Andy Matuschak
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Implicit practice - a sight reading parable
🕑 Added 2022-04-01 05:24:22 +0000 UTCThe best scientists, entrepreneurs, and engineers I know pour themselves into their work. You couldn’t capture their working hours on a timecard. Their creative gears turn restlessly, and insights produced in the shower or on walking conversations are no less valuable than those produced at the office. Yet I’ve noticed that top knowledge workers relate to their skills quite differently than top athletes and performing artists do.
Competitive athletes, musicians, and dancers work tirelessly—often with a stable of coaches—to assess, develop, and maintain the core skills of their disciplines. They watch tape of themselves. They measure their performance at microtasks intended to isolate specific core skills. Decades into their career, they still practice scales, or perform plyometric exercises, or whatever else they need to do to maintain top performance.
By contrast, knowledge worker friends will sometimes tell me about studying a new programming language, or brushing up on their statistics with a tutor. But I notice that these “training” efforts are usually temporary and focused on subject matter, rather than on “core skills” analogous to those an athlete or performing artist might refine daily. It’s rare that a knowledge worker tells me about a diligent ongoing training program to improve their skills at reading difficult texts, or synthesizing insights, or sharpening their research questions.
In his book summarizing a career spent studying deliberate practice and elite performance, K. Anders Ericsson suggests[1] that we shouldn’t be surprised by the omission. The core skills of tennis and ballet have been systematically characterized; they can be easily and objectively assessed; for each skill, we know practice activities which can can improve performance. The same can’t be said (yet) for the skills of a scientist, or a startup founder.
But I don’t think this is the whole story. When I talk to serious knowledge workers about this disparity between themselves and athletes, I’ll often hear a response which sounds like: “I do practice the skills you’re talking about, every day, as part of my work. I’m reading memos and synthesizing insights and formulating questions all the time.” The implied belief is that they practice these skills implicitly, as part of their routine work—so they don’t need the dedicated assessment and development used in these other fields.
Ericsson and co-authors tackle this objection in another paper[2]:
Although work activities offer some opportunities for learning, they are far from optimal. In contrast, deliberate practice would allow for repeated experiences in which the individual can attend to the critical aspects of the situation and incrementally improve her or his performance in response to knowledge of results, feedback, or both from a teacher. … During a 3-hr baseball game, a batter may get only 5-15 pitches (perhaps one or two relevant to a particular weakness), whereas during optimal practice of the same duration, a batter working with a dedicated pitcher has several hundred batting opportunities, where this weakness can be systematically explored … In contrast to play, deliberate practice is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance. Specific tasks are invented to overcome weaknesses, and performance is carefully monitored to provide cues for ways to improve it further.
I’ve learned (the hard way) this past year that there’s a type of situation in which implicit practice will often fail—and fail invisibly. I hope this story might help you spot places where a similar pattern occurs in your life.
A sight reading parable
I’ve been playing piano since I was eight years old. Unfortunately, I didn’t take the instrument seriously until I was a teenager, and a vocal music obsession diverted my musical attention for much of my adult life. So I don’t have the fluency one might hope for after a couple decades. Still, I can learn and perform “early advanced” classical repertoire, and I take great joy in my time at the piano.
Last year, I discovered that despite the efforts of multiple teachers and thousands of hours at the piano, a gaping—yet invisible—hole in my skills has been seriously handicapping my progress, and my enjoyment. My repertoire and technical skills may have been those of a modestly experienced amateur, but until I discovered this problem and started working on it deliberately, my sight reading skills were those of a beginner perhaps three years into playing.
Sight reading is the skill of picking up and performing a piece of music you’ve never seen before, with little preparation or practice. By contrast, “studying” a piece is like reading by slowly sounding out a piece of literature written in a foreign language, in a foreign alphabet. I’d had that experience in high school, translating Homer’s epics from ancient Greek. For two years, I’d only ever experienced Greek at the pace of two lines of verse per hour of study. Then we picked up the New Testament, and for the first time I had the experience of “sight reading” Greek: the language was simple enough that I could translate it on the fly. (It is to the advantage of a proselytory text to use inclusive language!) What a joyful, freeing feeling that was! So utterly different from the plodding experience of cross-indexing multiple scholarly references to understand each phrase.
I didn’t notice that I was always “studying” but never “reading” as a pianist, because no student expects to be able to sight read challenging piano music. Such pieces require weeks or months of study—not to read the notes off the page, but to practice difficult physical motions, to interpret the movement of many voices, and so on.
