Why don't you use spaced repetition to learn, despite its effectiveness?

I use Anki (the most popular SRS program) daily and recommend to anyone that will listen. But I think there are three points worth making about it:

1. Many people use SRS without realizing it. Many language learning apps just build the principles of spaced repetition into the software without explicitly mentioning it. As such, it's worth remembering that the spacing effect is a scientific phenomenon, while spaced repetition is the implementation of tools to apply it, typically via spaced repetition software (SRS.)

The concept of the spacing effect seems pretty straightforward and easy to understand, but for whatever reason there is a gap between that and the "optimal" method implemented by SRS apps.

2. The software tends to be ugly and/or too complicated to use. I like Anki and appreciate the developer making it so accessible, but let's be honest: it looks like a piece of software from 1995. This scares away a lot of people that would otherwise be interested (I have personal experience with this, unfortunately.)

3. The recurring meme that "SRS is only for memorization, and I don't need to memorize things / memorization is an outdated learning method." This has been argued against (and debunked, IMO) multiple times, but the meme persists.

I suppose this is a failure of those marketing SRS to effectively teach interested parties more about memorization and why it's so critical for learning, because every time a topic comes up about Anki/SRS, this same debate appears, every time.

I understand it as a technique for memorization, which is not a form of learning I ever have much need for.

There is a limit of how much time You can spend on repetition daily and how much cards brain is able to remember. Preparing cards is big overhead, using cards by other people usually is not recommended.

I've tried, but once you fall behind you're done. The current algorithms just drown you in the cards you've forgotten. There's no way to say "I went on vacation. Please reset my progress to something manageable to me."

Plus, memorization is still hard. You have to really focus on internalizing the cards as they show up, and not just skimming them. It's work.

I guess because it's the method to _memorize_ things, not learn.

And IRL you rarely need to bluntly memorize stuff, even in foreign languages.

I use it for learning vocabulary, but I haven't really applied it to other kinds of learning. I've thought about using it for physical skills like learning to tie important knots for climbing, but the extra bit of friction with involving equipment puts me off the idea.

It sounds more like a chore. Read, write, note things down. And then re-view your cards/notes over and over. There has to be a short term goal associated like an upcoming exam, interview, etc. for spaced repetition. Although I'm lazy. :)

For me learning is fun. If I add any rule or framework or whatever on top of “just reading and practicing” then all of a sudden, learning is not fun anymore. So, I keep it simple at the expense of doing my learning not the most productive way.

Because it's not the most effective way to learn; it's the most effective way to not forget.

Here's an article by the person who discovered SR: https://www.supermemo.com/en/blog/twenty-rules-of-formulatin...

To do it effectively, you'd have to have learned everything in advance and processed the knowledge in a format suited to SR. The processing itself makes it ineffective. For many things, 30% retention is good enough. It would cost more to read a book deeply with SR than to read several books shallowly without it.

If only there was a fix for that? Well, spaced repetition was designed to work in tandem with incremental reading. Which is you jump around topics related to your topic and extract the most relevant details.

People seem to have adopted only half of the pair, which is why it feels so inefficient. Supermemo was actually very efficient with this... except that it's reliant on Internet Explorer and now breaks on all modern OSes and doesn't even run on Mac. For some reason, people were able to rewrite SR into Anki, but not the incremental reading part.

However, AI seems to be taking on this role quite well. It's capable of not only incremental reading, but also processing the data into spaced repetition format. But I'll just wait for someone to build this.

I used this method to learn Latin during the lockdown. But I found Anki more trouble than it was worth. Instead I went old school and used handwritten bits of paper. Worked just fine.

Learning is not a distinct thing I set aside time to do. I am always learning, and I don't have a strategy for acquiring information

Please tell us about your experience of using spaced repetition.