I tried using Anki but found it far too boring to sustain my interest. Staring at fact flashcards for hours on end just felt like a waste of time.
In my experience it was much more useful and engaging to learn by doing things (creating, writing, experimenting) that the facts were related to - then the most necessary facts would become deeply embedded in my memory, with others at just the right level of vagueness necessary to look up the details if needed.
Well, Anki isn’t meant to be used on its own. You are supposed to be doing those other things and Anki assists. Like if you were using it in a college chemistry course you’d have numerous facts in Anki, but still doing labs and other homework and things to exercise the knowledge. Anki itself is meant to help you remember better, but other things are needed to fully exercise that knowledge in appropriate contexts.
I use it with Spanish, but without conversations with my wife and others or trying to read Spanish language content it would be a useless exercise on its own.
Hey! I'm building an app for couples to learn languages from each other. I started building it because I've been learning Chinese with my wife, but mostly alone with Anki, so I wanted to make it more multiplayer.
The app has an Anki-like backend, and augments the flashcards with guidance, feedback, and challenges with your wife. https://learncoupling.com
This happens quite a lot when using Anki where you have to start doing it for hours.
If you stop doing for weeks, and then try to come back, there are so many cards piled up that it would take so long to go through that you just don't feel like doing it anymore.
Get up and walk away, come back tomorrow. There are settings for maximum reviews per day, if you need assistance in doing this. The good news is that the longer you go between reviews and get the card right, the further out it will be until the next review.
I've been using Anki to learn Japanese for about a year now, quite successfully.
The largest factor determining your daily reviews is your daily new cards - it depends on retention somewhat, but in general daily reviews after a few months stabilize at around 10x daily new cards.
So the best way to use Anki is to limit your daily new cards to an amount where you can easily handle the reviews. And yeah, you basically can't take a day off ever.
Anki is very powerful, but you also need to structure your learning/routine around it somewhat, or maybe another way to look at it is that you need to make Anki work for you. I currently spend about 15-20 minutes a day on Anki, earlier on in my language learning it was over an hour a day.
There's absolutely no need to do all the cards for the day. The option to limit cards per day is just for psychological effect because completionists get demotivated by not hitting 0. Just do as much per day as you can and ignore that number.
well, yeah. you shouldn't be doing 35 new cards a day. it's not anki's fault that you had several hours worth of reviews. it's your fault. anki scales to take up as much time as you tell it to. if you had done 5-10 cards a day you could have easily had it take like 20 minutes. also you should have cards set to leech suspend. there is no reason to having certain cards that you clearly aren't going to learn taking up an order of magnitude more time than other cards. just nuke those cards from orbit and move on. most people's bad experiences with anki is due to user error.
that said it certainly doesn't help that anki takes a non-trivial amount of time and study in and of itself to properly set up to be really efficient.
My fault? More like my consciously made trade-off of time vs speed.
And it worked stunningly well. You see, I figured that whatever I targeted I'd do about 80% of the time. So, 35 a day is about ~1000 a month, and I reckoned I could hit that 10 months in a given year.
My first year of Japanese was basically RTK + KO2001 and JLPT2 grammar study. I was a few points off passing JLPT2 inside 1 year of study. At the time it say I had around 2 to 3 thousand vocab, and could read all Jyoyou kanji, plus understand almost all sentence structure used in daily life.
My 2nd year of Japanese I acquired an additional 10k vocab. I passed JLPT2 and came a few points short of passing JLPT1.
6 months into my 3rd year of study I passed JLPT1 and never touched studying Japanese again.
It has always been a big part of my life since then, and I credit that brutal effort with me really turning my life around. It was an absolutely epic adventure.
Maybe user error is a bit harsh because it's difficult to find everything you need to know about using Anki properly in one place... but yeah, most people's dislike of Anki comes from not knowing how to use it.
Categorize your cards, and when you come back focus on the categories you want to work on. I think Anki allows tagging. I use Memrise and it allows you to split courses into different “chapters”, which all share the same course database. In fact, it allows you to pull in data from all existing public Memrise databases.
I think this sounds symptomatic of having made flashcards which are too big. There was a time when I discovered this failure mode big-time: I basically burnt out of flashcarding, because my cards were all much too big.
The memrise blog has some very important info about how one should create cards. Making them ask about only one thing in isolation is one of them.
For example all downloadable Kanji decks basically ask "Kanji -> meaning, kun readings, on readings, nanori readings, translation, example jukugo, example sentence, pronunciation, stroke order, ...", i.e. not atomic at all.
I have instead made my own deck where each Kanji has multiple cards that ask for different pairs of information. One of the important reasons is that I may have more trouble remembering one of those than the others, and that should not make me have to redo those others, since SRS should ask when I'm about to forget.
> Staring at fact flashcards for hours on end just felt like a waste of time.
I think I found your problem.
