Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

I’ve been using Anki for about a decade now, and as far as I’m concerned, the only real improvements needed are design/UI based. It is functionally irrelevant if the algorithm is optimized or not when the actual user interface seems boring to potential users. While I do like that Anki has power user options, it’s also very unintuitive to the average person just looking into it.

Which is really a shame, as the spacing effect itself is such an underrated aspect of human learning that it almost feels like cheating.

I love Anki but it’s an archetypal example of “designed by an engineer”.

It’s powerful, with a lot of depth to its features - but it’s also hideous, clunky and unintuitive, and it takes a long time to figure out how to use it effectively.

An HN-reading tech nerd can probably figure it out, but your average Duolingomaxxing normie? No chance.

Sorry, but what's clunky about it? All buttons in reach of your thumb on the mobile app and usable keybindings on desktop?

Is there not enough useless whitespace around every button?

Compared to i.e Duolingo, the app is quite boring. I still have been using it for years. But I sometimes wonder if adding a bit of gamification may help. For instance, streaks, sound effects, etc. Obviously, those should be optional

I think the default settings are fine for 99% of the users. I've used them to "master" a language and I've been more than fine. Actually, I'd argue I was more effective than people who didn't use SRS.

I used to be something of an Anki evangelist and recommended it to anyone that would listen. But the minute I showed it to someone that isn’t already technically-minded, their eyes glazed over and they lost interest immediately.

I think it just needs a fresh minimal design, a tutorial, and some premade decks that aren’t just the half-baked free ones.

I'll give you one example. Occasionally, I come across something that needs to be not be shown anymore. I realize that the question wasn't a good one, or my template spit out something empty. Now, do I suspend card or suspend note? Every single time, I have to go search for which is the right one. (Okay, okay, maybe user error, but still.)

Another example until recently was the extremely useful image occlusion enhanced add-on. Can you easily tell the difference between overlapping and nonoverlapping? At least they renamed those settings to the much more intuitive "Hide One , Reveal All" and "Hide All, Reveal One."

There are streaks, but they're hard to find. There is a heat map add-on that makes them a lot more obvious.

I've quit Duolingo because of the gamification. It's far, far too much, and it puts me in the wrong mindset for learning. Instead of concentrating on the knowledge, I'm gaming the system to improve my score the most. There were times I would stop learning because I knew if I saved it for later, I could use a multiplier for a higher score.

And the daily emotion-tugging streak reminders started to actually piss me off.

On top of that, at one point they were changing the icon regularly and made it really ugly. Despite a ton of complaints, they left it that way for a long time.

So I canceled my subscription and I'm done with them. I'll find another way to study that I like (I've already tried Anki and it works, but I don't like it) and isn't mentally abusive.

There's an excellent heat map addon that helps with that. Some people have tried the "dopamine effect" style things (confetti when you answer a question etc), and it didn't work for me, but there are addons for it if you'd like to try it.

Reminds me of how I'm using Anki on iOS to learn German, and my phone's configured language is German, except for the Anki app, which is ironically the only app I've configured to be in English because I couldn't understand what 80% of the buttons meant.

I have been trying to use Anki for years. Every time it is the same story: I keep it up for a few months until I miss a couple days, then due cards accumulate far beyond what can be reasonably managed, and I end up spending more time trying to fix the app than actually learning anything.

I’ve been reading about spaced repetition and Anki for years. Never got around to actually trying it on anything.

I wonder if there are any good recommendations for something to try it on?

Language learning is the classic use case, but I also use it from everything from historical facts to encyclopedia entries on a subject I’m trying to master.

Probably the simplest use case to get started is improving your English vocabulary. (Assuming English is your first language.) I try to add a card for any word I come across that I don’t know the meaning of, and it works very well.

AnkiDroid maintainer here: we're actively working on a new design for the reviewer (currently available in the Developer Options in the production app).

I don't think any of us are satisfied with how most things look, but we're severely under-resourced.

Feel free to email me if you'd be interested in getting involved with the Android side of things.

First thing that comes to my mind is that it is basically impossible to make it show you both sides of all the cards you are about to see for the first time today at the same time. So that you can actually try to learn it in more effective and less frustrating way then flashing cards on you in random order.

