things I want to explore with Anki

alex 24th August 2024 at 12:03pm

the role of low intensity cardio on the effectiveness of Anki reviewing and retention (first introduced to me via Anki tips by hiAndrewQuinn;

adding examples to vocabulary: a friend uses some examples when reviewing vocabulary cards, and I now see how useful this could be. For example, the Wiktionary page for κάνω (equivalent to I make or I do) has many examples for its usage; in fact, some of them are so useful they would warrant their own flashcards. So I would like to automate fetching the definition and some examples to show in either direction (ENG <-> GR) as bonus exposure (of course, while very unaware whether this would be good in the long term). And the sentences could rotate, also.

— when I tried learning Slovene, I drilled a lot of individual words (be it vocabulary or verbs) without context; this is a bad strategy in general, let alone in such a heavily declensed language.

Language Transfer shows a more efficient way to introduce these grammatical mechanics: over time, the following happens very organically.

κάνω (verb, 'I do')
το (pronoun, 'it')
το κάνω ('I do it')
τον (pronoun, 'him')
το έχω κάνει ('I have done it')
το έχω κάνει με τον ('I have done it with him')

...but I'd like to go a step further: taking the above example of Wiktionary, would it be possible to automate adding cards that I would be likely to read and understand correctly? If I know the verb κάνω, and the words ταξίδι and ώρες, it would be easy, I suppose, to expose myself to the concept of taking time, and have a flashcard for το ταξίδι κάνει τρεις ώρες. (the trip takes three hours). This is probably beyond the concept of SRS and more into the broader cognition spectrum — but it piqued my interest. It seems to be a more powerful strategy than copying whole sentences over and over again.

[edit on 2024-05-30: I am finally organising a few notes I have on this matter, and, of course, Gwern had already tackled the above concern of mine]

— sometimes I copy whole sentences as I aim for structure, and not ortography — and there's an odd ortography mistake every now and then. I wonder if I could establish the concept of precedence: maybe Anki would not expose me to full sentences without mastering the individual words (assuming I would add them at the same time) and given any systematic ortographic mistake, I could easily mark a word to be retested (maybe via the tags?).