For cards you can create great web UIs using HTML, CSS and JS, but there is no way to persist user-input, for example by updating field values of the current card/notes. If that was supported it would open up lots of possibilities, including more dynamic “web app” style cards instead of the current more “static” ones, e.g. up to a questionnaire that shows questions based on previous and current user-input.
Some users want to rate their current performance relative to their previous performance. So they need to capture some data about previous performance (using HTML forms) and later compare that with the current performance. Examples:
- Math: how long did it take to solve the equation?
- Music: at what tempo could you play xyz on your instrument?
- Translate: where did you struggle translating this sentence? If same phrase, then “Again”
Another field could be randomized cards, where the same card has similar but different content every time shown. Probably there are situations where the randomizer needs to know what has been shown and what hasn’t.
Thanks for considering,
Andreas
Please read the forth of the 20 rules (it’s the Minimum Information Principle).
Forget the questionaire example, the other use-cases are still valid (I think). At least for music related practicing, it would be very helpful to be able to track the tempo of the previous performance
Seems already more reasonable.
I have to admit, I have yet to find a good workflow to make Anki useful in music practicing. @ArthurMilchior has written a very good article on one way, however I personally haven’t found it useful in practice, even though I match the “target” audience of that article (more than ten years of practicing, and using Anki mainly to learn by heart the pieces).
So far, what has worked best was just writing such information down on a piece of paper for the next time I practice. From my experience, Anki is very good at making you memorize stuff, but it doesn’t work that well when you try to learn a skill where must of the work is not in the memorization (for instance, some topics that I found hard to use Anki to learn where maths, CS and music).
So, on the one hand, I would be very interested in seeing Anki expanding its capabilities to be able to use it to learn these skills, but one the other hand I doubt you’ll be ever able to reach the improvement Anki provides where it really shines (ie. learning languages, medical stuff, poems and books, incremental reading, …) without a massive refactoring of Anki. I say this because, even though I never used them, I am aware of the existence of other applications that are more specialized in learning this kind of stuff, and that work quite differently than Anki.
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Nice article. I think Anki is perfect if you want to learn something by repetition. And a musical instrument is learned through repeated practice. For me, it did a great job so far. I see Anki more like a scheduler which tells me “when” to do “what”. The “what” could be improved, if there was persistence in the web UI, because you can do a lot of things in a web UI (e.g. animated notation etc).
Thanks for the shoutouts. Sorry it didn’t help you. FYI; you’re the first feedback I receive from someone who at least tried it.
Not exactly surprised that what worked for me didn’t work as-is for someone else, anki is really adaptable, but becomes quite personal too. But I would have hoped it helped other people… too bad.
Still, it pleases me to know people read and recall what I write, and find it useful enough to share it. 