Effective learning: Rules of formulating knowledge (1999)

https://www.supermemo.com/en/articles/20rules

by misiti3780 • 10 years ago

130 35 10 years ago

supermemo.com

punnerud• 10 years ago

Skip to the end and read the summary first

abathingpape• 10 years ago

It makes me wonder if summaries should come first in web articles.

based2• 10 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstract_(summary)

jasonkostempski• 10 years ago

They should, in all things that include a summary, web article or otherwise. When a tl;dr is at the end of something, it is tl;ar (too late; already read). It drives me nuts, it defeats the whole purpose.

atsaloli• 10 years ago

On a related note, Romans wrote sums at the top of a stack of numbers they were adding. http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&searc...

Summaries at the top, always.

nomurrcy• 10 years ago

I've been using Anki for the past year while learning German and it has been (seemingly) very helpful. I doubt I would have acquired the vocabulary I have in the past year without it. I'm not sure if this is simply due the fact that it helps make studying a habit or that SRS is as beneficial as claimed.

I have found it useful enough that I'm extending its use to other subjects I'm interested in.

Has anybody used Anki and Supermemo have thoughts on the two? I've never used supermemo - would be very interested to hear if it is worth looking into vs Anki for any reason.

cle2• 10 years ago

SuperMemo has a lot more advanced features (e.g. incremental reading). But the tradeoffs are pretty significant, in my opinion. Anki's decisive features for me are its mobile apps, its simplicity, and its open source license.

I've been using Anki for 5 years now and have about 10,000 notes. I don't use it for foreign language learning. I would not feel comfortable investing that much effort into a closed-source platform effectively run by one person (Piotr). Also, thanks to Anki being open source, I've written a handful of simple plugins for myself.

emilga4• 10 years ago

How are you able to keep 10000 notes in Anki organized? With that many notes, how can you tell whether something you want to remember is already in your notes or not?

It seems to me that the Anki card browser is quite bad at this, but maybe I'm just bad at using it!

guizzmo• 10 years ago

The first rule "do not learn what you do not understand" is nonesense in the context of learning mathematics/physics/hard sciences.

If you understand a subject, then it means that you have learned it effectively.

In my experience with teaching at university, I have found that the wish of students to understand before learning is actually a great barrier to comprehend a subject.

In order to build intuition on a subject, a student should first try to apply it, play with it (without understanding it) and then understanding will come. But I have yet to witness a student which understand a subject without being able to use/apply the subject.

Take the notion of electric field. You could try to understand it before learning how to use it. Good luck. You are not a fish, so you probably have no sensors of electric field on your skin, and thus you have no prior notion to cling to. I contend that it is virtually impossible. Or you could try to use the concept of electric field to compute forces on charged particle, or compute the electric field created by a charge, or you could build a program that represent the electric field in space. Doing this requires no understanding, just boring substitutions in the definition of the electric field. But doing that forces you to build understanding (its a vector, it changes direction with the sign of the charges, etc, etc)

Another example is understanding how to bike. You could try to understand how balancing on a bike so that it stay upright, understand how moving the handlebar right makes you turn left or, you could just try to bike, and then understand how it works out.

So my advice: don't try to understand. Do, and do again untill you have learned. Not the other way around.

MrQuincle• 10 years ago

As a kid I cried at times because learning foreign words, lists of topological places, or events in history was so hard! If I don't get the structure or context I am so lost.

At electrical engineering they still tried to teach me in the same way. Giving me assignments with little context. What saved me in the end were textbooks and the internet.

The easiest way for me to understand new concepts are the subsequent generalizations or extremes. Complex numbers? Quaternions. Gradients? Clifford algebra. Sets? Categories. Fourier transform? Wavelets.

Sure there might be people who benefit from solving the puzzles from their teachers, but it assumes that every mind works the same way.

groovy2shoes• 10 years ago

I'm the same way. At university, I had an instructor for Calculus I who seemed content with just having us memorize formulas and identities and "shortcuts", only to regurgitate them on demand. I barely passed with a C-. Then, I had an instructor for Calculus II who was much the same. I made a D+ in Calc II, which, since Calculus I-III are considered essential courses for engineering students, was not passing. My second time through Calc II, I barely passed with a C-.

Then, I get to Calculus III, and my instructor introduces each concept by showing us a complicated-but-ultimately-intuitive formula for something, then deriving the "shortcut" step-by-step. While most of the students griped that it was boring, I found it quite interesting, and for the first time in my university career I felt like I could grasp calculus. I made an A-.

There are other instances of this, as well, but that one was probably the most dramatic. I don't know what it is. I came up with a handful of analogies just now, but none of them seemed particularly satisfying, so I gave up. Perhaps it's just a quirk, I dunno :)

noelwelsh• 10 years ago

I took understanding as meaning motivation. If I was teaching electric fields I wouldn't start with the equations. Perhaps I'd start by demonstrating what an electric field is (e.g. http://practicalphysics.org/electric-fields.html), then perhaps how it's useful, and then open the discussion of what it's properties are. You can then relate the properties back to the demonstrations and applications.

theoh• 10 years ago

In the hard sciences, learning by rote, or just learning to manipulate symbols according to rules, is not a good long-term strategy.

http://www.physics.emory.edu/faculty/weeks//journal/elby-ajp...

drieddust• 10 years ago

So my advice: don't try to understand. Do, and do again untill you have learned. Not the other way around.

