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While this particular article was about SRS for learning programming (note: very interesting - may experiment applying this to teaching kids/young adults coding

While this particular article was about SRS for learning programming (note: very interesting - may experiment applying this to teaching kids/young adults coding - possibly with a "limited, variable sugar reward system"), SRS can be applied to language learning, In fact, in language learning, it can be a fancy way of avoiding saying 'rote memorization'. The hard part for most people of language learning is 'rote memorization' (e.g. knowing conjugations cold, without thinking). For those of you who are interested in language learning, I'd like to redirect you to tokenadult's very long and comprehensive post from 2.6 years ago. "Learning foreign languages to high levels of communication proficiency was the first adult learning challenge I took on. I majored in Chinese at university and worked for quite a few years as a Chinese-English interpreter and translator..." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302816 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302816 Brief aside on non-Anki SRS. Memrise is a SRS for language learning that I gave up on because it took 3-4x longer to demonstrate that I 'knew' a word because of the variations on testing (cloze, completion, multiple choice (guess). Also, no fault of Memrise - but the problem of SRS is that a) the decks cannot be reversed - e.g. French to English cannot easily be made English to French and b) eventually you just start spitting out entire phrases rather than individual words. Context is everything. Language can be subtle. We may forget the subtleties in our native language(s).

rtpg 11y ago
As for deck reversal... I have an Anki deck, where the default template actually generates multiple cards (I put in Kanji/Reading/English Definition, and it spits out 3 cards, with front being Kanji, Reading, English respectively). You can do this in Anki by clicking on "Cards..." on the add dialog in Anki and then creating multiple cards. This lets me concentrate on the parts of the word retention that I cannot hold onto. Sometimes it's recalling from reading, sometimes recalling from English. Mainly depends on how I initially encountered the word/ how familiar I am with the radicals. But it avoids reworking the things I _do_ get.
- wallflower 11y ago
  Thanks, I've been hiding from Anki! That is a clever idea that I will play with.
alextgordon 11y ago
I don't bother reversing decks. It's more efficient to do more repetitions of Native->Foreign than it is to do equal repetitions of N->F and F->N. i.e. if you can respond that the French for cat is "chat", then you will very likely remember that the English for "chat" is "cat".

rtpg 11y ago

As for deck reversal... I have an Anki deck, where the default template actually generates multiple cards (I put in Kanji/Reading/English Definition, and it spits out 3 cards, with front being Kanji, Reading, English respectively). You can do this in Anki by clicking on "Cards..." on the add dialog in Anki and then creating multiple cards. This lets me concentrate on the parts of the word retention that I cannot hold onto. Sometimes it's recalling from reading, sometimes recalling from English. Mainly depends on how I initially encountered the word/ how familiar I am with the radicals. But it avoids reworking the things I _do_ get.

wallflower 11y ago
Thanks, I've been hiding from Anki! That is a clever idea that I will play with.

alextgordon 11y ago

I don't bother reversing decks. It's more efficient to do more repetitions of Native->Foreign than it is to do equal repetitions of N->F and F->N. i.e. if you can respond that the French for cat is "chat", then you will very likely remember that the English for "chat" is "cat".