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Spaced repetition: Never forget vocabulary ever again

Benny Lewis

On Monday (17th) Ill be releasing the Language Hacking Guide [Edit: it's available f or download now!] with a detailed account of the unconventional methods I use to keep my progress and positivity up when starting to learn a strange new language, speak it my f irst week, and the techniques I use to reach f luency quickly and get along with native speakers while doing so (either travelling or f rom home), all of which can be applied by anyone. The guide includes over 30,000 words and hours of f ascinating audio interviews with some of the Internets best known language learners, as well as worksheets, transcripts, tons of f ree resources, e-mail updates and more! But it will be growing and getting updated. Ive learned a lot in the last 7 years of trying to rapidly pick up new languages, but what has always helped more than anything has been openness to new techniques. In todays post I want to share with you a technique I started using just a f ew weeks ago that has totally transf ormed my vocabulary learning approach!

SRS: Spaced Repetition System

SRS is a presentation method that gives you the inf ormation before you would forget it and makes sure that it stays constantly f resh in your mind. So, you might see a word a f ew minutes af ter the f irst time, then a f ew days later, then a f ew weeks later etc. always at the time you need to see it most to make sure it is constantly f resh in your mind. Its a more complex version of the flashcard system where you have a word on one side of a card and its translation on the other. You look at the word, test yourself to see if you know it and turn over the card to see the translation. You couldnt get more low-tech than that even if you tried, but SRS uses 21st century technology to make this possible while considering the time dimension. So how would a guy like me who hates studying indoors, def initely dislikes f lashcards and already has a pretty good learning strategy, be interested in software f or improving recall of vocabulary?

Finding the time to study

Like many people, Im a busy guy! Im trying to work, write a book, dramatically improve my level of a language, have a social lif e and grocery shop/clean/sleep/eat/write blogs & emails/exercise etc. every day . But there are ways to make time get it back f rom the time spent waiting. Note: the next paragraphs are taken from the Language Hacking Guide You wait f or the bus/metro/train to arrive, you wait in it while going to work/school or home, you wait in the supermarket queue/line, you wait in a traf f ic jam in your car, you wait when ordering cof f ee in the morning, you wait f or your water to boil if you prepare it yourself , you wait f or your f riend to arrive, you wait at the doctors/dentists, you even wait f or a minute or two in lif ts, elevators, at traf f ic lights, when waiting f or something to load on your computer, f or someone to answer the door af ter you knock etc. In most of these situations you may be alone so if you cant talk to someone, what do you do? Stare into space? Read advertisements around you? Twiddle your thumbs? Press the pedestrian cross or lif t button again in f rustration that nothing has happened yet? These little segments of our day f ly by unutilised and actually add up to a huge amount of time wasted. You cant avoid these situations they are natural parts of your day. For most people, these little segments are annoyances why is the other person so late? Why does there have to be so many people ahead of me in the supermarket? Why did my computer have to crash to be rebooted now of all times? Waiting in f rustration is simply what we end up doing considering how much time per day we spend doing this, this is an unneeded source of stress! I actually dont mind when these occasions arise! Seriously if someone is arriving a little late, or if I just missed the bus and the next one wont come f or 15 minutes, or the Internet goes down and I cant work rather than cursing at my bad luck, and adding stress to my lif e by being angry during this time, I think to myself great! Another chance to study some vocabulary!!

Improving on the old-school method

For several years, in these situations I would take out my phrasebook, or pocket vocabulary book f or these moments, open it up to a random page and learn whatever I saw. Sometimes Id see a word I never did bef ore and sometimes Id see something I needed to review and had already long f orgotten and need to relearn rather than just remind myself . It did the job but to be honest, in retrospect it was inef f icient and sloppy. (Although, if you learn by listening, these moments are good times to take out your MP3 player and press play!) Randomly or even systematically going through vocabulary in order like this means that you

might not review the hardest words when you need to, or youll keep seeing the easy words too of ten, or youll f orget words because you didnt review them f or a very long time. SRS answers all of these issues by letting you decide when you should see a word again based on certain criteria (usually, how hard you f elt it was). So the easy words are pushed way of f into the f uture, the hard ones keep constantly reappearing until you are f inally happy with them, and the middle-dif f iculty ones will reappear just when you need them most, to ref resh your memory. Deciding when to study a word again when you see it in a printed list is too hard, but thats where technology comes in!

Anki
Anki is an application developed by Damien Elmes f or reviewing things you need to learn, using SRS. Not just vocabulary, but city/country capitals, medical terminology, a script f or a play etc. Anything you need to apply to memory really! Its a completely free download (or low-bandwidth website) and works on Windows, Mac, Linux and even on mobile phones! On the surf ace, the program does more or less what you would expect f rom a f lashcard it shows you a word with no translation (the word can be either in your native language or in the target language) and you can decide if you know what it means. Then press Answer and it will show it to you. If you thought it was super easy, press the button on the right (which includes a distant time f actor, depending on how you reacted to the word in previous attempts), if you had absolutely no idea press the button on the lef t (it will reappear very soon), and otherwise press one of the other buttons. I like having 4 levels to decide how easy I thought it was, and I use each one accordingly. If it sounds drastically simple, thats because it is! The most important part of the interf ace is actually pretty much just that (as you can see on the iPhone screenshot I took; similar on other systems) the impressive part of all of this is actually the algorithm working in the background to decide precisely when to show you the words. You dont really have to think about that aspect though, since the system covers it f or you. All you have to do is think about the word and then grade it on dif f iculty (hardest one if youve never seen it bef ore).

