Study New Languages

Spaced Repetition Learning Systems or Spaced Repetition Software (SRS) has been one of the most useful tools I’ve added to my language learning arsenal in the last year. I have found my acquisition of new vocabulary has grown exponentially and in the last year my understanding of Spanish has grown through my habit of being a “word collector”. Any new word that I run across (I’ve been studying Spanish primarily as of late), is written down and then I look it up and add it into my card database.

One of the keys to using SRS effectively is to make it a part of your daily routine. I know that there are some days it’s just not possible, but like many other things try to force yourself back into the habit of using it and you WILL learn the words that you have in your card database. Along with this, try not to make your list of words too big or it may discourage you to make progress. I try to keep my stack of words to be reviewed the following day in the 100-150 range, but at times have pushed it higher than that. To me, it becomes more tedious when my stack of cards to review is greater than 150 a day.

The second big key to effectively using SRS is to be honest with yourself. You will be presented with a card (a word), you should try to remember the translation of that word or concept and when you think you remember it, click the button to reveal the correct answer. If you missed it, of course you will score it accordingly (in mnemosyne you give yourself a 0). If you really struggled to get it you would rank yourself with a low score, if you absolutely NAILED and it seemed trivial it give yourself a higher score.

The concept here is that things you REALLY know well will not be presented to you as often as those that you struggle to recall. You’ll get to see those that you struggle with more often and ultimately they will become more familiar and you’ll be able to pace those out to longer and longer intervals between reviewing.

Some of the popular SRS software available is listed below.

My favorite: Mnemosyne – This is my favorite – freely available for Mac (intel), Windows and Linux. It’s also a research project on long term memory. One of the things I like is that it has support for plugins that add features and it’s easy to synchronize a card deck between machines. It gives you the ability to score your ability to remember in a scale from 0-5 and I use this one daily. (Supports unicode characters, pictures, sounds and html formatting as well.) It’s able to import/export to and from several formats and keeps good statistics on each card. It’s also possible to have 3 sided cards and categories (which can be toggled on and off in daily use or in the export process/etc.)

My second favorite: Anki – I use this one occasionally. It now has a simplified interface with three levels to rate your recall of a word. It tells you (by default) how long you will wait before reviewing the word when you score it. Freely available for a number of platforms (Mac/Windows/Linux)(including ipod touch/ other handheld devices. Decks can be synchronized online as well. It supports sound and images as well as unicode characters and imports/exports to many formats as well.

Other SRS software:

Supermemo

JMemorize

FullRecall

I highly recommend that you look into the use of SRS to aid in memorizing of words. You’ll find that it helps to make your memorization more efficient and effective!