The effectiveness of spaced repetition in learning is one of the more remarkable discoveries of the last century. More remarkable still is that it is largely ignored in education, despite its experimentally proven effectiveness. There are a number of reasons for this, but just because the establishment hasn’t adopted it doesn’t mean you can’t.
What is spaced repetition
The idea that the more you repeat something the better you remember it is, I think, pretty obvious to most people. Take, for instance your mother (or other loved one’s) name. My mom’s name is Nancy. That’s a fact, one that is effortless to recall. Could I forget what my mother’s name is? Our current understanding of memory says that yes, I could forget my mother’s name, but the memory is so deeply drilled into my brain that the amount of time that would have to pass before it faded is longer than my expected lifespan. Effectively, if not in reality, the memory is permanent.
So, the more you repeat something the better you remember it. Simple. The problem, of course, is that if you repeat everything every day, very quickly you’ll run out of time to learn anything new, as your entire day will be consumed with reviews. Thankfully, our memories don’t fade in a single day, and older, more established memories fade more slowly than new memories. It’s the nature of this forgetting that makes spaced repetition work.
The interval between reviewing a fact and forgetting it can, with a considerable degree of accuracy, be calculated based on previous performance in remembering that fact. The actual calculations and record keeping are rather complex, but nothing a computer can’t handle. By calculating when you’ll forget a given fact, a spaced repetition system (SRS) can schedule the next review as far as possible in the future, reviewing information only when absolutely necessary to stave off forgetting. This reduces the review workload to a reasonable level, often just 10 or 15 minutes per day, even with a very large collection of facts.
Getting started with spaced repetition
While it is possible to manage spaced repetition without a computer, its very unadvisable. Thankfully, there are a number of excellent pieces of SRS software available. My personal favorite is Anki — it’s open source, free, and under extremely active development. Instructional videos are available for most common tasks, and the author has written an extensive FAQ. There is also an active forum for asking questions that aren’t answered by either of those.
In the near future I’ll write about how to most effectively use spaced repetition in language study. UPDATE: Tips for SRS success.
Related posts:
- Tips for SRS success
- Avoiding SRS burnout and repetition hell
- Maintaining one language while learning another
- Self-regulating Anki settings
- Repetitio est mater studiorum
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi John, I really like what you’ve got on the new blog so far. You’ve gotten my hopes up probably ridiculously high for spaced repetition now. I’m going to give it a try. At the very least it should be an improvement on what I’ve been doing with Pleco’s flashcards, where I create custom dictionary entries with an unknown word and, instead of a conventional definition, just a sentence or two of the context in which I read the word.
Since I’m creating custom dictionary entries anyway, why not do it in Anki where I can get the benefits of spaced repetition?
Come to think of it, taking the “definition” of a word to be the context in which it appears has some similarity with the idea in another one of your posts of trying to learn more from context rather than looking up “the definition” (which is always a gloss that at best reduces nuance and at worst is just plain wrong) for every word.
Very glad you like it. If there’s anything specific you’d like me to post about (i.e., start a discussion around) please let me know.
I think you’ll really enjoy Anki. It’s not perfect (what software is?), but it’s as close as I’ve found, and the effects are really profound. I don’t know how I would have become literate in Chinese without it (I’m sure I could have, but it would have been a drag). If you have a smartphone/PDA capable of doing Unicode, make sure you check out Anki’s mobile interface, that’s what really sold me on it.
I agree with the idea of a word’s definition being the context into which its embedded being a good idea. I’m actually working on a project that aims to do just that. Stay tuned!
I just downloaded Anki (again — have downloaded, forgotten about, and uninstalled several times by now) and am having no luck downloading custom decks: clicking the ‘Download’ button in the app just gets me a connection error dialog.
