I recently started using Anki on my phone. Seems easy, effective and even somewhat fun. I don’t actually have anything that seems very important to memorize yet though. I’ve been (re-)learning Hiragana and Katakana with the vague intention of learning enough Japanese to read untranslated manga or something, but while it’s been easy enough so far the goal doesn’t seem super high value and Kanji is looking many times harder.
What do you do for a living? I’m sure there’s something there that’d be worth memorizing.
How good are you with names & faces? Birthdays? Telephone numbers?
Another thing I use it for is learning new vocabulary. Maybe once or twice a week I’ll run across a word in an article that I would typically jump over & just assume I know what it means based on the context, sometimes when I look it up I’m surprised. The other benefit is that memorized words will be more available to you when writing or speaking.
The names and faces thing sounds good, but if I know someone well enough to have their picture I can probably just remember their name, and it seems awkward to take a photo of someone you just met.
Yeah, I suppose if you live somewhere with a non-censored internet, you can just find them on Facebook & viola. I live in China so that isn’t an option. I downloaded pictures of my co-workers from the company website instead & plugged them into Anki. Yeah it is a bit weird, but it works & as long as people don’t know you’re doing it, it seems to encourage people to like you & feel liked by you. I work in medicine & there’s also a good correlation to hospital safety when you know the names of the people you’re working with.
The other thing I thought about was making an undercover video & then extracting the photos from there. Basically, don’t let them know you’re taking their picture. The upside is that it seems less weird than taking the photo of someone you just met, the downside is that if you get caught everyone is going to think you’re a true freak.
I’ve found that I’m getting a lot more value out of non-fiction books / guides than I used to by using the following process:
Read through book once normally
Sit down in front of computer with Anki open, scan through each page quickly
Any insights that I think are valuable, get turned into a new card in my main deck, and tagged with the book’s name.
Only useful if you are reading through essays, books, etc that have insights you want to take away and keep, I suppose.
(Most of my recorded books are programming or business specific so far, but a good general example to make into cards that work for you is CPR & resuscitation guidelines.)
I tried doing something like this once, but step 2 ended up being too boring for me to do immediately after step 1 (my brain kept saying “but we just saw this!”). I also tried combining step 1 and step 2 but this introduced a trivial inconvenience into the process of reading which just made me read less often.
For those who use public transit, anki on the phone is lifechanging. I’d advise keeping a small notepad with you in case you think of something to look up, check, add or edit later—those are all inconvenient on the phone, especially if one is on the subway and can’t get online at all.
Agreed. I’ve known about Anki for a long time, but lacked the push that got me finally using it, until I read the Motivation Hacker. Now I have Anki set up on my phone, along with Beeminder. It feels really good of a morning to be able to cycle through my Anki learning for the day, and tick that goal off in Beeminder. Bonus: Combined with better use of Evernote, I finally feel like I’m really getting the use out of having a smartphone that was my reason for switching to one a year ago.
It amuses me that Motivation Hacker was the push towards setting up the systems that would allow me to actually remember the important facts from books, etc that I read, such as the Motivation Hacker.
I have this crazy idea to use Anki to learn the multiplication table to 100x100, to be able to multiply large numbers fast. The only problem is, it seems both pointless and impossible, :-)
Have a look at this blog post where, among other things, some kind of return-on-investment is calculated for learning multiplication tables further than 10x10.
I have this crazy idea to use Anki to learn the multiplication table to 100x100, to be able to multiply large numbers fast. The only problem is, it seems both pointless and impossible, :-)
That’s not impossible. Not particularly worthwhile but possible.
If you read a comment on LW that’s downvoted to −5 and says “14% positive” this means it’s received 1 upvote out of 7 total.
If you remember all of the repeating digits (142857) then you can also identify 28%, 42%, 57%, 71%, and 85% as 2⁄7, 3⁄7, 4⁄7, 5⁄7, and 6⁄7, respectively.
