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Correct me if I'm wrong but whilst there is a lot of evidence that reviewing learning material at regular interval is more efficient than doing it all at once,

Correct me if I'm wrong but whilst there is a lot of evidence that reviewing learning material at regular interval is more efficient than doing it all at once, there is nothing that says that flashcard is THE implementation of spaced repetition. There are some way to get things into long lasting memory that may be less documented academicaly but do work : learning by doing for instance. No one learns Java by putting all the elements of the language into Anki and learning them with Anki. One learns Java by writing Java programs. I have tried many times using SRS and that's not something for me. I need context and enjoyment. Flashcards are too articial a learning environment for me.

evanbubniak 5y ago
SRS and learning-by-doing aren't mutually exclusive, in fact, I find that doing them together is much more effective than doing either one individually. The catch is that, in my experience, SRS won't help you learn material you've never seen or used before. For programming, I make Anki cards for a given language/library/algorithm during or after the process of actually implementing something with it; then I can add my own code snippets into the card. For natural languages, I make a card only after I've seen or had to look up a particular grammatical construction or vocab word; then I can add my own example sentence, or the context where I first saw the term, into the card. So long as I'm regularly reviewing, then even for rare idioms or vocab, I can remember things I last saw years ago. SRS is not as effective if you're studying prebuilt material by rote without any other interaction with the content. Rather it should be one part of a broad portfolio of activities you do to learn. For coding it should complement things like implementing projects, learning new libraries, reading open source code, reading technical books on the subject and so on. For languages it should complement things like talking to native speakers, reading news articles in the target language, listening to podcasts etc. where you use content from your other things and turn them into Anki cards.

evanbubniak 5y ago

SRS and learning-by-doing aren't mutually exclusive, in fact, I find that doing them together is much more effective than doing either one individually. The catch is that, in my experience, SRS won't help you learn material you've never seen or used before. For programming, I make Anki cards for a given language/library/algorithm during or after the process of actually implementing something with it; then I can add my own code snippets into the card. For natural languages, I make a card only after I've seen or had to look up a particular grammatical construction or vocab word; then I can add my own example sentence, or the context where I first saw the term, into the card. So long as I'm regularly reviewing, then even for rare idioms or vocab, I can remember things I last saw years ago. SRS is not as effective if you're studying prebuilt material by rote without any other interaction with the content. Rather it should be one part of a broad portfolio of activities you do to learn. For coding it should complement things like implementing projects, learning new libraries, reading open source code, reading technical books on the subject and so on. For languages it should complement things like talking to native speakers, reading news articles in the target language, listening to podcasts etc. where you use content from your other things and turn them into Anki cards.