I have mixed feelings about shared decks. I’ve tried many, yet always find something about them that irritates me - aesthetics, content accuracy, etc. Or more likely that just doesn’t fit contextually with what I’m learning.
However, the low startup energy with shared decks is certainly a selling point. I can’t even begin to estimate how much time I’ve spent over the years creating 50K+ cards…
> highly personalised system that doesn't need to work for anyone else.
My experience exactly.
There is a third-party paid exchange here:
(I’ve had a few exchanges with the founder, and wish him luck.)
> I can never keep the workload under control, or my habits change, and give it up.
> to build up a highly personalised system that doesn't need to work for anyone else.
"Anyone else" includes "future you", because humans change over time. A highly personalized system is usually a highly inflexible system.
The problem seems not dependent on the specifics of my efforts for me - it seems inherent to Anki for language-learning. That the flash cards have lots of bells and whistles seems unrelated to my giving up because 90 minutes a day wasn't enough to keep things under control.
I haven't had any time that my circumstances have change so much that my accessorising ended up a negative. (And I'm having trouble thinking of situations where that would be the case).
But sure, in general I can think of cases where it's probably more advisable to go with a general purpose solution (stairs rather than a climbing wall for going upstairs) in case personal circumstances change, temporarily or permanently.
Bells and whistles, especially when it comes to making things perfectly tidy, tend to introduce a lot of rules for using and maintaining a system. For example, a color-coding system with too many colors to reasonably recall without daily practice from using the system: any interruption, such as a vacation or even a weekend, will disrupt in some way the ability to use and maintain the color-coding system.
Informal rules also accumulate over time, adding to the complexity of any given action. It doesn't take a major change to topple your flashcard system, but slow, accumulated changes have been enough to do so.
If you do less one day, Anki gives you those cards the next day on top of the normal workload of that day. There is no way out.
Worst, the less you retain, the more mistakes you make, the more your workload goes up. Anki algorithm never do the "lower workload because this person does not retain" decision. Instead, it will just give you more and more work in such case.
If you're finding that you reliably do not recall some card Anki will eventually mark it as a leech. Those cards get suspended automatically after some number of lapses. That will reduce your workload because suspended cards are't part of your workload.
> If you keep failing that card, Anki will continue to alert you about the leech periodically. These warnings occur at half the initial leech threshold. For example, if you set the warning at 8 lapses, future warnings will happen every 4 lapses (at 12, 16, and so on).
Suspend means you never see the card again. So how could you keep failing it after it's been suspended for being a leech?
If it becomes leech, it will be ignored entirely by anki.
All of that is too much expertise about how to mark cards instead of allowing you to do it intuitively.
The only bit missing is some algorithm deciding how often to introduce new cards based on your historical data.
I recently started to use Supermemo because of some comments on HN, and so far it have been going quite well. I feel less overwhelmed when I have to take a break, I think the algorithm (or maybe it is just good defaults?) is much less punishing. I am still new to it, and I have a baggage of knowledge from my past experiences using SRS, so it is unfair to compare it to Anki at the moment. But it renew my passion for memorizing, so far it has been worth the investment.
Some things I do to manage this:
You can put an upper bound on the number of cards reviewed per day. For me it's 50. After that it says I'm done for the day and I wait till the next day.
If missing only 2-3 days leads to such a huge backlog, you really need to take a break in adding new cards. My aim is to spend no more than 5-10 minutes per day reviewing cards. If it seems I always have too many cards to review, I don't add any new cards until I get only a few cards to review per day (when really busy, I don't add a new card until I have a day with 0 cards).
You can only learn so much per day. You need to limit card additions to ensure you don't exceed that amount.
The other thing I noticed is that I had two types of cards: One where the answer can be instantaneous (e.g. facts). And ones where some thinking is involved (proof sketch of a theorem, details of some algorithm, etc). The latter would kill the experience because of the time involved. So I separated the decks: Simple cards (the majority) go in one deck and this is reviewed daily. Hard cards have their own deck(s) and I'm not as committed to them - I work on them only when I know I have time and am committed to it.
