Immersive Repetition

Immersive Repetition

The problem with AJATT and Refold: execution, not idea.

Effective as this method is, it has its issues. First is the considerable friction in actually reading native content. Who has time to find intersting and free content (sorry, newspaper articles) and get it in front of them each day? Second is the pain of looking up new words. Have you ever had to flip through a 辞書 to look up a word? Yuck. Talk about a surefire way to lose the will to learn. Even today with copy, paste, and Google Translate, there is still considerable friction. The final issue is Anki itself, and this is the big one. Anki may be the most powerful way to brute force acquire vocabulary, but how do you even use the app? Using the app is not intuitive, the manual is long, and honestly how does anyone know what are the right amount of cards to learn/review each day? Moreover, creating new cards based off the content you are reading is a painstaking, manual process. Sure, there are pre-made decks out there, but that will only get you so far. And finally, there’s the 🐘 in the room: the UI. Most people expect apps to look and feel polished. Anki looks like its from 90s, and would-be users often assume it lacks quality because of its appearance.