[deviation]

I use Anki to learn French, Chess openings/tactics/techniques, to unscramble letters for scrabble, for Pub Trivia... The options are kind of limitless.

As a mid-30s guy who has well passed the neuroplasticity of his teen years, it's a godsend for me.

To echo the author's thoughts though, I can't prove empirically that I learn more effectively using Anki (or spaced repetition) than other methods... Only anecdotally. I have a shockingly poor memory, but now I'm B2 certified in French and an ~1800 Elo on chess.com .

Do I still forget things all the time? Yes.

[cosmic_cheese]

Another mid-30s guy here, and while the the flash cards and SRS algorithm bring plenty of value, for me probably the most powerful thing that Anki enables is consistency. It's easy and low friction to have a chunk of each day carved out for whatever decks I'm happening to be working on at that point in time — regardless of the topic my routine is always the same, and eventually it feels wrong if I haven't reviewed. It effortlessly pulls itself along.

I find that very difficult to achieve with any other method of studying, with exception to content immersion in the case of language acquisition.

It also has me a bit spoiled, because now when I have no other option but to pore over typical painfully dry, unnecessarily fluffed up instructional materials I groan to myself. It's so much easier and more time-efficient to memorize a deck with the actually-important bits over a 2-3 week period.

[wisemanwillhear]

I'm glad the article acknowledges that flashcards are just one small part of learning. When I first got into spaced repetition, first with the Mnemosyne Project and later switching to Anki, I discovered that the efficiency I imagined was partially illusory.

* Memorizing things often takes much more time than learning things naturally as you use them because it takes extra time out of your day. * I often lacked the associations that would normally help reinforce a concept or fact because I used brute force a-single-super-simple-concept-at-a-time memorization instead of more natural methods where context helped me gain a better understanding. * Breaking things down into very narrow, simple, one concept cards is more difficult than I imagined. * Creating mnemonics is really helpful but can be time consuming, and you don't know which cards where you will need them until you repeatedly forget those cards. Someone on HackerNews about a year or two ago recommended using AI and that did help a little, but it didn't take long before I realized that the AI created mnemonics feel so similar and less connected than time tested mnemonics that I find them less effective. * Since brute force memory is slower I often learn slower, which is less efficient than learning a groups of related things together at a pace where the concepts together give you a better understanding than learning one at a time. (Sometimes you need to slow down because your not getting the concept, but going too slow is less efficient also.)

I still use spaced repetition but I realized it's not the amazing revolution that I first imagined that it would be.

[j45]

Memorizing becomes easier after understanding. My guess is understanding things, not just what they mean, but how they work, or interact with other concepts, speeds up repetition quicker because that is what's firing when renewing it.

[wisemanwillhear]

I think that's a good observation (your mileage may vary), but the time that flashcards are the must needful is when your first learning. Yet my first Chemistry university professors pointed out that, although most people imagined it was easiest to get started in a new field and harder to learn when you made it to me advanced classes, in fact, it's hardest to get started when the concepts are new and foreign and easier later when your just adding a deep understanding to what you have already fought to learn.

[shevy-java]

> it's hardest to get started when the concepts are new and foreign and easier later when your just adding a deep understanding to what you have already fought to learn.

This is quite true; I feel this is the case with maths. Simple math, logic math is all fine, but higher maths and theorems I find very, very difficult to understand. Here this is one of the few areas where my memorizing techniques did not work well. Sure I can remember many things, but applying that knowledge is very different to just memorizing stuff.

[j45]

You have a good point, the flashcard contents can make a big difference too.

Whether they're just for learning first principles first, and then a different set that are higher order connections between them.

[helterskelter]

Practicing your retrieval is actually one of the best ways to retain knowledge of something. Flashcard programs like Anki are really great because it identifies where you need more work and drills you on your weak points -- it feels awkward working constantly on your weak points, but you get quantifiably better results with the flashcard method it uses.

Some people criticize flashcards as optimizing for rote memorization and deemphasizing understanding, but you'll never achieve understanding or mastery in general without a solid platform of knowledge to work from.

[cwnyth]

My problem with Anki is that it's very, very inefficient. It will take much more time and effort to memorize the vocabulary words you learn, and losing those words is very quick. It's much better to use SRS with actual and varied sentences.

[pferde]

I have the exact opposite experience with Anki. I use it to memorize vocabulary of a language I'm learning, a language completely different to other languages I know, and my retention before and after I started using Anki is night and day. Frankly, I was floored once I realized how much faster I was learning, and how easily I can recall even words I last practiced or used months ago.