With piano, my teachers and I focused on studying repertoire “at my learning edge.” Each of these pieces would take months to learn. Almost all the time with those pieces was spent on interpretation and technique. After the first few sessions, I had the score memorized, so I didn’t need to read it anymore. But that meant that in a whole year, I’d only read a few pages of new music! Imagine learning to read with only a few pages of prose per year. No wonder I read music so slowly.
Unfortunately, this situation only made itself worse. As the pieces I learned became more musically challenging, each piece took longer to learn, which further reduced the amount of new music I would read each year. My poor sight reading skills made new pieces take even longer to learn: because I couldn’t read most of that music in real-time, I’d need to memorize passages before I could practice them. So each year, I’d read fewer bars of more difficult music, and atrophy still further in sight reading, and so on, in a downward spiral. Thus poor sight reading skills resulted in fewer implicit opportunities to develop sight reading skills. An awful feedback loop!
Emotionally, my poor sight reading skills gave rise to a powerful feeling of scarcity in my piano experience. Whenever I’d start a new piece, I knew that I’d have to study for months before I could play it. And I knew that I could only study a few new pieces per year. So choosing a piece to study felt like a high-stakes decision. I couldn’t respond to impulses I felt each time I sat down to the piano: I’d have to stick with one piece for a long time. That weightiness made piano less joyful.
I couldn’t quite articulate this, but I really wanted to be able to sit down and just play new music on a whim. Of course, I understood that the “at-level” pieces I was studying were quite difficult, so I couldn’t play those spontaneously. But even when I chose pieces which seemed much easier, I still couldn’t play them on the spot. These simpler pieces might take five sessions of practice instead of fifty, but they still felt like “sounding out the words” rather than “reading”. And I felt that if I couldn’t play even these easier pieces spontaneously, there was no point: I’d just be taking time away from the “at-level” pieces which would develop me as a pianist.
The moral here is that implicit practice wasn’t enough to improve my poor sight reading skills. New pieces took months to learn, but my teachers didn’t notice a problem because such pieces should be hard, should take a long time… though in hindsight perhaps not that long. The real problem was that all music took me quite a long time to learn, even music at a level I might have studied years earlier. But I never worked on “easier” music like that with a teacher, so no expert ever had the opportunity to notice the problem.
The irony in this situation is that piano is one of the classic domains which expertise researchers reference when discussing deliberate practice. The skills are well characterized and readily assessed; we have practice methods for improving performance at each skill at all levels; we have well-known teaching practices; etc. In fact, it was this kind of formal structure which finally identified my sight reading as a problem. A potential new piano teacher wanted me to sketch my abilities using the rubric of the Royal Conservatory of Music’s syllabus, which helpfully delimits “levels” for various skills, and provides learning resources for each. I measured myself at level 8 or 9 along each axis—except for sight reading, which was around level 3. Oops.
I didn’t grasp right away how important that gap was. I thought, almost as a matter of hygiene: well, maybe I should bring that straggling skill up to the level of the others. So I bought some sight reading workbooks. These books provide snippets of pieces organized by difficulty. The idea is that you find an appropriate “starting place”, simple enough to sight read, then you read a page or two of new music each day. The music slowly becomes more complex over time, much like graded reading books for children. I made progress rapidly, but that meant playing little eight-bar snippets of simple folk songs—so the growth didn’t feel terribly profound.
A few months into this process, I saw a YouTube video suggesting that pianists practice sight reading by using books which compile “easy” arrangements of music they enjoy. I purchased a book of Disney music intended for beginners, and—embarrassing as it sounds—that book gave me one of the most profound musical experiences of my life. The night it arrived, I sat down to the piano and opened to the first page. I played the first piece, then the next, then the next, straight through, until I reached the end of the book, over 200 pages in a single night. I read more music in that one night than I’d played in the prior decade of cumulative practice. After years of pieces which required weeks of study before they could really be played, it was absolutely exhilarating to play dozens of beloved songs on the spot. The arrangements were simple, but that didn’t matter. In some strange way, these arrangements made me feel more like a pianist than the difficult Chopin pieces I’d been studying. They ended the feeling of scarcity I hadn’t recognized; they gave me a feeling of agency I didn’t know I’d been missing. I’ve practiced sight reading daily for much of the past year, and the progress continues to feel deeply rewarding.
Many musicians reading this will suggest that my experience was quite unlucky. I could have avoided this problem if I’d had teachers with a broader focus, or if I’d studied traditions like jazz which rely on improvisation and session play. But I feel I got lucky in this situation. My weak skill happened to be in a domain amenable to deliberate practice. It was easy to accidentally stumble into an assessment which revealed the problem. And once the problem was identified, it was easy to make rapid progress. But my weakness could have been hiding instead in a much less well-defined domain, one without properties so friendly to deliberate practice.
