English Tea Break

SRS Basics

Recent studies show that English students with a vocabulary of 3,000 word families will understand 95% of casual conversations. With a vocabulary of 5,000 word families, they will understand 98% of those conversations.

What does this mean? Let's break it down.

First of all, a "word family" includes a base word and all of the words related to it. For example, the word family for the base word, "help", includes:

  • helps
  • helpful
  • helping
  • helped
  • helpless
  • unhelpful

Immersion will teach the patterns for the common beginnings (prefixes) and endings (suffixes) of words. So, if you know the base word, you'll be able to understand every other word in the word family. As a bonus, when you hear a native English speaker make an English mistake by saying something like "My coworker's dishelpfulness (this is not a real word) resulted in him being fired", you can make a good guess as to what the native speaker meant to say. We all make mistakes. 😉

Second, the results of the research study mean great news for you! 3,000 - 5,000 words is not a lot, and with a vocabulary of that size, you'll be able to understand almost everything. Remember—not even natives know everything, so almost everything is a very good goal.

How will you learn 3,000 - 5,000 words? At English Tea Break, we highly suggest using a Spaced-Repetition System. An SRS is a piece of software that optimizes our learning. We'll use it to learn vocabulary as fast as possible, so you can start understanding (almost) everything that you hear during immersion!

Here's why an SRS is so powerful.

The Forgetting Curve

In 1885, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus published a theory about "the forgetting curve", which predicts how quickly we forget something after learning it. The graph looks like this:

Graph depicting Ebbinghaus's Forgetting Curve. Memories fade quickly during the first couple of days and then taper off.

Imagine learning a random piece of information: An octopus has 3 hearts.

If we follow the red line on the graph, your memory of this information is currently at 100%. I could ask you how many hearts an octopus has, and you would say 3, because you just learned about it.

But imagine if I asked you tomorrow. Would you remember the number 3? According to The Forgetting Curve, you would have a 50% chance of remembering it correctly. If I asked you in 2 days, you'd have a 33% chance of remembering. The chance of remembering correctly decreases as days pass.

With an SRS, we can improve our chances of remembering correctly.

The same Forgetting Curve graph but with additional lines added representing memory decline after 1, 2, and 3 repetitions of learning the same piece of information.

On this second graph, the red line is the same; it shows what happens after learning a new piece of information. But the new green lines show what happens when we learn the same piece of information multiple times over multiple days.

Right now, I just told you that octopuses have 3 hearts. If I tell you about octopus hearts again tomorrow, you'll be on the leftmost (the one farthest to the left) green line. Look at the rate of decline for that line! After just 1 repetition of learning the same piece of information, we forget much more slowly. One day later, after learning that information for the second time, we're 80% likely to remember, instead of 50%. After 2 or more repetitions—the other green lines—the decline gets slower and slower.

This is the power of SRS tools. By using them, we get to keep our memories longer.

SRS Usage at ETB

An SRS can be used to learn (and remember) anything! They're commonly used by medical students to memorize anatomy and other medical terms. At English Tea Break, we use it to memorize vocabulary very, very quickly. The idea is to relearn something right before you're about to forget it. This allows us to learn as much as possible with the least amount of effort. SRS tools have algorithms that predict when you are close to forgetting a word, and then they teach you that word again.

With an SRS, it's easy to learn 10-20 new vocabulary words every day, that's 3,650-7,300 words per year! Remember the 3,000-5,000 word goal to understand 95-98% of English conversations? You can get there in half a year, if you're disciplined.

For this reason, at English Tea Break, using an SRS is the only required Booster. All of the others are optional, but for vocabulary, there are no alternatives that are nearly as effective.

The only downside to using an SRS is that it can be a little boring. But if you can handle a little boredom for about 15-30 minutes every day, you will see a massive improvement in your vocabulary very quickly. When I was learning French, I would wake up and immediately study with my SRS, so I wouldn't have to think about it for the rest of the day.

There are many SRS tools, but the best one is called Anki. It's a simple program, but it can be confusing for users. Over the next four lessons, I'll teach you how to use Anki.

In the Gather Tools lesson, I asked you to download Anki. If you haven't done that yet, you can download Anki here. You'll need it for the next lessons where I'll be teaching you how the program works.