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I wrote "Why Anki Doesn't Work for Me" (https://medium.com/@iandanforth/why-anki-doesnt-work-for-me-...) six years ago, which means it was before the new algorithm was implemented. While Anki likely still suffers from all the other issues I mentioned, this directly addresses my point (3). I'm going to have to give it another try and see if the other points are still too much friction, or if the frustration caused by the algorithm was a majority of my pain.

I'm sorry, I didn't read the article but I thought my experience would be a good anecdote.

I've used Anki for multiple years and learned around 18'000 Japanese words. It's difficult to say but I'd say I've learned how to read around 5'000 kanji. When I studied in Japan, my kanji reading—don't mix that up with comprehension!—was way above everyone else's. And most of my classmates were either Korean or Chinese.

That's what 10 minutes of free time—I did that during my daily train rides—can get you! Keep practicing. Being ignorant is the first step towards becoming more knowledgeable.

Pretty OT: A few month ago I tried to marry my simple note system with anki. My goal was to be able to send simple front/backside cards to an api and it would get integrated and I can use it immediately. Ofc, when I edit cards via my notes-backend, the cards in anki should update too.

Long story short: not possible with anki. It took like an entire day for me to realize its just not possible without diving deep into ankis sqlitedb and having the client installed on my server to interact in a horrible way with decks. I wrote my own space repetition [1] backend in a week and never looked back to anki. Ill intergrate FSRS in my software.

1: https://github.com/entropie/ha2itat/tree/main/plugins/entrom...

> Thankfully, the leading spaced repetition software, Anki, has incorporated FSRS as its default scheduling algorithm since version 23.10, released in 2023-11

I've used Anki for a long time and apply updates, but I don't closely track changes. Based on the above, I figured I'd be using FSRS, but I'm not. All of my decks have that setting turned off. Fair enough (no silent updates to existing data), but even when I create a new deck, I have to turn the FSRS setting on manually. I found the same even with a whole new profile. What aspect of this is "default"? Is there a global setting I'm missing?

I'm glad it's available, though, without any plugins!

That tutorial guy on YouTube, Derek Banas, swears by Anki. He's quite the voracious learner as well as being a pretty good contractor. I've used it myself (sparingly, when taking on new projects with new technology stacks), and never really committed to it because of the somewhat static and predictable nature of the learning session (as described in the article; the algorithm). However, from learning about the upgrade (well, 2023 upgrade), I will try it out again: high hopes.

RemNote (https://www.remnote.com/) solves the problems people are mentioning about

1) The time it takes to make cards. RemNote allows you to take Notion-style block notes and quickly turn bullet points into flashcards using symbols. For example, you might be in class and make a bullet point in the format

- The quick brown fox jumps over >> the lazy dog

which you can later review as a flashcard that is automatically separated front/back by the >>.

2) The old and unintuitive UI - again, basically just Notion with flashcards. You can easily view all your notes in a bullet hierarchy and then switch over to SR flashcard practice. Even has rich code blocks, image occlusion, tables etc. A much better implementation of Anki's notes/cards metaphor in my opinion.

I am not sponsored by RemNote, just a university student who has bounced off Anki and really likes the app.

I gave up on spaced repetition systems, even my paid memrise subscription, because I couldn't find good flashcard sets. To create good flashcards, you need some domain knowledge. An AI can pick facts from wikipedia and quiz you on them, but it takes a real human to identify what knowledge is relevant and worth learning.

Are there any algorithms/plugins that are optimized for an on-/off-review style (ie, potentially months-long gaps between sessions)? I know that the ideal would be to do reviews every day, but I'm doing this for pleasure and I'd rather tweak the algorithm to what works for me than the other way round.

The folks at SaySomethingIn, that originally started with Welsh and other Celtic languages, have recently expanded to Japanese. I haven’t tried it myself, but I’ve found some decent success with one of their other courses. It’s all about spaced repetition and focuses exclusively on listening and speaking.

https://www.saysomethingin.com/en/

Language vocab seems a good use case. What other things are people here using spaced repition for?

