How to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn: The Spaced Repetition System

A few months ago I set off on the adventure of learning Chinese after moving to Singapore. I never expected to find a language more cryptic than the one found in Alonzo Church's book, an Introduction to Mathematical Logic – in my opinion, the bible from hell written by the devil himself!

The Problem: How do you avoid being overwhelmed by the complexity and quantity of information you need to learn?

I was wrong! Chinese is far more overwhelming at first glance and I quickly realized how much of a time investment learning this language would be!

If you think about it for a minute, people in China spend a quarter of their lives learning just to read and write characters and they do that all the way up into their senior level years in school. Furthermore, I often hear from my native Chinese speaking friends that they keep a dictionary handy on their phones because they often forget how to read and write some of the lesser used characters. For reference, for those not learning this language, according to Wikipedia, there are tens of thousands of characters in the Chinese written language! That's astounding! And damn scary for anyone wanting to learn Chinese!

Now, I don't know about you, but I don't have a twenty to twenty five years to learn Chinese. I need to cram as much knowledge in the littlest time possible and actually remember it! But all through my primary and post-primary schools years, no one ever bothered to teach how to study properly. I've has always been a brute force type of guy by reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading again.

As for the immediate problem I faced, there are thousands of characters and I needed to learn quite of few of them to become literate! It wouldn't be possible to review each character every time I add one to my list. Obviously, there are a handful which are used quite frequently, but it's the ones that are not that become difficult to memorize. After doing some research on techniques to improve the ability to memorize information, I found one that works almost perfectly for remembering even the least used characters. The method is backed by quite of bit of research as well and can be applied to just about any subject matter out there!

So, this is not a trick to get readers nor is it a science fiction post – methods in memorization and the upkeep thereof have improved to the point that you no longer have to worry about keeping up your own memory, nor do you have to struggle during the actual memorization process.  We are one step closer to becoming cyborgs, and yet this discovery is not new: it just never caught on.

The Solution: Spaced Repetition 

Unlike ordinary repetition where you exhaust your energy focusing on each item equally, Spaced Repetition, does just the complete opposite. Your time an energy becomes optimized for learning the material you have not learned or let sink in yet. Well, I know what you thinking. "No shit Sherlock!" But the reality is, I never studied like that. My friends never studied like that. And I somehow doubt you ever studied like that either!

Well spaced repetition is accomplished by an algorithm where each item's interval between study times is increased for each time you arrive at the correct solution, and vice versa if you get the answer wrong. By doing this, you increase the amount of times you see the cards you are struggling to remember and spend less time looking at information you already knew.

Programs like Anki,  SuperMemo, and Mnemosyne have finally linked the brain to technology and made it possible for humans to rely on machines for memory upkeep. This may sound absurd, but it is insanely effective. These programs have “decks” that are filled with items you've told the program that you'd like to learn.  When you input something into the program, you are immediately tested. You then grade yourself based on a point scale (ranges depend on the program), and the program then files that object into its algorithm based on your response. If you had a hard time remembering the definition of “Spaced Repetition System”, then it would schedule for you to review this word again either immediately (if you failed completely), or within a day.  If you had an easy time with the word, it would schedule the word again further and further down the road, eventually only showing it to you once every few years.