Memory Researcher Says Anki Won't Make You Fluent

i don't think there's any research that actually says that it would acquire those words faster long term i guess like my point is more like the benefit of anki is more hey guys welcome back to the kodakera podcast yeah so this week on the podcast we talked to justin sun who's a medical expert and he makes videos about his thoughts on most efficient study methods and has a lot of videos analyzing the ineffectiveness of anki and the limits of active recall so we get into a pretty interesting debate on the podcast where i argue that anki is useful for language learning but you guys can check it out you know what is effective though smashing the like button so before we even get into that you know what to do guys yeah and as always make sure to be following us on twitter let's go yeah justin thanks for coming on the podcast but can you give us a quick background of who you are and we're at today cool uh so yeah my name is justin sung i used to be a medical doctor but now for the last three years i've been working in education full time so i'm a learning coach i help people to learn more efficiently across a wide range of subjects and different professions so yeah and i've got a youtube channel as well where i pretty much talk about that type of stuff right yeah and i i came across your channel actually because like um some of our our listeners actually recommended um us to check out this one video that you did where you talked about um the the limits of like active recall and space repetition because our podcast is about language learning and so a big part of how everybody learns languages from people we talk to is using anki and space repetition yeah but like what what are your thoughts if you could briefly like talk about about on key and space repetitions i think that i think one of the common things that people need to really wrap their heads around is that learning is not like a simple thing it's not like there's a single solution that achieves a like a single you know universal outcome it's not like if you do spaced repetitions through you know like whatever app that you're using it's not gonna then just directly translate to mastery of a language because mastery of a language is actually a really complex thing you need to know vocabulary but you also need to know grammar and syntax and logic and you need to develop procedural fluency you need to be able to recall it quickly you need to be able to use that knowledge in different contexts and different types of environments and what what something like anki does with space repetition frameworks is that it is allowing you to build some level of retention of information through purely just through uh what's called preventing retrieval failure which is that if you don't retrieve something often enough your knowledge will decay and knowledge will decay no matter what and the idea is that if you just continue to space it and there's a lot of research on the timing of the spacing and you know what works better and what you know doesn't uh but if you just continue to space it and you continue to repeat it it will deepen this neural groove that allows the information to be stored there but the way that it stores the information is first of all very isolated and secondly it's very like brute force so there's a lot of things in life that we learn that we don't actually need to do that level of heavy spacing for and we can still learn it very easily like most people aren't doing anki for the first language that they learn to speak you know unless you grew up in like some cave by like wolves and you like learn english as your first language when you're like 11 when you're discovered by civilization you know like people are not learning languages that way a lot of people are not learning you know other things in their life like hobbies or anything else where they may actually develop a really deep level of you know knowledge about it like some people you know if they if you get someone's favorite movie or like a favorite book series there are some people that will know like which chapter of which book a certain event happened in and they can take two characters from two book series and they can create like an entire scenario of exactly how they would interact if those two characters met that's like the level of depth that they have on their knowledge and they're not going through reading a book and they're making some anki cards and before bit like you know smashing through like 200 200 cards like the human brain does not need that heavy level of repetition to learn information and so what the research shows is that anki is good and space repetition is good for creating especially short-term retrieval for isolated facts but when we start looking at high volumes of flash cards lots of stuff to learn over a long period of time and then being able to actually use that that um that information in a meaningful way it's it really starts to fall apart and we start seeing that really the main benefits are not coming from that for example you could do like a million flash cards but then afterwards if you have a conversation with someone you may still struggle but if you would have let's say three or four conversations you may actually develop more mastery than the million flash cards combined so in that case it's kind of like what was the point of that first first mode yeah i would say like an argument against that is that um the point of using anki for for language acquisition is not to learn how to output the language through using anki yes because the idea is like anki is not going to be the only source of you learning this one word it's more like a way to artificially see the word more times so that in your immersion when the word comes out you don't have to go look it up in a dictionary which is the same thing as uh space repetition because it's like the natural frequency of the word and every time you look it up to remember what that word means is is same as space repetition right yeah so would you say like in that instance anki is useful it's it's yes and no because you're bringing up a really good point is like that anki has a very specific purpose and so i agree that it can be a really good um supplement to something else but it's kind of like if you if you don't have the other thing and if that that other thing is not tuned in more you're not really going to get that much benefit from and we like we know this you know we have like like i work with so many language learners that have been trying to on and off to learn the language for like five six years and they have like more um cards and they even know what to do with and every time they take a break