






What’s the scientific consensus about Spaced Repetition Apps





It is effective on a variety of academic fields and mediums. 


Spacing effects can be found in:








  • maze learning (Culler 1912)
  • typewriting (Pyle 1915)
  • archery (Lashley 1915)










Encoding – the most important criterion for effective learning



A simple model of memory






  1. Retention intention
    mental representation in memory
  4. Recall – is the retrieval of stored information from memory






What’s more, there are two kinds of encoding.


Two types of encoding



Shallow encoding







Deep encoding










Why creating sentences is so complicated






  1. remember actively the words you are currently learning
  2. remember all the other words in the sentence actively
  3. connect them in a meaningful way
  4. apply all the known grammar rules
  6. remember the pronunciation of all the words in the sentences
  7. pronounce all the said words by using your muscles











Read more about optimizing your language learning here.

















SRS programs are just a white canvas



SRS programs













Quick learning is not about time but about the effort.



  • Hi Bartosz, fantastic site!

    I have two questions:
    1.) When you recommend doing own flashcards based on frequency vocabulary lists – isn’t there a risk, that complete beginner would create sentences, which are completely unnatural or simply rubbish? Whenever I did any card, I always relied on or similar sources with examples created by somebody else. Is Assimil or pre-created decks from Anki users really step in wrong direction at the beginning of learning process? I realize that you have your course related know-how and cannot reveal everything in detail, but I am still somehow obsessed that I am doing everything wrong using aforementioned resources 🙂

    I would like to notice, that somehow I still remember sentences studied this way in Anki, another question is long-term retention and ability to use such vocabulary in meaningful conversation, which I have not tested yet.

    2.) I looked for some scientific papers dealing with method based on memorizing whole excerpts of text, almost everything truly relevant is inaccessible for free, have you ever tried this? I have found one study where were mentioned students who learnt this way, they even won some debate contest in foreign language (I guess it was English) and referred to this memorizing as a way they had built their fluency. I would appreciate your opinion.

    Thank you for your inspiring and truly informative work!

    • Bartosz Czekala

      Hi Martin! Thank you!

      1) Of course, there is. It’s inevitable that initially most of these sentences will be terrible. Effective learning is not about being right from the very beginning. It’s about automating your knowledge. So what that you make 5 mistakes in one sentence. The only thing that matters is that you remembered about 1 grammatical construction and you used it. That increases your chances of using this construction correctly again. Once you automate it, you can move on to the next one, etc.

      You will always remember some sentences. The funny thing is that if you remember full sentences, your knowledge isn’t very well consolidated. Otherwise, it would be generalized – you would be able to recall a given word without any effort (just like in your native tongue) but you wouldn’t remember concrete examples.

      2) I haven’t tried it. It doesn’t make much sense to me. Producing speech is a spontaneous act. In order to do it you need a lot of smaller building blocks, not whole excerpts. I am sure it makes sense when you debate as you learn the whole argument but in the real world that seems pointless.

      Hope that answers your questions!:)

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