There lots of knowledge types where Anki might not be the ideal choice. For example,
- itemized lists of information. E.g. The 5 reasons for the civil war, type of questions. What to do, if you miss one item? Your card as a whole gets over exposed, while the missed item might get underexposed.
- Related information, e.g., history dates. When using Anki the students tends to latch on to incidental facts, e.g., Treaty of Paris, ah I remember it has two repeating digits, yes, 1899. While it would be more useful for a student to think, ah, that was after the Cuban independence struggles in the 1890's.
Any user will recognize that this effect is very strong. You tend to remember cards by the most trivial of things.
- Hierarchical knowledge. Things like chess openings. How do you put that in Anki cards. It's all a kludge. Where to put the variants, etc.
- Knowledge networks. Things like medical information (where Anki is hugely popular). But typically, you get cards with massive amounts of information because you have lots of linked information, (symptoms, causes, treatment, pharmaceuticals, etc. )
- Even in language learning. We have the useful fiction that there is a 1-1 relationship between words in two languages, but there almost never is.
- Learned knowledge tends to be linked to Anki. It happens often that you can remember things when doing Anki, while being at a loss when needing the information in the real world.
Add to that, that Anki does nothing for conceptual understanding. You really need to learn a subject before memorizing it, but in the learning phase Anki is not helpful.
So in short, yes, Anki is the best tool there is to help learning, but I'm sure better tools can be made, especially when targeted to a particular knowledge field.
> - Even in language learning. We have the useful fiction that there is a 1-1 relationship between words in two languages, but there almost never is.
It's not really a problem: space repetition is a way to build familiarity with vocabulary. Once it is done, more finer uses can be inferred from context. The value lies in breadth not depth.
It's a very bad way to build familiarity with vocabulary for two reasons—it doesn't teach word boundaries and it doesn't teach collocations.
For example, even simple words like "nose" differ a bit from language to language. Can "nose" refer to the thing that smells on a pig or an elephant? In English, no. In Chinese, yes. In Malay, people and pigs have noses but an elephant's trunk is a different word.
In English if someone asks you how you are, it's reasonable to reply "absolutely fantastic" or "pretty good", while it would be a bit odd to answer "pretty fantastic" and very strange to answer "absolutely good". This isn't because of a grammatical issue that can be memorized. It's just that certain words tend to be used together and the only way to really consistently get it right is to get a lot of input and develop a feel for the language.
Extensive reading is a better way of building and maintaining vocabulary than anything you can do with flash cards and at the same time you'll be gaining understanding about the common stories, beliefs and culture of the speakers of the target language.
Hmm, sort of agree for the later stages of learning, but learning by flashcards is incredibly helpful at the beginning and to get started.
Referring badly to a nose on an elephant is better than not having any word ready at all.
Saying „absolutely good“ is totally fine for most people if you are a beginner in the english language. (Also, you can put phrases on flashcards)
And sure, reading extensively is a great way to build vocabulary. But it takes a while (depending on the language quite a long while) before you can begin to read extensively.
A lack of suitable resources is often a problem at the lower levels. FWIW, I experienced this first hand as the first foreign language I learned to a relatively fluent (~B2 level) was Japanese and that was from 2000-2002.
Graded readers are ideal early on, but if the language you're learning just doesn't have them, then going through multiple textbooks aimed at your level (e.g. an intro textbook from publisher A and another intro textbook from publisher B) is a good strategy. Materials aimed at 5 or 6 year-old native learners are also often a decent path. It's not exciting but there's a lot of repetition, there are a lot of pictures and if it's a character-based language, there will be a syllabary like hiragana/zhuyin/pinyin to help you.
Depends on learner. I’ve seen people really love graded readers from an early stage. I personally can’t stand them until the 1000-2000 word or more range. Note that I am a big fan of extensive reading, but the lower level stuff just makes my eyes bleed, and in some cases is just bad (e.g., graded English readers that use lower frequency meanings of common words to meet a word limit).
