How to study 1000's of cards over an indefinite time scale!?

How to study 1000's of cards over an indefinite time scale!?

Postby KnowledgeBoy » Tue May 28, 2019 5:54 am

Hi,

I'm currently studying the Knowledge of London to become a black taxi driver. It means I have to studying 100's of runs across the city and around 10,000+ points of interest. I am constantly adding to my list of points to study, and now need a helpful way to revise them.

I have been using flashcards for revising my runs for around 18 months and I recommend it to anyone studying the Knowledge. It's fairly straightforward to study the runs as they are in blocks (or "lists") to keep them tidy.

The points however are "collected" in such a way that it's hard to categorize or put them into sets, and we are advised not to do this anyway.

How can I set up one flashcard set to help me study these 1000's of points in such a way that it increases the points/cards I get wrong, and spaces the correct cards out further and further the more times I get them correct. I understand I have to have it in the Leitner mode, but because I'm dealing with 1000's of cards, it's hard to know how to set it up, as trial and error could take me months to figure out!

Thanks in advance
KnowledgeBoy
 
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Re: How to study 1000's of cards over an indefinite time sca

Postby Ernie » Thu May 30, 2019 6:13 am

I'm not 100% sure I understand the situation. And I don't have a straightforward answer.

First, read my documentation if you haven't already. The comments on "Leitner/Short Term Goal" are short though, most is on Spaced Repetition (SRS), though you should know a little about my SRS and know the differences.
http://orangeorapple.com/Flashcards/AboutSR.aspx

There's not many settings for Leitner. If you want to reduce the penalty for a wrong answer, change "Reduce Streak (on wrong)". If you want to lengthen the time after re-seeing a missed card, increase the "Max cards in Round".

I think my Leitner works well for smaller sets of cards, e.g. 50 to 100 cards max. One possible issue with a 1000 card deck is that let's say you are starting fresh, and you get a card correct (maybe on first time, or maybe you just got it wrong and got it correct on the retest in the next batch of 30), you won't see that card again until you've gone through the entire deck of 1000 cards and got all of them correct. Maybe that's what you want as it lets you see all cards in the shortest time frame, but the disadvantage might be that you don't get those periodic repeats quick enough to start getting them learned. In your case, as you've already been studying, it should already have statistics

So the simple answer is, turn on Leitner, adjust those two settings if desired, and let it do its thing. When you start a "set", you'll get an intro screen telling you how many cards remaining in set. For example, you might get 300, meaning the app things those 300 cards are ready to be studied again. After going through those, next set of cards you'll get missed cards (wrong, then correct) plus a new set of cards you last got correct.

If you want more consistency between the review times on an individual cards, you can consider using SRS. Each cards will have an interval, which is ideally the amount of time you are just about going to forget the card, and the card will then become "due" at that time. You'll see cards you don't know well more often generally, but then you won't get to new cards as quickly since you are focusing more on lower interval cards, until you get those intervals up. If interested in this approach, you can let me know and provide more suggestions.
Ernie
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Re: How to study 1000's of cards over an indefinite time sca

Postby KnowledgeBoy » Fri May 31, 2019 12:21 am

Hi Ernie,

Thanks for your response. I've been playing around with the settings for the last couple of days and I think you're right in suggesting the spaced repetition function. I get the wrong cards showing up more regularly which is perfect.

Im constantly adding cards via the spreadsheet set up. Every card has 5 sides of information I have to learn. The first card being the name of the point in London, for example, "London Bridge Station".

That is the first card I see, at which point my goal is to know it's road location. This is the 3rd card. In this case the road location is "Railway Approach"

The second card is the post code prefix to help me know it's general area if the point of interest has the same name as another point of interest somewhere else in London. In this case I skip that card because I know there is only one London Bridge Station.

The 4th card is where I need to know how to set down and leave the point of interest, as if I was driving a London Taxi. In this case, Railway Approach is a one way street, so I need to set down and leave on the left hand side of the road. In knowledge terms we have shorthand for this which is SDOL/LOL (set down on left/leave on left). Some points of interest have no restrictions, some have to be set down on the right, etc, etc.

The final card is my first available movements after leaving the point and details of how to set down the point. These can be as simple as...

"Left or Right Borough High Street" - in the case of London Bridge Station. But other points of interest have much more complex sections of road to remember. So this is usually the most detailed card.

As you can see, there is quite a bit to know about each point of interest. To complete the Knowledge we will have to have learnt in excess of 10,000 points of interest, and all the details about each one, like I described above. As you can imagine, it's quite an intense, and lengthy process!!

Anyway, I thought I'd give you a little insight into this unique qualification, of which the examination process takes on average 3/4 years to complete, but commonly takes people much longer, sometimes over 10 years!

As I add each new card to the spreadsheet, I then have to download it into the app via Google drive, but I haven't had enough chance to test whether the statistics are kept for old cards, even when downloading the newly updated set of cards. Will this be the case? If so that saves me a lot of trouble! For example, say I had 2000 cards that I had been revising, and I've recently added another 100 to the spreadsheet. When I download the updated spreadsheet to the app, with the 2100 cards, will the older cards still have all the info/statistics from the previous incarnation of that deck? As the app recognises it as a different deck, and just adds it to my deck list, at which point I need to delete the 2000 card deck to replace it with the 2100 card deck.

Sorry if this all sounds a bit confusing! It's very hard for me to describe!!

Thanks in advance!
KnowledgeBoy
 
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Re: How to study 1000's of cards over an indefinite time sca

Postby Ernie » Fri May 31, 2019 8:35 am

To update your deck, tap "Edit", tap existing deck, Download/Update. The deck has a "deck code" which will be pointing to Google Drive (if that's where it originally came from.) The app will delete and replace all cards, but it will try to match up old an new cards to copy statistics forward. It does this by matching up text from side 1 and side 2. If it can find a unique match with either Side 1+2, side 1, or side 2, then statistics are copied. If you make a change to an existing card, don't make it to both sides 1 and 2 at same time. Another solution here is to add an "ID" column and give each card a unique ID. The app should match cards based on that instead. (You generally don't want to be adding a NEW deck.)

The app can keep track of up to 4 different statistic sets per card. For example, say you are studying a Spanish from English, the app can keep statistics for English->Spanish separately from Spanish->English. The downside is that you have twice as many items to study and build up statistics for. The general way to do this is to turn on "Advanced Layout" in deck options. If you feel like you need to break each card into smaller questions, this might be an option.

If you are using spaced repetition, I recommend you go to Global Options > Control > Study Buttons, and add "Postpone / Next Review". Because you know some of these cards, you likely don't want to do through the normal scheduling. When you answer a card, think about how long you want to wait before you see it again (the time when you are just about ready to forget it), and you can then tell the app to set the interval to something in that ballpark (options are limited). After setting a good initial interval for the card, you shouldn't have to mess with it much for that card after that. You might want to change some of the settings to be more aggressive, such as a wrong factor of 0.7 instead of 0.5, or a min interval of say 1 day instead of 8 hours, etc.

Best of luck and this crazy exam! If you have any questions, I'll try to provide guidance.
Ernie
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Re: How to study 1000's of cards over an indefinite time sca

Postby KnowledgeBoy » Sun Jun 02, 2019 11:33 am

Thanks Ernie, i've been playing around with it and i'm gradually getting to grips with it! Thanks for the info, theres some points you have mentioned that i havent's tried due to not really understanding what it does, but it sounds like some of those things will be useful!

All the best!
KnowledgeBoy
 
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