[kd5bjo]

The only thing I’ve found to help here is to make sure the act of reviewing the cards is inherently fun— then you’re less likely to get behind.

My strategy for this was to dump the entire text of some good literature into Anki decks that give me one new paragraph per day. The steady drip of unseen material removes the stigma of pressing the “again” button and gives me a small reward of story progression from each session.

In a separate deck, I use cloze deletion on sheet music to help learn songs. That deck only gets reviewed by actively playing music, which is an inherently enjoyable activity on its own.

[jac241]

I created an add-on (Anki Killstreaks - https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/579111794) that uses the killstreak feature from Halo and COD to make the reviews more fun. Has a corresponding leaderboard (https://AnkiAchievements.com) that shows your rank while reviewing in Anki to help you stay motivated. Both are FOSS.

[edylemond]

I've been doing something similar for reading, mainly articles but also want to try this with books. I'll split them in paragraphs and then turn every paragraph into a note. The ones I want to remember become flashcards. I've actually developed https://traverse.link/ to streamline this process

[johnny_b]

Interesting! So that's a separate deck with paragraphs as cards? And that's gets "mixed in" into whatever else that you are learning?

[kd5bjo]

Right; each book is a subdeck of my main one with a new card limit of 1/day and a lengthened repetition schedule.

Because paragraphs are so variable, my Project Gutenberg import script makes 25-line cards with a 5-line overlap between adjacent cards (for context). It also blanks out a random word on the 15th line as a cloze deletion test, to ensure I have some understanding of what’s going on.

[tra3]

Are you saying you’re reading through anki? If so, what?

Brilliant strategy.

[kd5bjo]

Yes. At the moment, I’m working through Frankenstein, Alice in Wonderland, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, and the Rust book.

This is still a fairly new strategy for me, so I don’t yet know how many parallel threads I can keep straight at the same time— So far, it doesn’t feel like I’m anywhere near the limit.

[simbyotic]

You should definitely write something about this, seems very interesting.

[tra3]

Agreed. In particular, how do you order these? And how does it fit within spaced repetition paradigm?.. I've been struggling with reading classics. I wonder if it would help.

[kd5bjo]

This is still in the experimental phase, and I want to wait on a full writeup until it’s had sufficient time to prove itself and get the kinks worked out. I’m happy to ramble on about it here for a bit, though.

This idea was actually born to combat review starvation: I haven’t been very active at adding new cards lately, and there was a risk that my daily review count would hit 0 for long enough that I’d stop checking regularly— I needed a source for lots of interesting but low-priority cards to keep the pump primed.

The original paper on cloze deletion [1] uses them as a readability measure: Readers are given an unfamiliar text with blanks and are asked to guess the omitted words; the percentage correct is then a measure of the text’s quality rather than the reader’s knowledge.

Instead of a knowledge quiz, which is how clozes are usually treated in the SRS world, this is an automated reading comprehension test— Just the thing for capturing the intangible benefits of reading literature. In theory, as you become more familiar with the book’s style and subject matter, you should be able to pass the first review of an unseen passage most of the time.

I settled on 25 lines of text per card with one omitted word about 2/3 through the passage. Successive cards contain some duplicated lines (5) to provide a sense of continuity between the cards, which are presented in a disjoint manner.

I import each book into its own deck set to show 1 new card per day (in the order added)- I want whatever mental connections are necessary to understand the next passage to end up in long-term rather than short-term memory. The reviews give me an opportunity to spot details that seemed unimportant on a first reading but that foreshadow something that happens later.

Beyond that, it’s driven by Anki’s normal scheduling algorithm; these are subdecks of my general-review deck, so Anki will autumatically mix the new cards and reviews with any other reviews I have due.

Most of the books I’ve imported are 300-400 cards, so it’ll take about a year to work through each of them. I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up doubling the number of books I’m reading at once, which would bring the average to around 1/month.

[1] https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/writing/1953-taylor.pd...

[tra3]

Interesting. Do you have an automated way of breaking books down, or are you doing it manually?

[flumpcakes]

This is called 'incremental reading' and techniques around this have been developed by research/development from the person who wrote supermemo (the closed source anki predecessor).

[tra3]

Thanks for the keywords — looks like some tooling already exists for this (https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/935264945), though it’s mostly focused on articles. Gotta do some more research on this.

[kd5bjo]

It’s closely related, but I suspect that Dr. Wozniak would consider my implementation to not be “true” incremental reading: There’s no attempt to progressively distill passages down into more traditional flashcards, and a fixed rate of new material; There are almost certainly other differences as well.