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Spaced Repetition is Awesome

188 points by frrp 12y ago

erikb 12y ago
Since I started SRS (first Anki and now even more successful with memrise) I have to agree that it's the most awesome thing I encountered so far learning languages. To say the truth due to lazyness and being tired after work I haven't found a reasonable alternative to learn thousands of vocabs. So before SRS I really was screwed, only learning very, very slowly.
rmc 12y ago
One of the hardest things for spacedrrepetition software is finding/creating decks of words to learn. Does anyone have any recommendations for how to go about that?
- Walkman 12y ago
  Anki have shared decks[1], but the general advice is that you always create your own deck. I personally hand create every single card I learn and couldn't be happier with the results so far. [1]: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/ https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/
  - Larrikin 12y ago
    I've always found this advice to be a little overrated. Card creation takes a lot of time and I've found it be only slightly helpful in the memorization process and try to avoid creating a card from scratch when I can. I use an extremely modified version of the Japanese corePlus deck and have found it invaluable that it already came with 6000+ vocab words with example sentences all already tagged with the most popular textbooks and online learning materials. I've been using it for about 3 years now and it has expanded to include pictures and example text for many more words as well. However it would have been a huge time sink to even attempt such a deck on my own. The problem with shared decks is that Anki is not a very good way of learning information for the very first time. Seeing the material from another source, like a textbook or encountering it in the wild and then studying by tags is the process I find to be the best flow for me. I have a cram deck for all the vocabulary I have ever studied, one for the current chapter I'm studying, and if I'm taking a class one for all the vocabulary I've studied in the class that semester or year. With textbooks, I read over the vocabulary and tag words or add an example sentence if I need to but I often don't have to. Using this method I can learn somewhere between 50-100 new words in a week if I need to with pretty good recall. However I have another cram deck that is tagged with words that are the top 2000 and 6000 most common. Unless I have seen the word previously I find even going through 10 words to be a painful process and it takes me much longer to memorize. I have that cram deck setup to only show me 5 new words a day and mostly use it as a review deck. Edit: Grammar
- sbmassey 12y ago
  You could try Memrise or Duolingo, of which the first has large numbers of user made stacks, but which I usually find have enough errors or other problems as to become rather irritating to work with. Duolingo is awesome, so long as what you want to learn is on their fairly small list of languages, as it has some understanding of grammatical issues, and far fewer outright errors than Memrise. My main issue with Duolingo is that its courses are somewhat limited - even if you finish one, you won't have much more than very basic literacy and vocabulary in the language. Personally, now, I am concentrating on Anki, and I build my stacks by adding words and short phrases as I come across them during the day. It is an excellent, if clunky, tool: it allows you to add TeX for learning equations, etc; its model lets you define different types of data structure ('Note'), from which you can define different question-responses to learn ('Cards'). The main problem is the limitations of the iOS app, which doesn't let you add new Notes or process your TeX for you.
  - udfalkso 12y ago
    I love memrise. I've found it most useful for learning geography so far, not language. http://www.memrise.com/course/42769/country-mapping/ http://www.memrise.com/course/42769/country-mapping/
- CraigJPerry 12y ago
  https://github.com/CraigJPerry/shortcuts https://github.com/CraigJPerry/shortcuts Some of these are copies of other's decks. The vim one is good, even as someone who's normally the vim expert in a given group of Unix bods I still find myself learning. The git one is crap, I will redo that myself when I get a chance. The idea / pycharm ones are just a dump of the keybindings. Same for the GitHub one. Its pretty easy to make simple decks. There's an excellent multimedia deck called "knots" which predictably enough teaches knot tying. Worth a look to see what's possible with Anki.
- 633nm 12y ago
  I've mostly used Anki for learning Japanese, so I'm biased towards that specific language. There are however some awesome free tools floating around that take the pain out of creating flashcards: -[1] EPWING2Anki creates flashcards from a wordlist and a dictionary in EPWING format -[2] Sub2srs creates flashcards based on a movie and subtitle files It's also possible to use e.g. spreadsheets to mass-create cards. Further tools analyze e.g. a selection of ebooks and create word frequency lists of unknown words, Combined those tools have greatly assisted my progress. [1]: http://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/ http://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/ [2]: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=181475 http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=181475
  - shawnps 12y ago
    User hermanschaaf and I live in Japan and set out to build a fast Japanese dictionary: http://nihongo.io http://nihongo.io Source is here: http://github.com/gojp http://github.com/gojp Take a look if you have time, feature requests are very welcome :)
    - Larrikin 12y ago
      Once you study Japanese for any amount of time romaji becomes more of a liability than anything else. The thing I dislike most about most these one search bar dictionaries is there is no way to ignore romaji input. Its one of the main reasons I still use jisho.org so often and I'm very unexcited about their new beta. Adding the ability to turn it off would be a great start
      - shawnps 12y ago