> going through multiple textbooks aimed at your level (e.g. an intro textbook from publisher A and another intro textbook from publisher B) is a good strategy
Very underrated, imho. I wish more folks would do this.
> Materials aimed at 5 or 6 year-old native learners are also often a decent path
Again, this makes my eyes bleed. There is often quite a bit of words that are aimed at children that maybe aren’t the best for beginning learners. I can’t remember what they were with Japanese, but I’m pretty sure a lot of them were onomatopoeic words that every Japanese kid knows but non-native speakers do not… and probably should not learn that early in the process.
Iirc, third grade is when the language becomes more “standard” and less kids talk, middle school stuff is godly for beginning mid-range fluency, and high school content fleshes out mid-range fluency (as one might expect).
Books and online content aimed at teenaged readers can be surprisingly accessible, with the main challenge being to find material with substance (imho).
> Extensive reading is a better way of building and maintaining vocabulary than anything you can do with flash cards
Eh, I think that this is only true at certain ranges of fluency development.
Note that I am a huge fan of extensive reading, and I don’t think folks use it enough, but…
1. It’s usually prudent to brute force the first few hundred words, maybe up to 1000, depending on one’s access to quality graded readers. The theory says that you want 95-98% lexical coverage for extensive reading to reach its highest potential.
2. To maintain general fluency, extensive reading just can’t be beat.
3. That said, for domain specific vocabulary and/or low frequency vocabulary, cards are almost necessary since the space in between exposure can be incredibly wide. For reference, as a native speaker of English, I still add new words that I run across to a vocab memorization list — recent additions are petard and malapert. Frankly, I’m not sure I will ever run across these words again in a text, but I want to know them and (in the case of malapert) use them. For specialists in a field, knowing things like “nuclear non-proliferaiton treaty” or “bilateral negotiations” might be worthy of flash card study for folks in politics/political science.
> "I still add new words that I run across to a vocab memorization list — recent additions are petard and malapert."
I'm familiar with those only due to Shakespeare. I don't think I've ever heard anyone say "malapert", but have heard definitely heard friends say, "<person> was hoisted with <his/her/their/my> own petard" occasionally while playing board games as a teenager. Those friends must have picked it up from Hamlet. None of us used SRS for vocabulary building back then. We just read a lot.
A couple of problems I found with Anki for languages:
1. The words aren't in context, which leads to "flashcard blindness", where you see a word in context, know that you recognize it, but can't remember what it means.
2. The theory behind spaced repetition is that you learn most efficiently when you try to remember something just when you're about to forget it. But that means that if the algorithm is working properly, every single card is hard. This makes motivation a problem, because you know studying is going to be a grind, not fun.
3. While "being able to remember it after thinking a second or two" might be fine when studying for an exam, or in many other contexts where memorization might be important, that's too slow for languages. What you want for a language is "know it immediately without having to think about it".
4. The "scheduled review" system is too inflexible. Some days you get only a handful of cards to review, some days you get dozens. It's hard to tell when you're starting out how many cards you should be adding each day such that the number of cards match the amount of time / effort you have to study. Furthermore, if you skip a single day, you have twice as much the next day; and if life happens and you end up missing a week or a month, you come back with a giant jumble of cards, half of which you've forgotten, and it's really difficult to dig your way out of it.
By a strange coincidence, in 2019 I also started on an alternate to Anki to help myself study Mandarin. It has some similarities to his system, in that there's multi-level knowledge; but it's different in that instead of having a fixed schedule, it has the concept of "difficulty" and "study value" for each word / grammar concept, and the algorithm tries to give you a full "readunit" of "native input" which will balance the two. "Spaced repetition" emerges naturally from the model, and if you go away for a week (or 6 months), it knows you've forgotten some things, so it gradually refreshes your memory.
