One massively overlooked way to improve spaced repetition is to make easier cards. It's surprising just how easy an effective card can be.
I started out using Anki to learn French vocabulary. I'd make pairs of cards, with English on one side and French on the other. This started out easy, but became utterly brutal and depressing with several hundred cards in my deck. Too many near synonyms.
I eventually took a hint from Katzumoto's Japanese advice, and started making cloze cards. I'd copy and paste an entire paragraph from an ebook or a web page, and hide just one word. These cards were easy, but also effective.
Then I got lazier.
I'd only hide half a word. Or I'd just boldface a word, and mark the card as a "pass" if I could sort of remember that word in context.
And somehow, these cards actually worked better.
Then I got lazier still. If seeing a card made me grown "Oh, not that card", I'd just delete it. If I missed a card 3 times, I configured Anki to permanently suspend it. If I actually needed to know a word, no worries, I'd see it again soon in a more helpful context. And my French vocabulary continued to grow by leaps and bounds.
I don't think that biggest improvements will come from better spaced repetition algorithms. I suspect the biggest wins will come from improved card formats. And it's surprisingly hard to make a card too easy to be useful.
(Source: 35,000+ Anki reps across three languages.)
Geeks like us love to get into SRS algorithms and chase after the 1% improvements with a cleverer repetition algorithm or a better input method. The real failure mode is much more mundane: People give up.
I see it all the time. People cram thousands of cards into Anki in their first month learning something. After a month or two they are so overwhelmed with reviews and the reviews become such a chore that they just give up. (Of course, there are people who manage to add thousands of cards every month for years and years. These are the people who would probably do nearly as well with just a pen and paper. )
Two pieces of advice that make all the difference: Make your cards a little bit 'too' easy and be rather selective with your cards.
When you first make a card you're probably actively studying the subject of the card. You're very familiar with it and it's all in your head right now. The temptation is to make a card that is fun and challenging for you right now. Resist! Instead, make a card that feels slightly too easy, so that in a week or two it will be enough to tickle your memory rather than confuse you.
Also, people dump entire books worth of sentences into Anki. I like to use the metaphor of walking through an orchard: take your time, look around and grab one or two of the nicest apples you find. If you try to grab everything you're only going to slow yourself down. Also, if you pick up a rotten apple (uninteresting/too difficult card) it pollutes your entire deck. You start to resist review your flashcards.
> The real failure mode is much more mundane: People give up.
The other major failure mode is similarly boring: sometimes it's just not useful to blindly memorize things. The exact problem that spaced repetition solves is pretty niche, and while it can be "close enough" to be beneficial in adjacent endeavors, it's also extremely subject to Goodharting. The more hardcore you go into optimizing your SRS procedure, the likelier it gets that the metrics you're optimizing for depart from your actual goal.
Is there really any solid research determining the "best" algorithm, or even ranking them? As best I can tell, any process to repeat wrong answers more often and the correct answers less often, and does so with some amount of increasing time delta, will work. But I have yet to see any proof that one algorithm is better than another.
Are there any guides or content or examples that yourself (or anyone else here), who's used Anki not for language learning?
For example, learning from books or mathematics?
What even is a good progression for creating cards? Only add them slowly and optimise for having a few cards in your review queue and only add after several days or weeks of no cards? Find a good text and just add them?
Sorry, it appears that the people in this thread are clearly deriving value from SRS and speaking as someone who's tried SRS and Anki on multiple occasions and failed to keep it up, it would be helpful to get insights =)...
For what it's worth I've gone the opposite direction (one language, 70k Anki reps). For me, carefully adding context has largely felt like time wasted at card creation time (which can a surprisingly large proportion of study time per card, given how brisk reviewing usually is) and I've been bothering with it less and less. The default simple cards my dictionary plugin creates are usually good enough for me. I go out of my way to add context on the front of the card now mostly when it's a specialized word almost always seen within that context (so there's zero added value in learning it independently).
I do agree with the general idea that laziness and going easy on yourself is good though. I give myself quite a lot of slack when grading my answers, applying a "my understanding of this word is close enough to avoid confusion in practice" threshold rather than some impractical ideal of native-level mastery.
> For me, carefully adding context has largely felt like time wasted at card creation time
I actually had several custom tools that heavily automated card creation—I could grab a sentence from a web page, or bulk import highlighted phrases from an ebook. Then I had a UI which allowed me to easily highlight an interesting word, and either cloze it, or add a Wiktionary definition on the back. Then I had an Anki plugin to bulk import the cards. This could all obviously be combined into a single tool, and occasionally someone tries.
For my most heavily automated experiment, I used a tool similar to subs2srs to import sound, bilingual subtitles, and tiny screen captures from 4 episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender. That was a fascinating experience, and I'm still earwormed with the dialogue of those episodes a decade later, after only a couple of months of Anki reviews. (See elsewhere in this thread for a link.)
