Other programs I’ve tried: Supermemo, Mnemosyne, Quizlet
Anki is a free and open-source flashcard program using spaced repetition, a technique from cognitive science for fast and long-lasting memorization. What makes it better than its alternatives are the countless plugins that can customize your learning experience and the fact that you can control the parameters of the algorithm.
I used Anki for 3ish years and SuperMemo for the last year, and have to say I’ve liked SuperMemo exponentially more because of it’s incremental reading feature, where you put hundreds of sources to learn from (like lesswrong posts) into it, and go over them over time and can rank them by priority. Is far less of a pain to learn from things then making cards one by one.
There is an Anki add-on that basically provides the same functionality with a pretty impressive feature set. Personally I found it a bit clunky to use and stopped, so I might look into SuperMemo.
I used the other Anki add-on for Incremental reading enough to be convinced of IR’s potential, but unfortunately that addon has enough issues that it’s not really usable for me. I’ve had the one you linked to installed for a while (based on many recommendations on Anki website and reddit), but I never figured out how the UI actually works. For now, SuperMemo definitely seems to have a lead when it comes to IR.
you might want to try dendro.cloud which is made by long-term SuperMemo users to be an easier alternative to SM. Unfortunately I think they’re in the midst of a redesign though so they may not be accepting more registrations
If you want to try it again, I’d be happy to teach you (and anyone else interested!). It took me like 5+ months on my own to even start incremental reading because I couldn’t figure out the documentation. I’ve found with 1-1 teaching though that in ~1-2 hours I can get people to being able to do ok IR.
Also: For people interested in either Anki or SM (or just learning/SRS in general), I recommend joining the SuperMemo.wiki discord server
There’s an anki discord server but the SuperMemo one tends to be more active/more interesting discussion
On the broader topic of SRS, how do you deal with ever-increasing workloads? I’m a user for 4 years now and have been struggling with my current workload, unable to add any more cards.
To me this suggests that your cards aren’t well formed or you try to memorize before understanding. Spend more effort on learning a fact before you put it into the SRS and work on making the cards clearer.
I don’t quite think this is it. What I am learning is language (specifically, vocabulary) so there isn’t a lot to understand before putting a card into SRS, and the card can’t be much clearer than “biblioteca → library”.
What I mean about ever-increasing workloads is that at some point, even without adding new cards, you have long-tail cards that you have to review and give you a pretty consistent workload for a long time (because they’re long tail cards and have long intervals and are spread out). Right now, without adding any new cards, I do ~250 cards/day; this is barely less than what I was doing when I was learning new material 2 years ago (~300 cards/day).
Generally, if you follow the SuperMemo recommendations you first learn that library is the word for biblioteca and only after you have learned that you create a card and put it into SRS to avoid forgetting the card. You don’t just put that card into a SRS without having learned the word first.
Most of the time in SRS is spent because you forget cards. If you build a good foundation by learning before memorizing you reduce that time.
I have to be honest, your tone is coming off a little condescending. I am sure you don’t mean it that way, but please make it explicit.
These aren’t new cards that I’m studying. Like I said, I’ve been using Anki for 4 years now; I have learned almost 20k cards, and have about 465k reviews. I have done my due diligence and read the 20 SRS rules several times. Perhaps I’m just not being clear.
My current problem is that, out of ~250 cards I do each day, ~200 of them are mature, and that number doesn’t seem to be going down. Right now, I have about 18.8k mature cards, and only 850 young cards. My time is increasingly being taken up by the mature cards, and the more I study, the larger that corpus will become. So how does one deal with that fact? The cards seem to accumulate over time, and not spread out to infinity in a way that you’d eventually only do a handful of cards a day and still remember everything.
Sure. Caveat: I haven’t actually done any cards the past 8 days (finding it hard to motivate myself...) so this is likely low on young cards, but accurate on mature cards.
First image is desktop Anki, second is AnkiDroid simulations (which in my experience have proven pretty close to the truth). https://imgur.com/a/Swb6UjH
The second graph has a large spike in the first week because of the past 8 days. I’m also not sure what new cards AnkiDroid is seeing since I don’t have any new cards being added.
The number of reviews drops in about 5 months, but even a year from now, I’m not even at 2⁄3 reviews of what I’m currently doing (which would be ~160 cards). It’s a little unsatisfactory since it assumes I’m performing adequately during that whole time and my reward is being able to add maybe 8-10 new cards a day, after a year of strictly review.
