The thing is, different levels of availability require different rehearsal commitments. I’ve not seen any explicit support for varied automaticity goals in Anki or the other spaced repetition programs I’ve played with. The best I can do is try to decide on a review-by-review basis whether I should set the next interval of a given card more conservatively than suggested.
For normal Anki learning I think the solution is having redundancy in cards. I’m at the moment learning anatomy and I have lots of cards for every muscle and bone. I have graphics from different angles. I have cards asking for holonyms.
Along these lines, I have embraced the power of Cloze deletion. I have no problem with keeping all of the following cards in rotation:
The [...] is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a [...] in which relatively unskilled persons suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which [...] suffer illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which relatively unskilled persons [...].
Even if I don’t actually care about memorizing the wording verbatim, breaking the information up this way forces me to learn the information in a sort of “anisotropic” fashion.
edit: Also, yes, at least two of these cards would be dead-easy, practically already known before I saw them even once, but seeing the information “too much” at the start can help push you over the initial hump.
It should be noted that how the cloze cards play out changes greatly depending on whether you allow different cards of the same note to show up on the same day. One version gives you that early overload effect, while the other gives a kind of extended familiarity effect where for months you’ll probably have at least one variation of that cloze come up every day or two. The more variations on a note, the longer this stretches out.
The problem in Anki, at least, is that this is a global deck setting (“Bury related reviews until the next day”) and not one you can customize for individual notes. Maybe I should start organizing decks by desired automaticity levels rather than by content.
Tangentially related:
I have found the ease of creating cards one of the most important factors determining the speed at which I learn. For example in anatomy, I started with making cards from a photographic atlas, but this took way too long. (I still desire to make cards from them, since they use actual photos, not simple schematics). For the later, I had to manually cut out the images, and extract the labeling. In contrast, what I ended up using was Gray’s Anatomy for Students Flash Cards. It’s a 817 page book, with most of it in being alternating pages of images and corresponding names.
This was much easier to make (digital) flash cards from. With pdftk, I could separate the pages into a file of all images and a file of all assorted labels. With pdftotext I could easiliy convert the pdf of labels into text (which I could simply, ~automatically form into flash cards) while I used imagemagick to extract the images themselves. (with all the borders, etc, cut off.) (while I have done a part of the conversion process manually (some names were split into multiple lines, and there were minor irregularities in the text format of the file, so I manually made each section into a separate flashcard (Inserting headers of a card, deleting newline characters if splitting an item into two, and marking the beginnings and endings of clozes), but I am certain that that could’ve been easily automated, with a proper understanding of regexps. (learning which would’ve been more economical on my time)). With all this, it took me 13 days until I had first exposure to all 3630 cards, probably significantly less, than if I had to do everything manually.
So, whenever you can, automatize.
(Before this, I used to extract glossaries of books manually. Obviously, I use the same tools for that too, now.)
I learned to love books which had great glossaries, and great summaries. Some are so great, that by reading the summaries, you don’t even have to read the actual chapters. (Which may be artificially inflated in length because of a length goal the publishers set, or because it is more targeted towards entertainment value, than for quick conveying of the ideas behind them. A quick skimming may still be worth it, though, even if in preceding chapters you established that their compression is pretty lossless.) Only tables are better.
One thing I want to add to my current toolset is a way to automatically extract wiktionary definitions: sometimes the whole idea is in there, but either way, speaking the language of your desired subject by the time you encounter the more in depth books is handy. (this, coupled with a trickle system, AKA (~20) word(s) of the day)
I used to try to avoid duplicate cards, but I learned to love redundancy.
You know, I had a start-up idea along these lines recently: something that would combine SRS with social bookmarking.
Example: I’m slowly-but-steadily working my way through Learn You a Haskell for Great Good. I have it on good authority that few people make it as far as I have. I feel like the only reason I can do it is because I stop to make cards for terms, concepts, and many of the examples. I take days or weeks away from the book between sessions while I let those facts firm up in my head, and then I resume.
While I hold that there is real value to making cards yourself when this involves putting things into your own words, making a high-quality card is also a time-consuming chore that is just as much about formatting. I’ve often wished, as I read, that I had a browser extension that would let me pluck pre-made cards out of a side-bar that went with the passage I was reading—cards by one of the thousands of people that have no doubt come before me in that chapter.