I make and maintain my own cards/notes, which I think is part of why it works so well - it's tailored to my learning, not to someone else's.

[cwnyth]

Well, I should have qualified my statement: Anki is inefficient compared to better methods, but more efficient than haphazardly trying to memorize things. Yes, it's better than nothing, but there are better SRS implementations, including most readers.

I saw a lot of this from personal experience. I had to learn not only Latin and Greek, but also French and German just for my doctorate, and I learned Russian, Thai, and Swedish separately. And then I taught Latin and Greek for years, inquiring often how my students were learning. Anki (vel sim.) is fine, but there are better ways (and none of those ways start with the letter D and end with the letters lingo).

[pferde]

I guess my (badly conveyed) point was that Anki is already so efficient for me that I don't feel the need anything more.

Well, not for vocabulary, anyway. There is more to learning a language than vocabulary. :)

[cwnyth]

Hey, fair enough. To each their own. If Anki is fine for you, great! Do what works.

[socalgal2]

> including most readers.

Can you be more specific? Do you have any recommendations?

[StefanBatory]

> but there are better ways

What are those?

[SubmarineClub]

You know you can just…create Anki cards with sentences, right?

Anki doesn’t force you to make cards with vocab words in isolation.

[potro]

It doesn't but it also will not create a different sentence to you to practice a word. I tried this (use sentences instead of words), it sucks: you spend more time per card, but you learn less efficient, as you learn not just a word but all the hints coming from the same sentence.

I wrote my own program 2 years ago, that generates new sentence on each review using AI (at that time I used Anki as scheduler). That was fun and quite effective as far as I can tell. I would recommend others learning language past A1, maybe A2 level to do the same. This day you don't need Anki for this, just use one of FSRS libraries for scheduling.

[pessimizer]

> It doesn't but it also will not create a different sentence to you to practice a word.

Anki doesn't create either words or sentences. Drilling words doesn't work. You've drilled words and found it doesn't work. Try using clozes. It is not "less efficient" than drilling words, because drilling words does not work.

No word in French means anything in English. The meanings of words are just surveys of the contexts in which they are used, and French words are used in French contexts. Learning that a French word means an English word is just bad information that is cluttering up your brain.

If you're learning Spanish, French, German or Italian, try these.

https://sookocheff.com/post/language/cloze-deletions/

20,000 clozes, words are repeated all the time, treat them as disposable. Read the sentences out loud and say the answers out loud to keep yourself honest.

edit: you don't need AI to generate sentences. There are already sentences available in every language.

https://sookocheff.com/post/language/bulk-generating-cloze-d...

[BalinKing]

I ran into that issue too w/ sentence-based flashcards, where I almost immediately memorize the sentence itself and the whole thing becomes self-defeating. Similarly, I thought to use LLMs to generate fresh sentences on-the-fly, but the output was never reliable enough for my use-case... e.g. I came across some grammatical construction that the LLMs refused to use correctly. But, this probably depends on the language in question, since it sounds like you had success with it! Maybe I should try again at some point, now that the consumer models are a lot beefier than they were even six months ago.

[potro]

I used it for practice Spanish. LLMs have no issues with generating decent sentences in it. Also as I practiced vocabulary building, I didn't need specific grammar constructs or even to be very sensitive to the occasional mistakes in this area (which I don't remember to notice).

It took me quite a bit of iterations to get AI to generate output I found good enough and with acceptable errors rate for my practice but that was the part of fun.

If anybody wants to try the same route, the biggest mistake not to repeat is to trust LLMs to generate words definitions by them itself. It does it quite well, but still gives wrong definitions from time to time (~1% in my case for the OpenAI models 2 years ago). This wasn't acceptable to me and took a lot of effort to review and correct cards I already had. Feed vocabulary article with word definition to LLM instead if you want it to generate word definitions suitable to your level instead.

[zmmmmm]

I'll throw a shout out to the new Google Translate practice feature - it generates sentences around a theme you specify and speaks them to you at varying speeds in your native and learning languages.

[eisleggje]

Personally, I feel this isn't really an issue, as someone who has learnt multiple languages to proficiency (some with anki involved, some without). I mean I'm at a level where I speak mostly fine, read historical literature, novels, academic/political works, and engage with significantly divergent dialects without any trouble (I'm interested in such things, so.)

You find a word you don't know, you add a sentence. Find a different use in the wild or in the dictionary, add a sentence. Want to harvest many examples at once? If your dictionary lacks example sentences, you should really find a better one (of course, dictionaries with historically oriented/early-attestation examples are not neceessarily bad - many of the best dictionaries are such - but they're not great for mining examples of usage). (Granted, some languages simply don't have dictionaries that meet this criteria, in that case you must work with what you have.) Corpora of speech or literature can also be used if they exist. Most of this process can be automated to 1-2 keypresses.

