Anki

2025-01-01 Tags: software

Nicky Case has a great "explorable" explanation of the science of spaced repition, called how to remember anything forever-ish.

The general idea is that you want to study flash cards as little as possible, both to not take up all your time, and based on the science of encoding things to long term memory. With spaced repitition, every time you review a flash card and get it right, the app schedules it for review again further and further out.

Anki is a desktop and mobile app that's one of the most popular formats for it. I've been told that a lot of med school students use it extensively.

It's really great for anything that can be broken up into small reviewable chunks, like factoids and vocabulary and grammar rules - I've used it for memorizing phone numbers and addresses and a lot for spanish vocab.

It's not as useful for putting together complex ideas and concepts, and not at all a replacement for actual language practice.

Final other recommendation, I've really enjoyed the book Fluent Forever's recommendations for flash card structure - avoid english translations and focus on pronunciation (downloading audio clips of each word) and pictures, to try skipping translating in your head while speaking. It is more work though to design your own cards and download audio and pictures, but that work is half the value of encoding the connection between the words and the concepts.

Anyways Anki is great! And free!