You can see how this might work. People could build karma when others copy their cards. Site creators might create their own cards as a way to help readers and boost traffic, or pay bounties of some kind to others who make them.
You could browse other cards by the writers of cards you’ve cloned, and all cards would have automatic links to the sites they go with—getting around a big problem with imported cards, which is that they are shorn from their creation context.
Monetization? Maybe ads in the corner of the side-bar or something. Maybe partnerships with popular for-pay learning sites.
There are no doubt some thorny copyright issues at play though, and the overall potential market is probably pretty small.
I honestly don’t know. I would say quite much, but it does not feel like that: I do not review all my cards at one time in the day (I have notifications periodically nagging me if there are still due cards, so I don’t forget, and they aren’t too much bother) Another nice trick is to make more, smaller decks. When I see that there are 120 cards in one deck for review, I am not that ecstatic about that. If those same cards are split into 4 decks with 30-30 cars, I don’t even think about it. Generally, 20 cards are play, they don’t even register, and 80 seems to be the other end, that starts to feel a bit too much. (And the actual number of cards never changed)
If I somehow miss a day, though, that can make things indeed messy.
Anki has good statistics so it shouldn’t be hard to get the number of daily time spent on reviewing cards. The fact that you don’t know is suprising to me as I frequently check the Anki stats. Care to elaborate?
As far as images go I think 3D programs are the way to go. BodyParts3D is a promising project as it comes with an open license but unfortunately it’s not complete and it’s UI isn’t user-friendly.
BioDigital is my other source but unfortunately it has a closed license that prevents sharing of the finished deck.
While we are at the topic of the ontology of anatomy, what’s wrong with the English language to have polysemy in “arm” and have it mean both the whole arm and the upper arm?
For normal Anki learning I think the solution is having redundancy in cards. I’m at the moment learning anatomy and I have lots of cards for every muscle and bone. I have graphics from different angles. I have cards asking for holonyms.
Along these lines, I have embraced the power of Cloze deletion. I have no problem with keeping all of the following cards in rotation:
Even if I don’t actually care about memorizing the wording verbatim, breaking the information up this way forces me to learn the information in a sort of “anisotropic” fashion.
edit: Also, yes, at least two of these cards would be dead-easy, practically already known before I saw them even once, but seeing the information “too much” at the start can help push you over the initial hump.
It should be noted that how the cloze cards play out changes greatly depending on whether you allow different cards of the same note to show up on the same day. One version gives you that early overload effect, while the other gives a kind of extended familiarity effect where for months you’ll probably have at least one variation of that cloze come up every day or two. The more variations on a note, the longer this stretches out.
The problem in Anki, at least, is that this is a global deck setting (“Bury related reviews until the next day”) and not one you can customize for individual notes. Maybe I should start organizing decks by desired automaticity levels rather than by content.
Tangentially related: I have found the ease of creating cards one of the most important factors determining the speed at which I learn. For example in anatomy, I started with making cards from a photographic atlas, but this took way too long. (I still desire to make cards from them, since they use actual photos, not simple schematics). For the later, I had to manually cut out the images, and extract the labeling. In contrast, what I ended up using was Gray’s Anatomy for Students Flash Cards. It’s a 817 page book, with most of it in being alternating pages of images and corresponding names.
This was much easier to make (digital) flash cards from. With pdftk, I could separate the pages into a file of all images and a file of all assorted labels. With pdftotext I could easiliy convert the pdf of labels into text (which I could simply, ~automatically form into flash cards) while I used imagemagick to extract the images themselves. (with all the borders, etc, cut off.) (while I have done a part of the conversion process manually (some names were split into multiple lines, and there were minor irregularities in the text format of the file, so I manually made each section into a separate flashcard (Inserting headers of a card, deleting newline characters if splitting an item into two, and marking the beginnings and endings of clozes), but I am certain that that could’ve been easily automated, with a proper understanding of regexps. (learning which would’ve been more economical on my time)). With all this, it took me 13 days until I had first exposure to all 3630 cards, probably significantly less, than if I had to do everything manually.
So, whenever you can, automatize.
