Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[bahihs]

Has anyone here ever used any of the software in the title? (For recreation or otherwise)

I myself have used DNB and gotten up D4B (I almost cried from joy when it finally happened, then I was swiftly struck down to D2B) before I quit; I think I'm going to start it up again. I've also used Anki to memorize spanish words (with some degree of success) and am still using it to memorize chess tactics positions (results have actually been showing up in otb games, not so much online). I'm thinking of using Anki for school stuff (anybody whose used it for learning a computer language (like perl) have you any advice for an aspirant?)

What about you guys? What do you use the software for/how?

[smjjames]

Theres a duolingo thread around, not sure if that's the kind of thing you're looking for.

[bahihs]

Theres a duolingo thread around, not sure if that's the kind of thing you're looking for.

Not really, duolingo is limited to learning language whereas the software I mentioned is often used for learning more varied material (of which language is a big part, admittedly).

I'm actually more curious of peoples experiences with Dual N Back

[Reelya]

Anki is like flash cards linking two ideas isn't it? Like pick the English word from another language and such?

I think flash cards would a dreadful way to learn programming. You learn to program by doing, and I'd never trust a text-book taught programmer over a practical-taught programmer. Programming is very much about knowing the structures on an abstract level and how to apply them in different situations where the end-code will actually look a lot different depending on the problem you're solving. A flash card can't properly capture that.

Do projects, and anytime you need a bit of code to do something you haven't done before, google it, before trying to write the function yourself. There will either be a choice of functions written by someone else you can port in, showing you some best-practice already debugged code, or there will be a built-in language function you just use as-is. There is no need to memorize a textbook worth of special commands for each language. 99% of the time you end up using the same handful of commands for every program, and you just need to remember what those commands are called in each language you use.

Learning a whole pile of vocabulary first for a computer language is just not the way to learn it, unlike a natural language. You just need the bare bones few essentials and can then already write every possible program in that language. Extending the vocabulary just makes it more efficient, but it's best to only pick up things as you need them via google. If they're a one-off you won't remember them - but don't need to! - and if you reuse them you'll know how to google them again and eventually just remember them without making a special effort.

[FearfulJesuit]

Yeah, I use Anki for language vocabulary. Since I've got four of them to keep track of (Russian, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit- adding Finnish soon too), it's way better than trying to use paper flashcards, especially since you can have it force you to type in the answer.

You can use Anki for word endings or inflections, too, not just vocab. I've never needed to do this for Latin or Russian or even Greek, but Sanskrit is just so ending-heavy that if you don't have a system to study them you're going to crash and burn.

Remember that Anki's true power lies in its versatility. You can set it up so that it just replicates vanilla flashcards, but you can make it do so much more. For Sanskrit, for example, I have it make me type in the answer, then show me any cognates in Latin or Greek to the word I'm trying to learn. (Generally speaking, the more painful your flashcard system is, the better it works. Forcing yourself to write down the answer is slower and more liable to trip you up than "just remembering it", but it works much better.)

I would never use Anki to learn a dynamic system like programming- that's about learning to think in a certain way. But once you've learned the system of a human language, you just have to keep shoveling words in there until you can do what you need to do.

[bahihs]

Interesting feedback, wasn't expecting the negative on learning programming. Yet I submit this discussion (scroll down to the part where he discusses learning alternative things with spaced repetition, such as a programming language called Haskell) as well asthis and this for more detailed discussions.

Let me just say for the record that I am in agreement with both of you (especially Reelya) in that programming requires a practical learning approach (like learning how to ride a bike, you need to skin your knees once or twice; you cannot learn it from reading a book). The way I learned python was by actively trying to code projects I was personally interested in (I learned more in two weeks of that, then 3 months of a formal python course).

However, I believe that once you understand the basic concepts of a program (functions, arguments, variables etc.) that is equivalent to understanding the fundamental elements of language (i.e grammar), and all that is required then, is vocabulary. Now using a practical approach is fine when you are working on projects on your own, but you if you are searching for a job or if you need to put "knows [programming language]" on your resume, you need to have a fluency with the language which requires memorization of things which you might not feel you need to know. Another thing that I've often found is that sometimes you'll code something in a very roundabout way, only to find later that there was a simple straightforward and efficient way to code that very thing. But you never considered it, because you didn't know it existed. That sort of thing wouldn't happen (or would happen less often) if you knew a wide variety of vocab.

