At the end of this, I was far enough along to have rudimentary conversations with French/English speakers, and to rely on those conversations for further learning.

I mention this because because I think the Assimil courses are actually built around some sort of spaced repetition. Doing them daily, I would often come back to some previously-covered topic right about the time it was getting a little fuzzy. I don’t know if this is true, but in any case, I’m now able to carry on conversations with native French speakers for 20 minutes to an hour after less than 2 years of regular (but not hugely intensive) study.

Doesn’t have to be a big thing. For example, simply choosing Anki over another flashcard system that doesn’t use spaced-repetition is already a great start.

Similarly, when I’m learning 20 hanzi a day, I will start revising yesterday’s words. Then in a week I will revise the entire week’s. Then after a month … Each period gets longer, and I seem to get reminded just as I’m forgetting

The correct URL is

http://language101.com/

My apologies. But the incorrect one will work too because we have that URL being re-directed to the right one.

We have focused on making it super easy to use. If anyone says they saw it on this bog, just tell us and we will set you up with a user name and password free.

We need the feedback of people who have used other spaced repetition programs.

Seriously, though, I wasted so much time learning, forgetting and relearning Chinese at the beginning that it was almost enough to bring me to tears when I saw all my old notebooks from years ago filled with page after page of Chinese I’d been studying. Many of the exact same things noted in multiple notebooks that I’d used years apart. What spaced repetition has saved me from is reviewing a concept way too much for the first few weeks, forgetting to keep reviewing it a few months later and then starting over from scratch when I encounter the phrase a year later.

My absolutely favorite way to learn vocabulary is by having lots of really, really understanding speakers of the language who will just bear with me until I understand what they’re saying. That worked great for Japanese when I was in school. Since I was helping them with English too, it turned out to be really mutually beneficial and a way to make some good friends, too. I still wish I’d had anki (and RTK) to help learn the written language, though.

It’s not that I’m against repetition itself. I just am not crazy about a system with demanding behavioral modification requirements.

I’m going to write about this more in the future.

And when was the last time you coded something? Once a coder, always a coder, I say…

(Don’t worry, I don’t mean it as an insult!)

Woah there, cap’n! I was a linguistics major and then Japanese major in school, and I’ve been exclusively employed as a language teacher or language school partner for the past 6 years! The last time I had a programming job was 9 years ago.

I recently organized all my chinese cards from ChinesePod and elsewhere into a single deck with an SRS-based routine for choosing which cards to study. I’ve found that it helps ensure that old words don’t buried while still allowing me to add cards at a rapid pace.