You misunderstand how important memory is for learning. Ofsted, the UK school inspection board, actually defines learning itself as a "change in long-term memory". You can't learn anything without a change to your memory, they aren't separate things.
So, sure, you should try to apply your knowledge and layer concepts on top of each other. But if you do that AND also remember a lot more of such experiences you'll learn a lot faster.
I agree that memory is (very) important for understanding but not in the way it’s purported by the article. I don’t need to remember the exact way something was written by the author. In fact, I’d argue that by focusing on literal remembering you are understanding less than otherwise.
> I don’t need to remember the exact way something was written by the author.
I agree. Who ever said you should try to remember that? Remember the high-level important and transferable information, don't waste time trying to remember information that won't help you elsewhere.
Think about it in terms of how many days of knowledge each rep gets you.
The first rep gets you 1 extra day of knowledge.
The next rep gets you 2 extra days.
The next one gets you 5 extra days.
So each rep is getting you more and more knowledge even though the time required to execute the rep remains the same. This is exponential growth.
If you only have 1 card then for most days you won't have any reviews to do so it doesn't work. But if you add cards regularly then over the long-run every day you'll be getting more and more "extra days of knowledge" by doing the same amount of reviews each day.
My main point is that when people think about "learning", they think about learning new pieces of information. Reps only reinforce old pieces, they don't teach anything new. Retaining knowledge is part of learning, sure, and I saw your article about "learning is remembering" which was a good read. And I support your initiative, spaced repetition is an amazing tool. But I'd still say "learn exponentially" implies more than just retention. I'd personally love a system that lets me pick up exponentially more new knowledge per day, though I'm not sure if that's possible
If you've forgotten something then you don't have that knowledge anymore. So remembering things for longer means you are effectively gaining knowledge.
It's like someone giving you $10 and then trying to argue that they haven't actually given you $10 because just a few minutes ago you had a $10 bill in your pocket but you spent it on something else.
The effectiveness of spaced repetition scales exponentially and much faster than other learning methods. So use spaced repetition and you’ll learn a lot faster in the long-run.
I use it for both types yeah. I basically try not to ever forget anything I hear that’s useful.
On Save All you can create cards that are just statements, no need to turn them into Q&A. So if I hear an interesting fact I usually just dump it in quickly verbatim.
I’ve been seeing HN submissions of various quality to extoll the virtues of SRS in an attempt to sell Anki clones or Anki for X for almost 15 years now.
To be perfectly honest, I flagged it because of the knowledge gained graph. It's a wild extrapolation.
For context, I was a big fan of SRS and even contributed to Anki back in the day! I was really into foreign language learning, had majored in one language and was learning another language in a separate language family.
I built, ran and put my heart into brick and mortar language immersion school for years. Over time, I realized both from my learning experiences and those of my students that SRS fell far short of extensive reading.
It's tempting to break things down to "units of information", as you put it your assumptions document. SRS is great for decontextualized information (e.g., memorizing all the capital cities in the world), but that's not really how language works or how the brain works for most learning tasks. There are higher-level things your brain picks up, such as collocations, grammar and shared cultural beliefs.
Over the short term, SRS can be useful for building a scaffold to work from, but over the long term, Extensive Reading crushes it on pretty much every metric, including raw size of passive and active vocabulary.
Extensive reading sounds compelling. Do you have recommendations for services that offer such content? In my own language learning, I have found a few websites here and there (eg Hola Qué Pasa [1]), but nothing that has a large database with varying levels of competence.
I'd recommend avoiding "services" and going for books, starting with graded readers. There's a wealth of options for Spanish learners.
If you absolutely hate books and want an online resource, then I'd suggest https://www.lingq.com. It has a lot of free content and lets you import your own. Their tech/design chops are meh, but it's run by true language learning enthusiasts and the founder dogfooded it for at least half a dozen languages.
> Effectiveness of spaced repetition scales really fast / exponentially whereas other learning methods don't scale like that - do you agree?
Of course not. As I wrote, in the comment you’re replying to, I was a user and evangelist of SRS for years but eventually saw the reverse.
It’s a very useful tool for a certain narrow niche of memorization tasks. However, it’s an extremely inefficient learning method over the long run compared to reading and using information or skills in context.
Is Extensive Reading just that? Reading a lot in general? Or is it reading a lot on the specific subject that you want to learn, taking all possible branches?
https://saveall.ai/