What I would like to see covered is a more vague area, but almost more important:
It’s the space in between reading/understanding something and the SRS. There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs (web browser, PDF readers etc.) into popular SRS (Anki, Mochi etc.). They should work almost as OS additions to make everything feel native and frictionless; I don’t need another standalone tool that does X Y and Z, I just need some sort of pipe into an SRS that is Mac friendly and does the job whilst not being in the way.
If someone knows of such a tool, I would love to hear about it.
I think this is a common misunderstanding. Half the benefit of SRS comes from working out what the flashcards are. You have to circle around a concept, look for similarities, differences, examples, generalisations, properties, etc.
Is it hard work? Yes. Does it help understanding? Massively.
This is also a very difficult skill which, I believe, is why many people fail to appreciate SRS. They try, write bad flashcards, don't see results, and give up.
EDIT: This also leads to another common misunderstanding, that SRS is only good for memorising facts. With proper elaboration (thanks child comment), it can be used to build understanding of complex subjects too.
From a user standpoint, would it be an interactive process where you highlight things and then click a button to say "turn this into a flashcard", or would it be an automated tool that would scan the content and come up with a list of questions and answers t hat would test the material for you? What criteria would be used to determine what's worth turning into a question and answer? And how granular should the question be? I've seen demos of things that pick out specific facts, like dates or names, from the text to turn into questions, but that might not be that useful to quiz for some material. It seems like a very open-ended process to me, so it would be hard to get right for everyone's needs.
Well, you probably not gonna like this but Emacs with Org-mode is excellent for managing Anki cards. My SR cards are not in some other medium — they are literally my notes. I can edit them freely; I can generate new content easily (e.g., using LLMs); I can turn any thought or a book quote into a card and vice-versa; cards are version controlled; I can embed formulas and code snippets; they are easy to search through; they are platform-independent; they are contextual — my cards are intertwined with additional notes, book annotations, screenshots, video links, etc — they help me study subjects with immersion;
Ideally the SRS app would make services available to facilitate quick creation of new cards, so for example one might highlight some text, right-click, and select Services → New SRS Card… which then opens an in-place lightweight card creator dialog.
- subs2srs MPV script: create srs cards from subtitled videos, if you have subtitles tracks for source and target language it will fill them both in (though that sometimes has caveats, different languages may distribute the meaning of a line of dialogue over different subtitle lines)
- asbplayer chrome extension: inject extra subtitle languages into streaming services and create flashcards from them similar to subs2srs
- yomitan: browser dictionary lookup, primarily for bilingual dictionaries for Japanese and Chinese but also has custom dictionary support.
It's not at the OS level, but I think a focused standalone all-in-one experience is actually better. We've explored a chrome extension here that does something similar to what you suggest, but it somehow hasn't proven useful in practice. I always keep coming back to just doing everything directly in the tool (upload PDF, take notes, make cards), as it helps me focus deeply on what I'm learning.
ChatGPT is the main spot where I'm going to be trying to understand a new concept, so after groking it I'll ask it to make flashcards which I can then just copy and paste into Mochi.
An improvement would be some sort of MCP integration between the LLM and Mochi so it can just add the card directly. I'm sure we'll get there soon.
1. https://gist.github.com/christiangenco/db4b61c315b93fc2a404a...
I have a slightly different system I'm developing:
Rather than reviewing with flashcards, review with actual content:
1. Tag the content with the words and grammar concepts
2. Estimate the difficulty [1] for you of each word or grammar concept -- the difficulty being essentially the inverse of your familiarity graphs in this article.
3. Choose content to read which balances difficulty and the impact on learning.
Since reviewing something you're about to forget has more impact than learning something new, "spaced repetition" falls naturally.
And instead of spending your review time going through flash cards, you spend your review time reading content in the target language.
[1] If you know the details of the FSRS algorithm, I'm using "difficulty" here differently than they do in their algorithm.
Showing schlafen before ausschlafen, or contextually simpler cards before more complex ones.
Optimizing blindly easy medium hard and next time to show a card is probably very far away from efficient learning.
If the process is inspected, most of the forever knowledge that I acquired I heard once and internalized.
If you pay for Mochi you also get API access, so one could make a ChatGPT wrapper which adds the cards for you. But since I like to review the cards manually before adding I don't mind the copy paste step.
• Memorizing Geoguessr metas. Made it to Master I rank this way.
• Memorizing new words. When I come across a word I don't know, I make a new flashcard for it.
