> How I wish I could explain that the context matters and they'd learn faster by actually using these discrete chunks of knowledge in context! That reviewing decontextualized data is a poor way to synthesize most thing! But who would listen? I wouldn't have 4 years ago.
Good point. When I read about SRS for the first time a few weeks ago, I had roughly the same idea as the author of this article (except I didn't carry it out--a million kudos because he did :) ).
Now I think the difference with using SRS for learning a natural language is the ultimate goal: It's not "I wanted to learn how to program in language X", if I wanted to do that, I'd do some tutorials or try to complete some Project Euler challenges in that language. Instead, it's "I want to spend less time having to look up parameters and usage of functions in language X's standard library, a language I am already quite familiar with, apart from spending too much time reading the documentation".
Now that I think about it, I see another great advantage: It's a personal thing, I don't expect most people to battle with this problem as much as I do, but whenever I need to look up something in the docs, the problem is not only that this takes time, but also that I have the tendency to read way more of the docs than what is relevant to the problem at hand, I click through to other pages that seem interesting, which reference an external site, I look up stuff related to that and get completely sidetracked. Not only does this take an extraordinary amount of time, but also drains mental energy that I should be using to work on the initial programming problem. This lack of focus has gotten so bad that it resulted in severe burn-out and I've basically resigned myself to not pursuing a career in computer programming related jobs, even though that's what I love to do.
Not having to look up things, so I do not need to task-switch (as much) and keep focused on the programming, well I tried so many other things, I really must give this a shot.
When I read about SRS, there were a couple of programs available, is Anki generally considered to be the best (free) one to start with?
Good point. When I read about SRS for the first time a few weeks ago, I had roughly the same idea as the author of this article (except I didn't carry it out--a million kudos because he did :) ).
Now I think the difference with using SRS for learning a natural language is the ultimate goal: It's not "I wanted to learn how to program in language X", if I wanted to do that, I'd do some tutorials or try to complete some Project Euler challenges in that language. Instead, it's "I want to spend less time having to look up parameters and usage of functions in language X's standard library, a language I am already quite familiar with, apart from spending too much time reading the documentation".
Now that I think about it, I see another great advantage: It's a personal thing, I don't expect most people to battle with this problem as much as I do, but whenever I need to look up something in the docs, the problem is not only that this takes time, but also that I have the tendency to read way more of the docs than what is relevant to the problem at hand, I click through to other pages that seem interesting, which reference an external site, I look up stuff related to that and get completely sidetracked. Not only does this take an extraordinary amount of time, but also drains mental energy that I should be using to work on the initial programming problem. This lack of focus has gotten so bad that it resulted in severe burn-out and I've basically resigned myself to not pursuing a career in computer programming related jobs, even though that's what I love to do.
Not having to look up things, so I do not need to task-switch (as much) and keep focused on the programming, well I tried so many other things, I really must give this a shot.
When I read about SRS, there were a couple of programs available, is Anki generally considered to be the best (free) one to start with?