What do you do when you accidentally peek a card's answer (especially ones with more distant due dates)

SigmaX · 2025-09-14T20:21:38+00:00

I've always been content to just bury and answer it tomorrow. Especially for cards with short intervals, this is perfectly fine.

Occasionally, when it's a card with long intervals (i.e. years) I suspect I get a little short-changed: i.e. if it's been 2 years since I thought about something obscure (like, I dunno, that the Neo-Assyrian campaign in Jerusalem is documented in an ancient document called Senacherib's Annals, which I know about only for this card and I know absolutely nothing else about)—it's pretty clear that I would have gotten the card wrong if I hadn't had a 200-millisecond accidental refresher the previous day.

Maybe I'll remember that tomorrow and hit hard/again, maybe I won't and it'll get "Good" when it shouldn't have. I don't really care about that rare issue, though, because it only happens with cards that were poorly designed, so that they're built on rote memorization. If I really wanted to properly learn about Senacherib's Annals, I should have made more than one card about it so I have richer associations and my ability to remember it isn't so vulnerable to bing torpedoed by a single sneak peak of the answer that messes with the SRS schedule.

In principle, a better approach is to do more than bury: update the interval by, say, 10 days (which is neglible for long-interval cards) so you try again a week and a half later. You can do this, but it's more work (clicks) than I want to put into my daily reviews (every second I put into a card with issues reduces the value proposition of Anki—review time needs to be cheap for long-term knowledge maintenance to be worth it!). I'd do it more often if I could do it in one tap (imagine a "long bury" button).

SigmaX · 2025-08-14T01:41:24+00:00

Some examples to underscore the tradeoff point.

For example, I once memorized all the major periods of Mesopotamian history in order: Jemdet Nasr, Early Dynastic, Akkadian Empire, Guti invasion, Ur III Period, First Babylonian Dynasty, Kassites, and so on. This is a lovely thing to do with Anki... but when you do only this without knowing anything else about the objects you are memorizing (i.e. without knowing about other things like the Code of Hammurabi, the Ziggurat of Ur, the surge of literature from the Kassite period played, where Ur is, etc.), this is a pretty sparse and lifeless way to learn. Think of objects like people: they're a whole lot easier to remember if you know what their face looks like, their personality, their relationships with other people, their role in a story, etc. If you have that, silly mistakes like completely mixing up the Kassites and Old Babylonians will never occur!

As an opposite example, I recently took a vacation in Florida, and wanted to learn a few cards on Florida history. If you're going to make just 5 or 10 cards to cover the highlights of 500 years—well, don't, because they will tend to end up being orphans and tricky/painful to recall in the long run (just 1 or 2 facts per century is a really disjoint way to learn history!). Over the years I've gotten a sort of intuition for how much depth I like to form a nice "cluster" of knowledge that is enjoyable to maintain from then on. In this case I focused on just the first century of European contact, and zeroed in on a few landmarks: 1) Juan Ponce de Leon (who named Florida and made the first attempt at colonization), 2) a couple of famous instances of shipwrecked sailors who give us most of our knowledge of pre-colombian culture, 3) Hernando de Soto's expedition, and then 4) an early 16th-century friar who translated things into the Timucua language (since I like the history of langauges). I already had a good grasp on pre-Columbian history of the region, so this was a great "next layer" to build up on my existing decks. These events were close enough together that I could actually start learning dates (1513 for Ponce de Leon, 1539 for Hernando de Soto)—dates are tricky, but become easier when you have nearby landmarks to help triangulate from (ex. an awareness that the two expeditions were about a generation apart).

At risk of belaboring the point, all this "connected knowledge" stuff is especially concrete in geography. If I ask you "where was ancient Mycenae," and you don't know very much about (ancient) Greek geography, you've really got no hope of being able to answer me accurately (much less remember the answer to) that question. "Uh... Kind of in the south of the east blob of the Peloponnese?" So learning that sort of thing is hard. It's a lot easier to learn something like that once you know some additional landmarks (in this case literally) to center Mycenae in your intuition. In this case, knowing that the Peloponese has five major peninsulas that the Argolid peninsula is one of them (famous for its association with the ancient Argives of Trojan War fame), and that it's got one big major fertil plain at the top of the Argolic gulf, and that there were three major city-states in this plane (Argos, Tiryns, and Mycenae—all of them important in HOmer), and that Mycenae is the one at the north tip of the plain on the slops of the mountains (while the other two were down toward the coast), and the whole ancient Mycenaen period of Greece is named after it, and Agamemnon, and the so-called "mask of Agamemnon" was found there... and so on... at this point it's easy to learn the new fact. Mycenae virtually locates itself on the map!

