> the numerical value for letters (A=1, B=2, C=3, etc) which I think will give me greater powers of lexical sorting. We'll see.

Another way of doing it could be generating a deck with questions like:

"Q or P. Which comes first?"

I suppose that which technique will be superior depends on whether you usually sort things relative to each other, or relative to their container. If you have a fixed container of files, you could think, "ah, 'T', that's 20 (out of 26), I should look down 3/4 of the length of the container". But if the container wasn't evenly divided - for instance, your 'I' for 'Insurance' was a much thicker file than your 'T' for 'Taxes' or whatever - you'd no longer be able to use those numbers directly. What do you think?

I think I'll go with the numbers. It's a smaller set of things to memorize and it's kinda like a fun game that I can quiz myself on when seeing license plates when driving (I find driving horribly boring). My dad used to factorize numbers on license plates when I was a kid :P

I can't stop myself from seeing whether the consecutive digits in phone numbers add up to 10 :)

Maybe Anki is indeed useful for memorizing flags, faces, words in a new language, syntax of programming languages and names of chemical compounds... maybe.

The things I'm trying to learn like past economic decisions and investments and their impacts, logical fallacies, algorithms and data structures for my next coding round, database design patterns, areas where one system design pattern excels and sucks at with examples, all study areas where finding the core patterns and their applications is central to the learning process, to make any bit of real progress. Anki sucks so bad at this. m

my disgust at atomic spaced repetition, of which Anki is the cheerleader, comes from how gullible I was reading salesy pitches of "remember anything", "remember forever", "how i could memorize x in y days" kind of articles floating around suggesting it. It left a bad taste, like those As-seen-on-tv home exercise equipments and non stick pans with grifty promises.

Anki maybe useful, to some, but it falls apart for everyone as soon as you add any meaningful complexity beyond mapping 2 lists word to word.

So why do it? Why not learn things the wholesome way? With pen and paper ?

I think Anki zealots that pitch the software as the solution to everything can be both tiring and misleading. But I also think that memorization, using whatever system, is going to be a part of any kind of learning. As you mention, in some cases larger (medicine, foreign language vocab), in other cases smaller.

If we accept that all learning involves some memorization, I believe there's no harm in using the best tool for that specific job. I've seen a good amount of literature showing that SRS-like systems are indeed the best.

> We've been doing it for a few weeks and she now knows ~100% of all countries and their flags. Just absolutely domination level learning.

is this just for fun?

It’s for world domination, obviously. ;)

Yea. She is interested in flags and so I could sneak it in that way.

Multiplication tables is useful enough to memorize. Where I got tripped up is factors that look very similar to each other but has different answer.