3 ms·

I often think this about Anki and spaced repetition. At the limiting case it has to be overwriting other memories, right?

• btilly 3y ago
  Only sometimes. Certain skills interfere with each other. For instance playing chess makes you worse at go, and playing go makes you worse at chess. Certain pairs of languages are likewise hard to learn together - my son found that he could not study both Russian and Chinese at the same time. But in general you just develop more and better memories.
  • throwaway675309 3y ago
    I spent years living in Taipei studying traditional Chinese before I moved to Moscow to study Russian. I actually found that they were linguistically distinct enough that it was easy to compartmentalize each language in my head without any cross bleed like you would have if you were studying Spanish and Portuguese simultaneously.
    • btilly 3y ago
      Yes, if you master one, then there is no conflict. But my son was a monolingual person learning another language. And he kept trying to apply Russian ideas to Chinese, and Chinese ideas to Russian. Therefore, even though he personally wanted to know Russian more, he chose Chinese instead because it met a school requirement for a second language. (And they couldn't teach him Russian.) He still plans to learn Russian, though.