Comment on 'Is incremental reading valuable?'

May 08, 2025

old.reddit.com (2024). "Comment on 'Is incremental reading valuable?'". Archived. Retrieved May 08, 2025.

Someone asks "Is incremental reading valuable?"

Since FSRS, an algorithm at least partially inspired by parts of the latest SuperMemo algorithms (to my knowledge), has become integrated into Anki, I've been thinking about whether integrating other SuperMemo features would be worth it? I've gotten a lot of value from Piotr Wozniak's ideas: his 20 rules articles helps me make good cards, his algorithm at least partly inspired FSRS, and his articles on supermemo.guru give me inspiration on how to learn more effectively with Anki.

But do you guys think incremental reading is a good learning technique that should be (more seriously) integrated into Anki? I've seen videos demonstrating it and even tried it myself (with some basic material). I considered continuing doing it with SuperMemo but the latest version of SuperMemo doesn't have PDF or latex support.

How worth it would it be to create a fully functional incremental reading add-on (more featured than current IR add-ons) for Anki?

To which somebody else responds:

I enjoy incremental reading and think it is valuable. I like the idea of having a fully functional Supermemo-like IR setup in Anki, but I'm not sure that's worth it. You can more easily make a crude, but very useful, incremental reading setup yourself outside anki.

The basic ideas of incremental reading are

1. Make flashcards as you read
2. Give yourself time to review the flashcards and let the knowledge marinate before continuing to read the same book (accomplished by reading many things and frequently switching what you're reading, instead of just powering through one book at a time)

You can accomplish this pretty easily by for example

1. Make a spreadsheet where you list everything you want to read
2. Every day you want to read - randomize the order of the list, then just start from the top and work your way down the list depending on how much time you have.
3. Optional and more complex: I give each item in my list a priority score 1-100, then do a weighted randomization, so that my higher priority items are more likely to be near the top each day
4. For each reading item have a file to take notes - then take notes and make anki cards as you go. A few days/weeks later when the same book comes up in the random order and it's time to read again, pick up where you left off.

This is very easy to do, and gives you most of the benefits of incremental reading, which I think are

• Reading multiple things at once
• Not having to decide what to read each day, just let the randomness decide for you
• Learning as you go - Giving yourself enough time to review and memorize the anki cards you made for one book before picking up the same book again some days/weeks later
• Variety in your reading - if you can only stomach reading topic 1 for 5min on a certain day, then close it and move on to topic 2. Topic 1 will remain in your list and pop back up for reading again in the future.

I've never actually used Supermemo or incremental reading within Supermemo, so I'm sure I'm missing some, but I think the drawbacks of this crude approach compared to the fully integrated Supermemo approach are

• De-integrated - you need to take notes outside of Anki, create your own flashcards, and develop a simple organizational scheme for your notes and IR spreadsheet
• Customization paralysis - I wasted way too much time trying to 'optimize' my priority weights and the daily randomization protocol, which was totally unnecessary. A fully integrated solution would do for you out of the box so that you didn't have to think about it.

It's very tempting to try to 'optimize' your learning setup before you get started, for example by waiting for someone to port the complex Supermemo IR to Anki. This would be great, and if you have the time and energy please do create and share this with the community. But, you don't need to wait for a a fully functional, integrated IR tool in Anki that may never be available. You can pretty easily try out the IR experience yourself.

A third person joins in and says:

As far as I know, the recursive nature of incrementally atomizing one's cards is also a cornerstone of IR. That would be a bit tedious to emulate without software support.

To which they get a response:

Agreed - this crude method doesn't meet Supermemo's minimum definition of incremental reading, partly because it's missing extracts.

It wasn't actually too difficult to do crude extracts, by for eg manually copying extracts to a separate text file, then adding the extract as a new line item to the master IR spreadsheet.

I tried this out and it worked fine, but I felt that the process of extracting sections to save them to read later slowed me down. I used the extracts as a form of procrastination to delay making flashcards until later and ended up with many more extracts than flashcards. I found I preferred to not do the recursion and instead force myself to make flashcards as I go.

I'm sure this extract process is much smoother in Supermemo.