• Memorizing things about people. My wife's favorite ice cream flavors, which spices each of my children dislikes, etc.
Anything I want to memorize but wouldn't be exposed to frequently enough in my day to day life. Flashcard review takes only a few minutes each day.
I tried it for a while with my eldest child (then aged 3) to help her remember numbers, letters, etc. She didn't find it very fun past the first couple of times, so I figured I wasn't going to hoist it on her.
I downloaded an existing deck and modified it so that only the correct answer is shown instead of multiple choices.
I still can remember some of the content even though I deleted the deck short after receiving my license.
Every time i did repetition, i've made a shorter note about the subject.
Then next repetition cycle, i'm reading the note, and making shorter note based on it. and so on.
once few cycles i'm re-reading the main starting note i made.
- Population of Tokyo / Tokyo metro area / Japan (where I live)
- Japan emergency numbers (like 911/411 in the US)
- kg <-> lb and km <-> mi conversion ratios
- My Japanese phone number (and my wife's)
- Number of neurons / synapses in a typical human brain
- Number of parameters in SOTA language models
- How many people work in my office
- Last 4 digits of a couple important credit cards, so I can identify them when UIs present me a choice of pre-saved CCs.
I just don't use an app. I will challenge myself to remember things or practice things manually.
It's probably sub optimal compared to structured spaced repetition, but it works well enough for me.
Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet.
There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just that people tend to fall off the same way they do on any other education pattern.
A couple years ago I was thinking "If Google and Apple really cared about kids they would make a spaced repetition unlock system", where by you have to make note cards every week and then have to answer correctly to get into your phone. (obviously requires some bypass system, other rules, etc)
You could probably jury rig it with a popup that comes up after you unlock, but people would never install it anyway.
I credit Anki to my success at GCSEs and A Levels despite having a head injury, and I also credit it to me burning out so hard I took a gap year!
And I'm enjoying the gap year, but Anki made it a near necessity.
One thing that bothers me about SRS is that it doesn't get enough attention from people who understand the difference between memorization and language acquisition. It gets a ton of attention from people who are doing test prep or who get intrinsic reward from their memorization accomplishments.
Memorization is not my goal — I want to get better at reading Spanish and French — but I find that drilling on vocabulary and example sentences helps a lot. I compare it to using scaffolding in construction. Scaffolding is not a building. Scaffolding doesn't serve any of the purposes a building does. But if you need to build, expand, or refurbish a building, sometimes building scaffolding in and around it can speed things up a hell of a lot.
I wish there were better guidance for using memorization to assist in language learning, but the world seems to be split between people who are satisfied with memorization as their goal (for test prep or intrinsic satisfaction) and people who dismiss memorization entirely because it isn't their goal.
More fundamentally, SRS isn't a superpower because it's just very specific to creating a direct prompt retrieval. Generalization is poor. Even creating a graph of knowledge, is a chain of edges between bits of knowledge, isn't done very well here.
And I suspect there's a very deep, fundamental difference between recollection knowledge and logical-modeling knowledge. Recollection seems very similar to a dictionary access, and if you recorded the time to recall in humans I suspect they'd all be constant. But learning the knowledge of a logical model, like of a mathematical concept, appears to be vastly different and have very different time to compute.
Proponents of SRS will point out logical models need facts as well, like formulas, lemmas, etc. Which is true. But if you already grasped it before you'd grasp it faster the second time. So the practical use of SRS is a significant step above having a very well sorted and labeled notebook, but still way below becoming a genius.
IIRC the effect was so profound they had to modify the structure of some tests or something to that effect.
And polyglots have been using SRS for years.
As always, the real problem when people fail to do something that works is psychological, not technical. I'd say anyone who made an Ozempic for motivation would make a killing, but I believe it's already a scheduled substance. Maybe one without potential for addiction or abuse. Or maybe an Ozempic for conscientiousness.
Easy statement to make when you're not defining the silver bullet. Kind of like saying dieting turns out not to be a silver bullet.
I've used spaced repairing for over 6 years. It's been transformative for me.
And a gigantic amount right with it.
This is a strange comment because it shrugs off something that has been transformative and hugely useful to a lot of people because it doesn’t fix all conceivable problems.
You still have to do the work.
It's a lever or a pulley, nothing more.
You'd probably say silver bullets aren't a silver bullet because you still have to load the gun and shoot it.
I mean, you say that, but I did mandarin for maybe 6 months, I did reviews for maybe a year or two on and off, I haven't done a review of mandarin for 8, 9 years now and I can still recall quite a bit of it. So for me it's worked quite well.
