There seems to be a lot of people here in the programming, mathematics, and/or the many fields of sciences here. Do you use SRSing to help you? Do you wish you used an SRS to help prevent forgetting? If so, what kind of cards did you make?

I'm going to be returning to my studies of mathematics and physics again, and I get a lucky opportunity to "do it all over again". I think memorizing vocabulary (English and Japanese for me, I already know the English though) and formula are a pretty good start. However it's very hard to SRS the understanding behind the fields as in depth as this. Also practice problems, proofs, etc will all be so easy there's no need for an SRS, or a 30 minute long card!

Any advice would be great, and if people are interested I can post my exploration of SRSing and "starting over".

I attempted to use Anki to study for a certification, but in the end I think the researching of the answers was a lot more helpful than Anki itself. It gave me a reason to do research (I was going to share the deck with co-workers) but the actual studying done with Anki wasn't really worthwhile.

I'm an undergrad in CompSci and SRS is very useful in some ways. Of course, most of my objectives are radically different from "long term memorization", which makes the way I use SRS rather different.

Mathematics:
Yes, but only for the theoretical part of the exams (if any). Useless for anything else.
*sigh* I wish I new SRS back when we were learning the derivative/integration formulae.

CompSci:
Anki is great for cramping the terminology in my native language and for theoretical definitions. I can't be bothered to SRS all this useless information that never comes up regardless of what you are writing.
The practical part, I learned many years ago.

I'm pretty doubtful that SRSing will help directly with understanding of the sciences, however I remember less than 25% of the vocabulary and technical terms from my studies in the US, and that was only a year ago.

For example, I remember all the theory behind calculus, and most of the problem solving methods (especially in programming), but I don't remember many of the derivative/integration formulas.

I suppose my goal here isn't really SRSing to keep understanding/theory fresh in my mind, but hopefully keeping the formula/vocabulary fresh for years. Sciences really have a lot less memorization and a lot more "oh I get it!" moments than language learning, so the gain from SRSing will obviously be less.

I also can't imagine SRSing help with gaining speed and accuracy for the sciences. Experience is really key here...

I have found that using the SRS to try and learn physics and math formulas is essentially useless. Getting these cards to maturity is near impossible. They're also painfully boring to review. Much like RTK, it's really only helpful if I create a mnemonic story for each formula before adding the cards. For me adding actual problems from textbooks, that I work out and solve as scheduled, is more fruitful than other methods.

Don't you just remember the solution to the problem? Normally finding the solution is much harder than actually solving the problem.

If SRSing doesn't work for your formula memorization, what method do you prefer? I suppose it could just be "look at the chart"

stehr Wrote:I have found that using the SRS to try and learn physics and math formulas is essentially useless. Getting these cards to maturity is near impossible. They're also painfully boring to review. Much like RTK, it's really only helpful if I create a mnemonic story for each formula before adding the cards. For me adding actual problems from textbooks, that I work out and solve as scheduled, is more fruitful than other methods.

You could lower the scheduling time. More work, but less need to rely on mnemonics.

It might be worth it to use an SRS at a lower interval and keep reviewing formula long term. The number of formula isn't very large, so reviews will never become as ridiculous as 2000+ kanji and 10,000+ vocab/grammar cards.

I SRS'd the genetics and digestive system part of my Biology course and got 55/55 and 54.5/55 respectively on their tests. Sadly I stopped SRSing after that because I felt it was too time consuming (30-1 hours of card making everyday). But my test scores felt along with it, I only got 44/55 on circulatory system and 33.5/40 on classification of living things and other tests fluctuated around 70-90%. This is high school though

So I'm going to try my best SRSing all of my school subjects this semester, and try to find methods that will make it more time-efficient.

My methods:

*For definitions, I would have the word on the front, definition on the back (duh). Sometimes I'd do cloze deletion. But I'd write the answer on paper or type it. Because sometimes I'd say the definition and forget what I said and give myself a correct or wrong, even though I deserved the opposite.

*I really trusted my instincts on how long I'd remember things. So if you've just solved a math problem, I wouldn't press "hard" which would make it come up in 8 hours, because I knew I would obviously remember it in 8 hours time. So sometimes I'd give it 9 days even though the answer itself was pretty difficult to get. Don't trust the Hard/Medium/Easy labels, instead look at the days. I think people will remember longer than they think they will.

