I’m curious to understand why. If you’ve heard of or tried spaced repetition but decided not to use it, what led you to that decision?
Was it too time-consuming, did it not fit your learning style, or was there some other factor at play? I’m hoping to go beyond the simple "I didn't know about it" or "it doesn't work for me" answers to better understand the practical barriers and perceptions.
[0]: https://consensus.app/results/?q=Is%20spaced%20repetition%20an%20effective%20way%20to%20learn%20and%20retain%20information%3F%20&pro=on
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13151790
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35511357
1. Many people use SRS without realizing it. Many language learning apps just build the principles of spaced repetition into the software without explicitly mentioning it. As such, it's worth remembering that the spacing effect is a scientific phenomenon, while spaced repetition is the implementation of tools to apply it, typically via spaced repetition software (SRS.)
The concept of the spacing effect seems pretty straightforward and easy to understand, but for whatever reason there is a gap between that and the "optimal" method implemented by SRS apps.
2. The software tends to be ugly and/or too complicated to use. I like Anki and appreciate the developer making it so accessible, but let's be honest: it looks like a piece of software from 1995. This scares away a lot of people that would otherwise be interested (I have personal experience with this, unfortunately.)
3. The recurring meme that "SRS is only for memorization, and I don't need to memorize things / memorization is an outdated learning method." This has been argued against (and debunked, IMO) multiple times, but the meme persists.
I suppose this is a failure of those marketing SRS to effectively teach interested parties more about memorization and why it's so critical for learning, because every time a topic comes up about Anki/SRS, this same debate appears, every time.
Plus, memorization is still hard. You have to really focus on internalizing the cards as they show up, and not just skimming them. It's work.
If you have any cards you forgot, they will be reset on their own by the algorithm. Like if you get a new card today and go on vacation for two weeks, then that card will be 2 weeks overdue. Fine, you review it, get it wrong, study it a couple more times and then it's back on track for the next day. That's exactly how the algorithm is intended to work.
Once the backlog is cleared or at a reasonable level I restore the settings for new cards.
And IRL you rarely need to bluntly memorize stuff, even in foreign languages.
However, the top comment from a recent article here [0] put it into perspective. For a lot of people, regularly being reminded of the fundamentals helps them overcome whatever prevents them from grokking something from the outset. For really difficult concepts (something that varies for everyone), I believe that regular memorization and repetition can help you learn over time.
Here's an article by the person who discovered SR: https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulatin...
To do it effectively, you'd have to have learned everything in advance and processed the knowledge in a format suited to SR. The processing itself makes it ineffective. For many things, 30% retention is good enough. It would cost more to read a book deeply with SR than to read several books shallowly without it.
If only there was a fix for that? Well, spaced repetition was designed to work in tandem with incremental reading. Which is you jump around topics related to your topic and extract the most relevant details.
People seem to have adopted only half of the pair, which is why it feels so inefficient. Supermemo was actually very efficient with this... except that it's reliant on Internet Explorer and now breaks on all modern OSes and doesn't even run on Mac. For some reason, people were able to rewrite SR into Anki, but not the incremental reading part.
However, AI seems to be taking on this role quite well. It's capable of not only incremental reading, but also processing the data into spaced repetition format. But I'll just wait for someone to build this.
Studying the psychology of learning, I happened upon the fact this is a real "Learning Loop" with another masters student who explained their problems studying effectively to me.
Basically, when you need to study for something, you often have loads of content. But you want to be able to manageablly learn it - and, in order throughout the learning process to be most effective - do so with spaced repetition/active recall. That requires the incremental reading or context you mention!
I built a way of capturing this reading-flashcards-reading-flashcards mangeable l op into a tool. Instead of just generating flashcards from PDFs and showing them one at a time, it first groups the reading (in this case, for a lecture, by slides covering each topic), and it shows you say the 7 relevant slides for that top, then it moves on to ask you 2-3 flashcard questions for each of those relevant slides (so lets say 18 questions). Crucially, it will keep track of you mistakes and progress on those chunks of flashcards with SRS later and the next day bring up those you forgot. As a learner you can then rotate back into studying via reading, addressing another incremental chunk.
It's so much better than trying to consume a whole lecture or chapter or large concept en masse! By actually contextualising and always feeling like the next bit is do-able, you have enough momentum to study well but also feel progress. This is why I like incorporating spaced repition, but contextually. For other psychology reasons related to study help in exam conditions, it also offers a free recall which tests at the harder end, beyond what most apps do, and does useful things with the results later on.
I do host that learning mode - "Learning Loop Mastery" - on my site, Revision.ai - which can turn lectures into those incremental learning loops via flashcards/reading sections if you want to try it. As of tomorrow it will be widely available (again).
On not forgetting, the clear group here are students who will be tested. I'm expecting large changes in education in the next 10 years away from testing and more toward experiential learning with clearly defined outcomes, which are then graded/measured.
So while I use SR to learn and test myself, I'm trying to think through the use cases for a different future that isn't 100% likely to materialize.
I think there's a credibility/trust issue, though, with taking other people's card decks and using them, assuming the info is accurate.