Anki doesn’t seem to separate these layers at all. Everything is a monolithic database. Import is unpleasant. Export is unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant. Doing anything other than practicing and editing in the UI is unpleasant. And, every time I try Anki, I get stuck when I can’t manipulate my own data outside Anki.
Is there any system out there that doesn’t have this issue?
Is that not what anki does? You have a collection of cards, each card can be in one or more decks derived from the cards.
> There also ought to be a way to constrain what cards should be studied in a given session
That's also decks. You can have your 'Japanese' deck, and then the 'Japanese::writing' subdeck for the subset which require you to have your writing materials handy.
You can also use "Better Tags" to tag cards, and then create a sub-deck with an ad-hoc tag query to only study a subset if you want.
Does creating more decks and then studying the subset you want to in a session not work for what you want?
> Anki doesn’t seem to separate these layers at all. Everything is a monolithic database.
Decks are separate files which can be shared, edited, created, studied, and reasoned about independently.
The "spaced repetition model" in anki is obviously separate from the fact that there are multiple (FSRS and the old one).
> Export is unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant
It's just files (zip files really). What's unpleasant about it?
> And, every time I try Anki, I get stuck when I can’t manipulate my own data outside Anki.
There's libraries to manipulate anki decks outside of anki for practically every programming languages. There are literally dozens of tools that can generate and import anki cards, such as the large family of japanese "mining" tools which create anki cards from media, dictionary entries, etc etc.
It's open source, and the code has clean library abstractions you can work with, so it's trivial to nab any of the data out of it.
> Is there any system out there that doesn’t have this issue?
Every issue you described is something that I experienced in other software, but which anki solved for me, so for me "anki" is that system.
On the other hand, how templates work and how cloze deletions work are really nice. With the flashcard app I built, I didn't have templates, but did have a very basic cloze deletion system where you could mark text to be "hidden" on the front. It was very limited in that you'd only ever get one front/back combination. You could hide multiple bits of text, but they'd all be hidden at the same time. With Anki, you can create multiple groups of hidden text, so that you end up with multiple flashcards from the same note (i.e. you hid three separate groups of text, so you now have three different cards to test with).
I've been working on an update to my app to incorporate templates and cloze deletions like how Anki does it, so now I appreciate that aspect to it.
For my own database, at least in the new version I'm working on, I've ended up creating a schema where the individual attributes for each card are thrown into their own tables, but this is mostly because I needed to support updating individual attributes separately since I use a very simple journaling system to sync across devices. With Anki's schema, I can see why sync was complicated (at least in earlier versions) since it wasn't really built for it.
Sprinkle in AI and you'd be a shoe-in.
Which is really a shame, as the spacing effect itself is such an underrated aspect of human learning that it almost feels like cheating.
I don't think any of us are satisfied with how most things look, but we're severely under-resourced.
Feel free to email me if you'd be interested in getting involved with the Android side of things.
It’s powerful, with a lot of depth to its features - but it’s also hideous, clunky and unintuitive, and it takes a long time to figure out how to use it effectively.
An HN-reading tech nerd can probably figure it out, but your average Duolingomaxxing normie? No chance.
I've been exploring some of these questions in my personal foray in design. If anyone’s interested, I posted an early experiment here: https://dribbble.com/shots/25737616-Descartes-Design-Flashca...
I wonder if there are any good recommendations for something to try it on?
It has other oddities too though, like the tab bar in the main window that doesn’t act like a tab bar. It should also really have two button mode (Again and Good only) for the review screen as a built in option, too — the addon that adds this is very popular and it’d be dead simple to implement.
people that are motivated and will succeed with Anki regardless of design will power through an annoying UI. so with better design, you'll increase top of funnel but radically decrease conversion.
Long story short: not possible with anki. It took like an entire day for me to realize its just not possible without diving deep into ankis sqlitedb and having the client installed on my server to interact in a horrible way with decks. I wrote my own space repetition [1] backend in a week and never looked back to anki. Ill intergrate FSRS in my software.
1: https://github.com/entropie/ha2itat/tree/main/plugins/entrom...
There is an implementation of their sync server, which you can self host. And it has a REST API
https://github.com/dsnopek/anki-sync-server
I think I ran into a blocker with it not supporting something I needed last time I tried to use it though.
I know this is not precisely what you wanted, but yes, Anki can update card contents.
Like other big cultural shifts from the time, the correction was necessary but also probably went too far in the opposite direction.