Using the program

There are broadly two ways to use this application and they depend mostly on the

resources available to you. Everyone can use it f or f ree on their computer, and you can simply decide to devote 30 minutes a day to using it and make sure to set aside that time every day. A huge amount of people have been recommending this program to me since I started this site, but I dismissed it as not f or me without really trying it, because of how I dislike f lashcards and generally dont like sitting down to study. If you have that f ocus, you will get a lot of use out of this program! Based on the time-wasting description above, you can guess where I do my studying! On the go! You can see in the posts main picture that I even swipe it out f or 2 minute waits bef ore crossing the road! I happen to have an iPhone (invested in it just bef ore my laptop broke and replacing it meant I suddenly couldnt af f ord to have bought an expensive Apple device, and still cant, but thats a sob story f or another day) which is jailbroken, but if you have an Android device or Nintendo DS you can also use Anki offline (no Internet access required). If you have any other portable device that can access the basic webpages (modern mobile phone, Palm device, Sony PSP etc.) either by wif i or 3G/Edge (mobile phone network), then you can use the Anki system that way too (on a very low bandwidth website). The way I did this was as f ollows: Install Anki on your computer, then download decks of prepared vocabulary sets to study in the language you are working on (on the Decks screen click Download there are lots already waiting f or f ree download!). You can also prepare the vocabulary yourself based on words you want to study, as explained in this video. If you dont have the right mobile device, then stick to this computer interf ace and use it to study the words whenever you have time. Its use is pretty self -explanatory, but here are some videos of how it works. If you can make it more portable, next thing to do is to create an account on Ankionline and then to synchronise your computers Anki with the online version (File > Sync). Then install Anki on your mobile device and synchronise with the same account (you only have to necessarily do this once, then just use your mobile device and ignore the computer version until you need more material to study). If you dont have the particular devices that allow f or of f line access, but can access the Internet on your mobile device, just go directly to the Ankionline page and use its low-bandwidth interf ace to learn f rom. The set-up takes a f ew minutes but then you just have to open the program and use it whenever you can! All the little minutes add up very quickly . Since I havent f ound some websites too helpf ul f or learning vocabulary, Ive done most of my studying over the last weeks in Berlins U-Bahn, on buses and in caf s/supermarkets etc. without ever carrying any books with me!

SRS must be used with other learning strategies

Despite how obviously enthusiastically Im sharing this system with you, it is important to be aware of the f act that it is just one way to acquire new vocabulary. The best way by f ar is to hear and apply it in context with native speakers. Even if you knew all the vocabulary in the world you still wouldnt be able to actually apply it in actual conversations if you didnt work on other skills important to language learning (which I discuss a lot in the Guide). Since you are usually hearing words in isolation (although its possible to include example sentences), it means you have no context and this is quite an artif icial way to learn words, as simple translations of something f rom your mother tongue, rather than understanding how to use the word itself . You cant learn any language just by learning translations. Someone using too much SRS would not necessarily be any f urther along compared to someone using other strategies. On top of this, just looking at the word is not enough and SRS can turn into nothing more than a f ancy version of rote learning by pure repetition if you dont think harder while using it. If you are exposed enough times you will be f orced to remember it, but what I pref er is to try to make an image association of the word and/or to think of an example to use it in and say that to myself , so that I use it in its right context. This way Im much more likely to remember it next time. SRS by itself is f ar f rom perf ect, but if you use it while thinking independently too, its potential is much greater. Im sure lots of you know the f eeling that you have learned a word, and you are sure of it, but you just cant say it. This may simply be because its been too long since you reviewed that word, and using SRS a f ew minutes a day will make sure that all words you use in the system will never be neglected if you use it right. Another thing to take into account f or learning words ef f iciently and avoiding f orgetting them is to avoiding learning the vocabulary only one way: foreign language to native language, f ocusing on recognition rather than production. This f ocus means a lot of people understand languages but are at a loss when the time comes to speak them. In this case, its important that you see words appear in SRS f or translation to the f oreign language too. When used on a computer, you can acquire single-word vocabulary very quickly (it works easily with the keyboard 1,2,3,4 & space keys f or quicker navigation than with the mouse) if you set aside 30 minutes a day to review words. And in its mobile f orm you can take advantage of time that you would otherwise waste, to improve your vocabulary! I interviewed the Anki developer Damien as part of the audio f or the Language Hacking Guide, to understand SRS better, and he is going to continue to develop dif f erent versions of this open-source sof tware f or people to enjoy. Give it a try!

If you have experience with Anki or other applications that apply SRS let us know! Has it helped, or do you pref er other systems f or vocabulary? People also use it f or learning scripts such as Kanji, and you can add audio and pictures if you f eel that would help! Wish me luck f or Monday! Ill have an extra bonus f or the f irst people to get a copy of the Guide. Ive been working f or about 6 weeks f ull time total to produce this and share it with the world! You can see that I havent been posting regularly to the blog because of that, so hopef ully that will change soon! Im looking f orward to releasing it into the wild *********************** Enter your email in the top right of the site to subscribe to the Language Hacking League email list f or way more tips sent directly to your inbox! If you enjoyed this post, you will love my TEDx talk! You can get much better details of how I recommend learning a language if you watch it here. This article was written by Benny Lewis Comments: If you liked this post or have anything to say, please leave a comment! I love reading them Just keep in mind that Ill delete any rude, trolling, spammy, irrelevant or way off-topic comments. If you have a general language learning question, please ask it in the forums. Otherwise please use the search tool on the right for any other question not related to this post. What is the best language learning course? Looking at the numbers (Very similar post) Introducing LWT: The free, open-source computer, iPad & mobile foreign language reading tool (Very similar post) The best online dictionary for learning any language: Google Image! (Quite a similar post) How your computer and the Internet can correct your grammar and spelling (for free) (Quite a similar post) Best free online dictionaries for translators and linguists (Quite a similar post) Why getting mistaken for a native speaker is much easier than you think (RANDOM Somewhat similar post)