When I told this story to Rob Ochshorn, he asked: are there other situations like this lurking in my life? Are there other weak skills, like sight reading, which have caused similarly harmful feedback loops? Skills which might feel rewarding in the same way to practice at an embarrassingly simplified level?
A design parable
I realized in that conversation that another much more important skill has fallen into the same spiral for me: the visual practices of user interface design. Just as my sight reading fell behind because I focused on learning pieces “at my learning edge”, this design skill never got a chance to grow because my design projects have always focused on conceptually difficult, and often novel, interaction designs.
Many young designers hone their skills by composing iteration after iteration of layouts in conceptually “simple” UIs—a sign-up screen, a list of search results, a news feed. With ample (if perhaps mundane) experience, they gain a deep intimacy with common patterns which allows them to do something like “sight reading” with a new interface: to converge spontaneously and in near-real-time to high-quality layouts.
But I came to design sideways, as an engineer, so my Apple projects were unusual concepts: iOS’s 3D page curl, novel multi-touch gesture interactions, physics-based UI animations, the gyroscope-driven 3D parallax effects, etc. At Khan Academy, I worked on designs like interactive number block manipulatives, an illustrated math “platformer” game, and a semi-synchronous peer learning environment. These projects were all quite difficult conceptually, so each one took many months. My collaborators and I would spend some of that time on the visual elements of the interface designs, sure, but each required us to focus mostly on challenging conceptual issues. This situation parallels “at-level” piano pieces, which took months of focus on technique and interpretation, but whose scores I’d no longer need to read after a few sessions. I’ve spent many years working as a designer, but I’ve laid out only a handful of interfaces—just as I’d spent many years learning advanced piano repertoire, only reading a handful of pages each year.
I can see now that my weak visual skills for interface design have created a feeling of scarcity similar to the one I felt at the piano. Interface ideas take me a long time to refine, so I feel like I need to choose projects carefully—I’ll only get to flesh out a handful each year, just as I’d only get to choose a few piano pieces to play each year. As my career has progressed, I’ve taken on more and more challenging design projects, which has generally meant that I design fewer and fewer new interfaces in a given year. But I’ve been (unintentionally) relying on implicit practice to develop my visual skills for interface design, and so I’ve been caught in a cycle: my slow visual design skills lead to fewer opportunities for implicit practice, which in turn leaves those skills further and further behind my “learning edge.”
I escaped this cycle in piano with deliberate practice. That’s trickier to arrange in design: the skills aren’t as well characterized; assessment is much more challenging; we don’t have strong practice methods. But I’ve had some promising experiences by constructing explicit practice routines for myself. I brainstormed a big list of software which I wish existed. Then I chose a few examples which I felt required no unusual representations, no unusual conceptual or interaction models. These examples could just use the standard platform controls, in standard layouts. Then I designed visual layouts mocking up these apps.
The experience felt much like playing “beginner” arrangements of Disney music. On the one hand, the exercise felt sort of “beneath me”: shallow, hyper-simplified. Not something I’d want to share with others. But on the other hand, I felt the same exhilarating taste of fluency and spontaneity. Not all interfaces must take months to design—look, I can come up with a software idea and design an interface for it on the spot! What freedom.
I can feel clearly that this skill is much more difficult to develop than sight reading. It’s harder to assess my own work; it’s less clear what I should work on next, or how to fix problems. But I’m excited at the progress, and excited to continue explicit practice in this vein.
With these two stories under my belt, I’ve experienced the limitations of implicit practice quite viscerally. The most important lesson for me has been that what’s hard about developing these skills is not figuring out how to practice or generating the right kind of feedback, but rather identifying the skills which must be improved in the first place. I’m now on the lookout for other skills I’ve neglected which have followed a similar pattern. I imagine there are other important patterns of atrophied skills which I’ve not yet identified—I’ll be searching for those, too.
[1] See his book Peak (2016) with Robert Pool, p. 98.
[2] Ericsson et al. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. See page 368.
Comments
Martin Bernstorff
Hi Adam! Extremely intriguing thoughts! As Andy noted, I'd also really enjoy if you have any notes on your experience while trying a practice like this :-)
Parker
Meditation! Explicitly practicing noticing stress and choosing not to get stressed. Those who are free from stress/know how to calm on the spot are called "enlightened". Really, it's just an explicit skill that we all can practice with the correct instructions.