One could train a language model to predict task difficulty (and other parameters) here, which would be great for the initialisation of new cards

I would pay for an e-ink tablet dedicated to notes and spaced repetition. (I know there are e-ink note taking tablets, but none of them have spaced repetition.)

I'd like to be able to take freehand notes, and then be able to block out, or blur, certain sections and each blocked or blurred area becomes a spaced repetition entry.

Or, in more detail. I'd like to look at a page of notes and loop select a certain area. That selected area becomes a spaced repetition item. After the initial loop selection I can do another loop selection to blur one or more areas that would be blurred. Etc, etc.

I have been using Supermemo daily (except for when I miss a day or two, vacations with no desktop, etc) since about 2010. I have found the newer algos to be pretty good. I have not had any bugs or a messed up collection. Its one of the pieces of software that is keeping me on Windows. There is still no foss replacement for incremental reading/writing [1]. Also, Supermemo has two modes that lets you skip a few days without being overloaded [2][3]. So you don't go from 20-30 cards to 200 if you skip a day.

That being said, its just another tool in the toolkit for learning stuff. I don't think I'm that much smarter or better at anything just because I have used Supermemo often for awhile. Honestly, I just like making cards and throwing articles I want to read later into Supermemo for processing. Most of what I use Supermemo for is incremental reading, which I have never been able to find a good replacement for. I like being reminded of cool stuff I have read and ideas that I have had. I would recommend also learning and practicing various mnemonic techniques alongside spaced repetition.

Most of the other algos/apps I have tried have been okay, I have not tried FSRS because I don't really use Anki anymore. I used Anki when I was in college for about 2-3 years because I would do flashcards using the mobile app. I was still using Supermemo daily during the same time period though.

I also use Clozemaster for language vocab with Supermemo. I put the sentences and some explanations into Supermemo after I do them in Clozemaster. I do not really consider myself to be a language learner or learning a language. I pick up new vocab very slowly and do not do anything else to practice the languages I am learning vocab from. I have also been using Math Academy almost daily for about seven months which is nice, but definitely not a full replacement for learning math. Using Math Academy actually made me start working with math textbooks and online resources again.

[1] https://www.help.supermemo.org/wiki/Incremental_reading [2] https://www.help.supermemo.org/wiki/Postpone [3] https://www.help.supermemo.org/wiki/Mercy

For anyone looking to read more about spaced repetition, Gwern's Spaced Repetition for Efficient Learning is worth checking out.

https://gwern.net/spaced-repetition

Just added FSRS to my free mac flashcard app. If interested, check it out https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flashcard-max/id1430950704

Anki is a good piece of software. But I couldn't come up with a worse scheduling algorithm if I tried (old and new one). It's like "here's the thing you just added one second ago. Here it's again immediately after. Ok you got it, you'll see it once again in a month or so lol".

It makes it unusable and every time I tried I went back to my own self written program that just lets me set/adjust the intervals myself.

SM-2 is very easy to implement and is still an effective memorization tool.

A lot of the difference in that graph seems to come from 70% vs. 90% retention.

This is absolutely true and yet Anki and these algorithms have a long way to go.

For example, I still have not seen the perfect pairing between a notecard tool like Anki and LLMs. Most tools I've seen are focused around simplified notecard creaton. While I agree automatically creating cards from study material is great, the features I am most excited about feel more like a personal spaced repetition tutor.

- A system that rewords questions for me on certain reviews so I am not over fitting my memory to the wording of my note cards

- Automatically grading my responses. Perfect for scenarios like driving using voice recognition.

- Helping me draw connections to things I don't know based on the things know really well. The system should have a good sense for what anologies or topics to pull inspiration from based on my previous reviews.

- Automatically creating and splitting cards for me if I am forgetting parts or have inconsistent responses.

In the end I am looking for something "smarter", more personal, and with a focus on simplicity. Spaced repetition tools have gotten really good AND they have a long way to go.

Maybe a skill issue or maybe it's time we need a refresh?