Unfortunately, I'm not convinced that there's a good startup market for language-learning tools. Language learning is normally aspirational, much like a gym membership. And customers don't have any serious plans on how to reach their stated goals. (Again, like a gym membership.) Duolingo isn't terrible, but I suspect—based on lots of Anki experiments—that it should be possible to build much more effective tools than Duolingo. I'm just not convinced that anyone but serious ESL students would pay for them. Too many genuinely good tools in this space have sunken quietly, despite a user-friendly UI and a good landing page.
If you have better tooling, you can add cards way faster. My project (https://github.com/FreeLanguageTools/vocabsieve/) is a tool to help you make sentence cards nearly effortlessly, or even converting ereader highlights, which probably averages to maybe a few seconds per card created.
I'm kind of wondering the same thing learning my guitar: Maybe a good thing is to approach an issue with different ways your head has to think about it.
Like, yes. I can just spaced repetition the heck out of the notes on the fretboard. Just hammer my head into the notes on a string until I pretty much just give up. Always an idea.
But I've found it more effective to mix contexts up. Some weeks, I just drill notes because I'm lazy. But then I also start tinkering around for a week with some weird scale, like hungarian scales and such. Some other week, I'm tinkering around with arpeggio chords, some other week with cord progressions with power chords, some weeks I'm trying to replicate some sound or feeling of a song.
And over time, the brain is putting things together. Suddenly there are realizations: Hey, this is just a G-Minor scale, which makes sense for a somewhat solemn song. Oh, this is just a G-Major scale but we skip those. Wait, I remeber half the notes of the scale, isn't this just that pattern? Also, if the scale is like this, couldn't we try playing that?
It's just a weird feeling, because the amount of things I think I know expands at a much lower rate of the things I realize I don't know - or don't have the technique for, lol.
But I'm kind of considering using a spaced repetition algorithm to just poke for 5 to 10 minute guitar things to do to get both the muscle memory and the neural connections about them going.
I've thought about doing this too - and there are certainly things that are worth rote memorization on guitar. But my experience has been that things stick a million times better when I learn them in context and really focus on using them, so I'm unsure how useful implementing spaced repetition would be vs "just play yer guitar".
That said, the notes on the fretboard is well worth the effort of rote memorization. I found the technique in this video[1] worked absurdly well for me. Years and years of only knowing the notes half-assed and not very well on the middle three strings got absolutely busted after doing this for a few minutes every time I was waiting on a build or something. I can nearly always find a note now, I'm not quite to instant recall but have substantially more ability in this regard now.
A place where spaced repetition might be worth it is in memorizing all the triads or keys, which is good to have instant recall on. I have these decently in my head but usually have to "convert" from a nearby chord in C major for oddball ones, which is fine while practicing but not what you'd want for performance.
I’ve been using Anki on and off for years for language learning but have most recently been using it to study for online uni courses.
Something that’s become evident, perhaps due to the varied nature of the content (vs. all language) is how much gravity card formatting has. In decks made by others I find myself frequently re-wording the answer sides of the cards which makes a noticeable difference in retention — answers that are succinct and flow nicely stick better.
So in short, I’d concur. Card format is important. If you find a card that feels awkward somehow don’t hesitate to rework it.
We've got pretty similar ideas on SRS. I'm working on Phrasing.app, we use (a heavily modified version of) FSRS and have implemented a lot of what you're talking about. We just had a company retreat where we talked about new review modalities and several of these ideas came up.
If it looks at all interesting to you [1], I'd love to chat more and hear more about your experience / approach / etc. Feel free to reach out at ben [at] phrasing [dot] app
Yeah. I'm the author of FSRS and I agree with you. In my opinion, the quality of cards determines the upper limit and the algorithm just helps you achieve the upper limit efficiently.
> I don't think that biggest improvements will come from better spaced repetition algorithms
Exactly that, specially for language learning. The stated goal of hitting a target probability is pointless IMO.
Language acquisition is not about memorizing words, but progressive familiarization (eg via retrieval practice).
You have to expose yourself to massive amounts of language, create your own cards fast, review them faster, move on even if you "fail", don't do too many repetitions (6-8 should be enough for >95% of cards)
The most important aspect of an SRS algorithm is to be practical: sensible choices, equally spaced out among them, that allow you to decrease / maintain / increase intervals without ever punishing you for failing.
What killed Anki for me was having to add cards. It is such a chore adding single word cards. I also ran into the problem of increasingly niche synonyms that I'd learn, but would rarely see in text. For some reason I never really considered cloze cards.
The anki default of 8 relapses before suspending a card is much too high. It took me a while to realize, but dealing with problematic cards takes up -way- more energy than learning new cards... it's not energy/time efficient at all.
Do you have any recommended sources on cloze style cards?
You have absolutely nailed it. Anki should work as a sliding window on material that you wish to learn not as an ever increasing bucket with more and more stuff in it. That way the new material will always be underexposed. It's much better to keep moving. I have the exact same patterns with learning pieces to play on the piano, and within those pieces you see those patterns again (it's almost a fractal).
