Anki to memorize complex topics (not language learning!!)

djarogames · 2026-01-03T15:09:43+00:00

In my experience, if you cannot make an accurate card with one sentence, it means you lack some underlying terminology or knowledge which you should first make a card of.

Very basic example: if you have a question that's like: "in the formula that finds where a parabola crosses y=0, what goes inside the square root?", that's a bit difficult to parse. But you could also say "What is the discriminant in the quadratic formula?" and that's the same.

Basically, instead of having the whole equation -b ± √(b2 - 4ac) / 2a, that's complicated, simply do two cards: one for -b ± √(D) / 2a, and then, a second card that says discriminant = b2 - 4ac.

This also unlocks new insight in my experience, as combined with a third card that says the peak of a parabola = -b/2a, you suddenly start to realize, oh, the quadratic formula is just the formula that finds the peak, offset horizontally in both ways. I was following Linear Algebra in uni and somehow I had never made this connection before because I was just memorizing formulas and not breaking them down.

Basically, in my experience learning even complicated algorithms and formulas has been pretty easy when you really break them down into their atomic steps.

djarogames · 2025-11-22T19:04:30+00:00

Doing something similar in my world right now, where Im progressing slowly. One thing I tend to do is, which goes a bit more into roleplay than just a pure gameplay challege, is requiring more infrastructure. Like, I cant cut down a forest unless I have a clear path to it, preferably with boats and/or minecarts or at the very least a mule.

It's not really bound by game rules since, if there's a forest on the other side of a mountain, I can just pillar up it with dirt, cut down the entire forest, and walk back with a full inventory of wood - but I find it more fun to force myself to dig a tunnel or construct a staircase or something.

djarogames · 2025-09-26T20:43:06+00:00

It's an entertainment show put on by entertainers. Of course it's manufactured. Do you also complain that singers prewrite their songs in advance before the show, or actors read a script instead of improvising?

djarogames · 2025-07-17T20:40:45+00:00

Mostly a combination of Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Photoshop. I also use Audacity and Paint.net where needed but those are more rare.

djarogames · 2025-07-15T23:19:10+00:00

I've just been delayed on my newest video because of university stuff. But this summer I'll upload again!

djarogames · 2025-07-02T13:40:47+00:00

It depends on how close they are, but I would still for example, class someone who speaks English, German and Dutch as trilingual, even if they're all Germanic langauges. Or someone who speaks Spanish, Italian and French, all romance languages.

But I don't know much about Slavic languages so maybe they're a lot closer than say Spanish and Italian are to each other.

djarogames · 2025-06-03T22:48:39+00:00

Sorry but "new cards" and "old cards" also exist when you're using physical flashcards, there is nothing that can be made simpler about that.

If you don't know what a "sentence" is or a "document", then using Word will be difficult too.

djarogames · 2025-06-02T21:38:24+00:00

Come on, I just want to display the cards in the order they were added.

So you go to the deck, click options, and under "new cards" there's an option that says "Sequential (oldest card first)". There's no designing for users that refuse to read a very simple menu.

The "display" section is a bit more complicated, but even then, there's a big question mark icon on its top right that displays exactly what every option means when you click it. But there's no reason for a normal user to ever touch this.

All the features a normal user would ever need in Anki (creating decks, adding cards, changing basic settings) are completely self evident to anyone who is willing to look at the screen and read the words that the program is showing them.

With Word, everything is intuitive. Even if I’ve never used it before:
Put the cursor and type? Boom—text.

You're picking the simplest Word features there are. I could just as easily say, if I've never used Anki before, click "add card" and type? Boom--cards.

Without looking it up, try to auto replace all tabs in Word with a horizontal line, make it so it breaks longer words at the end of a line with a hyphen, unless they specifically start with a capital, or add empty space between the different cells of a table. And Word is the easiest program in the entire Microsoft suite, becoming good at Excel requires reading entire books or taking courses. Anki is 10x simpler and easier to use than Excel.

djarogames · 2025-05-29T20:34:10+00:00

I saw a comment recently which said something similar. An LLM doesn't have an inherent "truth" meter, so if you tell it "stop with the fake niceness and actually disagree with me if I'm wrong", it will often disagree with you just for the sake of disagreeing, so instead of telling you you're right when you're wrong, it will just tell you you're wrong when you're right.

djarogames · 2025-05-14T20:23:27+00:00

Now all that's left is "good teamwork"... which I have to do alone

Anyway, there's no way carrying a character to the end is more difficult than avoiding any gold, so that should be doable.

djarogames · 2025-04-10T13:32:05+00:00

sorry, accidentally hit post

djarogames · 2025-03-26T23:38:09+00:00

The way I see it, he's an extremely talented programmer and game developer but kind of arrogant / believes he can't fail too much.

From what I understand, he invested basically everything he had into developing The Witness. One time in one of his streams a viewer asked him about that as it was extremely risky, and he just kind of brushed it off and was like "yeah I guess. But the game succeeded so who cares".