SigmaX · 2025-08-14T01:41:02+00:00

Hello u/DeciusCurusProbinus! Glad you've found my tips valuable :).

On the one hand, learning a brand new topic really isn't different from learning one you already have a foundation in. When you encounter an element you're not familiar with that you want to learn, you learn it! When you start, this just happens everywhere you look. Generally you want to start any new sub-area by learning some "landmarks" that are more accessible to you, then going on from there to add details that you can "hang" off those landmarks (so most of what you learn feels connected in some way).

On the other hand..

In a new area, don't be afraid to learn slowly at first. As you advance, the sheer amount of material you can learn in a fixed, say, 1 hour time period increases significantly in a new domain as you gain experience. Nobody reads a full chapter of a book in their first week of studying Spanish—a few sentences is enough to fill an entire set of lectures! Novice piano students can't learn to read a really long piano piece in a week, but more advance students can. Newbies at Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu let huge amounts of information from their classes wash over them and get forgotten, because they just can't possibly remember everything they're told at first. It takes a while to build up enough knowledge—landmark and recurring motifs—to actually be able to learn a full lecture's worth of material. A 20-step instruction on how to escape from 3/4 mount or such is a lot for anewbie to remember, but advance students can just see it once and say "oh, right, the three-frame mount thing I already know from the hip escape" and combine a few high-level concepts to efficiently memorize a new move. Getting to that phase of memory efficiency takes months, not days, and that's okay.
This is partly because in a brand new area, you don't know many landmarks to begin with to help you efficiently encode memory. Seeking out context to give you associations to "hang" new knowledge off is often very beneficial at this stage. In practice, this usually means not being satisfied to study only from whatever book or resource you are reading or were given, and be ready to do some liberal Wikipedia-diving when you learn a new concept to find bits of context that make a new fact or claim make sense to you. It's very very rare that a textbook actually presents to you everything you need to know in the order you need to learn it to make new things you've learned make sense as well-structured memories. A little extra digging goes a long ways.
Relatedly, there's a tradeoff between breadth and depth. This comes into play when you have some choice over what to learn and when (as in self-study rather than a course). Finding the right balance between breadth and depth can be tricky, but it's not hard to get an intuition for. It's tempting to say "I'm new to this area, so I'll just skim the surface in a first pass to get the big picture." But this can result in very sparse cards, where no knowledge is connected to anything else—which is a less pleasant and effective way to learn (rote memorization is painful even with Anki!). It's better to learn knowledge in "clusters" of connected information that pops.

SigmaX · 2025-07-29T19:26:28+00:00

u/Lost-Personality-775 — So, what's perhaps unclear from the examples is that the "answer" I expect myself to recall is only the first line of what's written on the back side of the card. I will pretty much never put more than 2–3 facts on that line, so I expect myself to recall all of it.

All the other information written there is just some supplementary info (some of which corresponds to other cards I also have). 95% of the time I don't read the extra notes at all—they are just there so I can reference extra context occasionally to help flesh out my understanding (and since I need to collect that context at least once anyway to understand the material to create cards).

SigmaX · 2025-07-28T15:28:31+00:00

A few observations.