Is anyone working on this? I started https://www.automem.us/ with the vision above and some traction but have unfortunately not been able to keep up with it as much as I'd like. If there is any interest in this let me know, I'd love to connect to collaborate or open source it.

I see a lot of discussion about SRS, and I think most can agree they have improved.

What I would like to see covered is a more vague area, but almost more important:

It’s the space in between reading/understanding something and the SRS. There are almost no standalone tools dedicated to creating flashcards easily from existing programs (web browser, PDF readers etc.) into popular SRS (Anki, Mochi etc.). They should work almost as OS additions to make everything feel native and frictionless; I don’t need another standalone tool that does X Y and Z, I just need some sort of pipe into an SRS that is Mac friendly and does the job whilst not being in the way.

If someone knows of such a tool, I would love to hear about it.

My personal peeve about Anki: I don’t like its data model. It seems to me that there ought to be collections of notes (which might be things one would download or generate with an LLM or make yourself or share with friends or students). On top of one or more collections of notes are the sets of cards to want to learn, and they can derive from the notes. This includes, roughly, templates plus some concept of which cards are enabled. On top of that is the spaced repetition history and model. There also ought to be a way to constrain what cards should be studied in a given session. (For example, if learning Chinese or Japanese, one might want to have a pencil and paper when practicing writing but not reading. When practicing without paper, one might want to skip the writing cards.)

Anki doesn’t seem to separate these layers at all. Everything is a monolithic database. Import is unpleasant. Export is unpleasant. Sharing is unpleasant. Doing anything other than practicing and editing in the UI is unpleasant. And, every time I try Anki, I get stuck when I can’t manipulate my own data outside Anki.

Is there any system out there that doesn’t have this issue?

I found it a little annoying that SRS is immediately explained to mean Spaced Repetition System, but then the F is added without explaining what it stands for. Most references of the article do neither. Except https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki/wiki/The... which says the F means Free. Seems a little too easy? I found nothing else. Chatgpt says it means Flexible, which actually makes more sense? Anybody else can chip in?

Pro Tip , if you're using LLMs to learn, create an MCP tool for them to insert Anki cards on topics you're discussing in a csv on google drive, then sync that with you anki decks on your phone.

This was a game changer for me and working with LLMS, while I still think they make you dumb, and we essentially use them to offload critical thinking (almost only find myself using them when tired lazy, and just cant), if you must use them use them as a study tool.

I used basically this algorithm in college with the following setup:

Make a word document that lists all the keys to memorize vertically. Save as PDF

Open the PDF in a viewer with annotation tools. Make a clickable note in the margin just next to each key. Write out the value to memorize in the note field.

Cycle through the clickable notes. When you get one right easily, drag the note more to the left in the margin. As you cycle, focus on the ones furthest to the right. If you get one wrong, move it a bit further to the right.

In general the notes will move to the left until you're comfortable with all of them. And the balancing of which ones you need to see and focus on plays out very naturally and you feel in control the whole time.

There are many downsides with this compared to a tool like anki (e.g. I only used it on a laptop), but there was also something about it that just worked really well for me, so I never ended up switching to a different tool. But this was before anki had the similar algorithm described here. Maybe my experience would be different today

Super nice, thank you for this post! Based on this I've updated the vocabulary learning scheduling in DuoBook (https://duobook.co) to FSRS based. We should be up to date with the science based learning :)

Spaced repetition has been all the rage for 20 years now.

Dozens of apps, thousands of lectures, and it turns out its not really a silver bullet.

There's nothing really wrong with it, it's just that people tend to fall off the same way they do on any other education pattern.

A couple years ago I was thinking "If Google and Apple really cared about kids they would make a spaced repetition unlock system", where by you have to make note cards every week and then have to answer correctly to get into your phone. (obviously requires some bypass system, other rules, etc)

You could probably jury rig it with a popup that comes up after you unlock, but people would never install it anyway.

I probably need to go read the studies but of SRS is so great, why aren't all schools just SRS farms (or are they?)

