Comments on: Spaced Repetition Goes Mainstream?

By: YesforSRS

YesforSRS — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 08:07:07 +0000

Best way to motivate yourself to use a SRS:

Use a SRS for a few months. Pay attention to how the things you put in become very familiar and hard to forget.

Quit using your SRS, but keep studying. Notice after awhile that things have become hard to remember and that the SRS is a great tool.

Go back to your SRS. Learn to use it in moderation/style that is adaptable to you. Love your SRS.

By: Xamuel

Xamuel — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 04:15:47 +0000

I’ve been promoting Anki to all my calculus students for about a year now 🙂

By: All Japanese All The Time Dot Com: How to learn Japanese. On your own, having fun and to fluency. » Other People’s Perceptiveness (OPP): What It Takes To Be Great

Sun, 05 Oct 2008 04:01:09 +0000

[…] reader (Gav) has sent me a link. You know, one of those external links that comes up every once in a while, and just so resonates with the kind of things you read here, that it simply has to be […]

By: Dan R

Dan R — Fri, 23 May 2008 22:10:57 +0000

What got me wired on the SRS thing, besides the fact that I read all about the abysmal failure of the learning industry to do anything with it all the time (since that’s my profession), is a neat little app in facebook called Kanjibox.

It has some drilling algorithms in (best described as “SRS-y”) but its quiz function, with repeated testing and scoring is a great motivator as you get to see how you are doing against others.

If Anki, which is great on usability, could be mashed up with some kind of social sites so you could track progress against other people in some meaningful way, that would kick ass, and give a real external motivation that I suspect would help some of the correspondents here.

By: khatzumoto

khatzumoto — Mon, 12 May 2008 03:23:52 +0000

@Alec
@vgambit
You guys are my heroes…Way to tough it out! (LoL).

By: khatzumoto

khatzumoto — Mon, 12 May 2008 03:09:45 +0000

@Marilyn
Don’t mean to be mean to Pimsleur but, I personally feel that there’s too much English and it’s not natural enough — too stilted. And, it plays to the whole “buy language skills in a box” desire without fulfilling it. Just what Ramses said.

I play around a little bit with language tapes for Mandarin and Japanese speakers to learn Cantonese, buuuut…the bulk of my listening (and skill) has come from watching Cantonese things by and for Cantonese speakers. That’s what this is all about: “keeping it real”. It’s real Japanese that you need to be able to understand and real Japanese speakers talking at real speed…with whom you need to be able to communicate.

So…I’d say it’s much more worth it to watch a drama or the news and then rip the audio.

But that’s only my opinion and maybe other people have made good progress with tapes like that; it’s just that I personally didn’t use them for Japanese. I find them a little too dry, too boring.

Funnily enough I was having a conversation with this Japanese guy, and I explained the method I used, and he said: “That’s genius…You know why that works? Because the things you watched and listened to had EMOTION”. I thought that was an interesting (and very accurate) insight on his part.

Anyway…whatever. Do what’s fun.

By: Alec

Alec — Sun, 11 May 2008 08:02:10 +0000

I recently thought about switching to the more user-friendly Anki but decided to stick with Supermemo. It may not be pretty but it does whatever I want it to do and more. Someone said they had problems putting audio in the question; I’ve just done it with just a little bit of fiddling around. Long live Supermemo! Having said that, I really do hope they get someone on board to make the program less buggy!

@Daniel
It might be hard to do SRS everyday, but definitely not impossible. I’ve been running Supermemo everyday for about 3/4 years now and have plugged in everything from Japanese to Physics to Maths to English. Yes, there have been days I’ve missed or rushed through, but doing it properly 20 times a month is better than not at all!

By: vgambit

vgambit — Sun, 11 May 2008 05:43:10 +0000

After reading this article, I think I’m gonna start using SuperMemo instead of Mnemosyne or Reviewing the Kanji.

I mean, Piotr Wozniak lives his life by SuperMemo (literally). He’s also the creator of the algorithm and the lead programmer for the project (which he has been working on since before I was born).

To be honest, I wasn’t really all that confident about SRS (as many times as I have attempted to use it in Mnemosyne) until I read this article and tried out SuperMemo. After doing the demonstration cards, I’m hooked.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Sun, 11 May 2008 05:24:29 +0000

As an American, when I hear ‘spectacles,’ I think of those glasses attached to a thin rod, where the person uses the rod to hold them in front of their face when they want to read something.

I also find that human nature makes it hard to successfully employ an SRS. Just like we say “I am going to exercise every day” or “I am not going to drink any Pepsi today”, there are always obstacles and without an iron will, practicing with an SRS everyday is VERY difficult.

