
How to Remember More of What You Learn with Spaced Repetition (2016) - e19293001
https://collegeinfogeek.com/spaced-repetition-memory-technique/
======
oskarth
Shameless plug: I made Code Cards
([https://codecards.me/](https://codecards.me/)), which helps you remember
programming concepts by active spaced repetition. Think of it as Anki but made
with code specifically in mind.

In the interest of full transparency, I think there are some things missing to
make it the best tool it can possibly be. I'm still mulling over how to tweak
it so it works better w.r.t. motivation/relevancy and
availability/convenience.

Write-up:
[https://www.oskarth.com/srspractice/](https://www.oskarth.com/srspractice/)

HN thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13521066](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13521066)

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hoodwink
I love Anki. I use it for 10 minutes a day for retaining math, vocabulary, and
programming languages.

I've also hacked together a system, inspired by spaced repetition, for
remembering better books I've read. It's turned into so much more. If you have
an interest in remembering books better or using technology to get more out of
reading, I'd love to chat.

~~~
rwill128
I would like to chat for sure. I ran across Anki a few months ago, and thought
about all the potentially incredible interactions between spaced repetition
and Natural Language Processing techniques.

For a super basic idea, imagine a Chrome plugin that creates an Anki deck out
of a Wikipedia article at the click of a button? (Maybe not the most useful
application, but pretty neat and a great place for a simple proof of concept.)

And what if you took that a step farther and made an app that does the same
thing with text extracted from an image set. So you could take pictures of a
textbook page or pages and have it do the same thing with those.

Of course, there are many practical challenges to developing the NLP process
in a way that it can identify the most salient parts of a text and capture
flash-card-friendly phrases or factual statements, but I think the challenges
could be overcome. And it would be an amazing feat to capture the benefits of
spaced repetition without the upfront cost of manual deck creation.

~~~
sharun
You could call it version 1.0 of the system Neo uses to learn everything about
everything in the Matrix :)

I don't think NLP is necessary though.

If you take a look at the stackoverflow data dump sooner or later every
possible variation of a question for a particular answer is going to get
asked. Ofcourse there are always new topics that haven't been covered but this
is a minuscule portion of the entire data set. I think it's a safe bet looking
at Q&A happening on sites like Quora\Reddit etc in a couple years the chances
that someone is going come up with a question that no one has asked before is
going to be very low.

Wikipedia is missing 2 important pieces.

1\. Linkage between all these questions and the content on the site. Currently
Google provides this link.

2\. A system to communicate to the reader what skill level /pre-reqs they need
to fully appreciate/understand the content they are looking at. The UI for
such a system already exists in most games.

Once these pieces are in place you are ready to create a very useful Anki deck
on anything.

What most people don't realize is the entire mass of human knowledge given the
size of most wiki/q&a site dump is about 100-150 GB. Throw in all the edu
video content being produced on Khan Academy, NPTEL etc and you get to a
1-2TB. This isn't a big amount of data. All it needs is a learning system
built on top of it for it all to be put to good use.

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neves
I'm a fan of spaced repetition. Here is the definitive bag of tips about it:

Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge - SuperMemo
[https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules](https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules)

~~~
kolinko
+1.

Supermemo is on the market for over 20 years, I remember using it on Amiga.

Quite amazing that they are still on the market, with not much competition.

~~~
leogiertz
[Shameless Plug]

We recently launched a free flashcards app on the Mac App Store called PAL:
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pal-
flashcards/id1187236321?...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pal-
flashcards/id1187236321?mt=12)

It's also available on [https://www.pal9000.com](https://www.pal9000.com)

We've tried keeping it as simple as possible which a fair number of people
seem to like. :)

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madaxe_again
I've practiced this for as long as I can recall - not because I was told to,
but because I found recalling something and working with it in an appropriate
mental context worked to cement seemingly limitless amounts of information in
my mind.

I'm not convinced that an app or any external crutch is required - one simply
needs to get in the habit of reflecting on new information, and sporadically
testing retention. The first step for me to start the loop is to subvocalise
(or vocalise if I'm in private) the pertinent info several times after
receipt, which beds the memory of learning something in, and the context, if
not the fullness of the information itself. It's enough - it's a hook to
trigger recall of the full information - sits in episodic memory as "a thing I
said or did", rather than passive "this happened/I heard this" information,
and therefore surfaces the entry point easily. If an entertaining association
rises at that point, I store that too, as it acts as a mnemonic.

I do find myself sometimes doing this with useless information, however, and
end up memorising pretty much every bit of information I only intended to
retain for 30 seconds (e.g. a chunk of foreign text, ticket numbers, seating
plans) - and find myself doing habitual recall on them until they cement like
everything else.