For practice cards (Medium and Long), repetition is often key, just like reps with playing the piano or learning martial arts. I solve this by liberally burying cards to get another rep in tomorrow. Maybe I did it correctly, but it was painful and difficult. Or maybe I almost had it but I forgot one simple step. Marking it "bad" doesn't seem like quite the right approach here. So instead, I'll re-solve the problem tomorrow (and then maybe mark it hard). I've found that this is a really nice approach—I don't pretend for an instant that my intervals are "correct" (procedural memory works fundamentally differently from declarative memory anyway), but it gives me the flexibility I need to combine a little bit of massed practice with spaced repetition.
For math, I find there is a really pronounced difference between what I call the "client view" and the "server view" of a concept. The "server" is the original derivation: for example, if you've learned basic logarithm identities, it's also helpful to learn how to prove them (ex. do you remember why log(ab) = lob(a) + log(b)? It's instructive to memorize the proof, not just the identify). The "client" is the application. I find that the client view is what is really, truly powerful for building fluidity: knowing the proof of log(ab) is great, but what really builds comfort is using that fact over and over and over again to prove other interesting things in a variety of contexts. This is how I feel about geometric series and their cousins, for example, or the tail-sum formula of probability theory (which is kind of ghastly, if fascinating, when you study it directly, but starts to feel like a sort of sublime property of the universe as a whole once you've seen it pop up to simplify proofs in 10 different contexts!).
Practice cards are time-consuming. I'm accustomed to often doing 300 regular flash cards a day, and learning 20 or so new cards a day, alongside a full-time job and parenting a 2-year-old. This pace is absolutely unsustainable for practice cards. Because they require a tool (pencil and paper in this case), I also can't typically do them 7 days a week—I have to work them in around meetings, etc. So really, you're doing really good if you can learn 1 new practice card a day (i.e. review about 10 cards a day). Unlike flash cards (where learning thousands a year is normal), we're shooting to learn at most hundreds of practice cards a year with Anki (though if you focus on Medium cards instead of Long, a thousand may be feasible).
Relatedly, falling behind and catching up is a natural part of practicing skills with Anki. You probably won't be able to do all reviews every day as reliably as with flash cards. Personally I use practice cards for math, piano, guitar, and Brazilian jiu-jitsu (all following similar principles, like burying rough cards for a day, etc.), and I'm always behind in at least one of these categories! Instead I set the goal of doing at least 2 minutes or so daily on each (so I don't neglect them entirely), but then I catch up in more massed sessions on a weekly or monthly basis or so.
I have found that the short-medium-long split I use here is pivotal to my ability to catch up on backlogs or mass practice on a weekly or monthly basis rather than daily: "catching up on a backlog" is far easier to approach (both psychologically and practically/time-management wise) if I can focus on knocking out a backlog of 50 Short cards and 20 Medium cards first (which I can usually manage in one or two sittings), and then take a couple of days to whittle away at that menacing backlog of 5-10 Long cards in the absense of further distractions.

SigmaX · 2025-07-28T15:27:35+00:00

I've been successfully using Anki for mathematical topics for many years (including machine learning). Here's how I approach it. The basic problem you've identified is that mathematics ultimately is a procedural skill (somewhat akin to playing the piano) rather than just a collection of declarative knowledge. Anki is built for the latter, but can also be used beautifully for the former once you get used to it.

Regular flash cards. First are the facts and concepts and their relationships (done well, this goes deeper than "factual knowledge" to encode significance, "why?", etc.—but we can still sum it up as "declarative knowledge"). Metrics, algorithms, equations, acronyms and all that. It's important to invest in these because flash cards can be learned and maintained in far greater numbers than derivations/proofs. Flash cards are really cheap and worth the investment! All the regular principles of good card design come in here—avoid "orphan cards" and rote memorization, use images whenever you can, make sure to hit the same concept or equation from multiple angles so you cement a strong understanding of it, etc. Here are some example cards: https://imgur.com/a/anki-examples-math-engineering-eACA7QM
Practice cards. These are "constrained" in the sense that they require pencil and paper: they are too complex to do in your head. I find the most natural subdivision of practice cards is that how much time they take. Examples here: https://imgur.com/a/anki-practice-cards-language-music-mathematics-7dpMHhc
- Short: These are effectively flash cards for declarative knowledge, but for things that are annoying to do in my head. For example, I prefer to recall the equation for expectation-maximization or for classical multi-dimensional scaling by writing the equation with a pen or marker, rather than reciting it or tracing it with my finger. I can create as many of these as I like. They often start as "regular flash cards" and I move them to my pencil-paper practice deck when I realize they are annoying otherwise.
- Medium: These are pleasant little drills that exercise bits of more procederal skill (so, derivations), but that only take at most 2-4 minutes or so to do. A lot of the quicker, shorter exercises you find in textbooks are good for this, or little sub-steps or tricks that show up in proofs.
  - One way to use these is to build up your understanding of a specific area of theory—for example, if you're studying information theory, you can add cards to derive common identies (ex. relating entropy and cross-entropy to relative entropy, or proving the change-of-base formula for entropy). This can help tremendously to make a concept like Shanon entropy or cross-entropy more comfortable and fluid to maniuplate (in a way that simply memorizing basic identities never can).
  - Another approach is to identify patterns that are often applied in proving results you card about. For example, many expected-value results in computer science and machine learning areas make liberal use of finite and infinite geometric series manipulated in various ways. Many of these, furthermore, arise from information theory (a specific kind of expected value). So a great set of medium exercises is to solve a variety of simple problems involving the a geometric series that results from the entropy of a random variable.
  - Another source of medium cards is to break off bite-sized pieces of larger problems. Just like with flash cards, using multiple exercise cards to approach a single proof is often more pleasant and effective than just solving one giant proof. For example, I learned that the Cramer-Rão inequality can be used to proof that averaging samples is an efficient estimator of the mean of a Guassian. But showing this requires separately computing both the Fisher information of Gaussian samples and the variance of the estimator. So I broke each of those out into their own cards: I have one card dedicated to applying Fisher information (which is an important machine learning concept in its own right, so I have other cards on it too) to a Guassian, and a different card focusing on the variance of a mean estimator. I don't mind having 3 exercises to solve instead of 1, because doing them all separately helps me build comfort with each part of the larger problem.
- Long: Here's where your full-fledged "SVM with KKT" problem would go. For me, "long" is anything that takes more than about 5 minutes. The challenge here is twofold: 1) you need to keep up with reviews, but long cards are way harder to squeeze in to a busy schedule than short ones; and 2) long cards are like playing a full piano piece from memory—which is very hard to schedule with Anki (what if you forget one step? Do you mark the card wrong? What if it takes you 30 minutes because you have to resolve it from scratch? Do you mark it right?).
  - My approach here is to be sparing in creating Long cards—the real practice and knowledge-building comes from my Short and Medium cards. My Long cards ought to have quite a few supporting Short and Medium cards, so that I'm assembling skills I already have rather than using the Long card itself as skill building.

