> You know what is more effective than spaced repitition? Reading, listening, and doing to the thing you are interested in.
No, they are not more effective, they are less effective. The fact that they are less effective is the only reason that people do spaced repetition. It takes less time to learn a fact if you optimize for the way memory works. Reading, listening, and doing the thing you are interested in builds memory just like spaced repetition does, just in a haphazard, random way.
> note that reading/doing something is itself spaced repititon.
But worse. There are plenty of things that simply can't be learned by spaced repetition because nobody has come up with a good way to do them, and/or they are physical. But some facts simply have to be memorized, and when doing the thing you will have to recall them. You can either look them up every time you have to use them, and a) forget completely if there's too large a gap between incidents of having to look a thing up, or b) spend all day studying something that you'll completely forget in a week. Spaced repetition is about using a timing trick to make those facts reflexive and long-lasting.
When reading/listening and doing you encounter thousands of facts/words/whatever in the same amount of time spaced repetition will give you tens. If you are a complete beginner spaced repetition does well, but that is misleading - it does well in the easy to study situation of someone who knows nothing and doesn't examine the much harder to study place where someone knows a little something where you spend most of your time.
If you know nothing, spaced repetition can get you over that initial hump well. However I maintain that you quickly reach a point where you are beyond that and then space repetition is less useful than other courses of study in general. Use well it can still be a supplement to other study methods, but those others should be the priority.
No, they are not more effective, they are less effective. The fact that they are less effective is the only reason that people do spaced repetition. It takes less time to learn a fact if you optimize for the way memory works. Reading, listening, and doing the thing you are interested in builds memory just like spaced repetition does, just in a haphazard, random way.
> note that reading/doing something is itself spaced repititon.
But worse. There are plenty of things that simply can't be learned by spaced repetition because nobody has come up with a good way to do them, and/or they are physical. But some facts simply have to be memorized, and when doing the thing you will have to recall them. You can either look them up every time you have to use them, and a) forget completely if there's too large a gap between incidents of having to look a thing up, or b) spend all day studying something that you'll completely forget in a week. Spaced repetition is about using a timing trick to make those facts reflexive and long-lasting.