Background: I’ve been using Anki for about 2.5 years. I have done the following:
(+3) assorted unusual English vocabulary (English is my first language)
(+1) the NATO phonetic alphabet
(+2) hiragana and katakana
(0) phone numbers of family and friends
(+2) the streets of San Francisco
(+1) assorted technical concepts, some LW-related
The numbers in parentheses are my rough impression of usefulness and/or enjoyment on a possiblyfamiliar scale of −10 to +10. When I was first getting used to Anki and only using it for English, the usefulness was around (-1), for reasons I can get into if anyone’s interested.
My biggest problems with Anki are first that it’s a pain to input cards in a useful way, and second that for some things (e.g. hiragana and katakana) a more structured format would be strictly better.
When I was first getting used to Anki and only using it for English, the usefulness was around (-1), for reasons I can get into if anyone’s interested.
I’m currently using anki just for English, so I’d be interested in what you found harmful.
It was a few different things, and it only lasted for the first month or so of using Anki. During that time I occasionally had moments in conversation when I grasped for one of the words in my deck, when normally I would smoothly talk around the idea with simpler words. Sometimes I succeeded in incorporating a new word into my speech, but the usage was awkward. Sometimes my interlocutor didn’t know what the new word meant, and not only did I have to explain in simpler terms, I came off as out of touch and a bit of a know-it-all. It was a little uncomfortable at the time, but the harmful effects did fade as I became more aware of which words were ok to say in what contexts.
The primary benefit has been a better understanding of the written word rather than a larger productive vocabulary.
(+3) Emacs Keybindings + Listing good usecases for the bindings
(+1) Git commands
(+2) Compound Kanji
(+1) Basic Unix Command Line
(+0/+0.5) C I/O Function prototypes
(+3) Gaussian Integrals
(+4) Addresses
(+1) GRE Vocabulary words (All of it from taking the GRE, not from general usage)
I’ve considered adding all of my family’s birthday’s to the list but 1) I’m too embarrassed to ask 2) Calenders are an easier solution. Has anyone else done something similar?
Also, indirectly, I teach a class of about 25~ students every quarter and while I don’t put them in a deck, I make sure that I’m exposed to the entire classes’ names in a roughly spaced repetition way (First class I attempt to say everyone’s name twice, grade different assignments at the appropriate spacing and ‘reset’ my schedule for mistaken names). This has caused my students to respect me as a teacher much more (No other Teaching Assistant knows everyone’s name!) and slightly deters people from being quiet when they don’t understand something (as I can just call out their name).
There’s no pictures and the first time I get the dossier is on the day I teach my class. It’s slightly premature optimization to start an anki before the first week of TAing, because about 5 or so students shuffle in an out during the first two or so weeks. Currently though, I’m applying for a physics major only class where there would be pictures and the class size is much more static.
Thanks for suggesting an out and out comparison. It hadn’t really occurred to me to do this if I do land the other job.
My biggest problems with Anki are first that it’s a pain to input cards in a useful way
My more recent failed attempt to get an Anki habit going involved using Vim and a text file to input cards, instead of the tedious Anki GUI. I write lines of three tab-separated sections into the deck text file, with the first being the question, the second the answer and the third the card tags. Anki’s import will ignore lines that start with # as comments. This lets me do batch editing of the cards using the macros, search-and-replace and block editing functions in the text editor.
Problems with this approach is that I need the Anki software to preview my Latex formatting and I need to write raw HTML into the import if I want to use formatting or images. Anki should support card text with newlines if it’s enclosed in quotes, but I don’t seem to have cards using this in my example deck. Another problem is that Anki uses the question field of the card as a primary key and keeps the old deck when importing, so if I edit a question in one of the cards, I’ll either need to completely regenerate my deck from the txt source or manually delete the card with the old question from the Anki database.
As a Vim-specific tweak, my text file has the modeline
# vim: set formatoptions-=t noexpandtab softtabstop=0 showbreak=\ \ lbr wrap
This disables physical autowrap of long lines, ensures that pressing tab emits physical tab characters and makes long physical lines visually wrap at the word break and indent the continuation of the physical line on the next visual line by two spaces so it’s easy to tell apart from the next item.
The text file approach does not store the review data for cards, to if I should lose the Anki database, I could reimport my deck but would have to go through all the cards with zero review data. More experienced Anki users can maybe tell how big a problem this would be.
