[keiferski]

I know it's not exactly what you asked for, but in my experience, spaced repetition is borderline science fiction -- if implemented properly. It's not as instantaneous or cool as The Matrix, but it does feel like magic when you can remember obscure words or concepts years after entering them into a SRS program.

[mdp2021]

It's called "studying", which implies a form of "spaced repetition", but makes notions meaningful and "alive" by making them integrated in your "body of knowledge". To do differently - to just keep notions in a mental closet -, would be like memorizing a book: you have not read it. "Reading" - digesting information - and "memorizing" are not the same.

To "study" you will have to use some sort of (often natural, implicit, unplanned) spaced repetition. But you will also process the information with an eye to make it productive (as opposed to "just stored").

[legerdemain]

With the exception of word lists for foreign language study (and to be honest, vocabulary is rarely my most important issue with foreign languages), I haven't found anything that benefits from studying flashcards.

I know that flashcards were a big thing among students when I was in grade school and college (decades ago). I'm sure they helped students memorize pieces of information, but I'm not sure they helped students understand them.

[zozbot234]

Thing is, current flashcard software (including Anki) does not support complex "study and understand" workflows very well, but a lot could be done to improve it. Even something as trivial as supporting explicit dependencies among cards, i.e. "don't bother to show card X unless you have managed to push out repetitions of cards Y and Z beyond $time_interval" would help a lot.

This would also enable flashcard/SRS workflows to interoperate seamlessly with other memorization techniques, like memory palaces or mind maps. Foreign language vocabulary is the rare example of a domain that doesn't need these things, so flashcards are perceived as "good enough" for it.

[legerdemain]

OK, thanks for confirming that it's not just me and that Anki and friends are a study tool with very limited usefulness.

[gverrilla]

mostly in schools there's no understanding whatsoever: to the contrary, students have to REMEMBER what the teacher provided as a valid understanding.

[mdp2021]

Fortunately, no, not necessarily: not in the schools I have been to. In the schools of my youth, you had to understand the taught, not just remember it. Students were evaluated for how well they had processed the information, for their mastery in its "handling".

[sdfgsdf]

I'm interested in this, but I'm doing something wrong.

On the one hand, I've downloaded AnkiDroid and played with it a bit. But I have the impression that just "seeing" the card isn't helping me. I need to be forced to write down the answer.

On the other hand, I've struggled to understand what "kind" of things should go in to a card. For example, verbs: I'm learning a language that has a complex verb conjugation structure. What I really need is to study the conjugation table. But instead the usual cards I download just ask the infinive form, and then display the conjugation table in the back - I'm not going to sit down and study the conjugation table when I'm swiping cards. When I sit down and study I do without cards, so I don't see the benefit...?

I feel I'm missing the trick.

[keiferski]

1. Definitely use Cloze cards. These allow you to highlight a section of text which you have to type in order to pass the card. They are much more effective than regular flash cards, especially for foreign languages (or anything that requires accurate spelling or precision typing, e.g. code syntax.)

See the Cloze Deletion section: https://docs.ankiweb.net/editing.html

2. Try to make the cards into real-world examples. For instance, don't add the conjugation table, create example sentences for each of the conjugations and make each one a card. For foreign languages, I try to add audio to my flashcards, too.

3. Always make your own cards. Downloading premade decks never works and you miss part of the learning process.

4. For things that don't necessarily lend themselves to being on a flashcard, don't just write the information. Try to frame it in terms of a question and/or in a form that mimics the context in which you'd use the information.

For example, let's say you want to memorize the periodic table. Don't just write:

Carbon - Atomic Number: 6, Chemical Symbol: C, etc.

Instead, create cards with questions like:

What is the sixth element on the periodic table?, Is carbon before or after nitrogen?, What element has the chemical symbol C? and so on.

The more "viewpoints" you have of the topic, the better. I've found this to be a solid approach for virtually any topic.

[david-gpu]

> Downloading premade decks never works

In my experience it works just fine. For example, using a geography deck to learn the location, flag, capital city, etc. of every country in the world. It also worked well when I taught my kids the multiplication table, the NATO phonetic alphabet, and so on.

[sdfgsdf]

I followed your link. It reads

> To create a cloze deletion note, select the Cloze note type, and type some text into the "Text" field. Then drag the mouse over the text you want to hide to select it, and click the [… ]

Select the Cloze note type, where exactly? I've searched both AnkiDroid and AnkiWeb (I was thinking that maybe I could creat cards from my computer and use them on my phone) and I can't find any button to make a note a "Cloze note".

[keiferski]

Sorry I have actually never used AnkiDroid. I think it's just a mobile app for Anki on Android? If it's like the iOS one, you can create Cloze cards from it.

Here is a video that walks you through it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d__MjidDz8c

When you create a card, it should say Card Type or Type at the top. By default, this is on Basic. Click it and you can switch to Cloze. Then highlight the text and click the [...] icon in the toolbar.

[ninkendo]

What SRS software do you recommend?

[mattm]

I've tried both Supermemo and Anki. Supermemo's algorithm is much better - I found I spent less time reviewing compared to Anki. Unfortunately, it's Windows only so I use Anki for the convenience.

[keiferski]

I’ve heard good things about Super Memo but it’s Anki for me. It’s simple, reliable, and gets the job done.

[i5heu]

Anki

OpenSource and Libre!

[james-redwood]

Mochi.cards

[hidden-spyder]

Is it really that good?

[rolisz]

Yes. I have concepts in Anki that I will be promoted to repeat again in 4 years and I've had to repeat 4-5 times in the past two years.

[jstx1]

Why though? In what circumstances apart from preparing for exams does it makes sense to do this?

[kthejoker2]

Without ascribing concrete value to it, I've done this my whole career and I am generally viewed as a "know-it-all" .. "Ask kthejoker, if anyone knows, he will."

Especially with regards to solution architecture, you're often combining or comparing a huge (think factorial!) mix of tools, code, data, etc. Each with their own configurations, settings, gotchas, patterns, constraints, capabilities, hacks ...

Being able to quickly recall and locate URLs, code repos, docs, points of contact in a company or the wider community ... for me, it is the ultimate career moat.

This article on A Cloud Guru kind of encapsulates the sentiment well

https://acloudguru.com/blog/engineering/the-career-changing-...

Anyway, convenient texhnology for spaced repetition plus a second brain is amazing compared to earlier centuries.

In the future this will probably be a core part of OP's question .. adding things to the brain, automatically deriving connections, surfacing things into your "local" memory at the perfect time ...

[rolisz]

I memorize a wide variety of things:

* programming things that I use rarely enough that I don't memorize them simply from usage, but often enough that there is a time saving from having to DDG what's the exact way to do something.

* a couple personal information items like my credit card number (I don't like having it saved anywhere), my wife's phone number, my businesses registration number, etc

* moves for solving Rubik cube

* Bible verses

[craigr1972]

This!