Spaced Repetition
This is probably the most important piece of information that I can impart to you.
Spaced repetition completely changed my world. When I was lost on the streets of Tokyo, Spaced Repetition rescued me. It gave me food when I was hungry, water when I was thirsty, and medicine when I was sick. It helped me discover what could potentially be a new treatment for colon cancer. It has saved hundreds, if not thousands of trees without a single protest march. It has let me meet countless cute girls both in and out of bars.
Okay, I’m exaggerating a little bit. I have an exact count of how many girls it helped me meet.
What Is It?
Put simply, Spaced Repetition is a system for putting information into long-term memory as efficiently as possible. It involves learning something, and then reviewing it, and then reviewing it again later, and then reviewing it again even later.
The trick is in the increasingly long intervals between the reviews, which reflects how information is stored and reinforced in your memory. Ideally, the intervals should be calibrated so that you review an item just before you would have forgotten it, thus achieving maximum time efficiency with your reviews.
Simple right? Simple but extremely powerful, and set up correctly you can be confident of never forgetting things that you learn this way.
Neato, But How Can I Apply It To Japanese?
If you’re like me, in the process of learning Japanese you have probably created flashcards at some point. Maybe even a lot of flashcards, bags and boxes full. If you’re tech savvy/environmentally conscious/living in a small apartment, you might be using a computerized flashcard program instead. You also probably review those flashcards by taking a deck and reviewing it from top to bottom, discarding cards you get correct and reinserting those you miss back into the deck to be reviewed again. After you’re done, you put the cards away and probably never look at them again (or at least not once you pass the exam, amirite?). Flashcards are a great way to learn material, but reviewing them in the traditional way makes it impossible to use them to go back and cover old material – there are simply too many cards to manage.
Enter Sebastian Leitner. This guy, when he wasn’t fighting the Nazi takeover of Austria or languishing in a Soviet prison cell, thought a lot about spaced repetition and flashcards. He developed a system of boxes to put the flashcards in depending on how well he knew them.
Box 1 contains new or frequently forgotten cards, and later boxes contain progressively better-learned cards. Box 1 is reviewed daily, Box 2 every 3 days, Box 3 every 5 days, etc. When a card is reviewed successfully, it is “promoted” to the next box; on failure, it is demoted all the way back to Box 1. The end result is a very substantial increase in memory retention, as well as a substantial reduction in number of flashcards, number of boxes, and number of mice living in nests made from old neglected boxes.
Sounds Awesome, Where Do I Sign Up?
Well, you could make your own set of Leitner boxes and start sorting your flashcards into them. Or, you could take advantage of all the cool technological advances we as a society have enjoyed since the fall of Nazi Germany and have a computer program do it all for you!
I personally use Anki for all of my flashcard and spaced repetition needs. Anki is free, current and actively maintained by a very talented developer, and through plugins has great features specific for Japanese learning. There are also a growing number of pre-made Anki decks available on the internet for various Japanese learning resources. Anki even allows you to synchronize your personal decks and review schedules to a centralized server, allowing you to catch up on your reviews from anywhere you can access the internet.
If for whatever reason Anki doesn’t float your boat, Mnemosyne is another good option I have used in the past.
There are many other options available, but one that I would urge caution on is SuperMemo. SuperMemo predates most spaced repetition programs out there, and has a very broad feature set for studying many different kinds of material. In my experience, however, it is difficult to learn to use, frequently buggy, and system resource heavy, not to mention the fact that it is commercial software. What you gain in learning efficiency you may easily lose in simple usage efficiency. As other (free) programs are quickly catching up (or may have already caught up) to SuperMemo’s algorithms and features, I see no reason to go through the long process of making it work and learning to use it properly.
勉強中 