This is reminiscent of the idea that indigenous peoples regularly met at annual feasts to not only celebrate, but to review over their memory palaces and perform their rituals as a means of reviewing and strengthening their memories and ideas.

Appropriate context for this: https://www.jeremycherfas.net/blog/a-garden-with-a-water-feature

So they've mentioned research in the 1960s, but rely on a 2016 paper for a basic definition of spaced repetition?

I'm beginning to think that the entirety of this work is AI generated...

Malashenko, Gevorg T., Mikhail E. Kosov, Svetlana V. Frumina, Olga A. Grishina, Roman A. Alandarov, Vadim V. Ponkratov, Tatyana A. Bloshenko, Lola D. Sanginova, Svetlana S. Dzusova, and Munther F. Hasan. “A Digital Model of Full-Cycle Training Based on the Zettelkasten and Interval Repetition System.” Emerging Science Journal 7, no. 0 (March 18, 2023): 1–15. https://doi.org/10.28991/ESJ-2023-SIED2-01.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Manuel_of_Eames_Cursive_Shorthand_by_the/2Bk9AAAAYAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=0

Manuel of Eames Cursive Shorthand by the Card System<br /> A Reporting System with Longhand Movement, in which the Vowels and Consonants are Joined in the Order of Their Occurrence, Including a Remarkable Discovery in Pedagogics which Reduces the Time of Learning at Least One-half

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lernkartei

reply to u/chiefkeif at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/18fjaya/new_member_here_is_zettelkasten_the_right_method/

Some of your root issues may be addressed directly by engaging with by spaced repetition systems (for improving memory recall: try Anki, Mnemosyne, et al.) as well as mnemonic systems (memory palaces, the major system, etc.). Given that a Zettelkasten can be an instantiation of both of these simultaneously, you may find benefits for using it in such a setting. This being said, you may be better off with either one or both of the more proximal solutions with a zettelkasten being somewhat more distal for your specific needs.

Cornell notes = ZK bibliography notes + ZK fleeting notes + questions for spaced repetition

One of the primary problems with note taking in most of the mid-twentieth century (and potentially well before, particularly as framed in most educational settings) was that students would take notes, potentially review them once or twice for a test, but then not have easy access to them for later review or reuse.

People collected piles of notes without any ability to reuse or review them. Perhaps we should reframe the collector's fallacy as this: collection without reuse has dramatically decreasing returns. Certainly there may be some small initial benefit in writing it down as a means of sense making, but not reviewing it past a short period of two weeks or even several months and not being able to reuse it in the long term is a travesty, especially in a world of information overload.

https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulating-knowledge

cross reference: https://hyp.is/H5NJiLHvEeyaWksSiTFgKg/super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm (same??)

Reply to u/Wooden-School-4091 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17kui2u/analog_zettelkasten_for_natural_sciences/

Given that Carl Linnaeus "invented" the standardized 3x5 inch index card and used it heavily in his scientific work (read Isabelle Charmantier and Staffan Müller-Wille's works for more on his practice), and a variety of others including me, use it for mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, etc., Zettelkasten can certainly be used for STEM, STEAM, and any of the natural sciences.

See also, notes and links at: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%22zettelkasten+for+studying%22

If I were using it for classes/university/general studying via lectures, I'd base my practice primarily on Cornell Notes in combination with creating questions/cards for spaced repetition and/or a variation on Leitner's System.

Some of the best material on spaced repetition these days can be found via:

• Soren Bjornstad: https://controlaltbackspace.org/repeat/
• Piotr Wozniak: https://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm

and other material on their sites.

Beyond this, I'd focus my direct zettelkasten practice less on the learning portion and more on the developing or generating ideas portion of the work. Some of my practice with respect to mathematics can be found here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/17bqztm/applying_zettelkasten_for_math_heavy_subjects/

For those interested, it may bear mentioning that Bjornstad, an engineer at Remnote, has a TiddlyWiki-based zettelkasten at https://zettelkasten.sorenbjornstad.com/#PublicHomepage:PublicHomepage which he demonstrates with a walk through at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjpjE5pMZMI

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYmLhurh_a4

Scott Scheper shows an outline of his spaced repetition practice for vocabulary words. He also shows his random "chaos" boxes with random notes that he keeps unfiled and unorganized.

reply to u/taurusnoises and u/Leander_znsnsj at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/162os2q/how_can_i_use_zettelkasten_as_a_high_school/

I'm generally in the same boat as u/taurusnoises and don't think that a Luhmann-artig ZK is necessarily the right way to go—particularly at the lower levels.

I would suggest that if interested students look closely at the overall set up, they'll find that the literature note portion is almost identical to that of the Cornell note-taking method. The primary differences between them are placing more emphasis on follow-up and review, forcing yourself to answer questions, and doing spaced repetition. (Of course, naturally, there's nothing wrong with doing all your Cornell Notes on index cards despite every version I've ever seen recommending sheets of paper!)

If you do ultimately choose to go with the expanded zettelkasten workflow, I would recommend you spend more time focusing on your own thoughts on the facts and ideas as they relate to the the Cornell portion. Focus more on the area of your major (or particular interests if you're still unsure of your major) in which you're most likely to need to create writing or other particular outputs. One or two good main cards a day with a full class load is a solid start.