This is right. I tried and gave up on spaced repetition a few years ago. When I tried again a year ago and did more research, I realised my problem on the first attempt was that I made too complicated cards.
I went back and dug up some of my more valuable cards from my last attempt, and some of them were so complicated that I had to break them up into 10–15 cards now that I know how to design good cards.
That said, I don't think the point is to make them easy. Since you want to aim for a 90-something percent success rate to get the most benefit out of it, too easy will make the going slower. The point is to make them atomic and that usually feels easy, even if you fail 10 % of recall tests.
Truly sorry to hijack, but if you have any recommendations for shared French vocab cards I'd greatly appreciate you pointing me in the right direction. I have some French from school, but would like to get back into it and it's...daunting.
Sorry to hijack your hijack, but I was/am in a similar position with my French/Italian/Portuguese/Dutch and more. I learned them to a high B low C level, but they've since faded from memory.
Trying to learn from language resources is painfully slow. Trying to watch TV or listens to podcasts is ineffectively difficult.
I'm building Phrasing[1] to tackle just this problem. We've just launched with all of the base functionality[2], including automatic analysis of native material to surface the most important words, phrases, and quotes specific to that material. We then make it dead simple to create flashcards-on-steroids which will automatically be applicable as flip cards, cloze cards, audio cards, and more.
When it comes to SRS, we:
- use our own fork of FSRS coincidentally (that's why I'm here hey )
- do away with scheduled due dates and actually try to keep the user engaged at a specific difficulty (you'll only see hard cards if you're doing well and 'can afford' it, you'll see easier cards if you're not doing well)
- dose out new reviews constantly, as it's better to make forward progress then to bang your head against all those challenging reviews
We just onboarded our second cohort of users, but we're planning to onboard another cohort at the end of this month. If you're interested you can fill out the beta application
What were the key insights or surprises you got from that 13,000 word piece?
For background, I contributed to Anki long ago, wrote regularly about SRS in the late 2000s and got deeply into them for language learning for a few years. Later, I mostly stopped using them since I found extensive reading both more interesting and a better return on my time.
You've inspired me to rethink my approach to Anki. I've used it on and off for the last few years, but always fall in the trap of creating cards that were too convoluted. Sounds like I could benefit from some deliberate "laziness".
Did you ever feel like you were answering correctly, on close cards specifically, not because of an improved understanding but because you were associating the correct answer with the prompt/excerpt? Would appreciate any advice on how to avoid this!
> Did you ever feel like you were answering correctly, on close cards specifically, not because of an improved understanding but because you were associating the correct answer with the prompt/excerpt?
I actually suspect that associating the word with the context helps, as surprising as that might be.
Let's say I grab a few sentences from an interesting article, and I boldface a word. I'll mark the card as "pass" if I at least sort of understand it in context.
On day 1, I honestly might find the word fairly confusing. I can explain what it means, but maybe the grammar is unfamiliar. Ditto for the first few reviews. But then around day 8 or so, the card disappears until day 20 or 30. And the next time I see that card, suddenly the odd bit of grammar is completely natural and obvious. There's maybe some kind of medium-term memory consolidation mechanism occurring? Something happens when I'm not looking at it.
Seeing the word in context somehow allows my brain to grab on. The human brain contains some incredibly powerful language learning machinery. In adults, that machinery still exists. Even if it's a bit rusty. And that machinery seems to work best on semi-comprehensible speech in a natural context. So think of Anki less as a set of facts you must learn, and more as a tool to distill and concentrate natural language so that you can let your brain work on your weak points. (And as soon as possible, start reading lots of books and watching TV! I learned the hardest 10% of my vocabulary using Anki, and much of the rest from context reading books.)
Also, I find it fascinating that LLMs are trained using a very similar process. Either "predict the next word" or "fill in the blank". Now, they need a lot more input than any human does, but the fact that fill-in-the-blanks works so well in both cases is fascinating.
Here are two of the most interesting experiments I tried with Anki:
(The only language I ever bothered to push to a high level was French. Spanish and ancient Egyptian were basically experiments to see how quickly I could pick up the basics, using the tricks I learned while working on French. A language that you can use at a professional level is a bit like a pet; it requires ongoing care.)
That is a legitimate problem of SRS (recognition vs knowing), I use a few ways to avoid it:
-Don't do many repetitions of the same card. Eg. if i want to learn 5 new specific words, maybe I use 6-8 sentences that each use 2 new words, so that each new word shows in 2-3 cards. Then I only review each cards 6-8 times in a 2-month period (normally).
-Use long intervals. I rather forget than learn to recognize the thing. But even if I forget, I almost never click "fail". You learn with retrieval effort, even if you just forgotten the thing (that's science)
-Even so, by the 4-5th rep I start recognizing cards, so I be mindful when reviewing, and force myself to really think the answer (occasionally, writing down the answer, for instance). This clashes with my principle of going fast, so there is deff a balance.
-I don't track "streaks", but if I struggle or I have the feeling that something shows up too much, I archive and create more cards.
