Hi there, Steve here in Palm Springs.
Um, I decided to try filming outside because I had some negative
comments about the redness of my eyes using the lights inside.
Um, I'm going to talk about spaced repetition systems, which are very
popular amongst language learners.
I'm going to give you my perspective on them and why I don't use them a lot.
Um, down here in Palm Springs, we've been here for about 12 days.
Enjoying it.
It's very warm.
It's sunny.
We're having renovations done on our house in Vancouver, which is
a good reason to be down here.
Also, we were able to get our second, uh, vaccine dose, the
Pfizer, and we appreciate that.
And a minor excitement like a bat flew in the house a couple of nights ago.
And, uh, we closed it into one room and the next morning phoned
the wildlife, uh, who came within 40 minutes and took it away, very
impressed with the level of service.
Um, now spaced repetition.
Now remember that to me, and I think this is sort of beyond dispute,
the most important elements in language learning are your attitude.
In other words, are you enjoying it?
And second of all, are you putting in the time?
Those are the overwhelming issues.
So, obviously, if you enjoy doing spaced repetition systems,
then you should do them.
Um, even if they are a less efficient way of spending your time than something
else, if it increases the amount of time you spend with the language,
then they are good things to do.
Spaced repetition systems, uh, represented by well-known names,
especially for language learning, like Anki A N K I and Memrise, and others
are widely used by language learners.
The idea is that there is an ideal sort of spacing between when
you first encounter a new bit of information to learn like a word
and when you should next meet that and then next and next and next again.
And so typically in spaced repetition systems, there are flashcards.
And you schedule these new words or phrases to appear at a certain interval,
which the app will schedule for you in a way that optimizes your ability
to retain these bits of information.
Uh, so there's nothing wrong with doing that.
So why am I not a fan?
And I should point out too, that at LingQ, we also use spaced repetition
systems and we have flashcards.
But to me, the use of flashcards, spaced repetition systems, et cetera,
is the advantage of it is that it's a randomized way to expose you to
the language a different way than let's say, reading or listening.
So it's another way to get at the same bits of information.
Uh, I am not persuaded that the sort of optimized algorithm achieves a great deal.
Um, because you know, it's not like you're learning objective facts of history, which
there might be 5,000 that you may need to learn or 1000 or some such number.
When we're dealing with words, we're dealing with a situation where the
frequency with which these words appear in texts declines very, very rapidly, so
that the most frequent 500 words, you're going to see them so often that you
almost need and worry about learning them.
But that's when the spaced repetition system is going to be the most effective.
And I certainly used space repetition for learning Chinese characters,
because I decided that the first thousand characters, which would
be very important for me to build up my vocabulary beyond tha,.
That I would use this sort of concentrated way of getting at them
and each one with all of the different strokes and stuff like that, I felt
it would be a useful thing to do.
Also when I was doing Chinese, I had six, seven, eight, 10 hours a day.
However much time I wanted to spend it was my full-time job.
So I would still have three hours of one-on-one lessons with my teacher.
I would still be reading a lot.
I would be listening a lot.
And I would put in an hour or so a day with these thousand highest
frequency characters using sort of a self-designed space repetition system.
However, since that time I have never used space repetition systems.
Whenever I find myself going through a long list and remember that in the
languages that I have learned at LingQ, the number of sort of words that I
have saved, LingQs that I have created the numbers in the tens of thousands.
Okay.
Uh, in a way, the way I create flashcards at LingQ, every time
I save a word at LingQ, I have created a fresh card, flashcard.
Every time I save a phrase, I've created a flash card and I do review these when
I turn the page, when I have just read a page and there's a bunch of words there
that either I just saved or I've saved previously and they've shown up again
and to kind of refresh them a little bit.
They hit me again with them.
I'll review them as I turn the page, but I will not sit down for a list of, you know,
5,000, 10,000 words that I have saved.
In other words, flashcards that I have remembered or in Anki
terms, a deck that I have created simply by reading and listening on
LingQ, saving words and phrases.
I've got a deck, I've got lots of them.
Um, I can even, uh, on LingQ if I tag them, you know, I can tag them for verbs.
I can tag them for tagging them for other parts of speech.