Especially for language study, as a friend put it, speaking a language is like learning a musical instrument, no amount of book studying will teach you how to play the instrument. The way you learn to play is to play. And similarly, the way you learn to speak is to speak. Sure, you can fill your vocabulary, but I question a little how much it helps in context. Obviously it's not zero. I'm sure curious, if there are better methods than SRS for language learning given that hearing, creating, understanding, and speaking whole sentences is the goal, not individual words. I can generally learn a new word in my native language with one exposure, no SRS needed.

A while back I built https://readboost.io/ but so far never advertised for it. The idea: Embed Q&A into your ePubs and optionally download Anki cards for your book. Probably gets buried here, but maybe someone finds some value in it.

What I find interesting about spaced repetition is the underlying thesis that raw memorization, in certain contexts, is playing a more important role for learning than what some modern education ideas would make you assume. In mathematics or programming, for instance, there is this idea that understanding a concept is better than memorizing algorithms or recipes (derivation methods for instance). But spaced repetition challenges that, in a sense.

I’ve been using Anki for about a decade now, and as far as I’m concerned, the only real improvements needed are design/UI based. It is functionally irrelevant if the algorithm is optimized or not when the actual user interface seems boring to potential users. While I do like that Anki has power user options, it’s also very unintuitive to the average person just looking into it.

Which is really a shame, as the spacing effect itself is such an underrated aspect of human learning that it almost feels like cheating.

The author bashes other algorithms for being "arbitrary", but I don't see how FSRS is any less arbitrary.

I like WaniKani because it forces me to type the right answer. When I tried Anki, it was too easy for me to "cheat" and press space for something I "kinda" remembered.

I do agree with the author's phrase of "...a daily ritual of feeling bad about what you’ve forgotten..." though, and would like to try the new algorithm. Is there a way to configure Anki to force you to type the correct answer?

SRS is wonderful. The improvements in the linked article are real and laudable.

But they are comparatively narrow and technical compared to the improvements that need to be made in usability and scalability (of content dissemination and navigation).

Shameless: I am working on a FOSS SRS platform / toolkit that I believe can take some substantive steps forward here. Can read some at http://patched.network, or poke around http://github.com/patched-network/vue-skuilder

systemS? There is only one program out there that is viable: AnkiDroid.

Anki runs on desktop: you have to be chained to a desk rather than taking advantage of idle moments when you are on-the-go. Even if you have it on a laptop, you still need a place to sit; SRS on mobile can be used anywhere, like standing-room-only public transit.

The AnkiMobile companion app for iOS is a paid app that is somehow chained to the desktop version, whereas AnkiDroid is a full-featured clone of Anki that you could use air gapped without ever syncing anything to or from another device. It has integrated management of decks and note creation/editing.

Every other SRS app out there is just playing very distant catch-up to Anki/AnkiDroid. They usually mention Anki in their pitch, trying desperately to explain why some very minor and very subjective negative point about Anki is worth switching to their massively inconvenient solution.

Do any of these algorithms use vector embeddings to determine the semantic similarity between cards? Seems like that might be a useful parameter for tuning the algorithm, since you’re likely to forget something similar on a topic you’ve forgotten things about.

What’s a good way to learn to understand concepts in a spaced-repetition way? I’ve used anki before for remembering facts or answers to specific questions, but is there a standard way to setup spaced repetition flashcards to learn, for example, when to apply a certain software pattern or something?

If anyone's interested in experimenting with FSRS, we at Open Spaced Repetition provide official packages in Python, Typescript and Rust

PY: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/py-fsrs

TS: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/ts-fsrs

RS: https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/fsrs-rs

Currently ts-fsrs and rs-fsrs support FSRS 6 and py-fsrs should also support FSRS 6 in the next day or so. Also, both py-fsrs and fsrs-rs include the ability to optimize the FSRS model from your past reviews!

I think it’s important to note that the original SRS algorithms are not for learning. They or for remembering or “not forgetting”.

The system assumes you have already learned the fact (for some unclear to me definition of learned)

Most users inserts new words in the hope that repeating them in anki will help them learn. It does to some extend, but it is not quite the right tool.

