You’re referring to incremental reading, which yes is indeed one of the killer features of SuperMemo. You're basically just reading, but you have at the core of it an SRS (SuperMemo) to store cool ideas in flashcard form and every article (“Topics” is how they are referred to in SuperMemo) will be shown to you at a later date. I like to think of them all on a “conveyor belt” that means everything you put into it will eventually find its way back to you. I love incremental reading but for many years I have struggled to find a way to mimic this OUTSIDE of SuperMemo. The overall peace of mind and level of control I have over the learning process is quite remarkable, and incremental reading is more than just the sum of its parts. I wish there were a standalone app for your phone or iPad for incremental reading, as I would love to use my iPad to do what I do when reading in SuperMemo on my windows laptop.
Dude, nice job! I've been using SuperMemo daily since January 2006! I started using it only for Japanese vocabulary words, but after a few years I tried to branch out and start using it for other stuff. It took a while to really wrap my head around using SRS to learn bigger concepts outside of learning languages. To make a long story short, it all comes down to breaking down any concept or idea into single sentence bites that are added to your flashcard collection. Very often complicated concepts require many flashcards, and (to me) THIS is where learning truly happens. Looking at an idea and saying "what makes this idea work?" and making sure those ideas are covered adequately in your flashcard collection. Now as I listen or read something, I'm constantly asking myself "Is this idea covered in my SuperMemo collection?" And if not, I write down single sentences in my Notes app and add them the next morning after I finish my repetitions. (When do you do your reps? First thing in the morning or throughout the day?) I was annoyed when I was going down this path because there were little to no resources for using SRS to learn complex information (Outside of the SuperMemo web site), so a lot of this I had to learn by trial and error. Let me know if you want to chat, so cool to find others that are dedicated enough to go 10+ years with SRS!
I have a blog, like the early 2000’s! I’m also working on a book, hopefully I’ll have it done by the end of this year. The blog is called supermemoadventures. I’ve been using SuperMemo for 17 years, every single day. If you have any questions, feel free to ask here.
Cool! Yeah, at a certain point I was looking for help in my flashcard routine but realized not many people have used a program like SuperMemo for a few years in a row every single day, and I thought it would be a good idea to write down my experiences and observations.
I’ve been using SuperMemo for Windows every day for 17 years but I’ve started using Anki so I can do some foreign language flashcards on the go (I add them to SuperMemo after the interval gets to more than 1 month). Anki is easy and convenient, SuperMemo is extremely powerful and versatile when it comes to easily adding media like pictures to your cards. I say go with whatever you are most likely to not quit doing. Either choice would be fine, although I’m obviously Team SuperMemo all the way
Whoa, awesome to see a fellow SuperMemo user here! I've been going for 17 years, I absolutely can't imagine life without SuperMemo and I've stopped trying to sell my friends on it. Have you tried integrating Study Wand with SuperMemo at all? I'm always on the lookout for ways to maximize my information intake (Aside from SuperMemo, which already does a nearly perfect job at it).
Nothing automated yet, but I may plan to. I don't regularly add that many new cards to my collection to where it'd be an immediate benefit for me. I may add more with StudyWand since it seems to do a good enough job of creating cards. Incremental reading is the primary way I add new material to my collection, but I don't really fully process articles that much into items these days. Most of my SuperMemo use is using incremental reading to ensure I always have something interesting to read as well as tasklists for planning/ideas. I have a lot of stuff that I like to revisit or review, which I find using SuperMemo great for too.
I’ve been using SuperMemo for almost 17 years every single day, started using it before Anki even came out. Too invested in my SuperMemo flashcard collection to jumó ship. I am 100% satisfied with SuperMemo 18’s algorithm, I’ve upgraded every single version since this is kind of my thing now. I’m a guy that does flashcards every day and can almost perfectly memorize everything I put in it.
Hey, you sound like me! I’ve been using SuperMemo daily for more than a decade, and I’ve noticed something similar. Processing information and thinking in terms of “how do I make a flashcard that covers this fact?” has been helpful at both making flashcards but also just general understanding stuff. Taking notes in my Notes app in the form of questions and answers has been very useful.
I agree completely. Creating good cards, or thinking about how to cover a topic/fact with cards well forces you to break it down into very small pieces. Otherwise the cards get bulky, aren't precise enough and are generally annoying.
Breaking it down into such small bits makes it immediately obvious if I haven't understood something, because I either wouldn't understand the answer for one of my own cards, or wouldn't even know how to create an answer.
If done properly, it's much harder for something to "slip through the cracks" so to speak.
When I first started properly integrating this into my day to day life I also noticed that I was interested in remembering many more mundane things than I would've expected. Simple stuff that I really didn't have a place to write them down for, but that also weren't really important enough to take time out of my day to actively memorize it. There's a place for that now. It's been really interesting to see how broadly applicable spaced repetition is and that it's not just useful to learn for college exams.
Yes, exactly! I frequently notice during my day-to-day life, I will ask myself simple questions like “what is the state department?” and then I Google the question, read the answer, and create a question and answer pair in as simple language as possible and then store that in my notes app. I no longer feel embarrassed, but I’m actually excited to find these kinds of gaps in my knowledge. I also feel way less pressure to act like I understand something that I don’t out of fear of looking stupid. It has been such an overall net positive for my brain.
As far as productivity goes, I use a text document to track when I begin a new task and I don’t “start” the next task until I finish the previous one. Doing this has made me really conscious of finishing something before I start something else. As far as studying goes, I use SuperMemo to keep track of useful bits of knowledge and my Notes app on my iPhone to keep track of what goes into SuperMemo. I use Things 3 on my iPhone to keep track of recurring To Dos and I work every day to get that list to zero. I have made sure that my Things 3 to do list gets to zero by the end of the day, and I’ve been doing that for the last 554 days.
Yo, I've been using SuperMemo for 16 years every single day (Did my cards this morning :), and you're spot on! I would love to chit chat about SM sometime, I've not met many people that use SRS for so long! Send me an e-mail at thesupermemoguy (at) gmail (dot) com
I guess I’m the extreme case then; I’ve been using SuperMemo for 16 years, every single day; originally it was to memorize foreign language vocabulary words, but has since expanded to everything I want to know. Left unchecked you’re right, you can easily become obsessed with memorizing junk knowledge and becoming like the comic book guy from the Simpson’s. But over time it has helped me learn how to “compact” complicated ideas into simple statements and more easily internalize new ideas. Since I’ve been using SuperMemo to remember concepts, metaphors and illustrations kind of just “appear” in my brain. I don’t fully understand why, I think it’s like lightning striking a place with lots of metal; you can’t force it to happen, but you can make the conditions conducive to “lightning strikes” of inspiration.
