Thanks for this great introduction to Anki and spaced repetition.
I’d love to see more people experimenting with different use-cases for Anki, by sharing actual cards and card templates.
Some experimental applications of Anki I’ve tried over the years:
Absolute pitch. I created a simple deck with each of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, played in various octaves, to test whether I’d be able to develop absolute pitch. Result: miserable failure.
Chords. Here I would be reviewing a bunch of chords rather than individual notes, and prompted to guess their names name (e.g. 7#11). Result: modest improvement.
Tango songs. My goal here was to learn the 1,000 or so songs that are regularly played at tango events so I could better dance to the music. Result: success. (However, this was pretty time consuming and I also wondered whether trying to “memorize” songs in this manner would make me enjoy them less, via hedonic habituation; I wasn’t able to conclusively test this hypothesis, though, since I abandoned the deck after I stopped dancing regularly.)
Film plots. After watching a film, I’d copy the plot from the corresponding Wikipedia article, in the hope that this would allow me to better remember it. Result: failure (I found it too effortful to read the full plot each time, and separately I also felt that the vividness of my memory diminished over time so that even if I did read the plot, it would become increasingly difficult to remember the associated scenes).
Implementation intentions. I write the “trigger” on the front and the “action” on the back. Result: modest success.
Keyboard shortcuts. Self-explanatory (example). Result: better than nothing, but Anki isn’t the best tool for this.
Textbook study. As described here. Result: resounding success. (Though I’m not sure this counts as an “experimental” use of Anki.)
Hey Pablo! These seem really interesting, I love the implementation of music with Anki (even if they haven’t all been successes). Adding audio files was one thing I forgot to mention in the post, I did it when I was learning Chinese and it was pretty useful (although I stopped learning Chinese pretty soon after I started adding them, so they never really caught on—I suspect it would have been too much work to mass-produce).
I like the keyboard shortcuts one! It would be great if Anki had a way of testing whether you’d typed out the right keys, although I agree that without this it seems hard to implement.
And thanks for describing how you create Anki cards for textbooks—it’s always interesting to hear other peoples’ actual card creation process, i.e. how you decide which bits of knowledge to Ankify in whatever you’re reading, rather than just the mechanics (the former is something I didn’t really go into in the post).
Thanks for this great introduction to Anki and spaced repetition.
Some experimental applications of Anki I’ve tried over the years:
Absolute pitch. I created a simple deck with each of the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, played in various octaves, to test whether I’d be able to develop absolute pitch. Result: miserable failure.
Chords. Here I would be reviewing a bunch of chords rather than individual notes, and prompted to guess their names name (e.g. 7#11). Result: modest improvement.
Tango songs. My goal here was to learn the 1,000 or so songs that are regularly played at tango events so I could better dance to the music. Result: success. (However, this was pretty time consuming and I also wondered whether trying to “memorize” songs in this manner would make me enjoy them less, via hedonic habituation; I wasn’t able to conclusively test this hypothesis, though, since I abandoned the deck after I stopped dancing regularly.)
Film plots. After watching a film, I’d copy the plot from the corresponding Wikipedia article, in the hope that this would allow me to better remember it. Result: failure (I found it too effortful to read the full plot each time, and separately I also felt that the vividness of my memory diminished over time so that even if I did read the plot, it would become increasingly difficult to remember the associated scenes).
Implementation intentions. I write the “trigger” on the front and the “action” on the back. Result: modest success.
Keyboard shortcuts. Self-explanatory (example). Result: better than nothing, but Anki isn’t the best tool for this.
Textbook study. As described here. Result: resounding success. (Though I’m not sure this counts as an “experimental” use of Anki.)
Hey Pablo! These seem really interesting, I love the implementation of music with Anki (even if they haven’t all been successes). Adding audio files was one thing I forgot to mention in the post, I did it when I was learning Chinese and it was pretty useful (although I stopped learning Chinese pretty soon after I started adding them, so they never really caught on—I suspect it would have been too much work to mass-produce).
I like the keyboard shortcuts one! It would be great if Anki had a way of testing whether you’d typed out the right keys, although I agree that without this it seems hard to implement.
And thanks for describing how you create Anki cards for textbooks—it’s always interesting to hear other peoples’ actual card creation process, i.e. how you decide which bits of knowledge to Ankify in whatever you’re reading, rather than just the mechanics (the former is something I didn’t really go into in the post).