When should we integrate collections?

From: Srdjan
Country: {{{Country}}}
Sent: May 15, 2021
Subject: Separate collection? Shock!

Question:

When do you think we should keep collections separate?

Your recent video suggests we should keep a separate collection for studying a foreign language?

In our community this has been a polarizing issue. The camp favoring separate collections argues that foreign language items will be more frequently forgotten, which will be detrimental to the intervals of all the other items in one's collection.

But the camp that favors keeping everything in the same collection always invoked the authority of Woz and the general principle of putting most of your learning in a single collection for maximal interleaving benefits.

(the question was inspired by this video about separate tab pictures for different collections)

Answer:

You need to balance pros and cons. If you care about long-term learning, integration is superior. In short, if the collection is to become "part of your brain", it will work best as a one body of knowledge.

If you integrate your language collection with the main body of knowledge, items in a foreign language can receive higher difficulty and shorter intervals. The algorithm will cope with such a situation (in theory, the more data you have, the better the optimization).

Benefits of integration:

• interleaving
• pleasure of learning
• many of the advantages of incremental reading show up only in large bodies of knowledge

However, if you have short term goals (e.g. exams), or use collections for entertainment, keeping them separate has many benefits.

Benefits of separation:

• richer toolset, e.g. separate collection statistics (some tools do not work well in subsets)
• portability (you can take your collection on a flashdrive on the move with minimum overhead)
• speed (small collections can even be used on a slow flashdrive)
• synchronization (using DropBox or other services is rather not recommended, but for a small collection it might be easier and safer to use, esp. if knowledge is not of top priority and if reversing to a backup is not a "tragedy")
• size (if a Russian collection contains no videos or other large files, it can be a fraction of the size of the main collection)

As for the video, and a collection for learning Russian:

It is an example of a hobby collection. For example, if you plan to visit Russian speaking countries, you may invest some time in heavy learning, and then, when intensity drops, you can deprioritize, delete, or integrate with your main collection.

If you attend school and learn for exams, you may naturally prefer separate collections. You can focus on specific material for a while at the cost of everything else. This is usually bad for long term learning, but this approach is forced by the learn-test-forget cycle (i.e. the hallmark of wasteful learning at school). In theory, you should be able to formulate your knowledge well, and integrate exam knowledge with your main collection at later time, and at lower priority. You can then incrementally delete all junk and leave only the knowledge you value in long term.

This text and video are used to explain SuperMemo, a pioneer of spaced repetition software since 1987. For other videos see: SuperMemo Video