I have been using SRS for everything in my life for the last 2.5 years and I have no doubt I will be doing ANKI flash cards on my death-bed someday (as depressing as that sounds). It's the single most important productivity hack I have ever discovered (when used effectively). I successfully used ANKI to learn a 2nd (and now 3rd language) and retain a lot of knowledge I acquire from books:
I think what really puts me off is the effort of building those cards. It’s not quite a productivity hack if I’m having to sit and spend hours making those cards (vs. someone making those cards - and effectively - for me in exchange for $$). I like memrise a lot for some languages though, and they’ve long been advocates for this technique by building an entire business around it. Not much good material for math/CS on it last I checked.
There's a few decks I've seen for math/CS, but I haven't had much luck myself, and have resorted to making my own. I've been trying to figure out the best way to do it.
It's pretty easy to do with Supermemo. But, it's still not as easy/simple as making cards for vocab.
For a specific math/CS topic it's not too hard, just in general.
I find it’s less the act of making the cards and more the lack of tools. Its possible to make Anki cards on the iPad app but many features are missing. Perhaps I just need to try AnkiWeb.
This gets used a lot in language learning, especially in the Japanese learning community where people are trying to memorize thousands of Kanji characters. Like the article says, the idea is that recalling a fact when you are on the verge of forgetting it causes it to be reinforced, increasing the interval before you will next forget it. Using the Japanese language SRS tool WaniKani (https://www.wanikani.com) I’ve memorized around 900 vocab/characters in the past three months (which is actually kind of slow compared to most people).
This has been a fun experience for me. I’ve always felt like my memory was poor compared to most people, but now I have proof that with the right strategy I can remember anything I want.
> Some researchers also believe that semantic priming is a factor.
When learning a new Kanji in WaniKani you are given a mnuemonic to associate with it. I find that my retention is much better when the mneumonic feels strongly associated with the shape/meaning/reading of a character.
Another thing that I’ve found helps retention outside of SRS is using/encountering an item outside of a study session. The surest way for me to remember a new word is to hear it in a show or song where I fully understand the context it’s being used in. Also if the thing you’re memorizing more of an abstract idea, then explaining it to someone else is a great way to reinforce it for yourself.
When I looked at WaniKani some time ago, I got the impression (based on their description, I didn't try it) that they first teach you radicals, then kanji made out of those radicals, then words made out of those kanji. Is that correct?
I didn't try it because the approach seemed to lack context to me, and also because I already know Chinese, so learning Kanji wasn't a priority (I wanted to focus more on pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar). Instead, I built my own sentence-level SRS by taking examples from the Tatoeba corpus, segmenting them with Mecab, adding audio using Open JTalk and then scheduling reviews based on the probability of not knowing one of the words in a sentence. I've been dog-fooding it for three months now, and in theory I should be able to understand 14310 sentences from the corpus.
Yeah, it does build up from radicals->kanji->vocab over 60 levels. I agree, for someone who knows Chinese already WaniKani is probably not the most effective way to study. But for people who are unfamiliar with the Chinese/Kanji character set learning radicals first really helps with mentally parsing characters with high stroke count. However as I’m sure you know Kanji readings can be a lot different from the Chinese characters they came from, so there is still some memorization work to be done.
Also WaniKani doesn’t touch on grammar at all, so it works as only a part of an overall study routine. I do wish there was a similar SRS service for grammar/reading. Building up your own decks is such a huge amount of work, and for someone who is just learning it’s nice to have a curated deck that is verified for correctness. Sounds like you have an awesome system that’s working for you though.
I did a big surge of learning this way for a post-graduate exam in 2010. It was very effective, much better than any of the 'usual' ways of learning.
However, once the exam was over, there was no way I could maintain the 1 hour plus of card review each day. Eight years later I remember very little of what I learned.
Admittedly I was studying quite hard, ending up with nearly 4000 cards after 6 weeks, perhaps there is more luck with less intense schedules. The material was also complex and esoteric.
4000 cards in six weeks is completely doable long term as long as you configure ANKI correctly. As an example, I have 14000 cards in my Italian deck, which I have been making for 2.5 years, and 6K in my french deck, and I do my reviews in < 30 minutes a day. Everyone can find 30 minutes
Dr Ali Abdaal runs a YouTube channel (about studying medicine at Cambridge University) and one of his videos is on "Evidence-based revision tips", with citations for the studies he's working from - here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ukLnPbIffxE it's about 20 minutes.
He says that spaced repetition is effective, but basic repetition of re-reading, re-watching, re-listening is not effective.