they just start the cards from scratch because they never got to finish their deck and they eventually get to a point where they've got so many things on repeat that they just give up on even doing all of them that's you and they just sort of start again um so we know that it it does achieve that like very specific type of retrieval in terms of getting some words into your vocabulary and getting them in enough frequency but the thing is that it's not necessary to do it in that way right so uh what you were saying is that if you were having like a natural conversation with someone they're words that are coming up if you were to look up that word that is not actually the same as if you were to see that word appear in flashcards through through anki because the context of how that information is presented to you is different so for example like a really really clear example would be like your phone number now let's just say for your example right that your phone number is like one two three four five six seven eight nine okay now a lot of people if you said that to them and like so is your phone number one two three four five hundred six seven eight nine they'll be like visualize it try to see if that matches the way that they understand it and then once they have it in their pattern of like one two three four five six seven eight nine then they would be able to make that connection because the structure and the context and how the information is perceived makes a really big difference to how understandable and how easy it is to actually retain so a word that comes up in just normal conversation and you looking that up in the context of using that word immediately for the purposes of that conversation allows you to retain that word much better than just purely doing it beforehand so what i usually say is you should do it in reverse you should be starting with conversations and doing lots of what's called interleaving which is one of the most evidence-based ways of actually acquiring new skills including languages which means looking at the information but from multiple different angles or for example having conversations like for example really common way people learn languages is they'll start with a very simple dialogue uh going to the store asking where the toilet is how how are you how was your day how was the weather things like that and then there's sort of scripted responses underneath that but a more effective way of doing that is don't just have the you know how was your day have you know three other variations of asking kind of the same thing and for each of those variations think about two or three different ways that people may actually respond to that question and create these branching chains of dialogue that's still relatively simple but sort of hit the information in different ways and you can learn how the word fits in different syntaxes how you can manipulate it where it works and where it doesn't you know how it needs to be modified when you use it with you know other types of words and we get that deep understanding of it straight off the bat and then once we have done that we can see hey there are a few words here that for some reason i just i just can't keep getting i've done this interleaving and i've done the dialogue and all these words i sort of figure out how how they work and i'm confident enough to use them i can go over to my friend's house and i can you know talk to their parents in this language and you know you know i'll be able to hold a conversation but these few words here just don't seem to be sticking in that's the stuff that you should be putting on the anki right because that's stuff that has been shown that through a more efficient way of encoding the information it doesn't seem to have stuck for whatever reason and that could be really really complicated but for whatever reason it hasn't seemed to work so we can then just say okay let's try to brute force this in and then you know three weeks later it might click and be like oh you know i'm starting to get it now we can take it out of the the anki deck right yeah i think that's actually like a mistake a lot of people do with anki which is like they try to learn through anki like anki is the method that they used to learn but actually i think it's more effective to use anki to like like you said just remember to recall the things that you have trouble like recalling or things that maybe come up less often in in the natural frequency of of um conversation i mean i would actually suggest that if there are words that are not coming up high enough in in normal conversation that's something that rather than putting that in thank you to begin with we should be thinking about ways of interleaving our dialogue to give ourselves opportunities to have that come up more frequently so yeah i don't know if you if you've ever talked to anyone about or like learn about the idea of like comprehensible input and comprehensible output hypothesis yeah like those are you know two very predominant kind of themes in in learning and the combination of like comprehensible input plus output and this idea of what's called pushed output which is essentially um i don't know if again you've heard of pushed output but it's just the idea that instead of just getting someone to say something you actually push them to to output it in ways that they are uncomfortable with and it makes them you know find gaps and it increases these things called um like learning events um where it basically means that they are gaining ground in their learning so if you think about comprehensible input comprehensible output and then having actually the the push in retrieval very few of those things are ticked when you start with anki and you finish with anki and there's not a whole lot going on most people just add on like practice and dialogue and speaking just kind of sprinkled over the top of it but it really should be completely flipped the other way around like people that have three four hundred um cards in their um yankee flash card base they should really be cutting that down to like fifty you know sixty you know beyond a hundred really if they're all a hundred years like no no one who can do that who can learn 100 new words through just pure repetition and actually hold on to that like after a month if you don't practice it like every single day you just like you're slipping on that vocabulary just like by the second yeah personally i found the best results just 10 words a day and even 10 i honestly 10 is like you got to put up some serious time like because even with a 10 right like you're probably also supplementing that with other other forms of practice if you're just doing the 10 and you're