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What (not necessarily LW-related) things do people find useful to Anki? (Or have Ankied but they turned out not to be useful, etc.)
Some things I have:
the NATO phonetic alphabet
mass of Earth/Moon/Sun, radius of Earth/Moon
log_2 of 1.25, 1.5 and 1.75, and log_10 of 2 through 9
The 68-95-99.7 rule
Some things that I noticed I had to keep looking up: which is which between SQL left and right joins; the argument order to python's
datetime.datetime.strptimefunction; the spellings of irrelevant and separateI think only the latter group have had any use worth speaking of so far, though the third and fourth are things that I have more than once wanted to know and not known. The first two may just be almost-useless (though I like knowing them, so not necessarily worthless).
Things I kind of want to remember but suspect they wouldn't be worth it include other alphabets, and locations of countries/US states/UK counties/London underground stops (the aggregate may be useful, but there's an awful lot of cards there).
If you are going to memorize any logs, you should only bother memorizing logs of primes, since you can add those together to get other numbers.
This took me a minute. Just to unpack for the dense ones like me:
log(a * b) = log(a) + log(b)
so if you memorize log(7) and log (11), log(77) is easy as pi.
Pharmacy stuff *Brand & generic name pairs for prescription drugs. *Classes & mechanisms of action for prescription drugs. *1st line therapies for various diseases. *Etc.
Mandarin Chinese *Mostly just doing vocab at the moment, but have used it for listening (MP3 clips), writing, & grammar.
Misc work stuff *Names of new employees (they're Chinese names, so difficult to remember) *Who is the contact person for what (eg if you want a new email account, you need to contact Mrs. Wu YiJun for approval)
Background: I've been using Anki for about 2.5 years. I have done the following:
The numbers in parentheses are my rough impression of usefulness and/or enjoyment on a possibly familiar scale of -10 to +10. When I was first getting used to Anki and only using it for English, the usefulness was around (-1), for reasons I can get into if anyone's interested.
My biggest problems with Anki are first that it's a pain to input cards in a useful way, and second that for some things (e.g. hiragana and katakana) a more structured format would be strictly better.
I'm currently using anki just for English, so I'd be interested in what you found harmful.
It was a few different things, and it only lasted for the first month or so of using Anki. During that time I occasionally had moments in conversation when I grasped for one of the words in my deck, when normally I would smoothly talk around the idea with simpler words. Sometimes I succeeded in incorporating a new word into my speech, but the usage was awkward. Sometimes my interlocutor didn't know what the new word meant, and not only did I have to explain in simpler terms, I came off as out of touch and a bit of a know-it-all. It was a little uncomfortable at the time, but the harmful effects did fade as I became more aware of which words were ok to say in what contexts.
The primary benefit has been a better understanding of the written word rather than a larger productive vocabulary.
My more recent failed attempt to get an Anki habit going involved using Vim and a text file to input cards, instead of the tedious Anki GUI. I write lines of three tab-separated sections into the deck text file, with the first being the question, the second the answer and the third the card tags. Anki's import will ignore lines that start with # as comments. This lets me do batch editing of the cards using the macros, search-and-replace and block editing functions in the text editor.
Problems with this approach is that I need the Anki software to preview my Latex formatting and I need to write raw HTML into the import if I want to use formatting or images. Anki should support card text with newlines if it's enclosed in quotes, but I don't seem to have cards using this in my example deck. Another problem is that Anki uses the question field of the card as a primary key and keeps the old deck when importing, so if I edit a question in one of the cards, I'll either need to completely regenerate my deck from the txt source or manually delete the card with the old question from the Anki database.
As a Vim-specific tweak, my text file has the modeline
This disables physical autowrap of long lines, ensures that pressing tab emits physical tab characters and makes long physical lines visually wrap at the word break and indent the continuation of the physical line on the next visual line by two spaces so it's easy to tell apart from the next item.
The text file approach does not store the review data for cards, to if I should lose the Anki database, I could reimport my deck but would have to go through all the cards with zero review data. More experienced Anki users can maybe tell how big a problem this would be.
For all this interest into making the thing technically nice to use, still haven't found a suitably big and growable set of stuff I want to memorize to bother with the habit.
Using Antisuji's system:
I've considered adding all of my family's birthday's to the list but 1) I'm too embarrassed to ask 2) Calenders are an easier solution. Has anyone else done something similar?