For all this interest into making the thing technically nice to use, still haven’t found a suitably big and growable set of stuff I want to memorize to bother with the habit.
Background: I’ve been using Anki for about 2.5 years. I have done the following:
(+3) assorted unusual English vocabulary (English is my first language)
(+1) the NATO phonetic alphabet
(+2) hiragana and katakana
(0) phone numbers of family and friends
(+2) the streets of San Francisco
(+1) assorted technical concepts, some LW-related
The numbers in parentheses are my rough impression of usefulness and/or enjoyment on a possibly familiar scale of −10 to +10. When I was first getting used to Anki and only using it for English, the usefulness was around (-1), for reasons I can get into if anyone’s interested.
My biggest problems with Anki are first that it’s a pain to input cards in a useful way, and second that for some things (e.g. hiragana and katakana) a more structured format would be strictly better.
I’m currently using anki just for English, so I’d be interested in what you found harmful.
It was a few different things, and it only lasted for the first month or so of using Anki. During that time I occasionally had moments in conversation when I grasped for one of the words in my deck, when normally I would smoothly talk around the idea with simpler words. Sometimes I succeeded in incorporating a new word into my speech, but the usage was awkward. Sometimes my interlocutor didn’t know what the new word meant, and not only did I have to explain in simpler terms, I came off as out of touch and a bit of a know-it-all. It was a little uncomfortable at the time, but the harmful effects did fade as I became more aware of which words were ok to say in what contexts.
The primary benefit has been a better understanding of the written word rather than a larger productive vocabulary.
Using Antisuji’s system:
(+3) Emacs Keybindings + Listing good usecases for the bindings
(+1) Git commands
(+2) Compound Kanji
(+1) Basic Unix Command Line
(+0/+0.5) C I/O Function prototypes
(+3) Gaussian Integrals
(+4) Addresses
(+1) GRE Vocabulary words (All of it from taking the GRE, not from general usage)
I’ve considered adding all of my family’s birthday’s to the list but 1) I’m too embarrassed to ask 2) Calenders are an easier solution. Has anyone else done something similar?
Also, indirectly, I teach a class of about 25~ students every quarter and while I don’t put them in a deck, I make sure that I’m exposed to the entire classes’ names in a roughly spaced repetition way (First class I attempt to say everyone’s name twice, grade different assignments at the appropriate spacing and ‘reset’ my schedule for mistaken names). This has caused my students to respect me as a teacher much more (No other Teaching Assistant knows everyone’s name!) and slightly deters people from being quiet when they don’t understand something (as I can just call out their name).
Next time (right now?), why don’t you try the students using anki and see how it compares? Does the school give you their pictures ahead of time?
There’s no pictures and the first time I get the dossier is on the day I teach my class. It’s slightly premature optimization to start an anki before the first week of TAing, because about 5 or so students shuffle in an out during the first two or so weeks. Currently though, I’m applying for a physics major only class where there would be pictures and the class size is much more static.
Thanks for suggesting an out and out comparison. It hadn’t really occurred to me to do this if I do land the other job.
My more recent failed attempt to get an Anki habit going involved using Vim and a text file to input cards, instead of the tedious Anki GUI. I write lines of three tab-separated sections into the deck text file, with the first being the question, the second the answer and the third the card tags. Anki’s import will ignore lines that start with # as comments. This lets me do batch editing of the cards using the macros, search-and-replace and block editing functions in the text editor.
Problems with this approach is that I need the Anki software to preview my Latex formatting and I need to write raw HTML into the import if I want to use formatting or images. Anki should support card text with newlines if it’s enclosed in quotes, but I don’t seem to have cards using this in my example deck. Another problem is that Anki uses the question field of the card as a primary key and keeps the old deck when importing, so if I edit a question in one of the cards, I’ll either need to completely regenerate my deck from the txt source or manually delete the card with the old question from the Anki database.
As a Vim-specific tweak, my text file has the modeline
This disables physical autowrap of long lines, ensures that pressing tab emits physical tab characters and makes long physical lines visually wrap at the word break and indent the continuation of the physical line on the next visual line by two spaces so it’s easy to tell apart from the next item.
The text file approach does not store the review data for cards, to if I should lose the Anki database, I could reimport my deck but would have to go through all the cards with zero review data. More experienced Anki users can maybe tell how big a problem this would be.
For all this interest into making the thing technically nice to use, still haven’t found a suitably big and growable set of stuff I want to memorize to bother with the habit.