I can't really see any downside to knowing more programming vocab, the problem for me, is only in the implementation of the cards. Its easy enough to look at a word and select an image (for meaning) and sound file (for pronunciation), but its not so easy for a snippet of code which is usually much more abstract.

Anyway, as I said before, I'm more interested in people's experiences with DNB, I've heard you get psuedo-hallucinations at the higher levels (D7B and higher).

[Reelya]

It's just not a good use of the time, and you'd be cluttering your knowledge space with details of all the functions almost everyone never uses.

Like for C++ are you really going to remember every single method of every STL library class? That's actually less than useless for actually knowing how to use the classes properly. Take a look at the stl::vector for a start:

http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/vector/vector/
Just the first out of 30+ methods has multiple forms of the arguments, and different behavior in different versions of C++. Are we going to start with the 100's of Flash cards you'd need to make just to memorize all the details about vectors, when you only really need to know 2-3 of those functions. Working out which ones are important is better done by looking at example code than by memorizing all the options. What is important is how they function with different arguments, and that is something you learn by examples and experience.

So which libraries should you memorize completely? stdio, stdlib, vector, map, list etc? Not only would this be impractical you'd end up tripping over yourself more than it would help, because many standard library functions can take a wide variety of arguments forms depending on what data you want to feed into them and how you're intergrating them into your program, you'd need dozens of flash cards just to memorize all the possible forms of a single named function, let alone memorizing ALL the c++ functions. We're talking tens of thousands of functions and methods here, and that's only counting the standard libraries that ship with all versions of c++.

Don't even get me started on how much of a nightmare that would be for DirectX or OpenGL, where virtually every function argument has dozens of possible formats depending on specific bit codings of color depth and special flags. Almost all of which you will never use.

Maybe for a toy language like Haskell rote memorization of the entire standard library is effective. It would be a nightmare and impede actual performance for c++. get ready for 10 hours a day of memorizing stuff you'll never use, and the guy hiring you has never heard of.
 

[bahihs]

Hmm, but why would I need to memorize something "cold" like that? That is to say, do I really need to go into the STL and memorize every single function? What if instead, I just follow along on a textbook (or online course, or tutorial etc.), memorizing the functions and snippets of code and work problems, as I go through them, instead? You're absolutely right in saying that trying to memorize every single method and argument and behavior of even one library, is a colossal waste of time; but then, I don't really see that as the goal of spaced repetition. If you read the supermemo article I provided, the author discusses how programming information should be divided between the programmer's brain-space and the computer's memory; there is a diminishing return after a while, which (elsewhere on the supermemo site) is described as the "5 minute rule". If you need more than 5 minutes to figure out/look up the information, its better off being memorized. This is because total memorization time of any given card is about 5 minutes, including card creation (without card creation, that time drops to about 1.8 minutes over 4 years).

The only point of space repetition (as I see it) is to remember what you (hopefully) already understand, not to build understanding using brute force. So yes, going about it as you described would be very inefficient and almost certainly detrimental. But I don't think anyone would do it that way anyway. Rather than trying to memorize an entire library, it makes more sense to memorize the information in a tutorial or course or book.

Admittedly, I seem to have suggested the former with my repeated use of "vocab", but what I really meant was the memorization of, for instance, the reference page provided at the end of each chapter that has a list of all the functions and methods used within that chapter (an example of this can be found in the excellent book, Accelerated C++) 

[Arx]

I've never memorised more than basic functions in a programming language. Everything I need I'll use often enough to remember quickly, and anything else is what the IDE is for, or a reference website if your preferred IDE isn't linked to the documentation.

For actual languages, though, these are useful. More so than Duolingo for the vocabulary, since all the ones I know of let you do a few minutes on your phone every now and then, which you can't with Duolingo.

[FearfulJesuit]

I've never memorised more than basic functions in a programming language. Everything I need I'll use often enough to remember quickly, and anything else is what the IDE is for, or a reference website if your preferred IDE isn't linked to the documentation.

For actual languages, though, these are useful. More so than Duolingo for the vocabulary, since all the ones I know of let you do a few minutes on your phone every now and then, which you can't with Duolingo.

Yeah. It can be a bit of a hassle to sync up your computer and phone decks, but if you do that every day when you get up, you'll be just fine.