So for example, in Japanese, simply remembering how to read a word out loud is a task in and of itself. If you put words in context (which in language learning makes sense) the learner will quickly start to recall the meaning of the word based on the look of a sentence.

For a learning system this open up a lot of issues to solve. The best attempt I’ve seen was a web app that gave you full sentences and you clicked the characters word you didn’t understand and based on that it would give you different sentences.

There are two problems with that website: I don’t remember what it was called and it used google translate from 10 years ago. The second could be improved by expanding the corpus and use LLM to form sentences for the learner.

I haven't seen it mentioned yet with CTRL-f and I haven't used Anki in a while, but has there been work put into modifications in Anki or other programs using spaced repetition along with interleaved practice to also see if that improves studying.

Interleaved practice explainer: https://openlearning.mit.edu/mit-faculty/research-based-lear...

I am the creator of Trane (https://github.com/trane-project/trane/) which can replace Anki and similar systems for domains that have a well-defined hierarchy between subskills (turns out that's most of them, including learning vocabulary).

There are several unresolved issues with Anki, SuperMemo, at al.

1. Emphasis on memorization. I wanted something that could be applied to domains (music) whose scoring is not based on memorization, but mastery.

2. Lack of any hierarchical information limits how well it works to learn much larger skills. It's trivial to replicate the functionality of Anki with Trane: just have one lesson where you put all your exercises. Anki cannot replicate what Trane does, which is to use the dependencies of the many sub-skills to track and limit progress until mastery is achieved.

3. Emphasis on creating your own exercises. You are expected to come up with your own decks, which takes a lot of time. For complicated skills, you need to be a domain expert to really know how to do this.

Trane is pretty much done, and I have used it to teach myself music. It does not have a UI at the moment, so I am pretty sure I am the only user. Not that I mind, because I rather not work for free.

Currently working on a literacy tutor that will be built on top of it. When it's complete, it will be able to guide all students from learning their A-B-Cs to reading and writing at college level, backed by the most up-to-date research on reading and writing acquisition. Hopefully I will be able to release an MVP in the middle of the year.

I've been looking into FSRS since I'm building a language learning app[1], but I haven't implemented it yet. Can FSRS work if I don't want to have 4 choices - bad, good, hard...? I have found myself to get into a decision paralysis so just bad/good works better for me. Plus I can swipe the cards tinder style! :D

My second reason is that I'm worried about the complexity - both from non-nerdy users perspective and me having to debug it.

[1] https://vocabuo.com

Super insightful. FSRS sounds like the upgrade I didn’t know I needed for my Anki habit!

Hmm, I have Anki and I don't see an option for this algorithm. Anyone know how to enable it? The preferences say I'm on the "V3 scheduler" but have no option for an algorithm. I don't think I'm on the algorithm described in the blog post because whenever I don't know a card it goes back to 1 day as if it was new. Or maybe I am on it and I'm just misunderstanding how this works? I'm on Mac, Version ⁨2.1.66 (70506aeb)⁩.

I wonder how it compares with the current SuperMemo.

I experimented with SuperMemo around 18 months ago, and it made me fall in love with SRS again. The main reason being the algorithm is less punishing when I skip a day. Maybe it has better defaults?

I once skipped a whole week and could get back on track in the next week, in Anki that feels unbearable.

Another thing I really liked about it is that you can edit a card as you are studying without having to open a separate window, helps me stay in the flow when studying.

But… With a better algorithm I might give it a try in the future… Being FOSS is the real advantage here.

They have gotten better and I think it's clear they'll continue to get better :). FSRS is already good (I use it both in Anki and for periplus.app), but looking at the benchmarks [1] there's a lot of room left for improvement.

One direction could be to incorporate semantics, which afair FSRS doesn't do at all yet. A good flashcard deck will have a lot of semantic overlap, e.g., a card for the vocab word itself, that word in a sentence, etc. Struggling with one component is a strong signal you'll struggle with another.