        I understand what you mean; I've been studying Japanese for five years now and learned hiragana and katakana in the first two weeks of class. I have always told new learners to do that first as you rarely see romaji used in Japan. Do you mean that on jisho you always use the Japanese search box?
        Larrikin 12y ago
- xiaoma 12y ago
  I took words from my reading. When I was at a bit lower-level I worked through a newspaper, highlighting words I didn't know making flash cards of them and then practicing the flash cards during free time and then reading the newspaper selection later. Here's an entry I wrote about that process: http://toshuo.com/2007/learn-a-language-by-taking-advantage-of-hidden-moments/ http://toshuo.com/2007/learn-a-language-by-taking-advantage-... Every single word encountered this way should make its way into your SRS after learning it. As far as deck strategies, I was an Anki user and didn't like getting too many decks going at once. I tried doing separate decks for each book, video game, etc I was working my way through but it turned out to be huge pain. Now I favor only one deck per language for recognition, one for writing and one for ear training.
- cbovis 12y ago
  Skritter has a whole bunch of curated lists out of the box including those for popular text books and academic levels. You are paying a premium for its use though (£10 a month).
melling 12y ago
Can anyone explain how a good SRS system should work? Are there any deficiencies in the current apps? I've got several iOS language apps and I'm looking for features for my next release. I just added about 1000 pictures so it's easier to learn by association, rather than word pairs e.g. gato/cat. Here's my Spanish app. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish-lite/id388918463?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish-lite/id388918463?...
- Larrikin 12y ago
  I personally wouldn't use your app because it doesn't look like you can add or modify cards and list and doesn't appear to robust enough to be the main way of studying.
  - melling 12y ago
    Yeah, I've got to find a way to allow for word lists to be imported. iOS doesn't really have a good way to import csv. iOS 8 has some data sharing that I'll look into.
    - walterbell 12y ago
      Dropbox?
- muxxa 12y ago
  One thing that Anki does very well (and that neither memrise nor duolingo attempt) is allow you to immediately rate the difficulty of an exercise right after you do it. This allows you give feedback that e.g. You got something right by fluke or conversely that you got something wrong because it was so easy you weren't paying full attention. I find with memrise that it sometimes repeats the easy stuff too often leaving less room for hard stuff that I 'fluked'. Also Anki allows you to fill your brain with the subset of the universe of vocabulary that most interests you (knowing that pinguna is a macchiato made my life a lot better today). I'd advise starting out with the set courses of memrise and duolingo and using them to fill up an Anki card set as you come across interesting vocab.
watterssn 12y ago
For those looking for SRS built around keyboard shortcuts and programming editors give https://www.shortcutfoo.com https://www.shortcutfoo.com a try. The learn section uses an SRS algorithm and uses timing to determine the rating (vs selecting a number). shameless plug: I built it :)
merraksh 12y ago
From his examples I wonder if these apps are good for grammar too, given that the two Portuguese sentences he writes have wrong grammar and/or declination. 1) Mulheres bonitas sao muito motivado. Literally "Beautiful women are very motivated", though the correct one (for gender and number) should be "Mulheres bonitas são muito motivadAS". Not sure what sense this makes though, I guess he wanted to say beautiful women were a good motivation (for him to learn Portuguese), "Mulheres bonitas são boa motivação". 2) (NSFW) Sua rabos e bonita should better be "seu rabo é bonito", i.e. (literal translation) "your a__ is nice". Wrong gender in "your" and "nice" and wrong number in a.
- yummyfajitas 12y ago
  Thanks. I did those from memory, still learning. Never claimed anki will make you perfect instantly.
  - merraksh 12y ago
    Makes sense, it's probably easier and more fun to learn some vocabulary than correct grammar. I moved to an English speaking country (from Italy) eight years ago and still confuse "his" and "her" sometimes.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - ricardobeat 12y ago
    Is that really on Duolingo? The wording "seu rabo é bonito" would be considered hugely gross regardless of context or location.
    - yummyfajitas 12y ago
      I thought I was clear about that in the post - I put stuff like that one into Anki because DuoLingo won't remind me of it - but reading it again it seems unclear. Anyway you are correct - that's not in DuoLingo. I learned that from a different source who does not consider it "hugely gross" (at least when I say it).
a3_nm 12y ago
A very cool thing with Anki (with contrast with Duolingo) is that it is free software (as in free speech), and is distributed on F-Droid https://f-droid.org https://f-droid.org for Android users who do not have Google play.
yummyfajitas 12y ago
Let me just say this post was mainly to inform my readers that SRS exists. A far better submission for HN would have been gwerns review article, with science and such.
juanre 12y ago
For those of you using Emacs and org-mode org-drill is a great option, http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html
kyro 12y ago
Spaced repetition is indeed awesome. For a month now I've been working through a deck of hard English vocabulary using Anki, and already my speech and reading comprehension capabilities have increased dramatically.
- kremlin 12y ago
  Care to link?
patrickk 12y ago
Sivers on SRS (great info): http://sivers.org/srs http://sivers.org/srs
- pitt1980 12y ago
  great link I'd love to see more non-foreign language SRS applications seems like every college textbook/class (or really any textbook/class) should have a SRS application to go with it wouldn't it be nice if all those freshman level lessons had gotten implanted in your memory
xiaoma 12y ago