Also, indirectly, I teach a class of about 25~ students every quarter and while I don't put them in a deck, I make sure that I'm exposed to the entire classes' names in a roughly spaced repetition way (First class I attempt to say everyone's name twice, grade different assignments at the appropriate spacing and 'reset' my schedule for mistaken names). This has caused my students to respect me as a teacher much more (No other Teaching Assistant knows everyone's name!) and slightly deters people from being quiet when they don't understand something (as I can just call out their name).
Next time (right now?), why don't you try the students using anki and see how it compares? Does the school give you their pictures ahead of time?
There's no pictures and the first time I get the dossier is on the day I teach my class. It's slightly premature optimization to start an anki before the first week of TAing, because about 5 or so students shuffle in an out during the first two or so weeks. Currently though, I'm applying for a physics major only class where there would be pictures and the class size is much more static.
Thanks for suggesting an out and out comparison. It hadn't really occurred to me to do this if I do land the other job.
I don't really see much use for Anki for everyday life, honestly, because I don't have too many things I need to memorize right now.
However, some people at the LessWrong DC group have started learning Lojban, and Anki is just the biggest possible stick to hit the "learn words in a new language" problem with. I've learned a lot of words just doing that for a week. I still have to learn grammar concepts, but having a bigger vocabulary at my fingertips is pretty great.
The street grid layout for the city you live in, if relevant. Not very hard and allows you to understand locations much more easily if you live in a city where people speak in terms of cross streets. Don't go overboard trying to remember places you'll never go and other exceptional situations.
Mnemonics
Using anki to memorize a complete 3 digit peg list allows you to do some pretty impressive memory feats, including recalling long lists in order, and memorizing really long numbers.
What kind of images do you use for the pegs?
Many people use the Major Method to come up with peg words/images so that the number to word relationship is nonrandom and easier to commit to memory. Here is an example of how it should work.
I choose to use peg words that are objects and not abstract verb/ideas. The number 201 can be 'nest' or 'incite', both of which satisfy the major mnemonic method, but using 'nest' as your peg word is better because it is an object that you can better picture in your head and create interactions between it and other peg objects, to create a string of events.
I've got a major system peg list of a 100 English words, but even there it was hard to come up with a word for a concrete object for all the combinations. Can you really find concrete object names for all of the 1000 sound combinations? There's an online list, but it has words that aren't concrete objects and several of the words don't seem to actually encode right (eg. its word for 55 is 'hello', which has only a single L-sound, and isn't an object. Mine is 'lily')
This is what I did, and its far from complete, I took the rememberg list and copied it to a txt file and then uploaded it to an anki deck, then I went through each peg word to make sure I like it, if not I replace it.
Rememberg uses the typographic system which is why 'hello' is is 55. I personally prefer the phonetic system. Also, I wouldn't like 'hello', as 'lily' is so much better.
Some stuff I used Anki for:
A couple years ago I had used Anki with some pre-made decks (German, Lesswrong sequences), but reviewing it started feeling like a chore, and I stopped. It's easier to stay focused with cards I made myself.
When I'm in Japan I jot down all the phrases I learn on a piece of paper, and then later on enter them into Anki (I also have a running list of "things I would like to be able to say").
A related question: What sort of time per card have long-term Anki users experienced?
As a first "project" with Anki, I've been learning english vocabulary. Half are new words, and half are words I recognized but understood only vaguely. I have 2300 cards, and spent around 18 hours reviewing and 8 hours collating cards, which is around 40 seconds per card. Three months out, I'm reviewing ~30 cards a day in ~2 minutes.
I feel like a fool when I think that I've spent 26 hours studying vocabulary this summer, but I'm pretty pleased with the equivalent "40 seconds to learn a new word". More generally, the cumulative time spent on any habit will sound pyschotic when quoted over long time periods: 4 minutes a day is 24 hours over a year.
CFA exam: There are many dry facts to be learnt.
Driving Theory Test: What different roadsigns mean and so on.
Sports teams: I don't care about sports but it's handy to be able to understand colleagues' conversations.
Genocides: Because it is sad nobody even remembers most of them.
Latin phrases: A part of my education I missed.
The Lord's Prayer: Because going to hell is a bad idea.
Facts from books I have read: Because otherwise I'd just forget them in a year.
Small exponents: e.g. 6^3.
If you live in London, the tube map can become suffiiciently memorised to serve for pegs in itself.
London cabbies probably have a great foundation for building memory palaces.