Comments on: Reading is a lot like spaced repetition, only better

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 20:22:37 +0000

One thing that could, and probably should, be added to your list of steps to learning a word is fluency, or the ease and speed at which a word is recalled. This matters greatly for proficiency and, if included in your comparison, would further strengthen your conclusion that reading is awesome.

The main difference is of course that, since you see so many more words in total when reading, you get really fast at recalling the high-frequency ones, but this never really happens with SRS. Just barely recalling content words that are rarely used (let’s say the name of a country) is okay, and needing to think before coming up with the right answer is okay, but this clearly doesn’t work for more common words.

As mentioned, this means that reading is even better than you propose here. It could even be argued that a natural frequency distribution is preferred because seeing words you know well is only bad if just barely being able to recall them on a test is the goal. If reading proficiency is the goal, seeing words you know well in context, even if we ignore the benefits of seeing them in different contexts, grammatical patterns, etc., is still valuable because it speeds up the processing of the most common words.

By: Fen Ma

Fen Ma — Sun, 24 Feb 2019 14:52:15 +0000

I don’t totally understand this reading vs SRS. Spaced repetition is one of many tools to support my learning, reading is doing and using the language. Much more the real thing. So I always have to read and cannot do SRS in isolation, but always have to see it in the context of other learning. I see SRC less as an independent learning, but more as an organization of learning to sort out what I have to review or learn again and to take track of knowledge. So the question is more, how to allocate time, to use the extra 5 minutes. Perhaps with ESCAPE, i’ll try it.

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Sat, 23 Feb 2019 18:38:13 +0000

In reply to pdwalker. Sounds good! Let me know what you think about it after you've tried it.

By: pdwalker

pdwalker — Sat, 23 Feb 2019 17:24:33 +0000

Ok, it’s 2am and you’ve caught my attention with wordswing.

I think I shall spend some more time on it tomorrow.

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 11:28:49 +0000

In reply to Neema. I actually wrote an article specifically about being overwhelmed by vocabulary! Check it out: https://www.hackingchinese.com/overcoming-problem-many-chinese-words-learn/

By: fundaskills

fundaskills — Fri, 22 Feb 2019 11:22:56 +0000

Such an informative blog on reading chinese that will help students in an enormous way, Thanks to the author who took Mandarin serious and interesting.

By: Neema

Neema — Wed, 20 Feb 2019 06:28:20 +0000

Olle, thank you for this wonderful treasure trove of a website, and thank both you and Kevin for the text games at WordSwing. I’ve enjoyed them quite a bit, and indeed they add quite some flavor to my learning and helped broaden my vocabulary :).

I actually had a question for you, Olle, regarding the e-mail you sent to introduce this article (and would be happy to hear Kevin’s thoughts too if he’s lurking):

“””
What’s your take on this? Are you sacrificing reading and listening because you feel you have to go through a pile of flashcards? I know there have been periods where I have felt like that, but I’m curious what you think!
“””

Do you think you have a “priority” for what things you need to study? For me, I often have about 2 hours of time spread throughout the day (listening to podcasts or reading flashcards during my commute, some phone-reading during lunch, study time at night)… but I always feel pressure to get the flashcards finished before getting to sleep. “If I don’t, there will be a lot more tomorrow, etc etc.” So even if I’d rather get a bit further in a WordSwing game or in a textbook lesson, I feel like for my flashcard-sanity I need to “pay that down” (even though it is fun most of the time :).

And a related question: how did you handle periods where you felt overwhelmed by flashcards? (Cut off new cards for a while? Delete cards? Maybe there’s already an article on this somewhere 🙂