An interesting post over on the All Japanese All The Time blog, revisiting Spaced Repetition Systems, or SRS.
Khatzumoto is making an observation about how certain knowledge makes its way into our long term memory that I would like to extend:
Why do you remember your own name? Because your mother sat you down one day and said it to you a thousand times until it had been indelibly etched into your little toddler memory? Because your name is special and powerful and beautiful and unique? No, and, no.
You have heard, read, written and said your name many times, not all at once but spread out over time. That’s the key to remembering something. Not cramming–not concentrating repetitions, but spacing them. Basically, if you hear or read something at the right spacing over time, you will remember it better and better. And the cool thing is that this spacing grows over a time. After a while, this space of time can grow so long as to go beyond the duration of your natural life. Put simply, even if you stopped writing, saying and hearing your own name today, and didn’t hear it again until the day before you died, you would probably still remember it.
Learning your own name, didn’t come through cramming that’s for sure. But the key reason that you remember your name was not the spacing or time, it was context.
Over and over again, you heard, said, wrote and read your name in different contexts. Over and over for 20 years. Whether the spacing was 1 second or 1 week didn’t matter - that the interaction occurred in so many different contexts, does. That it occurred over 20 years is simply the reality of interacting in so many different contexts, it takes time.
Take any word, kanji, idea, equation or whatever and do something with it every day for 20 years and you’ll know it like the back of your hand.
But look at the task of learning Japanese. You want to get to the same level in Japanese in 2-3 years, that you achieved in English in 20. This time constraint requires, not spacing, but prioritization. You still need to see and interact with all that material in different contexts - how do you find the time?
Take all the Japanese you could learn in 20 years. Take every word, every kanji, every colloquial expression and try to do something with each one, every day, for 2 years. It’s impossible.
You simply won’t be awake long enough over the next two years to find enough different ways to touch that much material every day.
So, unless you can figure out what doesn’t need to be reviewed on any given day, you’ll run out of time.
And so the spacing of an SRS is an attempt to find the minimum number of reviews necessary to get it in your head. But - and this is a heavy But - memorizing something is different from remembering something.
Recalling what you’ve memorized is a dictionary lookup in your head. Remembering something you’ve experienced can pull forth libraries of knowledge and intuition.
Remember that the ideal is how you learned your name: Varied contexts day after day. Note that I said, learned your name, not memorized.
If you think I’m just playing a semantic game, do a little experiment with me:
Tell me every word you know.
Just list them out.
Too hard? Well just give me your “active vocabulary”. Not every word you can read and hear but just the ones that you write and speak with.
It’s a monumental task. The only way you could complete even a portion of this task is to imagine something. Think of a pink elephant or a baseball game and think of words to describe what you see. The more you describe, the more words you find buried in your mind. You’ll have to search far and wide in your minds eye to scratch the surface of the words you know.
The point is that there are tens of thousands of words you can use effortlessly but you can’t recall until you actually need them! They are not associated with definitions but with context.
And some of those words went into your head on the first shot! - no time, no spacing, but perfect recall.
So what does this mean for an SRS? It’s not about memory - that comes for free with context. It’s not about time - seeing things in different contexts always takes time.
An SRS is all about prioritization. And learning language is all about context. Put the two together and you can prioritize what to look for, in context.
Whether you review the same item on day 1,3,7,10,14 and 30 or you review it everyday in between doesn’t matter. You’ll memorize it either way. Whether or not you learn it, depends on how varied the context.
And this is why I harp on exploration, play, or whatever you want to call it. There are words like わたし or 今日 that are easy to find in context - in fact they’re impossible to avoid. But for the wide swath of slightly less common words, how do you experience them in enough different contexts without spending 20 years?
One way, is with an SRS.
Put the same words, kanji and grammar from different contexts in an SRS, it will help you prioritize what to look for in context based on what interests you.
Commenter sarius24 responded to the AJATT post:
Somtimes I just want to get on top of a soap box and tell people in my school in Québec on how they should be using an SRS to improve their french. Basically most kids suck at it, especially in english schools.
There are a few billion people on this planet who have mastered their respective languages without ever hearing of anything even remotely related to an SRS.
They didn’t need to collect sentences because they simply lived life while using their language as best they could. In time they mastered it.
They didn’t need to look for context because, in life, it comes to you.
But you and I - we don’t want to spend 10, 15, and 20 years mastering a language. And the time constraints that we apply require prioritization.
So what is an SRS, really? Just a tool for prioritization. You still need to stop and smell the roses - think of an SRS as pointing out the especially fragrant ones.
