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.
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?
AlchemistCamp|3 years ago
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.
rsanek|3 years ago
[1] https://holaquepasa.com/
p-christ|3 years ago
Effectiveness of spaced repetition scales really fast / exponentially whereas other learning methods don't scale like that - do you agree?
If so then over the long-run spaced repetition is always going to be extremely efficient relative to other learning methods.
copperx|3 years ago