I'm always a little confused when I see articles on the internet extolling the virtues of spaced repetition learning. I don't doubt that it's a good way to memorize things; it's just that I have never really found that memorization was ever an obstacle to my ability to learn something. I've always found that retention proceeds from understanding.
Time spent flicking through flashcards for vocabulary or formulae or chemical paths or whatever seems like a poor substitute for time spent reading material that uses the vocabulary, explains the derivation of the formulae, or describes the chemical process, or whatever...
Is this just about passing tests, or is this genuinely how other people approach learning?
> poor substitute for time spent reading material that uses the vocabulary
You can't effectively read material without having enough vocabulary to cover at least some 80% of it.
My most recent language learning experience is Japanese. The difference between trying to read before cramming on an ~8000 word vocabulary and after is night and day.
And the comparison basis here is not reading hardcopy, but electronic text with the help of an instant dictionary lookup tool (hover the mouse over anything to get to the reading and meanings instantly). That is to say, even with that tool, which eliminates some of the barriers of the writing system, trying to read is still like pulling teeth compared to the experience when you're crammed on a decent chunk of vocab.
Vocab gets you to that point where you can guess the meanings of unknown words from context, as well as their readings. You can start using mono-lingual dictionaries and other resources.
Now if you're coming from, say, one European language to another, you may be able to get away without using spaced repetition, because of a lot of shared vocabulary (cognates) and concepts.
In any case, brute force reading is spaced repetition. It's just inefficient spaced repetition that fails to schedule the appearance of a word based on your recall performance for that specific word.
I'd like to add that this concept is not just for natural languages. Say you read your first Shakespeare or Nietzsche or any book where your wish to learn and understand the content trumps the plot. Cramming the perspective (historical, philosophical, ...) should help massively in the pursuit of knowledge.
Should, because I've never tried it, but wish I could. Something like Kindle + Audible + augmented learning would be my dream. I always get my additional info from deep-diving Wiki and the internet, but that's obviously not as deep as a good set of notes, or a teacher should get me. There's an undeveloped space between the layman and the scholarly level.
In high school there was this old-school paper database resource I really liked that gave you this perspective for all the great novels. It didn't help you directly with your book report, but it helped find the words, themes and directions to report about. I even remember one: the 'vatersuche'-motif, which is a literary concept where a young man is looking for knowledge about his father via his actions that make the plot. It's so obscure, I can't even google it right now. That, or I don't know the proper translation, which proves the point.
Not the OP, but the reality is that you can read anything that interests you. Especially when you are starting, the first few thousand common words are incredibly common. So you'll get those over and over and over again. The main problem is that depending on what grammar is present, you may have difficulties.
There is something called the "natural order hypothesis" that states that the order in which people acquire the grammatical structures of a language is roughly the same, no matter what order the grammar is introduced. This is one of Stephen Krashen's hypotheses that has some good evidence in trials.
So the problem is that if you pick a piece that has a lot of grammar that you haven't acquired yet, you'll be spinning your wheels for a long time. The solution to this is simply to move on and find something else to read.
As for tools, the rikaichan plug in in Firefox and the Chromium port (rikaikun) are the main ones. There are lots of children's stories on the internet. Search for 昔話. You'll find lots to read :-) If you're a bit more advanced, then news is always good. TBS news is nice because they always give you both the video and audio along with the text (which is invariably exactly the same as what's in the video): http://news.tbs.co.jp/
But you can even read Twitter or and other social medium. I spent a long time reading the Ruby dev list in Japanese to learn computer terms. Good luck on your studies!
> reading hardcopy, but electronic text with the help of an instant dictionary lookup tool (hover the mouse over anything to get to the reading and meanings instantly)
Care to share the tool you use to read and the dictionary tool?
I've been using Anki for a few years, here are my thoughts on your questions:
> I have never really found that memorization was ever an obstacle to my ability to learn something.
I think it depends what you are learning, for example when learning languages I find a lot of the difficulty is just in retaining the words.
