Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yosito | Hacker News Reader

I've used Anki to learn languages with SRS for years. I keep running into the same problem, even with difficult languages: my knowledge of the language quickly outpaces the rate at which I can study new cards, and my ability to retain vocabulary doesn't really seem to fade. Once I learn words, I don't need to review them in x months or years. I just know them and, for the most part, won't forget.

I learned Hungarian (one of the more difficult languages to learn) by loading up a database of ~10k cards. While it worked great in the beginning, within a year, I was just constantly telling the algorithm that I didn't need to review cards for 3-5 years. But the thing is, with a language, I'm not going to forget all those words in 5 years. There will be no point in reviewing them. So I just started deleting cards if I knew them already. And eventually I was spending so much time deleting cards that I just gave up on SRS altogether.

It could be that I have some latent savant-like language learning abilities, though I doubt that. I think my experience is likely related to language learning itself. With a language, if you are immersed, you have constant daily repetition with or without the cards.

All that to say, I think SRS algorithms should have a language learning mode that automatically archives vocabulary cards once you've mastered them to a certain degree. I'm not sure what would work best. Maybe once you've crossed the 6 month threshold, it could just automatically archive the card.

Language learning has a lot of quirks and this just isn't the case for most people who didn't learn a language early on, and if you're immersed/actively using the language then you're way less likely to forget. Your daily usage and exposure is simply your spaced repetition.

If one is bilingual at an early age, then it's much easier to learn/retain additional languages. Most language learning in America starts kids off much later than it should (middle or high school). Full immersion is also a great way to learn.

And as far as SRS goes, it's important to not make cards if you think they're not necessary as it's easy to just make the whole review process too much to chew on. And sometimes you can cluster information in a single card (maybe a sentence that's an idiom if using language as an example) such that you do get continued exposure, and can decide later if you need to break it up if you can't recall some parts of it.

I think you should just drop SRS and print a vocabulary sheet a day, read it and place the sheet it in the shredder and never worry about that page again.

There was a "retirement" add-on to address this issue. Not sure if it's still maintained, but it automatically "retired" (suspended, moved to another deck, etc.) when a card reached a certain interval.

I have been thinking about learning apps for years now (without actually trying my hands at the problem) and my idea for solving this is dropping cards, and instead use a “knowledge graph” and its nodes as the primitives. Then you can have the vocabulary and for example example sentences with a missing word. If that example sentence contains a word you have also in your database, answering this harder question will also count as a review for the used words, so you won’t have to review them separately anymore, while you still get to practice them at no additional effort.

You should do something with this! It sounds super cool, and there is definitely an unsolved problem waiting there for you.

Interesting idea, though it's important to note that vocabulary is probably only 20% of learning a language. There's also grammar, pronunciation, tone, etc. And many languages don't even have a clear concept of what constitutes a "word".

I've had a similar experience. I think the SRS algorithms are tuned with the assumption that you're not doing anything else to remember the words. If I'm learning a language, and I'm doing SRS and reading the news every day, the SRS gets less useful.

My takeaway is that SRS is great for the early stages when it's impossible to grok real material. You can rely on the SRS to help you "bootstrap" your language knowledge to the point where you can start reading. Once you reach that point, you're free sailing and don't really need the SRS.

100% agree with this. In the early phases (in my experience) encountering of new word drastically outpaces your ability to do flashcards. And this is fine! Then, as you progress, you don't don't need to review every damn flashcard because it's way more basic than the level you're at.

This is is one of the primary reasons why I think SRS is not more widely adopted for languages, the other being that most people will never go through the effort to learn why and how they should do it.

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