Comment by dkarl
1 day ago
> it turns out its not really a silver bullet
One thing that bothers me about SRS is that it doesn't get enough attention from people who understand the difference between memorization and language acquisition. It gets a ton of attention from people who are doing test prep or who get intrinsic reward from their memorization accomplishments.
Memorization is not my goal — I want to get better at reading Spanish and French — but I find that drilling on vocabulary and example sentences helps a lot. I compare it to using scaffolding in construction. Scaffolding is not a building. Scaffolding doesn't serve any of the purposes a building does. But if you need to build, expand, or refurbish a building, sometimes building scaffolding in and around it can speed things up a hell of a lot.
I wish there were better guidance for using memorization to assist in language learning, but the world seems to be split between people who are satisfied with memorization as their goal (for test prep or intrinsic satisfaction) and people who dismiss memorization entirely because it isn't their goal.
If I weren't already busy enough using Anki to accomplish my own goals, I would almost certainly look into deeply integrating LLM calls into it so that we could e.g. practice writing and speaking with it in a way that is much closer to the kind of immediate feedback loop you get with a tutor.
For now, I make do by having Gemini Flash 2.5 open in a separate window and checking my short answer writing responses with that.