Strategies, Tips, and Tricks for Anki
I'm a heavy user of spaced repetition for language learning (I've been learning portuguese over the past two years and now I've switched to russian) and there's a lot of good advice in here.<p>What I don't get is using spaced repetition for all kinds of trivia and stack overflow answers like the author seems to do. I've never felt the need to do that and I don't get what it gets you. I read the linked article "How Anki Saved My Programming Career" and I still don't get it.<p>IMO learning stuff by heart makes sense for languages (natural languages have a significant amount of irregularities and you have to learn tenths of thousands of words to be fluent, plus the grammar on top of that). You need to be able to recall all of that stuff at a blink of an eye if you want to participate in a conversation. It also makes sense for other disciplines like medicine where you need to have encyclopedic knowledge about certain subjects without having to look up in a dozen different books.<p>But "Who is the teacher behind FastAI"? Is that really something worth memorizing by heart? Do you often end up in a situation like "oh my god the production server is broken and the only way to fix it is to figure out who's the teacher behind FastAI and I have no internet connection to look it up!"?<p>The other article has examples like "how do I get the subset of an array in JS". In my experience if I encounter this type of question it either means that I end up having to hack a JS program but it's a one-off I don't intend to actually learn the language (in which case I don't really need to bother to learn the language) or I'm actually learning the language but then I will probably encounter this situation enough times that I'll have it memorized soon enough. Programming languages are generally fairly regular and the amount of grammar and syntax to memorize is ridiculously tiny compared to human languages.<p>This also goes for learning things like "what is comonotonic?". Either you really encounter this word often in your work and you'll have learned it soon enough, or you see it once every other year and then is it really that big of a deal to have a quick google to refresh your memory if you've forgotten what it means?<p>Maybe it's just that I don't like trivia and I don't care if I can't remember some technical term while "talking to Ryan at Starbucks" to take an other example from TFA.