*If you have a textbook that has question/answers, use those instead of trying to come up with your own. Saves time. Try to come up with 10-20 questions per lesson like Khatz recommends (or less, if it takes too much time)

*You MUST have a scanner! Especially with subjects that have a lot of visuals. If you don't know Latex for Math, then you'll have to also write the method on how to get the answer on paper and scan it. This can be time consuming sometimes though, but I can't find a more time-efficient method.

*Sometimes you remember the answer for stuff like math questions and then it feels like you're cheating or don't know the solution as well as you should and it will start to feel like rote memorization, 21(30+59)^2 will start to feel as easy as 3 x 3. So sometimes you have to grade yourself on how well you think you would do if you were given a different question rather than how you answered the question at hand.

Eh, mostly common sense advice, but they are some of the hurdles I think people will go through when starting to SRS school stuff. I'm still trying to look for success stories that give hints on how to reduce time spent making cards, but alas I can't find any.

Squintox Wrote:Eh, mostly common sense advice, but they are some of the hurdles I think people will go through when starting to SRS school stuff. I'm still trying to look for success stories that give hints on how to reduce time spent making cards, but alas I can't find any.

That's exactly why I made this thread.

I think the thing that saddens me most is how much I've forgotten from high school. I don't even remember which classes I took, much less the subjects! That was less than 5 years ago too...

I'm a physics grad student and have been toying with the idea of SRSing simple facts / derivations. It would definitely be possible to do for just facts and formulae (I wish I knew about SRS when I was studying for the physics GRE). I think you could also use it for simple derivations that people often forget years after their class is over (ie - deriving sound speed, E&M waves, etc.) Obviously, you can't have a prompt that's like "Solve the Schrodinger equation for _____ potential", or "Derive the Schwarzschild metric" since those aren't really things you can do on the back of an envelope. Perhaps you could somehow SRS the outline of a more complicated derivation like those above, but I'm not sure how useful that would be.

As people have pointed out, this is most helpful if you are at the point where you can do all these derivations - you're just perhaps forgetting the starting point, assumptions, or something like that. I'm not sure how well this would work with putting in things as you're learning them.

How useful SRSing facts would also depend on what field you're in. I know in astrophysics there are tons of facts that you deal with all the time (ie - "what's the rest wavelength of Halpha?" or "What temperature gives you a thermal energy of 1keV?"), and having them memorized will certainly help you. I'm assuming it would be amenable to most areas of science as long as you use it for what it was designed for - memorizing simple facts. If you find yourself looking things up repeatedly, then SRSing these facts should help.

Well I gotta go to 予備校 for the first semester this year and I'll defs try SRSing to help me out.

I'm finding the same problem of card creation time being the biggest drawback (which is why I went with just raw vocab for speed). In terms of my KanKen study it used to take ages at the beginning but now it's quick because I'm at the tail end of it. I had the idea to streamline it big time by taking pictures of the DS screen with my webcam and just put them in the question field but the JxPlugin threw a fit when I put an image in the deck so that threw that idea out the window. I may try a diff SRS to get around that problem for a deck that requires images.

What about something like a program that scans something and turns it into text that can just be copy and pasted?? For me, If I had a text book I'd highlight as I was reading through it for the first time and marking stuff for SRS so I didn't have to go back and find it later.

Any good Speech to Text programs that could be utilized? Or why not just use audio cards as problems? Perhaps you've got the text book in front of you and it's quite apparent to you that you need to know X, Y and Z about a fact, bust out ur mic and record the question and the answer in Anki and boom you've saved urself the typing time.

Come on people, ideas!

mezbup Wrote:Well I gotta go to 予備校 for the first semester this year and I'll defs try SRSing to help me out.

What kind of prep school will you be going to, and what will you be studying? I see you post all the time, but I have no idea what you're doing!

For formula there's lots of programs out there that will print out a picture of the formula. That can easily be inputted into Anki, as I don't think it supports various styles of complex notation.

I'm not sure how much time speaking would save when making cards. I can personally read much faster than I can listen, so I think it wouldn't save much time over time. Also it makes it harder to edit later if needed. Not to mention it'd make it harder to review on something like an ipod.

