Oh interesting, I have never seen Anki (https://apps.ankiweb.net/) being used for large blocks of source code.
Anki is an open source application (desktop + mobile) for spaced repetition learning (aka flashcards). It's a very popular tool among people who want to learn languages (and basically anything else you want to remember). There are many shared decks (https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/). Creating and formatting cards is also possible and pretty easy.
If you are planning to learn a language or anything else give Anki a try. I used it for all of my language learning efforts. With this least my vocabulary is rocking solid.
I've been experimenting with Anki recently. I loaded up a deck of popular fonts, with the goal being to memorize them to the point where I could recognize them in the real world. Each card contains the sentence, "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog," and you have to identify what font it's written in.
The first day was really tough; I missed cards over and over again. 20 new cards (the default) is probably too many for this type of study. But I kept at it, once per day, and today (a week later) I can recognize nearly every font in the deck, and the ones that I have trouble with are very similar to other fonts (which is a useful thing to know in its own right; you can start to group fonts into "families" with a common ancestor). Pretty cool!
There's just one problem: so far, this hasn't translated into any ability to recognize fonts in the real world. I can think of a few reasons why. First, there are a LOT of fonts out there; even the "most popular" ones don't show up all that frequently. This is especially true for business logos, which like to use unusual fonts to make themselves stand out. Secondly, I think studying by memorizing a single sentence has caused me to "overfit!"
For example, there's a font that I can instantly recognize (Minion Pro) by how the 'T' and 'h' look together at the start of the sentence. I don't pay attention to anything else about the font, because that single feature is enough to distinguish it from the rest of the deck. And this turns out to be true for most fonts: Today Sans has a funny-looking 'w', Syntax has a funny-looking 'x', etc. So if I see a logo written in Today Sans, but it doesn't contain a 'w', I can't recognize it! Similarly, because the cards only contain the one sentence, which is entirely lowercase except for the 'T', I can't identify any fonts from an uppercase writing sample. What I can do is say, "Hmm, I don't know what that font is, but it definitely has a lot in common with Myriad..." and then I look it up and find out that the actual font is Warnock, which was designed by the same guy (Robert Slimbach) who designed Myriad.
So yeah, Anki is pretty cool, but an unintended side effect is that it can give you a striking sense of how a classification algorithm "feels" from the inside. :)
I would be careful with what you put in Anki. There is only so much stuff that you can memorize outside of stuff you'd learn from normal life, because the time you have to devote to flashcarding is kind of limited (except if it's something that excites you it creates more time). I think generally when you choose to make the investment to add cards to your Anki deck you should have a really concrete use case and I don't see how you'd save time over the course of an entire life for your font project.
There are a lot of fonts out there (~50,000 families according to random Quora people). Their distribution is probably power-law-like even if you discount the ones that are preinstalled on major platforms. It might make sense to recognize a few if you want to be able to really deeply discuss the difference in how they are used for design, but just recognizing them doesn't seem like the right way to gain that understanding. If you repeatedly perform a task where you have to recognize a font, learning only the top 100 won't help you much since it will eventually become pretty obvious. If you don't do that task, then why train for it instead of looking it up as necessary?
My thinking on "what's worth flashcarding" is that there are two major categories where it makes sense. First, if you need to remember a bunch of specific facts and you will need to recall them more quickly than they can be looked up. This is the case for things like tests, but there are also reasonable possibilities for this in real work (for example, if you are a programmer you may know you are going to need to look up the parameter ordering of a standard library method that you use only once a month, or you could memorize it).
The second is where you are using the flashcards as a scaffold, but the actual knowledge is something that references or brings together the facts that are contained in the flashcards. Recognizing fonts fits into this category, but I have a hard time imagining that actually recognizing them is the knowledge that is most efficient. Instead maybe you should be studying the major categories of fonts, features of fonts, or something that would help you make quicker decisions for whatever the real task is. I used to be able to recognize a lot of fonts and it's basically only useful as a parlor trick.
Although if you are new to design then learning the top 20 or whatever could be helpful to just have a basic fluency with Arial vs Times New Roman vs Comic Sans, so you have a shared vocabulary to discuss with others. "It's like Times New Roman but more suited for headlines and all caps" for example.
This is the weird confluence of work I've done at multiple companies (in one case I basically implemented a SRS like Anki with applications to finance exams, and in another I did a lot of work with fonts for a laser cutting design editor).