Another place where I've found it useful is for memorizing definitions in (pure) mathematics. To be able to read the later parts of a book you need a good working knowledge of earlier definitions. You could look back for the definitions every time, but that breaks the flow of reading.
> I've always found that retention proceeds from understanding.
Yeah, I find that too. But this is something that I do after understanding something to help retain it better and for longer.
> Time spent flicking through flashcards for vocabulary or formulae or chemical paths or whatever seems like a poor substitute for time spent reading material that uses the vocabulary ...
The time I spend on memorization is very small, less than 5 minutes a day, and I usually do it on my phone while I'm waiting for something. It replaces checking reddit or playing phone games rather than deep reading of interesting material.
General guidelines for spaced repetition tell you not to memorize things you don't understand anyway, and say that you only waste your time by doing so.
In general, it helps with indefinite retention. And if you don't do something often, or regularly, any permanent footholds offer some scaffolding to get back up to speed quicker the next time you need to do it.
As a problem approaches looking like learning a language, spaced repetition gets more useful. If you learn a second language, you will probably hit a plateau if you never try to memorize anything, because language has a large set of symbols, some infrequently used, but still critical in some situations.
It probably helps anywhere that "deliberate practice" and "memorization" almost overlap in how they work or in effectiveness, say, in memorizing program hot-keys.
> it's just that I have never really found that memorization was ever an obstacle to my ability to learn something
I mean, taken to an extreme, that's clearly wrong - if you had no working memory (or, say, forgot everything after 10 minutes), you also couldn't learn anything, at least in the sense of being able to use that knowledge long-term. Learning and memorization go hand in hand - learning is, in a sense, the act of getting new things into your memory.
If you mean that there's more to learning than just memorization, you're right! (mostly, see note) In many domains, you need more than just to try and rote memorize a bunch of facts. E.g. when studying math, you need to memorize things like definitions, but also understand them, which is another way of saying "memorize what they really mean". You need to "memorize" how to solve problems. Etc.
You certainly need to have that initial understanding when reading the material the first time, otherwise you can't possibly remember it. But, all of these can reasonably be called memorization, because they are all things that you might know one day, but get lost over time, and are things you can "drill". Therefore spaced repetition is a good way to make sure the stuff you learned once will stay in your memory long term.
Note: some things are pure memorization of facts, in a sense. E.g. I memorized all the locations of countries of the world, then their capitals, and now I'm working on their populations. There is some understanding that goes in here (and one of the reasons I do it is because it forces me to learn more about countries and make interesting connections), but for the large part, this is just brute "practice this fact enough times" learning.
I’ve found it to be immensely helpful in medical school. I only add cards after I understand a particular concept—read about a concept first, then add cards to make sure I retain it. The most popular decks on r/medicalschoolAnki have many thousands of premade cards; with additional cards for microbiology and pharmacology, people may have as many as 20K Anki cards by the time they take Step 1 (standardized national exam of basic medical knowledge) after 2 years of medical school.
With this approach, Anki is much more about retention than learning. Books and lectures are good for learning, but Anki is ideal for ensuring I can remember side effects of a particular heart medication months or years after cardiovascular lectures ended.
It’s certainly useful for passing tests too, but the main value is in retaining knowledge long after a particular test has been taken.
> Time spent flicking through flashcards for vocabulary ... seems like a poor substitute for time spent reading
I've been using Anki decks in tandem with native reading material to study Japanese. Whenever I encounter a word I don't know, I add it (along with a sample sentence demonstrating usage) to my Anki deck. Whenever I don't do this I get frustrated by having to look up the same words multiple times (often times a new word is used infrequently enough that I forget it even if I look it up every time I encounter it).
Also, when learning Japanese, there are a lot of things where memorization is very useful like learning to map between English words and kanji and learning the readings of place names and people's names.
Time spent flicking through flashcards for vocabulary or formulae or chemical paths or whatever seems like a poor substitute for time spent reading material that uses the vocabulary, explains the derivation of the formulae, or describes the chemical process, or whatever...
Is this just about passing tests, or is this genuinely how other people approach learning?