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PaperclipPerfector  10d ago (text post)   1473 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for April 16, 2025

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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It's been 5 years since I started using Anki (Wow!). For those of you who don't know, Anki is a flashcard software that uses spaced repetition to optimize remembering whatever you put on the flashcard. You can use Anki for just about anything, although higher skill levels are required for certain kinds of cards (math cards, cards that randomize questions, etc.). I primarily use Anki for language learning (Spanish and Italian), but I also have cards for lots of work things (biology, stats, math) and things like peoples birthdays and phone numbers. I'm thinking of making an effort post on my blog/here/r/slatestarcodex about this at some point, but I'm struggling to think of objective measures I could use to show that Anki is actually working/useful/worth it. Thoughts TheMotte?

Anki is one of those things that I get excited for about 3 weeks every 3 years, start going over my abandoned vocabulary desks only to quickly give up again. I find the the mental effort simply too much and the whole thing rather too boring unfortunately.

I once read about a strategy that only adds cards that you find super interesting and want to keep reviewing, and deletes/archives all other cards so you get the benefit of remembering atleast those facts.

Do you need to manually create your cards or are there prepared decks to download?

You can download shared decks from ankiweb.net. I've used some for spanish colloquial phrases, logical fallacies, and basic vocab for Italian and French. Most of my cards are self-made though.

replaced my nightly twitter doom scroll with anki decks for geography, presidents and amendments a few months back. Highly recommend.

Whoa, deck for geography sounds really neat. Is it online anywhere?

Wouldn't the "objective effects" of an Anki deck just be the benefits of spaced repetition? That's well established empirically AFAIK.

I agree it's well established, but the last time I made an effort-post on /r/slatestarcodex there were many people that seemed to doubt that Anki was an effective way to learn things.

There's also the question of long-term effects of spaced-repetition. Ebbinghaus's original experiments certainly didn't go as far out as five years, and neither have any academic studies. The long-term posts I've seen on less wrong and other blogs are also not as glowing. I haven't really experienced this, but I'm not sure how to convey it.

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