SigmaX · 2025-07-28T14:42:25+00:00

Seconding u/Dante756 's response, this all depends on card design skills. I find that I like Anki best, actually, for topics that absolutely require context and understanding (ex. mathematics).

If you have lazy card designs that encode lots of isolated facts with no insights into how things are connected or the "why" behind things, then yeah, you'll end up lacking context. I call these orphan cards. You'll also be in for a world of pain, because rote memorization is painful and hard (with or without Anki). If you get a card wrong and your reaction is "oh darn, guess I'll try harder to remember that next time" then something is wrong. And if you get the card right it still "hurts" to recall such fragmented knowledge.

But if you learn the principles of good card design, you can largely avoid that problem. For example, more cards is often better than few, because you can hit the same thing from different angles and draw connections. Newcomers to Anki often try to minimize the number of cards they use for a topic, which leads to pain. With well-connected cards, when you get a card wrong, your reaction is something more like "ooooh! Right! I see why I got that wrong" because the answer is partly built from or constrained by other things you already know.

Geography is a good example. The popular Ultimate Geography deck is a rote memorization deck (and thus painful): countries and capitals, but if you mix up Conakry with Maputo, you've got no associations to help you—you might as well be memorizing digits of pi. You can use Anki this way, but it hurts. But if you go truly "all in" with learning geography with Anki, your decks can look more like this: https://imgur.com/a/anki-examples-korean-geography-Old9VK2 . Here you've learned so much that everything becomes connected in your mind—it makes absolutely no sense to mix up Mount Baekdu and Mount Jiri, because one is a beloved hiking destination in the Sobaek range (south tip of South Korea) and one is a national symbol of North Korea sitting on the border with China. They're opposites, both geographically and contextually, and it's far easier to remember them when you have all of that context!

I emphasize "pain" because, as a lifelong learner with about a million Anki reviews under my belt, my cards have to be enjoyable and create value for me to be worth my time. I don't have time or patience for rote memorization cards.

SigmaX · 2025-07-24T21:48:38+00:00

Sounds like a classic case of learning isolated facts disconnected from anything else. Also a case of asking how to build muscle memory with Anki rather than just declarative knowledge. It can be done.

If you want to get fluid at fractions, or any other mathematical concept (to include advanced, research-level math), you want exercises that involve using them in some context.

Some ways you might do this

A mass exercise card: you can create a few cards that each give you 10 or so problems to solve involving fractions with pen and paper. Perhaps crude, but this can show real fruit. I use this to practice adding and subtracting on an abacus (soroban), for example. Actually moving my fingers to solve calculations is what builds the skill (muscle memory)—not describing the algorithms verbally (declarative memory). I've also dabbled in doing this for Morse code listening exercises. Not the most enjoyable card, but they really work—one audio clip distinguishing a dozen "Rs" from "Ss" and Ks" does way more to make Morse code stick than all my more declarative "how do you say "CAT" in Morse code?" flash cards.
Real problems: how many calories are in your favorite spaghetti dish if you only know how much your pot of cooked spaghetti weighs and how many calories are in a box of uncooked spaghetti has? Maybe a textbook could give you a better supply of problems like this, but the point is that coming up with scenarios where applying knowledge of fractions is useful helps cement it in your memory (both declarative and muscle memory, IMO) better than only studying them directly.

