use case to get started is improving your English vocabulary. (Assuming English is your first language.) I try to add a card for any word I come across that I don’t know the meaning of, and it works very well.
people that are motivated and will succeed with Anki regardless of design will power through an annoying UI. so with better design, you'll increase top of funnel but radically decrease conversion.
And the daily emotion-tugging streak reminders started to actually piss me off.
On top of that, at one point they were changing the icon regularly and made it really ugly. Despite a ton of complaints, they left it that way for a long time.
So I canceled my subscription and I'm done with them. I'll find another way to study that I like (I've already tried Anki and it works, but I don't like it) and isn't mentally abusive.
I used to not care for gamification because I knew that my brain is resistant to it in activities that aren't otherwise rewarding on their own. Like, I quickly realize I'm just tricking myself, and then it stops working. But somewhere over the years, I must have burned out of my dopamine reserves or something, because apps like Anki feel now actively off-putting, in the sense that I lose all energy just looking at them. Memorizing cards gets tricky when your eyes just glaze over them and nothing is loaded even to short-term memory, much less long-term. So at this point I'd appreciate even a little bit of immediate feedback and some progress tracker that evokes ever so slightly positive feelings.
My kids loved it. I did not cared. So, the likely explanation is that many people like that icon changes or dont mind it.
I think it just needs a fresh minimal design, a tutorial, and some premade decks that aren’t just the half-baked free ones.
You do anki because you feel like you must and you have very little control over it.
I brought it up around the time I tried it and got shouted down. Pretty much every spaced repetition app was treating anki like a holy emissary, so I gave up on spaced repetition entirely.
It about halved the amount of reviews I needed to do, and they didn't come up in bursts, so they were a lot more pleasant. I didn't quite believe it at first, and worried that it would be less effective, but it worked just as well if not better.
I really recommend giving it another try!
I personally used Anki the whole time, so if you're currently doing your exams some of my advice might not be super useful. I did maths, physics, and computer science. I didn't use flashcards much for maths - just for the irritating stats equations - but used it extensively for physics, and a little for compsci (I barely studied for compsci).
During my GCSEs I extensively used them for history, which is probably the closest analogue to the wordy questions you'll get in geography. I used it for facts, order of events, etc. I found that the process of organising history into a well-organised Obsidian database, then distilling it into flashcards, was as useful as the flashcard reviews itself. I recommend separating your rough working during class (e.g. the short essays you write at the end of a lesson) and your organised notes, which I split into separate, interlinked concepts with flashcards at the bottom of the file synced with Anki via an extension.
I suppose the advice I'd have is
- Cloze cards are excellent, and you should use them
- You can't flashcard your way to mental models. Absolutely don't rely on them alone, and you need to do practice questions for every separate question type you'll get until you're confident with the mental model itself.
- That said, it's easy to get into the trap of remembering the answers to flashcards as words. While this lets you "learn" quicker, and speed up reviews, I found that I had much better real-world results when I tried to actually "load in" the mental model into my head. So for example, if I had a flashcard about refraction behaviour, I'd not just answer the question, I'd also visualise a laser going from air into water and how the behaviour of the light changed as the angle changed.
For history, it's been a while, but if I had a question about one factor in a broader crisis (e.g. the Berlin Airlift) I'd try to think about the broader context of the question - not in my internal monologue, but just vaguely considering the various factors involved, the period of history, personally I instinctively visualise a map, etc, for a second or two before clicking for the answer.
Edit: Oh, and the heatmap extension is great. It gives you streaks and a heat map that you really don't want to break!
> And the idea that you’ll literally never see a card again after the last interval is terrifying, as it means you’re constantly losing knowledge.
Anki runs on desktop: you have to be chained to a desk rather than taking advantage of idle moments when you are on-the-go. Even if you have it on a laptop, you still need a place to sit; SRS on mobile can be used anywhere, like standing-room-only public transit.
The AnkiMobile companion app for iOS is a paid app that is somehow chained to the desktop version, whereas AnkiDroid is a full-featured clone of Anki that you could use air gapped without ever syncing anything to or from another device. It has integrated management of decks and note creation/editing.
Every other SRS app out there is just playing very distant catch-up to Anki/AnkiDroid. They usually mention Anki in their pitch, trying desperately to explain why some very minor and very subjective negative point about Anki is worth switching to their massively inconvenient solution.
Long story short: not possible with anki. It took like an entire day for me to realize its just not possible without diving deep into ankis sqlitedb and having the client installed on my server to interact in a horrible way with decks. I wrote my own space repetition [1] backend in a week and never looked back to anki. Ill intergrate FSRS in my software.
