[rinvi]

I'm doing the same kind of thing for my college classes no matter the subject. But mine is a little different. Instead I do:

1. Feed lecture slides, labs, homework into ChatGPT and have it generate flashcards.

2. Write these flashcards into Anki and study them using Anki.

3. Run through some practice problems

I had originally intended for this system to be used long-term, but I get irresponsible and study the day of the exam. It really depends on the material, but for the most part, it takes around 5–7 hours of studying and preparation to feel completely confident about the exam. Often times, I wake up super early on the exam day to give me some time. This is not ideal of course and is just a product of my bad habits.

It's definitely doable to ace exams with only 2–3 of studying, but usually I need to pad it with another 2–3 hours of preparation like creating high quality flash cards and stuff. I believe most people can adopt this system and perform very well, but at the same time it's a very radical departure from traditional study practices and even then I'm not even using this system in the way it's actually intended (not the day of cramming-style method).

This system is not something I made up, but rather backed from a collective community effort that has produced amazing techniques, guides, research, etc.:

https://isaak.net/mandarinmethods/ - in depth guide detailing best practices with Anki regarding language learning (THE BEST)

https://cademcniven.com/posts/20211119/ - recommended number of cards per day to study based on some grassroots research

https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki - the most modern spaced repetition algorithm which uses machine learning to optimize for each individual's learning capabilities (THE BEST)

https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/18jvyun/some_posts_an... - meta resource on fsrs

https://www.justinmath.com/individualized-spaced-repetition-... - a reading which i've incorporated into the way i create flash cards pertaining to more problem-solving type of learning as opposed to pure memorization like facts about history

https://thehardway.guide/ - a damn good book teaching about actionable and pragmatic advice about language learning that i've applied to all of my college courses

[mnky9800n]

I never really understood the point of anki outside of vocabulary learning. I would be happy to have it explained to me. Even when learning a language, I found anki to be a bit useless since often times the grammar was as important to learn (e.g., any language with genders and cases). Like I guess I don't see how anki would help me be the scientist I am today, how it might help me learn new topics that I am interested in to pursue new research directions. I am not against anki, I simply don't see how it would benefit me although if you could explain it to me I am all ears.

[dackle]

You might find this article by Michael Nielsen interesting: https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

In particular I liked the section partway* through the article where he talks about using Anki to get up to speed on the AlphaGo paper for an article he was writing for Quanta.

* Do a Ctrl-F for "AlphaGo"

He also writes here about how to use spaced repetition to see through a piece of mathematics: https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics

[opan]

It's great for learning the Ham radio test answers (publicly available), Major System, and NATO Phonetic Alphabet. I did not particularly enjoy Anki when I first tried it for Japanese-learning. I also found using it on my phone (AnkiDroid from F-Droid) worked better since I could grind it out anywhere I was. I never used their sync thing, IIRC it's proprietary. I also had success once using it to study for a technical interview (tech support, not programming, mostly shell commands and important paths).

I stopped using it a couple phones ago when the app seemed to break after trying to copy over my data. I've had several incidences since where I regretted not knowing the Major System well anymore, as I ran into a long number it'd be useful to memorize for a bit. I mostly used public decks I downloaded, though I did make my own for the interview study.

[mnky9800n]

I use a spaced repetition system for learning Russian vocabulary. But tbh I find speaking in Russian and interacting in Russian to be better at learning words because they get associated with memories.