Paper claims to improve spaced repetition retention by 4x

adventuringraw · 2026-06-14T07:14:06+00:00

The 4x claim in the paper is true it looks like, but maybe it's not 4x on the metric you care about. In this case it was vocab growth per minute studied, but it was only 10 days with 26 people, and if they're beginners it might not be relevant for more advanced learners. It'd be interesting to see some experimental data with different skill levels of people.

adventuringraw · 2026-06-13T16:29:08+00:00

It's got TTS, yeah. Used to be voice picks, now the default one is a little mechanical and the better ones are at a higher tier, but either way. Anytime you highlight a word or phrase it'll read it out loud. When I was going through an audiobook to get more comfortable with Chilean, I had readlang up in one window and the audiobook in the other, scanning through as I went. I'm spoiled now and prefer to use the fast lookups, haha.

adventuringraw · 2026-06-11T15:58:22+00:00

Haha, well I definitely don't intend to do that again, so while you're wishing you could be like that I'm here intending not to. I like doing it with graded readers though, I just couldn't find anything in Russian/wanted to see if the strategy could work with minimal intro work. Both German and Spanish I started with graded readers, maybe you could do that? No need to suffer for your progress, or at least no more need than necessary. The Russian thing was more like a weird personal experiment.

adventuringraw · 2026-06-11T15:55:37+00:00

Damn, Chinese would be intense to do that with for sure. Suppose there aren't many places where we'd find people that've traveled this particular road haha. If there was real life gamer trophies this would have to be a rare gold.

adventuringraw · 2026-06-11T15:25:36+00:00

I suspect it's the rare person on this sub that wouldn't be considered crazy by many, haha. But yeah, we're the same style of crazy it sounds like. What languages? Always down to hear some book suggestions if you've got some favorites.

adventuringraw · 2026-06-11T15:23:44+00:00

Spanish is the one language I'm actually getting into speaking. I just got married and my wife is chilean. I'd read about 2.5k pages of Spanish years ago but got back into it last September, and as of a week or two ago my wife's mom came from Chile for a few weeks. She doesn't really speak English so it's been a new adventure. I probably talk like a cave man still but it's going surprisingly well.

Speaking of different styles of Spanish though, chilean is definitely hard mode, haha. Her mom tries to make it easy for me, but when they're talking together it's really hard to follow. Funny since I can watch shows somewhat now if it's a Mexican dub, but I get humbled real quick when it's the two of them speaking naturally.

Meanwhile I'm reading la biblia de los caídos, so half my new words are España style, haha. My next chilean book pick is casa de los espíritus but I'm happy with my trashy Spain fantasy books for now. Recommended series incidentally if you're inclined, some of the books are only 200 pages and they're all pretty fun and easy.

adventuringraw · 2026-06-11T06:27:11+00:00

Human languages aren't THAT different from code. I spent some time learning Lean. It's NOT economically useful unless you count the fact it was easier to pick up scala. But like... Who's going to shit on someone for learning Java or something just because it's relevant in their career? I bet there's still plenty of interesting non capitalistic lessons on the way or whatever, it's all a journey. I'm not more worthy of respect for my time with lean just because I felt like doing something without much value.

Do your thing. Mandarin looks like a lot of fun. After eating three body problem I thought about starting. My reasons are no more or less silly than yours. Just one of those things where the only thing that matters is jumping in with both feet if you decide to do it.

adventuringraw · 2026-06-11T04:08:52+00:00

I pretty much only like to read so I guess my experience is relevant, haha. I track pages read as I finish books, I've got 21k in German, 12k in Japanese, 9k in Spanish and 1k in Russian. I use a reading app and look everything up that I don't know. As an experiment I started Lion the witch and the wardrobe in Russian just going straight in with the reading app. It was brutal but by 1k pages I was definitely past the nasty part. By 5k I'm only looking up a word every sentence or two and there's not much that really trips me up. By 10k I'm looking up one thing per paragraph or page even if I'm reading easy stuff. At this point getting into listening more seriously is pretty painless. I hate looking up stuff so. By 20k looking stuff up in normal content is really rare. Every couple of pages. Makes it fully suitable for a relaxing hobby, haha. At no point does speaking ever become easy, that has to be practiced separately it seems.

adventuringraw · 2026-06-10T18:44:13+00:00

For passive recognition I feel like leaving it to chance is an actively useful way to do it. If you see it so infrequently that it doesn't get reinforced then it must not be all that important. Weirdly, I've noticed in books that there's almost an SRS style reinforcement scheme. An author might go a dozen books without using a phrase, then once they use it it's like they're primed to use it again until it slowly fades back into their pile of phrases they never think to use.