1: https://github.com/entropie/ha2itat/tree/main/plugins/entrom...
https://www.stephenmwangi.com/obsidian-spaced-repetition/
There is an implementation of their sync server, which you can self host. And it has a REST API
https://github.com/dsnopek/anki-sync-server
I think I ran into a blocker with it not supporting something I needed last time I tried to use it though.
I know this is not precisely what you wanted, but yes, Anki can update card contents.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2055492159
https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/intro.html
----
But you'd want AnkiConnect, or a Python-based addon for your workflow
> Anki desktop app auto-launch > Perhaps the most precarious aspect of the Anki-Connect add-on is that the Anki desktop application must be running for any of the API calls to work. Yanki Connect tries to sand down this rough edge by (optionally) automatically launching the Anki desktop app if it's not running already.
I've used Anki for multiple years and learned around 18'000 Japanese words. It's difficult to say but I'd say I've learned how to read around 5'000 kanji. When I studied in Japan, my kanji reading—don't mix that up with comprehension!—was way above everyone else's. And most of my classmates were either Korean or Chinese.
That's what 10 minutes of free time—I did that during my daily train rides—can get you! Keep practicing. Being ignorant is the first step towards becoming more knowledgeable.
We spend hours a day browsing the web, so I made a browser extension[0] that translates sentences at your knowledge level into the language you're learning, so that you're always learning a little through immersion.
I also used the same "10 minutes a day on Anki" strategy with my A levels, and it made the revision process so so much nicer because stuff I'd learnt two years ago was as fresh as if I'd learnt it a couple of months ago, rather than years.
[0] https://nuenki.app
Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.
Actually, it took me 20 minutes of time per day to do my reviews + new words. I had, on average, 200 cards to go through daily (180 review + 20 new cards).[1] Going through 18'000 words took me around 5 years. 5×365×20=36'500
> A rate which far surpasses native speakers.
Are you comparing me to babies? It took me 2 weekends to learn all kana, but it takes years for a toddler to learn just hiragana. It's not a fair comparison.
> Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.
I wonder why you think it's unrealistic. It's not like I'm a genius or anything.[2]
[1] Two cards is one word; one for English -> Japanese, one for Japanese -> English.
[2] Some teachers definitely thought I was a genius because of my memory, but it was all thanks to Anki. And proof is that I was absolutely bad at text comprehension. Anki doesn't make you practice that.
So, by my calculations for just the Anki time alone it's about 17.5k words split across 730 hours, which comes out to about 23 words and hour or one word every 2.5 minutes.
I've seen a pretty wide variety of people do Anki, and I can say there's a distribution in length of time per card for basically the exact same types of cards among people. The slowest people average around 3x slower than the fastest.
Now, those cards weren't alone - they were reinforcing content that I'd learnt in lessons. But if they were doing it for 10 minutes a day a few times a day, it seems quite plausible to me.
...Maybe the poster meant "«10 minutes» per ride"? («That's what 10 minutes of free time - I did that during my daily train rides»)
Like other big cultural shifts from the time, the correction was necessary but also probably went too far in the opposite direction.
Which is a long way of saying that memorization is underrated and it mostly has a bad reputation from anti-Victorian reformers.
Common sense challenges this honestly. Education systems that traditionally have put a strong focus on repetition, memorization and what you could call neuromuscular training (e.g China, the USSR, France) in particluar in STEM far outperform anyone else. Vietnam outperforms most rich countries.
In programming circles it's a cultural cliche because our profession is full of people who go by: "I am a genius, I work smart, not hard", probably the most damaging idea ever uttered in education, and in the humanities it's seen as culturally unsophisticated.
In reality, 95% of everything is mechanics. Starcraft, math, even literature and acting. Creative freedom is enabled only by a large body of effortless recollection.
I've stopped working on it and am now building something highly similar aimed towards high school students, but any feedback is welcome. This version was built for uni students
mimair.com - I never got around to adding any payment option so its completely free
This seems impossible to me. In anki, there's "hard", "good", and "easy" which are all for "I got this right".
For my usage, "hard" is "I got it right, but I was only like 60% sure", "good" is "I had to actively think", and "easy" is "effortlessly correct, no real thought required".
There's no way for an AI to tell if my identical input is the result of a 50/50 guess, or a little thought, or effortless recall. "delay to answer" also isn't a good approximation, I have a habit of alt-tabbing and chatting with a friend on random cards of any difficulty.
I find distinguishing those levels of easy for totally identical answers ends up making SRS more effective, and AI just can't know my inner thoughts. Maybe once we have brain implants.
