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ReactiveJelly

What the hell is a prompt?

I read a couple pages of the friendly article, waiting and waiting for the missing vocab word to be filled in.

I reluctantly opened the link that was an introduction to spaced repetition.

I opened the Wikipedia article for spaced repetition.

I searched on DuckDuckGo for "Anki prompt" and "Anki what is a prompt"

I opened the Wikipedia article for Anki.

What the hell is a prompt? Is it the question on the flashcard? Does Anki show you pop-ups periodically? There's no onboarding ramp for someone who doesn't know what spaced repetition is to read this article about 'prompts'

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Prompts is a piece of jargon, unfortunately confusing but crucial to anyone trying to memorize anything using an SRS. A prompt could take the form “What is a X” or be a blank “the dog ____ over the log” or just be a foreign word like 中国. So in some ways its a more general concept than a “question” but calling it the front side of a flashcard is probably clearer.

After checking the Wikipedia disambiguation page, I'm assuming that SRS means Spaced Repetition Software here?

Clicking through to the next article, "spaced repetition" itself seems to be a flash card based learning technique.

I wish more people would define the uncommon abbreviations and terms they use for the convenience of their readers.

The problem is always forgetting what is uncommon jargon and what your readers probably already know. We all have our bubbles (tech folk notoriously so).

Ironically the solution already exists but no one uses it because of the editorial overhead: hyperlinking text to their definitions. Also, there are many ‘types’ of linking and they all look the same (blue underlined text by default). I’d love a more subtle “context” link to be natively supported. Maybe one day the semantic web will save us all...

It is not a flash card learning technique, but it is pretty fundamental to how we learn and retain information.

SRS simply takes advantage of how spaced repetition works.

I’m not even sure if it’s particularly jargon-y but it might be more familiar as a verb: “When the witness paused, the officer prompted her to continue, saying “Any detail, no matter how small, might help us find the kidnapper.’”

It's the "front" of a flashcard.

The article has example prompts on its own content, served with the author's platform Orbit, I found these to be a useful (though meta) illustration of what he means by prompts.

The word “prompt” has nothing to do with SRS, I learned it in grade school English class. The “prompt” is the thing given by the lesson to prompt you to write onwards. Although to be fair I didn’t actually find this definition in the two dictionaries I checked, which was very surprising to me.

From the context, it's probably questions.

Creating and generating good questions and answers is a skill. Too vague, you don't know if your answer is incorrect or not. If your answer require too much, you're never going to get the answer right, and so forth.

"Questions" is too specific, as prompts are often not actually phrased as questions. E.g. cloze deletions, where you fill in a missing word, or vocabulary for language learning, where the prompt is a word and the answer is the translation.

Are you new to spaced repetition or Anki? I would recommend reading http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html.

your link doesnt have the word prompt anywhere, so I'm not sure it addresses OPs question.

I went to read the article expecting it to be about making command line prompts that would help users remember them by acting as spaced repetition lessons.

I was very wrong.

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