In relatively recent versions of Anki, you can create nested Cloze deletions: "{{c3::{{c1::foo}}{{c2::bar}}}}" will show you cards "[...]bar", "foo[...]", and "[...]", in that order, all with answers "foobar".
As for multiple choice and q&a---my practice is to make both Cloze and basic cards for, well, most things---Cloze are good for the early steps and for seeing how different pieces fit together, but basic cards are more demanding, and without them I don't quite feel like I've learned a thing.
(FWIW my primary use is physics & the mathematics behind it, not language learning.)
Someone could make an NLP algorithm to determine whether a given card is well made. Training data could just deleted/non-deleted cards from a power users such as you.
I’ve learned tens of thousands of foreign language words using Anki and have always find that having pictures on the cards help me remember the words.
I currently have a (foolish?) project. I’m trying to memorize the 750 cards of a quiz game that we play in the family. All questions are answered by a year. So for example: “What year did Coca Cola Light come out?”.
I have been using Midjourney to generate images for those cards which makes it so much eaaier to recall.
I have a system. I have a person representing each century; Einstein is 1900-2000 and for example Mari-Antoinette is 1700-1800.
Then items represent the decade; a sixties car represent the sixties, jacket with shoulder pads the eighties and so on.
I do something similar for the last digit.
Then I have Midjourney generate such pictures, in a comic book style, and I save the most fun or absurd one and use that on the back side of the Anki card.
The image is often easier to recall than the year by itself
1. Look up PAO - it's a tangentially related mnemonic system that uses images.
2. Test your recall periodically with/without the images otherwise you may find that the true nature of recall (aka in the wild) without said images is adversely affected.
3. Is it Trivial Pursuit? A friend of mine deliberately memorized all the cards of the original Genus edition.
It’s not TP, it’s a Swedish game called När då då.
The image is on the back of the card, with the answer. So trying to recall the year, I don’t get to see the picture.
But, the picture is the first thing that comes to mind when I get the question and the from it I get the year.
Thanks! I definitely will add more examples to the landing page, currently I'm working hard on the decks: pathlib in depth, a tour of the stdlib and Norvig's tricks (a collection of tricks from the Pytydes of Peter Norvig).
I believe the hardest part of using spaced repetition to learn programming is creating good decks, it's a ton of work.
It seems from the description that FSRS still puts an exact review date on each card? This feature was pretty much the reason why I stopped using Anki. I'm not in college and not doing exams, I just want to practice when I feel like it, maybe with large breaks between sessions, and not feel like there's a backlog building up.
I think Anki is a great app, I just wish there was an algorithm that would just randomly sample cards (with probability proportional to how urgently you need to review it) rather than put a review date on them. Something like https://github.com/fasiha/ebisu but available as an Anki plugin (if that supports custom algorithms on mobile yet?) or a similar app with an open format for cards.
You can't, but I wager a student excited to doing a review but with a suboptimal method, will do better than a student who dreads the review with the optimal method.
>I just want to practice when I feel like it, maybe with large breaks between sessions
That's how SRS already works. But if you clear out the "backlog" you can no longer practice whenever you want and must wait for a period before you will be able to practice again.
I made a half-baked app that did something like that and it worked very poorly. For facts I remembered repeating them was annoying, and many of those I forgot, I forgot them completely. So repeating served little purpose and the progress was very slow. The key is to repeat when one _almost_ forgets and this can't be done without due dates and scheduling.
I'm working on Phrasing.app that does just this. We originally used ebisu, but ended up (heavily) modifying our own fork of FSRS.
We don't use due dates really (except for some analytics by request), but instead try to keep a user at various difficulty levels.
We care more about forward progress then making sure you're always 100% caught up (if a words really that important, you can either favorite it or you'll see it again).
It's not an open flashcard app, we're really also heavily focused on automatic sentence mining for foreign languages, but I'd be happy to answer any questions about my experience adapting FSRS.
I’ve been using FSRS for 3 months and it’s finally resolved some of my pain points about having to trial-and-error adjust the old SM2 scheduling algorithm, since the content of each deck can greatly affect what the optimal retention is. Now you can just retrain the weights for each deck you have every few months and it will adapt appropriately. The paper[0] is also definitely worth reading if you want to see some rigorous analysis of large-scale real-world spaced repetition science.
Because of the extensive benchmarking most people probably will not benefit from refitting the weights to their collection until they have thousands of reviews (author recommends 1k+).
Note it still works fine even if you do your cards late, since the recall probabilities are based on
the stability and when you last reviewed the card, and the stability will update a bit longer if you somehow managed to still recall a card after the due date.
I use multiple spaced repetition apps per day just for fun because I like doing flashcards as a hobby. I have tried this out, its good, but still not as good as the newest version of Supermemo. You can tell if you put the same or similar material into two or more apps. FSRS is much better than almost everything else out right now though and I think it will be better than Supermemo very soon. I tried Mochi Cards for about a year and it was just okay, a little better than a default Anki install. Mnemosyne is the same. The Supermemo SaaS app is okay, but I don't like how they structure their language materials.