not at least consolidating that on like a every few days or once a week or something like actually trying to use the use it then it can that's good well yeah like it depends if you're talking about just like basic fluency or getting to like actually higher levels because um there are words that you see very often that everyone knows like shows up in writing a lot that is never used and if you if you use it in conversation or even through messaging it's it's not a natural statement right so those you kind of have to artificially um like increase the frequency at which you see it unless unless um are we talking about like pretty specialized words or like what type of words are we talking about here like like business like literally like yeah literary words like words that show up in novels a lot that pretty much is like really awkward if you say in real life like descriptive words stuff like that yeah um it's like unless you actually cram a lot of reading into a short amount of time it's it's like a way for you to artificially almost like artificially hack and acquire those words slightly faster i i actually i don't think there's any research that actually says that it would acquire those words faster long term i don't think there's any research that's ever actually shown that if you take words that you're not then applying and consolidating through some form of actual interleaving that just doing the flashcards on it produces meaningful long-term results where you're actually able to apply it there's some research that shows that you can at least just do individual recall of it but um in the absence of actual interleaved retrieval i i'm not aware of anything that actually says that it's it's meaningfully used i guess one one distinction that's important to make is that the the typical flash card that people we interview on our podcast make is called like sentence cards so basically it would be a sentence taken directly out of context um like from a novel for example where there's only one word you don't know so this goes in line with the comprehensible input where there's only i plus one like one single unit of word that you don't know and you understand any context so um in terms of how like what the card is it's only a recognition card where you see the word and then you recall what it means and they re and then you try to understand how what the sentence means yeah so like this is a word that you will pretty much never need to use in conversation or in output but you will need to know if you want to be able to read like a newspaper for example yeah sure so if that word is then viewed out of context so so let's just like say that this didn't exist like we didn't do this in the first place and then we were just going in our daily life and then we just encountered this word in the newspaper for example and we saw this word and we thought hey i don't know what this word means right what would be the difference between at the time of seeing the word in use which is infrequent seeing the word in use not knowing what it means looking it up and then learning it at that time versus proactively in advance cramming through more unfamiliar words with the hopes that you would actually be able to then retain it and remember it for when you see it in these infrequent cases uh wherever you're sort of you know getting it like what's the what's the difference there really i would say like let's let's hypothetically say like there's a word that only shows up maybe five times a year but every every native speaker knows this word so maybe five times a year is not enough times for you to actually remember how the word is pronounced and how what what it roughly means right because if you want to know the actual meaning like the true nuance you have to see in many different contexts but let's just say you want to know a rough meaning and how to pronounce it and five times a year is not enough but if you put into anki you would be seeing this word like every other week for example so you maybe you would see it like 30 times in a year so that that just ensures that the times that you actually see it in the wild in the newspaper you'd be able to recall it so we're talking about people that have actually already like a pretty good level of mastery and now they're just looking for those words that are you know very very very rare very very specific a very small list of words and nuanced contexts that they're just trying to understand i mean i wouldn't say it's like very like specific and rare words but more like it's beyond it's definitely beyond normal fluency like beyond like daily vocabulary like people who are trying to like read novels in a foreign language for example or just be like functional like working in a different country for example like there are those words that you would have to acquire in terms of like understanding just understanding what they mean so um there's an approach that i i teach to people that um because a lot of my students are on like work visas and stuff in foreign countries and they're trying to get that like professional level fluency of you know the second language and like a lot of people don't have time to just spend all of their time like learning the new language you know they have other things to do and also just like a life to live right so um what i tell them to do is to go through their daily life in their work and every time they come across a word that they don't know have a little notebook or something next to them where they just write down what it is and at the time they can just look it up and then throughout an entire week just tally up the number of the the number of times that each word comes up so that by the end of the week we have like a frequency distributed count of all the different words that could be used and that have come up and essentially what you're talking about is like something that comes up like five times a year that's the level of frequency where at no point would you really make the priority to learn that because there's always going to be other words that come up that are more frequent that you also don't know that are more high yield to know in which case i think the argument there is that you should really be learning the words that are more common first to build up your basic fluency that becomes a stepping stone to enter into more advanced conversations where potentially these more obscure words could come up more frequently like if you're having if your language limited because of other areas of fluency preventing you from engaging in i don't know like a business negotiation where there could be very specific words being used well then the reason that you're not encountering it more often