Tips and best practices:
* Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge[0]
* A list of Anki tips and suggestions that [a medical student] wrote[1]
* Anki Guide for Medical Students[2]
* How to make high quality Anki cards quickly[3]
* Anki Tips: What I Learned Making 10,000 Flashcards[4]
[0]: https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/medicalschool/comments/4ocdyb/a_lis...
[2]: https://drwillbe.blogspot.com/2011/08/anki-guide-for-medical...
[3]: https://managingmedicine.org/2013/05/14/how-to-make-high-qua...
My question: I have hundreds text files that are solely highlights I want to remember. I’ve made my own cards (for other things) for years and know that’s a best practice, but for this I want to automate the process more. Anyone have a suggestion to format long texts into many cards as quickly as possible? Script, Keyboard macro, or just general method?
Eventually I dropped Anki for the (closed source and freemium) memrise and I've been using ever since, I currently have a one year streak going. When learning vocab it actually asks you to write it down, or pick the correct translation from multiple choices which makes it a little less repetitive and more stimulating. It also has a few professionally made decks for some languages which are pretty decent in my experience. In the end it works a lot better for me.
But again maybe it's anki's defaults that aren't for me, but if that's the case they're pretty mediocre defaults IMO.
E.g. if your note field is called SpanishWord then putting {{type:SpanishWord}} in your card template means you're prompted to type the answer. (And Anki will show you a diff between your answer and the content of the field, so you can see spelling mistakes immediately.)
The pics from the Anki android app on the Play store shows how it works: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ichi2.anki...
> I am currently creating my own with the goal of it being the core of a quality collaborative deck.
You can do that? How does one contribute to a public deck on Anki?
Specifically your last part sounds like an awesome approach to learn and remember. However, I see a lot of difficulty in sharing the resultant cards and getting comparable outcomes. You probably need to set up the connections first by creating the cards. Simply having access to the cards may lead to people not taking the time and effort to bootstrap the connections by learning about them in a comprehensive manner. Also some organization that works for you may not necessarily work for some other person.
Nevertheless, I am very much intrigued by the potential of sharing knowledge this way. I just think it's not a clear cut and easy problem as one might imagine at first.
However, the transfer can be wildly better than trying to swallow a big pile of Facts (TM) solely by using them. Despite being superficially more work, Anki-memorizing+using can get you to mastery on topics with much less net time spent than simply straight-up using, as long as it is a task that involves a lot of "brute facts" of some sort.
This misconception wrecked my first couple of attempts to get into it, because I did not get the results I thought I should get. Better understanding has yielded better results.
An interesting thought would be to have some interactive anki cards.
I don't know about the details, but it could be something like, don't show me a card "how to list files using bash", show a command prompt, and if the user types a command that list files (tree, ls, find, etc.) approve the answer. Maybe ask "list files as many ways you can remember), etc.
How would this translate to other kinds of knowledge? Probably not easy, but not every card would have to be interactive, just the ones that make sense.
I want to use Anki so badly. I have bought the app on iOS ($25), but I haven't been able to get it to stick. I think the hardest part is to distill things into brute facts.
It seems like most the facts are trivial and obvious if you know the concepts and I haven't been able to map my concepts to something on an Anki card that would be useful for spaced repetition. IMO concepts are not something that you "forget" once you have done all the work of putting the pieces together in your head.
I would love to hear success stories of people using spaced repetition successfully for things that aren't facts.
I've only used spaced repetition for learning languages myself (vocabulary but also conjugations and declensions when applicable) and it's true that it generally works better when you can easily match something 1:1 to make both sides of the card. When you can't easily reduce something to a very simple and understandable expression it can get quite abstract and difficult to use.
For instance if you're making a deck to learn French you could make a card that says "une chaise -> a chair", no problem here. But now if you want to translate the word "encore" you have a problem because it can mean a bunch of different things in English: still, yet, even, again... Here making a card can create more confusion than nothing in my experience. It might be better to include it in short sentences demonstrating one specific meaning at a time, like "il est encore en retard" -> "he's late again".
Same thing for grammar: "je pense" -> "I think". Easy. "tu pensais" -> "you (sing. inf.) thought (imperfect)". Not so easy. For these things spaced repetition can only get you so far, you really need to practice the language "in context" to make it stick.
As a very long time Anki user who only very recently started using plugins, I agree with this.
I mean, I think vanilla Anki is already awesome and gives you tons, and I've used it that way for years. But yeah, there are some amazing plugins which can take things to whole other levels, especially in very visual fields.
Glutanimate makes great videos that introduce the plugins (and he writes/maintains some of them, including imo the above two).
But the basic idea is: Image occlusion - allows you to make a "cloze" using an image. I.e. you select 3 parts of an image to hide (by drawing something over them), and then you get 3 cards, one with each thing being hidden, then having to be revealed. That's the basic gist, and it's amazing, especially if you're studying something with lots of drawings (I usually don't, but e.g. anatomy is useful. And even I find uses for it).
Cloze overlapper allows you to easily create something that's recommended in the famous SuperMemo learning article. Let's say you want to memorize a song. You write the lines of the song, then the plugin generates cards which go:
Card 1: Song name [...] (you have to know the first line)
Card 2: Song name
The first line [...] (you have to know the second line)
And so on. So you're getting the context of the last line of the song, and then you have to know the next line.
This is the "standard" way to learn something like songs, poems, etc, but also useful for other ordered lists of things. Incredibly customizable btw (how many lines to show, whether to show line after as well, etc).
Other fun things: Image Resizer - simply a button that allows you to paste a smaller version of an image.
Advanced browser - makes the browser way more awesome (specifically, it gives you the option of sorting by arbitrary columns).
Note: Anki 2.1 just came out, and most plugins aren't compatible yet. So it's a real question whether it's worth upgrading if you rely on plugins.
The best spaced repetition method for me is listening to music. If I watch a film 5x or see a flashcard 5x or read a comic 5x, I'm bored. But I can listen to the same song 20x and still like it.
I'm about to take another stab at Spanish and vocabulary is one of my perennial weak points. I've played with Anki before, but it didn't seem as useful as I have been told.
Is it possible to get DroidAnki to have notices telling me that it's time to study something?
(created an account just to write this)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-4xOe79epU&list=PL3MozITKTz...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzBoDe3PgAc&list=PL3MozITKTz...
Glutanimate has taken Anki to a whole new level. He created a painless UI for occluding any part of an image and making Anki flashcards out of it (Image Occlusion Enhanced). I used it to efficiently create and memorize thousands of anatomy flashcards. Ordered lists can be a real pain to memorize, but when not missing steps is crucial (as it is for medical OSCEs), Cloze Overlapper has worked very well.
Anki lets you share your decks with others, and medical students have collaboratively created very high quality study decks for studying for the various STEP exams.
To be honest, I was always a fairly mediocre student. Big-picture concepts and figuring things out on the fly, no prob. But I've always struggled to nail down bits of information long-term or learn sequential information, meaning calc and ochem required inordinate amounts of time. No longer the case. Spaced repetition plus visual/text/auditory learning is a recipe for success.
The possibilities here should not be underestimated. Folks on Hacker News have talked about the value of information commons, and this right here is the next best example behind Wikipedia I have ever encountered. While quality collaborative decks exist for things like medical school, learning languages, and more, none exist specifically for the program I am in (PA school). I am currently creating my own with the goal of it being the core of a quality collaborative deck. I am using Gephi to spatially organize concept maps for diagnoses complete with incidence and strength of associations, when such information is available. I then export these maps to Anki, use Visual Occlusion Enhanced to block out the information I want to recall, and voila: time-efficient first-time learning and long-term retention.