A Love Letter to Flashcards

I use Anki to learn French, Chess openings/tactics/techniques, to unscramble letters for scrabble, for Pub Trivia... The options are kind of limitless.

As a mid-30s guy who has well passed the neuroplasticity of his teen years, it's a godsend for me.

To echo the author's thoughts though, I can't prove empirically that I learn more effectively using Anki (or spaced repetition) than other methods... Only anecdotally. I have a shockingly poor memory, but now I'm B2 certified in French and an ~1800 Elo on chess.com .

Do I still forget things all the time? Yes.

I do a really lightweight version of flash cards. Everytime I'm learning a new tool or tech, I grab oversized notecards (my favorite are 8x5" dot-grid cards). I put a label at the top, and create bullet points of each item i want to remember. I then review. No individual cards for each item or anything. Just all the things grouped on one card as bullet points.

For example, I'll have a `sqlite` card, and put all the commands and everything on it, as I learn them. I'll use it as a cheatsheet, but then also a few minutes of mindful review. This for the toolings that I want to know well enough to not get slowed down googling the commands. I do this for a lot of CLI tools, but also things I need to remember about the business of my company and working across group, etc....

Eventually the five or six working cards I have, get put on a pile and new ones come in.....

> From this perspective, fields that require deep understanding, like math, require memory just as fields with a breadth of shallow knowledge do, though in different ways.

I'm interested in understanding how others use Anki for conceptual subjects like pure math or physics. I believe many fundamental rules in Spaced Repetition (e.g. like keeping cards concise) are thrown out the window for conceptual subjects.

I tried to make an auto flashcard generator but ran into the issue that one word can map to many senses. But most word frequency datasets don't disambiguate the sense. So if you want to include all the senses for a word while ranking words by frequency they all get the same starting position.

Used to use Anki for foreign language learning. Guessing it would have been useful to memorise calc, chem and physics equations if it had existed when I was young.

Flashcards are brilliant. Anki is finally usable after they ditched the hot garbage algorithm they were using. Previously I've used the Leitner method and I stil think that's the best one for me.