(Before this, I used to extract glossaries of books manually. Obviously, I use the same tools for that too, now.)
I learned to love books which had great glossaries, and great summaries. Some are so great, that by reading the summaries, you don’t even have to read the actual chapters. (Which may be artificially inflated in length because of a length goal the publishers set, or because it is more targeted towards entertainment value, than for quick conveying of the ideas behind them. A quick skimming may still be worth it, though, even if in preceding chapters you established that their compression is pretty lossless.) Only tables are better.
One thing I want to add to my current toolset is a way to automatically extract wiktionary definitions: sometimes the whole idea is in there, but either way, speaking the language of your desired subject by the time you encounter the more in depth books is handy. (this, coupled with a trickle system, AKA (~20) word(s) of the day)
I used to try to avoid duplicate cards, but I learned to love redundancy.
Also, mind sharing your cards for the holonyms?
You know, I had a start-up idea along these lines recently: something that would combine SRS with social bookmarking.
Example: I’m slowly-but-steadily working my way through Learn You a Haskell for Great Good. I have it on good authority that few people make it as far as I have. I feel like the only reason I can do it is because I stop to make cards for terms, concepts, and many of the examples. I take days or weeks away from the book between sessions while I let those facts firm up in my head, and then I resume.
While I hold that there is real value to making cards yourself when this involves putting things into your own words, making a high-quality card is also a time-consuming chore that is just as much about formatting. I’ve often wished, as I read, that I had a browser extension that would let me pluck pre-made cards out of a side-bar that went with the passage I was reading—cards by one of the thousands of people that have no doubt come before me in that chapter.
You can see how this might work. People could build karma when others copy their cards. Site creators might create their own cards as a way to help readers and boost traffic, or pay bounties of some kind to others who make them.
You could browse other cards by the writers of cards you’ve cloned, and all cards would have automatic links to the sites they go with—getting around a big problem with imported cards, which is that they are shorn from their creation context.
Monetization? Maybe ads in the corner of the side-bar or something. Maybe partnerships with popular for-pay learning sites.
There are no doubt some thorny copyright issues at play though, and the overall potential market is probably pretty small.
It seems like your approach would create a lot of cards. How much time to you spend per day reviewing your cards?
I honestly don’t know. I would say quite much, but it does not feel like that: I do not review all my cards at one time in the day (I have notifications periodically nagging me if there are still due cards, so I don’t forget, and they aren’t too much bother) Another nice trick is to make more, smaller decks. When I see that there are 120 cards in one deck for review, I am not that ecstatic about that. If those same cards are split into 4 decks with 30-30 cars, I don’t even think about it. Generally, 20 cards are play, they don’t even register, and 80 seems to be the other end, that starts to feel a bit too much. (And the actual number of cards never changed)
If I somehow miss a day, though, that can make things indeed messy.
How do you get notifications only if there are still due cards? I would like this
Anki has good statistics so it shouldn’t be hard to get the number of daily time spent on reviewing cards. The fact that you don’t know is suprising to me as I frequently check the Anki stats. Care to elaborate?
I use org-drill, which, AFAIK, does not collect such data.
I’m still at organizing my way to deal with the information. One example:
Card 1: Front: [anatomy] cubiti/joint.latin(Between Humeris and Radius)
Back (typing): Articulatio Humeroradialis
+Image
Card2: Front: [anatomy] holonym.latin(Articulatio Humeroradialis)
Back (typing): Articulatio cubiti +Image
Card 3/4/5: Front: [anatomy] cubiti/joint.latin(Image1/2/3)
Back (typing): Articulatio Humeroradialis
As far as images go I think 3D programs are the way to go. BodyParts3D is a promising project as it comes with an open license but unfortunately it’s not complete and it’s UI isn’t user-friendly. BioDigital is my other source but unfortunately it has a closed license that prevents sharing of the finished deck.
While we are at the topic of the ontology of anatomy, what’s wrong with the English language to have polysemy in “arm” and have it mean both the whole arm and the upper arm?
For BodyParts3D, there is a wikimedia category for a good few animations (it’s the place I actually first met it). (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Animations_using_BodyParts3D_polygon_data) You can download whole categories with (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Imker_%28batch_download%29).. For how well does that category cover the desired items, I don’t know.