I used to blog about spaced repetition systems five years ago back when it was mostly just language geeks into it: http://toshuo.com/2009/review-anki-spaced-repetition-learning-system/ http://toshuo.com/2009/review-anki-spaced-repetition-learnin... It's undeniable that SRS is great for remembering discrete chunks of information, but making it the primary portion of language learning efforts is generally a mistake since learning a language is not simply a process of memorizing a dictionary, word by word. Unlike an SRS, Extensive Reading will also help solidify a learner's understanding of collocations and semantics. It teaches more of the target language's culture, too. There are two places in language learning where an SRS is fantastic. It's a great way to speed up learning the very basic scaffold necessary for engaging with graded readers or children's materials. Basic phonics training is particularly low-hanging fruit. Another great use is for memorizing words that one will very rarely hear in daily life and yet are the kinds of words everyone would be expected to know. I recently tried Duolingo. I like some aspects of it, but it's really too bad that it mixes comprehension and production in all the activities. Far more practice time should be spent on comprehension (both listening and reading) than on production. This is true at every level but even more vital for beginners. Typing out words in a foreign language just isn't the best use of a beginner's study time.
- eru 12y ago
  Yes. The one saving grace for Duolingo is that the production isn't `free' production, but most of the time you just repeat a sentence you just heard in the same exercise. (Though I have to admit, I got stuck on Duolingo learning Spanish once the productions got more complicated.)
- freehunter 12y ago
  I really wish there was a way for Duolingo to test comprehension without translating. Far too often translations are non-intuitive, especially with idioms. I don't know how they could do that, though. Edit - an example from Duolingo: Ihm gehören viele Zeitungen. Ihm means he/him gehören means to be a part of or to belong to, from Duolingo: (to) be part of (we/they) belong to (we/they) are part of viele Zeitungen is many newspapers. But the sentence does not translate as "he belongs to many newspapers". What it actually means is "He owns many newspapers". When Duolingo asks you to translate, there's no good way to translate that as a student. That is a complex sentence that, for all intents and purposes, can only be understood in German. You can't translate it without rewording it. Duolingo doesn't mention that gehören can mean "to own" in certain circumstances, because they can't give you the connotation of every situation that arises. Huge unsolved problem in language learning that would be great if it were fixed.
jms 12y ago
I've almost finished building a system for learning language specifically using spaced repetition. Instead of basic flash cards, reads you the word (audio); then if you don't get it you'll be shown the word (visual); then you'll be read the word in context; then shown the word in context. The system doesn't just drill you on single words, it tests comprehension on full sentences and documents too. I'm currently putting the last polishes on to make sure new users can easily start learning. If you're interested, I'll announce the beta launch on my mailing list at www.hotglot.com , or if you're super keen email me at james @ hotglot.com and I'll give access to the alpha version.
bayesianhorse 12y ago
I think spaced repetition is over-hyped and under-understood. In language learning, it can have some benefit, but I think duolingo's approach, which does not obsess over computing repetition times, more effective than flash card software. I found that in order to use a new word, 6 repetitions isn't enough, you rather need a few hundreds to make it stick. Also waiting a few weeks until the next repetition is just a waste of time...
aabajian 12y ago
I wrote a free spaced-repetition app for iOS a while back: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/memorize-me!/id578975798?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/memorize-me!/id578975798?mt=... My plan was to release packs of things to memorize (e.g. Famous Quotes, Ten Commandments, etc.), but with 0-10 downloads a week, I just gave up on it. If there's some interest, I'll consider releasing an update.
- rahimnathwani 12y ago
  So did another HN user :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152267
  - aabajian 12y ago
    Nice, haha, there's probably a dozen or so such apps. My motivation was to make an app that pings me when it's time to remember a certain item. So I could be anywhere and all of a sudden I'd get a message, "Propranolol (INN) is a sympatholytic non-selective beta blocker". I was in med school at the time.
    - gingerlime 12y ago
      At Kenhub[0], we built an anatomy learning platform that uses spaced repetition. The algorithm might not be as elaborate, but the basic concept is the same. In our case, it's a little different from a flashcard system, because anatomy structures are typically grouped and asked together (e.g. choose the right term from the following images, choose the correct term in the picture from the following list etc). There's also more complex topics such as origin, insertion, innervation, function - which covers the way anatomy structures 'interact' (e.g. this muscle flexes the arm...). [0] https://www.kenhub.com https://www.kenhub.com
tokenadult 12y ago
After reading all the comments posted here till now, I see that they are almost all about foreign language learning, with few mentioning other applications of spaced repetition systems. I had better apply my own background in foreign language learning (I learned Chinese as a second language beginning at age seventeen well enough to spend most of my twenties working as a language teacher, translator, and interpreter) to letting my friends here on HN know what else is useful to do for learning a human language well. I hope the FAQ information below helps hackers achieve their dreams. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language. http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneme.htm http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha... But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032 It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English). Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet. http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem. After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task on which most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful. The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning. The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A few years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language. I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website, http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary. The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language, http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-Grammar/dp/0520066103/ http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-... http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars/dp/0415150329/ http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars... http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language/dp/0582517346/ http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language... http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/0521431468/ http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/... and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying.
hngiszmo 12y ago
The biggest list of learning apps, many of which do support SRS is http://www.flashcardapps.info/ http://www.flashcardapps.info/ It's iOS only but my point is to show how there is a huge variety even for iOS users. I did my own free SRS flashcards app and focus much on cooperative content creation: https://fluxcards.de/ https://fluxcards.de/ My suggestion is to try it out if you never did as it is truly amazing. It can't replace a teacher or actually using what you are trying to learn but it can make sure 100% that you learn faster and never forget facts that you want to make sure you know. Try Anki or any other other SRS app if you don't want to fall for my bold self-advertisement but try it out. It's worth it and should be known by all.
tzs 12y ago
There was a discussion of spaced repetition here two days ago. Does this mean the optimum time for the next spaced repetition discussion is now about 10 days from now?
- walterbell 12y ago
  Could be an alternate view of the "saved stories" list. Since it would be repeated only to those who saved the story, it could increase increase ongoing engagement with the story. Would need a way to terminate the repetition.
hasenj 12y ago
1. Flash cards are boring as hell 2. Memorizing a bunch of vocabulary does not help you learn the language. If anything, it might be a hinderance. Bear with me here. The main obstacle in learning a language is not the acquisition of vocabulary per se, but getting familiar and acquainted with how ideas are expressed in the language. The most common mistake that beginners make is they try to form the sentence in their native language, then translate it to the target language. This approach is guaranteed to make you form BAD sentences. You need to be exposed to not just vocabulary, but phrases, collocations[0], and idioms. You must train your mind to use the expressions of your target language from the start .. without starting from some expression in your native language. To get there, you need to be exposed to tons of natural speech/writings/dialogs in the target language. That's why a vocabulary list on its own is pretty useless. If you're going to use flashcards, let the entries be phrases and collocations, instead of single words. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation
- claudius 12y ago
  What you say is true if mastery of the foreign language is required or the aim of the exercise. However, if you just want to order breakfast abroad without looking like an uncultured insensitive dick, translating sentences formed in your native language works just fine. Nobody expects people to master five-or-so languages, but putting at least some effort into learning the local language is usually greatly appreciated. Furthermore, depending on the degree of similarity between your native language and the “target“ language, forming sentences first and then translating them will actually get you pretty far – surely it will be useless if you speak, say, Finnish natively and want to learn some East Asian language, but I imagine it to work decently between, say, English and Dutch or Spanish and Italian. Even English and German share enough history that most sentences can be translated one-to-one.
  - hasenj 12y ago
    If you want to order breakfast, you can memorize things from a phrase book, or you can just carry the phrase book with you. And yes, of course, what I said was with "mastery of the language" as the goal in mind. You might have a point for "similar" languages, but even then you will be setting yourself to learning bad habits. My native language is Arabic. I learned English when I was in high school, and now I'm learning Japanese. All very different languages.
cbovis 12y ago
I can testify to the benefits of SR apps too after using Skritter to improve Chinese reading and writing. Once you get the ball rolling you quickly find yourself easily memorising characters and in some cases even predicting the formation of characters you've never met before. For anyone who wants to learn written Chinese or Japanese I would highly recommend it! That said though, for learning the spoken language there's no substitute for communicating with native speakers on a regular basis. SR tools simply help as an additional tool to speed up your spoken learning or help with reading/writing. http://www.skritter.com/ http://www.skritter.com/
brok3nmachine 12y ago
I'm close to launching a memory trainer for remembering Names and Faces. It uses a spaced repetition algorithm based on Super Memo 2 (Anki does as well, but I'm not sure how far it has evolved from its SM2 roots): http://www.supermemo.com/english/ol/sm2.htm http://www.supermemo.com/english/ol/sm2.htm I've also found SRS to be incredibly effective when combined with other mnemonic techniques, while learning French. I wrote about this recently: http://www.ubermemory.com/blog/understanding-mnemonics http://www.ubermemory.com/blog/understanding-mnemonics
donniezazen 12y ago
I have used Anki. I really wish they had paid high quality decks to study.
jongraehl 12y ago
Read https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22815528-anki-essentials https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22815528-anki-essentials (Anki Essentials) to get started.