Keep in mind that as you enter new areas, you will likely make lots of basic, factual, low level notes while you're learning. Don't worry about this (and don't ignore it either) as working with these ideas will help you to scaffold your knowledge and understand it better. You may not have lots of high quality main notes which will usually come as you get deeper into the nuances of your subject. You should still expect to find and generate insights though and these may be highly valuable as you need to execute projects or write papers.

Good luck!

reply to u/SnooPandas3432 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/158tzk7/zettelkasten_on_a_ring_binder_with_looseleaf_paper/

She didn't specify a particular dimension, but I recall that Beatrice Webb used larger sheets of paper than traditional index-card sized slips in her practice and likely filed them into something akin to hanging files in a filing cabinet.

For students, I might suggest using the larger sheets/3-ring binder to make Cornell notes for coursework and then later distilling down one or two of the best ideas from a lecture or related readings into index card form for filing away over time. You could then have a repository of bigger formatted literature notes from books/lectures with more space and still have all the benefits of a more traditional card-based zettelkasten for creativity and writing. You could then have the benefit of questions for spaced repetition for quizzes/tests, while still keeping bigger ideas for writing papers or future research needs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leitner_system

I thought Ebbinghaus did this in the late 1800s?! 😜

https://shareg.pt/th2DNz0

Q: Can I use a card index for note taking?

Compare with: https://hypothes.is/a/HTqQPrksEe2XdQcSVvzXLQ

Spaced Repetition: * the rate of decay * the timing of active recall * the sweet spot of forgetting

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incremental_reading

Incremental reading is spaced parallel reading of multiple sources with note taking and spaced repetition.

It's not far from how I read and take notes myself, though I place less emphasis on the spaced repetition piece as I tend to run across things naturally within my note collection anyway.

One of the major potential benefits of incremental reading (not mentioned in the Wikipedia article; is it in Wozniak's work?) is the increase of combinatorial creativity created by mixing a variety of topics simultaneously.

There is also likely a useful diffuse thinking effect happening between reading sessions.

Compared with Anki, there is not enough IDR's client in all different platform. for example, android, mac and so on. It means that it is not easy for people to recall flashcard anywhere

Here again he comes close to some of the methods and ideas of having flashcards for spaced repetition, but isn't explicitly aware of the words or techniques. Note that he also doesn't use the word flashcard. When was the word first used?

Rewriting things as flashcards also tends to be a part of the spaced repetition itself.

By cutting the notes up he's specifically decontextualizing them so as to make one's memory be better tested in coming up with the solutions/answers as they are more likely to appear on a test, decontextualized from the original lecture.

Rewriting one's notes soon after they are written will be easier because they are fresher in one's mind and any issues with them can be more easily remedied. There's also the space repetition effect to be had.

Note here that Maxfield suggests the sort of value behind the idea of spaced repetition, but writing in 1910 doesn't have the word or the effect related to it yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpvEY-2dSdU

In this episode, I explain the memory system I created in order to expand my memory to new heights. I call it the Sirianni Method and with it, you can learn how to create an intentional photographic memory.

Who the hell is the Sirianni this is named for, himself? (In the comments he mentions that "it's my italian grandpa's last name, I always liked it and a while back started naming things after it)

tl;dr: He's reinvented the wheel, but certainly not the best version of it.

What he's describing isn't remotely related to the idea of a photographic memory, so he's over-hyping the results, which is dreadful. If it were a photographic memory, he wouldn't need the spaced-repetition portion of his practice. While he mentions how he's regularly reviewing his cards he doesn't mention any of the last century+ of research and work on spaced repetition. https://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm is a good place to start for some of this.

A lot of what he's doing is based on associative memory, particularly by drawing connections/links to other things he already knows. He's also taking advantage of visual memory by associating his knowledge with a specific picture.

He highlights emotion and memory, but isn't drawing clear connections between his knowledge and any specific emotions that he's tying or associating them to.

"Intentional" seems to be one of the few honest portions of the piece.

Overview of his Sirianni method: pseudo-zettelkasten notes with written links to things he already knows (but without any Luhmann-esque numbering system or explicit links between cards, unless they're hiding in his connections section, which isn't well supported by the video) as well as a mnemonic image and lots of ad hoc spaced repetition.

One would be better off mixing their note taking practice with associative mnemonic methods (method of loci, songlines, memory palaces, sketchnotes, major system, orality, etc.) all well described by Lynne Kelly (amongst hundreds before her who got smaller portions of these practices) in combination with state of the art spaced repetition.

The description of Luhmann's note taking system here is barely passable at best. He certainly didn't invent the system which was based on several hundred years of commonplace book methodology before him. Luhmann also didn't popularize it in any sense (he actually lamented how people were unimpressed by it when he showed them). Popularization was done post-2013 generally by internet hype based on his prolific academic output.

There is nothing new here other than that he thinks he's discovered something new and is repackaging it for the masses with a new name in a flashy video package. There's a long history of hucksters doing this sort of fabulist tale including Kevin Trudeau with Mega Memory in the 1990s and going back to at least the late 1800s with "Professor" Alphonse Loisette and the system he sold for inordinate amounts to the masses including Mark Twain.

