What is a SRS? It is a spaced repetition system and it is one reason why I will someday be fluent in Chinese. I’ve been meaning to write a little something about it but it wasn’t until I discovered this fascinating article from Wired magazine about the man who first programmed this memorization tool, Piotr Wozniak, that I actually put in the time to do so. The article is really worth a read for anyone interested in language or memory. Go ahead and read it right now.
Some people say memorization isn’t that important anymore, I’ve had college professors tell me that. These professors have had many years of students come through their classrooms who just crammed narrow facts into their brains for exams only to forget them after a week, understandably the professors wanted to make sure we didn’t forget the big ideas, methods of argument, large trends, etc. This, they assured us, is the real value of a college education. If you forget a date you can always look it up but the ability to structure an argument, deduce an overarching theme, write an essay or form an experiment – that’s the important stuff. Yes, but in the real world memorization is still undeniably important. Nowhere has this been more apparent and more frustrating to me than in learning languages. If it was easy we’d all be picking up Italian by reading La Divina Comedia and no one would care about having a national language.
Anyway you look at it language is a massive amount of memorization. And it’s a good thing that we go the lengths to memorize tens of thousands of words and all the other stuff that comes with learning a language. Like learning the multiplication tables, having a crutch like a calculator or a dictionary will not save you, you still have to go through the difficult and time consuming work of memorization. The old method of writing out flashcards and studying them simply doesn’t work. Sure cramming flashcards the night before a test can help you do well the next day, but unless you do that everyday you’re going to forget the information. When learning a language you cannot study the more than 15,000 words you need to know to become fluent everyday. The problem of not knowing what you should be studying when you should be studying it is what screws us over. A SRS uses computers to tell us what to study when we need to study it, following well know facts on the human brain’s retention of information. It’s a tool you want to have on your side.
Because our ability to recall a piece of information we have learned is destined to decline over time we need to be reminded of the information to fully memorize it, not everyday after we learn it, but spaced out by intervals that utilize our time in the most efficient way possible so as to achieve the greatest rewards. Spaced repetition does this. This handy chart explains the SRS method of memorization for one piece of information over 60 days:
Living where the language you are learning is used is kind of like the SRS method. If you buy a cup of coffee everyday in Italian pretty soon you will have that Italian language knowledge for that occasion down pat. However living in a foreign country will not necessarily improve you language skills in all the ways it should be improving. Paul Child, the ever-loving husband of Julia Child, brings up a common language learning problem in Mrs. Child’s memoir:
“It’s easy to get the feeling that you know the language just because when you order a beer they don’t bring you oysters.”
This has been a constant issue with me while learning Chinese. Sure, if I was ordering a beer over the phone the person listening might mistake me for a native Chinese speaker, but that’s not fluency – not even close. The fact is that living in China, or any language immersion environment, is not the be all end all for language learning. If that was so then why can people live in a country for double-digit years and never learn the language? Learning Chinese takes a lot of work, wherever you are learning it. For me I started with traditional classes, which many question the use of though I have always found helpful to a degree, and now I’m studying completely on my own. Without an SRS (I use Anki, which is great for Macs) this would be very difficult and slow.
These days I live in Shanghai and work in an office almost entirely staffed by Chinese people and this environment provides me with many chances to practice all the aspects of Chinese (listening, speaking, reading, writing). Nevertheless, I’d probably be losing as much of my Chinese ability as I was gaining if I didn’t supplement my education by studying with Anki and other sources (reading Chinese books, watching Chinese movies, HSK test prep books, writing, etc.) Since I do all my office work on a computer using Anki everyday is relatively easy and there’s really no reason that anyone who routinely uses a computer couldn’t also use it to memorize almost anything. Whatever I decide to learn next, whether it’s law or the the Latin names of orchid species, I now have a tool that can make that possible. I gotta tell ya it’s comforting having a piece of software that can grant you knowledge like this.
Granted it’s not a dream come true, it still takes a fair amount of heavy and consistent effort to achieve results. This is a problem for any human being due to our lazy procrastinating nature. I try and make it enjoyable by using Anki in small chunks throughout the day. I usually do 3 ten minute sessions a day along with one big 20 minute session. If I forget a day I don’t sweat it and if I have the energy to power on for an hour of study I do that. Everyone uses a SRS differently and that’s as it should be. My secret is to set a tiny goal when I sit down to study my Anki, usually just a period of study time, and complete that goal without getting distracted. You do want to try and avoid SRS burnout. Adding Chinese words and sentences to my deck of things to study is now part of my learning method, and besides it’s always going to be easier to add flashcards than to actually study them.
I wrote this post because I want to spread the word. Like a Christian missionary in a foreign land I am following a system that has worked for me and I tell you because I think it will work for you too. Unlike a Christian missionary I love to worship false idols and engage in homosexual love, but that’s neither here nor there. In an odd way language learning is like religion, they’re both deeply individual activities (ehhh…). What works for me may not work for you, though in my experience SRS systems are one of the most universal methods for learning languages. We all forget things, right?
I first heard about using an SRS to learn a language from the inspiring language blog: All Japanese All the Time. Though if you look you’ll find people singing its praises all over the internet. Still, I hadn’t heard of it until this year and I’m not alone. Out of the 50 or so American teachers I worked with last year (all college graduates) none of those I talked to had heard of it before. I just wish I had use it during college, would have made life easier. Three blogs I’ve found that talk about using a SRS to learn Chinese, which may interest you, are: Sinosplice, Global Maverick, and Doubting to Shuo (who wrote a nice little review of Anki). These blogs (even the one about Japanese) are recommended for anyone wishing to read about learning Chinese.
As a final note I want to again heartily recommend Anki to anyone learning Chinese, Japanese, or….. anything! It’s pretty, works well, is entirely free, and has such a popular group of followers that it is constantly improving. Anki’s website has helpful demonstration videos as well that make getting started a cinch. There are other SRS programs out there but I’ve never tried them. Use the internet and find them if you’re interested, I’m happy with Anki so I don’t think I’ll bother. Now, I think I should go and do another Anki session. Peace.
