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Comment by namaria | Hacker News Reader

Storing facts is a poor proxy for acquired knowledge or skill. When you are good at something, you know a lot of facts. Trying to memorize facts to get good at something is inverting the order of factors. You memorize a lot of facts about a domain because you spent a lot of time and attention in it. But finding shortcuts to memorize facts won't in fact give you the actual knowledge and skills, just a way to mimic them convincingly.

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I recently started learning Japanese and "storing facts" using spaced repetition, and it's great for learning Hiragana / Katakana.

It's also very useful for things like passphrases.

Sometimes, you just need to memorize things.

I have acquired several languages, and I can tell you that naive memorization is a poor proxy for language acquisition. The best way to acquire a language is to use it a lot, consume a lot and produce a lot of language. Memorizing words and grammar may feel like learning a language, but it's very inefficient compared to just consuming and producing language in a natural setting.

Research disagrees with you. Memorizing vocabulary list is one of the most efficient use of time for learning a language. Sure it's not sufficient alone, and not fun but it works. It's especially useful at the start when learning even a few hundred words makes a huge difference.

Which research? I know this is mainly related to Duolingo, and it’s in Danish, but outside of confidence, grammar and vocabulary there doesn’t seem to much benefit in memorising vocabulary lists in terms of actually learning a language.

http://www.carstenbuus.com/da/00007-jagten-paa-det-graeske-s...

(not the parent poster)

https://www.academypublication.com/issues2/tpls/vol05/04/25....

> Abstract — There are disputes over the role of memorization in language learning. Memorized language, a mainstay of education for almost all of recorded history, was widely repudiated for suppressing creativity, understanding and enjoyment in learners. This paper aims at highlighting the fact that, despite these criticisms, memorization is a helpful strategy which can be employed by the learners and teachers in their process of language learning and teaching. It is discussed that memorization: 1) provides the learner with linguistic data; 2) is the first step to understanding; 3) enhances association in memory; 4) causes cognitive development as a learning strategy; 5) helps noticing; 6) provides rehearsal; 7) is especially helpful in early stages of learning. It is also pointed out that all these become possible when memorization is accompanied and complemented by other strategies and techniques.

I don't know why you're getting downvoted. Acquisition of a second language is a very narrow field of research and to claim that there is a clear consensus on what works best is showing very little insight.

> but outside of confidence, grammar and vocabulary

Just those, huh?

s/Romans/Duolingo/g

But for the task of learning the letters, this does wonders.

This is just a tiny part of learning the language, but it's a great tool for quickly learning letters and new words.

This is a common fallacy around science students who use anki for the first time. Smashing a deck without accompanying learning ressources won't lead to connecting the dots like you would in a traditional learning setting. So given an exam you would probably fail as you can't connect the dots because you just memorized facts in a random order. The exception is of course language learning for which anki and spaced repetition was made originally because random order doesn't matter and connecting facts neither.

> Smashing a deck without accompanying learning ressources

why does everybody keep pretending this is a dichotomy?

This is such a smart answer. i am adding this comment so i can remember where to look when I am thinking of re-reading your comment about memory;

For me, more than memorising things, is creating paths in order to find that piece of information when need it; and yes, you are right, we memorise when we need that information to apply it in a specific moment;

I finally admitted to myself that a robust PKM can store and recall more information more easily than I ever could. It's quite a bit of work to process things I read or listen to into my PKM, but whenever I decide to revisit an idea, I can immediately pull up and review everything I've previously thought it would be useful to remember about it.

My PKM of choice (Logseq) does have a built-in SRS, though, so maybe I should consider having putting things I really, really, really want to remember into it so they're stored in my brain as well.

I think you're making fun of me, which is fine.

But memorizing in stead of learning is an anxiety driven behavior that leads to inefficient use of time. You're welcome to do it but I am trying to contribute my own hard earned lesson that you don't need to fret about retaining facts. Just spend time doing the things you want to learn about and the useful facts will be retained.

I developed an open source app that tries to solve this problem. Active recall at the topic level with spaced repetition email reminders using FSRS algorithm. https://github.com/Gerosullivan/Learntime

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