per year is because you're only able to communicate within daily life and then actually it'll be like kind of the reverse is that you are limited because of the fact that you don't have other levels of mastery and theref you know um and then at the end of the week you just you know you just go through that list and you start with the highest frequency ones first and then because of the fact that it's naturally interleaved and because we had the context in it we can go through and do that dialogue option we can interleave it and at that point even if it's still not sticking we chuck it into our anki and then we can continue to repeat it but if we're at a point where like we've got all of that covered and the only words that we don't know now are like one word that you heard one one time like three months ago and you're like man i don't know what that word means and well it could be like let's say like elections roll around and then a bunch of election words you would have to wait till the next time election rolls around that now you could finally like but then you have to look it up again or like oh tax document words but then if you if you just um sort of like front loaded that and then periodically were like keeping contact with this word like almost artificially the next time it comes up you have a you won't have like this full understanding of the word but you'll be you'll sort of remember oh this means like the left party or something for example but the the frequent like because language like words have an exponential level of like diminishing returns like the total number of words in the language is like i don't know like several uh like 30 000 or so it depends on language obviously but let's say it's like thirty thousand to fifty thousand different words in a language like ninety percent of daily speaking is going to be through like the most common one thousand words or something yeah right and then like ninety nine point nine percent is gonna be through like the following 1000. so you're going to have like 10 000 words that yes it could come up every time that there is like election year coming up but to be able to say like proactively that here is like just a list of words that come up extremely infrequently that i will need to know for like a very specific context i mean i don't know how that is going to mathematically scale and we're still just spending hours and hours on doing these fashion i guess like my point is more like the the benefit of anki is more shown through there in those cases like for example like if you wanted to read a if you wanted to get into investing for example in a foreign language you could read a book on investing but you would have to look up everything every other word like for the duration of the entire book almost even though the same words are popping up right but if you just kind of front loaded that by uh maybe taking like the top 100 most common words in this in this field and then sort of just reviewing that you would be able to go through the book much easier so you're saying that you would before looking at the material you'd look up like a separate list of common words in the field and then front load it do the space repetition on it until you get to a level of mastery where for those 100 words you actually are able to retrieve it which realistically 100 words let's say is gonna take like weeks really to get a level of mastery where you've got retrieval on it and then we go through the material and then we see it in context and then we can actually understand it at that time i i i just think it's so much more efficient to do it the opposite way around start with the material yes if you need to look up every second word that's fine but what's the difference between looking up every second word versus having a list of every second word that you're then just gonna you know go through repetition at least flipping it gives you the opportunity to to learn it in a way that is framed a little bit more naturally with the context of the word itself allows you to hold on yeah that's what i mean like you you read through the book right and pretty much like maybe every word that you see for the second time like if it shows up two times and you don't still can't remember what it means then you add a tanki for example yeah yeah so i that that's a lot more of an effective system i normally say three actually um so i have this thing called flashcard rule of three where i say if you have something that comes up now wait for it to come up the third time before you don't remember what it is um right and there's a lot of stuff about micro retrieval and micro spacing and stuff that goes into that um but in a single study session let's say if it comes up three times and then you can add it to your anki deck and then when you review it if you're able to get it right for the first three tries in a row remove it from it and if you don't if you get it wrong three out of five attempts so any five consecutive attempts if you get it wrong three times in that five doing more repetition is probably not likely to massively increase the retention of that word because there is some contextual element to it that is just you know going off so you would do a deeper dive like for example looking at the etymology or where that word is derived from or something else that builds unnecessarily high level of connection with that word that would allow you to hold on and retain it so that you're not just having that word that has been in your database like constantly repeating for the last like four weeks and you have just gotten it on like off and on and off and on and off and on like you know repetitively yeah that also makes me curious like because you worked with a lot of um students directly especially like maybe like medical students so do you have any like horror stories of of people using anki or like miss you see anki i've got i've got more heart like i have people that literally like i mean like no joke i have people with like serious mental health problems a lot of it due purely to the fact that they have no time for anything else in their life because they're spending like six seven hours a day on anki every day they have like 3 000 flash cards that they're trying to get to because what they've been told is that space repetition is the king of all learning that if you do more space repetition your you know success in life goes up and they are so stuck to that and they have no alternative way of studying as soon as they take a day off they have accumulated like 500 due flash cards that they need to get through and that's like the only way you know for learning well i have people that um will be you know like working as doctors