SRS is great for memorizing truly unconnected pieces of information, like names of capital cities.
For anything where the information is connected, it's a lot better to use those connections instead of drilling it in a decontextualized fragments via SRS.
> it's a lot better to use those connections instead of drilling it in a decontextualized fragments via SRS.
Or, you can use SRS for "spaced repetition" of making these connections. That is, instead of treating it as rote memorization, use it for the timing effects. When I see a card about X1 which is part of a larger concept Y, I don't think "what was the exact answer to X1, which I remembered without any understanding and will just recite now?".
Instead, I often think "how do I come up with the answer to X1 right now? how does it connect to the larger concept Y?". Even better, if I've recently seen card X2 about the same concept, I might think "how does X1 relate to X2, which I just saw recently?". Sometimes, this actively helps you to make new connections. Of course, you need to explicitly make an effort to do so, yourself. If you practice pure recall only, that's what you'll get from SRS.
As another commenter mentioned, it's a false dichotomy.
> "[00:11:27] These SRS flash card apps are very good for learning vocabulary and depending on what's included in the flashcards, they could be for grammar as well. But the problem for a language learner is that it's de-contextualized. So say if you just study vocabulary words, then they're going to be a lot of things that you'll miss like collocations. You won't know which words are normal to use with which other words. For example, in English, if someone asks, "How are you?" it would be completely normal to answer, "pretty good". It would also be fairly normal to answer, "absolutely fantastic". But it would be strange to answer that you're doing "absolutely good". There's no grammatical reason. It's just not something that English speakers tend to say.
[00:12:17] And there are many, many, many language features that are like this. There are also questions of word boundaries. For example, in English, the word "nose" refers to a person's nose or a dog's nose, but not every kind of animal. For example, an elephant in English doesn't have a nose. It has a trunk. In Japanese, the same word, 鼻 (hana), is for a person's nose and the elephant's nose. So the question is, what exactly does "nose" mean? Well, really tedious language teacher could explain this for every single word that you study, or even put this on the back of every flash card for every word that you're reviewing. But, it's not going to be efficient. You'll spend so much time worrying about edge cases for every single word that you're learning that you're actually not going to get anywhere.
[00:13:11] The solution in language learning is extensive reading. If you do a lot of reading and the material is easy enough that you can go at a decent speed, then you'll just get so much input that you'll have a feel for what words are used when and you'll know what the specific definition boundaries around though are. And of course, it's not just language learners that have this problem with spaced repetition systems—that everything is reviewed out of context.
[00:13:11] You might remember from when you were younger and taking math classes, there were certain techniques that you had to get good at or you had to be able to do at least on some tests, like say, use trigonometric identities and some information to figure out how tall something is or how far away it is or completing the square to derive the quadratic formula... something like that. Mastering these kinds of problem solving techniques has the same sort of issue revolving around context. If you just mechanically memorize each piece of a method, you won't necessarily be able to apply it when you're given an actual problem on a test or any other situation.
[00:13:41] On the other hand, if you put the entire problem into a flash card like say you just write out a math problem and that's the cue part of your flash card, and every time you see that card, you have to solve the whole problem. Well, that's going to take enough time that you won't be able to do those problems very often. You might want to do it for some really important things, but it can't be your go to study method.
[00:14:55] Similarly with programming, you can memorize a lot of things about a programming language, but you're not actually going to learn that language or learn how to program at all if you don't write programs and if you don't have the experience of making mistakes and then the experience of debugging those mistakes and fixing your programs."
Trust me, this is an issue I've thought about a lot. I contributed to Anki in the mid 2000s, have previously made 10k+ decks I used for years and spent two years trying to integrate them into a curriculum for other students.
Just to clarify something in case it’s not obvious from my other comments. I’m not arguing for SRS as a replacement to all other forms of learning. You still need the extensive reading, problem solving, experimenting with a programming language.
However, I’ve found SRS to be a great addition to the methods above. For example, I haven’t found the methods above to give you long-term retention on their own. (And I’ve done a lot of problem solving.) Math is also a lot about building up the level of abstraction, and SRS can help with spacing the practice of lower-level concepts so you can more easily apply them to more complicated ones.
I’ve never been a fan of memorization in the past. However, I’ve found that:
1. Memorization (as in knowing foundational facts and being able to recall them efficiently) is actually pretty useful, as much as I didn’t want this to be true.
2. SRS can be used for thinking + deriving the answer to a card in addition to just memorization. It just gives you the right timing to do so.
> For anything where the information is connected, it's a lot better to use those connections instead of drilling it in a decontextualized fragments via SRS.
It's a false dichotomy. You can, and IMO should, do both.
> Every minute spent on flashcards is a minute that cannot be spent on more contextualized study.
I often spend less than 5 minutes in the morning on my flashcards. There's not much deep contextualizing you can do in 3-5 minutes. Certainly not in areas like physics.
It is a false dichotomy. All minutes are not equal. I'll gain much more by spending less time on HN than by cutting out flash cards.
I find that my brain sort of automatically uses connections. The really interesting thing about SRS is that you don't have to consciously think about how you're going to remember the cards. Like, you don't consciously think, "Ok, what's the pattern here, how can I turn it into a mnemonic..." Rather, your brain subconsciously does that for you.
I have used SRS and found it powerful, but not that powerful. SRS only commanded the times of rehearsal but not the way memory consolidated. And it consolidated by creating connections. So I needed mnemonics, prompts and all the likes, on top of SRS.
For anything where the information is connected, it's a lot better to use those connections instead of drilling it in a decontextualized fragments via SRS.