Which is a long way of saying that memorization is underrated and it mostly has a bad reputation from anti-Victorian reformers.
Common sense challenges this honestly. Education systems that traditionally have put a strong focus on repetition, memorization and what you could call neuromuscular training (e.g China, the USSR, France) in particluar in STEM far outperform anyone else. Vietnam outperforms most rich countries.
In programming circles it's a cultural cliche because our profession is full of people who go by: "I am a genius, I work smart, not hard", probably the most damaging idea ever uttered in education, and in the humanities it's seen as culturally unsophisticated.
In reality, 95% of everything is mechanics. Starcraft, math, even literature and acting. Creative freedom is enabled only by a large body of effortless recollection.
You can't understand something you can't remember.
I have been trying for years to fined a way to use it for mathematics and physics - with the former being more of a focus and didn't really get anywhere. For definitions it works, but it's quite hard to write proofs in a way where there is a short obvious memorization based answer. Either you spend far too much time on a card or the card gives you too much information so you don't really test the knowledge.
I also tried it for computer shortcuts - it seems to me that they are really useful only when part of the muscle memory - so practicing them works better then memorization.
And mathematics and physics, which are (at undergraduate level) even more well-understood than vocabulary.
I've used Anki for multiple years and learned around 18'000 Japanese words. It's difficult to say but I'd say I've learned how to read around 5'000 kanji. When I studied in Japan, my kanji reading—don't mix that up with comprehension!—was way above everyone else's. And most of my classmates were either Korean or Chinese.
That's what 10 minutes of free time—I did that during my daily train rides—can get you! Keep practicing. Being ignorant is the first step towards becoming more knowledgeable.
We spend hours a day browsing the web, so I made a browser extension[0] that translates sentences at your knowledge level into the language you're learning, so that you're always learning a little through immersion.
I also used the same "10 minutes a day on Anki" strategy with my A levels, and it made the revision process so so much nicer because stuff I'd learnt two years ago was as fresh as if I'd learnt it a couple of months ago, rather than years.
* Get interested in memorizing something / multiple things
* Find that the decks available to me are actually not so great
* Get reading online, people say that the real way to benefit from it is to make your own deck (which ups the time commitment significantly)
* Read online about how to get the most out of anki, find out that everyone universally agrees that the default settings are terrible but nobody quite agrees on how to set it for best results
* Try to hit a happy medium, but find that the overhead of 'rating' the difficulty of recall for cards (and how it interacts with the complex settings that I still don't have complete confidence in) adds an incredibly (to me) distracting amount of overhead and never get used to it
* Miss a few days, get overwhelmed with the amount of cards stacked up, don't feel good about my settings (which have implications for what cards show up like, a year + down the line)
* Ultimately fizzle out
I'm probably going to start the cycle over again soon. I really do want it to work out for me. Any tips to avoid this issue? I'm planning to actually pay for some decks this time to see if that gets me to the quality I want, and going to skip the whole 'trying to make my own deck' thing for now
Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.
This was a game changer for me and working with LLMS, while I still think they make you dumb, and we essentially use them to offload critical thinking (almost only find myself using them when tired lazy, and just cant), if you must use them use them as a study tool.
I did this because I realized I was hitting an issue where I theoretically "knew" a word (would get it always correct on the card), but wouldn't always recognize it in a novel context.
I'm hoping that having the context be variable when I'm learning it will help fix this issue.
Speaking for myself, I’d love to see a blogpost detailing how this is done. At the very least, I’d love to know: How are you syncing csvs to anki cards and how does the MCP interaction look like for an LLMs response to the CSV creation
No MCP on ChatGPT yet, but I can ask chat to generate an output of what we reviewed in a structured format.
I brought it up around the time I tried it and got shouted down. Pretty much every spaced repetition app was treating anki like a holy emissary, so I gave up on spaced repetition entirely.
It about halved the amount of reviews I needed to do, and they didn't come up in bursts, so they were a lot more pleasant. I didn't quite believe it at first, and worried that it would be less effective, but it worked just as well if not better.
I really recommend giving it another try!
> And the idea that you’ll literally never see a card again after the last interval is terrifying, as it means you’re constantly losing knowledge.
1) The time it takes to make cards. RemNote allows you to take Notion-style block notes and quickly turn bullet points into flashcards using symbols. For example, you might be in class and make a bullet point in the format
- The quick brown fox jumps over >> the lazy dog
which you can later review as a flashcard that is automatically separated front/back by the >>.
