Last week, John Pasden wrote an introduction to spaced repetition (you can read mine here). He and I don’t quite see eye to eye on the issue, so I thought I’d be able to pick a fight. Alas, I agree with his three main points:

1. SRS tends to appeal to technical people (he cited programmers specifically, but I strongly suspect it extends out to lots of engineers, scientists, etc.).
2. Non-technical people tend not to use SRS because they don’t like being “spoon-fed” knowledge.
3. SRS technology is being built into an increasing variety of study tools (he listed Skritter for Chinese and Smart.fm for Japanese as current examples), and eventually most everyone is going to benefit from it in one way or another.

I wish I could more strongly argue that everyone must use SRS, but I can’t, because I accept that what John says is essentially right — it doesn’t appeal to non-technical people. That doesn’t mean that you don’t need repetition, though.

Memorization isn’t a four-letter word

Memorization has gotten a bad rap. When we think of memorizing things, we tend to think of mechanical, rote memorization forced upon students by angry, over-corseted 19th century schoolmarms. Memorization, though, if don’t right, is simply priming your brain for processing material that you’re going to encounter frequently. Memorization has and will continue to be an integral part of your learning experience, whether you realize it and call it memorization or not.

An example: 9 × 9 = ???

You probably know the answer to this question, and you probably know it simply as a fact, rather than something you determine through calculation. If your elementary school experience was anything like mine, you drilled multiplication tables in about 3rd grade until multiplication of at least the numbers 1-10 became second nature. You didn’t need to do any math to know that 9 × 9 = 81 — you just know.

You, of course, have memorized the multiplication tables. Why would you do that? After all, there are plenty of calculators around, not to mention relatively simple ways to calculate the answer in your head. The answer is speed — by just memorizing that the product of two nines is 81, you can skip all of the mental calculations and just produce a number. This is important because multiplication is a math skill that you’ll continue to use throughout your math career. Increased efficiency in the most basic skills translates to greatly increased efficiency in more difficult skills that build upon the basics. Imagine calculus if you had to work out the answer to every addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division operation each time you encountered it.

In any field where advanced skills build upon basic skills, there are benefits to be had from simply memorizing things at the lower levels so that you can deploy them with speed at the higher levels. Language, of course, is no exception. A simple example is learning Chinese characters. Of course you can look each character up in a dictionary each time you encounter it, but that’s a hellishly tedious process. Instead you memorize that 及 is pronounced jí is means “and,” so that each time you encounter it your brain immediately knows the answer to the question the character poses and moves on.

Repetitio est mater studiorum

Repetition is the mother of learning

Memorization is of course accomplished through repetition. The more you repeat something, the better it sticks in your brain. You might need more repetitions or fewer repetitions depending on who you are, but very few of us can get away with no repetitions at all. There are plenty of other factors that determine how well you’ll remember things, but repetition is a big one, and one that you can control directly.

Repetition works in building memory because of the underlying way that you brain builds skills. There is an increasing body of research (and a pretty interesting book, Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code) that shows that our brain’s white matter — stuff called myelin — wraps often used neural pathways and increases the speed at which transmissions along the pathway are made. Because such myelin growth is spurred by the activity along the neural pathway (and, seemingly, nothing else), its only by repeatedly using that neural pathway that its transmission speed is increased.

Our brains are better at what we do often — both physically and mentally — than at what we do infrequently. Repetition is the key to the underlying neurophysiological system by which we become proficient at something, from swinging a tennis racket to speaking Swahili.

There’s no escaping repetition

Two interesting comments regarding SRS by non-SRS users help to highlight this. First, by Brendan O’Kane on John Pasden’s SRS post linked above:

I’ve never made much use of SRS for the same reason I never used flashcards — I’m basically a lazy, undisciplined learner. Anki and applications like that seem to be sort of like Getting Things Done systems — just great, if you’re the kind of person who can use them, but no good to people who can’t. Or at least me.

Then again, the way I’ve learned without computer aids does roughly resemble SRS: I’ll read something, have to look up a character or word, and then either remember the character or word, or not remember it, get irritated with myself for not remembering it, and remember it the second or third time.

The second by JP Villanueva on my post about how I learn foreign languages:

I don’t do Anki (or flashcards at all for that matter) because the languages I study are roman alphabet and usually cognate languages, so I find re-reading (x2 or 3) to be sufficient (after the look-it-up stage, of course). Short stories and fables are my genre of choice.

Both of them are tremendous language learners, and neither of them use any formal spaced repetition, but both of them nod to repetition as being part of their study. I suspect that if you ask almost anyone that has achieved a high level of skill in any field how they got there, repetition will be part of the answer. It’s just something that comes with having a normal human brain.

So, I … uh … don’t need SRS?

You don’t need SRS, just like you don’t need to eat broccoli. Sure, its good for you, but you can get the same nutrients elsewhere, and the nutrients are what really matter, right? Some people totally love broccoli, though, and so for them getting it just makes sense to eat what they love and reap the benefits.

Related posts:

1. You’re doing it wrong
2. Heisig, SRS, and my experience with learning Chinese characters
3. Getting started with a new language
4. Maintaining one language while learning another
5. The messy in-between

Tagged as: languages, learning, memorization, methods, repetition, srs, Tools