For language vocab, I use Clozemaster, but then I put the sentence into Supermemo after I get it right because the SM algo is that much better. They also have ChatGPT explanations for each word of the sentence. I also put those into Supermeno.
Also, I have not found a flashcard program that lets you make cards as fast as Supermemo. With Supermemo, you paste in a chunk of text (ctrl-n), highlight a word you want to make cloze deletion from, and press alt-x. You can do it multiple times on the same piece of text, and every time you do it, you get a new cloze deletion card in your reviews. Almost every other app, you have to make a single card at a time. I think its because most other apps stick too hard to the cards and decks metaphor. Supermemo uses a tree structure to organize everything. It makes a big difference. Technically, you don't really need to organize anything though. People act like the material they learn is going to be categorized into neat decks in their head.
> With Supermemo, you paste in a chunk of text (ctrl-n), highlight a word you want to make cloze deletion from, and press alt-x. You can do it multiple times on the same piece of text, and every time you do it, you get a new cloze deletion card in your reviews.
> Also, I have not found a flashcard program that lets you make cards as fast as Supermemo. With Supermemo, you paste in a chunk of text (ctrl-n), highlight a word you want to make cloze deletion from, and press alt-x.
In Mochi it's mostly the same. Press n (new card), ctrl-v (paste text), select word, ctrl-l (make cloze), ctrl-[n] (where n is 0-9) to create a cloze group. Each cloze group will have its own "card".
Anki FSRS moves closer to being a "just-in-time" algorithm based only on user-provided inputs. And although its data structures aren't strictly modular, they come as close as practical to that ideal while still remaining compatible with legacy Anki decks and extensions.
In practice, that's illustrated by the fact that there's now a button to fully recompute all intervals and difficulties based only on your history and the current algorithm tunings. And if you've already been using FSRS and the tunings haven't changed, the recomputation won't have any effect because it's equivalent to the incremental computations after each review.
So in principle it could be thought of as a just-in-time pure function, which involves a cache of generated data only for legacy & performance reasons.
Readit News
I started out using Anki to learn French vocabulary. I'd make pairs of cards, with English on one side and French on the other. This started out easy, but became utterly brutal and depressing with several hundred cards in my deck. Too many near synonyms.
I eventually took a hint from Katzumoto's Japanese advice, and started making cloze cards. I'd copy and paste an entire paragraph from an ebook or a web page, and hide just one word. These cards were easy, but also effective.
Then I got lazier.
I'd only hide half a word. Or I'd just boldface a word, and mark the card as a "pass" if I could sort of remember that word in context.
And somehow, these cards actually worked better.
Then I got lazier still. If seeing a card made me grown "Oh, not that card", I'd just delete it. If I missed a card 3 times, I configured Anki to permanently suspend it. If I actually needed to know a word, no worries, I'd see it again soon in a more helpful context. And my French vocabulary continued to grow by leaps and bounds.
I don't think that biggest improvements will come from better spaced repetition algorithms. I suspect the biggest wins will come from improved card formats. And it's surprisingly hard to make a card too easy to be useful.
(Source: 35,000+ Anki reps across three languages.)
Geeks like us love to get into SRS algorithms and chase after the 1% improvements with a cleverer repetition algorithm or a better input method. The real failure mode is much more mundane: People give up.
I see it all the time. People cram thousands of cards into Anki in their first month learning something. After a month or two they are so overwhelmed with reviews and the reviews become such a chore that they just give up. (Of course, there are people who manage to add thousands of cards every month for years and years. These are the people who would probably do nearly as well with just a pen and paper. )
Two pieces of advice that make all the difference: Make your cards a little bit 'too' easy and be rather selective with your cards.
When you first make a card you're probably actively studying the subject of the card. You're very familiar with it and it's all in your head right now. The temptation is to make a card that is fun and challenging for you right now. Resist! Instead, make a card that feels slightly too easy, so that in a week or two it will be enough to tickle your memory rather than confuse you.
Also, people dump entire books worth of sentences into Anki. I like to use the metaphor of walking through an orchard: take your time, look around and grab one or two of the nicest apples you find. If you try to grab everything you're only going to slow yourself down. Also, if you pick up a rotten apple (uninteresting/too difficult card) it pollutes your entire deck. You start to resist review your flashcards.
The other major failure mode is similarly boring: sometimes it's just not useful to blindly memorize things. The exact problem that spaced repetition solves is pretty niche, and while it can be "close enough" to be beneficial in adjacent endeavors, it's also extremely subject to Goodharting. The more hardcore you go into optimizing your SRS procedure, the likelier it gets that the metrics you're optimizing for depart from your actual goal.
For example, learning from books or mathematics?
What even is a good progression for creating cards? Only add them slowly and optimise for having a few cards in your review queue and only add after several days or weeks of no cards? Find a good text and just add them?