2) The old and unintuitive UI - again, basically just Notion with flashcards. You can easily view all your notes in a bullet hierarchy and then switch over to SR flashcard practice. Even has rich code blocks, image occlusion, tables etc. A much better implementation of Anki's notes/cards metaphor in my opinion.
I am not sponsored by RemNote, just a university student who has bounced off Anki and really likes the app.
I've used Anki for a long time and apply updates, but I don't closely track changes. Based on the above, I figured I'd be using FSRS, but I'm not. All of my decks have that setting turned off. Fair enough (no silent updates to existing data), but even when I create a new deck, I have to turn the FSRS setting on manually. I found the same even with a whole new profile. What aspect of this is "default"? Is there a global setting I'm missing?
I'm glad it's available, though, without any plugins!
The algorithm (FSRS) supports reviewing in advance or delay. It's free for users to decide the time of review. And it will adapt to the user's memory.
Meanwhile, spaced repetition is one essential technology to achieve free learning.
FSRS runs entirely locally and has no risk under others' control.
source: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/free-spaced-repeti...
> FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler) is a modern spaced repetition algorithm that was developed by Jarrett Ye.
If I do a search of "flexible spaced repetition software" I get no results, which strongly suggests the dumb guesser you're using guessed something plausible to placate its user. This is common behaviour for this type of software.
In summary, I politely suggest you critically review how you interact with knowledge on the internet.
I've stopped working on it and am now building something highly similar aimed towards high school students, but any feedback is welcome. This version was built for uni students
mimair.com - I never got around to adding any payment option so its completely free
This seems impossible to me. In anki, there's "hard", "good", and "easy" which are all for "I got this right".
For my usage, "hard" is "I got it right, but I was only like 60% sure", "good" is "I had to actively think", and "easy" is "effortlessly correct, no real thought required".
There's no way for an AI to tell if my identical input is the result of a 50/50 guess, or a little thought, or effortless recall. "delay to answer" also isn't a good approximation, I have a habit of alt-tabbing and chatting with a friend on random cards of any difficulty.
I find distinguishing those levels of easy for totally identical answers ends up making SRS more effective, and AI just can't know my inner thoughts. Maybe once we have brain implants.
I like the anki way of self rating, so I kept it. I want to be able to say: “hey, I know I screwed up the stroke order this time, but it won‘t happen again, promise” and hit “Good”.
Accordingly, the stereotypical CS major is attracted to Japanese and Klingon, the stereotypical Business major to Chinese. Even though few follow through because of the amount of work and perseverance required
PY: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/py-fsrs
TS: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/ts-fsrs
RS: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-rs
Currently ts-fsrs and rs-fsrs support FSRS 6 and py-fsrs should also support FSRS 6 in the next day or so. Also, both py-fsrs and fsrs-rs include the ability to optimize the FSRS model from your past reviews!
https://github.com/arvindang/rb-fsrs
Originally adapted from the Python version linked here.
There are several unresolved issues with Anki, SuperMemo, at al.
1. Emphasis on memorization. I wanted something that could be applied to domains (music) whose scoring is not based on memorization, but mastery.
2. Lack of any hierarchical information limits how well it works to learn much larger skills. It's trivial to replicate the functionality of Anki with Trane: just have one lesson where you put all your exercises. Anki cannot replicate what Trane does, which is to use the dependencies of the many sub-skills to track and limit progress until mastery is achieved.
3. Emphasis on creating your own exercises. You are expected to come up with your own decks, which takes a lot of time. For complicated skills, you need to be a domain expert to really know how to do this.
Trane is pretty much done, and I have used it to teach myself music. It does not have a UI at the moment, so I am pretty sure I am the only user. Not that I mind, because I rather not work for free.
Currently working on a literacy tutor that will be built on top of it. When it's complete, it will be able to guide all students from learning their A-B-Cs to reading and writing at college level, backed by the most up-to-date research on reading and writing acquisition. Hopefully I will be able to release an MVP in the middle of the year.
The simplest approach is Bayesian Knowledge Tracing [0], which is just a simple probability update and an Expectation Maximization optimizer to fit the latent factors. The standard version assumes an independent set of skills with no forgetting, but there are extensions for that [1] [2]. PyBKT [3] implements some common ones, so take a look there.
Learning Factor Analysis [4] seems to work considerably better than naive BKT, while being very simple to implement (it's a logistic model, sharing the family with most spaced repetition algorithms), so that might be promising if the hierarchical dependencies are incorporated. Some researchers have been applying increasingly complex NNs [5], including transformers, but personally I think that's just more parameters to overfit [6].