188 points by frrp 12y ago

erikb 12y ago

Since I started SRS (first Anki and now even more successful with memrise) I have to agree that it's the most awesome thing I encountered so far learning languages. To say the truth due to lazyness and being tired after work I haven't found a reasonable alternative to learn thousands of vocabs. So before SRS I really was screwed, only learning very, very slowly.

rmc 12y ago

One of the hardest things for spacedrrepetition software is finding/creating decks of words to learn. Does anyone have any recommendations for how to go about that?

Walkman 12y ago
Anki have shared decks[1], but the general advice is that you always create your own deck. I personally hand create every single card I learn and couldn't be happier with the results so far. [1]: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/ https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/
- Larrikin 12y ago
  I've always found this advice to be a little overrated. Card creation takes a lot of time and I've found it be only slightly helpful in the memorization process and try to avoid creating a card from scratch when I can. I use an extremely modified version of the Japanese corePlus deck and have found it invaluable that it already came with 6000+ vocab words with example sentences all already tagged with the most popular textbooks and online learning materials. I've been using it for about 3 years now and it has expanded to include pictures and example text for many more words as well. However it would have been a huge time sink to even attempt such a deck on my own. The problem with shared decks is that Anki is not a very good way of learning information for the very first time. Seeing the material from another source, like a textbook or encountering it in the wild and then studying by tags is the process I find to be the best flow for me. I have a cram deck for all the vocabulary I have ever studied, one for the current chapter I'm studying, and if I'm taking a class one for all the vocabulary I've studied in the class that semester or year. With textbooks, I read over the vocabulary and tag words or add an example sentence if I need to but I often don't have to. Using this method I can learn somewhere between 50-100 new words in a week if I need to with pretty good recall. However I have another cram deck that is tagged with words that are the top 2000 and 6000 most common. Unless I have seen the word previously I find even going through 10 words to be a painful process and it takes me much longer to memorize. I have that cram deck setup to only show me 5 new words a day and mostly use it as a review deck. Edit: Grammar
sbmassey 12y ago
You could try Memrise or Duolingo, of which the first has large numbers of user made stacks, but which I usually find have enough errors or other problems as to become rather irritating to work with. Duolingo is awesome, so long as what you want to learn is on their fairly small list of languages, as it has some understanding of grammatical issues, and far fewer outright errors than Memrise. My main issue with Duolingo is that its courses are somewhat limited - even if you finish one, you won't have much more than very basic literacy and vocabulary in the language. Personally, now, I am concentrating on Anki, and I build my stacks by adding words and short phrases as I come across them during the day. It is an excellent, if clunky, tool: it allows you to add TeX for learning equations, etc; its model lets you define different types of data structure ('Note'), from which you can define different question-responses to learn ('Cards'). The main problem is the limitations of the iOS app, which doesn't let you add new Notes or process your TeX for you.
- udfalkso 12y ago
  I love memrise. I've found it most useful for learning geography so far, not language. http://www.memrise.com/course/42769/country-mapping/ http://www.memrise.com/course/42769/country-mapping/
CraigJPerry 12y ago
https://github.com/CraigJPerry/shortcuts https://github.com/CraigJPerry/shortcuts Some of these are copies of other's decks. The vim one is good, even as someone who's normally the vim expert in a given group of Unix bods I still find myself learning. The git one is crap, I will redo that myself when I get a chance. The idea / pycharm ones are just a dump of the keybindings. Same for the GitHub one. Its pretty easy to make simple decks. There's an excellent multimedia deck called "knots" which predictably enough teaches knot tying. Worth a look to see what's possible with Anki.
633nm 12y ago
I've mostly used Anki for learning Japanese, so I'm biased towards that specific language. There are however some awesome free tools floating around that take the pain out of creating flashcards: -[1] EPWING2Anki creates flashcards from a wordlist and a dictionary in EPWING format -[2] Sub2srs creates flashcards based on a movie and subtitle files It's also possible to use e.g. spreadsheets to mass-create cards. Further tools analyze e.g. a selection of ebooks and create word frequency lists of unknown words, Combined those tools have greatly assisted my progress. [1]: http://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/ http://subs2srs.sourceforge.net/ [2]: http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=181475 http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=181475
- shawnps 12y ago
  User hermanschaaf and I live in Japan and set out to build a fast Japanese dictionary: http://nihongo.io http://nihongo.io Source is here: http://github.com/gojp http://github.com/gojp Take a look if you have time, feature requests are very welcome :)
  - Larrikin 12y ago
    Once you study Japanese for any amount of time romaji becomes more of a liability than anything else. The thing I dislike most about most these one search bar dictionaries is there is no way to ignore romaji input. Its one of the main reasons I still use jisho.org so often and I'm very unexcited about their new beta. Adding the ability to turn it off would be a great start
    - shawnps 12y ago
      I understand what you mean; I've been studying Japanese for five years now and learned hiragana and katakana in the first two weeks of class. I have always told new learners to do that first as you rarely see romaji used in Japan. Do you mean that on jisho you always use the Japanese search box?
      - Larrikin 12y ago
xiaoma 12y ago
I took words from my reading. When I was at a bit lower-level I worked through a newspaper, highlighting words I didn't know making flash cards of them and then practicing the flash cards during free time and then reading the newspaper selection later. Here's an entry I wrote about that process: http://toshuo.com/2007/learn-a-language-by-taking-advantage-of-hidden-moments/ http://toshuo.com/2007/learn-a-language-by-taking-advantage-... Every single word encountered this way should make its way into your SRS after learning it. As far as deck strategies, I was an Anki user and didn't like getting too many decks going at once. I tried doing separate decks for each book, video game, etc I was working my way through but it turned out to be huge pain. Now I favor only one deck per language for recognition, one for writing and one for ear training.
cbovis 12y ago
Skritter has a whole bunch of curated lists out of the box including those for popular text books and academic levels. You are paying a premium for its use though (£10 a month).

