3.7 KiB
% SRS - So you can be a cyborg, too!
Why I love my SRS
Say, you want to learn something. Something big, like, Japanese or Chinese. Japanese uses 4 different writing system, but the one that stands out are the 漢 字, i.e. the thousands of funny symbols. To be literate in Japanese, you need to now about 3000 of those. How would you learn something that huge?
Memory
To learn anything, you need three things. First, the information must be sticky. That means it must be represented in a form your brain can actually remember. What that means is: Ever tried remembering a long number? Like, 20 digits long? Impossible, unless you break it down. But ever remembered the whole plot, including all scenes, of a great movie? Totally easy. Your brain can remember pictures and narratives (related things, both by time and cause) easily, but abstract information is very hard. So you need to transform the 漢字 , or whatever your learning, into pictures and stories, aka mnemonics. Fortunately, they were designed with that in mind, so that's very simple.
Reviews
Second, you need to review regularly. Your memory is leaky and needs constant reinforcement. Fortunately, every time the memory is refreshed, it will stick around a lot longer - roughly 2-3 times as long if you review just on the brink of forgetting. If you know some math, you'll recognise this as an exponential progression. What does that mean? You only need to review about 7-8 times and the memory will stay for decades! So, that's manageable. Unfortunately, the brain is a little faulty, so you will forget a few things anyway. The good thing is, though, that with very little effort, you can already reach a retention rate of 90-95%, so on average you only need around 10 reviews per fact to make sure you'll remember it for a very long time.
That sounds pretty nice already, but still, 3000 漢字? Isn't that a lot of work? No. That's 3000 facts, meaning about 30,000 reviews. A review takes 10 seconds, at most. On average, it will take only about 5, but let's assume 10. Worst case scenario, you know. In total, that's only about 3.5 days of work. If it were not spaced out so much, you could finish it in a week. Sweet!
Have a look at those graphs.
That's your work over 10 months. The first shows how much reviews you will be doing per month in total. Yellow is the amount of new (or unseen) facts, red are reviews (or reps) of old facts. Below that is the amount of reviews per day for each month. As you can see, the daily workload is at most 20 minutes and goes does down rapidly. After 5 months, you know all 漢字 and will only be refreshing. And that's only for a moderate amount of work with 20 new facts per day. You can easily do 50, or even 100 if you are determined. Pretty good, right?
Redundancy
Unfortunately, that's quite enough. To remember something well, you need a third thing: redundancy. Your brain is associative. The more connection a particular memory has, the stronger it is, no matter where the connection comes from. Fortunately, we can fix this problem rather easily: just add redundant information. If you add a specific piece of information, say a new word, only once to your deck, you will have a hard time learning it. Add it in 3 to 5 different sentences, and suddenly it will be trivial.
A nice side effect is that added redundancy makes the individual cards easier, making reviews faster. The additional workload is only about 2, maybe 3 times. Still, seeing how ridiculously low it already is, this doesn't really matter at all.