These days, most of my time on Anki is on Japanese (which I’m learning for fun) and Chinese (which I already know, but I’m brushing up on tones and characters).
Looking through my decks, I also have decks on:
Algorithms and data structures (from a couple books I read on that)
Communication (misc. tips on storytelling, giving talks, etc.)
Game Design (insights and concepts that seemed valuable)
German
Git and Unix Command Line commands
Haskell
Insight (misc. stuff that seemed interesting/important)
Mnemonics
Productivity (notes from Lukeprog’s posts and vairous other sources)
Psychology and neuroscience
Rationality Habits (one of the few decks I have that come all made, from Anna Salmon I think, though I also added some stuff and delted others)
Statistics
Web Technologies (some stuff on Angular JS and CSS that I got tired of looking up all the time)
(also a few minor decks with very few cards)
I review those pretty much every day (I sometimes leave a few unfinished, depending on how much idle time I have in queues, transport, etc.)
Apparently I have 6887 cards (though that includes those I suspended because they’re boring, useless, too difficult, duplicated, or possibly wrong; I tend to often suspend cards instead of deleting them); of those around 3000 are Chinese pinyin cards I automatically created with a Python script (I set them up to get between 1 and 5 new ones per day, depending on how busy I tend to be), 1000 are Japanese (the biggest deck of manually-entered cards), and the remaining decks rarely go over 300 cards.
I study probably between 20 and 40 minutes per day, usually in public transit or during “downtime” (waiting in line, carrying the baby around the house hoping for him to sleep, in the restroom, the elevator...). The time depends of how many new cards I entered recently.
Geography: “what direction [relative to central london] is this tube stop in?”, English counties (locations), U.S. states (locations, capitals), Canadian territories and provinces (locations and capitals), countries (locations, capitals, and at some point I’ll add flags). (Most of these came from ankiweb originally, but I had to add reverse cards.)
Bayes: conversions between odds, probabilities and decibels (specific numbers and more recently the general formulas)
Miscellaneous: the NATO phonetic alphabet, logs (base 2 of 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, and base 10 of 2 through 9), some words I can never remember how to spell (this turns out not to help), some computer stuff (the order of the arguments in python’s datetime.strptime, and the difference between a left join and a right join), some definitions in machine learning, some historical dates (e.g. wars, first moon landing, introduction of the model T), some historical inflation rates, some astronomical facts.
Also a deck based on the twelve virtues of rationality essay. (This one and most of the bayes one I found through LW.)
I’m not sure most of this is useful, but most of it hasn’t cost me significant effort either.
if you memorize logs, I recommend memorizing natural logs of primes. This is all you need to quickly calculate natural log, log_2, and log_10 of any integer.
You get ln of any number by adding together the natural logs of the prime factors, and you get log_m of n by the formula
log_m(n)=ln(n)/ln(m)
(maybe memorize ln(10) too to make the calculation a little easier)
I can’t do real division in my head, but if I wanted to maximise my logarithm-ability while minimizing my number of cards, I would go for logs base (probably 10) of primes, and 1/log(e) and 1/log(2).
But I’m not too fussed about minimizing cards, or about natural logs. Learning more primes might be helpful, but I can get them approximately. E.g. I don’t have log_10(11) memorized, but I know it’s between log_10(10) and log_10(2*6) which are 1 and 1.08, and it would be closer to the latter (my calculator says 1.041, which is slightly lower than I would have guessed, but if I put it in Anki I’d only go to 1.04 anyway).
Those who are currently using Anki on a mostly daily or weekly basis: what are you studying/ankifying?
To start: I’m working on memorizing programming languages and frameworks because I have trouble remembering parameters and method names.
These days, most of my time on Anki is on Japanese (which I’m learning for fun) and Chinese (which I already know, but I’m brushing up on tones and characters).
Looking through my decks, I also have decks on:
Algorithms and data structures (from a couple books I read on that)
Communication (misc. tips on storytelling, giving talks, etc.)
Game Design (insights and concepts that seemed valuable)
German
Git and Unix Command Line commands
Haskell
Insight (misc. stuff that seemed interesting/important)
Mnemonics
Productivity (notes from Lukeprog’s posts and vairous other sources)
Psychology and neuroscience
Rationality Habits (one of the few decks I have that come all made, from Anna Salmon I think, though I also added some stuff and delted others)
Statistics
Web Technologies (some stuff on Angular JS and CSS that I got tired of looking up all the time)
(also a few minor decks with very few cards)
I review those pretty much every day (I sometimes leave a few unfinished, depending on how much idle time I have in queues, transport, etc.)
That’s fantastic. How many cards total do you have, and how many minutes a day do you study?
Apparently I have 6887 cards (though that includes those I suspended because they’re boring, useless, too difficult, duplicated, or possibly wrong; I tend to often suspend cards instead of deleting them); of those around 3000 are Chinese pinyin cards I automatically created with a Python script (I set them up to get between 1 and 5 new ones per day, depending on how busy I tend to be), 1000 are Japanese (the biggest deck of manually-entered cards), and the remaining decks rarely go over 300 cards.
I study probably between 20 and 40 minutes per day, usually in public transit or during “downtime” (waiting in line, carrying the baby around the house hoping for him to sleep, in the restroom, the elevator...). The time depends of how many new cards I entered recently.
Geography: “what direction [relative to central london] is this tube stop in?”, English counties (locations), U.S. states (locations, capitals), Canadian territories and provinces (locations and capitals), countries (locations, capitals, and at some point I’ll add flags). (Most of these came from ankiweb originally, but I had to add reverse cards.)
Bayes: conversions between odds, probabilities and decibels (specific numbers and more recently the general formulas)
Miscellaneous: the NATO phonetic alphabet, logs (base 2 of 1.25, 1.5, 1.75, and base 10 of 2 through 9), some words I can never remember how to spell (this turns out not to help), some computer stuff (the order of the arguments in python’s
datetime.strptime, and the difference between aleft joinand aright join), some definitions in machine learning, some historical dates (e.g. wars, first moon landing, introduction of the model T), some historical inflation rates, some astronomical facts.Also a deck based on the twelve virtues of rationality essay. (This one and most of the bayes one I found through LW.)
I’m not sure most of this is useful, but most of it hasn’t cost me significant effort either.
if you memorize logs, I recommend memorizing natural logs of primes. This is all you need to quickly calculate natural log, log_2, and log_10 of any integer.
You get ln of any number by adding together the natural logs of the prime factors, and you get log_m of n by the formula
log_m(n)=ln(n)/ln(m)
(maybe memorize ln(10) too to make the calculation a little easier)
I can’t do real division in my head, but if I wanted to maximise my logarithm-ability while minimizing my number of cards, I would go for logs base (probably 10) of primes, and 1/log(e) and 1/log(2).
But I’m not too fussed about minimizing cards, or about natural logs. Learning more primes might be helpful, but I can get them approximately. E.g. I don’t have log_10(11) memorized, but I know it’s between log_10(10) and log_10(2*6) which are 1 and 1.08, and it would be closer to the latter (my calculator says 1.041, which is slightly lower than I would have guessed, but if I put it in Anki I’d only go to 1.04 anyway).