This is so so true so some level I think our desire to understand everything beforehand is just a lazy strategy. Probably either to learn only what is easy or what is useful. Sense of wonder and discoverablity which makes putting the effort in a joyous activity is gone from us. Our profit mazi

On the contrary Children just keep practising until they learn. I wish I can go back to stage where my 2 years old daughter is.

Demcox• 10 years ago

This was posted in 1999..... Still relevant but those screenshots were...old.

rdslw4• 10 years ago

If you're wondering if it's (supermemo) worth your time, let me share with you my 10 (ten) years supermeme learning conclusions.

I got supermemo advanced english course (20k phrases) around 2004 as a present and started it in 2005. Initially I thought it will take 2..4 years. Exactly 10 years later, on September 2015 I was at 19k. I reached last 20k phrase (but not finished the course) around spring 2016. I ended doing it in August 2016. I learned every day around 10..15 minutes. During those 10 years I had around 3 breaks of 2..4 weeks each which of course resulted in huge amount to material to rehearse after the break. I had multiple one day slips.

My conclusions:

* I would did it again!!

* It was tough and I was thinking of stopping multiple times

* The biggest thing I got is grit (will power) strengthening - I didnt expect it, and IT IS GREAT

* Of course better english command came also with the course :)

* It impacted (in subtle) ways my approach to learning, which I see much better now with implementing on my own repeating strategies on every possible area

* Use supermemo mobile apps (it was not possible in 2005)

* For foreign languages, db with sound is ultra worthy - I picked up much better pronounciation on the way, while didnt expect it.

Ask me if you want to know more.

Trivia: I had to have virtualbox VM with old windows xp on my every laptop, just to have supermemo installed and available there :)

mistermann• 10 years ago

Now that you're done, why do you think your initial estimate was so far off?

rdslw4• 10 years ago

Two things: a. underestimating 'compound interest' (if I may say so) of repetitions from past material you must do in the future. As more and more material is done, there are more repetitions you must do every day, simply because you're forgetting some of the material. So simple '20k / X new words per day' gives BIG error. b. "I had multiple one day slips" is another one, especially as you quickly "learn" that the more new ones you do, bigger daily repetitions number follows :) So quite often I was just doing repetitions to reduce burden on me.

Guessing from my memory, average repetition number over that 10y would be around 100 per day.

BTW: You can start with smaller db. e.g. I started in the middle doing Russian one and used a 5k one.

mbrookes2• 10 years ago

This is not a dig at the parent - they clearly have commitment and drive, but since they're promoting SuperMemo rather than commenting on the post, let me just say that this:

"I would did it again!!"

or this:

"Of course better english command came also with the course"

(among a choice of several examples) should tell you everything you need to know about the effectiveness of SuperMemo after 10 years of learning.

versteegen• 10 years ago

But 12.5 minutes a day for 10 years is only 761 hours. The purpose of SuperMemo is to optimise for total time spent. (Of course, the specific course/material might not have been the most effective.)

But I guess that argument doesn't hold water, since rdslw is surely also exposed to a lot of other material in English.

gwern• 10 years ago

Those are grammar/style issues, though: 'did' is a tense error, and 'came also' is a reversal of the normal phrase 'also came'. (Not capitalizing 'English' is just being sloppy, as we can safely assume that they know English is a proper noun, since even non-English speakers know that.) Grammar and composition are hard to fit into the SRS framework because you need feedback on subtle errors and exposure to a wide variety of native writing. As far as vocabulary goes, which is what spaced repetition is particularly claimed to be good for, he looks fine to me. Certainly he's better off than if he had tried Rosetta Stone or something...

rdslw4• 10 years ago

Nah, rather about me (sloppiness + using English only from time to time) and (this is big for grammar/style) that my native language is quite far from English in terms of lexical distance, and this creates a lot of problems when your brain (thinking in native language) translates word-by-word to other language.

Especially that I said 'better' not best/perfect etc. As someone commented, SR is not really good for grammar.

But thanks for spotting my mistakes :)

Anti-disclaimer: I'm not in any way connected to supermemo, having profits etc. It's funny that my post could have been seen as a promotion :)

jyriand• 10 years ago

I don't like rules. 20 rules to effective learning, 50 rules to great success in life etc. You see those articles everywhere. Nobody can memorize those 20-50 rules; more often than not, too many rules will hide the important ideas that might be hidden in one of those points. Instead of rules I would like to see principles that are extracted out of these rules.

mbrookes2• 10 years ago

Could we get a [1999] in the title please?

lolive• 10 years ago

I use Twitter as a reminder of all the good things I read on the Web. Basically i use it like the "Star" feature of (good old) Google Reader. Is there a way to convert my tweets into flashcards? So i can keep in memory all the good things I met of the Web ?

yowlingcat• 10 years ago

Am I the only one that gets nostalgic for university while reading this? Ah, I think back to university many years ago and it almost makes me a little sad. A time when I spent so much of my time learning that these techniques would come in handy. My brain felt so much more limber at that period. I am certainly faster and productive now at my craft, and am very happy with that. But, oh, to be a student again...

Effective learning: Rules of formulating knowledge (1999)

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