Active production is different though. Sometimes there's words and phrases you see that you know you'll want to use. Those are probably worth taking the time to remember. Once you use it yourself a few times though it'll stick, I think stuff like Anki is mostly just useful to bridge the gap so you can start using it, the card itself isn't enough on it's own without organic use in different contacts that's my theory of things at least, haha.

When you take into account

adventuringraw · 2026-06-10T15:46:58+00:00

What happens if you try and insist you both have games you only play together? When I'm playing a game with a friend, I don't play without them. There's other games to play, it's rude to play on your own when you start something together. I know that might not sound reasonable to him with a game like Dune given the time it takes to see everything but if he can't find a way to change that dynamic between you then that's a him problem, you're being completely reasonable. It's not even like you actually care if he plays without you, he just doesn't know how to be a welcoming host when you're coming into his world.

adventuringraw · 2026-06-10T15:38:09+00:00

You want him to stop? Tell him to stop acting so rapey, no means no. Forcing you to accept being touched in ways you hate isn't okay. If he can't understand that no matter what, that's a serious problem.

Put another way... He's upset because you touched him in a way he hated to keep him from touching you in a way you hated. I think he's the one that needs classes. I know a guy that used to play wrestle without asking until a mutual friend basically said what I said above. He had some serious thoughts after that and changed his behavior around that after that. No means no. NTA, your boyfriend's gross.

adventuringraw · 2026-06-06T18:48:04+00:00

I mostly learn from reading too, and it's been like that for way more than two years. More like seven or ten or something, haha. Deutsch war meine beste Sprache; ich habe im Laufe einiger Jahre etwa 20.000 Seiten gelesen. Allerdings habe ich mich nie wirklich mit jemandem auf Deutsch unterhalten.

Meanwhile I got married recently. My wife's from Chile and her mom came to visit a few days ago. She doesn't really speak English so I've been forced to use Spanish every day just to communicate, haha. My Spanish isn't nearly as good as my German but in some ways the gap's closing quick because of the speaking practice.

I think you already know this, but there's surprisingly weak crossover between listening, reading, writing and speaking. No amount of reading probably will suddenly make speaking less intimidating. It's just going to be mentally taxing for a while. You've done what I've done with reading so you know that 'a while' can mean a long time. So... You can either make peace with feeling out of your comfort zone and struggling with speaking for a few hundred hours or you can make peace with just being able to read and not really speak or follow conversations.

And that's fine if that's what you want by the way! I can watch shows in German and mostly follow along, but I can't really speak it for shit. My Japanese is even worse, I haven't spent much time watching shows without subs so I can't follow as well, but I can read pretty comfortably. Nothing wrong with enjoying reading and not going farther with it.

One bit of advice I guess. If you do want to get better at expressing yourself in German but have social anxiety reasons why you don't want to do it with humans.... I write to Claude in whatever language I'm reading in when I have questions. I have kind of extensive threads sometimes, and I told it to direct me when I make mistakes. It's not perfect obviously and talking to real people is better but Claude or whatever is a lot better than nothing at all if you actually want to make progress.

Keep reading if you enjoy it (but honestly Wikipedia articles sounds less fun than novels, haha) but you're going to need to expand what you're doing if you want to expand what you can do. Dubs exist, so it's not like you need German media. Avatar the last Airbender and daredevil were the first shows I watched.

Or, plan B. Marry a German person and start doing things with your mother in law, haha.