I think SRS needs to be only a small part of the learning routine, the cherry on the cake. For me that is ~15 minutes / day, and backlog is manageable even if I occasionally take 2-3 days off.
People focus way too much on the backlog - don't even look at it, just set your max cards per day to something you can actually DO and let Anki schedule them out as best it can.
It is, after all, just a scheduler.
I just pulled up my stats.I have been studiyng for almost a year and have averaged less than 2 minutes of study a day (with the average review lasting less than 2 seconds). In total it's more or less 10 hours.
It has been insanely effective. I read somewhere on HN that making extremely easy cards helps. It for sure helped me to keep the habit.
Retention is high so that helps keep progress between periods of deck usage at least.
Well... yeah? I guess if you're a full time student or something it's fine but IMO if your review times exceed 5 minutes it's time to stop adding cards for a while.
It'll create a backlog of cards to review, but that's surmountable. The number can become intimidating (I think my worst was around 2k cards), but there are a few ways to clear it. You can "just" get back into the daily habit, it'll take (by the default numbers, if one deck) # cards/100 days to clear out, more or less (some cards may come up for review again in that period so the actual number might be a bit higher). You can also up the daily review limit to clear it faster (I did this when I hit 2k, 200/day was about my personal time limit to spend on it so it took just over 10 days to clear).
In a simplified system suppose that we just double easy card review times, and reset hard cards back to 1. You have a card up for review today, you last saw it N days ago. Two scenarios:
1. You don't delay. You review the card now. It's either hard and reset to 1 (see it again tomorrow) or easy and you see it again in 2N days.
2. You delay. You review it M days from now. When you finally do it's either hard and reset to 1 (see it again the next day) or easy and you see it again in 2(N + M) days.
That's it. The algorithm has you covered if you delay. It doesn't do something silly like say "This card was supposed to be reviewed after 2 days, but you waited a month. You remembered it, but we're going to show it to you again in 4 days." The algorithms will take the delay into account (maybe not one-for-one) like I illustrated above.
Recently a friend got me into Duolingo with him, I've been managing to maintain a streak on it because if I'm too busy I can atleast just do a quick "lesson" before midnight, but I don't really find it to be very effective for learning unless you're coming from literally zero starting knowledge.
I already know the basic vocabulary (especially phonetically) and sentence structure, so it's too slow. I usually just do the first handful of lessons and have figured out the kanji enough to just jump ahead to the test to unlock the next unit.
Language learning and art practice both tend to quickly get put on the backburner for weeks whenever I get busy with a project or whenever work gets busy.
Shameless plug - I'm building https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive which is basically GitHub/Reddit for flashcards. Very much pre-product and a WIP, though the offline client proof of concept is done.
This is a problem, but perhaps not the one you think. The goal here is the habit; how much you get through is way secondary. As a multi-year user of Anki, I'd recommend working on the daily habit as an addition to whatever German, etc. you're already doing.
Anki has easy ways to limit your use; set your max-card-per-day to something silly like 5. You can do 5 cards a day, yeah? That'd take less than a minute, typically.
Once you're ok with that, up it a bit. Don't make this the SOLE vector of practice, use it as an adjunct to your normal routine of learning.
A habit done suboptimally is >>>> missing doing it, but perfectly. Frequency is generally better than quality. Once you get the former, ratchet up the latter.
I still benefit from a year of training, but it seems the long-tail of spaced repetition doesn't work for me at all. But so long as I get to the point where I can read or watch TV, the considerable effort I've invested in making cards (not to mention reviewing them) was worthwhile.
It's also fun to have an extended/time-intensive personal task where it can be worth it to build up a highly personalised system that doesn't need to work for anyone else. It allows for a selfishness that's the polar opposite of accessibility design, but can end up resulting in quite novel/pleasing design decisions. (There've been some other posts about making software just for yourself on hacker news before).
They have a lot of shared decks hosted online, but I guess for hosting costs or copyright reasons delete any decks that aren't regularly downloaded, which results in many niche decks getting deleted. I've uploaded several German-language decks that get deleted because of course they don't get the same traffic as English ones. Bit of a pity - I wonder what the ecosystem would look like if things were otherwise.