Spaced repetition with "active recall" comes out significantly more effective - instead of exposing yourself to the same material over and over, challenge yourself to recall the material at the time when you're on the edge of forgetting it; the active mental effort of doing that appears to fix information in memory much more effectively than reading or hearing it again.
A consequence of that is his suggestion that notes and review material should not be facts you want to remember, but questions that will prompt you to think and recall what you want to remember. "Writing questions for yourself makes you engage in cognitive effort, and the more brainpower it takes to recall a fact, the better strengthened that connection seems to get, according to the evidence at least".
Hm, I'll probably develop mobile before Firefox so FF would be long way out, but not out of the question! You can follow @ForgetMeNotBot on Twitter for (very infrequent) updates.
Useful review. One caution I have while reading posts like this, is that the author does not distinguish between the testing effect, and the spacing effect.
While the value of testing (and especially spaced testing) is well established [1], the value of spaced restudy (e.g. you see both the question and answer together) is less established (but see this Bjork paper [2], which argues there is some benefit to spaced restudy).
There was a popular discussion on this topic somewhat recently on HN[1] when a Wired article from 2008 entitled To Remember Everything You Learn, Surrender to This Algorithm made the front page.
Readit News
Nicky Case recently made this interactive explanation of how it works, which is itself an SRS system: https://ncase.me/remember/
Other things I use it for:
* extending my english vocabulary
* wine knowledge
* retaining math theories
* world history
* receipts
It's pretty easy to do with Supermemo. But, it's still not as easy/simple as making cards for vocab.
For a specific math/CS topic it's not too hard, just in general.
This has been a fun experience for me. I’ve always felt like my memory was poor compared to most people, but now I have proof that with the right strategy I can remember anything I want.
> Some researchers also believe that semantic priming is a factor.
When learning a new Kanji in WaniKani you are given a mnuemonic to associate with it. I find that my retention is much better when the mneumonic feels strongly associated with the shape/meaning/reading of a character.
Another thing that I’ve found helps retention outside of SRS is using/encountering an item outside of a study session. The surest way for me to remember a new word is to hear it in a show or song where I fully understand the context it’s being used in. Also if the thing you’re memorizing more of an abstract idea, then explaining it to someone else is a great way to reinforce it for yourself.
I didn't try it because the approach seemed to lack context to me, and also because I already know Chinese, so learning Kanji wasn't a priority (I wanted to focus more on pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar). Instead, I built my own sentence-level SRS by taking examples from the Tatoeba corpus, segmenting them with Mecab, adding audio using Open JTalk and then scheduling reviews based on the probability of not knowing one of the words in a sentence. I've been dog-fooding it for three months now, and in theory I should be able to understand 14310 sentences from the corpus.
Also WaniKani doesn’t touch on grammar at all, so it works as only a part of an overall study routine. I do wish there was a similar SRS service for grammar/reading. Building up your own decks is such a huge amount of work, and for someone who is just learning it’s nice to have a curated deck that is verified for correctness. Sounds like you have an awesome system that’s working for you though.
However, once the exam was over, there was no way I could maintain the 1 hour plus of card review each day. Eight years later I remember very little of what I learned.
Admittedly I was studying quite hard, ending up with nearly 4000 cards after 6 weeks, perhaps there is more luck with less intense schedules. The material was also complex and esoteric.
I recently made a Chrome extension that shows cards in new tabs so that I actually review them. Check it out if you're interested, I'd love your feedback https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/forgetmenot/nncbpj...
He says that spaced repetition is effective, but basic repetition of re-reading, re-watching, re-listening is not effective.
Spaced repetition with "active recall" comes out significantly more effective - instead of exposing yourself to the same material over and over, challenge yourself to recall the material at the time when you're on the edge of forgetting it; the active mental effort of doing that appears to fix information in memory much more effectively than reading or hearing it again.
A consequence of that is his suggestion that notes and review material should not be facts you want to remember, but questions that will prompt you to think and recall what you want to remember. "Writing questions for yourself makes you engage in cognitive effort, and the more brainpower it takes to recall a fact, the better strengthened that connection seems to get, according to the evidence at least".
I recently published a Chrome extension to review knowledge in a new browser tabs after trying and failing to use Anki post-graduation. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/forgetmenot/nncbpj...
Check it out if you have the chance. I'd love some feedback (and for more people to use spaced repetition in their everyday lives)!
While the value of testing (and especially spaced testing) is well established [1], the value of spaced restudy (e.g. you see both the question and answer together) is less established (but see this Bjork paper [2], which argues there is some benefit to spaced restudy).
[1]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/174569161771887...
[2]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797615617778
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17706776