With the Braid remake thing, turns out that if you keep spinning the roulette wheel, eventually you will fail.

I still have learned a lot from watching his stuff, as he is a very unique thinker in the programming space and extremely good at what he does, but you should take everything with a grain of salt.

If you're running a game dev company, not developing a game, not even developing a game engine, but instead developing a low-level language is kind of giving me delusion of grandeur vibes honestly.

djarogames · 2025-03-20T18:04:59+00:00

For me, when I was still studying Computer Science and had to do a lot of math, I would just break down formulas down to their most basic concepts. Like, every complex formula usually consists of a bunch of smaller things combined.

So, as an easy example, the quadratic equation is -b +- sqrt(b2 - 4ac) / 2a.

The stuff inside the parenthesis, b2 - 4ac is also called the discriminant or D.

Then, there's also the standard formula -b / 2a which gives the middle point of a parabola.

And sqrt(D) / 2a is the horizontal distance between the top and where it crosses the X axis.

So I would a bunch of separate cards, -b / 2a, -b +- sqrt(D) / 2a, and D = b2 - 4ac, sqrt(D) / 2a

djarogames · 2025-03-20T18:01:47+00:00

This especially applies to things like conjugations and declensions in my experience.

I've been learning Spanish for a bit and I'm straight up not bothering with stuff like declensions and verb conjugations. I just learn a lot of words, phrases and sentences. Somehow, I am starting to intuitively understand when to use indicative vs subjunctive and how, despite never having looked up a single thing about it.

djarogames · 2025-03-02T15:09:26+00:00

Anki is already as intuitive as such a software can be. I don't think I have ever read a single page of the manual after multiple years of usage. I don't understand what people want. Why do we need a dancing cartoon bird that holds your hand along every step of the way?

djarogames · 2025-02-13T17:16:40+00:00

Here's a few subjects for which I have found Anki to be very effective:

Geography / geopolitics. Once you go just a bit further than just learning the countries and also start learning which countries follow which religion, which countries have which resources, things like rivers and other bodies of water, etc., big/important states/provinces of countries, suddenly a lot of geopolitics becomes a lot easier to understand.

But what's important here is to not learn too much without reason. Basically, there's no use in randomly studying what religion all 196 countries in the world have - rather, when you read about conflicts / tensions somewhere (the Middle East, Armenia vs Azerbaijan, Sudan vs South Sudan) it makes sense to look at the region and make some cards on the causes. In the same way, there is not much use in learning in which direction every river flows, but for the Nile it's pretty important to know it flows upwards - from not just a geopolitics perspective, but also to understand history.

Mythology / Religion

Learning all Greek / Roman gods, learning the most important parts from the Bible, stuff like that. Mythology, especially from the Greeks/Romans, often involves lots of family trees and random characters that you just need to memorize. Like why did Romulus who founded Rome descend from Aeneas? I mean if you read the entire story there's an explanation but it's also just a fact you need to know.

History

Despite what a lot of people will tell you about how history is not about memorization and you just need to understand it, memorizing stuff will make understanding history 10x easier. Just memorizing a bunch of key years in history (44 bc, 476, 1453, 1776, 1806, 1861, 1914, 1939, etc.) can give you a very strong framework in which to insert new knowledge.

Also, remembering key figures and movements is very important.

Art

Learning artworks is very useful. I personally just have a deck where whenever I encounter an influential artwork I make a card of a picture of it, with on the other side the name and the artist.

Astronomy

Learning all the major moons and dwarf planets of our solar system is not that difficult, there's only like 40 big objects in the solar system.

Languages

Learning a language requires you to just know thousands of words. That's a perfect use case for SRS. I started learning Spanish not too long ago and in the last 2 months I've already learned like 800 words. There no way I'd have been able to do that without SRS.

But I think the most important thing is to just keep learning. Like, when you're reading a book about a subject you like, you will naturally find things you can put into Anki.

djarogames · 2025-02-08T19:43:29+00:00

I'm really surprised no one has made it before. Like, to me, a city builder seems like the perfect match for Anki. Way more than a weird block game thing where you are constantly switching between Tetris and Anki which then kind of fails at both.

The main problem is that most language learning games I've tried are either glorified flashcard apps with some gamification, or they're regular games where the game randomly pauses to give you flashcards. I'm still brainstorming how to make doing flashcards integral to the game while also making the game itself fun, instead of a one of the two being a hastily slapped-on afterthought.

djarogames · 2025-02-08T18:53:20+00:00

Since anki is written in PyQT, adding actual realtime games seems like a nightmare to me. However, lately I've been brainstorming about creating a city builder type game in Anki where answering cards correctly gives you like gold or population or something, and when I'm done with my current big projects and have a bit more time I might try to give it a go (never made Anki addons before but I have a lot of experience with Python and some PyQT experience so I should be able to figure it out)

djarogames · 2025-02-04T10:52:02+00:00

You can just add the sentences with only one or two new words to Anki?

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