A major limitation exists for spaced repetition software (e.g

I've found the sweet spot.for Anki is the things that I need only occasionally but not never. Things I use frequently I already pick up through repeated use, things that I never use eventually falls out. But things that are somewhat relevant about that I find myself googling more than twice is a good candidate to Anki.

> I learned mathematics more effectively by focusing primarily on textbook problems (reviewing older material through new problems) As a caveat, sometimes it can be hard to do this. If I randomly pick textbook problems, I have no guarantee that the new material will review the old.

Right, there's a big distiction to be made here. Knowledge that is primarily conceptual (like almost all of math) generally does not benefit from spaced repetition. The learning involved is understanding -- a new concept may be hard to understand in the first place, but once you get it, you don't really forget it. Or you just need a super-quick refresher if you haven't touched it for a few months. While knowledge that is primarily arbitrary-factual is the perfect candidate for spaced repetition -- mainly things like vocabulary, medical terms, and so forth. Just associating a largely arbitrary name for something. And indeed they are mostly useful for learning for exams. E.g. I used it to learn Chinese characters and could never have passed Chinese class otherwise. But on the other hand when I actually lived in another country that speaks a different language, spaced repetition isn't much …

> (though I moved to SuperMemo about a year back) What pushed you to make the switch? Was it Incremental Reading, or some other feature/reason?

> Several excellent physics and math students I worked with have never used spaced repetition software, but were excellent at their studies because they consistently solved textbook problems. Isn't it the case that only minority of students uses this software or flashcards in general anyway? I mean, of course it is possible to succeed without it, because overwhelming majority of students/learners is not using it.

You're right that retrieval practice isn't optimal for all types of knowledge. But not all spaced repetition systems are flashcard systems. Just under a month ago, I read about 'math academy' here on HN. One thing it does is sort of what it sounds like you envisage: surfacing exercises relating to concepts you might be about to forget.

I've been working on https://github.com/trane-project/trane for the past year or so, mostly to get around these limitations. I tried to find a way to use Anki or another existing software to aid my music practice, but I couldn't get it to work. Some ways in which it's different: - Dependencies are core to the system. For example, if I am learning a music piece, I want to start by learning small sections and only move on to larger sections when I am good enough at the small stuff, eventually ending with a final exercise that tests my performance of the whole piece. A lot of knowledge/skills follow that pattern, but I couldn't find a way to make Anki or SuperMemo understand this. - It's meant for both memorizing stuff and practicing exercises. I have tested it with your exact example (math problems from textbooks). It works fairly well, but it's at a very early stage (you can look around a…

I had the same experience. I tried Anki for 2 years to learn to crack programming interviews, and failed. Then I started doing leetcode problems regularly on the site and that helped me to get past my block.