Here are some practical notes for my own personal usage.
1 Theory
More on the theory and background has been written by others. An example of integrating flashcards into an intensive learning system for theorems and mathematics is here.
For a virtuosic example of integrating flashcards into a self-learning project, see Isaak’s 12 Months of Mandarin and Methods of Mandarin.
To do: add theory of anchors, phonetic encodings, optimal scheduling for Spaced Repetition…
2 Scheduling algorithms
FSRS seems to be good. See open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki: A modern Anki custom scheduling based on Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler algorithm. Note the heartwarming origin story:
Hi, I’m Jarrett Ye, the creator of FSRS. FSRS is a highly efficient spaced repetition algorithm used by many people worldwide, saving considerable time. It applies cognitive science and educational technology to help students learn more effectively.
However, most Chinese high school students are still forced to study “611” — from 6 AM to 11 PM, six days a week. Tragically, many students have committed suicide or developed serious mental health issues.
The 611Study. ICU project aims to stop this abusive study model and protect students’ lives and health.
As a former Chinese student, I experienced overtime study and sleep deprivation during high school. Anki saved my life. I want to use this algorithm to save more lives, but most Chinese high schools still prevent students from using it.
I hope this project can raise awareness and help more students.
Wow! This author deserves your citations (Su et al. 2023; Ye, Su, and Cao 2022).
I believe this is now Anki-native as per fsrs4anki/docs/tutorial.md.
3 Minimal pair tests for learning language sounds
See How to Teach Old Ears New Tricks:
With a handful of recordings […] (freely accessible through Web sites such as Rhinospike and Forvo) and with testing software such as Anki, you can build powerful ear-training tools for yourself. These are tools that, after just a few hours of use, will make foreign words easier to hear and easier to remember, and they may give you the edge you need to finally learn the languages you’ve always wanted to learn.
Fascinatingly,
Some of the best data on this phenomenon come from studies of Japanese adults learning to hear the difference between r and l. Why the Japanese? For one, because the r-versus-l problem is notorious; Japanese speakers tend to do little better than chance when attempting to tell their rocks from their locks. Second, they know they have this difficulty, and many will happily volunteer to come into a research laboratory— whereas English speakers do not care much about learning the difference between Hindi’s four nearly identical-sounding d’s.
More on Minimal Pair Tests here.
4 Anki
My workhorse tool. A powerful albeit geeky option. See the Anki website. Anki is open source and has a large community of users and developers. It is very flexible and a little bit ugly.
4.1 AI Card generation
-
A turn-key, all-in-one solution, Smart Notes: it lives inside Anki, churns out example sentences, translations, mnemonics, images and TTS at the click of a button, and even bulk-processes whole decks for USD10/mo (Standard plan covers ~10 M LLM chars, ~675 min TTS, 1 000 images)
-
AnkiConnect enables external applications such as Yomichan to communicate with Anki over a simple HTTP API. Its capabilities include executing queries against the user’s card deck, automatically creating new cards, and more.
Useful infrastructure that makes it easy to programmatically edit your flashcards without building a whole new plugin.
AnkiAIUtils: AI-Powered Visual Mnemonics for Anki Cards / thiswillbeyourgithub/AnkiAIUtilsThis one augments troublesome cards with extra AI mnemonics. Their image mnemonics feature (
illustrator.py) is the AI+Anki feature that I want, but it didn’t work for me, so I forked the code and made some changes, and learned the code itself is low-quality and seems AI generated. It is still clunky after my attempted fixes. I appreciate the author’s willingness to share their ideas, but also I prefer to pay someone money to use a smoother service rather than spend any more hours on this.ValeriiZhyla/anki-cards-ai-generator
This one generates new flashcards for you using LLMs. Especially supports German and English languages and knows about CERF language levels
Anki AI - Enhance Your Flashcards with ChatGPT and other LLMs / rroessler1/anki-ai-field-generator
Interactively adds fields from LLMs to your cards inside the app.
5 Mnemosyne
Mnemosyne aims to be a user-friendly flash card program, with a clean, deceptively simple interface that does not require you to wrap your head around complicated concepts before you can start using it. At the same time, under the hood it is very powerful, and its architecture allows infinite extensibility and customisibility through plugins and a scripting API, for the benefit of power users.
Source code here. Mnemosyne also looks good but I have never used it, preferring the Anki community and iOS support. Mnemosyne is desktop-and-android only.
These days it resembles Anki closely.
6 Rember
Rember — Create amazing flashcards with AI
Rember is a simple yet powerful spaced repetition system designed to help you remember more.
Manually creating flashcards is tedious and time-consuming. Rember uses AI to create cards automatically from your content. Easily tweak them in our editor to make them just right.
USD8/month. At time of writing it does not support importing cards from other systems, and I have a years-long investment in my Anki cards.