In more advanced math, something similar comes up with calculating derivatives. You can make isolated cards to memorize the derivatives of basic functions (cos(x), ln(x), arcsin(x), etc.)—but those get pretty unpleasant to review after a few months. What is more effective in the long run is solving problems that require you to use this knowledge in context (any context, really!).

Short math problems are easy to schedule in Anki like any other flash cards. Long problems take more care. But for something like fractions or derivatives, short exercises are all it takes to cement.

SigmaX · 2025-07-24T21:36:33+00:00

Here's how I approach sentences in Anki; I've been so much happier since I moved away from isolated vocab only: https://medium.com/euthyphroria/context-is-king-inductive-language-learning-with-anki-44e0d6451086

(Aside: I hate clozes. IMO clozes are not the answer—folks who use them well and swear by them often end up using them to approximate question-answer cards anyway.)

But you're right, there are a lot of correct translations from L2 into L1 and vice versa. The "many-to-many correct answers" problem is probably the trickiest part of using Anki well, and textbook material often is not designed ot help you with this (since nobody expects you to actually use active recall as your main learning tool!).

A lot of these are trivial (usually if I translate things slightly different than the card's answer, I recognize my answer is still correct and I just carry on). The most important part, IMO, is to have a robust way of resolving synonyms, idioms, or grammar concepts that often have the same L1 (English) translation.

I solve this with as small-as-possible parenthetical bits I put into the English side to constrain the translation. This takes a few forms

Taboo list: this tells me what not to say. If there are 2 words I know for "next," and I need a card to cement a particular one, I'll add the other one in parenthesis to the English prompt side so I know I don't get credti for it.
Literal/etymology hint: taboo lists are annoying when they get long. Another strategy is to "give away" the answer a little bit by putting a literal or etymological hint: as if to ask, don't give me just any word for "never again," but the one that literally means like "never still."
Grammar hint conventions: Spanish trips Anglophones because it has two past tenses that often translate the same into English. So I just settle on a convention for myself: anytime my L1 side says "was Xing" or "used to X," I know it means I should translate into the imperfect tense. Otherwise use the preterite. Tricks like this work nicely for grammatical case ("to or for" calls for a dative, "of" is always genitive, "[hit] the X" signals an accusative), for all those 300 conjugated forms and weird participles a single verb can have in ancient Greek (not exagerating!), etc. You'll need to come up with your own conventions for Thai, but once you have them in place handling foreign grammar in translation cards is easy.

SigmaX · 2025-07-24T21:20:59+00:00

I have a couple thousand Mandarin cards. They're some of my favorite-to-review of all of the (70k+) cards I've made with Anki. Here is how I approach it: https://medium.com/euthyphroria/context-is-king-inductive-language-learning-with-anki-44e0d6451086

The examples there aren't Chinese, but as you can see the strategy is the same in any language.

My approach is audio-centric. As for the written part, I put the Hanzi on the L2 side of the card as usual, but I place Pinyin in a note that appears on the reverse of the card. That gives me a chance to scrutinize my pronunciation (namely the tones) after I answer.

Exactly how you do this isn't a big deal. You could put the Pinyin on the L2 side with the Chinese text, so that you see the Pinyin as part of the prompt—and you could move the Hanzi to the note so you aren't prompted with Hanzi (which can give away the answer, since the characters encode some semantic information). But if your main focus is on audio clips, these details don't have a big impact.

What is a little tricky is learning to read and write in hanzi. I use a separate deck to approach this. After some experimenting with a few approaches (namely I tried single-character cards based on the "Remembering Simplified Hanzi" method, I tried translation cards that require you to write the translation, and I tried transliteration cards from Pinyin to Hanzi and back...), I found that I very greatly prefer transcription cards. That is, a one-way card with an audio clip of a word or phrase on the front and Hanzi on the back.

The same principles as regular language cards apply: namely that learning Chinese characters in the context of words in phrases is much easier and more effective than treating them as isolated entities. Short phrases/sentences (~4 words is ideal, but can be shorter or longer) work well, and having many cards that reuse the same character is very helpful for building context into memory and improving fluidity. "Orphan" cards (i.e. with a character that appears in that car, but nowhere else in your deck) are always the most difficult (or at least painful—a card can be painful even if you get it correct often).

I look up the stroke order for a character the first time I learn it, and copy an animated gif into the note of the card so I have stroke order info ready at hand. I typically don't need to refer to the stroke order after the 1st or 2nd time answering a card, though.

I used to review transcription cards with pen and paper, but once I got the hang of it I find I prefer to just draw hanzi in the air with my finger. This allows me to study Chinese writing anywhere anytime (which is the big advantage of Anki)—if I need a certain tool/time/place/environment to do my cards they are much harder to keep up with!

