Care to share your experiences with Anki? I’m just starting using it, and I have several qualms and questions. First of all, what is the proper way to select a sub-deck with hard cards and drill through them repeatedly? Second, if you are learning languages, what is your approach to grammatical notes and multiple word forms, and, generally, what do you do when you need to have more that just two pieces of information linked, as it is often the case with irregular verbs? Hope you don’t mind my asking.
Normal flashcards should be all equally difficult: as easy as possible. The idea is to break everything down into atomic facts; this makes it so you can’t short-circuit a difficult card by just memorizing the answer; by memorizing all the parts, you still have the whole.
If you really want to drill one sub-deck, you can choose “cram mode” , and select the tag of the cards you want to review.
I don’t use anki for languages, but to learn conjugations of verbs, I would have many example sentences with a ”… ” where the verb should go. You could ask on #anki or the google group. Here’s a good article on how to make effective flashcards from the inventor of the spaced repetition algorithm, Piotr Wozniak.
Unconventional decks like having anki cards for a whole piano piece or problem in a textbook might work, but I haven’t tried them… yet. I’ll be experimenting with those this coming semester.
Unconventional decks like having anki cards for a whole piano piece or problem in a textbook might work
I have used Anki for learning bass guitar parts to songs, and I found this method: break a piece up into individual riffs or themes, make flashcards with the “[name of song] [riff or theme sheet music / tablature]”. Add in flashcards that use cloze deletion on a list of how the riffs progress (intro → verse → … → verse → chorus → coda, for example, deleting chorus) and you have 10-20 cards, depending on complexity. I also threw in transitional licks appropriate to the song to bump the count up.
When testing yourself with the deck, have your instrument at hand. On riff cards, practice the riff for five minutes, then hit ‘again’. Answer the other cards as normal—I originally planned to play the riff that was deleted, but I found it wasn’t really necessary. I suggest responding ‘again’ to each riff card until you can play the riff first try.
The bonus of this method is it works out to ~1 hour of practice of your instrument. I found huge improvements because it ensured 80% of my hour was spent actually learning and improving rather than practicing well-known or ingrained patterns. My recall of songs from name was significantly higher too.
Note that it might work better if you simply play the riff or theme once; my system has this weird time dynamic where some cards can take 5 minutes and be repeated three or four times, where others take 5 seconds and are dismissed first time around. This may not play nice with the spaced repetition algorithms.
Normal flashcards should be all equally difficult: as easy as possible. The idea is to break everything down into atomic facts; this makes it so you can’t short-circuit a difficult card by just memorizing the answer; by memorizing all the parts, you still have the whole.
In my experience, I’ve found this to not be as true as it seems. I originally had many of my cards as atomic as possible, based on what Piotr Wozniak suggests, but while I had each individual part memorized, they all seemed to hang loosely connected, without a vivid thread holding it all together. Two clear examples for me are memorizing chess moves and poetry: Originally I’d memorize poems line by line, with each line shown in its surrounding context to prompt me, and chess games move-by-move, prompted by the state of the board at that moment.
I later experimented with more coarse chunks, where a single card would represent an entire stanza of a poem, or 10 ply of moves from a high-tier chess game. The cards took longer per interaction, but only a little longer (since I didn’t have to switch contexts, increasing short-term flow), and the relativly fewer number of cards needed to represent the information more than made up for the longer reviews. But the most important benefit was that things suddenly became much clearer for me. Instead of being vaguely aware of the contours of the poems, I would find myself reciting them wholesale in the shower, unprompted (even fairly long poems like Tennyson’s Ulysses, which clocks in at 70 lines—which, by the way, I shudder at the thought of trying to memorize line-by-line, like I have some shorter poems). Suddenly, I would see an entire series of chess moves as being deeply interconnected, in a way I never noticed trying to memorize those same moves one at a time.
