Comments on: Anki Review

By: midonnay

midonnay — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 00:12:57 +0000

thanks alot Damien for making such an awesome program….

I’ve been using flash card programs for year for learning….

first JFC for japanese, then stackz….

been hearing about ANKI for yonks and finally tried it about a year ago…

it has been a revelation…

now I use it to study everything

physics, electronics, java/python/c++ programming, operating systems etc as well as languages

the cram function btw is useful for studying just before exams….

sometimes you get anxious that you haven’t learnt everything properly and the cram function puts you at rest by letting you quickly go through all your notes.

By: John

John — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 13:30:40 +0000

I tried various flashcard programs before discovering Anki, which I now consider to be by far the best of any I have tried. I love Anki, and it is free!

My concern is, however, that with all the criticisms that Damien receives from people who (perhaps) do not understand as well as he does how memory retention works, is that he will be tempted to lose his focus. That he will attempt to have Anki address these criticisms, and in the process make it a less effective memory learning tool.

“Study on demand,” sounds like a good idea, but my own experience in trying to memorize things by incessantly repeating them, is that it is frustratingly ineffective. I remember repeating a new word I was trying to learn for an entire hour — only to have completely forgotten it anyway by the next day. (I tried this with several different words, with the same result.) Very ineffective use of time, I discovered. Of course, “Study on demand” is not nearly that extreme, but it seems to be a step in that direction, and, to my perspective, would not fit into Anki’s approach. (Just my two cents.)

Thanks so much for all the hard work you have put into Anki, Damien!

John

By: K. M. Lawson

K. M. Lawson — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 01:09:38 +0000

Thanks for the link and the kind words!

By: Argancel

Argancel — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:18:46 +0000

Hi Lawson, just wanted to give you a big thank you for your review. I can see that you have a lot of experience in the “spaced repetition systems” area and was delighted to come up with a site entirely dedicated to flash cards.

I made a link to this article on my own review of Anki that you can find on my blog here. It is in french site so you might not understand it all. But it has pagerank 4 so I guess it will help to raise your audience.

I will check out the rest of your articles when I’ll have some time.

Cheers!

By: K. M. Lawson

K. M. Lawson — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 01:37:17 +0000

Hi Michelle,

It is true there are some serious design and usability issues with Anki. As you say the functionality itself is great.

On the other hand, as you note, he has worked a lot on it and he is very responsive to user input. I urge you to email the developer and make clear some of your frustrations so that he knows there are potential users out there who also feel the way I feel. It is a shame because this is truly the most powerful app out there (for Mac at least).

By: Michelle

Michelle — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:15:40 +0000

I have the new version of Anki downloaded (0.9.9.7.5) and was a bit shocked. It’s been a while since I used Anki the last time. And ever since the developer has done a lot of work on it. I was not shocked about the functionality, but about the interface. Back then when I first used Anki, it already was a very confusing interface, but somehow I finally worked my way through it. And now it’s like I have to re-learn the interface structure again. A lot of things are extremly hidden and placed in menus where they don’t belong at all. I guess the main issue about Anki is its usability. The functionality itself is great — when you find out where it’s hidden and how it works…

By: K. M. Lawson

K. M. Lawson — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:25:35 +0000

Mark – As my review probably suggests, there are many things about the interface in Anki that really frustrate me too and are the reason I still favor iFlash in many ways (to be reviewed), but I think you will find Anki is much more flexible than you think. You can, for example, set the “new words per day” to be extremely high, effectively removing that concern.

By: Ed Bradburn

Ed Bradburn — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 10:19:41 +0000

I just wanted to add my 2 cents (or, indeed, roubles) after using Anki for a few days for my Russian language learning.

It has one killer feature that Mnemosyne (and maybe iFlash?) lacks: you can type in the answer to have it checked.

This is a huge timesaver, since it eliminates having a second app (like Notepad++) open all the time, plus you really can see whether you missed something (like the tricky soft sign in Russian) instantly and without error.

If Anki only had advanced field spec’ing/card layout facilities like Dingsbums it would be nearly perfect.

By: Mark

Mark — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 04:10:35 +0000

Michael: I understand that spaced repetitions is very powerful, and I’m constantly looking for a piece of software that can help me organise myself in this way, but I’ve yet to find anything that works in the way I’d like to. As I understand it Anki forces the user to study on it’s learning curve a limited number of cards per day. This doesn’t work for me (I’ve tried Anki and found it too fiddly – I can’t imagine using a piece of clunky software like this every day).
I currently use iFlipr on my iPod touch. I can create sets as I please with this and take control of them. There is a Leitner type system for organising the learning process which works well over the short term. It has lots of limitations however, but is so simple to use, and I’m in control of the process, so I’m more than happy with it (though it does lack a long term forgetting curve system using spaced repetition).

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 22:52:40 +0000

Mark, I think you may have serious misconceptions about how spaced repetition works.

If you are using words “in normal context of living” then great; the next time you review those words in Anki you’ll grade them “easy” and Anki will take account of them. It’s that simple.

Spaced repetition doesn’t need or force you to “avoid coming into contact with knowledge” for peak efficiency. That’s just nonsense.

I also live in China and having programs like Anki and Mnemosyne to help me memorize plus automatically organize thousands of hanzi in my studies has been fantastic.