Most of these methods have been around for millennia and are all generally useful and well documented though the cultural West has just chosen to forget most of them. A week's worth of research and reading on these topics would have resulted in a much stronger "system" more quickly.

Beyond this, providing a fuller range of specific options and sub-options in these areas so that individuals could pick and choose the specifics which work best for them might have been a better way to go.

Content research: D- Production value: A+

{syndication link](https://www.reddit.com/r/antinet/comments/10ehrbd/comment/j4u495q/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3)

Henry David Thoreau repeated himself frequently in his journals. Damion Searls who edited an edition of his journals suggested that some of this repetition was for the beauty and pleasure of the act, but that in many examples his repetition was an act of drafting, revising, and constructing.

Scott Scheper has recommended finding the place in one's zettelkasten where one wants to install a card before writing it out. I believe (check this) that he does this in part to prevent one from repeating themselves, but one could use the opportunity and the new context that brings them to an idea again to rewrite or rework and expand on their ideas while they're so inspired.

Thoreau's repetition may have also served the idea of spaced repetition: reminding him of his thoughts as he also revised them. We'll need examples of this through his writing to support such a claim. As the editor of this volume indicates that he removed some of the repetition, it may be better to go back to original sources than to look for these examples here.

(This last paragraph on repetition was inspired by attempting to type a tag for repetition and seeing "spaced repetition" pop up. This is an example in my own writing practice where the serendipity of a previously tagged word auto-populating/auto-completing in my interface helps to trigger new thoughts and ideas from a combinatorial creativity perspective.)

Look into plugin "Spaced Repetition" for Obsidian

https://mochi.cards

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Fernando Borretti</span> in Unbundling Tools for Thought (<time class='dt-published'>12/29/2022 15:59:17</time>)</cite></small>

https://borretti.me/article/unbundling-tools-for-thought

He covers much of what I observe in the zettelkasten overreach article.

Missing is any discussion of exactly what problem he's trying to solve other than perhaps, I want to solve them all and have a personal log of everything I've ever done.

Perhaps worth reviewing again to pull out specifics, but I just don't have the bandwidth today.

Again note taking is the wrong tool for fact-based acquisition. Apparently this is not advice given in most sources. Spaced repetition and mnemonic methods are far better suited for memorizing and remembering basic facts.

Take notes on the surprising and unique. Take notes as writing you'll reuse later. Take notes to understand.

If you don't refer back to your notes for any reason, why bother taking them? Were they so boring? Was there nothing of surprise in them for having taken them in the first place?

Often note taking (writing) for understanding can be initially useful, but reviewing over these can be less useful in a larger corpus of notes. File the boring and un-useful things away. Center the important and the surprising.

Example implementation of Anki into learning maths

This practice is quite similar to writing out good spaced repetition question/answer cards for forcing active recall and better long term memory.

Regular review through one's note cards is important for the memory portion of directly remembering your insights and received wisdom, but they're also important for helping to allow you to grow them into new ideas as well as combining them with other ideas to allow dramatic innovation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRssjvU2d-s

Starts out with some of the personal histories of how both got into the note making space.

This got more interesting for me around the 1:30 hour mark, but I was waiting for the material that would have shown up at the 3 hour mark (which doesn't exist...).

Scott spoke about the myths of zettelkasten. See https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/urawkd/the_myths_of_zettelkasten/

He also mentions maintenance rehearsal versus elaborative rehearsal. These are both part of spaced repetition. The creation of one's own cards helps play into both forms.

Because Hermann Ebbinghaus' early studies on memory, retrieval, and spaced repetition focused on meaningless random letter combinations that ha no natural associations, he started a field of learning theories that separated the ideas of understanding and learning. Learning is creating connections between ideas we already know (contextualization).

Curious to see what Brown et al have to say.

Brown, P. C., Roediger, H. L., & McDaniel, M. A. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/jhu/detail.action?docID=3301452

https://universitylifecafe.k-state.edu/bookshelf/academicskills/indexcardstudysystem.html

Natalie Umberger is writing about an "index card study system" in an academic study skills context, but it's an admixture of come ideas from Cornell Notes and using index cards as flashcards.

The advice to "Review your notes and readings frequently, so the material is 'fresh.' " is a common one (through at least the 1980s to the present), though research on the mere-exposure effect indicates that it's not as valuable as other methods.

How can we stamp out the misconception that this sort of review is practical?

Marshall, in looking at your cards, I'm curious how easy/hard you feel it is to remember longer portions of full quotes like your H.L. Menken example using only spaced repetition? I usually find it far more taxing and not as long lasting as using other more classical mnemonic methods (method of loci/songlines).

Piotr Wozniak has some material on creating/designing more concrete cards for spaced repetition that I've found generally helpful. I know that Andy Matuschak and Soren Bjornstad have some ideas, experience, and research in the space but I've yet to see more deep research on the effectiveness of these more specific practices at scale or beyond the anecdotal.

https://marshallk.com/7-steps-i-take-to-get-value-from-what-i-read-notes-on-note-taking-review

https://marshallk.com/7-steps-i-take-to-get-value-from-what-i-read-notes-on-note-taking-review

Spending just a few minutes writing about an idea in one's flash card review can be a useful way to better integrate that idea into one's field of thought. Bringing it out and expressing it more fully, linking it to other thoughts, and shifting the modality from reading into writing can be powerful methods for ensconcing it into one's memory as well as mentally owning it and even potentially extending it.

