Whether to Use Anki or SuperMemo

I'm really skeptical of these sorts of memorization systems, not because I think they don't work (I think they do), but because I see it as a brain "hack" that goes against the grain.

What do I mean by this? I think of our memories as a kind of most-frequently-used (MFU) cache. We remember best when we use the information all the time. So when we use this sort of spaced repetition we're trying to artificially "warm up" the cache in our brains. We're not trusting our brains to remember the things that are most important in our lives.

If you're trying to learn a language, you should learn the way children learn their first language: by speaking. Talk to people in that language constantly. If you don't know anyone who speaks the language, what are you learning it for? If you really need to learn the language (for work?) then find somebody who speaks it and arrange to meet them for coffee on a regular basis.

If you're trying to memorize something else, such as theorems in math or standard library functions in a programming language, I'd advise against it. Learn the theorems by applying them and trying to prove stuff. Learn the library functions by doing actual programming.

In the long run, if your knowledge is situated within a context and connected to other things you know (because you learned by doing) then I believe you'll understand it much better. Memorizing by rote, out of context, will help you to recall facts which often don't have any meaning to you.

The choice for me was quite simple, paying once for the great Anki app, or monthly subscriptions for SuperMemo?

Since I abhor the subscription trend it made picking easy.

I'm a bit surprised these systems still pay off for people. How many contexts require learning large bodies of unrelated facts, these days? Everything's just a google away. Even in the past, the only context where I would have used a system like this is language acquisition, and it's pretty clear that machine translation is going to surpass me very soon, if it hasn't already.

For me, most interesting work involves conceptually coherent bodies of knowledge. Learn the conceptual framework, and you'll remember the details by partial reconstruction as you need them. At least, that's how it usually works for me.

Have you ever learned a language in your 20s? If so, how good are you? How long did it take you?

I personally have tried to learn many languages in my 20s. I’ve became good at figuring out what are the shortcuts to kickstart learning. The best one I found is to learn as many words as possible + simple grammar + useful verbs. If you have the time learn hundreds per day with memory tricks. Once you know enough start trying to have conversations. Grammar is not really important in the beginning but you need to learn conjugations (if there are any) at some point early.

This is a much better approach vs trying to have convos when you know peanuts. If you’re planning to spend some weeks in a foreign country this is what I would advise to you. You are going to learn very little if you get there without having done that

> If you're trying to learn a language, you should learn the way children learn their first language: by speaking. Talk to people in that language constantly.

I agree that this is ideal, but it's also a huge synchronous time sink for the parties involved. When you're learning with flash cards, you can do it on your own time, in a more directed manner with trackable, linear improvement. In less structured environments, you don't get the breadth of vocabulary. In the beginning, you also end up asking "what does _ mean?" over and over again, or scrambling to write it down and look it up later, all while failing to grok the conversation happening around it.

Vocabulary alone is a huge barrier to entry in a language and, in my opinion, worth attempting to memorize in order to tackle a language.