Sorry, it appears that the people in this thread are clearly deriving value from SRS and speaking as someone who's tried SRS and Anki on multiple occasions and failed to keep it up, it would be helpful to get insights =)...
I do agree with the general idea that laziness and going easy on yourself is good though. I give myself quite a lot of slack when grading my answers, applying a "my understanding of this word is close enough to avoid confusion in practice" threshold rather than some impractical ideal of native-level mastery.
I actually had several custom tools that heavily automated card creation—I could grab a sentence from a web page, or bulk import highlighted phrases from an ebook. Then I had a UI which allowed me to easily highlight an interesting word, and either cloze it, or add a Wiktionary definition on the back. Then I had an Anki plugin to bulk import the cards. This could all obviously be combined into a single tool, and occasionally someone tries.
For my most heavily automated experiment, I used a tool similar to subs2srs to import sound, bilingual subtitles, and tiny screen captures from 4 episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender. That was a fascinating experience, and I'm still earwormed with the dialogue of those episodes a decade later, after only a couple of months of Anki reviews. (See elsewhere in this thread for a link.)
Unfortunately, I'm not convinced that there's a good startup market for language-learning tools. Language learning is normally aspirational, much like a gym membership. And customers don't have any serious plans on how to reach their stated goals. (Again, like a gym membership.) Duolingo isn't terrible, but I suspect—based on lots of Anki experiments—that it should be possible to build much more effective tools than Duolingo. I'm just not convinced that anyone but serious ESL students would pay for them. Too many genuinely good tools in this space have sunken quietly, despite a user-friendly UI and a good landing page.
https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulatin...
It will improve a lot your cards
Like, yes. I can just spaced repetition the heck out of the notes on the fretboard. Just hammer my head into the notes on a string until I pretty much just give up. Always an idea.
But I've found it more effective to mix contexts up. Some weeks, I just drill notes because I'm lazy. But then I also start tinkering around for a week with some weird scale, like hungarian scales and such. Some other week, I'm tinkering around with arpeggio chords, some other week with cord progressions with power chords, some weeks I'm trying to replicate some sound or feeling of a song.
And over time, the brain is putting things together. Suddenly there are realizations: Hey, this is just a G-Minor scale, which makes sense for a somewhat solemn song. Oh, this is just a G-Major scale but we skip those. Wait, I remeber half the notes of the scale, isn't this just that pattern? Also, if the scale is like this, couldn't we try playing that?
It's just a weird feeling, because the amount of things I think I know expands at a much lower rate of the things I realize I don't know - or don't have the technique for, lol.
But I'm kind of considering using a spaced repetition algorithm to just poke for 5 to 10 minute guitar things to do to get both the muscle memory and the neural connections about them going.
That said, the notes on the fretboard is well worth the effort of rote memorization. I found the technique in this video[1] worked absurdly well for me. Years and years of only knowing the notes half-assed and not very well on the middle three strings got absolutely busted after doing this for a few minutes every time I was waiting on a build or something. I can nearly always find a note now, I'm not quite to instant recall but have substantially more ability in this regard now.
A place where spaced repetition might be worth it is in memorizing all the triads or keys, which is good to have instant recall on. I have these decently in my head but usually have to "convert" from a nearby chord in C major for oddball ones, which is fine while practicing but not what you'd want for performance.
[1]: https://youtu.be/PJddQ6Q0UDo?si=4dmR7_tlsWIhgvYg
Something that’s become evident, perhaps due to the varied nature of the content (vs. all language) is how much gravity card formatting has. In decks made by others I find myself frequently re-wording the answer sides of the cards which makes a noticeable difference in retention — answers that are succinct and flow nicely stick better.
So in short, I’d concur. Card format is important. If you find a card that feels awkward somehow don’t hesitate to rework it.
If it looks at all interesting to you [1], I'd love to chat more and hear more about your experience / approach / etc. Feel free to reach out at ben [at] phrasing [dot] app
[1] https://blog.phrasing.app/phrasing-first-look/
At least with SuperMemo, this is actually one of their main tips.
See also: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/20_rules_of_knowledge_formulatio...
Exactly that, specially for language learning. The stated goal of hitting a target probability is pointless IMO.
Language acquisition is not about memorizing words, but progressive familiarization (eg via retrieval practice).
You have to expose yourself to massive amounts of language, create your own cards fast, review them faster, move on even if you "fail", don't do too many repetitions (6-8 should be enough for >95% of cards)
The most important aspect of an SRS algorithm is to be practical: sensible choices, equally spaced out among them, that allow you to decrease / maintain / increase intervals without ever punishing you for failing.
The anki default of 8 relapses before suspending a card is much too high. It took me a while to realize, but dealing with problematic cards takes up -way- more energy than learning new cards... it's not energy/time efficient at all.
Do you have any recommended sources on cloze style cards?
