Thoughts from Four Months of Anki
At the beginning of graduate school, I decided that I was going to take a new approach to studying. While my undergrad was rewarding in some ways, I felt as though much of the information I learned each semester was totally lost by the time the next round of classes, or even finals, rolled around. This couldn’t be the correct way to educate myself. There had to be another way.
Enter Anki. Anki is flashcard program that uses a spaced repetition algorithm to determine when its cards should be reviewed. The review schedule follows an exponential distribution that’s based on the research of Hermann Ebinghaus on the mind’s natural forgetting curve. Rather than cramming material which you soon forget, or haphazardly reviewing a random set of cards everyday (which ends up being a lot of extra work) Anki allows you remember nearly anything for approximately ~10 minutes of work spaced out over your entire lifetime. At least that’s what the claim is. Below, I’ll go through my thoughts on how well I think Anki stacks up after four months, what I’ve learned about learning and memory, as well as some general tips for SRS use.
