AnkiDroid

A colleague of mine, which is as interested in life hacking and getting more of the human brain as I am, showed me an Android application named AnkiDroid.

This is technique to easily memorize list of things. The kind of thing you might need to know by heart but never took the time to actually learn. Like countries and capitals, the bones of the human body, HTTP codes, vim motions, anything.

The idea is to present you each day with a list of 20 things to remember, represented as cards. It will first show you the front of the card (a country name for example), and you'll have to guess the matching capital. When you think you know it, you can reveal the answer by flipping the card.

You then press Yes or No, depending if you found the correct answer or not. You then go to the next card. If you were wrong on a card, it will pop up again soon in the deck. The more often you are wrong on a card, the more often it will pop until you memorize it. On the other hand, if you were right, you won't be asked this same card until tomorrow, and if you are still correct tomorrow, it will wait 3 days before asking, then 7, a month, and so on and so on.

Things you already know won't pollute the list of cards, but things you're not totally sure about will come up regularly and you'll then remember it just by the repetition of it.

In the end it makes a very addictive game, and I learned a lot of things in no time. I'm doing about 20mn of it every morning, while commuting, and I'm now able to place on a map much more countries than before.

You can even create your own decks easily, and learn whataver you want. I wish an app like that existed when I was still studying, it would have made things much much easier to remember.

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