Second thing, control over workload should not be that hard. Anki requires too much tweaking to work reasonably.

Third thing, both old and new algorithm have a notion of "you are pressing the buttons wrong". If you are pressing the buttons wrong, you will end up with absurd intervals - like 4 months interval on something you just learned.

Yeah, you do Duolingo because you want to. And you control perfectly how much duolingo you do any give day.

You do anki because you feel like you must and you have very little control over it.

> On top of that, at one point they were changing the icon regularly and made it really ugly. Despite a ton of complaints, they left it that way for a long time.

My kids loved it. I did not cared. So, the likely explanation is that many people like that icon changes or dont mind it.

This is an area where I feel like there's scope for improvement in the SRS space. All the SRS systems I've seen essentially assume the user is a perfect robot who will do their reviews every day without fail. But most people will have off days or go on holiday for a week and not look at the app, or whatever -- and as you note, the user experience in that case is awful: you come back to a huge number of reviews which is pretty discouraging to even start, you probably get more of them wrong than usual, so you likely do fewer reviews than you normally would, and the situation tends to get worse instead of better.

An SRS system which took more account of the human failings of the user might:

- let you pick a "max daily reviews" and then keep you from putting in too many new items up front, rather than letting you accidentally give yourself a huge daily workload after a few months

- let you tell it "I'm going to be on holiday in a month's time" and have it figure out what to do with reviews and new items to minimise disruption

- when you do come back after a break, pick the most useful reviews to offer the user up to the daily limit (e.g. something whose review interval is six months can wait a few more days, something the user added very recently and has seen only once could be put back into the "new items" bucket to relearn later, so if the user is only going to do 100 of their 300 due cards, other cards are more important to review today)

I'm of two minds about it. Duolingo is off-putting for me, not because of gamification as a concept, but rather because of their particular implementation - with tons of clearly user-abusive bullshit with gems and chests and watching ads and shit.

I used to not care for gamification because I knew that my brain is resistant to it in activities that aren't otherwise rewarding on their own. Like, I quickly realize I'm just tricking myself, and then it stops working. But somewhere over the years, I must have burned out of my dopamine reserves or something, because apps like Anki feel now actively off-putting, in the sense that I lose all energy just looking at them. Memorizing cards gets tricky when your eyes just glaze over them and nothing is loaded even to short-term memory, much less long-term. So at this point I'd appreciate even a little bit of immediate feedback and some progress tracker that evokes ever so slightly positive feelings.

it'd be nice to have a better UI. but the reason people don't use Anki isn't because it's hard to use. it's because the time to value is high, and the value really only comes from long term discipline and motivation.

people that are motivated and will succeed with Anki regardless of design will power through an annoying UI. so with better design, you'll increase top of funnel but radically decrease conversion.

biggest insight for me as a decade+ user: ignore the due count. just plug away at reviews when you have time. I've come back multiple times from backlogs of thousands of cards.

i really wish the UI would just hide number of cards due by default

>An HN-reading tech nerd can probably figure it out, but your average Duolingomaxxing normie? No chance.

Me, the person who reversengineered obfuscated code doing weird crypto primitives and submitted patches to linux kernel can't figure it out either. Maybe I'm not HN nerd enough, so I had to do the duolingo to pass my citizenship exams.

Anki seems like it works for a lot of people with a very specific flow, but I don't know what the flow is and why it doesn't work for me. It's weird.

Try to learn a different writing system, alphabet or not. Arabic, Cyrillic, Hangul, whatever. It has finite number of cards and you don't need large context to understand them.

Those reasons are why I love Anki. I'd rather have a program that exposes every mechanism of how it works and allows me to access it than a program that doesn't and the program appears to appear to work by magic. Give me visible cogs that I can tune and a good manual any day of the week.

Anki is refreshing function over form design. It's beautiful.

>- let you pick a "max daily reviews" and then keep you from putting in too many new items up front, rather than letting you accidentally give yourself a huge daily workload after a few months

Anki allows you to do that. It's in the deck preset options under deck limits. Nowadays you can also set weekday workloads, to reduce workload eg. during the weekend.

My biggest gripe with it is how clunky the editor window is. That’s the main part that’s due for a redesign in my opinion.

