
Ask HN: Spaced repetition – What did you use it for? - sh87
I see spaced repetition commonly used to learn a new language.<p>I&#x27;d like to know what other real world use (besides learning new words) did you use spaced repetition for ?<p>EDIT: I would appreciate if you could pick a specific example go into some detail and describe the experience
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yorwba
I use Anki to memorize political geography. It had been bugging me for a while
that I would read about something happening in a big country like the US,
China or India and have no idea where in the country the places mentioned were
located. So I wrote a script to automatically generate flashcards from
information in Wikidata: [https://github.com/Yorwba/anki-wikidata-
geography](https://github.com/Yorwba/anki-wikidata-geography)

There's also [https://github.com/axelboc/anki-ultimate-
geography](https://github.com/axelboc/anki-ultimate-geography) a deck covering
all countries, some overseas territories and oceans, which is what made me
start using Anki for geography.

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Jefro118
Expanding vocabulary, remembering historical facts, memorising national flags,
English counties and US states, remembering facts about programming languages.

For things like flags, counties, etc. it works great - I can now recognise
more or less every flag in the world and the total time allotted is probably
less than an hour.

For things like vocabulary, historical facts and especially programming
language stuff it's not quite as useful - a little bit of context helps here
to really cement these concepts in memory and spaced repetition doesn't work
as well when what you are remembering is less "atomic". It also makes it
harder work and less fun - this is a sign that you are stretching yourself a
little of course, which will pay dividends if you put in the effort. It does
make it more of a chore though. Overall, it's still a time saver.

One thing I've noticed using Anki is that I often find myself struggling to
remember something the other way round. E.g. I will have learned a word X
(front of the card) with definition Y (back of the card), but then I find
myself at some point in life trying to think of a word with roughly definition
Y and I can't quite remember the word X even though I'm aware this is
something I've put into Anki. I think I might try doing cards both ways round
but this can introduce some complexity since a one -> one mapping can then be
many -> one when reversed (at least with English vocabulary, might work better
with other things).

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sh87
I'm relieved (no really) to know you too find Anki/flashcards being
ineffective when the content is not, to steal your word, "atomic". I felt as I
was using Anki all wrong. Actually, that's what led me to search all over and
found most uses were for language learning.

~~~
Jefro118
Yeah it definitely makes it more difficult. If you want to try and figure out
how make Anki / SRS work better for non-atomic content, Michael Nielsen has
done some great work on this:
[http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html](http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html)

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yen223
Having just joined a new company, I'm using a simple flash-card system to
learn all the company's internal jargon.

Subjectively, I am finding it pretty effective at helping me understand how
all the systems fit together. It's easier to understand a codebase once you
have context of how everything fits together.

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lmiller1990
I use spaced repetition for learning Japanese vocabulary, but the idea should
work for remembering new words/definitions for anything. A few friends
studying med use Anki for definitions and revising images (what infection is
typical of this image?)

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thepete2
I use it for Spanish vocabulary (I'm a native German speaker). A couple of
days ago I realized that the online dictionary dict.cc [1] lets you export a
list of translations to a text file that I can then import to Anki. So now
whenever I translate an interesting word, I click it and I will learn it. Very
handy

[1] [https://www.dict.cc/](https://www.dict.cc/)

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misiti3780
Languages, Software, Math, Reading, Vocabulary, CS, UNIX commands, recipes,
fun statistics, anything that I think I will use/want in the future, goes into
ANKI