By: Ramses

Ramses — Sat, 10 May 2008 19:33:50 +0000

Man, I hate those typos. ‘Now’ must be ‘not’ and ‘sound’ ‘sounds’, ‘if’ ‘is’ etc. etc. ;).

By: Ramses

Ramses — Sat, 10 May 2008 18:11:42 +0000

Try analyzing the sounds. I find a lot of people now analyzing the sound, and then they wonder how come they sound so American/Dutch/etc./etc. Also, input if very important to get a good accent, because eventually you begin imitating the speech of natives.

By: Marilyn

Marilyn — Fri, 09 May 2008 21:23:38 +0000

^Yeah, thanks for your comments, guys. I’m just going to complete Pimsleur while I’m doing Heisig’s “Remembering the Kanji”, since it’s decent enough. Plus, I still am shaky about pronouncing Japanese words/sentences with a Japanese accent…I still sound so American. =P

By: きのこ

きのこ — Fri, 09 May 2008 09:20:52 +0000

Pimsleur drills you repetitively on very basic sentences like “どこに行きますか?” so it’s good for polishing your pronunciation if you still have some lingering accent trouble. I don’t recommend it as the sole method of learning Japanese (heaven forbid) but it can be a good supplement. The woman on Pimsleur II doesn’t sound Japanese, though. Her “すみません” is all wrong.

By: captal

captal — Fri, 09 May 2008 03:56:17 +0000

Great idea Rob! I’m going to steal that idea, thanks!

I also like to see how many stars I’ve gotten for stories I’ve shared 😀

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 08 May 2008 18:31:40 +0000

This may seem silly, but one thing I did when I was plowing through RTK was on the RTK website you can view other members and their progress as well. So I would just pick another member at random that was a little bit ahead of me in terms of progress and then imagine I was in a race against them. I would imagine that I hated them and I had to beat them no matter what. Silly yes, but it was fun and it helped to push me to get done faster.

By: Nivaldo

Nivaldo — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:38:18 +0000

I understand what you’re feeling and I think everyone who went through RTK understand too. It’s not easy to just go through 20xx kanji. I would recommend reading the article “Calm down, hurry up” and “Strategies for overcoming burnouts”(I think it’s that, don’t remember well). But yeah, the strategy I used was just to focus on each kanji individually. This way I managed to “calm down my spirit”(sounds a little bit religious 🙂 ).Maybe I’m just repeating what Anokさん said. Anyway, If you’re enjoying learning kanji, good, if not, bring fun to it so as to enjoy it. 🙂

By: captal

captal — Thu, 08 May 2008 12:08:48 +0000

ok ok, I’m remembering the dream- which currently is to be better at kanji than natives… which reminds me, I need to be off doing kanji… but the problem is that kanji can be a chore!!! Luckily I find a lot of it quite fascinating, but a lot of the learning comes down to- ok, put stuff in Anki, think of clever/gross/funny story, or steal one from RTK, and if all else fails, think of a clever rhyme or something. But coming up with clever stories even gets boring after a while.

I know I can push through it- I’m at 1100 right now- I just need to better allocate my time (this bloody MBA keeps getting in the way). Sheesh, if I only do 20 a day that’s only 47 more days, and I know I can do more than that (I’m no Wan though- if I do 50 in a day I get warm, fuzzy feelings.) がんばる！

By: Ramses

Ramses — Thu, 08 May 2008 10:51:27 +0000

@Marilyn:
I don’t know what Khatz things, but so far I know Pimsleur is onoy good for pronounciation. It doesn’t teach you much vocabulary nor it has much advanced grammar in the sentences. Also, there’s waaaay too much English in it, and English is bad when you want to learn another language, besides English 🙂 (ok, with the sentences there’s English aswell (or your native language), but it has a clear reason that it’s there, with Pimsleur there’s al ot of unnecessary English)..

By: Marilyn

Marilyn — Thu, 08 May 2008 05:13:45 +0000

Khatz-
With all the talk there is about SRS, I’ve tried them (such as Anki for sentences and the spaced repitition on the Remembering the Kanji website), and I’m currently going through Pimsleur’s Japanese I, which has an SRS approach. Of course, no Japanese audio listening is a waste, but I was kind of wondering: what do *you* think about Pimsleur and its potential effectiveness in the long-run, especially opposed to alternative speaking/listening programs for Japanese?
~Marilyn

By: Anok

Anok — Thu, 08 May 2008 02:47:23 +0000

Like Khatz says, you just gotta enjoy the journey and stop focusing on getting “there”. Remember the dream and measure yourself by what you DO know not what you don’t. You likely know a lot more now than you did a month ago. Try to always do something fun – Japanese shouldn’t be a chore. If it is, why are you even bothering to learn it? You should be enjoying yourself as much as possible. Crush your hindering thoughts and conquer your motivation.