While using supermemo I found it useful to put the sequence posts into the system and use the built in process for progressively reading and extracting the most important elements of the text (key paragraphs and sentences) for more frequent exposure.
Reading complex material through multiple exposures is an effective way of understanding concepts that are multiple inferential steps away and the process of actively extracting the key messages ensures a more complete understanding. Having supermemo handle the process of prompting me with material from a large ‘to read’ list also does away with huge akrasia problems (by narrowing the bottleneck down to ‘use supermemo at all’).
The supermemo documentation supplies tips on how to go about absorbing large volumes of material, filtering them by priority, breaking them down into concepts worth learning and, when appropriate, breaking that down into individual facts or concepts that can be prompted. When they cannot be broken down further it can just be useful to have paragraphs pop up as a reminder. Just that much exposure will be enough reminder to keep the concept fresh in the brain.
When using supermemo to help learn material from a dense texbook that I happened to consider to be particularly worth memorizing I ended up creating diagrams of some of the concepts and the repetition questions consisted of partially redacted versions of the diagram that prompted recall of whatever bit was missing.
I note that Anki doesn’t necessarily support some of these applications. SuperMemo itself is abysmally ugly and a pain in the arse to learn but the feature set is clearly that of an application created by someone who wanted to personally optimise his learning over diverse set of situations. It will be extremely frustrating for me if I migrate to a more polished but more specialised system.
I’ve wanted to try incremental reading myself, but not enough to install Windows on my Mac. I’m glad to hear you find it useful though—that makes me more likely to make a greater effort to experiment with it at some point in the future.
While using supermemo I found it useful to put the sequence posts into the system and use the built in process for progressively reading and extracting the most important elements of the text (key paragraphs and sentences) for more frequent exposure.
Reading complex material through multiple exposures is an effective way of understanding concepts that are multiple inferential steps away and the process of actively extracting the key messages ensures a more complete understanding. Having supermemo handle the process of prompting me with material from a large ‘to read’ list also does away with huge akrasia problems (by narrowing the bottleneck down to ‘use supermemo at all’).
The supermemo documentation supplies tips on how to go about absorbing large volumes of material, filtering them by priority, breaking them down into concepts worth learning and, when appropriate, breaking that down into individual facts or concepts that can be prompted. When they cannot be broken down further it can just be useful to have paragraphs pop up as a reminder. Just that much exposure will be enough reminder to keep the concept fresh in the brain.
When using supermemo to help learn material from a dense texbook that I happened to consider to be particularly worth memorizing I ended up creating diagrams of some of the concepts and the repetition questions consisted of partially redacted versions of the diagram that prompted recall of whatever bit was missing.
I note that Anki doesn’t necessarily support some of these applications. SuperMemo itself is abysmally ugly and a pain in the arse to learn but the feature set is clearly that of an application created by someone who wanted to personally optimise his learning over diverse set of situations. It will be extremely frustrating for me if I migrate to a more polished but more specialised system.
I’ve wanted to try incremental reading myself, but not enough to install Windows on my Mac. I’m glad to hear you find it useful though—that makes me more likely to make a greater effort to experiment with it at some point in the future.