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How to Remember More of What You Learn with Spaced Repetition (2016)
- neves 10y agoI'm a fan of spaced repetition. Here is the definitive bag of tips about it: Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge - SuperMemo https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules
- notheguyouthink 10y agoThat's interesting! I've been wanting to make a little quiz system to help memorize in-life things and ensure i don't forget stuff i want to know. Spelling, phone numbers, etc. Space repetition seems easy to implement and useful, thanks!
- kolinko 10y ago+1. Supermemo is on the market for over 20 years, I remember using it on Amiga. Quite amazing that they are still on the market, with not much competition.
- leogiertz 10y ago[Shameless Plug] We recently launched a free flashcards app on the Mac App Store called PAL: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pal-flashcards/id1187236321?mt=12 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pal-flashcards/id1187236321?... It's also available on https://www.pal9000.com https://www.pal9000.com We've tried keeping it as simple as possible which a fair number of people seem to like. :)
- oskarth 10y agoShameless plug: I made Code Cards (https://codecards.me/ https://codecards.me/), which helps you remember programming concepts by active spaced repetition. Think of it as Anki but made with code specifically in mind. In the interest of full transparency, I think there are some things missing to make it the best tool it can possibly be. I'm still mulling over how to tweak it so it works better w.r.t. motivation/relevancy and availability/convenience. Write-up: https://www.oskarth.com/srspractice/ https://www.oskarth.com/srspractice/ HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13521066 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13521066
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- MarkMc 10y agoThere's a great book called 'Making It Stick' which details effective, proven methods to improve memorisation and learning. Spaced repition (or more generally active recall) is one of those major methods. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learning/dp/0674729013 https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-Learnin...
- tunesmith 10y agoThere's this scaling problem with Anki, in that if you're doing 20 new cards a day, it gets overwhelming really fast. I haven't done the math yet to figure out how many (or few) new cards per day you should limit yourself to in order to have a manageable review workload over the duration of a course - anyone have any ideas? Sometimes it seems like the pace of college courses is by definition inefficient, like the only way you can pass is by cramming and forgetting. Not even naturally optimized for retention.
- MarkMc 10y agoI'm currently using Anki to memorise vocabulary for Indonesian. One thing I find enormously useful is to link the Indonesian word I'm trying to learn to an English (or even another Indonesian word) word I already know. For example, here's how I remember the word for 'choose': In The Matrix, Neo has to choose between a red pill and a blue pill. Therefore the Indonesian word for 'choose' is 'pilih'. To remember the word for 'page' I think of newspaper pages blowing in the local park. I already know the Indonesian word for 'park' is 'taman' so it then becomes very easy to remember that the word for 'page' is 'laman'. Thus each word has a little mnemonic story associated with it. Eventually through repeated exposure to the word I don't need the story any more, but it's enormously useful in getting to that stage.
- digitalmaster 10y agoI'm actually a huge fan of spaced repetition. Kinda mad I didn't know this about the brain back in college. I now use this interval method paired with Deliberate Practice for everything -- even working on an app that mirrors my current workflow.
- diego898 10y agoA great resource on this is gwern's page on spaced repetition[1], discussed previously[2] [1] https://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition https://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13151790 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13151790
- atomicone 9y agothanks for sharing this gem!
- two2two 10y agoChalk me up as an Anki user. I couldn't have done as well as I have in my college español class without it. I felt like I had superpowers when I knew vocabulary that some of the native speakers struggled with.
- yorwba 10y agoThe thing I like most about Anki is that it can show you nice little graphs of your progress. No matter whether that line is curving upwards or downwards, it helps a great deal to motivate myself for regular study.
- Houshalter 10y agoWhere is this feature? I haven't noticed it.
- misiti3780 10y agoupper right corner, the vertical bar graphs
- martalist 10y agohuh, nice! I hadn't noticed that before either.
- shahbaby 10y agoI had a similar realization this semester. It felt like after I learned a new concept, I had to give it time to solidify. The best students were always caught up with the class and following along whereas the average or below students were fully focused on one class at a time depending on which one had an assignment/exam coming up. I wondered why some students are able to keep up while others fall behind. I think it boils down to efficient study strategies like this and never falling behind in one class because there's something due for another class.
- Takizawa1 10y agoThe article mentions optimum spacing if you have an exam coming up. Has anyone found useful references in regards to optimum spacing if you want to permanently memorize information?
- gwern 10y agoThe schedule mentioned for exams is not used in most SRS; they already target permanent memorization (which is one reason why they sometimes need a 'cramming mode' for students who are willing to pay extra reviews in order to have cards memorized by a particular date).
- sharp11 10y agoThe rule of thumb is that retention interval correlates directly to spacing gap (ie., the longer you wait to practice, the longer you retain). That's one reason that SRS systems use expanding intervals.