melling 12y ago

Can anyone explain how a good SRS system should work? Are there any deficiencies in the current apps? I've got several iOS language apps and I'm looking for features for my next release. I just added about 1000 pictures so it's easier to learn by association, rather than word pairs e.g. gato/cat. Here's my Spanish app. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish-lite/id388918463?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4-spanish-lite/id388918463?...

Larrikin 12y ago
I personally wouldn't use your app because it doesn't look like you can add or modify cards and list and doesn't appear to robust enough to be the main way of studying.
- melling 12y ago
  Yeah, I've got to find a way to allow for word lists to be imported. iOS doesn't really have a good way to import csv. iOS 8 has some data sharing that I'll look into.
  - walterbell 12y ago
    Dropbox?
muxxa 12y ago
One thing that Anki does very well (and that neither memrise nor duolingo attempt) is allow you to immediately rate the difficulty of an exercise right after you do it. This allows you give feedback that e.g. You got something right by fluke or conversely that you got something wrong because it was so easy you weren't paying full attention. I find with memrise that it sometimes repeats the easy stuff too often leaving less room for hard stuff that I 'fluked'. Also Anki allows you to fill your brain with the subset of the universe of vocabulary that most interests you (knowing that pinguna is a macchiato made my life a lot better today). I'd advise starting out with the set courses of memrise and duolingo and using them to fill up an Anki card set as you come across interesting vocab.

watterssn 12y ago

For those looking for SRS built around keyboard shortcuts and programming editors give https://www.shortcutfoo.com https://www.shortcutfoo.com a try. The learn section uses an SRS algorithm and uses timing to determine the rating (vs selecting a number). shameless plug: I built it :)

merraksh 12y ago

From his examples I wonder if these apps are good for grammar too, given that the two Portuguese sentences he writes have wrong grammar and/or declination. 1) Mulheres bonitas sao muito motivado. Literally "Beautiful women are very motivated", though the correct one (for gender and number) should be "Mulheres bonitas são muito motivadAS". Not sure what sense this makes though, I guess he wanted to say beautiful women were a good motivation (for him to learn Portuguese), "Mulheres bonitas são boa motivação". 2) (NSFW) Sua rabos e bonita should better be "seu rabo é bonito", i.e. (literal translation) "your a__ is nice". Wrong gender in "your" and "nice" and wrong number in a.

yummyfajitas 12y ago
Thanks. I did those from memory, still learning. Never claimed anki will make you perfect instantly.
- merraksh 12y ago
  Makes sense, it's probably easier and more fun to learn some vocabulary than correct grammar. I moved to an English speaking country (from Italy) eight years ago and still confuse "his" and "her" sometimes.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- ricardobeat 12y ago
  Is that really on Duolingo? The wording "seu rabo é bonito" would be considered hugely gross regardless of context or location.
  - yummyfajitas 12y ago
    I thought I was clear about that in the post - I put stuff like that one into Anki because DuoLingo won't remind me of it - but reading it again it seems unclear. Anyway you are correct - that's not in DuoLingo. I learned that from a different source who does not consider it "hugely gross" (at least when I say it).

a3_nm 12y ago

A very cool thing with Anki (with contrast with Duolingo) is that it is free software (as in free speech), and is distributed on F-Droid https://f-droid.org https://f-droid.org for Android users who do not have Google play.

yummyfajitas 12y ago

Let me just say this post was mainly to inform my readers that SRS exists. A far better submission for HN would have been gwerns review article, with science and such.

juanre 12y ago

For those of you using Emacs and org-mode org-drill is a great option, http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contrib/org-drill.html

kyro 12y ago

Spaced repetition is indeed awesome. For a month now I've been working through a deck of hard English vocabulary using Anki, and already my speech and reading comprehension capabilities have increased dramatically.