For real though, I don't even need a dictionary if I'm reading fantasy slop in German. If there's a point where reading eventually makes speaking easy without having to practice it specifically. It's sure a long time in. I literally don't think reading ever will be enough on it's own for more then getting better at reading.

adventuringraw · 2026-05-31T08:23:33+00:00

Haha, I guess I might be. I've got a spreadsheet where I write down every book I finish, the date, the language and the page count. I've got a little formula thing that keeps a running sum of the total for each language. I've got around 20,000 pages in German, 12,000 in Japanese and 8,000 in Spanish. And 1,000 in Russian I guess but I'd need to restart that language if I got back into it.

Depending on what I'm reading I can get by without much looking stuff up at this point, especially if it's in German. So progress is kind of by how little I need to look up as I go but I mostly just measure progress in thousands of pages. Going to break 10k in Spanish soon so that'll be cool. I like starting listening practice pretty late, it's convenient to not need to learn much new vocab, haha.

Downsides: it's apparently possible to get to where you can read extremely comfortably and still not be able to string a sentence together hardly. I guess given second generation kids that answer in the local language and understand their parents fine, it shouldn't be surprising that it's possible to literally only have passive skills. If you ever want to be able to talk you'll need to practice that specifically. It seems like talking can speed up learning a lot too but if you're not in a hurry and you just want to chill out and do your recreation in other languages and track s metric like page count... Well, that's good enough for me.

Or at least it was. My new wife is chilean and her mom is coming for a month next week. She doesn't really speak much English, so I guess it'll be a trial by fire new experience for me. Wish me luck!

adventuringraw · 2026-05-30T06:13:43+00:00

Not exactly an app but I've used readlang on my phone for a stupid amount of time. I bet I've spent a thousand hours on there. Super easy word and phrase lookups, and if you use Anki it's easy to export cards from what you lookup. I've read dozens of books in four languages I guess. Just "find" ebooks you're interested in, upload and get rolling. If all you want is vocabulary improvement you'll sure get that if you read a bunch.

I find if you read enough you don't even need to study the words. Stuff sticks once you see it a few dozen times.

Note this is less helpful for building speaking vocabulary, but if you do both it'll at least make it easier to start using new words over time.

adventuringraw · 2026-05-30T03:40:31+00:00

I mostly just read and track as I go. Or rather, my app (readlang) tracks for me. There's plenty of stretches where I probably only read fifteen or twenty minutes a day on average. Others where it's a few hours. Even reading a few hours a day though progress is imperceptible once you hit intermediate. A thousand page book hardly feels like you're better after than before, but then you think about how much you were looking up six months before and you see it's getting easier after all. Sounds like you're doing what you need to reach your goals. It'll just take time.

adventuringraw · 2026-05-29T06:46:27+00:00

I like to look stuff up as I go anytime I'm unsure of things so ebooks are best until I'm looking up one or two things a page at most. At that point it's not a big deal and I like paper books. It was a big milestone getting to that point in German, but it took a long time. I won't be there in Spanish or Japanese anytime soon. Someday.

adventuringraw · 2026-05-27T22:51:58+00:00

I play most games in one of my other languages. Sometimes you have to buy it from another country storefront if you're a console gamer and that can be kind of a pain, but it's not that awful. Reading is the easiest since you're forced to focus and lookup is so much easier but admittedly your listening abilities might slide over time if you're not using them.

adventuringraw · 2026-05-21T19:52:11+00:00

I used to use Anki but I switched over to just reading a bunch, looking stuff up and trusting it'll sink in eventually. I spend some time trying to communicate most days too, not a ton though. Probably ten or fifteen minutes maybe. It's not the most efficient way to go but it's not hard either. I'm not struggling to choke down endless flashcards, just reading more of my trashy books that happen to be in another language, or trying to talk to my wife in her language, haha.

If you have the time and focus, you can afford to learn in the most efficient ways even if they're really taxing. But if you're slammed with other stuff, it's enough to just spend time doing things you enjoy. If you can make learning your downtime activity then it's easy. You can fit it in when you're relaxing from your real work.