The main benefit I thought atomization would provide, namely that each element would be readily available for combination with other, seemingly unrelated ideas, I don’t really notice much loss of. While each element is richly situated in an existing context, I can easily pluck that idea out of that context to join it with ideas from another, but the richness of the existing context makes it much easier to get a handle on that idea in the first place
Some more thoughts: there’s one card in my notes that asks:
“According to Ray Dalio, when you have a problem, you should ask yourself 6 questions:
What went wrong?
Have you made a mistake like this before?
What was the immediate cause of the problem?
What was the root cause of the problem?
What can you do to correct the problem in the short term?
What can you do to prevent problems like these in the long term?”
All 6 questions are hidden on the same card, so I have to provide all 6 in order to mark the card correct. Following the principle of atomization, I might have thought to create 6 different cards, one for each question to ask, but my experience with such atomized lists tends to be that each card is much more slippery, and the different items would all blend together in my mind (creating problems both during review and when the opportunity for application arises), whereas when the list is presented as a cohesive whole, it’s much easier to remember each part as a part of the whole, and makes each part contrast better with the other items
I’ve tried to learn Esperanto and French using Anki. I’d recommend that you don’t actually explicitly learn the grammar of your target language. For fluency, you need to be able to use correct grammar without conscious thought. Using grammar SRS cards, eg. ‘conjugate this verb’, will enable you to know correct grammar, but not at the intuitive, subconscious level you need for real fluency.
The best way around this, it seems, is to train RECOGNITION of the meanings of many example sentences. This can be done two ways.
Firstly, through lots of exposure to media in the target language, eg. audiobooks. You don’t need to understand what’s being said, so long as you familiarize youself with the pronunciation, tone and stress patterns of the language. You will gradually start to understand what’s being said, both from your SRS (see below) and just through osmosis, the way small children learn their home languages.
Secondly, by training understanding of many sentences in the language through SRS. You should not try to translate English sentences to sentences in your target language, you should only try to understand whatever the sentence in the target language means. In an SRS, you can add the sentence (in your target language) to the question field. Leave the answer field blank. If you fail to understand the sentence, look up all the words, idioms, etc. that you don’t understand and add them to the answer field.
Thank you so much for posting this! I use anki a lot, and your Mysterious Questions deck has been a great help =]
Care to share your experiences with Anki? I’m just starting using it, and I have several qualms and questions. First of all, what is the proper way to select a sub-deck with hard cards and drill through them repeatedly? Second, if you are learning languages, what is your approach to grammatical notes and multiple word forms, and, generally, what do you do when you need to have more that just two pieces of information linked, as it is often the case with irregular verbs? Hope you don’t mind my asking.
Normal flashcards should be all equally difficult: as easy as possible. The idea is to break everything down into atomic facts; this makes it so you can’t short-circuit a difficult card by just memorizing the answer; by memorizing all the parts, you still have the whole.
If you really want to drill one sub-deck, you can choose “cram mode” , and select the tag of the cards you want to review.
I don’t use anki for languages, but to learn conjugations of verbs, I would have many example sentences with a ”… ” where the verb should go. You could ask on #anki or the google group. Here’s a good article on how to make effective flashcards from the inventor of the spaced repetition algorithm, Piotr Wozniak.
Unconventional decks like having anki cards for a whole piano piece or problem in a textbook might work, but I haven’t tried them… yet. I’ll be experimenting with those this coming semester.
I have used Anki for learning bass guitar parts to songs, and I found this method: break a piece up into individual riffs or themes, make flashcards with the “[name of song] [riff or theme sheet music / tablature]”. Add in flashcards that use cloze deletion on a list of how the riffs progress (intro → verse → … → verse → chorus → coda, for example, deleting chorus) and you have 10-20 cards, depending on complexity. I also threw in transitional licks appropriate to the song to bump the count up.
When testing yourself with the deck, have your instrument at hand. On riff cards, practice the riff for five minutes, then hit ‘again’. Answer the other cards as normal—I originally planned to play the riff that was deleted, but I found it wasn’t really necessary. I suggest responding ‘again’ to each riff card until you can play the riff first try.
The bonus of this method is it works out to ~1 hour of practice of your instrument. I found huge improvements because it ensured 80% of my hour was spent actually learning and improving rather than practicing well-known or ingrained patterns. My recall of songs from name was significantly higher too.
