I agree with you for language learners.

I built and ran the academic side of a language school for four years, worked on two language learning startups and also learned two languages in different language families from my native language (and from each other) to a pretty fluent level.

In all those years I’ve never met a single really successful learner who made SRS a major part of their studies, though some used it as a small supplementary practice.

The thing is that words aren’t usually discrete pieces of information in the way that names of capitals or things a med student has to memorize often are (unless your goal is just to play scrabble with them, in which case SRS is great). Meanings don’t map one to one across languages, collocations are important , etc, etc. Putting sentence cards into Anki is better than isolation words with translations but even then, you won’t get as much cultural information or even raw quantity of input as you would from extensive reading and this is a topic L2 Acquisition researchers have covered in depth.

I think part of the problem is that SRS sounds really compelling to engineers and it’s generally easy to build into an app, so that’s been the focus of most language learning apps for the past 20 years.

There are some better ones that exist mostly to help learners handle native text and audio, though. LingQ, Language Reactor and language-specific apps that do similar things are great.

> In all those years I’ve never met a single really successful learner who made SRS a major part of their studies

I did, but very differently from how most people do it.

Premade decks with single words sucks, yes. But creating your own flashcards with lots of audio and mined sentences from your learning materials accelerates learning better than anything I tried before.

And yes, it requires a lot of immersion / exposure and other things. But when done properly it works really really well.

Have you ever gotten to a C1 level in a language you learned as an adult that isn't close to your native language? If so, what kind of effort did it take you?

Or if you only learned closely related languages, what aspect of it was "really successful"? Accent? Writing ability? Something else?

For me fluency is lower than C1, but yes.

It is a lot effort, I find Spaced Repetition actually very demanding – but effective, that's the point.

If you take Paul Nation's math (the famous https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1044345.pdf) and instead of doing that you mine the hardest sentences you find to an SRS (basically, separating grain from chaff) you save yourself a lot of time, because you will never find a piece of text long enough where you know exactly 98% of the words.

In my case, I use flashcards primarily for reading and listening comprehension, but lately I am using it a bit more for pronunciation, and it can also work well for spelling.

Some repetition is good and children in fact often repeatedly read their favorite book or watch their favorite show. However, a key thing to keep in mind with Paul Nation's study is that "repetitions" of a word represented encountering it in different contexts.

This is important for three reasons. First is polysemy, which he mentioned. This is words with multiple meanings like fair (reasonable/just / light or unblemished / a type of public event with entertainment and vendors).

The second and in my opinion even larger issue is gaining and understanding of how the words are used and their scope. E.g., there's no word in Chinese that quite matches "nose" in English. The closest is 鼻子, but that can refer to an elephant trunk or a pig's snout, which "nose" can't. In some languages, there's a word that can be used for humans and pigs, but not elephants. In others, the same word also encompasses bird's beaks. The only way you'll learn this is from encountering the word in a lot of different contexts, not from drilling it repeatedly in the same context. Furthermore, there are a lot of words that tend to be used with or near each other but near others (collocations). In English, it's normal to say you're doing "pretty good" or "absolutely fantastic", but saying you're doing "absolutely good" would be very strange.

Finally, there are a lot of shared cultural stories each language community has. In English, these would be from Christianity, from classical Greco-Roman figures like Aesop, from German storytellers like the Brothers Grimm, other European storytellers like Hans Christian Anderson, etc. In Chinese (or Korean, Japanese, Vietnamese or other nearby countries) people are going to have a lot of shared stories from ancient China—philosophers from the Spring and Autumn era, historical stories and dramatizations of the interesting times in history such as the Three Kingdoms era, and many, many folk tales. If you don't understand at least the core of the cultural cannon, you'll regularly be confused by things in TV shows like soap operas or variety shows, even if you understand every word in transcript. Reading fiction will be even harder.

The more distant the language is from the one you speak natively, the more the second and especially third points will impact you unless you take in an enormous amount of input.

"Dialog Challenged" here.

Your essay exposes many unconsidered ideas I can USE

Such as sorting spoken language from written.

*written* has vast Man-Page (Library!) For all languages. From parts of speech to detailed standards for each sort of publication, intended audience.

The only Man-Page (comments) I could find for spoken dialog was "Miranda Act", I better see what we have NOW.

Thanks

> You know what is more effective than spaced repitition? Reading, listening, and doing to the thing you are interested in.

No, they are not more effective, they are less effective. The fact that they are less effective is the only reason that people do spaced repetition. It takes less time to learn a fact if you optimize for the way memory works. Reading, listening, and doing the thing you are interested in builds memory just like spaced repetition does, just in a haphazard, random way.

> note that reading/doing something is itself spaced repititon.

But worse. There are plenty of things that simply can't be learned by spaced repetition because nobody has come up with a good way to do them, and/or they are physical. But some facts simply have to be memorized, and when doing the thing you will have to recall them. You can either look them up every time you have to use them, and a) forget completely if there's too large a gap between incidents of having to look a thing up, or b) spend all day studying something that you'll completely forget in a week. Spaced repetition is about using a timing trick to make those facts reflexive and long-lasting.

When reading/listening and doing you encounter thousands of facts/words/whatever in the same amount of time spaced repetition will give you tens. If you are a complete beginner spaced repetition does well, but that is misleading - it does well in the easy to study situation of someone who knows nothing and doesn't examine the much harder to study place where someone knows a little something where you spend most of your time.

If you know nothing, spaced repetition can get you over that initial hump well. However I maintain that you quickly reach a point where you are beyond that and then space repetition is less useful than other courses of study in general. Use well it can still be a supplement to other study methods, but those others should be the priority.

Anki is just a software tool for presenting pieces of data at an optimal rate for memory. It’s perfect possible to use it for reading, listening, or even prompting activities.