I'm always struck here that no one in these spaces mentions the idea of modality shifts as a thing of value.

Abysmally sad that this is presented without the context of any of the work over the last century and a half of spaced repetition.

I wonder that this point slipped past the reviewers and isn't at least discussed somewhat narratively here.

Dig into research on maintenance rehearsal versus elaborative rehearsal.

https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/what-language-s-are-you-studying/73190

I've been studying Welsh on and off now for just over a year.

I've been using a mix of Duolingo for it's easy user interface and it's built in spaced repetition. I like the way that it integrates vocabulary and grammar in a holistic way which focuses on both reading, writing, and listening.

However, I've also been using the fantastic platform Say Something in Welsh. This uses an older method of listening and producing based teaching which actually makes my brain feel a bit tired after practice. The focus here is solely on listening and speaking and forces the student to verbally produce the language. It's a dramatically different formula than most high school and college based courses I've seen and used over the years having taken 3 years of Spanish, 2 of French, and 2 of Latin.

The set up consists of the introduction of a few words which are then used in a variety of combinations to create full sentences. The instructors say a sentence in English and the listener is encouraged in just a few seconds to attempt to produce it in the target language (Welsh, in my case), then the instructor says the sentence in Welsh with a pause for the student to repeat it properly, another instructor says it in Welsh with a pause for a third repeat. This goes on for 20 to 30 minutes at a time. The end result is that the learner gets into the language much more quickly and can begin both understanding the spoken language as well as produce it much more rapidly than older school based methods (at least in my experience, though I have known some college language labs to use a much more limited version of a similar technique). Each lesson adds new material, but also reviews over older material in a spaced repetition format as well so you're always getting something new mixed in with the old to make new and interesting sentences for conversation.

SSiW also has modules for Manx, Cornish, Dutch, and Spanish.

I find that the two done hand in hand has helped me produce much faster results in language acquisition in an immersive manner than I have done previously and with much less effort.

https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/the-contestant-who-outsmarted-the-price-is-right/43337

Circling back to this a few years later... I just watched the documentary Perfect Bid: The Contestant who Knew Too Much (2017) which follows the story of Theodore Slauson from the article. Apparently he had spent a significant amount of time watching/taping the show and documenting the prices.

The documentary provides a single example of Slauson using a visual mnemonic for remembering the price of one item. The majority of his method seemed to be the fact that he put his pricing lists into a self-made spaced repetition system which he practiced with extensively. For some of his earliest visits to the show he mentions that a friend who travelled with him quizzed him on items on his price list on the way to the show. This, likely combined with an above average natural memory, allowed him to beat TPIR.

Outside of the scant memory portion portrayed, it was a reasonably entertaining watch.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6854248/

https://www.idorecall.com/

This was mentioned to me by Nate Maertens in our lunch discussion of edtech tools, spaced repetition, and Barbara Oakley from 2022-02-11.

Nice layout and bullet pointed reasons for using it on a slick website, but it looks awfully expensive in comparison to Anki and Mnemosyne (free). Looks like they've got pre-existing content, but a quick scan doesn't center the value of creating your own cards.

Susan Reynolds' paper indicates that students have positive reactions to her skeletal notes, but does her research indicate that they are measurably better?

What is the right balance of encouraging attention and participation in the process versus saving time for the students? Active work in the process is likely to be shown to work best.

Has anyone done research on actively helping students and modeling for them after a lecture experience to show them the appropriate follow up methods?

And possibly summarize it. And connect it to your own knowledge graph.

Readwise's spaced repetition and integration with Roam/Obsidian is doing some cool stuff with surfacing connections and serendipitous reminders. Here is a Twitter thread I wrote to myself when I started playing with it: https://twitter.com/alexbowe/status/1476817961897783296

https://super-memory.com/articles/20rules.htm

Who created SuperMemo? ::: Piotr Wozniak

Piotr Wozniak recommends against avoiding memorizing sets and prefers enumerations.

Is this a result of his not knowing the method of loci as a means of travelling through sets and remembering them easily? It's certainly evidence he wasn't aware of the as a general technique.

He does mention peg techniques, mind maps, and general mnemonic techniques.

Dr. Piotr Wozniak was apparently aware of at least some mnemonic techniques, but didn't rely on them heavily. Was this the result of the fact that he was pushing a product which he relied on for income? Was there something else?

Why didn't he more tightly integrate the two ideas?

I'm surprised that given the topic of the site and a mention of Tony Buzan on this page that mnemonic techniques don't have a more primary place here.