Oshyan Greene
Very late to a reply on this! I completely understand your feelings here. I would love to see any of this stuff if you ever change your mind. In the meantime I'm going to do my best to put some of *my* ideas and terrible designs out in the world and hope that inspires you and/or others like you to feel a little more bold to do so. 😁
Andy Matuschak
This is super interesting, Eric. Thank you for sharing! This jives with some of my piano practice orchestration experiences. In a future project I'd really like to explore what sort of scheduling primitives seem best-suited to this sort of activity.
Eric 'Siggy'
Hi Andy—just noticed your second comment & question! I like the "programmable attention" concept handle! It's been ringing in my head all week—a nice way of putting one's thumb on that aspect of SRS's benefit. As for mathematical practice: yes, I find value in repeating the same exercises (typically proofs, rather than numerical computations). I feel like my experience validates Michael Nelsons' notion (from his popular essay at http://augmentingcognition.com/ltm.html) that math involves more memory than we give it credit for. The popular assumption seems to be that you aren't really doing math unless you're doing "new problems" and not relying on memory. The SRS paradigm, by contrast, suggests that ~80% of my time should be spend reviewing and reinforcing old problems so my skill does not decay. It's a different perspective. One upside is that it builds confidence. It keeps most of my mathematical effort within the "flow" zone, so I don't get discouraged as easily, and look forward to my whiteboarding sessions—including the harder parts, when I dive into new material. The obvious fear is rote memorization. My experience, though, is that each time I do a proof, it gives me an opportunity to think about more deeply: to recognize *why* we prove such-and-such an inequality before using such-and-such an identity to cinch the case. Sometimes this leads me to create regular flash cards to pin down key insights (like, say, a graphic pointing out how such-and-such a polynomial bound on e^x is tighter for x > 0, while such-and-such a bound is tighter for x < 0). I think my experience mirrors what I've heard of people who memorize famous chess games. Sure, memorizing a sequence of moves by rote won't help you play your own games. But nobody does that, because it's almost impossible. Instead, the only way to remember many, long games is to *understand why* each move was made—and semantic encodings like that have a better chance of generalizing. The general principle here seems to be that "rote memorization doesn't exist at scale:" any time we learn a large number of things (ex. sentences in a foreign language), we automatically learn general, semantic knowledge to cope with the scale of it all. In that sense, understanding how proofs I've picked up really work in detail ought to generalize to building my ability to be creative. All I can say for sure is that it definitely helps me gain greater fluidity-of-reasoning with concepts than flash cards alone have been able to (even though I invest a lot of effort in creating image-heavy, insight-heavy flash cards that hit ideas from multiple angles). The most tangible benefit I can see is that it seems to be giving me fluidity with certain facts that recur in proofs. It breathes life into definitions: knowing that a subgroup is a subset of a group that is closed under an operation and inverses is fine (makes for a fine Anki card), but periodically doing a few proofs that such-and-such a subset is a subgroup under different circumstances helps make the idea much more fluid. Knowing the statement of a No Free Lunch theorem is swell, but having a proof of one in my back pocket makes it more tangible (almost 3D). Likewise, memorizing a proof that 1 + x <= e^x exercises certain calculus facts. But then using that inequality result to further prove that e^x <= 1/(1-x) (for x < 1) gives you a view of that result from the "client" side, so to speak (a "user" of the result). Pretty soon, 1 + x <= e^x starts to feel less like a complex piece of arcana, and more like a familiar, foundational fact: "oh yeah, that super important inequality so many other things are derived from." And so on for the geometric series (which shows up over and over in computer science proofs), etc. Overall it feels much like how reading/listening in a target language builds fluid comfort with common vocab and grammar—except I'm scheduling it, rather than relying on natural repetition in the wild. All that said, I've only been doing full, scheduled proofs (rather than flash cards with atomic facts or "so-short-you-can-do-it-in-your-head" proofs) for a few months. An open question is how well it will scale. It's clear I can maintain this up to a few hundred exercises—but I'm not sure what will happen once I've built up a library of thousands. Will I have to start suspending some as the intervals get too large to support long-form, procedural performances? Or will SRS-style scheduling still work? We shall see!
Andy Matuschak
This is so intensely interesting, Adam. Thank you for sharing! I can definitely empathize. I've been building software for 20+ years, but I've only ever done the "planning a project" thing, say, a couple dozen times. I can really believe that doing this kind of practice would help. Incidentally, and not withstanding my refusal to do so in the comment above, I bet a lot of people would really enjoy seeing any notes you might care to share on your experiences doing that kind of practice.