- terheyden 10y agoYou kinda have to find what works for you, but a good rule of thumb is to double the time - e.g. review after 1 day, then 2 days, then 4, then 8, 16, etc. If you get a card wrong, it goes back to 1 day. Pretty soon, the cards you know will be permanently memorized, and should only get reviewed in 6 months or a year, etc.
- hoodwink 10y agoI love Anki. I use it for 10 minutes a day for retaining math, vocabulary, and programming languages. I've also hacked together a system, inspired by spaced repetition, for remembering better books I've read. It's turned into so much more. If you have an interest in remembering books better or using technology to get more out of reading, I'd love to chat.
- drieddust 10y agoSure, I would love to understand how you are managing your reading. Some of text is prolific that I would like to commit it to my long term memory. I use Anki for some of the stuff for year, but it never came to point where I am using it regularly.
- hoodwink 10y agoShoot me an email at daniel dot doyon at gmail
- ai_ia 10y agoCan you give me your email id? Cannot find it in your bio.
- hoodwink 10y agoSure, daniel dot doyon at gmail
- rwill128 10y agoI would like to chat for sure. I ran across Anki a few months ago, and thought about all the potentially incredible interactions between spaced repetition and Natural Language Processing techniques. For a super basic idea, imagine a Chrome plugin that creates an Anki deck out of a Wikipedia article at the click of a button? (Maybe not the most useful application, but pretty neat and a great place for a simple proof of concept.) And what if you took that a step farther and made an app that does the same thing with text extracted from an image set. So you could take pictures of a textbook page or pages and have it do the same thing with those. Of course, there are many practical challenges to developing the NLP process in a way that it can identify the most salient parts of a text and capture flash-card-friendly phrases or factual statements, but I think the challenges could be overcome. And it would be an amazing feat to capture the benefits of spaced repetition without the upfront cost of manual deck creation.
- panglott 10y agoSpaced reptition isn't exactly a time-saving study method. It takes lots of time to build and maintain a large deck. For very small things to memorize (like the kana), it's probably easier to just make flashcards. But it's fantastic when you need to remember large parts of a very large flashcardable set of information, like "the kanji" or "new target language words". And it's best when you have already made a good start on the topic.
- madaxe_again 10y agoI've practiced this for as long as I can recall - not because I was told to, but because I found recalling something and working with it in an appropriate mental context worked to cement seemingly limitless amounts of information in my mind. I'm not convinced that an app or any external crutch is required - one simply needs to get in the habit of reflecting on new information, and sporadically testing retention. The first step for me to start the loop is to subvocalise (or vocalise if I'm in private) the pertinent info several times after receipt, which beds the memory of learning something in, and the context, if not the fullness of the information itself. It's enough - it's a hook to trigger recall of the full information - sits in episodic memory as "a thing I said or did", rather than passive "this happened/I heard this" information, and therefore surfaces the entry point easily. If an entertaining association rises at that point, I store that too, as it acts as a mnemonic. I do find myself sometimes doing this with useless information, however, and end up memorising pretty much every bit of information I only intended to retain for 30 seconds (e.g. a chunk of foreign text, ticket numbers, seating plans) - and find myself doing habitual recall on them until they cement like everything else. One thing that the article doesn't touch on but I think is important is sleep - I find if I recall immediately before nodding off the information sticks far more firmly, and I resultantly wake up in the middle of the night with fresh insights. Conversely, when I don't get enough sleep for a prolonged period, my recall definitely gets substantially worse - I find I both can't remember things and if I do, they're distorted, or I don't trust the information.
- mrkgnao 10y agoFrom my own org-mode link dumps: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14013310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14013310
- news_to_me 10y agoI learned about SRS when I started studying Japanese. It's the main principle behind WaniKani, which teaches you kanji and vocab. It's been working astonishingly well, and it's extremely gratifying to slowly accumulate more knowledge from a seemingly intractable subject.
- AndroidOatmeal 10y agoDoes this concept apply to learning skills (as opposed to memorization)? The general wisdom for mastering skills seems to be "just practice a lot." I wonder if spaced repetition could speed up this process.
- sharp11 10y agoFor skill learning, look into Anders Ericsson's book "Peak". There's much more to say than just "practice a lot" :)
- danieljohnson 10y agoIf this interests you and you want to dive deeper into how you learn, I am enjoying this coursera course and highly recommend it: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y agoIn addition to spaced repetition you can encode information in a way (method of Loci) that makes it very hard to forget. Did they mention this?
- ihaveahadron 10y agoNew learning drives out old learning when insufficient time intervenes Study until your learning quota is depleted. Stop, wait for it to replenish 100%. Repeat. With the right study material you can learn anything provided you have the prerequisites to learn it. If you don't, learn the prerequisite to the prerequisite you need.
- zeke 10y agoShameless plug: I made a spaced repetition website too. https://qquiz.com https://qquiz.com I use it for Spanish vocabulary but have German, English and several others on it.