I love Andy Matuschak! His podcast with Dwarkesh was so enlightening and his blog is great as well. He's one of those people whose work I go back and read every couple of months and I always learn something new
After single-fact memorization, concept-driven cards force retrieval of multiple related ideas and apply them to real-world critical thinking.
Examples:
- Cloze: "Swelling of the optic disc is called [c1::papilledema]"
Concept-based:
- Front: "Papilledema (optic disk swelling) - use the pathophysiology to explain what situations you would see this in generally."
- Back: "Anything causing central retinal vein drainage ↓ (e.g., high ICP or central retinal vein occlusion)."
- Extra field:
"""
Anything causing central retinal vein drainage ↓ (e.g., high ICP or central retinal vein occlusion) → back-up of blood into the capillaries of the optic nerve/disk → hydrostatic pressure ↑ → transudate of fluid leaking across the capillaries → optic nerve/disk swelling (optic disk swelling = papilledema).
Recall that the optic nerve (and thus the optic disk) drains into the central retinal vein, which ultimately drains into the cerebral circulation.
"""
In general I agree with this, and there is definitely something a bit insidious about optimizing the entire process so that you are on a perfectly calibrated i+1 treadmill.
But, for some languages with different alphabets and roots, it really is practically impossible to get any meaning from a magazine article in your target language at a beginner level. So getting out of this beginner phase as quickly as possible is really appealing. And if you can find text at this level that is interesting then that really helps.
I really like your comment about i-1 learning, I'd never thought of it like that.
I agree that they could be complementary, but I think there's a not-yet-made tool that goes even beyond this, where you are interacting with an LLM that has an Anki-like backend of some kind, keeping track not only the number of mistakes but of what kind of mistakes you made and when, so that it can later bringing up the card in a more natural way.
I had the exact same experience. The more work I did up front on a card, the better I was able to remember. When I was learning the kanji cards, I would take the time to draw them out in a special notebook while thinking carefully about the different components, and it really helped with retention.
I did not do this with many cards though, hoping that they would eventually stick.
I think in general the more you engage with the thing you are doing, the better you remember. Even when reading or listening to a lecture or whatever. Maybe what I'm proposing here is that by making it dynamic you create a system where deeper engagement is necessary.
So I definitely agree that this is 100% the best way to use Anki, that's why I wrote the line about "Writing cards that trigger memories of experiences I had in the real world always produced better cards."
I couldn't give you a percentage, but I made most of my own cards, including all of those 2000+ kanji cards. There's lots of debate in the language learning community about vocab cards or sentence cards, and generally the ideal is the sentence cards, as it provides the context that helps you use is naturally (as opposed to literal translations from your native language).
> I still need to work out different variations of the concept to understand it, and that's not something that Anki can help with.
I agree that sentences are generally superior to vocab. Vocab cards are extremely problematic once you go beyond beginner level, because words can (and often do) have multiple translations in both directions. This could be because there are multiple words meaning the same thing, or because a word has multiple meanings.
For example if the English prompt is "watermelon" - are you supposed to recall the Italian word cocomero, anguria, or melone d'aqua (all of which mean watermelon)? If the English prompt is "bank" - is that a place you deposit money, a river bank, to bank (turn) a plane, or to bank (count) on something happening? You end up having to build in messy hacks like giving clues in the prompt as to which translation is intended (which means you memorise the clue instead of the word) or having cards for bank(1), bank(2), bank(3), and bank(4) which becomes very tedious for recall. Sentences mitigate these problems somewhat.
I now only use vocab cards for object nouns where there's only one important translation, and mainly because I can put pictures on these cards so that I'm learning from e.g. the concept of an orange instead of the English word for orange (which saves you the step of mentally translating when you aren't yet fluent with the word).
I'm so tempted to try improving my language skills with Anki, both for my native language and my daily use language. But the commitment feels so daunting- I've barely missed a day in my reviews for the last two years, and only have 28,000 reviews total. I'm very impressed by your 98,000!
I guess the best way to start is just to create a new deck in it with one card and then go from there. I already have a daily review habit, which is the most important part.
Yeah I was definitely doing too many for it to be fun.
I think that when you have a really high level, Anki is actually even better than when you are at a lower level, because you already have the intuition for the language in general and you are just adding one small component. At lower levels you are making more assumptions about how the word will be used and that can lead you astray.