I recently started using Anki on my phone. Seems easy, effective and even somewhat fun. I don’t actually have anything that seems very important to memorize yet though. I’ve been (re-)learning Hiragana and Katakana with the vague intention of learning enough Japanese to read untranslated manga or something, but while it’s been easy enough so far the goal doesn’t seem super high value and Kanji is looking many times harder.
What do you do for a living? I’m sure there’s something there that’d be worth memorizing.
How good are you with names & faces? Birthdays? Telephone numbers?
Another thing I use it for is learning new vocabulary. Maybe once or twice a week I’ll run across a word in an article that I would typically jump over & just assume I know what it means based on the context, sometimes when I look it up I’m surprised. The other benefit is that memorized words will be more available to you when writing or speaking.
The names and faces thing sounds good, but if I know someone well enough to have their picture I can probably just remember their name, and it seems awkward to take a photo of someone you just met.
Yeah, I suppose if you live somewhere with a non-censored internet, you can just find them on Facebook & viola. I live in China so that isn’t an option. I downloaded pictures of my co-workers from the company website instead & plugged them into Anki. Yeah it is a bit weird, but it works & as long as people don’t know you’re doing it, it seems to encourage people to like you & feel liked by you. I work in medicine & there’s also a good correlation to hospital safety when you know the names of the people you’re working with.
The other thing I thought about was making an undercover video & then extracting the photos from there. Basically, don’t let them know you’re taking their picture. The upside is that it seems less weird than taking the photo of someone you just met, the downside is that if you get caught everyone is going to think you’re a true freak.
I’ve found that I’m getting a lot more value out of non-fiction books / guides than I used to by using the following process:
Read through book once normally
Sit down in front of computer with Anki open, scan through each page quickly
Any insights that I think are valuable, get turned into a new card in my main deck, and tagged with the book’s name.
Only useful if you are reading through essays, books, etc that have insights you want to take away and keep, I suppose.
(Most of my recorded books are programming or business specific so far, but a good general example to make into cards that work for you is CPR & resuscitation guidelines.)
I tried doing something like this once, but step 2 ended up being too boring for me to do immediately after step 1 (my brain kept saying “but we just saw this!”). I also tried combining step 1 and step 2 but this introduced a trivial inconvenience into the process of reading which just made me read less often.
For those who use public transit, anki on the phone is lifechanging. I’d advise keeping a small notepad with you in case you think of something to look up, check, add or edit later—those are all inconvenient on the phone, especially if one is on the subway and can’t get online at all.
Agreed. I’ve known about Anki for a long time, but lacked the push that got me finally using it, until I read the Motivation Hacker. Now I have Anki set up on my phone, along with Beeminder. It feels really good of a morning to be able to cycle through my Anki learning for the day, and tick that goal off in Beeminder. Bonus: Combined with better use of Evernote, I finally feel like I’m really getting the use out of having a smartphone that was my reason for switching to one a year ago.
It amuses me that Motivation Hacker was the push towards setting up the systems that would allow me to actually remember the important facts from books, etc that I read, such as the Motivation Hacker.
I use Notes on iPhone to record things to look up, check, add or edit later.
I have this crazy idea to use Anki to learn the multiplication table to 100x100, to be able to multiply large numbers fast. The only problem is, it seems both pointless and impossible, :-)
Have a look at this blog post where, among other things, some kind of return-on-investment is calculated for learning multiplication tables further than 10x10.
Awesome, thanks.
That’s not impossible. Not particularly worthwhile but possible.
I was expected to learn decimal equivalents for fractions up to 1⁄9 (including 2⁄9 etc.), and I use them now and then.
Instead of working on the higher multiplication tables, why not learn methods of approximation?
Funny that you mention fractions, I started learning them a week ago. Though I can’t say I even encountered decimal 1⁄7 in real life...
If you read a comment on LW that’s downvoted to −5 and says “14% positive” this means it’s received 1 upvote out of 7 total.
If you remember all of the repeating digits (142857) then you can also identify 28%, 42%, 57%, 71%, and 85% as 2⁄7, 3⁄7, 4⁄7, 5⁄7, and 6⁄7, respectively.