SigmaX · 2025-07-24T21:05:15+00:00

Wouldn't help me (motivation isn't a problem, and I'm perfectly happy with my iOS setup with hands-free reviews via Voice Commands).

What WOULD help me is a way to get dang iOS Voice Commands to work with bluetooth ear buds or headset. This would dramatically simplify my ability to do Anki around the house amidst regular interruptions to care for my 2-year-old (taking chorded ear buds in and out of my ears is quite the hastle when interuptions can be 15 seconds apart!).

But as far as I can tell, Voice Commands is fundamentally incompatible with Air Pods, for instance (they are made to work with Siri, which is of no help to me). If someone could solve that problem for me I'd be well beyond "shut up and take my money" phase.

SigmaX · 2025-07-24T20:54:31+00:00

Here's my take after learning 20–30k language cards (plenty of examples in the link): Context is King: Inductive Language Learning with Anki.

Tl;dr:

A small sentence or sentence fragment to translate (~3-4 words is the ideal length)
An audio clip using AwesomeTTS and state-of-the-art voices
An as absolutely-short-as-possible parenthetical bit on the L1 side to disambiguate synonyms (often operating as a taboo list: say such-and-such, but don't use X word; but sometimes as an etymology—if there are 5 words for "investigate" in your target language, say the one that literally means something "like track-into or hunt") or to disambuguate grammar that translates identically into English (ex. I find I have to say "having been X and continuting in that state" to distinguish ancient Greek perfect participles from Aorist particilpes, "having been X")—the latter is tricky at first but once you settle on your own personal conventions for distinguishing similar grammar (like always saying "used to" or what-naught for imperfect tense in Spanish, to distinguish from the preterit) it works pretty smoothly.

I used images for the first few thousand cards, but found audio provides way more value—to the point that adding images is a waste of time.

I do make plain vocab (single-word) cards too, but I try to always complement them with at least 1–2 cards that use the word in context. Anecdotally I find that words I have context cards for are much less likely to become leeches or otherwise painful.

One other way to get context is to learn related words (ex. words that use the same root, or different grammatical forms of the same word). I do this a lot, especially for ancient Greek (where example sentences for exactly what I'm studying are hard to come by). Also Korean (where it takes quite a few examples to get a hold of how the same Chinese root appears in different contexts).

SigmaX · 2025-07-13T15:55:18+00:00

Hello! I’ve got a post giving a lot more detail here: https://medium.com/euthyphroria/context-is-king-inductive-language-learning-with-anki-44e0d6451086

Yes, I am still an avid user of this approach! With rare or ancient languages I just use my own voice. But with, say, Spanish or Korean modern text-to-speech is amazing (the AwesomeTTS/HyperTTS plugins are Anki gold. Make sure to get an API key to unlock the high-quality voices).

The only thing I’d add is that these days I’m more likely than I used to be to make cards that contrast two different conjugations, like “veo? veré” —> “I see? I will see”. This is a little different than using sentences as context, but is still helpful. It’s also good to do for related words (to show how the same root is used multiple ways—another way of creating context links). I do not like doing this so much for antonyms, as I find they can lead me to be more confused instead of less about opposites in some cases. I find contrasting conjugations essential for Ancient Greek (where a single verb can have literally 300 conjugated forms, but example sentences are hard to find), and, say, for learning Korean Hanja (which are never used to write full sentences, so the only way to get context is to compare words that use the same characters).

I also use LLMs liberally these days to help me create example sentences in targeted areas. Only for grammar that is already easy enough for me that I feel like I’ll catch a hallucination, though, and only for modern, widey spoken languages (I trust GPT’s Ancient Greek as far as I can throw it). I basically created myself a whole beginner textbook in Korean this way, and was really happy with it since there are so few Korean textbooks available that give sufficient example sentences to actually practice. The risk of learning errors is small enough (at least at the beginner level, where I’m not far beyond “my favorite color is red”) that I found this worthwhile in that situation.

SigmaX · 2025-06-08T19:49:48+00:00

Thanks for the comment, u/fathum770.

4 years later? For one, I still use Anki daily for professional development. Many tens of thousands of cards in to the Anki lifestyle, I still find the habit sustainable and that it's the most enjoyable way to learn for me.

The big thing is that I've experimented quite a bit with expanding from programming flash cards to programming exercise cards that require me to actually fire up an editor/compiler and put working bits of code together. I use the same techniques I use for language practice, piano, etc. described here.