[45k reps here for Korean]
Mind linking out to Katzumoto’s Anki advice? Is this this one? https://tatsumoto-ren.github.io/blog/setting-up-anki.html
I went back and dug up some of my more valuable cards from my last attempt, and some of them were so complicated that I had to break them up into 10–15 cards now that I know how to design good cards.
That said, I don't think the point is to make them easy. Since you want to aim for a 90-something percent success rate to get the most benefit out of it, too easy will make the going slower. The point is to make them atomic and that usually feels easy, even if you fail 10 % of recall tests.
Trying to learn from language resources is painfully slow. Trying to watch TV or listens to podcasts is ineffectively difficult.
I'm building Phrasing[1] to tackle just this problem. We've just launched with all of the base functionality[2], including automatic analysis of native material to surface the most important words, phrases, and quotes specific to that material. We then make it dead simple to create flashcards-on-steroids which will automatically be applicable as flip cards, cloze cards, audio cards, and more.
When it comes to SRS, we:
- use our own fork of FSRS coincidentally (that's why I'm here hey )
- do away with scheduled due dates and actually try to keep the user engaged at a specific difficulty (you'll only see hard cards if you're doing well and 'can afford' it, you'll see easier cards if you're not doing well)
- dose out new reviews constantly, as it's better to make forward progress then to bang your head against all those challenging reviews
We just onboarded our second cohort of users, but we're planning to onboard another cohort at the end of this month. If you're interested you can fill out the beta application
[1] https://phrasing.app/
[2] https://blog.phrasing.app/phrasing-first-look
https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/
For background, I contributed to Anki long ago, wrote regularly about SRS in the late 2000s and got deeply into them for language learning for a few years. Later, I mostly stopped using them since I found extensive reading both more interesting and a better return on my time.
I’m interested in the topic but am not new to it.
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Did you ever feel like you were answering correctly, on close cards specifically, not because of an improved understanding but because you were associating the correct answer with the prompt/excerpt? Would appreciate any advice on how to avoid this!
I actually suspect that associating the word with the context helps, as surprising as that might be.
Let's say I grab a few sentences from an interesting article, and I boldface a word. I'll mark the card as "pass" if I at least sort of understand it in context.
On day 1, I honestly might find the word fairly confusing. I can explain what it means, but maybe the grammar is unfamiliar. Ditto for the first few reviews. But then around day 8 or so, the card disappears until day 20 or 30. And the next time I see that card, suddenly the odd bit of grammar is completely natural and obvious. There's maybe some kind of medium-term memory consolidation mechanism occurring? Something happens when I'm not looking at it.
Seeing the word in context somehow allows my brain to grab on. The human brain contains some incredibly powerful language learning machinery. In adults, that machinery still exists. Even if it's a bit rusty. And that machinery seems to work best on semi-comprehensible speech in a natural context. So think of Anki less as a set of facts you must learn, and more as a tool to distill and concentrate natural language so that you can let your brain work on your weak points. (And as soon as possible, start reading lots of books and watching TV! I learned the hardest 10% of my vocabulary using Anki, and much of the rest from context reading books.)
Also, I find it fascinating that LLMs are trained using a very similar process. Either "predict the next word" or "fill in the blank". Now, they need a lot more input than any human does, but the fact that fill-in-the-blanks works so well in both cases is fascinating.
Here are two of the most interesting experiments I tried with Anki:
http://www.randomhacks.net/substudy/https://blog.beeminder.com/hieroglyphs/
(The only language I ever bothered to push to a high level was French. Spanish and ancient Egyptian were basically experiments to see how quickly I could pick up the basics, using the tricks I learned while working on French. A language that you can use at a professional level is a bit like a pet; it requires ongoing care.)
-Don't do many repetitions of the same card. Eg. if i want to learn 5 new specific words, maybe I use 6-8 sentences that each use 2 new words, so that each new word shows in 2-3 cards. Then I only review each cards 6-8 times in a 2-month period (normally).
-Use long intervals. I rather forget than learn to recognize the thing. But even if I forget, I almost never click "fail". You learn with retrieval effort, even if you just forgotten the thing (that's science)
-Even so, by the 4-5th rep I start recognizing cards, so I be mindful when reviewing, and force myself to really think the answer (occasionally, writing down the answer, for instance). This clashes with my principle of going fast, so there is deff a balance.
-I don't track "streaks", but if I struggle or I have the feeling that something shows up too much, I archive and create more cards.
Does Anki or any of its plugins support creating a difficulty progression when creating cards?
ie. half-word cloze, then full-word, then multiple choice, then q&a, etc.
I’m not sure how this would work in practice. Like would the next difficulty card be added to the deck once the easier card has reached a threshold?
As for multiple choice and q&a---my practice is to make both Cloze and basic cards for, well, most things---Cloze are good for the early steps and for seeing how different pieces fit together, but basic cards are more demanding, and without them I don't quite feel like I've learned a thing.
(FWIW my primary use is physics & the mathematics behind it, not language learning.)
I currently have a (foolish?) project. I’m trying to memorize the 750 cards of a quiz game that we play in the family. All questions are answered by a year. So for example: “What year did Coca Cola Light come out?”.
