[keiferski]

Strongly disagree. The worst thing that’s happened to educational theory is the idea that everything needs to be fun and exciting to be worth doing. Some stuff is worth doing because it works, even if it’s a little boring. SRS is one of those things.

[hombre_fatal]

If an approach is so boring that you don't do it, then what does it matter how effective it might be?

Either find a way to make it less boring or switch up the approach. Whatever gets you to keep a habit is what's important.

Same with any habit we want to develop. Cooking. Exercise. Language learning. Building software. Meet people.

[keiferski]

Because realistically doing your Anki cards should take 10-30 minutes a day, maximum. If you can’t slog through 30 minutes of learning vocabulary/etc. then the thing you’re learning isn’t very important to you. SRS isn’t about doing flash cards for hours on end, it’s about determining the maximum retention rate while doing the minimum amount of work.

Even then, personally I don’t find Anki that boring at all. But I make custom cards that include audio, images, and other items.

[hombre_fatal]

> If you can’t slog through 30 minutes of learning vocabulary/etc. then the thing you’re learning isn’t very important to you

This obviously isn't the case if there's an alternative approach that does work for you.

> Even then, personally I don’t find Anki that boring at all.

Right, and you're having trouble picturing how something you get for free (or take for granted) has a cost for others. Isn't it obvious?

Running 10km a day is a great way to stay in cardiovascular shape. If you like running, it might be a great daily habit for you. But would you say other people must not care about their body just because they're not willing to run 10km, but they are willing to bicycle, swim, or kickbox daily?

[keiferski]

I think you are dramatically undervaluing how effective SRS is. 30 minutes of doing flashcards with Anki will accomplish about 500% as many other learning activities in the same time, in my experience.

So the point is that while SRS might be boring at times compared to other types of learning, the benefits are worth it. Effectiveness of learning does not correlate directly with enjoyment.

To phrase this another way: yes, in general you should find learning methods that appeal to you. But spaced repetition is so effective that it’s worth implementing, even if you don’t enjoy it.

Edit: using the metaphor that you added: if say, doing jumping jacks for 10 minutes burned 10x calories than every other exercise does in 60 minutes, and your goal is to lose weight, then yeah, it would seem a little silly to me to avoid doing jumping jacks because you don’t enjoy them. The benefits are worth the hassle.

[Gud]

The key modifier here being "in your experience". Perhaps for others, other methods are more effective.

[keiferski]

The science behind spaced repetition isn’t really up for debate, though. I guess if you really hate SRS, don’t do it, but all signs point to it being worth the time.

[frereubu]

GP: If an approach is so boring that you don't do it... Either find a way to make it less boring...

You: But I make custom cards that include audio, images, and other items.

I think you're agreeing!

[keiferski]

Not really if the solution is to stop using SRS. In my experience the benefits are as good as the hype.

[bluGill]

You know what is more effective than spaced repitition? Reading, listening, and doing to the thing you are interested in. Anki gives you fact that are disjointed from what you need. using the skill forces a study of what is important not facts that are of no use.

i'm not saying spaced repititon is useless - it is a great beginners tool. However you need to move on as soon as possible. once you can use the skill that is better in gereral. Doctors use spaced repition more than most because there are a lot of rare things they will never encounter but mixed in is one rare thing they need to know instantly and they cannot know in advance what that thing is. Almost nothing else is both like that and doesn't allow time to look it up.

note that reading/doing something is itself spaced repititon. It isn't algorithemic but it is still randon spacing of things you need to know and the more you need it the more often it repeats

[AlchemistCamp]

I agree with you for language learners.

I built and ran the academic side of a language school for four years, worked on two language learning startups and also learned two languages in different language families from my native language (and from each other) to a pretty fluent level.

In all those years I’ve never met a single really successful learner who made SRS a major part of their studies, though some used it as a small supplementary practice.

The thing is that words aren’t usually discrete pieces of information in the way that names of capitals or things a med student has to memorize often are (unless your goal is just to play scrabble with them, in which case SRS is great). Meanings don’t map one to one across languages, collocations are important , etc, etc. Putting sentence cards into Anki is better than isolation words with translations but even then, you won’t get as much cultural information or even raw quantity of input as you would from extensive reading and this is a topic L2 Acquisition researchers have covered in depth.

I think part of the problem is that SRS sounds really compelling to engineers and it’s generally easy to build into an app, so that’s been the focus of most language learning apps for the past 20 years.

There are some better ones that exist mostly to help learners handle native text and audio, though. LingQ, Language Reactor and language-specific apps that do similar things are great.

[jamager]

> In all those years I’ve never met a single really successful learner who made SRS a major part of their studies

I did, but very differently from how most people do it.

Premade decks with single words sucks, yes. But creating your own flashcards with lots of audio and mined sentences from your learning materials accelerates learning better than anything I tried before.

And yes, it requires a lot of immersion / exposure and other things. But when done properly it works really really well.

[AlchemistCamp]

Have you ever gotten to a C1 level in a language you learned as an adult that isn't close to your native language? If so, what kind of effort did it take you?

Or if you only learned closely related languages, what aspect of it was "really successful"? Accent? Writing ability? Something else?

[pessimizer]

> You know what is more effective than spaced repitition? Reading, listening, and doing to the thing you are interested in.

No, they are not more effective, they are less effective. The fact that they are less effective is the only reason that people do spaced repetition. It takes less time to learn a fact if you optimize for the way memory works. Reading, listening, and doing the thing you are interested in builds memory just like spaced repetition does, just in a haphazard, random way.

> note that reading/doing something is itself spaced repititon.

But worse. There are plenty of things that simply can't be learned by spaced repetition because nobody has come up with a good way to do them, and/or they are physical. But some facts simply have to be memorized, and when doing the thing you will have to recall them. You can either look them up every time you have to use them, and a) forget completely if there's too large a gap between incidents of having to look a thing up, or b) spend all day studying something that you'll completely forget in a week. Spaced repetition is about using a timing trick to make those facts reflexive and long-lasting.

[bluGill]

When reading/listening and doing you encounter thousands of facts/words/whatever in the same amount of time spaced repetition will give you tens. If you are a complete beginner spaced repetition does well, but that is misleading - it does well in the easy to study situation of someone who knows nothing and doesn't examine the much harder to study place where someone knows a little something where you spend most of your time.

If you know nothing, spaced repetition can get you over that initial hump well. However I maintain that you quickly reach a point where you are beyond that and then space repetition is less useful than other courses of study in general. Use well it can still be a supplement to other study methods, but those others should be the priority.

[keiferski]

Anki is just a software tool for presenting pieces of data at an optimal rate for memory. It’s perfect possible to use it for reading, listening, or even prompting activities.

[colin_jack]

> If an approach is so boring that you don't do it, then what does it matter how effective it might be?

Yeah true, but an obvious argument is that this is where discipline comes in. If you are one of the people Anki works for, then you have to find the level of discipline required to stick with it.