SuperMemo makes learning fun.
I. Anki’s Imperfections
Some things you don’t notice until you leave them. Often times our brains aren’t ambitious enough, meta-enough, or creative enough to picture a better way of doing things, so we stay with the suboptimal technique.
That’s Anki.
In Anki, you make cards, one by one, deck by deck. And perhaps the monotony of that experience is drowned out by the excitement you feel from using spaced-repetition in the first place, from knowing that you’re miles ahead of your peers anyway.
Well you are, but at what cost?
Hours and hours of boredom. Of formulating questions and typing them in one by one, but that’s not SuperMemo.
II. What separates SuperMemo
Rather than making the cards one by one to remember facts/interesting tidbits from an article, you import the entire thing into SuperMemo. Then, when SuperMemo’s algorithm decides it’s best to show it to you based on the priority you set it, you read the article and highlight the important bits. You’ve just made an extract. Those extracts will then be shown to you later, and then you’ll extract some of that. Incrementally, you’ll boil down the article to every word with all the fluff to just the pure facts, of which you can make cards out of, seamless with the reading process.
And it’s fun!
Incremental Reading is fun, because you get to read articles you knew were interesting. Incremental Reading is fun because it combines creation with input, it combines recreation with learning, and it combines fun and work, without monotonously making cards one by one.
We do things that we’re incentivised to do, and if life-long learning is a painful, monotonous chore, we just won’t do it. SuperMemo makes learning fun. Don’t you want to want to do good things?
III. The Learning Curve
The creator of SuperMemo is an odd guy. Though he’s lovely, he doesn’t care much for advertising the product apart from the hefty articles he’s written about them. Combined with it’s difficult to grasp 90’s UI, it makes sense why you likely haven’t heard about it, not because it’s worse than Anki, quite the opposite in fact.
Luckily for me I was walked through the basics of the program in an hour by a lovely guy on the SuperMemo Wiki Discord , who freely teaches SuperMemo just because of how great the program is. He’s a great dude, though if you’re suspicious of his intentions I don’t blame you. But, after further interrogation by me, it seems his long term goal is to create a legion of geniuses. Neat!
IV. The Peace of Mind
Though I’ve only been using it for about a month, SuperMemo is easily the most important program I own. It gives such lovely peace of mind knowing I can now learn about ANYTHING. Anything I’ve been putting off learning for the last 2 years because of the monotony of Anki I can now easily import into SuperMemo, knowing that I’ll come across it and memorise it in time.
I don’t know how exactly I dealt with this dissonance before (I don’t even think I did because I didn’t realise there was a better way to do it after) but reading non-fiction books has largely been a waste of time, as I forget everything except, if I’m lucky, a singular shiny fact from it a week after putting the book down.
I love Incremental Reading because I can’t go back to not learning things forever. What would be the point?
If I’ve convinced you to give SuperMemo a shot, check out https://supermemo.wiki/learn/#/
And if you want to speak to other Discordian SuperMemo-users, check out their Discord! https://discord.com/invite/vUQhqCT
-Gingerjumble