Thank you! I was planning on setting up a system for piano and guitar and I wasn’t really sure what would work. This sounds great =]
Note that it might work better if you simply play the riff or theme once; my system has this weird time dynamic where some cards can take 5 minutes and be repeated three or four times, where others take 5 seconds and are dismissed first time around. This may not play nice with the spaced repetition algorithms.
In my experience, I’ve found this to not be as true as it seems. I originally had many of my cards as atomic as possible, based on what Piotr Wozniak suggests, but while I had each individual part memorized, they all seemed to hang loosely connected, without a vivid thread holding it all together. Two clear examples for me are memorizing chess moves and poetry: Originally I’d memorize poems line by line, with each line shown in its surrounding context to prompt me, and chess games move-by-move, prompted by the state of the board at that moment.
I later experimented with more coarse chunks, where a single card would represent an entire stanza of a poem, or 10 ply of moves from a high-tier chess game. The cards took longer per interaction, but only a little longer (since I didn’t have to switch contexts, increasing short-term flow), and the relativly fewer number of cards needed to represent the information more than made up for the longer reviews. But the most important benefit was that things suddenly became much clearer for me. Instead of being vaguely aware of the contours of the poems, I would find myself reciting them wholesale in the shower, unprompted (even fairly long poems like Tennyson’s Ulysses, which clocks in at 70 lines—which, by the way, I shudder at the thought of trying to memorize line-by-line, like I have some shorter poems). Suddenly, I would see an entire series of chess moves as being deeply interconnected, in a way I never noticed trying to memorize those same moves one at a time.
The main benefit I thought atomization would provide, namely that each element would be readily available for combination with other, seemingly unrelated ideas, I don’t really notice much loss of. While each element is richly situated in an existing context, I can easily pluck that idea out of that context to join it with ideas from another, but the richness of the existing context makes it much easier to get a handle on that idea in the first place
Some more thoughts: there’s one card in my notes that asks:
“According to Ray Dalio, when you have a problem, you should ask yourself 6 questions: What went wrong? Have you made a mistake like this before? What was the immediate cause of the problem? What was the root cause of the problem? What can you do to correct the problem in the short term? What can you do to prevent problems like these in the long term?”
All 6 questions are hidden on the same card, so I have to provide all 6 in order to mark the card correct. Following the principle of atomization, I might have thought to create 6 different cards, one for each question to ask, but my experience with such atomized lists tends to be that each card is much more slippery, and the different items would all blend together in my mind (creating problems both during review and when the opportunity for application arises), whereas when the list is presented as a cohesive whole, it’s much easier to remember each part as a part of the whole, and makes each part contrast better with the other items
I’ve tried to learn Esperanto and French using Anki. I’d recommend that you don’t actually explicitly learn the grammar of your target language. For fluency, you need to be able to use correct grammar without conscious thought. Using grammar SRS cards, eg. ‘conjugate this verb’, will enable you to know correct grammar, but not at the intuitive, subconscious level you need for real fluency.
The best way around this, it seems, is to train RECOGNITION of the meanings of many example sentences. This can be done two ways.
Firstly, through lots of exposure to media in the target language, eg. audiobooks. You don’t need to understand what’s being said, so long as you familiarize youself with the pronunciation, tone and stress patterns of the language. You will gradually start to understand what’s being said, both from your SRS (see below) and just through osmosis, the way small children learn their home languages.
Secondly, by training understanding of many sentences in the language through SRS. You should not try to translate English sentences to sentences in your target language, you should only try to understand whatever the sentence in the target language means. In an SRS, you can add the sentence (in your target language) to the question field. Leave the answer field blank. If you fail to understand the sentence, look up all the words, idioms, etc. that you don’t understand and add them to the answer field.
More on this technique: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/all-japanese-all-the-time-ajatt-how-to-learn-japanese-on-your-own-having-fun-and-to-fluency http://www.antimoon.com/how/howtolearn.htm