Yes you get hints from the sentences, but you do too when reading/listening. Seeing a single word in the wild is also likely to lead to some free association shenanigans - ask any native speaker of whatever to define a polysemous word. Multiple sentences can just be added for one word, as needed, though the 'bulk' of sentences for 'review' is going to come from exposure in the wild.

In my own experience, word cards are less efficient because they accrue many more reviews - even for languages closely related to my L1 - having higher average difficulty and a higher fail rate. I would hazard a guess that I could review ~20 sentnece cards across my lifespan in the time it takes to learn ~1 non-trivial vocabulary card (ie. not words with zero polysemy, technical terms, things that don't occur in idiosyncratic phrasal constructions with specific converbs/clitics/prepositions/case usage abnormalities or syntactic abnormalities). And you get reinforcement of ~15 other words for free (depending on how long the average sentence is in your TL). I never worry if I end up adding a couple of sentences 'for' a single word.

It's basically targeted re-reading/listening, those being things that one does anyway and which accounts for the bulk of learning vocabulary.

AI is a non-starter for me (personally) in this for two regards: 1) they're awful at most of the languages I've studied at a trivial level. 2) those that they're 'good at' (in terms of grammaticality) they're often just horrible stylistically. I would like to be able to speak/write in a way that is pleasing in nuance/idiom, not just comprehensible.

But if these don't really apply to you or don't match your experience with your TL (they're better with some languages than others), more power to you!

[cwnyth]

That's why I used the word varied. But at the end of the day, you're still memorizing sentences, rather than how the word actually functions. It's inelastic.

[wordpad]

I think deliberate practice is what's really core to improving any skill, including memory.

Spaced repetition is an effective way to review things but its biggest benefit is a process that's easy to be consistent with.

Somebody else can have equal or better performance with other technique but just like dieting, it doesnt matter as much what method you use as long as you stick with it.

[lacedeconstruct]

I feel like the actual core mechanic at improving is the actual act of "recall", it doesnt matter what you do if its a form of recall it is effective and very awkward in practice because you just sit there waiting for your brain to do a mysterious thing

[sn9]

"Active recall" specifically (aka the testing effect [0]), as opposed to passive recall like rereading.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_effect

[all2]

When I was doing rote memorization and flashcards frequently (some years ago now) I observed that remembering things became a lot easier for me.

I also find my verbal fluency is directly affected by how much pure social time I have in my schedule. It makes me think its one of those 'use it or lose it' things and that I need to schedule more time with people.

[stets]

Really curious exactly how you learn things like chess with flash cards. French makes sense as I would guess you just have a word or phrase in both languages.

What do you do for topics like chess?

[deviation]

Sure, I can explain - it's a little complicated, but I maintain a small-ish catalogue of ~1000 positions for the following topics:

- Checkmates-in-one - Checkmates-in-two - Defensive technique (avoid checkmate/material loss) - Winning material - Endgame patterns - etc (~5 more)

... That I got by scraping the Lichess database, favoring common patterns that appear within +- 600 of my current Elo.

From there, I have Claude build me a script to convert each of those positions into a .png, then create me a deck with all the cards, et voilà. The front of the card is the position, the back is the best move in that position with a small explanation.

Every ~2-3 months when I see that most of the cards have matured (according the the Anki spaced repetition scheduler, I build a new deck around my new Elo.

I also play a lot. Prior to ~1000 rating I got away with spending 90% of my time in Anki and 10% playing online games, but lately it's been pretty 50/50. In higher ratings, playing real games tends to translate into wins more effectively for me.

For studying openings, it's almost the same thing, but the back of each card is the book move for my opening + the name of the opening the opponent chose.

[dschwede]

This sounds really helpful. Would it be possible for you to share a few pngs to illustrate how you did this? I'm very curious how you managed depth in openings on this.

[IndySun]

>now I'm B2 certified in French

Did you get there using only Anki? If yes, I need to persevere.

[blovescoffee]

I used a lot of Anki for spanish on top of classes. I'd say (anecdotally) it can bump you up a half to full letter in the A-C system depending on where you start. I learned far more living in Mexico though. You really need to talk to real humans to learn another language. If you don't, you can have a decent rating in A-C system but not actually converse that well.

[IndySun]

Thank you for that. Living amongst a language is truly an accelerator for learning one.