I studied for a Master’s degree in Teaching English as a Second language and there is a vast corpus of research.

And the majority of it is there because of the ‘public and perish’ culture of academics.

I tend to believe that the best way to learn any 2nd language is to get into using it in a mainstream fashion. One can get lost in being a student forever.

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I think there are big challenges in the research because learning results depends on motivation, technique used, skill at applying technique, and so on. So an A/B study on techniques to learn tones where one technique involves writing tones on your arm, and other involves learning to tightrope walk, then learning them on a high-wire, is going to skew towards the easy to learn technique because it gives the best results for the average person.

Maybe learning on a tightrope is the best way to learn, but we are unlikely to ever see it come from a study, because so few people will get past the first stage of learning how to do it. And so it is with techniques that are not widely understood or hard to implement. SRS is pretty easy and highly automatable, imaginative memorization requires skill to be developed. So SRS will tend to get good results for most people and gets ranked highly as a learning technique.

I found it’s more useful to consider individual success cases, and compare their situation (in terms of starting point and goal) and then consider what they did and whether you have similar skill and motivation levels to get there.

As a scientist (PhD in Mathematical modelling) and a student of Chinese, then I am always very interested in the different ways in which we can maximise our efforts in studying Chinese, and also very disappointed by the exaggerated or unsubstantiated claims of some.

In my opinion the key things to get right are knowing what works for you, have a clear idea of what you are aiming to achieve and then having the discipline to keep working at the language over a long period of time.