Yes, I used to be a daily guy. Over a graduate degree it got much more difficult to keep that up so I did have a backlog coming out of that, but I’m caught up.
I do think partly it’s my settings that I haven’t touched much, but that doesn’t really help me right now of course, just me in a few years. It also mostly just pushes the problem further into the future.
Some advice I’ve seen thrown around is that at some point, one should just retire cards and rely on seeing the information naturally in the real world and not in SRS; that sounds like a risky thing to do to me, but when I looked back at the backlog I had and what my accuracy was there, I estimate I had ~50-70% retention even after nearly 2 years of barely any reviews. (there’s a lot of issues with estimating that, since Anki doesn’t tell you something was overdue—so I had to calculate it, but some cards are double counted, etc) So overall I think that that might be a viable option: to, at some point, filter cards out that have intervals greater than a certain length, as well as filter cards that you spend too much time/lapse too much on. I haven’t found any good anecdotal reports of this approach, though.
It’s possible you’re in Ease Hell. It has been a while since I got into the weeds with my settings but there are pretty good reasons to change the default ease settings and reset the ease on old cards, as I recall. I’m also in the camp of only using the “again” and “good” buttons, since the other ones affect ease iirc. Anyway you’ve been at it longer than I have but maybe the ease hell thing is new info for you or other anki users.
I have used RemNote for a while but I am transitioning to notegarden.io. I find the memorization interface much nicer (nicer than Anki, too). Plus it’s not so buggy, though part of that is it doesn’t have as many features yet.
You can automatically create flashcards from your notes, enabling you to view your flashcards in context rather than isolated, like with Anki. Like Roam, Remnote also allows for backlinks and knowledge portals, giving you the means to link ideas more throughoughly. I’ve found it incredibly useful for studying and remembering new topics.
Software: Anki
Need: Remembering anything
Other programs I’ve tried: Supermemo, Mnemosyne, Quizlet
Anki is a free and open-source flashcard program using spaced repetition, a technique from cognitive science for fast and long-lasting memorization. What makes it better than its alternatives are the countless plugins that can customize your learning experience and the fact that you can control the parameters of the algorithm.
I used Anki for 3ish years and SuperMemo for the last year, and have to say I’ve liked SuperMemo exponentially more because of it’s incremental reading feature, where you put hundreds of sources to learn from (like lesswrong posts) into it, and go over them over time and can rank them by priority. Is far less of a pain to learn from things then making cards one by one.
There is an Anki add-on that basically provides the same functionality with a pretty impressive feature set. Personally I found it a bit clunky to use and stopped, so I might look into SuperMemo.
I used the other Anki add-on for Incremental reading enough to be convinced of IR’s potential, but unfortunately that addon has enough issues that it’s not really usable for me. I’ve had the one you linked to installed for a while (based on many recommendations on Anki website and reddit), but I never figured out how the UI actually works. For now, SuperMemo definitely seems to have a lead when it comes to IR.
you might want to try dendro.cloud which is made by long-term SuperMemo users to be an easier alternative to SM. Unfortunately I think they’re in the midst of a redesign though so they may not be accepting more registrations
If you want to try it again, I’d be happy to teach you (and anyone else interested!). It took me like 5+ months on my own to even start incremental reading because I couldn’t figure out the documentation. I’ve found with 1-1 teaching though that in ~1-2 hours I can get people to being able to do ok IR.
Also: For people interested in either Anki or SM (or just learning/SRS in general), I recommend joining the SuperMemo.wiki discord server
There’s an anki discord server but the SuperMemo one tends to be more active/more interesting discussion
On the broader topic of SRS, how do you deal with ever-increasing workloads? I’m a user for 4 years now and have been struggling with my current workload, unable to add any more cards.
To me this suggests that your cards aren’t well formed or you try to memorize before understanding. Spend more effort on learning a fact before you put it into the SRS and work on making the cards clearer.
I don’t quite think this is it. What I am learning is language (specifically, vocabulary) so there isn’t a lot to understand before putting a card into SRS, and the card can’t be much clearer than “biblioteca → library”.