Thanks for the detailed reply. I agree that this isn't the best use of Anki; I did it more as a way of testing how effective spaced repetition is. And in that respect, the experiment was a success, so now I feel confident using this system to memorize other things I care about. The ML insight was just a nice surprise. :)
Michael Nielsen just this month published an essay on using spaced repetition (and especially Anki) to augment long-term memory. It seems to be part of his work with YC Research.
I highly recommend it if this kind of thing interests you. It gives a solid overview of the theory and practical lessons from his daily use of Anki over the last few years:
Thanks for sharing. I agree with his advice about keeping the flashcards short. It is easy to get into a flow while answering the cards, but when one of them is too long, it disrupts the flow. Try breaking down larger cards into smaller bits of information.
I don't think Anki supposed to be used that way. Each card should be recallable under 10 seconds. So it should be only few lines of content. More content you put in one Anki card, it will take you more time and eventually you will stop looking at the card. A failure scenario.
Yeah that might be the reason I have never seen this. But whatever works for oneself is fine and worth to share.
There are quite nice deck ideas:
+ Facts about friends
+ Standard Library of your programming language
(https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3937203746)
+ Bird Voices
(https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2088996377)
Yeah, I used Anki a ton in college, and doing things like this was always futile and frustrating. Flashcards are fantastic for learning short bouts of things, but not large structures like many lines of code.
Additionally I'd say even if you succeeded in memorizing it this way, it's not making you a better problem solver, which is what actually matters for that particular subject; you're just (temporarily) better at regurgitating some lines of code.
I agree in general, but it seems like there might be a particularly constrained situation where it makes sense. I can usually look at a medium-sized block of code and suss out its intent in a short amount of time, even if I don't know all of the details about its behavior or how it works. A deck of flashcards curated from examples like that might be useful for recognizing the higher-level patterns that drive that intuition.
I wouldn't really know for sure; I took the long way 'round (time and experience) for gaining that skill. But it at least seems plausible. Of course, the linked article isn't this.
The problem I have with using anki for 2+ years is I get too lazy to make cards. It feels like tedious data entry work, I'm wandering if I'm the only one that feels this way? I have to run anki, open the add item panel, figure out how to format the card / phrase the question, pick a deck, pick a card type, move the mouse over click tag, enter tag, write it down, press enter, minimize the application. I would to do this several times throughout the day since I learn things inconsistently. My productivity tanks when I use anki. Because I also have many other tools for jotting notes, emails, slack, blog, etc. I already tried practically all the anki plugins out there too
This is mostly for computer science / programming. If I used anki for learning a language, I would just mass create all my cards at one time or use a curated deck.
In my experience creating cards (or writing down the words into a notebook) is an essential part of the process. I'm not sure about the exact mechanics of it, but for me writing a word implants it in my memory much deeper than just reading it.
I totally get that too, I write/draw things down and find it helps remembering things easier. Especially math. But I find the time it takes to transfer that thought onto anki is so painstakingly slow. Anki doesn't even have a dedicated shortcut key for minimizing / maximizing the add card panel either, at least for windows.
don't get me wrong here I love using anki and ankidroid but adding cards is a PITA. I add cards only on desktop anki because neither ankidroid nor ankiwebapp support easy-image formatting. But I do add cards from ankidroid if its a picture of some handwritten / whiteboard drawings I've made.
I've been sort of meta-learning for the past couple of weeks, reading about study methods and note taking and memory techniques, etc. and one prevailing theme regardless of the method is that repetition and rephrasing are key to internalise the information.
E.g. you learn and retain the information far more efficiently if you take the route of read -> write note -> create flashcards from the note. As opposed to autogenerating the flashcards from the source material, for example.
The process of formulating the note first and then formulating the flashcards means you have to actually think about the material in two stages instead of just performing data entry.
In my experience it doesn't take all that much time, and if you're really interested in learning a topic is it unreasonable to expect that you have to spend say 10% longer with any given book or article to perform this review process? If you spend a bit of time up front creating a structured approach and stick to it, it'll become very quick. Here's an interesting article as a reference: https://robertheaton.com/2018/06/25/how-to-read/
Anki is an open source application (desktop + mobile) for spaced repetition learning (aka flashcards). It's a very popular tool among people who want to learn languages (and basically anything else you want to remember). There are many shared decks (https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/). Creating and formatting cards is also possible and pretty easy.
If you are planning to learn a language or anything else give Anki a try. I used it for all of my language learning efforts. With this least my vocabulary is rocking solid.