< I don't use SuperMemo, can I go back Home?
BASICS
After downloading SuperMemo:
Add New: Add a new Q&A pair (Alt+A). Cloze deletions (fill in the blank) will be covered later.
Learn: Review your content (which may not come until a day later!) (Ctrl+L). (Contrary to popular belief, if you don't do all your repetitions, it's still better than abandoning material by deleting it (assuming they are not useless.) Reviewing material late actually gives bonus intervals (unlike SM-2 or even FSRS, from my observations). SuperMemo strictly orders itself such that intervals must grow by 1 compared to the actual previous interval.)
Learning
Personally, I would suggest you change the sorting criteria to ONLY items in learning if you are a beginner. Topics may interrupt your workflow. Alt+L -> O -> C. Drag the first slider all the way to the left. You can always review interesting topic titles manually. However, this doesn't appear to be the mainstream SuperMemo advice, as they love reading. (for now.)
For items: There are 4 rules:
1. Try to recall the answer from the question
2. Press Show Answer (Enter)
3. Grade yourself from 1-5. The most important thing is that 1-2 is incorrect, and 3-5 is Correct (in fact, there is barely any difference in the intervals between 3-5, though SuperMemo does fuzz out your cards a lot). The default is 3. Personally, I just press Enter if it is correct, and press 1 on the keyboard if not.
4. Press Next Repetition until perhaps your efficiency drops, or you feel fatigued, or have other stuff to do, or you would like to read more articles.
Editing
Q: Edit question
A: Edit answer(For these two, you can also just click with the mouse the "box")
Alt+A: New Item
Alt+N: New Blank Topic (not from clipboard)
Ctrl+F: Search elements
F3: Search current element
Alt+. : Delete all text after cursor
Alt+\: Delete all text before cursor
Atomic habits of atomic Q&As
When making them, make the questions and answers as short as viably possible, and they should only test ONE piece of knowledge. This comes from the fact that no spaced repetition software can address "partial understanding"; for instance, if I were going to re-study Geography, I would certainly have used many more Q&A pairs for their details. This comes from the fact that most words are just "fluff", and longer answers warrant their own questions!
On a similar note, plain text absolutely works the best for almost all material, except if you are learning stuff like anatomy. Making things prettier, or more image-y like Instagram, may just waste your time and unknowingly make your brain associate the answer with the style instead of the question itself.
Suggested settings
Suggested layout
Not the Warrior layout. Open Contents, snap it to the right, and snap Element Window to the left; save it with Ctrl+Shift+F5.
Also, I suggest File > Professional. There isn't much point in intentionally hiding features; you can just choose not to click them (instead of the burden of changing Levels if the selected feature is not in your Level)
Suggested Options
Alt+K -> O
Algorithm alert: 9880% diff, 9999 days, 7 factor (just a disturbance)
No leech management - you can see lapse count in Learnbar anyways
Also, in Contents window, turn Syncronize ON (second last in top bar, left to magnifying glass)
Knowledge tree
If you want to keep things organized, right-click an element in the Knowledge tree > New > Item or Topic.
Topics
Topics are non-flashcards; for instance, web articles. However, they can still help you make flashcards by selecting words > Alt+Z.
If the text (e.g., a web-imported article) is too long to make a viable cloze deletion, extract with Alt+X first.
Why clozes?
Some of you may have a fallacy that fill-in-the-blanks are for babies. The advantage is that you can make them quickly, and each topic can have multiple clozes such that you can know more accurately which part you don't recall easily. Speed is power here
Dismiss, Done, Delete
Dismiss (Ctrl+D) = Ignore in learning
Done (Ctrl+Shift+Enter) = Remove all components in the element, and dismiss it if it has children; otherwise, delete it. After a while, you probably realize this is the best option.
Delete (Ctrl+Shift+Del) will also delete children, so be careful.
Reading web/wiki articles
To import from Wikipedia or other sources, there are 2 recommended methods
1. Copy the website and press Ctrl+N to generate a new article from clipboard contents
2. Web import (Alt -> E -> W): Import from Chrome or Edge. SuperMemo 19 or later
The core premise remains the same - you wish to remember interesting or/and useful information, so the extracting and cloze workflow can work pretty well, though it's a bit harder for e.g. fiction books.
Splitting
For long articles, HTML headings (e.g. from Wikipedia) are perfect for this. Ctrl+Enter (Commander) -> Split, or Alt+F12 > R > S > S. Afterwards, you can execute Done on the original to save storage space. I suggest h1 to h6
Wikipedias vs blogs
Wikipedia: Objective knowledge from the "convergence" of the entire world. Good for "facts", bad for subjective advice. And surprisingly to most, it is usually much more accurate than books (that cannot have previous copies be re-edited after publishing). Probably good for science topics where the whole point is truth by observation. The downside is that there isn't much advice or many experiences; for instance, the meta-classic one is how to use SuperMemo better! (other than famous people, which may carry a bit of a survivorship bias)
Blogs: Subjective, usually based on one man's thoughts, like SuperMemo Guru. The benefit is that the unfiltered train of thought, like telling the truth about the harms of the education system can come to exist there. The downside is that the reward may be variable: some blogs may be generic, some may be somewhat wrong - yet I sometimes tend to prefer them, as some subjectivity w/ the human soul is better than none.
The important thing is that these are not false dichotomies: for instance, you can import a Wikipedia article about the history and meaning of a psychological bias, and then read a blog about how it harms people and how to avoid/"flip" it to help you. The best option is a balance!!
Syncing with Github
Using Git for SuperMemo backup is recommended. SuperMemo may break out, and while Repair Collection can recover most, it cannot recover from file destruction in the first place. Git helps with that. And it also doubles up as a cloud syncing service.
Initialize Git in your collection folder:
1. Download Git for windows
2. Make a GitHub account, then make a repo. Open Git Bash inside your SuperMemo directory and run :
git init
git remote add origin git@github.com:username/reponame.git
3. OPTIONAL: Make a file called .gitignore:
temp/
reports/
4. To UPLOAD to the server (you can make a file called PUSH.sh):
git add .
git commit -m "$(date +'%Y-%m-%d %H:%M')"
git push origin main --force
5. To DOWNLOAD from the server for instance if you use multiple computers (note that this replaces your entire directory with what is in the repo) (you can make a file called PULL.sh)
git stash -u
git fetch origin main
git reset --hard origin/main
git clean --force -d
In case you need to revert from a backup, find the commit hash from the reflog:
git reflog
git reset --hard [INSERT COMMIT HASH HERE]
git clean --force -d
For all of these if you don't close SuperMemo first, git will fail to access your files
Why Git and Github?
There are some cases of data annihilation if a cloud-sync service reads and locks a file at the exact time SuperMemo accesses it - plus those are syncing tools, not version control tools
Grats?
Now you should be pretty good at SuperMemo basics - in fact, you may not actually need most other features to begin with - for apps that have lots of them, like Notepad++ (which I write HTML in), most stuff I don't even use and can still appreciate its value.
The same goes for SuperMemo too. So cherish the wisdom of your new knowledge, or the pragmatic usefulness of it v.s. school (or other aspects of your life)!
See ya :) |
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