A Year of Spaced Repetition Software in the Classroom

This is why SRS is a tool but not a complete solution. In medical school, there is such an enormous amount of material to commit to memory (specifically for board exams) that a lot of students find SRS very helpful. It is possible (I did this for a little bit in the beginning) to rely on it too much and therefore not be able to make the connections needed, be it on an exam or in real life. There's an art to making good flashcards- knowing which context to test a fact in, how to give enough context but not too much, etc. Also, there is little point to memorizing cards without understanding the material first. If I struggle with a card, I know I need to review the material, develop a mnemonic, etc.

I think SRS is useful to learn "data", not competences. Learning data has it own usefulness.

I disagree with this in part. I'm using spaced repetition to learn maths - and without it I just wouldn't progress at all. My natural aptitude isn't great.

Can you say a little bit more about what you mean by immersion? Do you mean - say, having a teacher who can show you a problem from multiple angles, allowing you to triangulate your understanding by asking numerous questions... etc? Things like this?

I do agree that in terms of developing immediate understanding - having access to this environment allows you to obtain understanding quicker. And I agree that it doesn't cohere well with spaced repetition learning.

However, the problematic thing with learning with this way is that unless you go on to use it daily, you lose almost all of it. So all you manage to do is pass tests throughout your life - never developing a full suite of knowledge that you can deploy. What an enormous waste of time!

Given that the energy needed to learn/recall an individual card drops exponentially over time, over the long term this is a vastly more efficient process for retaining information.

The only question is whether it can be used to learn complex and abstract ideas. I believe it can.

Here's how I typically progress with learning a difficult, abstract mathematical concept or problem.

First pass - I'll rote memorise a solution.

Then after a couple of weeks - I'll typically forget various parts of the solution. More often than not these will be sub-problems that I don't completely understand. So I'll create new cards that will provide training on these smaller sub-tasks. In the meantime, I'll rote learn the solution to the larger problem again.

What I find is that no matter how many times I rote learn a complex solution, eventually I typically forget it. But the smaller, easier concepts stick. Eventually my rote knowledge gets swapped out progressively by the smaller units of understanding and I end up being able to work through the solution without remembering it as a whole at all.

This is a frustratingly slow process in the beginning - particularly if you are starting at the very beginning of a new field (as I am with maths). But in my experience it's worth it. For the first time in my life I feel I'm actually really learning a topic in a way that I'll truly own.

I've found SRS (with Supermemo) is indispensable for learning vocabulary of languages in which immersion is not possible or too impractical e.g. ancient Greek/Latin.

As you say, it requires discipline; but if something is important you'll find the time, if not you'll find an excuse.

At the last programming job I was fired from, I was deemed to be a slow and all around poor performer. About a year ago, I started doing my own version of Jack Kinsella's Janki method. As a result, I've leveled up to what some call a "full stack" web engineer.

SRS is a fun way to learn or else I wouldn't have kept at it so long. I would even go as far as saying it's made my personal projects a little bit easier for me to execute on. However.....

What I don't know is how applicable this is in the "real world". SRS systems don't translate well in the "Learn-in-5-days-or-die" approaches to IT training. As for benefits for work-related development and maintenance, I don't have a clue one way or the other.

What method did you use to initially learn the characters? If you just used Anki, I could see your result as making sense.

I used Heisig's Remembering the Hanzi to learn the characters and then would practice them in a space repetition system. A few years later I can still write most of them. His method has you create a story and make mental image associations for each character. Eventually you forget the stories over time, but the character usually sticks.

Anki is great to help learning languages, however I think you have to make some special effort to actually use the words (in full sentences) when you learn them if you want to be able to reuse them in the future. One-to-one flash cards only helps for basic information retention. For example I find kanas much easier to learn than kanjis, as the former translate perfectly as plain syllables in western languages, while the latter can be far more subtle.

Also after six months, if you're successful in your reviews, Anki should not expect you to review your (old) cards before several weeks, so it's strange that you forgot most of them for your test if it occurred in that range. It can also depends on the type of test I guess, how was it?

I find that in my language learning, when I have a question about a vocabulary word or a grammar point, I have to go back in my memory to the social situation in which I first heard it. Whether on TV or in conversation. I personally don't get the same hit to my memory from flash cards, though it may just be me.

I began my study of Chinese in 1975. I got to be good enough in reading Chinese to set the ceiling of scores obtained in an experimental administration of a test for Chinese language for speakers of English. (The test was not further developed by the test developers, but I saw the summary of norming administration scores.) I worked for quite a few years as a Chinese-English interpreter for government-sponsored people-to-people visits to the United States. I was just reading Chinese-language newspapers via Google News just before bopping over here to Hacker News.