I can, uh, I can look at only the ones that, uh, I just met
or the ones that I almost know.
And.
And I've experimented with all of these different ways of, of going
through these words in some kind of a concentrated learning session.
And I always find that I lose interest.
So I do it sporadically, but obviously if you're doing it sporadically,
you're defeating the purpose of the spaced repetition system, because
the spaced repetition system assumes that there's a certain regularity.
Okay.
Now, because of the way in which frequency, declines so quickly
the first 500, the first thousand fine.
You can see them again in your spaced repetition review.
You'll probably also come across them in some form of spaced
repetition, just through the natural process of listening and reading.
But after that, the frequency declines so quickly that so many of
the words that you need to learn, they're only going to show up
I don't know, twice in a book, some of them, and yet you
still don't need to know them.
So even if you learn them through some kind of spaced repetition,
you're likely to forget them again.
And to try to maintain all 20,000 of them in some kind of a deck that
you're constantly reviewing would start to monopolize all your study time.
So I just, but I repeat what I said at the beginning, people who
enjoy doing that should do it.
I don't ever, when I'm doing flashcards and I do them from time to time, as I say,
when I'm turning the page, I never treat them as a sort of a test of my memory.
I've tried to remember.
I just treat them as exposures.
In fact, I'll put everything on the face of the flashcard.
I just flipped through them as quickly as I can.
One thing that's good about our flashcards or activities at LingQ is that we
have a variety of different activities that come at you in a randomized way.
So again, by randomizing the nature of the activity,
in other words, it's either a flashcard or a reverse flashcard or dictation
or cloze test or multiple choice.
So that makes it a little more interesting, but I always come
away if I ever do sit down for 30 minutes and just to go through a
deck of say words and phrases, I really wonder if I achieved anything.
And of course, if I don't do it regularly, I won't have achieved anything.
But the idea of spending half an hour a day when I only have an hour
to spend on language learning to spend that time on flashcards is not
something that I'm prepared to do.
The biggest part of my learning time is simply listening.
There is another issue with flashcards and I'm not a neuroscientist,
but Manfred Spitzer, whom I often quote, he is a neuroscientist.
And he says that the brain has trouble learning details.
We forget details there in our hippocampus, we lose them.
We forget them.
What The brain is best at doing is creating patterns, recognizing
patterns, creating links, and that way, becoming familiar with
everything that we encounter in life.
That's what the brain does.
It, it, it enables us to deal with situations by creating patterns so that we
start to recognize what's about to happen.
And that's how we become familiar with a language.
And my impression is that if I can listen and read to content of interest
without worrying too much about what I forget and what I remember gradually
over time, my brain is going to become familiar with the language and that that
is a more effective and in my case, more enjoyable way of learning than trying to
go through these stacks of flashcards.
Um, so, uh, and, uh, you know, a big problem, I think in, in, in Anki for
many people is even creating these decks, uh, at least a LingQ, uh, this
job has done for you because when you're reading and saving words, you're
adding, uh, items, words, or phrases to the deck that you're going to review.
But I still think that once you're, uh, you know, the number of words that
you have saved, the LingQs that you have created starts to get over 10,000,
um, I don't know how you can continue doing justice to the
principles of these, uh, you know, the algorithms of spaced repetition.
Uh, and at the same time, find time to do the listening and reading and
speaking that you also need to do.
And, um, so there you have it.
Uh, I use, uh, you know, uh, at LingQ I arbitrarily decide that a
certain word is no longer status one.
It's now status two.
I know it a little better status three.
I know it even better.
It's that as far as I know it, then I move it back again because where is it?
I thought I really knew all of a sudden, I don't know them.
It always bounces back and forth.
Uh, that's how I study, but I want to stress again, that the two key
elements to success in the language learning are one, keeping a positive
attitude and enjoying what you're doing.
And second of all, you know, finding the time to do it.
And so if you are a devotee of spaced repetition, you enjoy doing
it, that's what you find the time to do by all means keep doing it.
I'm not suggesting people should stop.
I'm just explaining why I'm not a big fan or a big user.
There you have it.
And here are a couple of videos that you might find relevant to
this whole issue of remembering and words and how we learn languages.
Bye for now.