Anki/SRS unbelievers

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NoManches
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Re: Anki/SRS unbelievers

Postby NoManches » Sun Sep 02, 2018 3:10 pm

leosmith wrote:
NoManches wrote:You might be different...but I am a bit OCD when it comes to thing like Anki and it's just not healthy for me.

It's not healthy for a lot of people, imo. I wrote a blog post about this around a month ago - I use anki a lot, but in a limited manner now.



Good read, thanks for sharing.
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Re: Anki/SRS unbelievers

Postby PeterMollenburg » Mon Sep 03, 2018 1:12 am

Using Flashcards Deluxe on my mobile with a separate keyboard, i was able to build a vast deck over time of unknown words I came across in the context of my learning (most often language courses). I did single word translations, multiple definitions, single definitions, typed answers, multiple choice attempted, audio cards on automatic play in the car, cloze deletion and moved on to Anki. I got bogged down in detail, I simplified. I gave it a red-hot go. Over 10,000 cards. I tried Anki as well.

In the end it felt (even with contextualised sentences with type-written cloze deletion answers) too dry, too robotic and too technology reliant (a.k.a. unnatural). Admittedly, the getting bogged down in detail and the inability to ignore detail or any single unknown word, probably harmed my experience very much so. Still, I did address these problems. I just got sick of it.

I don’t know if I learned more efficiently with or without SRS. I wasted a LOT of time before arriving at a system that finally worked for me (adjusting settings, trying out different types of cards), but still got annoyed with it in the end.

I don’t care if my learning now is more inefficient (it may be, it may not be), I just don’t want to go near SRS programs for the time being. And getting away from an app or computer program in favour of reading real books, is appealing to me.

My comments don’t add much to the discussion, just that I prefer not to use them now for reasons that both involve the study of the language itself and to remove myself from being permanently attached to my mobile device. Would you have a chip inserted if it meant you could learn vocabulary 5 times faster than through other methods including SRS? I sure as hell wouldn’t, and the more we can withdraw from heavy reliance on technology, the better, in my opinion (as I type away on my keyboard attached to my phone).
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Re: Anki/SRS unbelievers

Postby rdearman » Mon Sep 03, 2018 9:22 am

PeterMollenburg wrote:Would you have a chip inserted if it meant you could learn vocabulary 5 times faster than through other methods including SRS?

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Re: Anki/SRS unbelievers

Postby patrickwilken » Mon Sep 03, 2018 12:48 pm

OK. I just wasted a bit of time working out how to convert the entire Harry Potter book I started reading into Anki.

Now I have 7028 cards. The questions are individual Spanish sentences from the book, with the answer an automatically generated audio of the Spanish sentence, plus the Google English translation.

If I do 10 new cards a day it will only take me a couple of years to finish the book. :P
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Re: Anki/SRS unbelievers

Postby rdearman » Mon Sep 03, 2018 2:41 pm

patrickwilken wrote:wasted a bit of time working out how to convert the entire Harry Potter book I started reading into Anki.

Important point, it didn't take long to make the cards, with TL sentences and audio. :) So it shouldn't bother you to remove them, since you can get a lot more where they came from.

patrickwilken wrote:I have 7028 cards.

So I suspect you have all the top 500+ words in Spanish included.

BTW from experience I can tell you a lot those cards will be dross you can suspend after one look. (Suspend is quicker than delete BTW) For example I suspect you'll find some of these duplicated.

"Hello Harry"
"Hello Hermione"
"Hello Ron"
"OK"
"What?"
"Who?"

My point being I estimate about 20% of those cards will be of no use to you, because you already know them, or they are duplicates. So be sure to suspend then straight-away. Also, change your settings so that "leeches" are suspended. Leeches are cards which you consistently mark bad because you can't remember them. I automatically suspend mine after 10 viewings. Because it just isn't sinking in, and by then I'm sick of the card.

As you progress you'll begin to see that some cards are not exact duplicates, but have the same meaning and you can simply remove one of them. For example:

"Which way did he go?"
"Did you see which way he went?"

So unless there is something useful in knowing the difference between these to types of sentences then suspend them.

patrickwilken wrote:If I do 10 cards a day it will only take me a couple of years to finish the book.

You'd think that, however, you'll remove (suspend) probably 25% of the book, a lot of them you'll mark "Easy" and they'll get pushed further and further back in your reviews.

