I get what you are saying. If I were studying this would be great. But it's been a long time since I have done any formal study. Most of what I learn now days is by doing. I might read a book on a topic but never have an assignment or a test to follow up. I'm attempting to find out if others in my shoes have found a use for memorization like this. If so it might be something worth me trying.

Do you ever find yourself going back to something you used to know well, only to find that you're now a bit rusty? In theory, spaced repetition would allow you to keep that knowledge from getting stale.

I think you'll find you learn new things quicker with judicious use of spaced repetition. As a bonus, you'll never forget those things as long as you maintain the habit. And we're all always learning, so that shouldn't be hard.

I do think the hardest part of spaced repetition use outside of the classroom is choosing what to memorize. In school, those decisions are made for you. I find it easy to bite off too much and start memorizing minutiae of a technology instead of the essential items. But I think it's just another skill to master.

Actually in history less so. Unless you are learning for some kind of odd test where they will demand ton of exact dates, you are better off learning how events related to each other and how they followed.

Hardest parts of physics and chemistry in understanding. Again, you can use flash card memorization here and there, but the first of it is different.

I have no formal training in history, but Anki has got me much more interested in it. Before Anki, I tended to collapse centuries of history into ‘the distant past,’ which made it hard to appreciate how events related to each other, or distinguish between events separated by years and events separated by decades or centuries. I discovered, by using Anki for an exam, that it’s relatively easy for me to remember 4-digit numbers, and relatively difficult for me to remember sequences of events. So, memorising the years of events has been a great way for me to learn more history. Arbitrary dates with no understanding of the context are harder to remember, so the cards that come up the most are the topics to read more about (or delete, if they really are useless factoids). It’s a bit like using the number line as a memory palace.

I dont have formal training either. But I found that they collapse into blob when you don't understand them. Because then you are memorizing names of events without knowing what they actually were in any detail.

Once you listen to more detailed lecture or read more detailed book, they become clearly distinct due to many small differences and stories. So misplaced event suddenly "dont makes sense", because you can explain why it could not happen then.

Did you use it for any of these and what was your experience?

I used it to study for an ICC exam. I passed the test so it worked really well i'd say.

ICC?

Not to nit-pick, but physics? What would you use flash-cards for in physics? Memorizing equations? Why would you ever do that?