Quartz article on flashcards (Anki)

[mcthulhu]

https://qz.com/1200506/the-latest-brain ... lashcards/

The benefit of spaced repetition systems is not news here, of course, nor is Anki. I thought this remark was interesting, though: "He says he wasted lots of time “Ankifying” information he didn’t need." An easy mistake to make at first, from my experience. I also liked the idea of an atomic approach: "Nielsen suggests breaking down each point he wants to learn into the smallest possible unit of information. By memorizing simple and discrete points, rather than combining multiple points or concepts, he found he could then later then apply them more effectively."

More interesting is the original thread that this short article is based on, at https://twitter.com/michael_nielsen/sta ... 9454774272, which has some good Anki tips, I think. Most of it is about memorization and study in general and is not directly language-related, though a couple of the comments do mention foreign language study. There was a link to an academic paper from Duolingo on improving the spacing algorithm for SRS that I hadn't seen before: https://s3.amazonaws.com/duolingo-paper ... .acl16.pdf.

https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/960556555526524928 is a related thread inspired by the first one, and has a few additional bits of information. Nielsen also responds there, and makes some good points about the benefits of making your own cards, and looking for ways to improve them and encode the information better. I guess it's not too surprising that so many people want to be given shared decks, so that they don't have to make the effort themselves. I think I agree with Nielsen, though.

I hadn't heard of https://www.brainscape.com/ before, but it was mentioned in one of the comments. It's "a robust web & mobile learning ecosystem," per their Web site. Has anyone used it? It seems to have a lot of pre-built language decks.

[Xenops]

I thought this part from the second link was telling:



I'm finding that it's great to put French in Action material into Anki, and it's amazing for my passive vocabulary...But not so much for my active use. Thus, I might have to "put it in use" by doing extra production exercises.