One thing that the article doesn't touch on but I think is important is sleep
- I find if I recall immediately before nodding off the information sticks far
more firmly, and I resultantly wake up in the middle of the night with fresh
insights. Conversely, when I don't get enough sleep for a prolonged period, my
recall definitely gets substantially worse - I find I both can't remember
things and if I do, they're distorted, or I don't trust the information.

~~~
mrkgnao
From my own org-mode link dumps:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14013310](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14013310)

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diego898
A great resource on this is gwern's page on spaced repetition[1], discussed
previously[2]

[1]
[https://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition](https://www.gwern.net/Spaced%20repetition)
[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13151790](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13151790)

~~~
atomicone
thanks for sharing this gem!

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panglott
Spaced reptition isn't exactly a time-saving study method. It takes lots of
time to build and maintain a large deck. For very small things to memorize
(like the kana), it's probably easier to just make flashcards. But it's
fantastic when you need to remember large parts of a very large flashcardable
set of information, like "the kanji" or "new target language words". And it's
best when you have already made a good start on the topic.

------
MarkMc
I'm currently using Anki to memorise vocabulary for Indonesian. One thing I
find enormously useful is to link the Indonesian word I'm trying to learn to
an English (or even another Indonesian word) word I already know.

For example, here's how I remember the word for 'choose': In The Matrix, Neo
has to choose between a red pill and a blue pill. Therefore the Indonesian
word for 'choose' is 'pilih'.

To remember the word for 'page' I think of newspaper pages blowing in the
local park. I already know the Indonesian word for 'park' is 'taman' so it
then becomes very easy to remember that the word for 'page' is 'laman'.

Thus each word has a little mnemonic story associated with it. Eventually
through repeated exposure to the word I don't need the story any more, but
it's enormously useful in getting to that stage.

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danieljohnson
If this interests you and you want to dive deeper into how you learn, I am
enjoying this coursera course and highly recommend it:

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-
learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)

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two2two
Chalk me up as an Anki user. I couldn't have done as well as I have in my
college español class without it. I felt like I had superpowers when I knew
vocabulary that some of the native speakers struggled with.

~~~
yorwba
The thing I like most about Anki is that it can show you nice little graphs of
your progress. No matter whether that line is curving upwards or downwards, it
helps a great deal to motivate myself for regular study.

~~~
Houshalter
Where is this feature? I haven't noticed it.

~~~
misiti3780
upper right corner, the vertical bar graphs

~~~
martalist
huh, nice! I hadn't noticed that before either.

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tunesmith
There's this scaling problem with Anki, in that if you're doing 20 new cards a
day, it gets overwhelming really fast. I haven't done the math yet to figure
out how many (or few) new cards per day you should limit yourself to in order
to have a manageable review workload over the duration of a course - anyone
have any ideas?

Sometimes it seems like the pace of college courses is by definition
inefficient, like the only way you can pass is by cramming and forgetting. Not
even naturally optimized for retention.

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MarkMc
There's a great book called 'Making It Stick' which details effective, proven
methods to improve memorisation and learning. Spaced repition (or more
generally active recall) is one of those major methods.

[0] [https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-
Learnin...](https://www.amazon.com/Make-Stick-Science-Successful-
Learning/dp/0674729013)

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shahbaby
I had a similar realization this semester. It felt like after I learned a new
concept, I had to give it time to solidify.

The best students were always caught up with the class and following along
whereas the average or below students were fully focused on one class at a
time depending on which one had an assignment/exam coming up.

I wondered why some students are able to keep up while others fall behind. I
think it boils down to efficient study strategies like this and never falling
behind in one class because there's something due for another class.

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Takizawa1
The article mentions optimum spacing if you have an exam coming up. Has anyone
found useful references in regards to optimum spacing if you want to
permanently memorize information?

~~~
gwern
The schedule mentioned for exams is not used in most SRS; they already target
permanent memorization (which is one reason why they sometimes need a
'cramming mode' for students who are willing to pay extra reviews in order to
have cards memorized by a particular date).

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news_to_me
I learned about SRS when I started studying Japanese. It's the main principle
behind WaniKani, which teaches you kanji and vocab. It's been working
astonishingly well, and it's extremely gratifying to slowly accumulate more
knowledge from a seemingly intractable subject.

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digitalmaster
I'm actually a huge fan of spaced repetition. Kinda mad I didn't know this
about the brain back in college. I now use this interval method paired with
Deliberate Practice for everything -- even working on an app that mirrors my
current workflow.

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AndroidOatmeal
Does this concept apply to learning skills (as opposed to memorization)? The
general wisdom for mastering skills seems to be "just practice a lot." I
wonder if spaced repetition could speed up this process.

~~~
sharp11
For skill learning, look into Anders Ericsson's book "Peak". There's much more
to say than just "practice a lot" :)

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zeke
Shameless plug: I made a spaced repetition website too.
[https://qquiz.com](https://qquiz.com)

I use it for Spanish vocabulary but have German, English and several others on
it.

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0xdeadbeefbabe
In addition to spaced repetition you can encode information in a way (method
of Loci) that makes it very hard to forget. Did they mention this?

