I use Anki to learn French, Chess openings/tactics/techniques, to unscramble letters for scrabble, for Pub Trivia... The options are kind of limitless.
As a mid-30s guy who has well passed the neuroplasticity of his teen years, it's a godsend for me.
To echo the author's thoughts though, I can't prove empirically that I learn more effectively using Anki (or spaced repetition) than other methods... Only anecdotally. I have a shockingly poor memory, but now I'm B2 certified in French and an ~1800 Elo on chess.com .
When I was doing rote memorization and flashcards frequently (some years ago now) I observed that remembering things became a lot easier for me.
I also find my verbal fluency is directly affected by how much pure social time I have in my schedule. It makes me think its one of those 'use it or lose it' things and that I need to schedule more time with people.
> From this perspective, fields that require deep understanding, like math, require memory just as fields with a breadth of shallow knowledge do, though in different ways.
I'm interested in understanding how others use Anki for conceptual subjects like pure math or physics. I believe many fundamental rules in Spaced Repetition (e.g. like keeping cards concise) are thrown out the window for conceptual subjects.
Yeah most of the advance assumes you have the data ready at hand and just need to phrase the cards right, get the number of words right. Whereas for conceptual domains the biggest problem is: how do I encode this as question-answer pairs at all? What I want to read more of is people sitting down and writing in the first-person perspective how they go about it, like Michael Nielsen does here: https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics
hey fernando, I read your article a lot and it's helped me a lot in my own spaced repetition so thanks from me!
a note on your request, have you seen this video before? Andy has some custom PDF reader he built with flashcards built-in, and it's two hours of tacit flashcard creation centered around quantum mechanics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFuu4pesKf0
Perhaps "Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics
" [1] might be of interest for you. I have read author's "Augmenting Long-term Memory" [2] and have incorporated a lot of his advice into my Anki practice.
For me, it's quick access recipes (breakfast pancakes for kids), what was the name of the glacier that we hiked to last year, behavioral prompts etc.
I think of it like drills in a sport. If your practice is 100% drills, you'll be pretty bad. But drills give you an awesome foundation to do the really complex stuff intuitively.
I actually tend to keep my cards super concise. I treat Anki as a way to practice fundamentals, like memorizing certain formulas. Anytime I try to add conceptual stuff to cards I feel like I'm only memorizing one specialized version of the thing and it doesn't feel super useful.
I tried to make an auto flashcard generator but ran into the issue that one word can map to many senses. But most word frequency datasets don't disambiguate the sense. So if you want to include all the senses for a word while ranking words by frequency they all get the same starting position.
This is a big part of why language learners have largely moved toward sentence mining as the preferred way to build an Anki deck.
Getting your words from real-world contexts, and keeping that context on the front of the card, largely eliminates the ambiguity problem. If a word has multiple senses, it gets multiple cards with different example sentences to illustrate each one.
It also helps a bunch with words that don’t really have a concise translation to your native language. For example the French words “mur” and “paroi” both mean “wall” in English, but the contexts where you use them are quite different. An example sentence helps with that, and getting that sentence from an even richer context such as a book or article you’ve read helps even more.
It’s also, frankly, just more enjoyable. I’ve come to view frequency lists as an antiquated tool. I needed them in the 1990s when good authentic-context study materials were hard to come by, but the modern Internet has made so-called immersion-based learning methods so easy and inexpensive I’m frankly mystified that people still cling to the joyless, almost mechanistic methods we were stuck with in the previous century.
The fun is in making the cards truly yours, by writing them yourself based on your experience. After experimenting with generated cards, I throw them away. They were semantically correct, but not relatable/memorable.
Used to use Anki for foreign language learning. Guessing it would have been useful to memorise calc, chem and physics equations if it had existed when I was young.
Flashcards are brilliant. Anki is finally usable after they ditched the hot garbage algorithm they were using. Previously I've used the Leitner method and I stil think that's the best one for me.
I use Anki to learn French, Chess openings/tactics/techniques, to unscramble letters for scrabble, for Pub Trivia... The options are kind of limitless.
As a mid-30s guy who has well passed the neuroplasticity of his teen years, it's a godsend for me.
