HACKER Q&A
📣 sh87

Spaced repetition – What did you use it for?


I see spaced repetition commonly used to learn a new language.

I'd like to know what other real world use (besides learning new words) did you use spaced repetition for ?

EDIT: I would appreciate if you could pick a specific example go into some detail and describe the experience


  👤 yorwba Accepted Answer ✓
I use Anki to memorize political geography. It had been bugging me for a while that I would read about something happening in a big country like the US, China or India and have no idea where in the country the places mentioned were located. So I wrote a script to automatically generate flashcards from information in Wikidata: https://github.com/Yorwba/anki-wikidata-geography

There's also https://github.com/axelboc/anki-ultimate-geography a deck covering all countries, some overseas territories and oceans, which is what made me start using Anki for geography.


👤 Jefro118
Expanding vocabulary, remembering historical facts, memorising national flags, English counties and US states, remembering facts about programming languages.

For things like flags, counties, etc. it works great - I can now recognise more or less every flag in the world and the total time allotted is probably less than an hour.

For things like vocabulary, historical facts and especially programming language stuff it's not quite as useful - a little bit of context helps here to really cement these concepts in memory and spaced repetition doesn't work as well when what you are remembering is less "atomic". It also makes it harder work and less fun - this is a sign that you are stretching yourself a little of course, which will pay dividends if you put in the effort. It does make it more of a chore though. Overall, it's still a time saver.

One thing I've noticed using Anki is that I often find myself struggling to remember something the other way round. E.g. I will have learned a word X (front of the card) with definition Y (back of the card), but then I find myself at some point in life trying to think of a word with roughly definition Y and I can't quite remember the word X even though I'm aware this is something I've put into Anki. I think I might try doing cards both ways round but this can introduce some complexity since a one -> one mapping can then be many -> one when reversed (at least with English vocabulary, might work better with other things).


👤 yen223
Having just joined a new company, I'm using a simple flash-card system to learn all the company's internal jargon.

Subjectively, I am finding it pretty effective at helping me understand how all the systems fit together. It's easier to understand a codebase once you have context of how everything fits together.


👤 lmiller1990
I use spaced repetition for learning Japanese vocabulary, but the idea should work for remembering new words/definitions for anything. A few friends studying med use Anki for definitions and revising images (what infection is typical of this image?)

👤 thepete2
I use it for Spanish vocabulary (I'm a native German speaker). A couple of days ago I realized that the online dictionary dict.cc [1] lets you export a list of translations to a text file that I can then import to Anki. So now whenever I translate an interesting word, I click it and I will learn it. Very handy

[1] https://www.dict.cc/


👤 misiti3780
Languages, Software, Math, Reading, Vocabulary, CS, UNIX commands, recipes, fun statistics, anything that I think I will use/want in the future, goes into ANKI