> any knowledge rather than specifying that the exact answer should be graded
I don't understand what you mean. The important thing is to feed back into the SRS algorithm "How much does this card need to be studied", and if you mean "any knowledge means we can study it less often", then I doubt the SRS will be able to be effective.
What are you suggesting to feed back into SRS? How will you ensure cards the user knows very well quickly get pushed way back (so the user isn't overwhelmed with a boring slog), and cards they only sorta know bubble up more quickly to start to cement the knowledge?
As an example Term: "What is the capital of France and how many inhabitants does it have?" Correct definition: "Paris, which has 2 000 000 inhabitants."
For me there is a difference in not having the answer at all, which falls into "again". But what about if I'm able to retrieve that Paris is the capital, but I remember that the population is 1 500 000. This is where the gray zone begins
There's a lot more room for gray zones in language learning, where you might have the french card "doubler" and answer it as "to pass", and then see the actual answer is "1. to overtake, 2. to double", in which case you have to read your heart and decide whether missing the second definition was careless because it's so obvious, or if it merits an "again"
An AI also can't really know, btw, if your answer of "to pass" was "to pass (overtake)" (correct), or "to pass (like a note in class)" (incorrect).
That's not the best example, but there are a ton of ambiguous english words, and you only know in your own heart which meaning of those homophones you meant.
Not to say that how quickly you can access it doesn't play a role in real life.
The AI cannot read my mind, there is no approximation that will work reasonably accurately here for "how confident was I in my answer", unless I input that myself.
Either I don't understand the algorithm or it doesn't understand me.
Depending on what you're learning, you might vary those. For language learning, that works well imo.
Also, make sure to switch to FSRS. The old algorithm defaulted to "again" resetting a card to 0, while "again" in FSRS does show it again, but doesn't reset it back to being effectively new.
If you want to understand the algorithm, read this: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/ABC...
I like the anki way of self rating, so I kept it. I want to be able to say: “hey, I know I screwed up the stroke order this time, but it won‘t happen again, promise” and hit “Good”.
https://github.com/runarberg/shodoku
https://shodoku.app/
https://www.saysomethingin.com/en/
I have been trying for years to fined a way to use it for mathematics and physics - with the former being more of a focus and didn't really get anywhere. For definitions it works, but it's quite hard to write proofs in a way where there is a short obvious memorization based answer. Either you spend far too much time on a card or the card gives you too much information so you don't really test the knowledge.
I also tried it for computer shortcuts - it seems to me that they are really useful only when part of the muscle memory - so practicing them works better then memorization.
And mathematics and physics, which are (at undergraduate level) even more well-understood than vocabulary.
But seeing how it's implemented, I think they could totally integrate something like FSRS to at least just replace their scheduling (how long until an item is next shown). The unlocking system can be implemented as a separate gatekeeping mechanism, and the buckets can be coded for certain step thresholds (instead of wanikani's "stage").
Basically, this is their entire srs system: https://docs.api.wanikani.com/20170710/#spaced-repetition-sy...
I experimented with SuperMemo around 18 months ago, and it made me fall in love with SRS again. The main reason being the algorithm is less punishing when I skip a day. Maybe it has better defaults?
I once skipped a whole week and could get back on track in the next week, in Anki that feels unbearable.
Another thing I really liked about it is that you can edit a card as you are studying without having to open a separate window, helps me stay in the flow when studying.
But… With a better algorithm I might give it a try in the future… Being FOSS is the real advantage here.
Q&A/discussion: https://supermemopedia.com/wiki/SuperMemo_dethroned_by_FSRS
Repo: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-vs-sm17
Discussion: https://discord.gg/qjzcRTx => https://discord.com/channels/368267295601983490/136895216717...
https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition
1) The time it takes to make cards. RemNote allows you to take Notion-style block notes and quickly turn bullet points into flashcards using symbols. For example, you might be in class and make a bullet point in the format
- The quick brown fox jumps over >> the lazy dog
which you can later review as a flashcard that is automatically separated front/back by the >>.
2) The old and unintuitive UI - again, basically just Notion with flashcards. You can easily view all your notes in a bullet hierarchy and then switch over to SR flashcard practice. Even has rich code blocks, image occlusion, tables etc. A much better implementation of Anki's notes/cards metaphor in my opinion.
I am not sponsored by RemNote, just a university student who has bounced off Anki and really likes the app.
I do agree with the author's phrase of "...a daily ritual of feeling bad about what you’ve forgotten..." though, and would like to try the new algorithm. Is there a way to configure Anki to force you to type the correct answer?
