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Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

(domenic.me)
655 points domenicd | 6 comments | 18 May 25 11:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.744s | source | bottom
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Pooge ◴[18 May 25 12:45 UTC] No.44020989[source]▶
I'm sorry, I didn't read the article but I thought my experience would be a good anecdote.

I've used Anki for multiple years and learned around 18'000 Japanese words. It's difficult to say but I'd say I've learned how to read around 5'000 kanji. When I studied in Japan, my kanji reading—don't mix that up with comprehension!—was way above everyone else's. And most of my classmates were either Korean or Chinese.

That's what 10 minutes of free time—I did that during my daily train rides—can get you! Keep practicing. Being ignorant is the first step towards becoming more knowledgeable.

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1. FranzFerdiNaN ◴[18 May 25 13:07 UTC] No.44021136[source]▶
Not buying at all that you learned 18000 words and 5000 kanji in ten minutes per day. Thats 60 hours a year for say five year, or 300 hours. Thats leaves you with about 70 words and/or kanji per hour or less than a minute per word/kanji. A rate which far surpasses native speakers.

Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.

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2. iamben ◴[18 May 25 13:18 UTC] No.44021217[source]▶
Sure, but I didn't read it as 10 minutes a day. The comment says ten minutes of free time. So could be 4 train rides, 10 mins after you finish your sandwich at lunch, 10 mins with your coffee in the morning, etc etc.
3. mdp2021 ◴[18 May 25 13:18 UTC] No.44021220[source]▶
> ten minutes per day

...Maybe the poster meant "«10 minutes» per ride"? («That's what 10 minutes of free time - I did that during my daily train rides»)

4. Alex-Programs ◴[18 May 25 13:26 UTC] No.44021274[source]▶
That isn't terribly far off. I used Anki throughout my A levels, spending about 250 hours on it in total according to its statistics, and had something like 10k cards that I reviewed 50k times.

Now, those cards weren't alone - they were reinforcing content that I'd learnt in lessons. But if they were doing it for 10 minutes a day a few times a day, it seems quite plausible to me.

5. Pooge ◴[18 May 25 13:28 UTC] No.44021288[source]▶
Whoops, sorry if that was confusing.

Actually, it took me 20 minutes of time per day to do my reviews + new words. I had, on average, 200 cards to go through daily (180 review + 20 new cards).[1] Going through 18'000 words took me around 5 years. 5×365×20=36'500

> A rate which far surpasses native speakers.

Are you comparing me to babies? It took me 2 weekends to learn all kana, but it takes years for a toddler to learn just hiragana. It's not a fair comparison.

> Anki works, it doesnt need these unrealistic takes.

I wonder why you think it's unrealistic. It's not like I'm a genius or anything.[2]

[1] Two cards is one word; one for English -> Japanese, one for Japanese -> English.

[2] Some teachers definitely thought I was a genius because of my memory, but it was all thanks to Anki. And proof is that I was absolutely bad at text comprehension. Anki doesn't make you practice that.

6. latentsea ◴[18 May 25 15:24 UTC] No.44022054[source]▶
I learned 17.5k words comprised of ~3k kanji in around 2 years at about an hour a day of review time. That's reviews + new cards, not including time immersing in order to find the daily quota of new vocab which itself was 2 to 3 hours of study.

So, by my calculations for just the Anki time alone it's about 17.5k words split across 730 hours, which comes out to about 23 words and hour or one word every 2.5 minutes.

I've seen a pretty wide variety of people do Anki, and I can say there's a distribution in length of time per card for basically the exact same types of cards among people. The slowest people average around 3x slower than the fastest.