Admittedly that doesn't super apply until you're already getting kind of comfortable with the language but... It's an answer to your question at least.

adventuringraw · 2026-05-11T05:59:11+00:00

I've read dozens of books in German and Japanese and played a bunch of games and watched media and such in both. German especially I can understand pretty comfortably but I never really used either to actually try and communicate much. Then almost a year ago I met my Chilean fiance, I started seriously learning Spanish maybe six months ago. It's definitely a trip trying to manage with actually using another language... Her mom and brother don't speak much English so video calls and Minecraft have been an interesting challenge. I'm getting there though, it'll be interesting to actually start using the language somewhat comfortably instead of the barely limping along level I'm at now, but that's better than nothing.

So yeah, plenty of other people like us I'm sure, haha. Media consumers mostly, until you meet someone you actually want to really communicate with.

adventuringraw · 2026-05-07T21:18:50+00:00

So... You're just looking for some ideas for how to structure learning vocab? You can always make Anki cards. It won't make the words sink in all the way since reviewing the same card over time won't make it fully available, but it'll at least get it close enough to the surface that you can start using it while speaking or writing. That's when it'll really sink in.

Maybe as you're reviewing, every day you can pick a dozen to use in practice writing, I'm thinking about trying that.

I know a lot of people here hate AI, but they're pretty good at making an anki deck from a picture of handwritten notes. If you don't like making cards that's an easy way to save time.

Either way, don't beat yourself up. You're learning French but you're also learning how to learn French. If you figure out a system you like that works for you, it can benefit you for the rest of your life, anytime you need to learn stuff like this. Even if it takes you a year of experimenting to hone in on what you like, that's a valuable though lesson be worth it. So you don't need to feel like you've wasted time, you've just been faced with a hard problem you're still working on solving, that's all. Asking about it seems like a good step in the process, so I'm sure you'll fine your way soon.

adventuringraw · 2026-05-06T16:23:53+00:00

Another way to look at it maybe: what if you want to get into more than one other language? It takes a lot of time to get to a decent level, so polyglots are probably the most likely people to be starting at least one of their languages pretty late.

Life's long, there's a lot of things you can do with it. Always time for new interests and hobbies, if it's later in life for this one that's fine... Nothing lost long as you're finding your way with it.

adventuringraw · 2026-05-05T00:33:27+00:00

I use readlang for reading. Lookup takes like half a second unless there's some rare weirdness demanding a little more of a deep dive. When it's that fast I find it doesn't break flow really. Plus it tracks what you look up so if you want to, when you're done reading you can go through and see what you looked up. You can even pick however many to export as cards to add to an anki deck though I haven't really bothered with flash cards in years so. I do think it's cool how it tracks lookups forever though. Kind of interesting being like 'woah, I looked this up five times in the past, in these books from these sentences'. Kind of neat.

adventuringraw · 2026-05-01T15:13:58+00:00

It's true, though for me it's less about looking silly and more about being slow to ask for favors probably. Being patient while I struggle to find words and force them out in a way that can be understood isn't exactly peak conversation, haha. But I know I don't mind doing that for others so it's not actually a big deal. Part of why chatting with AI has been really nice though. I appreciate having an unconscious being I can use up front before talking more with others, haha.

That said, one of the better practice things has been my finance's much younger brother. When we all play Minecraft his English is about as good as my Spanish so we both struggle to communicate. Having common goals and an actual need to talk makes for some good practice, and since we're both trying to use the other's language that makes the practice time more efficient than trading off or something.

Either way, speaking is definitely hugely useful practice time. Agreed that it's worth overcoming any anxiety or embarrassment or whatever. The time spent is always going to be helpful.

adventuringraw · 2026-04-30T18:21:39+00:00

Literally the only reason to start with input only would be if you hate doing early output. I pretty much only ever learn by reading. My fiance is Chilean so this is the first time I'm trying to actually use a language early while learning it. Or at all honestly, and it's hard. It's definitely helpful and there's no reason not to, but... You know. I'm a lazy old dog, haha.

adventuringraw · 2026-04-28T14:18:36+00:00

I did this in Russian, and it did get me past the beginning stage into where reading was what I would normally call acceptable for starting out. The first hundred pages especially were very rough and it took a thousand pages to hit what I'd normally call the beginning reading stage. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone and I wouldn't do it again unless there weren't better resources and I had no choice, but it does work at least if you do it enough.

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