Highly recommended by:

<small><cite class='h-cite via'>ᔥ <span class='p-author h-card'>Soren Bjornstad </span> in Rules for Designing Precise Anki Cards - Control-Alt-Backspace (<time class='dt-published'>03/21/2022 05:21:46</time>)</cite></small>

https://controlaltbackspace.org/memory/how-much-to-learn-with-anki/

https://controlaltbackspace.org/memory/getting-started-with-anki/

The best space repetition decks are ones the learner has created for themselves. Creating the cards yourself will act as a first layer of repetition, but it will help you fashion them in your own words and in a way that best dovetails how the information fits into your scaffold of existing information. By creating your own cards, you're more likely to do so for information you're most interested in . Importing cards from others defeats these benefits and increases the likelihood that you'll create a mound of material that is both uninteresting as well as material one doesn't have pre-existing scaffolding for.

Desirable difficulty is a learning task which one has a desire to know, but which is sufficiently difficult enough to be challenging. Spaced repetition systems, if properly filled with topics in which one has an interest, will surface the least well known material for revision and should provide a sufficient level of difficulty for learning.

see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desirable_difficulty

Elizabeth Filips has digital versions of medical school notes online. She's drawn them (in software) by hand with color and occasional doodles in them (there's an image of Einstein's head with an E=mc^2 under it on one page) which makes them more memorable for having made them in the first place, but with the color and the pictures, they act as a memory palace.

I've found no evidence (yet) that she's using direct mnemonics or that she's been specifically trained in the method of loci or other techniques. This doesn't, however, mean that she's not tangentially using them without knowing about them explicitly.

One would suspect that this sort of evolutionary movement towards such techniques would have been how they evolved in the first place.

https://github.com/reuseman/flashcards-obsidian

https://github.com/wxxedu/obsidianki4

This also looks like this is either on pause or generally unsupported. Caveat emptor.

Additional details: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/620260832

https://github.com/Pseudonium/Obsidian_to_Anki

Looks to be unsupported thought.

Additional details: - https://forum.obsidian.md/t/obsidian-to-anki-v3-4-0-a-feature-rich-plugin-that-allows-you-to-add-notes-from-obsidian-to-anki/5030/160 - https://santiyounger.com/obsidian-anki

https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/taking_srs_seriously/

And someone has actually built a spaced repetition system with Hypothesis! So it's not just me... 😄

SM2 spaced repetition algorithm: https://www.blueraja.com/blog/477/a-better-spaced-repetition-learning-algorithm-sm2

https://github.com/jethrokuan/srsly

A spaced repetition system using Hypothes.is built by @Jethro

Described at https://blog.jethro.dev/posts/taking_srs_seriously/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eP8Bq9x5yw

A nice overview of spaced repetition systems.

Soren Bjornstad previously worked for Anki and is now at Remnote.

I wonder if anyone has created a spaced repetition system set up that leverages Hypothes.is? It would be cool to write questions and answers as one takes notes in Hypothes.is and then be able to quickly/easily export those annotations into a spaced repetition system.

Example:

Q: What is the best annotation tool on the inernet?

A: Hypothes.is

Aaron Davis uses the review through his website's posts, bookmarks, etc. to create his newsletter as a means of reviewing what he's read and thought about.

The Cornell notes practice of writing questions in the empty left column as a means of testing knowledge can be an effective tool after taking notes to ensure that one has actually learned and understood the broad concepts. They can also be used for spaced repetition purposes as well.

Valuable though they may be as teaching and learning tools, they don't figure directly into the idea of permanent notes from a zettelkasten perspective.

Not highlighted in this context but it bears thinking about, Ahrens is looking at writing in particular while many note taking techniques (Cornell notes, SQ3R, SQ4R, etc.) and methods geared at students are specific to capturing basic facts which may need to be learned, by which I mean memorized or at least highly familiar, so that they can later be used in future analysis.

Many of these note taking concepts are geared toward basic factual acquisition, repetition, and memorization and not future generative thought or writing applications.

It's important to separate these ideas so that one can focus on one or the other. Perhaps there are contexts within which both may be valuable, but typically they're not. Within the zettelkasten context the difference between the two may be subtly seen in the conception of "literature notes" and "permanent notes".

Literature notes are progressive summarizations which one may use to strengthen and aid in understanding and later recall. These may include basic facts which one might wish to create question/answer pairs for use in spaced repetition programs.

Permanent notes have a higher level of importance, particularly for generative writing. These are the primary substance one wants to work with while the literature notes may be the "packing peanuts" or filler that can be used to provide background context to support one's more permanent notes.

Compare this with: https://boffosocko.com/2021/12/22/different-types-of-notes-and-use-cases/

Work out mathematically at what rate the accumulation of notes would outstrip one's ability to memorize them solely using spaced repetition of a few generations.

Robin Sloan has built a system that will present him with random notes from his archive every time he opens a browser tab.

This method also presupposes that one is taking notes solely for memorizing facts and helping to support basic understanding.

What about for analysis, comparison, synthesis, generation of entirely new ideas?

https://words.jamoe.org/highlight-question-and-answer/

A somewhat disingenuous reframing of the Cornell notes method. They've given it a different name potentially for marketing purposes to sell in a book. At least HQ&A is a reasonable mnemonic for what the process is.

They do highlight the value of modality shift from reading to thinking about how to formulate a question and answer as a means of learning. They don't seem to know the name or broader value of the technique however.