Simply put, the biggest single mistake learners of Chinese make in learning Chinese characters is learning them only in isolation and not also by reading connected Chinese-language text in which Chinese characters appear in "compounds" (meaningful Chinese words). The full argument for doing this is developed by the late John DeFrancis (a brilliant language teacher and textbook author) in the front matter of his book Beginning Chinese Reader,[1] which is still a very worthwhile book decades after it was first published. DeFrancis built in a lot of spaced repetition in the book lessons, back in the days before "spaced repetition" was a trendy term, but he crucially also makes sure the lesson texts illustrate the various ways that Chinese characters enter into compounds to form high-frequency words in the modern Chinese vocabulary. Try it if you'd like to more Chinese in the most efficient way possible.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Chinese-Reader-Part/dp/03000...

P.S. for a more extensive discussion of how to learn natural human languages effectively, see a comment of mine from about two years ago that was very popular with other readers of HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302276#up_6302816

Yeah, the "downside" of spaced repetition is that you can't stop and expect it to stick (unless you have other means of keeping your memory fresh, such as actually using a language you've been learning). I have some subjects in my stack of cards (10,014 and counting!) that I'm not really so interested in anymore, but I keep them around because I'm paranoid that in a few years I'll want to pick them up again and will have to start from scratch.

It's not really so much a downside as an unrealistic expectation, like expecting to keep weight off after you've stopped dieting.

> I expected that after six months of daily practice (about 20 minutes per day) I would have stored at least some characters in my long term memory.

Yeah, it doesn't work that way with SRS. If you're not actively using what you learned with your SRS (like say using Chinese on a daily basis) of course you're going to forget it! It's the same with bodybuilding: You have to constantly train your muscles and eat enough calories or they will shrink back to what they were before. It's not like you can gym, get as big as you want and then think if you stop you'll retain whatever you built :)

The only class I ever used flash cards was in Organic Chemistry. I do not think they helped long term memory at all as I recall next to nothing from that. If anything the act of creating the cards helped more than anything. I think this might be where the joining of the two sort of happens as you indicate.

To further that point, during exams some classes allowed 1 sheet of paper with anything you can put on it. I created some super dense cheat sheets in my time and I am fairly sure that I never referenced them but once or twice in 4 years of school. But again the active of creating them and sorting out important and unimportant information was key in solidifying knowledge for the long term. If someone handed me those cards or sheet they would have been useless to me in the long run is at least how I see it.

The other thing I learned in school was anything I crammed for I knew I was not going to learn. It may have been enough to get through the next couple of days but it was not going to stick. I took some summer school courses and found it to be a waste as it was too much like cramming as it was so condensed.

I guess I did well in school by using something like SRS which was allowing time between study sessions for information to settle and allow subsequent review after time. There is probably more than one reason for university courses to be on alternating days as it probably facilitates this kind of thinking. The only thing is that SRS seems to be focused on much shorter time periods than a day or 2.

Great book. Interleaving contexts, spaced repetition, etc. - all great concepts.

The most important takeaway for me was accepting that the tougher something is to remember, the greater the benefit will be when we actually remember it.

> Where my bright students might have been used to high Bs and low As on tests, they were now breaking my scales. You could see it in the multiple choice, but it was most obvious in their writing: they were skillfully working in terminology at an unprecedented rate, and making way more attempts to use new vocabulary—attempts that were, for the most part, successful.

> Given the seemingly objective nature of Anki it might seem counterintuitive that the benefits would be more obvious in writing than in multiple choice, but it actually makes sense when I consider that even without SRS these students probably would have known the terms and the vocab well enough to get multiple choice questions right, but might have lacked the confidence to use them on their own initiative. Anki gave them that extra confidence.

Not that you're wrong, but the author also points out here that SRS can help production by reinforcing the student's knowledge and boosting their confidence in what they've learned when it comes to using it.

Newer isn't necessarily better with SuperMemo algorithms. They introduced tremendous complexity without strong evidence of increased effectiveness, last I looked into it - it seems to create more corner cases to manage, if anything.

I'd be interested in materials I may be missing.

Have you looked at "Remembering the Kanji"? I was skeptical when reading "Remebering the Kana", but halfway through it I found that despite the silliness, it worked. I tried the Kanji book for a bit and was fairly surprised how well it was working.