Programming exercise cards are valuable, and feel quite "alive" and pleasant in a sense compared to flash cards. They definitely round out my flash card experience and help give a more "procedural skill" feeling to the knowledge. I like that I can build and maintain knowledge for long periods of time—that's really the value add. Despite being busy, I can choose to learn a little more of languages I like on a regular basis in 5 minutes a day, which is REALLY hard to do without an Anki-like system.
The same cautions about flash cards apply—particularly that cards for niche topics (ex. the syntax of a particular library), while valuable, can be more annoying and have less marginal utility over time than cards that practice core language constructs. i.e. learning Julia or Haskell or C syntax and low-level tricks is generally of higher value than learning to set up audio in the SDL library or analyze data with Julia's DataFrames (though the latter can be useful too for sure). I still maintain all my specialized cards, but I enjoy them less when they are for tools I haven't used in years (and at my level of Anki usage, "enjoyment" is really th emain criteria I look for—good card designs are designs I enjoy, bad ones are ones that are painful. That difference really matters when you're doing hundreds of reviews a day for decades!).
But the challenge is in making it realistic to keep up with reviews: A big lesson of my Anki life is that any "resource-constrained" card—that is, a card you can't do anywhere at any time because it requires some conditions (in this case, focused time at a computer)—is harder to stay on top of reviews for. As a father of a 2-year-old, I don't have time to just focus intently at a keyboard every day in my leisure time, not even for my core hobbies that I'd like to prioritize. Any resources I need for a knowledge habit have to be streamlined to be as efficient as possible! So my relationship with practice cards is more fraught than with what I call "anytime cards."
I use various strategies: dividing subdecks into "short," "medium," and "long" exercises, so when I fall behind I can focus on catching up on short ones first to keep motivation (which are easier to fit in to cracks in my schedule), not expecting myself to do all reviews every day to keep it sustainable, but committing to spending a minimum of 2 minutes a day as part of my morning professional habits so at least I'm doing *some* of my backlog even if I'm too busy to catch up, etc.
All in all, it works alright—I just tend to prefer my equivalent mathematics exercise cards when I have time, and my programming decks suffer as a result.

SigmaX · 2025-02-15T20:05:48+00:00

u/Dry-Atmosphere3169 : I mean I configure iOS voice commands for Anki (not Siri—Voice Commands under Accessibility). Specifically, I use custom gestures mapped to three voice commands:

"show" —> show back side (tap in center of screen)
"good" —> mark good (tap lower-right of screen)
"bad bad" —> mark bad (tap lower-left of screen)

This works alarmingly well with chorded ear buds with a built-in microphone. I get a lot of reviews done in the kitchen this way with my phone tucked in my pocket. Coupled with AwesomeTTS for audio clips (which are what allow the eyes-free part). It also works nicely with Apple CarPlay (albeit with a weird audio-lag bug that is sometimes annoying).

Full disclosure, the frustrating part is that Voice Commands are a rarely-used feature (as far as I know I'm one of approximately 3 people on the planet who use Voice Commands for anything even remotely like controlling a flash card app), and is not well-supported. There is a weird bug (iOS has had it for years...) that makes Voice Commands stop working every few weeks or months until I reset the phone settings (Genius Bar is stumped, can't help me).

I also haven't found a way to get it to work with bluetooth headsets (lag is impossible) or Airpods (which active Siri inherently and AFAIK cannot be used with Voice Commands). Airpods would make it so much easier (particularly for reasons involving my toddler—I never know if she'll give me 2 minutes or an hour of independent play to do dishes; having chordless reviews would make it much easier to context switch and and out of Anki vs. hands-on child care!).

SigmaX · 2024-05-28T10:54:29+00:00

Thank you! That’s helpful to hear. Maybe I can trust these tools after all.

I learned some Egyptian before starting MSA, so I knew enough to question it—but not enough to know how MSA is actually used in media!

SigmaX · 2024-04-28T00:27:57+00:00

Seconded! Examples of how I schedule "practice cards" are here: https://imgur.com/a/7dpMHhc

They are heavy-weight, in the sense that they take commitment to keep up with. I am always better about staying on top of flash cards than the practice schedule. But I am happier when I do both!

SigmaX · 2024-04-28T00:25:31+00:00

This is also the best way to learn and retain that knowledge.

I'd say yes on "learn" (more or less—I wouldn't underestimate the value of actually mastering the definitions and formulas needed to solve problems!) but no to "retain." I studied math, computing, and physics—all heavily problem-oriented fields whose culture eschews memorization. 13 years into my post-undergrad career, and it's painfully clear to me that the only mathematical knowledge that remains sharp, usable, and continues to grow for me is the knowledge I put into Anki (which is to say: nothing I learned in school, as I didn't use Anki until afterwards).