It's in closed beta now; the first public language (MVP) will be in Biblical Greek, but the second one (if it happens, maybe in a year or two) will be in Mandarin; and hopefully there will be other ones after that. There's a sign-up form you can use to be notified for updates.
ad 1: have you tried using Cloze cards for that? I like to group eg 1-2 reasons, then I will see the list with 1 or 2 items missing
ad 3: I had success for similar problems by simply creating a lot of cards that give enough context and just ask for the next step. In chess openings, couldn't you just display the current position and ask something like "In opening X, variant Y, what are the next moves for white here"? In some cases I've written scripts to create cards for all variations of a question I want to ask
ad 4: I think Cloze deletions can help to some extent here (I've basically made Cloze my new default card type), but you are probably running into the limitations of Anki there
ad 5: language learning, specifically vocab lists, has always baffled me as a use case for SRS. there is so much context that you need in order to use words proficiently (in what kind of medium was the word used? what register was used (formal/scientific/informal/...)? was it used ironically, empathetically,...?). the only way to learn language imho is to immerse youself as much as possible, through ways where it gets actually used, not such artificial environments
the one thing that I'd like to see changed about Anki would be to have more options for changing the scheduler, or making it easier to use custom schedulers on multiple device types. I simply don't like the logic of SM2/FSRS of hiding a card from you until a specified date and assuming that you'll be reading it then. if you don't open the app for a while, the review dates get completely messed up (I've had new cards scheduled for review sometime in the 2040's). I love the interface and that you can use HTML to enter cards, but I just want to put knowledge in there and get exposed to it from time to time. I wish there was a scheduler that just randomly shows you cards, with probability roughly proportional to how urgently you need to see them. and do not interpret too much into the fact if I haven't opened the app for half a year but still remember some of the cards well. I don't mind seeing those cards "too often", but I do mind if Anki hides the knowledge that I put in there from me, for years or decades even
It's not the logic of FSRS. In fact, FSRS knows the probability of recalling any cards in your collection, which may means how urgently you need to see them. So it can be implemented via an add-on.
1. The best card-creation practice is to divide these itemized lists into separate cards. So ideally, you shouldn't have 5 items on one card anyway.
2. Dates are pretty important to know, so I'm not sure what the issue is here.
3. With language learning, there is no reason why you need to make cards word-word. Personally I use image-word much more often, which correlates more to how we learn our first language.
It happens often that you can remember things when doing Anki, while being at a loss when needing the information in the real world.
I haven't had that experience at all. But if you have, there is a simple fix: create cards that mimic the situation you'd use the phrase in. For example, have the phrase "a cappuccino, please" matched with a photo of a barista in a coffee shop.
Anki does nothing for conceptual understanding. You really need to learn a subject before memorizing it, but in the learning phase Anki is not helpful.
I also don't agree with this. Learning the "foundational" aspects of something is critique for understanding it conceptually. For example, knowing the boring geographical details of European borders circa 1900 is key to understanding the subsequent 45 years of geopolitical conflicts.
In general, I think most of the critiques of Anki/spaced repetition/flashcards are mostly just critiques of the "typical" way people make cards and use the apps. If you get a little more creative with creating cards, most of these issues go away.
That all said, I do agree that Anki is definitely not perfect and could be improved – but more in the sense of making better-designed cards and better practices the default, not something you have to implement manually yourself.
> In general, I think most of the critiques of Anki/spaced repetition/flashcards are mostly just critiques of the "typical" way people make cards and use the apps.In general, I think most of the critiques of Anki/spaced repetition/flashcards are mostly just critiques of the "typical" way people make cards and use the apps.
Somwhere, there's gotta be an expert/course/training on how to best use SR, that is to say, how to best ingest knowledge into the system and prepare the reptition items themselves. Kind of like a best-practices approach ...
Who knows, right, maybe AI-assisted SRS can become so effective ...
... that the "singularity" ends up being us :)
(we become the superhuman intelligence that we were seeking to create ...
... by "partnering" with increasingly intelligent systems).-
In a sense it'd make much sense: We are as good a starting point as any, if not better.-
> We have the useful fiction that there is a 1-1 relationship between words in two languages, but there almost never is.