Try this cycle:
- Add however many cards you like
- Study
- Got bored and didn't finish all your cards? Stop and don't add any new card until you can finish quick enough to not get bored
- Finishing quickly? Add more cards
The exponentially increasing interval is your friend. Before you notice you won't be studying more than 10 cards a day :)
It doesn't feel like it in the first ~10 days of a block of cards, but there's a jitter in the spacing function, so you will see the same block at the same time 2 or 3 times but then they'll start dispersing and be a lot less overwhelming.
And most important of all: don't be afraid of slow progress: progress is progress!
I remember seeing people using flash cards in various science and math classes. The only thing that helped me to remember algos and derivations was to use them on some practical problem. I am as much as kinesthetic as visual learner, I think mainly because it keeps my brain from going into zombie repetition land. Don't even try to teach me something by just babbling about it in front of a class room. I need to experience the learning in some fashion. When all that fails I'll fall back on rote memorization and flash cards. I can definitely see its place in learning foreign languages (at least at the start, I always did better by using the words in sentences that forced me to think about them more than just as a jumble of letters)
A cardinal rule of all SRS advocates: You must understand something before making a flashcard for it. In math, that means solving problems with it, etc.
I learned analysis a long time ago. Forgot most of it, despite applying it a lot.
I learned statistics twice, applied it, and still forgot most of it. The third time round I made flashcards and I haven't forgotten much.
I studied a textbook on floating point arithmetic for work (mathematical - with theorems, etc). Because it was secondary to my main work, I would have gaps - sometimes for months, before I could return to it. Yet whenever I did return to it, I could continue where I left off without reviewing much - because of flash cards.
This is true for most people; almost nobody is going to get a good understanding of something just by reading about it. But if you have already understood something, then Anki can help you solidify that understanding into the long term.
Actually for language learning at least, understanding doesn't need to come before rote memorization.
While "stupidly" learning a one-two word definition might not allow you to understand how a word is actually used, it will allow you to get its meaning should you encounter it in native material, delaying understanding to that moment.
Well, there can be a lot to be understood in why something is defined the way it is. For example, a red-black tree is defined the way it is because it's a pretty simple structural way to force the tree to be "pretty well balanced". Why does it force that?
You're going for too big cards again. A single card doesn't need to answer absolutely everything there is about a red black tree. You want to ask about a single aspect of it per card.
The definition is "what is it?". There is nothing to understand here. It could be taught to a parrot or child to repeat this information.
What you're mentioning is a bunch of cards on top of that: how does a red black tree stay balanced on insertions? When is the self-balancing property of red black trees useful? When is it not? Etc etc.
You cannot answer this if you mistake a red black tree for another tree for example. It's essentially vocabulary.
Another one would be notations: what's the symbol for a cross product? Again, nothing to understand, but you must know it to work on actual math problems involving cross products.
I know that - I wrote the article which is the subject of this thread ;) I took you to be arguing that Anki should be used to learn without understanding.
I think to make the most of it you need to engage your imagination. Relating stories and context to the facts transforms it from ‘staring at flashcards for hours’ into more of a game and something to enjoy.
And the great thing is, because of the spaced repetition, you don’t need to spend hours on it at a time. You can learn a lot in 5/10 mins a day.
When I was starting Anki, I would spend time really focusing my thinking on the cards while reviewing them (reading sentences aloud multiple times until pronunciation is good, relating concepts to others, ...). I'm now convinced this is a waste of time and Anki is best used rushing through sessions as fast as possible (maximum 20min a day). This takes care of the small, boring but often essential rote memorization part, allowing you to use as much of your time and intellect for actual practice in the target domains.
(This may not apply if the target domain is actually itself rote memorization, e.g. medical exams)
For context in this thread, my maximum study in the last 2 months was 10.42 minutes, but my mode (and average as well, that point is an outlier) is close to 3 or 4
It was using flashcards of cats with funny captions and it actually worked. Sadly my old phone eventually broken and the app can't be installed from the appstore anymore.
Have you tried fluent forever? their app uses a similar concept except you pick your own photos to help you remember. I finally found a use for many of the random photos of my dogs I’ve been saving in my phone for years!
But remembering facts is exactly what it's for..? And even reasoning-based domains have parts that require rote memorization. E.g. "what is the halting problem?" doesn't require any reasoning or understanding. One needs to know such definitions in order to even start the reasoning part.
It really depends on what you're doing. Anki is the perfect tool for memorizing vocabulary in a new language, but it's not a replacement for practicing your writing or other creative endeavors. Each technique has its place.
Someone should just create an open source clone of Duo Lingo that can utilize user created content . It's basically anki with much more engaging visuals, game-ficication, and social aspects, and it works really well to keep users engaged both per session and long term.
I'm doing a more social language learning app, starting with helping couples learn languages from each other. So it's like multiplayer Duolingo + Anki. Won't be open source, but I plan on an API with import / exports from Anki https://learncoupling.com
In my experience it was much more useful and engaging to learn by doing things (creating, writing, experimenting) that the facts were related to - then the most necessary facts would become deeply embedded in my memory, with others at just the right level of vagueness necessary to look up the details if needed.