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> Staring at fact flashcards for hours on end just felt like a waste of time.

I think I found your problem.

Try this cycle: - Add however many cards you like - Study - Got bored and didn't finish all your cards? Stop and don't add any new card until you can finish quick enough to not get bored - Finishing quickly? Add more cards

The exponentially increasing interval is your friend. Before you notice you won't be studying more than 10 cards a day :)

It doesn't feel like it in the first ~10 days of a block of cards, but there's a jitter in the spacing function, so you will see the same block at the same time 2 or 3 times but then they'll start dispersing and be a lot less overwhelming.

And most important of all: don't be afraid of slow progress: progress is progress!

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I remember seeing people using flash cards in various science and math classes. The only thing that helped me to remember algos and derivations was to use them on some practical problem. I am as much as kinesthetic as visual learner, I think mainly because it keeps my brain from going into zombie repetition land. Don't even try to teach me something by just babbling about it in front of a class room. I need to experience the learning in some fashion. When all that fails I'll fall back on rote memorization and flash cards. I can definitely see its place in learning foreign languages (at least at the start, I always did better by using the words in sentences that forced me to think about them more than just as a jumble of letters)

A cardinal rule of all SRS advocates: You must understand something before making a flashcard for it. In math, that means solving problems with it, etc.

I learned analysis a long time ago. Forgot most of it, despite applying it a lot.

I learned statistics twice, applied it, and still forgot most of it. The third time round I made flashcards and I haven't forgotten much.

I studied a textbook on floating point arithmetic for work (mathematical - with theorems, etc). Because it was secondary to my main work, I would have gaps - sometimes for months, before I could return to it. Yet whenever I did return to it, I could continue where I left off without reviewing much - because of flash cards.

Memory is useful.

This is true for most people; almost nobody is going to get a good understanding of something just by reading about it. But if you have already understood something, then Anki can help you solidify that understanding into the long term.

Actually for language learning at least, understanding doesn't need to come before rote memorization.

While "stupidly" learning a one-two word definition might not allow you to understand how a word is actually used, it will allow you to get its meaning should you encounter it in native material, delaying understanding to that moment.

Even in science there is a lot of knowledge that doesn't need to be understood. For math subjects that would be all the definitions for example.

Well, there can be a lot to be understood in why something is defined the way it is. For example, a red-black tree is defined the way it is because it's a pretty simple structural way to force the tree to be "pretty well balanced". Why does it force that?

You're going for too big cards again. A single card doesn't need to answer absolutely everything there is about a red black tree. You want to ask about a single aspect of it per card.

The definition is "what is it?". There is nothing to understand here. It could be taught to a parrot or child to repeat this information.

What you're mentioning is a bunch of cards on top of that: how does a red black tree stay balanced on insertions? When is the self-balancing property of red black trees useful? When is it not? Etc etc. You cannot answer this if you mistake a red black tree for another tree for example. It's essentially vocabulary.

Another one would be notations: what's the symbol for a cross product? Again, nothing to understand, but you must know it to work on actual math problems involving cross products.

I know that - I wrote the article which is the subject of this thread ;) I took you to be arguing that Anki should be used to learn without understanding.