This question technique is also highlighted in the work of Andy Matuschak and Michael Nielsen. Cross reference: https://andymatuschak.org/prompts/ and their quantum mechanics course experiments.

https://github.com/adithyabsk/tftbot

A Twitter bot that will tweet out data from your PMK tools. Presumably this is for spaced repetition or a goal towards creating combinatorial creativity.

Modern digital zettelkasten don't force the same sort of digital internal branching process that is described by Niklas Luhmann. Internal branching in these contexts is wholly reliant on the user to create it.

Many digital systems will create a concrete identifier to fix the idea within the system, but this runs the risk of ending up with a useless scrap heap.

Some modern systems provide the ability for one to add taxonomies like subject headings in a commonplace book tradition, which adds some level of linking. But if we take the fact that well interlinked cards are the most valuable in such a system then creating several links upfront may be a bit more work, but it provides more value in the long run.

Upfront links also don't require quite as much work at the card's initial creation as the creator already has the broader context of the idea. Creating links at a future date requires the reloading into their working memory of the card's idea and broader context.

Of course there may also be side benefits (including to memory) brought by the spaced repetition of the card's ideas as well as potential new contexts gained in the interim which may help add previously unconsidered links.

It can certainly be possible that at some level of linking, there is a law of diminishing returns the decreases the value of a card and its idea.

One of the benefits of physical card systems like Luhmann's is that the user is forced to add the card somewhere, thus making the first link of the idea into the system. Luhmann's system in particular creates a parent/sibling relation to other cards or starts a brand new branch.

I'm seeing a larger growing pattern of people who are using Hypothes.is as a means of pulling their notes into their digital notebooks. Here Andy Matuschak is doing it to create spaced repetition cards for mnemonic purposes, a use case I haven't seen much of in the Hypothes.is space.

The fact that many are using Readwise (a paid monthly subscription) to do so is unfortunate. We definitely need more open source/free methods for doing this.

The Hypothesidian plugin for Obsidian is one of the few direct products I've seen in the space so far.

Most of this knowledge pattern I've seen has been in the tools for thought space and not within educational spaces, thought there is some overlap which will create the necessary bleed-through.

Services like IFTTT might also be a potential solution, but outputs from RSS and ATOM strip out data like tags which are highly useful. Perhaps a custom IFTTT integration? Though this opens up the issue of yet another middleman service for collecting rents.

Source: https://twitter.com/withorbit/status/1474575944429957125

I've been having a really good time this week writing prompts as inline annotations on web books. pic.twitter.com/gCvpTAsjt1

— Orbit (@withorbit) December 25, 2021

1. DeBoer 2001

Warren R DeBoer. 2001. ‘Of dice and women: gambling and exchange in Native North America.’ Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 8 (3): 215–68.

Might it be possible that these women were actually gambling information relating to their "gathering" or other cultural practices? By playing games with each other and with nearby groups of people, they would have been regularly practicing their knowledge through repetition.

How might we provide evidence for this? Read the DeBoer reference for potential clues.

There is certainly social lubrication of visiting people from time to time which can help and advance societies, but this regular visiting can also be seen as a means of reinforcing one's oral cultural history through spaced repetition.

It can be seen as "trade" but in a way that anthropologists have generally ignored for lack of imagination for what may have been actually happening.

Based on the collection of quotes and proverbs it sounds more like he's got his own commonplace book which he uses to inform his acting process. Sounds almost like he uses them so frequently that he's memorized many of them.

Interesting that he refers to them as "hymns".

Compare this with Eminem's "stacking ammo" for a particular use case.

h/t to Kevin Marks for directing me to this article for this.

Over the years in academic settings I've picked up pieces of Spanish, French, Latin and a few odd and ends of other languages.

Six years ago we put our daughter into a dual immersion Japanese program (in the United States) and it has changed some of my view of how we teach and learn languages, a process which is also affected by my slowly picking up conversational Welsh using the method at https://www.saysomethingin.com/ over the past year and change, a hobby which I wish I had more targeted time for.

Children learn language through a process of contextual use and osmosis which is much more difficult for adults. I've found that the slowly guided method used by SSiW is fairly close to this method, but is much more targeted. They'll say a few words in the target language and give their English equivalents, then they'll provide phrases and eventually sentences in English and give you a few seconds to form them into the target language with the expectation that you try to say at least something, or pause the program to do your best. It's okay if you mess up even repeatedly, they'll say the correct phrase/sentence two times after which you'll repeat it again thus giving you three tries at it. They'll also repeat bits from one lesson to the next, so you'll eventually get it, the key is not to worry too much about perfection.

Things slowly build using this method, but in even about 10 thirty minute lessons, you'll have a pretty strong grasp of fluent conversational Welsh equivalent to a year or two of college level coursework. Your work on this is best supplemented with interacting with native speakers and/or watching television or reading in the target language as much as you're able to.

For those who haven't experienced it before I'd recommend trying out the method at https://www.saysomethingin.com/welsh/course1/intro to hear it firsthand.

The experience will give your brain a heavy work out and you'll feel mentally tired after thirty minutes of work, but it does seem to be incredibly effective. A side benefit is that over time you'll also build up a "gut feeling" about what to say and how without realizing it. This is something that's incredibly hard to get in most university-based or book-based language courses.