or just professionals in general you know people with busy lives that have other things going on and let's say they're trying to pick up a language on the side like a lot of the time it'll be if they have like a work colleague that speaks a certain language or they work in a particular industry where they see a lot of clientele that's a specific ethnicity or if they're partners you know a different speaks a different language and they want to communicate with their family or things like that and you know this is probably the majority of language learners like the majority of language learners are people that are picking it up on this side you know to casually yeah yeah casually right and if you say to this casual learner that yeah you can get away with like 20 minutes a day until you learn your first 200 words and then after that you need to spend five hours a day on anki like every single day for like the next year and a half to get to that level where you can actually have like a 90 of the conversation like no one's gonna commit to that and they don't realize that going into it and then you know yeah so you have people like i've got someone that's been trying to learn spanish for like 10 years because it's been like on and off and they take a month break and they lose the whole language in that time um right so yeah that i think if there's anyone that's listening that's making the decision should i go flash cards if if you had like min max this should i just go full immersion opportunities because you can get 20 30 minutes of immersion a day like you can give yourself opportunities to have 20-30 minutes of immersion versus having 20-30 minutes of anki or let's say even an hour if you had to just pick i would 100 say go with immersion and just push that till you feel like you are not getting any benefits from it at all and purely going that route and then adding anki supplementary later kind of as a last resort is going to yield faster results it's going to allow you to consolidate you're not going to get that big input of new information and that sort of structure and sort of sense of security thank you provides but if you actually look at your ability to navigate a conversation and your ability to engage in more learning opportunities participate in dialogue and therefore actually practice what you're learning and hold on to it long term in a way that doesn't feel like tedious as hell then you know anki is not the way to do that right it's funny that you mentioned that horror story it's almost like a day job at that point you just get up you start doing anki and then you go to bed it is i have i have some students that wake up at like 4 00 a.m 5 00 a.m to do anki before school let's see a routine is they wake up at 5 a.m to smash out their 2 hours manky so that when they go come home they can do the remaining 4 hours oh man it's a loaded schedule right there for sure you hate to see it happen but we definitely have interviewed people who have done that and it's actually you know pretty sad as well because it's not just for language learning it's for everything as well like you could be learning science or you could be learning like math or whatever and a lot of people will see like a new terminology and the first instinct is like all right chuck it up the anki just let's let's memorize this new piece of terminology but it's like dude if you actually just finished studying the whole chapter there's no possible way by the end of this chapter you're not going to remember what that term means like all of the time spent on doing the anki and putting in your notes and all the other stuff that you think you need to do to remember it that's probably not even gonna be necessary because a week from now you're not even gonna be able to imagine not knowing what that word is right and like having rote memorization as a last resort i just think will help a lot of people with their mental health at the very least right i think there is slightly a distinction as well though because like for i'm sure for like science and um like maybe math it's more um like theoretical concepts that you have to really understand and not really like wrote memorization but a lot of times in language learning it's it's something like literally just how do you pronounce this like kanji so it's it's a one-to-one like recollections like either you remember it or you don't in that case like it might make sense or even like people who use like anki to memorize like the locations of of uh all the prefectures in japan or all the states right that's something i mean hands down i'd say that when it comes to like all the different ways that you can use anki language is probably top of the list in terms of it being like useful and effective in like more situations i i don't think there's any other situation unless you're just like literally memorizing a list of random facts that go in the chase or something you know like i don't think there's any other situation where it's as effective as it is for languages but i think even in languages it gets abused uh you know quite a lot and people are not prioritizing you know the immersion or the comprehensible output aspect of it and really you know pushing themselves with the interleaving right yeah and i i guess anki means uh anki means a rope memorization in japanese and was created to for the guy to study japanese yeah i don't know that actually you learn something new every day but with that justin i feel like we've taught everyone a lot you mean we've gone in so deep into the subject but it's that time of every podcast where we get into the message to the korikara squad and i know you've been raring to go and do this you've done so much medical study you're a doctor and i mean i know you've been studying for this moment to be to go and say the kodak got a message so i'm gonna put you on the spot right here to go and impart this piece of wisdom to the kodaka squad my message would just be you know just don't put too much pressure on yourself that's that's my message is that uh you know you just chill out a little bit right you love to hear it hey guys thanks for making the end of the podcast comment down below if justin convinced you to stop using anki but you know what time to do this time to go and shout out the patrons with kevin allen drew jack jack joey married nathan poland

Channel: KoreKara

Views: 42,556

Keywords: how to learn Japanese, how to learn japanese podcast, learn japanese podcast, korekara podcast, korekara podcast clips, interview with japanese learners, life in japan, podcast japan, japanese podcast, learn japanese

Id: cFXaeH53Mlo

Length: 29min 59sec (1799 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 30 2022