Comment by xkfm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xkfm | Hacker News Reader

I use supermemo, and the vast majority of my collection isn't language related. For languages, something like clozemaster, supermemo.com, or premade anki decks/courses are fine.

I still find it odd that the only two groups of people who seem to use the software a lot are med students and language learning enthusiasts.

Supermemo is really buggy, and the website is extremely disorganized, but has a lot of useful information on it. The main reason I use it is its incremental reading function. Essentially, you can import articles, and turn them into flashcards in one swoop, while still having access to the full text via built in search (if you choose).

For example, I just finished importing most of the CSS reference [1]. And it only took me ~10 minutes to open the tabs and import them into Supermemo. Each page will get whittled down into flashcards over the next few weeks.

As others have stated, my srs usage is actually quite a small portion of my day, and extremely high leverage.

The hardest skill to learn is learning how to make flashcards properly [2]. I almost exclusively rely on cloze deletions now.

I do my repetitions in the morning when my memory is still fresh.

[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference

[2] https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules

There's a plugin for Anki for incremental reading: https://github.com/luoliyan/incremental-reading

(Though I'm not sure how the internal database structure works with that, I think you can't save the whole text along with a deck instead of individual notes―but maybe addons can change that.)

I tried it awhile ago, and it didn't work well, but I'll try it again. Incremental reading is kind of finicky to get right. Incremental reading is the real draw of these programs for me, and Supermemo (despite it's flaws) is kind of the only one that has a decent implementation of it.

Ah, then the plugin likely won't work for you, as Alki is already not a paragon of usability for editing, and since the plugin is bolted on the existing app, it probably results in an inferior experience for such an interface-sensitive task, compared to a specialized app.

I just thought that it might be of interest for people already using Anki and curious about incremental reading.

That's my story as well. I tried the Anki plugin and didn't find it as per my taste.

Now incremental reading for me is a multi-monitor and multipass approach. One monitor has Anki, the other has the thing I'm reading. I keep on reading and keep noting down questions.

I've also come to realise that the context is totally different when I frame a question during reading, and when I revisit the same question later. A lot of times I have to clean-up the question: perhaps add a little more context, change wording etc. so it becomes a bit easier to answer.

I tried it and it did not work well as well - I have been thinking about building a piece of software to solve this issue because I find incremental reading so useful (potentially)

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