Learn and remember anything with Anki
2023-03-31
Thanks to the internet, we see presumable super-humans, which master an incredibly broad range of skills and are able to learn almost anything - no matter the difficulty - in quite brief time periods, all the time. Honestly, seeing this makes me feel unresponsibly unproductive as well as quite jealous and I'm probably not alone with these feelings. But what if I told you that anyone can get on this level of learning capability with simple techniques integrated into an easy to use and open source software? Well, you're lucky, because just that's the case...
The amazing thing about the human brain is that we are able to analyse our own intentional as well as unintentional behaviour, abstract generalized rules from that and incorporate these findings into our future actions to achieve better results. This is exactly what psychologists and neurologists have done in the field of learning for over a century and as it turns out one of the simplest, most boring learning techniques is also the most effective one - good old flashcards . For real, the combination of having to retrieve an answer from memory before turning the card around (called active recall ) and going through newly introduced or personally challenging cards more frequently than established or less difficult ones (called spaced repitition ) is the key element to improve the rate of learning and maximize long-term memory building.
Nowadays many flashcard software solutions that incorporate these findings exist, but a program called Anki stands out among the bunch. It is not only fully open source and feature rich, but most importantly available across all major platforms (also on IOS and Android) and backed by a huge community of enthusiasts providing many excellent card decks for download free of charge. The usual Anki workflow for learning a new skill is dead simple and goes as follows:
- You download one of the many existing card decks or create one yourself, if none of this topic exists.
- You study a certain amount of cards per day, which takes just a few minutes and about which Anki can remember you, and give feedback on how easy a card is to remember for your through the GUI interface.
- The evidence-driven algorithms integrated into Anki determine the perfect time span between recalls and optimize your capability of actually remembering the information you learn in the long-run.
Personally, I have been using it for more than 2 years now for learning Latin and English vocabulary, preparing for the theoretical driving test in Germany as well as practicing to read music notes and can say that it really is a great tool. Obviously, it still requires you to put some time and effort into frequent (daily!) practice , but I truly believe that given the excellent results it is in fact a time saver and actually improves the overall outcome.
So, select one of the skills you wanted to learn since you started thinking, setup Anki and give it a try yourself. It might feel strange in the beginning, but the results will blow you away...