Ohh I love this and it is indeed very different from what I do! I’d be super interested in a wee writeup on what non-language learner Anki users can learn from this approach, if you ever have the time for that. Maybe there’s a hybrid approach with the best of both worlds? (Also lowkey interested in why you stopped now!)
Oh, sorry! I stopped because for the language I cared the most about, I had reached a point where natural use of the language was enough to maintain at least 90+% of college-level reading skills. If I go too long without doing enough reading, then I start to miss obscure vocabulary in difficult texts. So when doing Anki reviews on old decks became tedious, I followed my advice and suspended my decks!
Adapting to non-language areas. If I were going to try to adapt this language-focused “memory” amplifier approach to other areas, I would start by experimenting with new card formats, looking for new embarassingly easy formats. I don’t know exactly what would work. But let’s try an experiment!
Keeping with your example, I asked ChatGPT to summarize a Wikipedia article about Isaac Newton. It gave me this (I have manually removed the citations and header/footer text):
Birth and death. Isaac Newton was born on 4 January 1643 (Julian calendar: 25 December 1642) in Woolsthorpe‑by‑Colsterworth, Lincolnshire, England, and died on 31 March 1727 in Kensington.
Polymath and scientific impact. He was an English polymath—mathematician, physicist, astronomer, alchemist, theologian and author—and a central figure in the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment.
Classical mechanics & Principia. Newton formulated the three laws of motion and the law of universal gravitation in his 1687 work Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, unifying terrestrial and celestial mechanics.
Independent invention of calculus. He developed infinitesimal calculus (his “method of fluxions”) around 1666, independently of Leibniz.
Contributions to optics. Newton conducted experiments showing that white light is composed of a spectrum of colors via prism refraction, and published Opticks in 1704.
First reflecting telescope. In 1668 he built the first practical reflecting telescope—now called the Newtonian telescope.
Turning this into a card. This feels like a good time to use cloze cards, because they’ll let us autogenerate a bunch of easy cards from the base text. Let’s split this into two cards, and add Anki cloze markers. Here’s how I might mark up the second:
Isaac Newton (2/2)
Independent invention of {{c1::calculus}}. He developed infinitesimal {{c1::calculus}} (his “method of fluxions”) around {{c2::16}}66, independently of Leibniz.
Contributions to optics. Newton conducted experiments showing that white light is composed of a spectrum of colors via p{{c3::rism}} refraction, and published Opticks in 1704.
First ref{{c4::lecting}}telescope. In {{c2::16}}68 he built the first practical ref{{c4::lecting}} telescope—now called the Newtonian telescope.
For those unfamiliar with cloze cards, this will generate 4 cards, each hiding the information marked with c1 through c4, respectively.
When reviewing each card,
You are in no way obligated to read anything other than what you needed to fill in the blank.
If you can fill in the blank, mark the card correct.
Note that these are all stupidly easy:
c1: “calculus” is a gimme, especially thanks to the mentions of infinitesimals and Leibniz.
c2: I only hide the first two digits of the year. And “17” is left unhidden elsewhere. Usually getting people in right century is good enough, so why stress over it? Or you could hide the decade digit if you were focusing on a specific century.
c3: “prism” is pretty obvious from context, but just in case, I leave the “p” visible.
c4: I leave “ref” visible, and you need to remember it’s “reflecting”, not “refracting”, but that doesn’t require more than basic physics knowledge.
Predictions. My hypotheses:
This style of card can be created very cheaply, especially since cloze gives you 4 cards for the price of 1.
You will retain a surprising amount of information about Isaac Newton.
You will (and should!) delete a bunch of these cards within a month or two, and not really feel the loss.
Reviewing these cards can be very low stress, especially since you should have a hair-trigger delete.
Possible objections:
“Doesn’t seeing the same information on multiple cards mess with the spaced recognition algorithm?” Surprisingly, this seems to matter less than I expected. We’re focusing on amplification, not flawless memorization.
“Would you actually use an LLM to generate initial summaries?” Possibly, at least if I could get the hallucination rate low enough. I might also copy-paste interesting bullet points from various places.
“Aren’t these cards too easy?” The more Anki reviews I did, the more I started to suspect “too easy” wasn’t actually a thing.
Anyway, like I said, this is mostly guesswork! I would be fascinated if someone wanted to create (say) 10-20 base cards this way, with 3-5 clozes each, and review them for at least 40 days, then report back. But I hope this provides some useful ideas to someone!