What you will find, and this is the point where people believe anki is a torture device, is at some point anki will just keep giving you difficult ones! You'll struggle to remember and it will seem like a chore. But if you think about it, the whole point of SRS is to weed out the easy ones and get you learning the hard stuff. So it isn't until the point where it gets painful that it actually becomes useful. But this is the point most people give up.
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Re: Anki/SRS unbelievers

Postby Adrianslont » Mon Sep 03, 2018 3:02 pm

patrickwilken wrote:OK. I just wasted a bit of time working out how to convert the entire Harry Potter book I started reading into Anki.

Now I have 7028 cards. The questions are individual Spanish sentences from the book, with the answer an automatically generated audio of the Spanish sentence, plus the Google English translation.

If I do 10 new cards a day it will only take me a couple of years to finish the book. :P

It sounds like a painfully protracted way to read a book - and I’m guessing you feel the same??

But, I’m wondering if making the cards is not a bad starting point for some intensive reading. Rdearman has pointed out that you would realistically delete a percentage of cards, anyway, and I’m thinking it might be worthwhile just to anki review the first couple of chapters and maybe a couple of later chapters and read the rest extensively. I wonder if it would give the extensive reading a significant boost - like subs2srs does with a tv series, say. Of course, some people would still find this too protracted but I’m curious - I think it might work for me.

Let us know what you do with your cards!
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Re: Anki/SRS unbelievers

Postby patrickwilken » Mon Sep 03, 2018 4:25 pm

rdearman wrote:Important point, it didn't take long to make the cards, with TL sentences and audio. :) So it shouldn't bother you to remove them, since you can get a lot more where they came from.


Good point. It was crazy easy actually to create a full Anki deck like this.

Any suggestions of altering any of standard settings in Anki? Should I bother to increase the ease, for instance?

Thanks for the suggestions.

Adrianslont wrote:But, I’m wondering if making the cards is not a bad starting point for some intensive reading. Rdearman has pointed out that you would realistically delete a percentage of cards, anyway, and I’m thinking it might be worthwhile just to anki review the first couple of chapters and maybe a couple of later chapters and read the rest extensively. I wonder if it would give the extensive reading a significant boost - like subs2srs does with a tv series, say. Of course, some people would still find this too protracted but I’m curious - I think it might work for me.


I did it partly out of curiosity to see how easy it was to do (it turns out it's very easy).

How useful I don't know. My Spanish is really beginner's level. I have about 2300 words that I am learning in an Anki deck (essentially my A1 textbook). Of these, about 30% are well known. I am sick of just doing Anki so I thought I would try to start reading, and so went for Harry Potter 1 as I have read it in German. So difficult, but with Readlang it is working OK. I intend to finish reading the book in about a month via Readlang. But as you say it's a way of sort of intensively reading though parts of the book.
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Re: Anki/SRS unbelievers

Postby rdearman » Mon Sep 03, 2018 5:40 pm

The only setting I change is on ankidroid phone app I turn on gestures so that I can swipe right to suspend a card with one move. Sometimes I lower or raise new cards or reviews if I feel I am burning out.

By default your cards are put in order from 1 to whatever this means that if you're doing a book it would actually start you at chapter 1 and go all the way through as long as you do not change the settings to randomise the card display. This is assuming of course that your original spreadsheet that you imported was not randomized going on in any way shape or form.

If I can make a suggestion. I think that you should use that anki deck for 4 weeks then at the end of the 4 weeks start reading the book whilst continuing with your anki so that you're slightly ahead of the game if you see what I mean?

I think if you do this then you'll find reading the book much easier. Basically because you will have already encountered most of the words in chapter 1 for example.

One thing you might want to think about doing before you actually start with this deck. In case you want to delete and start again. Is that if you created a tag for the chapter that the sentence came from it would help you a lot. Because it would then allow you to filter and only study chapter 1 or whatever the relevant chapter is at the time. So if you've studied the whole of the tags marked chapter 1 and then you start reading you will have read the entire chapter and fact have memorized the entire chapter before you start reading it

I also think that subsequent chapters in both anki and in the book will be easier for you. This is mostly just because of the redundancy within a book.
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Re: Anki/SRS unbelievers

Postby Sayonaroo » Sun Sep 30, 2018 10:56 pm

Thanks for mentioning the gestures feature on ankidroid. I can’t believe I’ve been doing reviews on my rooted nook glowlight plus ereader without gestures all this time. I think it’ll save me a lot of time. i chose left for 1, top for 2, right for 3, double tap for 4, bottom for show answer, swipe left for tag marked, and swipe right for suspend
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