I'm not an expert. I only built a basic KT tool to prepare for the national Ukrainian exam and found these along the way.
[0] https://www.cs.williams.edu/~iris/res/bkt-balloon/index.html
[1] https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-07221-0_...
[2] https://educationaldatamining.org/EDM2011/wp-content/uploads...
[3] https://github.com/CAHLR/pyBKT
[4] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2105.15106v4
[5] https://pykt-toolkit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/models.html
It sounds like you must have had some interesting difficulties with that, not having been a domain expert in music. What were they and how did you overcome them?
I experimented with SuperMemo around 18 months ago, and it made me fall in love with SRS again. The main reason being the algorithm is less punishing when I skip a day. Maybe it has better defaults?
I once skipped a whole week and could get back on track in the next week, in Anki that feels unbearable.
Another thing I really liked about it is that you can edit a card as you are studying without having to open a separate window, helps me stay in the flow when studying.
But… With a better algorithm I might give it a try in the future… Being FOSS is the real advantage here.
Q&A/discussion: https://supermemopedia.com/wiki/SuperMemo_dethroned_by_FSRS
Repo: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-vs-sm17
Discussion: https://discord.gg/qjzcRTx => https://discord.com/channels/368267295601983490/136895216717...
One direction could be to incorporate semantics, which afair FSRS doesn't do at all yet. A good flashcard deck will have a lot of semantic overlap, e.g., a card for the vocab word itself, that word in a sentence, etc. Struggling with one component is a strong signal you'll struggle with another.
The same thing could be done for just better spacing, so you don't "cheat" by having too closely-related cards next to eachother in a review (the review signal will be less noisy).
I’ve always felt this setup was a bit arbitrary and considered it a temporary solution. Thanks for saving me some time on research!
As a quick hack, increase the factor to 2.5 once you reach 1 day. That's what Anki's SM-2 used to use (if only pressing 'good')
I've built Komihåg [1] to try and combat this: Select any text on your iOS device and a flashcard is automatically created for you, and the app is then showing you the cards on the Home Screen / Lock Screen / Apple Watch Face.
I haven't gotten to implement any sophisticated scheduling algorithm yet but will definitely do that eventually.
[1] : https://komihag.com
My second reason is that I'm worried about the complexity - both from non-nerdy users perspective and me having to debug it.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/16t2lva/comment/k2cor...
I don't know if this is replicable with v6, or not. I would be interested to find out!
Once you upgrade, FSRS is available under the deck options.
Make a word document that lists all the keys to memorize vertically. Save as PDF
Open the PDF in a viewer with annotation tools. Make a clickable note in the margin just next to each key. Write out the value to memorize in the note field.
Cycle through the clickable notes. When you get one right easily, drag the note more to the left in the margin. As you cycle, focus on the ones furthest to the right. If you get one wrong, move it a bit further to the right.
In general the notes will move to the left until you're comfortable with all of them. And the balancing of which ones you need to see and focus on plays out very naturally and you feel in control the whole time.
There are many downsides with this compared to a tool like anki (e.g. I only used it on a laptop), but there was also something about it that just worked really well for me, so I never ended up switching to a different tool. But this was before anki had the similar algorithm described here. Maybe my experience would be different today
Anki runs on desktop: you have to be chained to a desk rather than taking advantage of idle moments when you are on-the-go. Even if you have it on a laptop, you still need a place to sit; SRS on mobile can be used anywhere, like standing-room-only public transit.
The AnkiMobile companion app for iOS is a paid app that is somehow chained to the desktop version, whereas AnkiDroid is a full-featured clone of Anki that you could use air gapped without ever syncing anything to or from another device. It has integrated management of decks and note creation/editing.
Every other SRS app out there is just playing very distant catch-up to Anki/AnkiDroid. They usually mention Anki in their pitch, trying desperately to explain why some very minor and very subjective negative point about Anki is worth switching to their massively inconvenient solution.
It makes it unusable and every time I tried I went back to my own self written program that just lets me set/adjust the intervals myself.
In the short term (first day), I think it's still better to set your own intervals (typicall 1 minute, then 5, then 10). But after that, the algorithm optimizes for reminding you just before forgetting. Highly recommend giving it a try.
Would love any feedback—I’m aiming for a more focused, restful take on what I like most about Anki. Styling is done with Tailwind.
