Main drawbacks:
- No way to "pause" for vacations, so cards can build up fast
If you take a break from using Anki for a few days, it can be quite demotivating to be faced with a large number of cards to review upon your return. It is very natural to want to pause the scheduler, so that you come back to find Anki in the same state as you left it. However, a pause feature would actually do more harm than good, as while it’s easy to pause a computer program, it’s impossible to pause human memory.
Consider taking a week long break, pausing the scheduler just before you leave and un-pausing just after you come back. Since the progress of all cards has been "frozen" for a week, a delay is applied to every card in the deck. In order to avoid catching up on the work you would have otherwise done during that time, you’re increasing the chances of forgetting cards for every single card in the deck. Not a great tradeoff.
Anki schedules cards for review close to the time it thinks you will forget them. If you come back from a vacation and find there are 200 cards to review, Anki is telling you that those 200 cards need to be reviewed soon or you’ll forget them. There is no way around this - the cards need to be studied or you’ll forget. The best thing you can do is put on some good music and get stuck into the reviews, motivated by the knowledge that your hard work will pay off in the future.
Note there is a postpone plugin available that reschedules the due cards over a specified number of days. It allows you to divide a large number of cards up over a period of days to work through, but you can accomplish the same thing by simply setting a quota of cards to study each day and studying them.
Anki works best if you can use it for a short period of time every day. Taking breaks means that you will inevitably have to do extra work when you return. The following tips can help you use Anki effectively:
Don’t add too much material at once. Studying a large number of new cards in one go creates spikes in the due cards graph. Anki sets the maximum number of new cards per day to 20. You’re free to change this limit, but bear in mind that the more cards you do per day, the more reviews you’ll have to do in the short term.
Consider doing no new cards in the week prior to your vacation, and only keeping up with your scheduled reviews.
Try to take Anki with you when you go away. Anki can be used on portable devices such as iPhones, PDAs, mobile phones etc.
This issue has been talked about many times on the forums already. Please read those threads instead of starting yet another discussion on the issue.
http://groups.google.com/group/ankisrs/browse_thread/thread/68a9d394333177e8
http://groups.google.com/group/ankisrs/browse_thread/thread/886c3c64a8238660
http://groups.google.com/group/ankisrs/browse_thread/thread/3043f479c0fd827
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=1338&p=1" - http://ankisrs.net/docs/FrequentlyAskedQuestions.html
- No built-in multiple-choice function like smart.fm (yet!)
Multiple choice questions are a poor learning tool for a number of reasons. The reason they are commonly used in an academic setting is because they are easy to mark, and they allow the person studying to demonstrate their ability to recognize the correct answer even if they can’t produce it themselves.
Furthermore, good multiple choice questions have well chosen "distractors" - answers that are similar to the correct answer. A computer can look for similary spelt words, but it is not capable of chosing good distractors for more complicated topics.
If you are studying for a test and you have a sample test with a multiple choice question like the following:
Q: What animal has a really long neck?
A: 1. A monkey. 2. A giraffe. 3. A donkey. 4. A snail.
Then that question should be rewritten in Anki as follows:
Q: What animal has a really long neck?
A: A giraffe.
"
On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 11:43, Nathan Hawks <nhawks@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
This is probably my first post to the group. I had been using Smart.fm
and had done a quick video showing how it works, which is why I just
found out via a video comment that Smart.fm is closing its doors, and
iKnow is becoming a paid product.
I know there are other flash card alternatives but they all appear to
be the exact opposite of "user friendly." Can somebody bust this myth
with a free, user-friendly alternative for flashcard Lojban learning?
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