The first day was really tough; I missed cards over and over again. 20 new cards (the default) is probably too many for this type of study. But I kept at it, once per day, and today (a week later) I can recognize nearly every font in the deck, and the ones that I have trouble with are very similar to other fonts (which is a useful thing to know in its own right; you can start to group fonts into "families" with a common ancestor). Pretty cool!
There's just one problem: so far, this hasn't translated into any ability to recognize fonts in the real world. I can think of a few reasons why. First, there are a LOT of fonts out there; even the "most popular" ones don't show up all that frequently. This is especially true for business logos, which like to use unusual fonts to make themselves stand out. Secondly, I think studying by memorizing a single sentence has caused me to "overfit!"
For example, there's a font that I can instantly recognize (Minion Pro) by how the 'T' and 'h' look together at the start of the sentence. I don't pay attention to anything else about the font, because that single feature is enough to distinguish it from the rest of the deck. And this turns out to be true for most fonts: Today Sans has a funny-looking 'w', Syntax has a funny-looking 'x', etc. So if I see a logo written in Today Sans, but it doesn't contain a 'w', I can't recognize it! Similarly, because the cards only contain the one sentence, which is entirely lowercase except for the 'T', I can't identify any fonts from an uppercase writing sample. What I can do is say, "Hmm, I don't know what that font is, but it definitely has a lot in common with Myriad..." and then I look it up and find out that the actual font is Warnock, which was designed by the same guy (Robert Slimbach) who designed Myriad.
So yeah, Anki is pretty cool, but an unintended side effect is that it can give you a striking sense of how a classification algorithm "feels" from the inside. :)
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/whatthefont/id304304134?mt=8
My personal favorite webfonts are proxima nova (for commercial) and roboto(for free google fonts) for modern web typesetting
There are a lot of fonts out there (~50,000 families according to random Quora people). Their distribution is probably power-law-like even if you discount the ones that are preinstalled on major platforms. It might make sense to recognize a few if you want to be able to really deeply discuss the difference in how they are used for design, but just recognizing them doesn't seem like the right way to gain that understanding. If you repeatedly perform a task where you have to recognize a font, learning only the top 100 won't help you much since it will eventually become pretty obvious. If you don't do that task, then why train for it instead of looking it up as necessary?
My thinking on "what's worth flashcarding" is that there are two major categories where it makes sense. First, if you need to remember a bunch of specific facts and you will need to recall them more quickly than they can be looked up. This is the case for things like tests, but there are also reasonable possibilities for this in real work (for example, if you are a programmer you may know you are going to need to look up the parameter ordering of a standard library method that you use only once a month, or you could memorize it).
The second is where you are using the flashcards as a scaffold, but the actual knowledge is something that references or brings together the facts that are contained in the flashcards. Recognizing fonts fits into this category, but I have a hard time imagining that actually recognizing them is the knowledge that is most efficient. Instead maybe you should be studying the major categories of fonts, features of fonts, or something that would help you make quicker decisions for whatever the real task is. I used to be able to recognize a lot of fonts and it's basically only useful as a parlor trick.
Although if you are new to design then learning the top 20 or whatever could be helpful to just have a basic fluency with Arial vs Times New Roman vs Comic Sans, so you have a shared vocabulary to discuss with others. "It's like Times New Roman but more suited for headlines and all caps" for example.
This is the weird confluence of work I've done at multiple companies (in one case I basically implemented a SRS like Anki with applications to finance exams, and in another I did a lot of work with fonts for a laser cutting design editor).
I highly recommend it if this kind of thing interests you. It gives a solid overview of the theory and practical lessons from his daily use of Anki over the last few years:
Thank you so much!
There are quite nice deck ideas:
+ Facts about friends
+ Standard Library of your programming language
(https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3937203746)
+ Bird Voices
(https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2088996377)
Additionally I'd say even if you succeeded in memorizing it this way, it's not making you a better problem solver, which is what actually matters for that particular subject; you're just (temporarily) better at regurgitating some lines of code.
I wouldn't really know for sure; I took the long way 'round (time and experience) for gaining that skill. But it at least seems plausible. Of course, the linked article isn't this.
This is mostly for computer science / programming. If I used anki for learning a language, I would just mass create all my cards at one time or use a curated deck.
don't get me wrong here I love using anki and ankidroid but adding cards is a PITA. I add cards only on desktop anki because neither ankidroid nor ankiwebapp support easy-image formatting. But I do add cards from ankidroid if its a picture of some handwritten / whiteboard drawings I've made.
E.g. you learn and retain the information far more efficiently if you take the route of read -> write note -> create flashcards from the note. As opposed to autogenerating the flashcards from the source material, for example.
The process of formulating the note first and then formulating the flashcards means you have to actually think about the material in two stages instead of just performing data entry.
In my experience it doesn't take all that much time, and if you're really interested in learning a topic is it unreasonable to expect that you have to spend say 10% longer with any given book or article to perform this review process? If you spend a bit of time up front creating a structured approach and stick to it, it'll become very quick. Here's an interesting article as a reference: https://robertheaton.com/2018/06/25/how-to-read/
Anki is an open source application (desktop + mobile) for spaced repetition learning (aka flashcards). It's a very popular tool among people who want to learn languages (and basically anything else you want to remember). There are many shared decks (https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/). Creating and formatting cards is also possible and pretty easy.
If you are planning to learn a language or anything else give Anki a try. I used it for all of my language learning efforts. With this least my vocabulary is rocking solid.