It has other oddities too though, like the tab bar in the main window that doesn’t act like a tab bar. It should also really have two button mode (Again and Good only) for the review screen as a built in option, too — the addon that adds this is very popular and it’d be dead simple to implement.

Looking at the manual, Anki seems to let you manually set a new card limit, and also to set a review limit (after which it won't show more reviews even if they exist), but I didn't see anything for "given that I want a daily workload of this many reviews, limit my new cards automatically to try to not exceed that in future".

A quick and easy one is learning the NATO phonetic alphabet. You can find premade decks for it.

Leetcode patterns, and common problem types to apply those patterns to.

It is not a human failing. A human who has huge amount of free time on Sunday, but comes home from work super tired on Monday did not failed anything. And from the other side, there wont be any difference between you revising a card after 89, 90 or even 95 days.

A human who had a lot of time to learn during January, because his job workload was easy is not failing anything if his job related workload becomes high in March and April. But, all that January effort will be punished by super high workloads in March and April in Anki.

>But somewhere over the years, I must have burned out of my dopamine reserves or something, because apps like Anki feel now actively off-putting, in the sense that I lose all energy just looking at them

This resonated with me. I think the decline in excitement towards learning, that we used to do without thinking about it, happens naturally with aging.

Evolution doesn't reward older humans that much for learning so most of us don't feel that same excitement. Compare this to when we're young and need to learn fast, so the dopamine rewards are off the charts.

Consider all of the retirees who spend hours at slot machines (or virtual ones like Candy Crush) to get that dopamine fix as easily as possible.

Maybe a more tasteful gamification balance can be found.

Anki has a feature named Easy Days which allows you to spend less time on Anki on some days of the week.

Source: https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-options.html?highlight=easy%20...

I feel like from a habit-forming perspective Anki would benefit from a fixed-time mode instead of varying the number of reviews. The default daily maximum is 200 reviews per deck, I think, but it's hard to tell whether that's too little or way too much until you've hit that level.

If you could set a study time of say 30 minutes, then when you skip a day, you could just do your usual 30 minutes and maybe only get through 50% of the scheduled cards, but you could slowly catch up over the next few days. And if on the contrary you run out of reviews for today, you could carry on with some scheduled for tomorrow until you've hit your target time.

FSRS can handle off-schedule reviews just fine, I think, so it should be able to accommodate such a rhythm where you don't always review cards on exactly the optimal day.

>watching ads

Does it show you ads in the language you're learning? Because if so, that could be an asset...

You seem to be reading more into the phrase "human failing" than I intended by it. All I meant was the ordinary variations in human behaviour where we sometimes fall a little short of what we hoped we would or could do.

We seem to agree on the substance: that the SRS system should be able to work more humanely with and for the kind of entirely normal situations you describe, by for instance being able to adjust to variations in available time and picking the "best" cards to review rather than assuming the user will get through the whole lot, and in suggesting to them when they should do fewer new items to avoid difficulties in a month or two.

> All the SRS systems I've seen essentially assume the user is a perfect robot who will do their reviews every day without fail.

This reminds me of GTO (game theory optimal) play in poker.

There’s a perfect way to do things, so we should just try to do something as close to that as possible, right? The reality is that you can’t actually do things in this perfect way. In GTO’s case it’s that it’s too complex for a human to have memorized and in SRS many (not all) people will fail to follow the algorithm for one reason or another.

The problem is these strategies aren’t very resilient. If you miss the implementation by a bit, it can cause big losses. An algorithm that’s less theoretically optimal but more attainable by actual humans can end up much stronger in the real world.

This is one of the reasons I ended up writing my own language study system. I haven't used the FSRS thing mentioned above, but I've heard it's much better, and having looked at the algorithm, it seems like it should be better.

The other reason I wrote my own system was to integrate SRS with extensive reading. Basically, my algorithm tracks the difficulty of all the words and grammar concepts, like FSRS; but then it gives you content at the right level for learning (either fewer than 5 new concepts, or an average of 95% known material).

And among the things that fits, it balances reviewing older material and learning newer material, based on what would have the largest impact. (Reviewing something you're about to forget has a bigger impact than learning something new, because the new thing you're going to forget much more quickly. So the balance of new / review and spaced repetition falls out naturally.)