This method will give you quicker grammar acquisition and you'll speak more like a native, but your vocabulary acquisition will tend to be slower and you don't get any writing or spelling practice. This can be offset with targeted memory techniques and spaced repetition/flashcards or apps like Duolingo that may help supplement one's work.

I like some of the suggestions made in Lynne's post as I've been pecking away at bits of Japanese over time myself. There's definitely an interesting structure to what's going on, especially with respect to the kana and there are many similarities to what is happening in Japanese to the Chinese that she's studying. I'm also approaching it from a more traditional university/book-based perspective, but if folks have seen or heard of a SSiW repetition method, I'd love to hear about it.

Hopefully helpful by comparison, I'll mention a few resources I've found for Japanese that I've researched on setting out a similar path that Lynne seems to be moving.

Japanese has two different, but related alphabets and using an app like Duolingo with regular practice over less than a week will give one enough experience that trying to use traditional memory techniques may end up wasting more time than saving, especially if one expects to be practicing regularly in both the near and the long term. If you're learning without the expectation of actively speaking, writing, or practicing the language from time to time, then wholesale mnemotechniques may be the easier path, but who really wants to learn a language like this?

The tougher portion of Japanese may come in memorizing the thousands of kanji which can have subtly different meanings. It helps to know that there are a limited set of specific radicals with a reasonably delineable structure of increasing complexity of strokes and stroke order.

The best visualization I've found for this fact is the Complete Listing of the 214 Radicals and Major Variations from An Introduction to Japanese Kanji Calligraphy by Kunii Takezaki (Tuttle, 2005) which I copy below:

(Feel free to right click and view the image in another tab or download it and view it full size to see more detail.)

I've not seen such a chart in any of the dozens of other books I've come across. The numbered structure of increasing complexity of strokes here would certainly suggest an easier to build memory palace or songline.

I love this particular text as it provides an excellent overview of what is structurally happening in Japanese with lots of tidbits that are otherwise much harder won in reading other books.

There are many kanji books with various forms of what I would call very low level mnemonic aids. I've not found one written or structured by what I would consider a professional mnemonist. One of the best structured ones I've seen is A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters by Kenneth G. Henshall (Tuttle, 1988). It's got some great introductory material and then a numbered list of kanji which would suggest the creation of a quite long memory palace/journey/songline.

Each numbered Kanji has most of the relevant data and readings, but provides some description about how the kanji relates or links to other words of similar shapes/meanings and provides a mnemonic hint to make placing it in one's palace a bit easier. Below is an example of the sixth which will give an idea as to the overall structure.

I haven't gotten very far into it yet, but I'd found an online app called WaniKani for Japanese that has some mnemonic suggestions and built-in spaced repetition that looks incredibly promising for taking small radicals and building them up into more easily remembered complex kanji.

I suspect that there are likely similar sources for these couple of books and apps for Chinese that may help provide a logical overall structuring which will make it easier to apply or adapt one's favorite mnemotechniques to make the bulk vocabulary memorization easier.

The last thing I'll mention I've found, that's good for practicing writing by hand as well as spaced repetition is a Kanji notebook frequently used by native Japanese speaking children as they're learning the levels of kanji in each grade. It's non-obvious to the English speaker, and took me a bit to puzzle out and track down a commercially printed one, even with a child in a classroom that was using a handmade version. The notebook (left to right and top to bottom) has sections for writing a big example of the learned kanji; spaces for the "Kun" and "On" readings; spaces for the number of strokes and the radical pieces; a section for writing out the stroke order as it builds up gradually; practice boxes for repeated practice of writing the whole kanji; examples of how to use the kanji in context; and finally space for the student to compose their own practice sentences using the new kanji.

Regular use and practice with these can be quite helpful for moving toward mastery.

I also can't emphasize enough that regularly and actively watching, listening, reading, and speaking in the target language with materials that one finds interesting is incredibly valuable. As an example, one of the first things I did for Welsh was to find a streaming television and radio that I want to to watch/listen to on a regular basis has been helpful. Regular motivation and encouragement is key.

I won't go into them in depth and will leave them to speak for themselves, but two of the more intriguing videos I've watched on language acquisition which resonate with some of my experiences are:

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ox6MdRTc0yE

This is hilarious!

This is definitely the harder part of the practice, but daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual reviews can definitely help.

To start I primarily focused on 3-5 broader sub-topics of things I felt were most important to me and always did those first. This helps to begin aggregating things and making a bigger difference. The rest of my smaller "fleeting" notes I didn't worry so much about and left to either come back to later or just allow them to sit there.

I think Sonke Ahrens' book How to Take Smart Notes was fairly helpful in laying this out.

Incidentally the spaced repetition of review is also good for your memory of the things you find important.

Can we, like Shepherds, tell a merry Tale? Stephen Duck, The Thresher's Tale (poem)

There's a link here to shepherds and a bardic tradition. In some sense, shepherds have lots of time to kill during the day and thus potentially tell stories. But they're also moving around their environment which also makes it easier for them to have used songline-like methods for attaching their memories to their environment.

How far back might this tradition go in our literate culture?

