Spaced repetition can allow for infinite recall (2022)

Spaced repetition is the cherry on the cake: learn by practicing, but create your own cards along the way, and when reviewing just focus on making a recall effort, not nailing everything.

For language, 10-20 mins / day is great, and if you are putting enough effort, 6-8 reps is enough to learn a card with 2 new concepts at ~15secs / rep, which really makes a difference long term.

I made a tool[1] with that approach in mind and tailor-made for language acquisition patterns. The key part is that creating cards (audio included) must be super-easy and fast, but they need to come from you nevertheless.

[1] https://thehardway.app

Strongly disagree. The worst thing that’s happened to educational theory is the idea that everything needs to be fun and exciting to be worth doing. Some stuff is worth doing because it works, even if it’s a little boring. SRS is one of those things.

I think the mistake here is simply to many new cards a day. If you miss a week and have 863 reps, you definitely are going way too fast. You shouldn’t have to spend more than 5-20 minutes daily going over your review, and if you miss a week you shouldn’t need more than two or three half hour sessions to catch up.

I think there are diminishing returns as well by having to many daily new cards, as there is only so much you can commit into memory every day. So you will probably end up having terrible recall as well (which further adds to your reps).

I’m using Anki to learn Japanese. I actually go a step further in taking it slow as I’m still on my N5 vocab (first 1000 words) after 9 months of learning. I think it will be another 9 months before I can read stuff I‘m interested in in Japanese (which will probably be Go books).

Are you sure this class of people don’t implicitly do spaces repetition via:

- “reading books” (coming across the same ideas in different books, tying new ideas to old books)

- “discuss and debate” (remembering and being reminded of previously learned things)

- “study their subjects” (?) (presumably restating the previous two? - Maybe original research, which is finding new facts or reinforcing old ones)

- “work hard” (??)

I also wonder if there’s something about the mental process of people who seem to “just get it” - is their mind subconsciously turning over stuff they’ve learned in the same way an external spaced repetition regimen would? They may be getting the benefit of spaced repetition, but from the outside it doesn’t look like they follow a study plan.

How do you think that "working hard" bit works and produces results?

Repetition!

If you're learning a language and trying to learn vocabulary, a new alphabet, etc, anything that involves lots of recall being necessary, spaced repetition is an excellent aid because without the basic shit you can't do any of the rest.

Plus it's supposed to be consistent over a (very long) time, not a "quick fix" so it's actually really the opposite of the "get slim quick" type schemes.

It's probably not especially useful when you're not cramming stuff/trying to build up a base to stand on, which lets you actually get on with the actual meat of the learning.

For those of us who aren’t brilliant, but want to learn well anyway, Anki’s (my preferred SRS) is a godsend when used in the right domains — foreign language vocabulary is the best example.

I don’t see spaced repetition as one of those get-fit-fast schemes. I see it as going to the gym as opposed to generally living an active lifestyle. Some gifted people can get very, very fit without going to the gym, just by playing sports and other physical activities. Gym isn’t that fun compared to playing soccer, and it takes a lot of time and consistency to be worth it.

I mostly agree with you, I don't do SR myself, but I do think the benefit of spaced repetition is solid for medical students/researchers and language learners.

Also some people just find it fun to go through their Anki deck instead of doomscrolling while on the subway or waiting in line. Whether there's any real benefit for that person is debatable. It's “fun“ in the same way going to the gym, or drinking kale smoothie is fun.

The key for improvement is deliberate practice, and one component of that is "working really hard" which you've pointed. But this is still too vague to be helpful. For those interested in the science of expertise, I highly recommend Peak by Andres Ericsson.

> Aristotle, Leibniz, Einstein or whatever brilliant person you can think of didn't become who they are using cue-cards.

Indeed, but I think that being relevant assumes that people using these techniques believe it will somehow make them brilliant/geniuses.

> Spaced repetition always seemed like those schemes to get you fit or slim in 30 days that never work.

I'm not arguing for spaced repetition, but the whole point is you do some amount every day (or as needed) for the rest of your life (within reason). So it's not equivalent to get fit/slim quick at all, it's more about disciplined improvement of yourself. If that isn't effective for you don't do it, but based on your comment it seems like you're coming at it from the wrong angle.

Spaced repetition is merely an optimal way of organizing repetition. All of the “brilliant” people you’ve met almost certainly study their topics constantly, and this daily exposure is itself a form of repetition.

This misconception is a common mistake by people that think Anki / SRS are equivalent to the spacing effect itself. That is not the case. The spacing effects exists independently of any particular software implementation.