kremlin 12y ago
Care to link?

patrickk 12y ago

Sivers on SRS (great info): http://sivers.org/srs http://sivers.org/srs

pitt1980 12y ago
great link I'd love to see more non-foreign language SRS applications seems like every college textbook/class (or really any textbook/class) should have a SRS application to go with it wouldn't it be nice if all those freshman level lessons had gotten implanted in your memory

xiaoma 12y ago

I used to blog about spaced repetition systems five years ago back when it was mostly just language geeks into it: http://toshuo.com/2009/review-anki-spaced-repetition-learning-system/ http://toshuo.com/2009/review-anki-spaced-repetition-learnin... It's undeniable that SRS is great for remembering discrete chunks of information, but making it the primary portion of language learning efforts is generally a mistake since learning a language is not simply a process of memorizing a dictionary, word by word. Unlike an SRS, Extensive Reading will also help solidify a learner's understanding of collocations and semantics. It teaches more of the target language's culture, too. There are two places in language learning where an SRS is fantastic. It's a great way to speed up learning the very basic scaffold necessary for engaging with graded readers or children's materials. Basic phonics training is particularly low-hanging fruit. Another great use is for memorizing words that one will very rarely hear in daily life and yet are the kinds of words everyone would be expected to know. I recently tried Duolingo. I like some aspects of it, but it's really too bad that it mixes comprehension and production in all the activities. Far more practice time should be spent on comprehension (both listening and reading) than on production. This is true at every level but even more vital for beginners. Typing out words in a foreign language just isn't the best use of a beginner's study time.

eru 12y ago
Yes. The one saving grace for Duolingo is that the production isn't `free' production, but most of the time you just repeat a sentence you just heard in the same exercise. (Though I have to admit, I got stuck on Duolingo learning Spanish once the productions got more complicated.)
freehunter 12y ago
I really wish there was a way for Duolingo to test comprehension without translating. Far too often translations are non-intuitive, especially with idioms. I don't know how they could do that, though. Edit - an example from Duolingo: Ihm gehören viele Zeitungen. Ihm means he/him gehören means to be a part of or to belong to, from Duolingo: (to) be part of (we/they) belong to (we/they) are part of viele Zeitungen is many newspapers. But the sentence does not translate as "he belongs to many newspapers". What it actually means is "He owns many newspapers". When Duolingo asks you to translate, there's no good way to translate that as a student. That is a complex sentence that, for all intents and purposes, can only be understood in German. You can't translate it without rewording it. Duolingo doesn't mention that gehören can mean "to own" in certain circumstances, because they can't give you the connotation of every situation that arises. Huge unsolved problem in language learning that would be great if it were fixed.

jms 12y ago

I've almost finished building a system for learning language specifically using spaced repetition. Instead of basic flash cards, reads you the word (audio); then if you don't get it you'll be shown the word (visual); then you'll be read the word in context; then shown the word in context. The system doesn't just drill you on single words, it tests comprehension on full sentences and documents too. I'm currently putting the last polishes on to make sure new users can easily start learning. If you're interested, I'll announce the beta launch on my mailing list at www.hotglot.com , or if you're super keen email me at james @ hotglot.com and I'll give access to the alpha version.

bayesianhorse 12y ago

I think spaced repetition is over-hyped and under-understood. In language learning, it can have some benefit, but I think duolingo's approach, which does not obsess over computing repetition times, more effective than flash card software. I found that in order to use a new word, 6 repetitions isn't enough, you rather need a few hundreds to make it stick. Also waiting a few weeks until the next repetition is just a waste of time...

aabajian 12y ago

I wrote a free spaced-repetition app for iOS a while back: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/memorize-me!/id578975798?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/memorize-me!/id578975798?mt=... My plan was to release packs of things to memorize (e.g. Famous Quotes, Ten Commandments, etc.), but with 0-10 downloads a week, I just gave up on it. If there's some interest, I'll consider releasing an update.

rahimnathwani 12y ago
So did another HN user :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152267 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8152267
- aabajian 12y ago
  Nice, haha, there's probably a dozen or so such apps. My motivation was to make an app that pings me when it's time to remember a certain item. So I could be anywhere and all of a sudden I'd get a message, "Propranolol (INN) is a sympatholytic non-selective beta blocker". I was in med school at the time.
  - gingerlime 12y ago
    At Kenhub[0], we built an anatomy learning platform that uses spaced repetition. The algorithm might not be as elaborate, but the basic concept is the same. In our case, it's a little different from a flashcard system, because anatomy structures are typically grouped and asked together (e.g. choose the right term from the following images, choose the correct term in the picture from the following list etc). There's also more complex topics such as origin, insertion, innervation, function - which covers the way anatomy structures 'interact' (e.g. this muscle flexes the arm...). [0] https://www.kenhub.com https://www.kenhub.com

tokenadult 12y ago

After reading all the comments posted here till now, I see that they are almost all about foreign language learning, with few mentioning other applications of spaced repetition systems. I had better apply my own background in foreign language learning (I learned Chinese as a second language beginning at age seventeen well enough to spend most of my twenties working as a language teacher, translator, and interpreter) to letting my friends here on HN know what else is useful to do for learning a human language well. I hope the FAQ information below helps hackers achieve their dreams. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language. http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneme.htm http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha... But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032 It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English). Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet. http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem. After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task on which most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful. The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning. The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A few years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language. I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website, http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary. The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language, http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-Grammar/dp/0520066103/ http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-... http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars/dp/0415150329/ http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars... http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language/dp/0582517346/ http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language... http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/0521431468/ http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/... and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying.

