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Comment by watwut | Hacker News Reader

It seems to me that pretty much anything has better ROI then 10-20 minutes of pure rote memorization a day. Plus, keeping in 10-20 minutes a day requires separate skill on itself. Anki has a way of taking over and expanding the time it requires.

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Strong disagree. The pivot completely away from rote memorization in public schools is a mistake. Being able to immediately conjure math facts for example without having to use higher level concentration makes the next level of thought easier to access. Rote memorization is currently undervalued.

Oh man I could not disagree more. “Math facts” don’t require any sort of conjuring, in fact cease to seem mystical at all, once you have a deep understanding of the material. Take your favorite math textbook—do you seriously think the author wrote all that down by rote memorization? Of course not: it came naturally as a byproduct of study. Memorization for the sake of memorizing is the worst possible way to learn mathematics.

The 2 aren't mutually exclusive. If you give 2 middle schoolers a test and one knows all of his time tables by rote, he's going to fly circles around the "kid with deep understanding" that's writing out the multiples manually.

Is what you are measuring actually meaningful?

Also you dont need to write them out, you can still calculate it in your head "manually".

I think second student may have easier time to apply knowledge on things like 4 * 2,75.

If the test is purely about multiplying small numbers and the other kid don't know multiply, maybe.

If the test is designed to test understanding, then the kid with deep understanding will win.

By your definition, multiplying kid is faster at multiplying, but don't really know what he is doing outside of memorized situation. And at other is better at everything else.

This applies to lots of areas though, the multiples is just one tiny example. Like rote memorization of an api for a language. It's far easier to see and plan ahead when you don't have to constantly stop to figure out something else. More of your mental energy can go toward higher level thinking when you don't have to continually downshift to figure out the low level pieces.

Now let’s ask both of those kids to multiply 226*148, and see who comes out on top.

If you give them a typical school tests designed to test a typical school scenario, then the kid best at school will get the highest score.

But the question is, if school tests are at all related to reality. I don't think so.

How do you have a "deep understanding of the material" without committing any of it to memory?

Would it be better if memorisation could be achieved through distributed practice, vocabulary learned through reading and listening, spaced repetition achieved through well written textbooks, curriculum, mentorship, etc? Absolutely, but these factors aren't always a given and often are often outside of one's own control. If failing to keep good Anki hygiene is considered in the ROI calculations, these issues should be included to.

Maybe your textbooks just don't distribute problems well enough, the curriculum changes drastically such that what you've just learned isn't touched on again before you forget it, or maybe you just don't have the time or material to consistently practice foreign languages for 1-2 hours a day. In these cases, the 10-20 minutes spent reviewing cards serves as a useful crutch in preventing that information being forgotten entirely, which undoes all the time spent trying to learn it in the first place.

If you have 20 minutes a day to use anki for memorization in foreign language, then you have 20 minutes a day to consume foreign language media. You just swap activity. You do not need perfectly designed media for that, you need any media slightly harder than your level. Internet has them.

That is exactly setup where anki makes less sense.

Anki makes great sense when you have a lot of time for that foreign language activity and are spending portion of it in anki vocabulary.You do it in addition to other activities.

I find that Anki, by showing up the cards at certain (optimised) intervals, delivers distributed practice. Out of the efficient learning methods as evaluated by this paper: "Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology" [1] (scroll to Table 4 for results) Anki delivers both distributed practice and practice testing in a very natural way.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/stoken/rbtfl/Z10jaVH/60XQM/full

> of pure rote memorization

I wouldn't describe my use of Anki as "rote memorization". Though certainly some people use it that way. There is a big difference between blindly putting raw and unfamiliar facts into an SRS, and using an SRS to remember things you have learned and understand. It's the second case that pays large dividends over time.

Anki certainly is rote memorization. SRS is just the most efficient way to successfully do it.

There is uh, a reason the program's name is almost literally "blind memorization". The connotations are not quite as negative as the phrasing sounds in English, buut the meaning is not a coincidence.

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