But this isn’t even what I want to complain about: do you by any chance have specs for the Anki file format? I’ve never made any use of flashcards, but there are a couple of entirely legally obtained dictionary files that’d be great to have in flashcard format, and if Anki decks are text-based I’m sure an afternoon footering about with regexps would do the trick…
Brendan,
What you want is not to conform to the Anki file format, but to conform to the one of the formats that Anki can import. (I know a fair amount of this, because I got implemented it for exports from ChinesePod to both Anki and Pleco.)
It’s pretty simple: check out the specs.
Yup, what Pasden said. The .anki file that’s produced is actually an sqlite database (you can open it with any sqlite tools) but messing around with it is probably not worth the time.
I’ve had good luck with using simple tab separated UTF-8 text files.
Once you get your entirely legally obtained dictionary files in an importable format, would you mind sharing?
Anki is a great system. However, I’d just like to warn people not to get too ambitious early on. For Chinese, I wouldn’t try to do more than ten sentence cards a day. It’s far too easy to get stuck in repetition hell and get discouraged. Unfortunately, that situation has happened to me a couple of times. Now I can also remember several of the phrases verbatim from that period, so it does work. I’ve since restarted and only do a couple of sentences a day that I really like when I read, so it’s been much more manageable. Also, I see you recently did a post on your english reading list. Are you going to do a post on a chinese reading list? Anyway, nice website and keep up with the good content.
I’ve been using Pleco on my phone which also supports spaced repetition. Like Brendan I’ve installed and uninstalled Anki a dozen times. I just can’t get myself to sit at my computer, the very portal through which one accesses all of life’s distractions, and make myself study. I’m much better off throwing a few minutes in here and there on my commute to work.
Anki is a great program, but not one that’s well suited for my habits.
Kellen,
If you have a web-capable phone, you might want to check out Anki’s online version. It’s what I do most of my reviewing on (I use the desktop version for card entry, though — it’s a helluva lot faster than doing through my phone).
Can totally understand how Anki itself wouldn’t be suitable for everyone. I guess I more of a spaced repetition evangelist, rather than an Anki evangelist. Anki just does it better than most anyone else.
John, since it’s all your fault for getting me started on Anki in the first place, I’m going to pose my very user-specific question to you in the hopes that you might have an idea what to do.
The problem is Windows Mobile or specifically maybe the IE browser on my phone. When I go to the anki site and log in, it claims it’s showing me my Anki cards, but I can’t actually see them. I get the Anki site sidebar, but a complete blank where the card should be. Any ideas? I’m guessing it’s a rendering problem with IE. But then I had no luck trying to install Opera mini. Ack.
I’ve got puppy love for Anki and feel like the ability to review cards on the go, instead of at my computer, might seal the deal. Really, this could be It — wedding bells, the whole thing. If only she wouldn’t abandon me in my time of greatest need…
Seriously, any ideas appreciated.
I feel your pain. I adore Anki on my iPhone.
My guess is that the browser you have doesn’t support the Javascript that Anki’s mobile site is using (sorry, I don’t know much about Windows Mobile).
There is a simple version of the review interface available at http://anki.ichi2.net/simple — it just uses normal page loads, so it should work on any device (though you may have font issues). You can also get to it through the “Review (Other)” option in that menu.
Let me know if this helps. Perusing the Anki forum it seems that there is much gnashing of teeth over using Anki on WM, so I suspect that you’re not alone.
John, this is huge. My (glacially slow) cell phone is now displaying character after blessed (infernal) character. No font issues that I can see.
Swooning comes next, I’m sure.
One weird hiccup: anki wouldn’t let me in when I typed the url (the /simple) one straight in. I had to go first to the regular site and then type the url in. That was even though I was already signed in. But whatever, it works. The siren call of character study resonates throughout Beijing again.
Cool, I’m glad it’s working for you!
I think I see why it won’t let you access it directly. If you look at the URL you’re actually taken to, your username and password are embedded into it. For mobile browsers that don’t support cookies, I guess. Not even a little secure, but it works.