I have been using Midjourney to generate images for those cards which makes it so much eaaier to recall.
I have a system. I have a person representing each century; Einstein is 1900-2000 and for example Mari-Antoinette is 1700-1800. Then items represent the decade; a sixties car represent the sixties, jacket with shoulder pads the eighties and so on.
I do something similar for the last digit.
Then I have Midjourney generate such pictures, in a comic book style, and I save the most fun or absurd one and use that on the back side of the Anki card.
The image is often easier to recall than the year by itself
1. Look up PAO - it's a tangentially related mnemonic system that uses images.
2. Test your recall periodically with/without the images otherwise you may find that the true nature of recall (aka in the wild) without said images is adversely affected.
3. Is it Trivial Pursuit? A friend of mine deliberately memorized all the cards of the original Genus edition.
The image is on the back of the card, with the answer. So trying to recall the year, I don’t get to see the picture. But, the picture is the first thing that comes to mind when I get the question and the from it I get the year.
I'm currently doing the same for geography ... flags, capitals, etc. I reckon it will give me a +5 advantage on most trivia nights
Just a few days ago, I published a Python implementation of the classic SM-2 algorithm that I use for https://python.cards, but I may switch to FSRS. https://github.com/vlopezferrando/simple-spaced-repetition
Any chance you are open sourcing the web app? I can see it being a popular way for niches to show flashcards eg. for students to learn X
I believe the hardest part of using spaced repetition to learn programming is creating good decks, it's a ton of work.
About open sourcing the web app, I might do it. It's a Django app, and I've published some videos while coding it (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyWUj9r0soytotuuh2JnPrw), so it's no secret.
I think Anki is a great app, I just wish there was an algorithm that would just randomly sample cards (with probability proportional to how urgently you need to review it) rather than put a review date on them. Something like https://github.com/fasiha/ebisu but available as an Anki plugin (if that supports custom algorithms on mobile yet?) or a similar app with an open format for cards.
That's how SRS already works. But if you clear out the "backlog" you can no longer practice whenever you want and must wait for a period before you will be able to practice again.
We don't use due dates really (except for some analytics by request), but instead try to keep a user at various difficulty levels.
We care more about forward progress then making sure you're always 100% caught up (if a words really that important, you can either favorite it or you'll see it again).
It's not an open flashcard app, we're really also heavily focused on automatic sentence mining for foreign languages, but I'd be happy to answer any questions about my experience adapting FSRS.
You can see more about the product at https://blog.phrasing.app/phrasing-first-look/
Because of the extensive benchmarking most people probably will not benefit from refitting the weights to their collection until they have thousands of reviews (author recommends 1k+).
Note it still works fine even if you do your cards late, since the recall probabilities are based on the stability and when you last reviewed the card, and the stability will update a bit longer if you somehow managed to still recall a card after the due date.
[0] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3534678.3539081?cid=996605471...
[1] https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/The...
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For language vocab, I use Clozemaster, but then I put the sentence into Supermemo after I get it right because the SM algo is that much better. They also have ChatGPT explanations for each word of the sentence. I also put those into Supermeno.
The hardest part is making good cards for sure. This will help with more ideas: http://arxiv.org/abs/2401.01257 and https://rust-book.cs.brown.edu
Also, I have not found a flashcard program that lets you make cards as fast as Supermemo. With Supermemo, you paste in a chunk of text (ctrl-n), highlight a word you want to make cloze deletion from, and press alt-x. You can do it multiple times on the same piece of text, and every time you do it, you get a new cloze deletion card in your reviews. Almost every other app, you have to make a single card at a time. I think its because most other apps stick too hard to the cards and decks metaphor. Supermemo uses a tree structure to organize everything. It makes a big difference. Technically, you don't really need to organize anything though. People act like the material they learn is going to be categorized into neat decks in their head.
In Mochi it's mostly the same. Press n (new card), ctrl-v (paste text), select word, ctrl-l (make cloze), ctrl-[n] (where n is 0-9) to create a cloze group. Each cloze group will have its own "card".
Aren't there three separate items?
1) Your cards (or a subset of cards).
2) The history of your interactions with them.
3) An algorithm (potentially just-in-time) taking that history into account to present cards to you, thereby adding to the history.
In practice, that's illustrated by the fact that there's now a button to fully recompute all intervals and difficulties based only on your history and the current algorithm tunings. And if you've already been using FSRS and the tunings haven't changed, the recomputation won't have any effect because it's equivalent to the incremental computations after each review.
So in principle it could be thought of as a just-in-time pure function, which involves a cache of generated data only for legacy & performance reasons.
I would love some feedback.
BTW, the code is on github [2].
[1] https://youtube2anki.fly.dev/
[2] https://github.com/vacmar01/youtube2anki
I'm currently learning MRI technology for my radiology board exam with the following youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPcImQzEnTpz-5TzxyyoY...
This is what got me the idea.