The same thing could be done for just better spacing, so you don't "cheat" by having too closely-related cards next to eachother in a review (the review signal will be less noisy).

[1] https://github.com/open-spaced-repetition/srs-benchmark

Interesting. I was never really happy with any spaced repetition algorithm, so I recently implemented my own dumb system which simply asks you for the number of days after which the card shall be shown again: https://github.com/kldtz/vmn

Usually my intuition about how well I know something is not too far off. If you don't specify anything, it doubles the time since the last review.

I’m solo-building a free Anki alternative using the Ruby FSRS gem: http://cadence.cards/welcome

Would love any feedback—I’m aiming for a more focused, restful take on what I like most about Anki. Styling is done with Tailwind.

I do think that Wanikani and Bunpro are kind of in a catch-22 on this compared to Anki. They've built their gamification features and UI on the idea that cards have specific buckets that they're in and something like FSRS is a lot more varied than that. Especially Wanikani, which has a system of unlocking more items based on your current items reaching a specific stage.

How are people using Anki for maths? Any nice decks you could share?

how to ace any uni theory course

> download all pdfs

> merge pdfs into one

> compress

> write a very specific prompt for gemini to turn these into anki cards separated by a semicolon

> do 50 anki cards a day for 3/4 weeks before exam

not a single lecture attended top of my class (ku leuven). feels like cheating honestly

I wish there was some SRS-like tool but for learning music.

I just let chatgpt quiz me anki style on topics I'm learning

The current version of the supermemo algorithm is SM-18. The author thinks SRS has gotten way better since the author was previously using an out of date version of the algorithm, SM-2.

language learning is 100% memorization. eventually your brain memorizes all the phrases that click into “situation-space,” for every possible situation there is a memorized response. language can be broken down into situational meta-phonemes. using flash cards and grammar is just a way to bootstrap yourself into memorizing all the appropriate responses for any given kind of situation.

Hi Duolingo.

This should be a first class feature in iOS. Hey Siri teach me what elide means.

Point of feedback: I know it says it in the link, but it would be nice if an article almost entirely about FSRS actually spelled out what it stood for even once in the body of the article.

(Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler, in case anyone was wondering)

What is everyone using spaced repetition to memorize?

What's the go-to SRS app now (I'm still on Anki)

I'd love to have a system that shows me what I already know well as rarely as possible, because that's the most frustrating part.

Makes sense. But is it same as “by heart”? If not, what is the difference?

> If we step back, we realize that this scheduling system (called “SuperMemo-2”) is pretty arbitrary. Where does the rule of 1, 6, 2.5times correct + 1, reset back on failure come from? It turns out it was developed by a college student in 1987 based on his personal experiments. Can’t we do better?

Note that Anki uses (used) such an old algorithm because it derived it from an ancient open source version of SuperMemo, a software which started the spaced repetition trend. Anki just added a usable GUI instead of the convoluted mess that is SuperMemo. Newer versions of SuperMemo improved the algorithm, but they are no longer open source. I wonder how FSRS compares to current iterations of the SuperMemo algorithm.

Repeatedly memorizing the same thing over and again does not make one smart.

Ofocurse it does help you win stupid games.

Like scoring good marks in exams.

So that you can spend the next 30 years of your life doing jobs you hate for money to just end up dead for infinity.

I'm building a language app based on using LLMs and spaced-repetition.

We generate cards that respond to speech to evaluate card recall and pronounciation (via speech recognition). We don't market it as AI but behind the scenes we use LLMs to explain the context behind every word and phrase, offer additional usage examples and cultural notes, and also generate roleplays based on specific topics & scenarios.

Happy to pass along invite codes to anybody who wants to check it out. https://getdangerous.app

This is something I’ve been tackling myself in the language app I’m making https://store.steampowered.com/app/3220820/Bilingual_Crosswo.... Right now, I’ve added a set of front loaded intervals: 2M, 5M, 10M, 20M, 40M, 2H, 6H, 1D, 2D, 4D, 8D, and so on eventually stretching to a full year.