Inputting would be a lot of work. I don't think it'd be worth it for short term things (one class/test, then you don't care). However I think taking pictures/scans would save a lot of time. Especially if you got a less-than-legal copy from mysterious places in digital format, you could just crop out what you want, and slap it straight into anki.

mezbup Wrote:Inputting would be a lot of work. I don't think it'd be worth it for short term things (one class/test, then you don't care). However I think taking pictures/scans would save a lot of time. Especially if you got a less-than-legal copy from mysterious places in digital format, you could just crop out what you want, and slap it straight into anki.

Maybe my digital editing skills are lacking, but it seems like it would take me twice as long to crop out a selection than to just type what I am looking at. I have a decent typing speed, I think about 70wpm, so I can't really justify croping an image, and then saving it, and then adding it to the deck, when I would have to do is just type the info straight into Anki.

Then again, if we talking about math formulas or pictures I guess your right. What I'm thinking about is more on the Humanities side.

Tobberoth Wrote:

stehr Wrote:I have found that using the SRS to try and learn physics and math formulas is essentially useless. Getting these cards to maturity is near impossible. They're also painfully boring to review. Much like RTK, it's really only helpful if I create a mnemonic story for each formula before adding the cards. For me adding actual problems from textbooks, that I work out and solve as scheduled, is more fruitful than other methods.

You could lower the scheduling time. More work, but less need to rely on mnemonics.

I find that when I use the SRS to learn something from scratch, it's best to create cards that focus on recognition of facts. Production of facts, for me, takes too much effort to rely solely on the SRS to memorize. I can get by with Japanese, but I find it especially hard to do with math and physics formulas.

Well I'm sure it's nothing like 予備校 in Japan but it's basically a 1 semester prep course part time through Auckland Uni that covers so many topics it borders on ridiculous but it's designed to simulate uni life and what not and getting a 75% score over the whole course gets you automatic entry into Uni. It's for people like me who are over 20 and left school before gaining university entrance.

Other than that it's full time 独学 for me.

Some good point's about audio cards, in particular editing later could be a problem but not really a huge issue. The big issue is reviewing through mobile devices (which is important to me) and yeah, falls flat there. Although I was thinking in terms of speaking speed vs. typing speed it wins. I will still bear it in mind as a tool in the input arsenal when the time comes. I did also mention the possibility of speech-to-text which could possibly be an excellent solution but that really relies on the accuracy of the software... food for thought.

Yeah, fastest way is to obtain digital copies of textbooks that are copy and paste-able. I managed to get a digital copy of the full minna no nihongo (besides that there are already anki decks for that) but I'm really not sure about other textbooks?

Other alternatives are leveraging other peoples time in doing it a group for certain things. We've seen here that group projects become very successful because they make enormous tasks very possible.

I'm in the process of obtaining some Speech to Text software to try it out now.

I think maths can only be learnt through internalisation by doing problems. Much like learning to draw, there's not really much to memorise, just practice.

Actually there are some proofs which are examinable, but you can't really SRS something that takes half a page or more to do. Other than that, there are probably no more than a few formulas which are worth memorising for exams each year for my course anyway.

I suppose that for physics and math you could write in your SRS "DO PROBLEM #3 on Pg. 239" and if you don't remember how to do it or you did it poorly, you could use that to determine when to do it again if you need a refresher.

And it using the time limits on Anki you could timebox it too.

Hmm...

I've never seen the point in memorizing formulas though. It's like memorizing words without having a context in a sentence, but much worse. At least with words you might be able to create a sentence to get the meaning off the top of your head, but I sure as well won't write F=ma and automatically visualize a problem with a guy pushing a crate on an incline with a spring and a surface with friction, putting in random numbers and checking it in my head all at once. =)

I'm pretty sure I'll be SRSing vocabulary this time. I remember almost all of the concepts from 1-2 years ago, but almost none of the vocabulary. I can recognize, explain, and use many concepts I don't know the name for, so I'm sure SRS would help this.

Formula by itself isn't very useful for "real" mathematics. However they're nice for "shortcuts" when solving problems. The only real time this would actually really be useful is tests, but if you've learned it once, it seems like SRS will keep it in the memory. That's what I'm hoping anyway :/