Adiós Duolingo, hello Anki

Learning more effectively in the age of AI

Update: AI-generated Anki cards are risky and not to be trusted

Last weekend I went to the LessOnline meetup in Berkeley. There were a lot of cool people there, and I hope to eventually write up a post focused more on that, but alas, running a startup leaves little time for blogging.

Anyway, one of the several things I learned about at LessOnline was Anki, which is basically a flashcard app that uses spaced repetition to help with memorization. I had previously heard of Anki, but dismissed it as too much work to set up. By the time I was done making all the cards, I would know the material anyway and there would be no point practicing it.

But it turns out that LLMs are really good at making Anki cards from academic papers (especially review articles). I can now upload a PDF to Claude and ask it to make 5 Anki cards about the key takeaways from the paper.

Example LLM-generated card.

I’ve recently been learning more and more esoterica of meiosis and developmental biology. Reality has a surprising amount of detail,¹ and being able to reason through complex problems requires me to actually remember these details instead of having to look them up every time. Anki is extremely useful for this. I can also share my deck with my other team members at Ovelle to help everyone learn.²

The main risk of using LLMs to make Anki cards is memorizing incorrect information. Out of the first 100 cards, I caught two errors (one was using yeast gene names for human meiosis, the other was because the model didn’t know what the TTM complex was). So I do have to be vigilant, and I wouldn’t use AI-generated cards on topics where I couldn’t tell if something seemed wrong. This method is most useful for solidifying information that I already know vaguely, rather than learning completely new things.

In parallel, I recently have grown tired of Duolingo. I’ve kept up a streak for slightly over 5 years (starting during COVID lockdown) but I reached the maximum level on the Polish course in late 2022, and it hasn’t really taught me anything since then. I do think the “streak” mechanic is brilliant for incentivizing me to practice every day, but at this point, I’m more Goodharting my streak rather than actually learning things. If I want to learn more Polish, I’m better off including that in my Anki deck (or practicing with an LLM) instead of using Duolingo.

I guess I can count to 1835 in Polish – but don’t ask me to decline those numerals!

Fortunately, I can also set up Anki with a streak mechanic, and although I don’t think I can officially “transfer” my Duolingo streak, I can always mentally add +1835 days. So, starting tomorrow, I’ll be setting aside Duolingo for good, and fully switching over to Anki. Here’s to further learning!

1. E.g. if you know about VDJ recombination, you can immediately see that making an egg starting from a lymphocyte would mean that the resulting baby would have severe immunodeficiency. But I once had to tell this to someone who really should have known better given her job title!

2. There are also a lot of shared decks online, but they’re mostly made by med students and they’re at the level of “what is a chromosome”.