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Comment by mnky9800n | Hacker News Reader

I never really understood the point of anki outside of vocabulary learning. I would be happy to have it explained to me. Even when learning a language, I found anki to be a bit useless since often times the grammar was as important to learn (e.g., any language with genders and cases). Like I guess I don't see how anki would help me be the scientist I am today, how it might help me learn new topics that I am interested in to pursue new research directions. I am not against anki, I simply don't see how it would benefit me although if you could explain it to me I am all ears.

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You might find this article by Michael Nielsen interesting: https://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html

In particular I liked the section partway* through the article where he talks about using Anki to get up to speed on the AlphaGo paper for an article he was writing for Quanta.

* Do a Ctrl-F for "AlphaGo"

He also writes here about how to use spaced repetition to see through a piece of mathematics: https://cognitivemedium.com/srs-mathematics

It's great for learning the Ham radio test answers (publicly available), Major System, and NATO Phonetic Alphabet. I did not particularly enjoy Anki when I first tried it for Japanese-learning. I also found using it on my phone (AnkiDroid from F-Droid) worked better since I could grind it out anywhere I was. I never used their sync thing, IIRC it's proprietary. I also had success once using it to study for a technical interview (tech support, not programming, mostly shell commands and important paths).

I stopped using it a couple phones ago when the app seemed to break after trying to copy over my data. I've had several incidences since where I regretted not knowing the Major System well anymore, as I ran into a long number it'd be useful to memorize for a bit. I mostly used public decks I downloaded, though I did make my own for the interview study.

I use a spaced repetition system for learning Russian vocabulary. But tbh I find speaking in Russian and interacting in Russian to be better at learning words because they get associated with memories.

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