I don’t think any one claims that memorizing a bunch of facts will make you a genius; rather that if you are aiming for optimal learning and memory, SRS is pretty much the gold standard and is backed up by tons of scientific research.

Learning isn't only about becoming brilliant. For me personally, spaced repetition is one of the best tools to aid language learning. Classes and such are great for your main progression, but spaced repetition is the way to make the vocabulary actually stick.

That is spaced repition, just with a bit of change in what they’re repeating

Wow, never heard of SuperMemo and this Wozniak. What an interesting and awesome rabbit hole

It seems pretty easy to illuminate this question once you consider concrete examples.

For example, neither google nor an LLM replaces the utility of building your own vocabulary so that you can express yourself in a foreign language when you're in convo with someone.

What you remember becomes part of your thinking and reasoning. So no, why would you google something if it doesn’t come to mind as something relevant.

A software-based spaced repetition system probably could have made someone appear borderline superhuman in the era before Google. Google cleared a lot of this low-hanging fruit, and then it became "merely" the best way to cram facts into your noggin so you can become an expert at whatever you want, which is still extremely valuable. Your doctor probably used SRS to get through medical school, and now look at how much money they're making. For most professions, nothing -> Google was probably a much bigger jump than Google -> LLMs, so I expect that to still largely be the case.

TL;DR: SRS is, perhaps counterintuitively, most useful for those of us seeking true mastery over something.

LLMs memorize information at a superhuman level the same way an 8 tb harddisk does.

Silly.

I don't how well it works in practice for long texts, but for song lyrics I've used this Anki plugin: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2084557901

It takes a text, and creates a bunch of cloze deletion cards, each presenting you with a number of lines, and asking you to recall the next line.

I guess it matters how long it is and if you need to know it exactly, and how long you need to retain it. I had to memorize 50 to 100 word phrases and I chained them together with index cards. The first sentence is the cue for the second, the second for the third, etc. Carried them around in my pocket in order and started from first a few times a day until I could do the whole thing. But I only needed to know it exactly for a few weeks usually.

I used the same binding for a kanji learning app (https://shodoku.app).

I had some problems with their documentation though. Following their examples was pretty straightforward, but I always had trouble e.g. what is the difference between State.Learning and State.Relearning, or what does fuzzy mean in FSRS parameters, or reps on a Card. You have to either read the algorithm explainer or the Anki source code to understand that.

Seems nice. The page is so irritating on iOS that it must dominate your revenue losses though, not fear from cloud. Like portrait screen 4 colums of 2 character wide lines of texts. All video autostarts on fullscreen when gets into view, ehh. Have to ask, have you ever tried this?

Not all spaced repetition is equally effective.

Repeated exposure (e.g. re-reading a book) does something, but active recall is much more efficient at solidifying memories.

When building a spaced repetition toy, the most satisfying algorithm I found was:

* Model the forgetting curve as p = 2 ^ (−∆/h) (p = probability of recall, ∆ = time since last review, h = forgetting half-life for a particular card and user) (see https://research.duolingo.com/papers/settles.acl16.pdf)

* Numerically fit this curve to the last ~10 recent reviews of the card by the user to give an estimate for h (the half-life but effectively the intrinsic "difficulty" of the card for that user)

* Schedule the next review of the card at the time when a particular recall probability is reached. This probability should be configurable by the user: >90% for an "easy" session, <70% for a "hard" session.

* Use the "due date" to queue up cards for review. If a user reviews a card _before_ the due date, ensure that the half-life is never reduced after a succesful review. Provide some feedback to the user to suggest they stop the session when there are no pending cards left ("10 more cards due today, 100 cards due tomorrow, 1000 cards due next week")

* Don't schedule the same card twice in a row as this is annoying for the user. If it has just been reviewed and is due next, move it back to second place in the queue.

I found this works well once there are 2 or more reviews of a particular card for a particular user. For scheduling the _second_ review of the card I had to invent a heuristic like: if first review failed, schedule again in 1 minute, if first review passed schedule again tomorrow. However in apps where many users are reviewing the same cards, you could probably build a good model of the difficulty of a card for a user before 2 reviews by considering the performance of other users on that card.

I never got try the algorithm - I simply don’t get the UI in spite of all my best efforts. I’m looking for a wanikani like tool, with the same srs , and same excellent and simple ui. I’ll have a look at supermemo ( I don’t mind paying ).

Whats wrong with Anki? Works like a charm for me

Have you tried Anki since FSRS was introduced? If not, may be worth giving it another shot.

Most people don't use space repetition as their only study technique, they just use it for 10-15 min and spend most of their time actually doing the thong to learn, for I with language learning, I do 10-15min of anki and 45-90 lf language immersion.