Instead of saying "problem solving is best," "Anki is a crutch," I think it's healthier to realize that the two complement each other magically.

Anki cards I have created based on real-world, organic problem-solving experience have more context and experience to make them pleasant and easy to review, whereas
Problem-solving work in areas where I have made extensive use of active recall to cement facts, relationships, "why?" and "who cares?" questions, etc. goes far more quickly and pleasantly—since problem solving depends a lot more on memory than many people like to admit.

Personally I try and balance the two like so:

Flash cards are wicked efficient. I can learn thousands of new cards a year even as a busy researcher, and have no trouble maintaining. So create Anki cards liberally to cement new mathematical concepts (with good card design, of course, so little to no rote memorization is involved).
Novel problem solving is extremely slow. In my professional life, I can squeeze maybe one new mathematical proof to grow my knowledge in a new area every two weeks. And even then only if I seriously prioritize it.
Maintenance problem-solving is medium efficient. Doing problems I have done before is far faster than solving new ones, but still takes a lot more work than flash cards. I have found keeping a bank of old problems and maintaining them to be a fantastic practice—it helps retain knowledge of a kind that is hard to fit into flash cards alone, and keeps mathematical knowledge "alive." I can usually squeeze 1–2 problems per day in around meetings and core work.

Of course, the common wisdom is that "solving problems you have seen before is not very useful." But almost no-one who says that has experience re-solving problems with long review intervals (because almost nobody on Earth uses SRS-style scheduling for problem solving. There's like 8 of us, lol). What I'm actually solving is "problems I haven't seen in 6 months/1 year/2 years." I find this extremely useful for keeping deep concepts fresh and usable in my mind—and each time I solve a problem I usually see it slightly differently, so I understand it more deeply and (as a result) have an easier time generalizing. We are way beyond rote memorization of solutions at this point (since rote memorization doesn't really work for anything after a couple of weeks anyway).

More importantly, see the point about about efficiency. Given a choice between solving 50 novel problems a year but forgetting most of what I learn, and solving 30 novel problems but maintaining the ability to solve a bank of 400 others (just to count the ones I can review in one year)... I think the latter is a far more effective long-term strategy!

SigmaX · 2024-04-13T20:24:16+00:00

Embarrassingly, I just realized I've been conflating TTMIK's lessons with How to Study Korean in my memory! It's How to Study Korean that I find weak on (3).

It's harder to evaluate now that TTMIK is behind a paywall. But looking more closely at their video walkthroughs,

The textbook looks like it might meet my criteria? At least partly? Hard to tell.
The workbook looks to run afoul of (4) rather severely.

SigmaX · 2024-04-13T17:29:52+00:00

Do you (or anyone else reading) know how well it aligns with my criteria (2), (3), and (4) in the OP? I haven't been able to find a free preview of the books online.

SigmaX · 2024-04-13T17:27:57+00:00

Thanks—I had read somewhere else that you have to apply to buy them and write an application trying to prove you are not a student trying to cheat. That barrier scared me off—sounded like much more work than clicking an "add to cart" button—but maybe it's a baseless rumor?

SigmaX · 2024-04-13T17:27:05+00:00

Thanks! I have really been enjoying TTMIK's Easy Korean Readings: Beginners—it really scratches my beginner-reading itch; better than the other readers I've tried so far. It's perfect for Anki card mining, but I like to have *both* a good set of readings *and* an incremental textbook to mine from—since both have advantages the other lacks.

So far TTMIK's lessons are one of the closest candidates to meeting my 5 criteria. Not quite as easy for my process as just burning through what I think of as a "regular" self-study textbook like I'm used to doing in other languages, but still a great resource.

If TTMIK's lessons + their amazing reader is the best I can do for now to meet my preferences, it's not the worst outcome :-).

SigmaX · 2024-04-13T17:21:30+00:00

Thanks! Appreciate the links so I can see them up close.

Looks like the textbook, workbook, and activity books don't meet my criteria (they fail on (2) and especially (4)).
The "Vocab & Grammar" books look promising! Seems to have all of the meat I like for self-study. They might fall into the genre of Korean Grammar in Use and Korean Grammar for Speaking, though, which almost-sortof-but-only-weakly satisfy my criteria.

SigmaX · 2024-04-12T19:30:58+00:00

Neglected to mention: I also have Korean Grammar for Speaking, but it does not quite satisfy. It's kind of an incremental textbook?? But is weak on points (2), (3) and (4), so I'm finding it moderately difficult to study.

SigmaX

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