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ChristianKl comments on Open Thread, May 11 - May 17, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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An idea: auto-generated anki-style flashcards for mathematical notation.
Let's say you struggle reading set builder notation. This system would prompt you with progressively more complicated set builder expressions to parse, keeping track of what you find easy or difficult, and providing tooltips/highlighting for each individual term in the expression. If it were an anki card, the B-side would be how you'd read the expression out in natural language. This wouldn't be a substitute for learning how to use set builder notation, but it would give you a lot of practice in reading it.
There's an easy version of this you could cobble together in an afternoon which has a bunch of randomly-populated templates it renders with MathJax or something. There's a more sophisticated extended project which uses generative grammars, gamified progress visibility and spaced-repetition algorithms.
I've been thinking about putting something like this together, but realistically I don't have the time or the complete skill-set to do it justice, and it would never get finished. Having read this thread about having difficulty in reading mathematical notation, I'm convinced a lot of other people might benefit from it.
ETA: it was probably misguided of me to liken this to Anki decks. I'm not talking about generating a bunch of static flashcards to be used with an existing system like Anki, but something separate that generates dynamic examples of what you're trying to learn, against which you'd record your success at parsing each example in a way similar to Anki. There are, of course, all sorts of problems with memorising specific examples of mathematical notation with an Anki deck, which respondents have prudently picked up on.
It's important to understand the notation before you put it into Anki. Automatically generated cards with mathematical notation that the person doesn't yet understand is asking for trouble.
I may not have presented this well in the original comment. This wouldn't be generating random static cards to put into an Anki deck, but a separate system which dynamically presents expressions made up of known components, and tracks those components instead of specific cards. It seems plausible to restrict these expressions to those composed of notation you've already encountered.
In fact, this could work to its advantage. It also seems plausible to determine which components are bottlenecks, and therefore which concepts are the most effective point of intervention for the person studying. If the user hasn't learned, say, hat-and-tilde notation for estimators, and introducing that notation would result in a greater order of available expressions than the next most bottleneck-y piece of notation, it could prompt the user with "hey, this is hat-and-tilde notation for estimators, and it's stopping you from reading a bunch of stuff". It could then direct them to some appropriate material on the subject.