20 second video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxEqRe1Pp1w
It's possible to batch convert your cards to this format using Anki's "Card Templates" feature.
https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/fields.html#checking-your...
I’ve always felt this setup was a bit arbitrary and considered it a temporary solution. Thanks for saving me some time on research!
As a quick hack, increase the factor to 2.5 once you reach 1 day. That's what Anki's SM-2 used to use (if only pressing 'good')
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> download all pdfs
> merge pdfs into one
> compress
> write a very specific prompt for gemini to turn these into anki cards separated by a semicolon
> do 50 anki cards a day for 3/4 weeks before exam
not a single lecture attended top of my class (ku leuven). feels like cheating honestly
• Memorizing Geoguessr metas. Made it to Master I rank this way.
• Memorizing new words. When I come across a word I don't know, I make a new flashcard for it.
• Memorizing things about people. My wife's favorite ice cream flavors, which spices each of my children dislikes, etc.
Anything I want to memorize but wouldn't be exposed to frequently enough in my day to day life. Flashcard review takes only a few minutes each day.
Every time i did repetition, i've made a shorter note about the subject.
Then next repetition cycle, i'm reading the note, and making shorter note based on it. and so on.
once few cycles i'm re-reading the main starting note i made.
I downloaded an existing deck and modified it so that only the correct answer is shown instead of multiple choices.
I still can remember some of the content even though I deleted the deck short after receiving my license.
I tried it for a while with my eldest child (then aged 3) to help her remember numbers, letters, etc. She didn't find it very fun past the first couple of times, so I figured I wasn't going to hoist it on her.
I got introduced to this idea a few years ago from AJATT [1] and my personal experience is that it works very well.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20100406173634/http://www.alljap...
I just don't use an app. I will challenge myself to remember things or practice things manually.
It's probably sub optimal compared to structured spaced repetition, but it works well enough for me.
Note that Anki uses (used) such an old algorithm because it derived it from an ancient open source version of SuperMemo, a software which started the spaced repetition trend. Anki just added a usable GUI instead of the convoluted mess that is SuperMemo. Newer versions of SuperMemo improved the algorithm, but they are no longer open source. I wonder how FSRS compares to current iterations of the SuperMemo algorithm.
Accordingly, the stereotypical CS major is attracted to Japanese and Klingon, the stereotypical Business major to Chinese. Even though few follow through because of the amount of work and perseverance required
I'm not at all interested in anything I've seen in other non-English languages, except possibly Korean now, since they seem to be producing a lot of stuff.
However, almost everything that I'd enjoy gets translated to English for both Japanese and Korean now, so there's a lot less incentive to learn them.
No wonder my second language was English and third language Japanese.
Never heard a single word of Mandarin in any media I was exposed to. I can understand Spanish very well but I do not count it as a learned language as it is too close to Portuguese (my first language).
I've learned Japanese and part of the reason is that I thought kanji were attractive. I remember watching anime on TV when I was a kid and seeing the opening credits with Japanese characters looked soo cool.
2. Japanese is becoming one of the most popular languages for foreign media, probably even surpassing English at this point. Anime is really huge now, particularly in the US. It has shifted from being a nerd thing to being of interest for the "cool kids" (if there is even such a thing now). Japan also had a huge and very interesting media industry in the 80s and 90s including some very novel video game concepts, most of which has not been translated
Chinese evil. Communist. Bad. Bad Chinese. Bad bad. Cheap products.
Japanese. exotic. mystical. Samurai. Ninja. Anime. Good. Sony. Good. Good cars. Zen. Good.
Me good. Me learn Japanese. Me exotic and mystical. Super power. Me good. Me smart. Me learned Japanse. Me great.
Me me me. Me me me. Me me me.
It makes it unusable and every time I tried I went back to my own self written program that just lets me set/adjust the intervals myself.
Ofocurse it does help you win stupid games.
Like scoring good marks in exams.
So that you can spend the next 30 years of your life doing jobs you hate for money to just end up dead for infinity.
"not ... smart", "[only use is to] win stupid games.", "[you will spend] your life doing jobs you hate for money".
My dude, I'm learning Japanese vocabulary, which has helped me to start reading light novels for fun. By your argument: I'm not smart, wasting my time, and hate my life, or soon will?
Thing is I would fully agree with you that memorizing != comprehension, but that doesn't mean than memorizing is without it's use. Do yourself a favor and learn to not be so rude. It is literally the first item in the site guidelines:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky.
You also said reading stuff in English give you less satisfaction than reading in Japanese.
You might want to reflect on why that is the case.