To echo the author's thoughts though, I can't prove empirically that I learn more effectively using Anki (or spaced repetition) than other methods... Only anecdotally. I have a shockingly poor memory, but now I'm B2 certified in French and an ~1800 Elo on chess.com .
Do I still forget things all the time? Yes.
When I was doing rote memorization and flashcards frequently (some years ago now) I observed that remembering things became a lot easier for me.
I also find my verbal fluency is directly affected by how much pure social time I have in my schedule. It makes me think its one of those 'use it or lose it' things and that I need to schedule more time with people.
> From this perspective, fields that require deep understanding, like math, require memory just as fields with a breadth of shallow knowledge do, though in different ways.
I'm interested in understanding how others use Anki for conceptual subjects like pure math or physics. I believe many fundamental rules in Spaced Repetition (e.g. like keeping cards concise) are thrown out the window for conceptual subjects.
Yeah most of the advance assumes you have the data ready at hand and just need to phrase the cards right, get the number of words right. Whereas for conceptual domains the biggest problem is: how do I encode this as question-answer pairs at all? What I want to read more of is people sitting down and writing in the first-person perspective how they go about it, like Michael Nielsen does here: https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics
I wrote a bit more about this problem here: https://borretti.me/article/the-applicability-of-spaced-repe...
hey fernando, I read your article a lot and it's helped me a lot in my own spaced repetition so thanks from me!
a note on your request, have you seen this video before? Andy has some custom PDF reader he built with flashcards built-in, and it's two hours of tacit flashcard creation centered around quantum mechanics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFuu4pesKf0
Perhaps "Using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics " [1] might be of interest for you. I have read author's "Augmenting Long-term Memory" [2] and have incorporated a lot of his advice into my Anki practice.
For me, it's quick access recipes (breakfast pancakes for kids), what was the name of the glacier that we hiked to last year, behavioral prompts etc.
1: https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics
2: https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html
Great blog posts. Exactly on point.
I kinda feel like using memorization techniques for things that require deeper understanding probably isn't the most efficient way to learn.
IMO you want to be actively trying to map the new concepts to things you already understand, and constantly working to update your mental model.
I think of it like drills in a sport. If your practice is 100% drills, you'll be pretty bad. But drills give you an awesome foundation to do the really complex stuff intuitively.
I actually tend to keep my cards super concise. I treat Anki as a way to practice fundamentals, like memorizing certain formulas. Anytime I try to add conceptual stuff to cards I feel like I'm only memorizing one specialized version of the thing and it doesn't feel super useful.
I tried to make an auto flashcard generator but ran into the issue that one word can map to many senses. But most word frequency datasets don't disambiguate the sense. So if you want to include all the senses for a word while ranking words by frequency they all get the same starting position.
This is a big part of why language learners have largely moved toward sentence mining as the preferred way to build an Anki deck.
Getting your words from real-world contexts, and keeping that context on the front of the card, largely eliminates the ambiguity problem. If a word has multiple senses, it gets multiple cards with different example sentences to illustrate each one.
It also helps a bunch with words that don’t really have a concise translation to your native language. For example the French words “mur” and “paroi” both mean “wall” in English, but the contexts where you use them are quite different. An example sentence helps with that, and getting that sentence from an even richer context such as a book or article you’ve read helps even more.
It’s also, frankly, just more enjoyable. I’ve come to view frequency lists as an antiquated tool. I needed them in the 1990s when good authentic-context study materials were hard to come by, but the modern Internet has made so-called immersion-based learning methods so easy and inexpensive I’m frankly mystified that people still cling to the joyless, almost mechanistic methods we were stuck with in the previous century.
The fun is in making the cards truly yours, by writing them yourself based on your experience. After experimenting with generated cards, I throw them away. They were semantically correct, but not relatable/memorable.
Used to use Anki for foreign language learning. Guessing it would have been useful to memorise calc, chem and physics equations if it had existed when I was young.
it is less useful for physics, math, and music since fluency is so much important.
It is important for language acquisition too, but the language involves a lot more rote memorization than the above.
Flashcards are brilliant. Anki is finally usable after they ditched the hot garbage algorithm they were using. Previously I've used the Leitner method and I stil think that's the best one for me.
Which algorithm is the hot garbage one to you? SuperMemo 2?