hngiszmo 12y ago

The biggest list of learning apps, many of which do support SRS is http://www.flashcardapps.info/ http://www.flashcardapps.info/ It's iOS only but my point is to show how there is a huge variety even for iOS users. I did my own free SRS flashcards app and focus much on cooperative content creation: https://fluxcards.de/ https://fluxcards.de/ My suggestion is to try it out if you never did as it is truly amazing. It can't replace a teacher or actually using what you are trying to learn but it can make sure 100% that you learn faster and never forget facts that you want to make sure you know. Try Anki or any other other SRS app if you don't want to fall for my bold self-advertisement but try it out. It's worth it and should be known by all.

tzs 12y ago

There was a discussion of spaced repetition here two days ago. Does this mean the optimum time for the next spaced repetition discussion is now about 10 days from now?

walterbell 12y ago
Could be an alternate view of the "saved stories" list. Since it would be repeated only to those who saved the story, it could increase increase ongoing engagement with the story. Would need a way to terminate the repetition.

hasenj 12y ago

1. Flash cards are boring as hell 2. Memorizing a bunch of vocabulary does not help you learn the language. If anything, it might be a hinderance. Bear with me here. The main obstacle in learning a language is not the acquisition of vocabulary per se, but getting familiar and acquainted with how ideas are expressed in the language. The most common mistake that beginners make is they try to form the sentence in their native language, then translate it to the target language. This approach is guaranteed to make you form BAD sentences. You need to be exposed to not just vocabulary, but phrases, collocations[0], and idioms. You must train your mind to use the expressions of your target language from the start .. without starting from some expression in your native language. To get there, you need to be exposed to tons of natural speech/writings/dialogs in the target language. That's why a vocabulary list on its own is pretty useless. If you're going to use flashcards, let the entries be phrases and collocations, instead of single words. [0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collocation

claudius 12y ago
What you say is true if mastery of the foreign language is required or the aim of the exercise. However, if you just want to order breakfast abroad without looking like an uncultured insensitive dick, translating sentences formed in your native language works just fine. Nobody expects people to master five-or-so languages, but putting at least some effort into learning the local language is usually greatly appreciated. Furthermore, depending on the degree of similarity between your native language and the “target“ language, forming sentences first and then translating them will actually get you pretty far – surely it will be useless if you speak, say, Finnish natively and want to learn some East Asian language, but I imagine it to work decently between, say, English and Dutch or Spanish and Italian. Even English and German share enough history that most sentences can be translated one-to-one.
- hasenj 12y ago
  If you want to order breakfast, you can memorize things from a phrase book, or you can just carry the phrase book with you. And yes, of course, what I said was with "mastery of the language" as the goal in mind. You might have a point for "similar" languages, but even then you will be setting yourself to learning bad habits. My native language is Arabic. I learned English when I was in high school, and now I'm learning Japanese. All very different languages.

cbovis 12y ago

I can testify to the benefits of SR apps too after using Skritter to improve Chinese reading and writing. Once you get the ball rolling you quickly find yourself easily memorising characters and in some cases even predicting the formation of characters you've never met before. For anyone who wants to learn written Chinese or Japanese I would highly recommend it! That said though, for learning the spoken language there's no substitute for communicating with native speakers on a regular basis. SR tools simply help as an additional tool to speed up your spoken learning or help with reading/writing. http://www.skritter.com/ http://www.skritter.com/

brok3nmachine 12y ago

I'm close to launching a memory trainer for remembering Names and Faces. It uses a spaced repetition algorithm based on Super Memo 2 (Anki does as well, but I'm not sure how far it has evolved from its SM2 roots): http://www.supermemo.com/english/ol/sm2.htm http://www.supermemo.com/english/ol/sm2.htm I've also found SRS to be incredibly effective when combined with other mnemonic techniques, while learning French. I wrote about this recently: http://www.ubermemory.com/blog/understanding-mnemonics http://www.ubermemory.com/blog/understanding-mnemonics

donniezazen 12y ago

I have used Anki. I really wish they had paid high quality decks to study.

jongraehl 12y ago

Read https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22815528-anki-essentials https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22815528-anki-essentials (Anki Essentials) to get started.