Especially for language study, as a friend put it, speaking a language is like learning a musical instrument, no amount of book studying will teach you how to play the instrument. The way you learn to play is to play. And similarly, the way you learn to speak is to speak. Sure, you can fill your vocabulary, but I question a little how much it helps in context. Obviously it's not zero. I'm sure curious, if there are better methods than SRS for language learning given that hearing, creating, understanding, and speaking whole sentences is the goal, not individual words. I can generally learn a new word in my native language with one exposure, no SRS needed.
Note that Anki uses (used) such an old algorithm because it derived it from an ancient open source version of SuperMemo, a software which started the spaced repetition trend. Anki just added a usable GUI instead of the convoluted mess that is SuperMemo. Newer versions of SuperMemo improved the algorithm, but they are no longer open source. I wonder how FSRS compares to current iterations of the SuperMemo algorithm.
I've done lots of tweaking to the algorithm over the years to make it feel like I'm less surprised by the scheduling, and less like a slave to it. One very stark difference between mine and Anki is that I have a large number of "overdue" cards, but the system still prioritises when to show me the overdue cards with quite a few different metrics based on how overdue it is, how new it is, how long the current interval is, etc. So, like Anki, I still just double the interval for correct cards, but for incorrect cards, the reviews are repeated same day until they're correct, and then the interval is reduced a lot more than Anki. So, the cards then become overdue sooner, but because the scheduling of overdue cards is better, they get pushed later if your overdue queue is too large, and sooner if you've not got anything more useful to review.
FWIW, my typical session is 40 minutes per day during my daily lunchtime walk, and I'll get through about 150 cards in that time. If I'm on a long train journey, I'll often clear out double that or more, but the disaster situation of being on holiday for a month might leave the queue with a couple of thousand extra cards, but they never seem unmanageable. Even after a 2 month break when I was travelling last year, and only doing reviews on flights and trains, I'd definitely forgotten some words from not reviewing at the appropriate time, but the percentage of totally forgotten cards felt better than I used to experience after just missing a few days with Anki.
One thing the article mentions that I don't massively concern myself with is desired retention. I'm not sure I'd want to express it as a target percentage, but I've definitely been thinking about how I want to change things to deprioritise stubborn words without just suspending them or deleting them. I definitely find that having them keep showing up, so I might see a pattern of them wrong twice each day before finally getting them right, after a few days of that they do usually suddenly stick for good. But sometimes I look at the word and think I don't really care if I remember it or not.
I'd like to be able to take freehand notes, and then be able to block out, or blur, certain sections and each blocked or blurred area becomes a spaced repetition entry.
Or, in more detail. I'd like to look at a page of notes and loop select a certain area. That selected area becomes a spaced repetition item. After the initial loop selection I can do another loop selection to blur one or more areas that would be blurred. Etc, etc.
You can probably do what you want with the in-built image occlusion feature. Might be worth downloading an Android emulator and seeing if we meet your workflow requirements.
Any recs for moving this into Anki? I already use Anki for cards I created while going through Genki with my tutor, and world capitals.
The easiest thing I can think of is just grab https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/369908962 , and schedule everything you've already seen in WaniKani for immediate review, heavily relying on pressing easy to try to get things into a longer interval if you already feel you know them. This probably works best if you're relatively low-level on WaniKani. You might be able to use the WaniKani and Anki APIs to automate this to some extent.
Googling around, it seems others have run into this, e.g. https://community.wanikani.com/t/export-wanikani-srs-progres... and https://community.wanikani.com/t/userscript-wani-kani-export... look promising. https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/n1pihp/why_y... also seems good.
Usually my intuition about how well I know something is not too far off. If you don't specify anything, it doubles the time since the last review.
I do agree with the author's phrase of "...a daily ritual of feeling bad about what you’ve forgotten..." though, and would like to try the new algorithm. Is there a way to configure Anki to force you to type the correct answer?
20 second video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mxEqRe1Pp1w
It's possible to batch convert your cards to this format using Anki's "Card Templates" feature.
https://docs.ankiweb.net/templates/fields.html#checking-your...
But seeing how it's implemented, I think they could totally integrate something like FSRS to at least just replace their scheduling (how long until an item is next shown). The unlocking system can be implemented as a separate gatekeeping mechanism, and the buckets can be coded for certain step thresholds (instead of wanikani's "stage").
Basically, this is their entire srs system: https://docs.api.wanikani.com/20170710/#spaced-repetition-sy...
But they are comparatively narrow and technical compared to the improvements that need to be made in usability and scalability (of content dissemination and navigation).
