I've started doing anki for geography for myself and with my 9yo daughter.

We've been doing it for a few weeks and she now knows ~100% of all countries and their flags. Just absolutely domination level learning.

I think it's a matter of finding things that fit Anki, and not trying to fit Anki to the thing you want to learn. Geography is a perfect application: we all would be a bit more informed by knowing all countries, seas, etc; and it's something that Anki is very well suited for.

I've also added:

- the numerical value for letters (A=1, B=2, C=3, etc) which I think will give me greater powers of lexical sorting. We'll see.

- NATO phonetic alphabet

- multiplication up to 12x12. I neglected/avoided automating that stuff as a kid and my confidence in doing mental arithmetic is still low. Not sure this is a good case for Anki yet...we'll see.

- A custom deck with the faces and names of everyone at my work. This feels like a slam dunk. I am terrible with names, so I think this can up my game a lot.

In my experience it's hard to find things that feel marginally useful/fun to learn and that works with Anki. But when it does, it's amazing.

> the numerical value for letters (A=1, B=2, C=3, etc) which I think will give me greater powers of lexical sorting. We'll see.

Another way of doing it could be generating a deck with questions like:

"Q or P. Which comes first?"

I suppose that which technique will be superior depends on whether you usually sort things relative to each other, or relative to their container. If you have a fixed container of files, you could think, "ah, 'T', that's 20 (out of 26), I should look down 3/4 of the length of the container". But if the container wasn't evenly divided - for instance, your 'I' for 'Insurance' was a much thicker file than your 'T' for 'Taxes' or whatever - you'd no longer be able to use those numbers directly. What do you think?

I think I'll go with the numbers. It's a smaller set of things to memorize and it's kinda like a fun game that I can quiz myself on when seeing license plates when driving (I find driving horribly boring). My dad used to factorize numbers on license plates when I was a kid :P

I can't stop myself from seeing whether the consecutive digits in phone numbers add up to 10 :)

Multiplication tables is useful enough to memorize. Where I got tripped up is factors that look very similar to each other but has different answer.

> We've been doing it for a few weeks and she now knows ~100% of all countries and their flags. Just absolutely domination level learning.

is this just for fun?

It’s for world domination, obviously. ;)

Yea. She is interested in flags and so I could sneak it in that way.

Maybe Anki is indeed useful for memorizing flags, faces, words in a new language, syntax of programming languages and names of chemical compounds... maybe.

The things I'm trying to learn like past economic decisions and investments and their impacts, logical fallacies, algorithms and data structures for my next coding round, database design patterns, areas where one system design pattern excels and sucks at with examples, all study areas where finding the core patterns and their applications is central to the learning process, to make any bit of real progress. Anki sucks so bad at this. m

my disgust at atomic spaced repetition, of which Anki is the cheerleader, comes from how gullible I was reading salesy pitches of "remember anything", "remember forever", "how i could memorize x in y days" kind of articles floating around suggesting it. It left a bad taste, like those As-seen-on-tv home exercise equipments and non stick pans with grifty promises.

Anki maybe useful, to some, but it falls apart for everyone as soon as you add any meaningful complexity beyond mapping 2 lists word to word.

So why do it? Why not learn things the wholesome way? With pen and paper ?

I think Anki zealots that pitch the software as the solution to everything can be both tiring and misleading. But I also think that memorization, using whatever system, is going to be a part of any kind of learning. As you mention, in some cases larger (medicine, foreign language vocab), in other cases smaller.

If we accept that all learning involves some memorization, I believe there's no harm in using the best tool for that specific job. I've seen a good amount of literature showing that SRS-like systems are indeed the best.

> My deeper beef with this method is the complete absence of emphasizing, discovering or forming connections between cohesive things. We're trying to learn, it's a super power to start seeing patterns in what we learn, it forms buckets that we can put new concepts and information in. Without it, the learning is ... shallow.

You can make connections that give you really deep intuition; it just takes practice making cards. I wrote about it here: https://jacobgw.com/blog/tft/2024/05/12/srs-intuit.html

> My deeper beef with this method is the complete absence of emphasizing, discovering or forming connections between cohesive things. We're trying to learn, it's a super power to start seeing patterns in what we learn, it forms buckets that we can put new concepts and information in. Without it, the learning is ... shallow.

I'm confused why you'd expect spaced repetition to serve this purpose. Did someone claim it would?

Yes, it is shallow. It's meant to be shallow. It's not meant to replace other tools to build connections. It's not meant to be a complete solution. You still need to apply the material to learn it.

Spaced repetition is for remembering/recall - not understanding. It's useful for people who have already done the work to understand (practice problems, etc), but would like to keep it in memory. If you are taking grad level analysis, and can't remember that a compact set is closed, because it's been 2 years since you took undergrad analysis, then SR will help you.

What I like about the Anki approach is that it’s very conducive to scheduling and timeboxing. It removes a lot of variability from the process of memorizing things, and for me variability/unpredictability is a point of significant friction and a strong determiner of if I can consistently work on learning something or not.

In some cases one can also use decks made by others, which can help avoid wasting time on dry, unnecessarily fluffed up instructional materials with low signal-to-noise ratios like is common in university courses.

I think learning with a network aligns with how our brain works better than learning linearly. In this sense, zettelkasten is a superior system than Anki, but I do come to realize that a network is harder to maintain as it's missing a clear starting point. Also I find it harder to recall, especially compared with linear stories. Another constant problem with any spaced repetition system is that you learn by repeating word by word, but essentially we memorize by adding more edges to the node of knowledge, just like how you know a person better if you add more tag to them: my son's friend/ our neighbor/ the boy who owns the white dog, etc. I'm pretty optimistic about this problem being solved by the next gen SRS: using AI to come up with different frames/description of the same knowledge.

Andy's collaborator Michael Nielsen has a nice blog post, "using space repetition system to see through a piece of maths"[0]. He makes a point that the idea is to commit more and more higher order concepts to memory. But he does emphasise that Anki is one way to achieve his and a more simpler pen-paper method that you wrote might work.

[0] : https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics

Okay, you're already operating at a higher level. You can mostly-memorize entire concept maps and redraw them from memory. You realize most people can't do that? Lots of other people are still operating at the flash card level.