I’ve always felt this setup was a bit arbitrary and considered it a temporary solution. Thanks for saving me some time on research!

I'm not ready to share a link to my actual implementation yet, but I've been working on an SRS system for Chinese and been using it as my daily driver for about 3-4 years now, after previously using Anki and getting frustrated with how reviews pile up after a couple of days off.

I've done lots of tweaking to the algorithm over the years to make it feel like I'm less surprised by the scheduling, and less like a slave to it. One very stark difference between mine and Anki is that I have a large number of "overdue" cards, but the system still prioritises when to show me the overdue cards with quite a few different metrics based on how overdue it is, how new it is, how long the current interval is, etc. So, like Anki, I still just double the interval for correct cards, but for incorrect cards, the reviews are repeated same day until they're correct, and then the interval is reduced a lot more than Anki. So, the cards then become overdue sooner, but because the scheduling of overdue cards is better, they get pushed later if your overdue queue is too large, and sooner if you've not got anything more useful to review.

FWIW, my typical session is 40 minutes per day during my daily lunchtime walk, and I'll get through about 150 cards in that time. If I'm on a long train journey, I'll often clear out double that or more, but the disaster situation of being on holiday for a month might leave the queue with a couple of thousand extra cards, but they never seem unmanageable. Even after a 2 month break when I was travelling last year, and only doing reviews on flights and trains, I'd definitely forgotten some words from not reviewing at the appropriate time, but the percentage of totally forgotten cards felt better than I used to experience after just missing a few days with Anki.

One thing the article mentions that I don't massively concern myself with is desired retention. I'm not sure I'd want to express it as a target percentage, but I've definitely been thinking about how I want to change things to deprioritise stubborn words without just suspending them or deleting them. I definitely find that having them keep showing up, so I might see a pattern of them wrong twice each day before finally getting them right, after a few days of that they do usually suddenly stick for good. But sometimes I look at the word and think I don't really care if I remember it or not.

Does anyone have tips for how to use space repetition to be a better knowledge worker? I feel like i could use it to have a better memory of business processes, but i dont know how to get started.

I’m sure the algorithm can play a huge role in the effectiveness of learning but for me the difficult part was always creating the cards and actually opening the app to practice.

I've built Komihåg [1] to try and combat this: Select any text on your iOS device and a flashcard is automatically created for you, and the app is then showing you the cards on the Home Screen / Lock Screen / Apple Watch Face.

I haven't gotten to implement any sophisticated scheduling algorithm yet but will definitely do that eventually.

[1] : https://komihag.com

Has anyone tried to use an LLM to test questions / concepts in a broader way via spaced repetition instead of just memorization? Just wondering.

I was working on a product which has FSRS implemented, and is heavily inspired by anki. The change we made was that rather than rate yourself, you have to type your answer and its graded by an LLM. It also has a button to explain the concept to you as if you are 5 (eli5) and you get feedback on your answer. You can also create the flashcards by uploading a pdf and then generate them from it.

I've stopped working on it and am now building something highly similar aimed towards high school students, but any feedback is welcome. This version was built for uni students

mimair.com - I never got around to adding any payment option so its completely free

I just loaded Hacker News after a WaniKani session.

Any recs for moving this into Anki? I already use Anki for cards I created while going through Genki with my tutor, and world capitals.

Why does everybody want to learn Japanese? What makes Japanese so enticing? Why not Mandarin or at lead Spanish?

I find with spaced repetition that it works really well for some well-known things like vocabulary (EDIT: well-known meant as "spaced repetition is well-known to work for this use-case, not well-known as "the subject is well understood"), medical etc. but for everything else it becomes a struggle for a long time.

I have been trying for years to fined a way to use it for mathematics and physics - with the former being more of a focus and didn't really get anywhere. For definitions it works, but it's quite hard to write proofs in a way where there is a short obvious memorization based answer. Either you spend far too much time on a card or the card gives you too much information so you don't really test the knowledge.

I also tried it for computer shortcuts - it seems to me that they are really useful only when part of the muscle memory - so practicing them works better then memorization.