What I mean about ever-increasing workloads is that at some point, even without adding new cards, you have long-tail cards that you have to review and give you a pretty consistent workload for a long time (because they’re long tail cards and have long intervals and are spread out). Right now, without adding any new cards, I do ~250 cards/day; this is barely less than what I was doing when I was learning new material 2 years ago (~300 cards/day).
Generally, if you follow the SuperMemo recommendations you first learn that library is the word for biblioteca and only after you have learned that you create a card and put it into SRS to avoid forgetting the card. You don’t just put that card into a SRS without having learned the word first.
Most of the time in SRS is spent because you forget cards. If you build a good foundation by learning before memorizing you reduce that time.
I have to be honest, your tone is coming off a little condescending. I am sure you don’t mean it that way, but please make it explicit.
These aren’t new cards that I’m studying. Like I said, I’ve been using Anki for 4 years now; I have learned almost 20k cards, and have about 465k reviews. I have done my due diligence and read the 20 SRS rules several times. Perhaps I’m just not being clear.
My current problem is that, out of ~250 cards I do each day, ~200 of them are mature, and that number doesn’t seem to be going down. Right now, I have about 18.8k mature cards, and only 850 young cards. My time is increasingly being taken up by the mature cards, and the more I study, the larger that corpus will become. So how does one deal with that fact? The cards seem to accumulate over time, and not spread out to infinity in a way that you’d eventually only do a handful of cards a day and still remember everything.
Can you show us what your future card distribution looks like (# of cards vs days in the future)?
Sure. Caveat: I haven’t actually done any cards the past 8 days (finding it hard to motivate myself...) so this is likely low on young cards, but accurate on mature cards.
First image is desktop Anki, second is AnkiDroid simulations (which in my experience have proven pretty close to the truth). https://imgur.com/a/Swb6UjH
The second graph has a large spike in the first week because of the past 8 days. I’m also not sure what new cards AnkiDroid is seeing since I don’t have any new cards being added.
The number of reviews drops in about 5 months, but even a year from now, I’m not even at 2⁄3 reviews of what I’m currently doing (which would be ~160 cards). It’s a little unsatisfactory since it assumes I’m performing adequately during that whole time and my reward is being able to add maybe 8-10 new cards a day, after a year of strictly review.
This is really weird. Have you done cards regularly since adding them a few years ago? Or did you catch up from a backlog recently?
I had a deck with 10-13k cards and I was able to get down to like 40 cards/day after a year or two.
Yes, I used to be a daily guy. Over a graduate degree it got much more difficult to keep that up so I did have a backlog coming out of that, but I’m caught up.
I do think partly it’s my settings that I haven’t touched much, but that doesn’t really help me right now of course, just me in a few years. It also mostly just pushes the problem further into the future.
Some advice I’ve seen thrown around is that at some point, one should just retire cards and rely on seeing the information naturally in the real world and not in SRS; that sounds like a risky thing to do to me, but when I looked back at the backlog I had and what my accuracy was there, I estimate I had ~50-70% retention even after nearly 2 years of barely any reviews. (there’s a lot of issues with estimating that, since Anki doesn’t tell you something was overdue—so I had to calculate it, but some cards are double counted, etc) So overall I think that that might be a viable option: to, at some point, filter cards out that have intervals greater than a certain length, as well as filter cards that you spend too much time/lapse too much on. I haven’t found any good anecdotal reports of this approach, though.
It’s possible you’re in Ease Hell. It has been a while since I got into the weeds with my settings but there are pretty good reasons to change the default ease settings and reset the ease on old cards, as I recall. I’m also in the camp of only using the “again” and “good” buttons, since the other ones affect ease iirc. Anyway you’ve been at it longer than I have but maybe the ease hell thing is new info for you or other anki users.
Anki decks by LW users points to http://www.stafforini.com/blog/anki-decks-by-lesswrong-users/
Anki on Android in 60 seconds
Did you try readwise? I found it more modern with vast array of source recordinf
Try Remnote
I have used RemNote for a while but I am transitioning to notegarden.io. I find the memorization interface much nicer (nicer than Anki, too). Plus it’s not so buggy, though part of that is it doesn’t have as many features yet.
Why?
You can automatically create flashcards from your notes, enabling you to view your flashcards in context rather than isolated, like with Anki. Like Roam, Remnote also allows for backlinks and knowledge portals, giving you the means to link ideas more throughoughly. I’ve found it incredibly useful for studying and remembering new topics.