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I was curious to read the self-criticism section since I fall into the memory-skeptic camp myself. And I did in fact find my main concerns referenced there, th

I was curious to read the self-criticism section since I fall into the memory-skeptic camp myself. And I did in fact find my main concerns referenced there, though my impression is that they weren't taken seriously. One telltale sign is the condescending tone with which they're referenced: > Bluntly, it seems likely that such people are fooling themselves, confusing a sense of enjoyment with any sort of durable understanding. ... You'd think their claim to have a broad conceptual understanding of French was hilarious. The other signal is the convenient changeup of exemplar subjects, natural language vs. computer programming. In the above, for example, having a "broad conceptual understanding" of French is obviously useless—and yet having a broad conceptual understanding of topics in e.g. Computer Science is extremely useful because: 1) It's part of a map that allows you to jump deeply into related as areas if a demand for that knowledge actually arises. 2) The 'broad conceptual understanding' (if done well) is generally of 'basic principles,' which have an interesting property of being applicable to wide ranges of much more specific subject areas. > Another common argument against spaced repetition systems is that it's better to rely on natural repetition. A more fair angle on this argument is that it's better to rely on natural contexts instead of 'repetition'—this is the reason "brain training" apps fail, for instance. (SRS obviously isn't as bad as those, but it still certainly ranks lower than a 'natural context' in regards to imparting skill in that context.) > For instance, it's no good (but surprisingly common) for someone to memorize lots of details of a programming language they plan to use for just one small project. ... But the truths of the last paragraph also have limits. If you're learning French, ... This is another sneaky subject change. It's pointed out how using memory systems for learning programming languages is probably non-optimal. But then this next paragraph is supposed to show us the limits of the supposed non-optimality—but it never does, because it switches to talking about a natural language instead, using an argument about lacking interlocutors which is completely inapplicable to the programming languages example. In any case, there are things about this project that I like very much, but I do still suspect there are subtle flaws in the premise of what this would end up making people better at, and the tone approaches Wolfram-esque levels of grandiosity that makes it hard to take seriously.

jacobolus 7y ago
>> Bluntly, it seems likely that such people are fooling themselves, confusing a sense of enjoyment with any sort of durable understanding. ... You'd think their claim to have a broad conceptual understanding of French was hilarious. The way people learn French (or any language) is not by memorizing atomized vocabulary definitions on flash cards, but by listening to / reading a large amount of comprehensible input, which is to say, meaningful grammatically correct sentences in their context. Memorizing vocabulary might help some self-studying language students bootstrap enough very basic understanding to make a wider variety of inputs comprehensible, in the absence of a teacher or properly-designed curriculum, but in and of itself does not comprise learning the language. People who encounter a large amount of appropriate-level language in context do end up with what might be called “intuitive understanding” of language (or maybe “subconscious understanding”; “conceptual” is not a great label, IMO). They know how to recognize and later how to form grammatical sentences because they have been exposed to a wide variety of such sentences. They learn the subtle connotations of words (beyond the definitions offered in an English–French dictionary) by seeing the words used many times in context. Etc. From what I have read, speaking per se is just not that useful at the earliest stages (at least the first several months) when learning a language. >> It seems plausible, though needs further study, that the mnemonic medium can help speed up the acquisition of such chunks, and so the acquisition of mastery. This whole argument basically boils down to speculation.

jacobolus 7y ago

>> Bluntly, it seems likely that such people are fooling themselves, confusing a sense of enjoyment with any sort of durable understanding. ... You'd think their claim to have a broad conceptual understanding of French was hilarious. The way people learn French (or any language) is not by memorizing atomized vocabulary definitions on flash cards, but by listening to / reading a large amount of comprehensible input, which is to say, meaningful grammatically correct sentences in their context. Memorizing vocabulary might help some self-studying language students bootstrap enough very basic understanding to make a wider variety of inputs comprehensible, in the absence of a teacher or properly-designed curriculum, but in and of itself does not comprise learning the language. People who encounter a large amount of appropriate-level language in context do end up with what might be called “intuitive understanding” of language (or maybe “subconscious understanding”; “conceptual” is not a great label, IMO). They know how to recognize and later how to form grammatical sentences because they have been exposed to a wide variety of such sentences. They learn the subtle connotations of words (beyond the definitions offered in an English–French dictionary) by seeing the words used many times in context. Etc. From what I have read, speaking per se is just not that useful at the earliest stages (at least the first several months) when learning a language. >> It seems plausible, though needs further study, that the mnemonic medium can help speed up the acquisition of such chunks, and so the acquisition of mastery. This whole argument basically boils down to speculation.