The problem with these cloze cards is that you tend to link the shape to the information rather than the words themselves. After a few goes you’ll basically stop reading the words entirely. It’s not very effective for recalling the facts irl, since usually you’ll be trying to recall the answer to a specific question (prompt), not fill in the blanks. I find that the things the OP talks about in the above guide are much better for actually recalling info when it counts.
As an aside, the philosophy of impulsive deletion/suspension from your main comment seems like a promising idea. I typically take the opposite approach and don’t even suspend leeches, with that being exclusively for useless or obviously-defined words. I might try it out if I go about learning another language though, it definitely has potential (though it also seems far more suited for high-immersion learners which isn’t something I’m good at).
Ohh I love this and it is indeed very different from what I do! I’d be super interested in a wee writeup on what non-language learner Anki users can learn from this approach, if you ever have the time for that. Maybe there’s a hybrid approach with the best of both worlds? (Also lowkey interested in why you stopped now!)
Oh, sorry! I stopped because for the language I cared the most about, I had reached a point where natural use of the language was enough to maintain at least 90+% of college-level reading skills. If I go too long without doing enough reading, then I start to miss obscure vocabulary in difficult texts. So when doing Anki reviews on old decks became tedious, I followed my advice and suspended my decks!
Adapting to non-language areas. If I were going to try to adapt this language-focused “memory” amplifier approach to other areas, I would start by experimenting with new card formats, looking for new embarassingly easy formats. I don’t know exactly what would work. But let’s try an experiment!
Keeping with your example, I asked ChatGPT to summarize a Wikipedia article about Isaac Newton. It gave me this (I have manually removed the citations and header/footer text):
Turning this into a card. This feels like a good time to use cloze cards, because they’ll let us autogenerate a bunch of easy cards from the base text. Let’s split this into two cards, and add Anki cloze markers. Here’s how I might mark up the second:
For those unfamiliar with cloze cards, this will generate 4 cards, each hiding the information marked with c1 through c4, respectively.
When reviewing each card,
You are in no way obligated to read anything other than what you needed to fill in the blank.
If you can fill in the blank, mark the card correct.
Note that these are all stupidly easy:
c1: “calculus” is a gimme, especially thanks to the mentions of infinitesimals and Leibniz.
c2: I only hide the first two digits of the year. And “17” is left unhidden elsewhere. Usually getting people in right century is good enough, so why stress over it? Or you could hide the decade digit if you were focusing on a specific century.
c3: “prism” is pretty obvious from context, but just in case, I leave the “p” visible.
c4: I leave “ref” visible, and you need to remember it’s “reflecting”, not “refracting”, but that doesn’t require more than basic physics knowledge.
Predictions. My hypotheses:
This style of card can be created very cheaply, especially since cloze gives you 4 cards for the price of 1.
You will retain a surprising amount of information about Isaac Newton.
You will (and should!) delete a bunch of these cards within a month or two, and not really feel the loss.
Reviewing these cards can be very low stress, especially since you should have a hair-trigger delete.
Possible objections:
“Doesn’t seeing the same information on multiple cards mess with the spaced recognition algorithm?” Surprisingly, this seems to matter less than I expected. We’re focusing on amplification, not flawless memorization.
“Would you actually use an LLM to generate initial summaries?” Possibly, at least if I could get the hallucination rate low enough. I might also copy-paste interesting bullet points from various places.
“Aren’t these cards too easy?” The more Anki reviews I did, the more I started to suspect “too easy” wasn’t actually a thing.
Anyway, like I said, this is mostly guesswork! I would be fascinated if someone wanted to create (say) 10-20 base cards this way, with 3-5 clozes each, and review them for at least 40 days, then report back. But I hope this provides some useful ideas to someone!
The problem with these cloze cards is that you tend to link the shape to the information rather than the words themselves. After a few goes you’ll basically stop reading the words entirely. It’s not very effective for recalling the facts irl, since usually you’ll be trying to recall the answer to a specific question (prompt), not fill in the blanks. I find that the things the OP talks about in the above guide are much better for actually recalling info when it counts.
As an aside, the philosophy of impulsive deletion/suspension from your main comment seems like a promising idea. I typically take the opposite approach and don’t even suspend leeches, with that being exclusively for useless or obviously-defined words. I might try it out if I go about learning another language though, it definitely has potential (though it also seems far more suited for high-immersion learners which isn’t something I’m good at).