I also wonder at the influence of time on oral traditions as the result of this. Lynne Kelly describes calendrical devices in a variety of indigenous settings in Knowledge and Power in Prehistoric Societies for potential use in annual spaced repetition. What about the spaced repetition within daily cycles of regular work as described in this paper with respect to shepherds, fishing communities, and crofting?

The daily cycle of life may have been a part of the spaced repetition for memory.

How might we show this?

A quick example that comes to mind is the French children's song Alouette, Gentille Alouette which details how one kills, cleans, and dresses a chicken for cooking.

https://asuth.com/about

Founder and formerly of Quizlet, Invite to Gardens and Streams event.

https://www.reddit.com/r/commonplacebook/comments/jb8x3d/what_does_your_indexing_system_look_like/

Brief discussion of indexing systems for commonplace books. Locke's system is mentioned. Another person uses a clunky system at the bottom of pages to create threaded links.

Intriguingly, one person mentions visiting theirs often enough that they remember where things are. (spaced repetition with a bit of method of loci going on here)

https://genki3.japantimes.co.jp/en/student/

Self-study Room offers a variety of online materials to support your learning with GENKI textbooks.

Mainchini is a clever looking Chrome extension that does spaced repetition for learning Japanese by showing words every time one opens a new browser tab.

This idea is a bit on the extreme side, but it does suggest that having a multi-card comparison view in a PKM system would be useful.

Drawing on Raymond Llull's combitorial memory system from the 12th century and a bit of Herman Ebbinghaus' spaced repetition (though this is also seen in earlier non-literate cultures), one could present two (or more) random atomic notes together as a way of juxtaposing disparate ideas from one's notes.

The spaced repetition of the cards would be helpful for one's long term memory of the ideas, but it could also have the secondary effect of nudging one to potentially find links or connections between the two ideas and help to spur creativity for the generation of new hybrid ideas or connection to other current ideas based on a person's changed context.

I've thought about this in the past (most likely while reading Frances Yates' Art of Memory), but don't think I've bothered to write it down (or it's hiding in untranscribed marginalia).

Not exactly a real scientific trial, but...

Note also that the other part was his having taken notes and actively engaged with the material as he heard it. The notes also formed the basis of his ability to do the spaced repetition.

Mnemonic methods could be used in place of the note taking for the properly trained. Visual memory just goes to expand on it.

This is an awfully fluff article that's probably too prescriptive. I wonder how many people it influences to try it out? How successful will they be without a more specific prescription?

Polar is an integrated reading environment to build your knowledge base. Actively read, annotate, connect thoughts, create flashcards, and track progress.

This also shouldn't have been in question. There's a reasonably large body of practical experience of the effects of spaced repetition from indigenous cultures, not to mention psychology research from Hermann Ebbinghaus onwards.

However, I suspect that without prompting or repeated uses and examples, the percentage of students who actually do is likely abysmally poor.

This is a bit surprising, though the (N=3) numbers were so small.

It also makes me wonder if the Aboriginal method training included a spaced repetition component of any sort as traditionally it likely would, though it's highly likely that novices memorizing a random list of butterflies wouldn't have reviewed over their performance a week, a month, or other intervals later.

It would be highly useful to do another test at a larger interval, say a week or a month later as well, both with and without the suggestion of spaced repetition with all three groups.

This may not be as bad a thing as needing to reread a short section is also good for creating context of the original note as well as review for memory and retention.

This is an example of spaced repetition being done as retrospective and hiding some of the value of making the important things stand out and reviewing them for better long term retention.

This sounds promising. I'll keep my eye on a possible release.

Signed up for an account on Apr 6, 2021 at 19:40.

It would be far better to have apps focus on better reasons for on this day features. I'd love to have something focused on spaced repetition for building up my memory for other things. Reminders at a week, a month, three months, and six months would be a useful thing for some posts.

Example of unwanted spaced repetition via social media.

How is this any different to extracting questions from the text and adding them to something like Anki? Except that in Anki I have the questions with me all the time, I don't need to be online, don't need to register anywhere, and can choose the questions that are meaningful to me, can connect it to other knowledge...it seems that this simply embeds a less useful form of spaced repetition into the text. Or am I missing something?

I can easily see some extensions for using Hypothes.is here.

• Cornell Notes
• Reviews notes
• Flash cards for spaced repetition
• Notes for building memory palaces

Indigenous peoples not only used holidays and other time-based traditions as a means of spaced repetition, but they also did them for just this purpose of time-based need. Winter's here and the harvest changes? Your inter-tribal rituals went over your memory palace for just those changes. Songs and dances recalled older dishes and recopies that hadn't been made in months and brought them into a new rotation.

Anthropologists have collected examples of this specific to hunting seasons and preparations of the hunt in which people would prepare for the types of game they would encounter. Certainly they did this for feast times and seasonal diets as well. Indians in the Americas are documenting having done things like this for planting corn and keeping their corn varieties pure over hundreds of years.

How preliminary can they really be? The idea of spaced repetition goes back to the ancient Greeks and Romans and Hermann Ebbinghaus did psychology research on the topic and was publishing in 1885. Surely they've got to have a better grasp than this indicates here.