But you aren't forced to drill single word L1->L2/L2->L1 cards. You can drill sentences; I've never found single vocabulary word cards useful, or translation cards (before more advanced stages - B2/C1 - rather than early on.) What I found useful were full L2 sentences, often embedded in paragraphs, with words missing ("clozes.") There's also an L1 version of the complete sentence in small print on the front of the card, to use as a prompt to figure out the L2 word being asked for, but it may be phrased completely differently.
They allow you to just learn languages as they are. You can also drill synonyms and antonyms: single L2 word on the front, multiple L2 synonyms and antonyms on the back (and maybe a terse also L2 definition.) When the card comes up, name as many as you can out loud, say the definition if you can remember it. If you got a lot of them, and/or could repeat the definition you pass the card.
Also, an author (David Parlett) who studied the process of language learning from written grammars and radio broadcasts/ethnographic recordings (i.e. without an instructor or specialized recordings, usually very small languages) advised a long time ago that one tackle the hard part(s) first: coming from one language to another there are features that have no parallel in the languages one already speaks but are very important to be able to use. For example, if you're going from English to a Romance language, verbs and their conjugations. Anki can just let you learn those by rote and figure out how to use them later; if you separate each conjugation onto its own card, it will eventually be effortless. Then all you have left is vocabulary and set phrases, and all of the vocabulary and set phrases you read from native material will be sandwiching another verb that you can conjugate, being reinforced in that conjugation.
What I'm saying is that you can't dismiss Anki because you think that translating word by word between languages is a dead end for learning languages. There are any number of ways to use Anki; ingenuity doesn't stop at the existence of a spaced repetition effect, you can subject that to a little further engineering. People are doing all of the above, I certainly am.
> You really need to learn a subject before memorizing it, but in the learning phase Anki is not helpful.
I disagree with this for similar reasons. A lot of the learning phase is memorizing a bunch of vocabulary and units and remembering basic checklists. Having that done before you show up to do the learning will accelerate that learning significantly.
I don't think spaced repetition and Anki are limited by not being all-encompassing. It's a tool for remembering largely atomic things, and we have to figure out how to apply it.
But overall I probably have to agree with you on some level, because I think that Anki itself promotes a particular style of usage that may not always be ideal. Anki encourages a usage that reflects its simple model of spaced repetition, which is largely borrowed from Supermemo, and they make it difficult or impossible to change that behavior to the point of actively discouraging users from experimenting. I find it annoying that Anki is very opinionated, and I think that its decisions about how it should work were partially shaped by the fact that it started very amateurishly put together, and adjusting one's opinions to match the interface is easier done than the opposite. There's not a lot of good, exacting science around spaced repetition, and all the papers people cite are old, of very small size, and not very systematic or adventurous. It's too early to be opinionated.
- itemized lists of information. E.g. The 5 reasons for the civil war, type of questions. What to do, if you miss one item? Your card as a whole gets over exposed, while the missed item might get underexposed.
- Related information, e.g., history dates. When using Anki the students tends to latch on to incidental facts, e.g., Treaty of Paris, ah I remember it has two repeating digits, yes, 1899. While it would be more useful for a student to think, ah, that was after the Cuban independence struggles in the 1890's.
Any user will recognize that this effect is very strong. You tend to remember cards by the most trivial of things.
- Hierarchical knowledge. Things like chess openings. How do you put that in Anki cards. It's all a kludge. Where to put the variants, etc.
- Knowledge networks. Things like medical information (where Anki is hugely popular). But typically, you get cards with massive amounts of information because you have lots of linked information, (symptoms, causes, treatment, pharmaceuticals, etc. )
- Even in language learning. We have the useful fiction that there is a 1-1 relationship between words in two languages, but there almost never is.
- Learned knowledge tends to be linked to Anki. It happens often that you can remember things when doing Anki, while being at a loss when needing the information in the real world.
Add to that, that Anki does nothing for conceptual understanding. You really need to learn a subject before memorizing it, but in the learning phase Anki is not helpful.
So in short, yes, Anki is the best tool there is to help learning, but I'm sure better tools can be made, especially when targeted to a particular knowledge field.