I used Anki back in 2008 to help me learn Japanese. The best result was memorizing 10,000 vocab inside a 12 month period during my second year of study. That di

I used Anki back in 2008 to help me learn Japanese. The best result was memorizing 10,000 vocab inside a 12 month period during my second year of study. That did phenomenal things for my Japanese in combination with decent amounts of conversation. The power of SRS if you are someone who can take a little bit of pain and who is good at devising learning strategies is off the charts. I guess the best way I can put it is there are some things for which the traditional model of learning would only take you so far but that through a cleverly devised SRS strategy you could take yourself to places that would be traditionally not attainable for you. Maybe that's a bad explanation, I don't really think I'm doing it justice. Something I've settled on attempting in 2019 through SRS is learning psychology. Now SRS is only ever PART of a strategy, it's never the whole thing. But my strategy to get me to the next level that just reading pop psychology books isn't getting me to is that memorize all the replicated and highly cited studies in psychology across as many branches of it as possible. This takes the format of remembering the names of the study/paper, the year it was published, who the authors were, what journal it was published in. The second part is memorizing and being able to verbalize a summary of the the study and it's conclusions. Think what you will about what that will do for my ability to understand psychology but I can tell you this for sure: rote memorization of all the facts then frees your mind up to get to the next level then connecting all the dots between the facts. People often criticize rote learning because they think learning is more about connecting the dots and that's what we should focus on. It's exactly backwards. First focus on getting all the dots into your head and then inferences start to come thick and fast naturally. The key to devising an SRS strategy is think in terms of "pieces of information" and to find good sets of "pieces of information" that have extremely good power to weight ratio. There's two things I'll say there... You COULD use SRS to memorize an entire introductory psych textbook. You COULD. But it would be the exact wrong way to go about it. If you memorize the relevant category of information you can use that to Intuit all the explanations . The other thing to say is the "pieces of information" should have the same shape. They should be in the same category. They shouldn't be random, but highly cohesive. For medicine this would be like you start with anatomy first and you do all of that before moving on. You go in layers. The next key is then your search stategy on how to locate the information. The next key is defining different phases of your strategy which boils down to figuring out which set of pieces of information to after in which order to achieve which specific goals.