Shameless: I am working on a FOSS SRS platform / toolkit that I believe can take some substantive steps forward here. Can read some at http://patched.network, or poke around http://github.com/patched-network/vue-skuilder
Getting 10 new cards that I happen to already know is easy. That's very different than getting 10 new cards that I get wrong, and therefore need to memorize.
I'd love to have 2 settings like:
- Max number of new card fails, say 4
- Max number of new cards, say 20
Fancier versions could use a decaying average of new card fails from the last few days. Those recently memorized cards are more challenging during review.
That being said, its just another tool in the toolkit for learning stuff. I don't think I'm that much smarter or better at anything just because I have used Supermemo often for awhile. Honestly, I just like making cards and throwing articles I want to read later into Supermemo for processing. Most of what I use Supermemo for is incremental reading, which I have never been able to find a good replacement for. I like being reminded of cool stuff I have read and ideas that I have had. I would recommend also learning and practicing various mnemonic techniques alongside spaced repetition.
Most of the other algos/apps I have tried have been okay, I have not tried FSRS because I don't really use Anki anymore. I used Anki when I was in college for about 2-3 years because I would do flashcards using the mobile app. I was still using Supermemo daily during the same time period though.
I also use Clozemaster for language vocab with Supermemo. I put the sentences and some explanations into Supermemo after I do them in Clozemaster. I do not really consider myself to be a language learner or learning a language. I pick up new vocab very slowly and do not do anything else to practice the languages I am learning vocab from. I have also been using Math Academy almost daily for about seven months which is nice, but definitely not a full replacement for learning math. Using Math Academy actually made me start working with math textbooks and online resources again.
[1] https://www.help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_reading [2] https://www.help.supermemo.org/wiki/Postpone [3] https://www.help.supermemo.org/wiki/Mercy
The system assumes you have already learned the fact (for some unclear to me definition of learned)
Most users inserts new words in the hope that repeating them in anki will help them learn. It does to some extend, but it is not quite the right tool.
So for example, in Japanese, simply remembering how to read a word out loud is a task in and of itself. If you put words in context (which in language learning makes sense) the learner will quickly start to recall the meaning of the word based on the look of a sentence.
For a learning system this open up a lot of issues to solve. The best attempt I’ve seen was a web app that gave you full sentences and you clicked the characters word you didn’t understand and based on that it would give you different sentences.
There are two problems with that website: I don’t remember what it was called and it used google translate from 10 years ago. The second could be improved by expanding the corpus and use LLM to form sentences for the learner.
We generate cards that respond to speech to evaluate card recall and pronounciation (via speech recognition). We don't market it as AI but behind the scenes we use LLMs to explain the context behind every word and phrase, offer additional usage examples and cultural notes, and also generate roleplays based on specific topics & scenarios.
Happy to pass along invite codes to anybody who wants to check it out. https://getdangerous.app
Interleaved practice explainer: https://openlearning.mit.edu/mit-faculty/research-based-lear...
(Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler, in case anyone was wondering)
A lot of the difference in that graph seems to come from 70% vs. 90% retention.
> download all pdfs
> merge pdfs into one
> compress
> write a very specific prompt for gemini to turn these into anki cards separated by a semicolon
> do 50 anki cards a day for 3/4 weeks before exam
not a single lecture attended top of my class (ku leuven). feels like cheating honestly
This and other stuff I read on the article makes me thing that this person is maybe over-using the SRS. In my opinion, although OP is clearly way smarter than me, at some point we need to graduate from SRS, read native material, in Wanikani probably at first 100% of time needs to be dedicated to SRS and gradually time on SRS needs to be reduced and increased on reading native material, once on a reading level which is good enough so new vocabulary appears sparsely enough, what is the point on grinding an SRS? Most people don't even reach level 60, I don't see the point on being on lvl60 and still stay there grinding leeches. In the end SRS is not an end, it just gives you a mapping, an automatic translation from A to B without context. It is just a temporary bootstrap so you end up fixing it through real material afterwards. However, I think Wanikani should allow to suspend leeches, for sure.
Regarding Bunpro, I bought it, but I'm more convinced with time that SRSing grammar is probably not the best idea, and I think they could do a lot better if they had better exercises, like "not exactly an SRS", just selecting varied exercises for you every day.
PS: I remember seeing an expert in languages recommending that all cards you add to Anki need to be deleted after 2 months. If you didn't learn it by that time and it is important it will come up again and you will re-add it. Not sure if I agree with this either, but between this, and having a word forever there must be an intermediate point.