Andy Matuschak
Thanks for the kind words and for your generous support, Malcolm! I've gotten a lot out of reading your reflections on similar topics, too. 🙇♂️ I think you're right that a bottlenecking workshop would be useful for lots of people, but I have a strong allergy to multi-person video chat events, so I'll have to beg off. If you'd like to host such a thing, I'd love to hear about it!
Andy Matuschak
Thank you for the kind words, Oshyan! Your request for sharing the list and my design work is totally reasonable, but I notice that I feel a strong instinct not to. I think there's a part of me that's very self-conscious about my weak design skills, and feels threatened by the prospect of this work being shared. I worry that if I did this, it would make me feel less comfortable engaging in the practice. Maybe in the future, as my feelings about this change…
Andy Matuschak
https://notes.andymatuschak.org/Programmable_attention I'm also curious how this works for mathematical exercises for you! Once you've solved one once, is there value for you in solving it again? Or do you have to wait quite a while?
Andy Matuschak
This is really fascinating: thank you for this thoughtful message! I love the way that you're using these systems to orchestrate all kinds of tasks, complete with feedback loop. I've been calling this broader framing "programmable attention", and I really think you're right that a central benefit is constant orchestration overhead, as you suggest here: "If I have to *decide what to practice* before sitting down to make progress, then I find simply won't sit down at all (except in a rare surge of energy every few weeks or months or—meaninglessly—years). Anki is a force multiplier, because I can create new cards in those natural "surges" of curiosity, but then practice them every day."
Andy Matuschak
These were new to me, thank you! Yes, this dichotomy seems to manifest in a few places. Flow vs. deliberate practice seems to be another angle on the same, per Ericsson: flow is pleasurable and often involved in directly useful applications, but deliberate practice is generally regarded as unpleasant and produces no output other than skill improvement.
Hi Andy, I've been turning over the idea of intentional practice for (engineering) leadership. I had a similar/adjacent problem to your sight-seeing challenge: I was unable to conceive of how I could practice at leadership without "doing it live"/in a work setting _or_ without recruiting a role-playing partner[1]. The turn for my "practice" was realizing a one common task I struggled with was as repeatable and atomic[2] as scales are for music: Turning a project that has some clarity but clearly lacks a lot of details into enough of a plan that one can consider how to execute it is a classic "unreasonably difficult even when you account for how difficult it is" problem for software teams, as you likely know from experience. It turns out that all one needs to _practice_ at it is available on the marketing websites of the numerous startups and product companies out in the world. Any number of feature or pricing pages are sufficiently interesting to ask yourself "how would I start building this?" and do a 15-60 minute exercise of breaking it down, thinking about scenarios, discovering risks and dependencies, laying out a plan, and even thinking out the high-level technical design. Much like working from a Disney songbook, this is even easier if you start from products you already know. Most developers know GitHub's features pretty well, so starting from their page on [Pull Requests](https://github.com/features/code-review) is a familiar starting point that lets one work on the mechanics of thinking holistically and then down to details about how to build a wholly new capability or feature into a product. It seems like this epiphany allowed me to move from a "well I guess this struggle bus is going to limit my growth" mindset to "I can get as good as I want at this by doing the reps" perspective, much like your sight reading journey. [1] I suspect role-playing management scenarios is half of what leadership coaches do? [2] Atomic in the sense that you can "return to square one" at your own pace without imposing on anyone else. To carry the metaphor, practice sessions are more atomic than rehearsals and performances.
Malcolm Ocean
Whoa! This is really cool. It makes me think it would be neat to have an online event that walks people through a process of figuring out what might be bottlenecking their skills in various domains. Maybe an interintellect salon or something like that! I'd be happy to help with hosting this if you're interested in doing it. (Also I've been consistently impressed by what you're doing here and so I jumped up a contribution tier 🔥)
Oshyan Greene
Although I'm not a piano player, this was a very relatable story! My coach frequently reminds me of the value of *explicit*, intentional practice, even with things I take for granted. And yet I have resistance to it, focusing more often on the "boring"/tedious aspects. So I appreciate both that you are taking on the practice work with enthusiasm, and that you well described some of the joy that can *also* come from it. I'm also curious about this "big list of software which I wish existed" and the "few examples which I felt required no unusual representations, no unusual conceptual or interaction models". Might you share either the entire list, a part of it, and/or perhaps some of the design sketches? I know you felt they weren't something you would want to share, but I am absolutely interested in what output *at this level* looks like, and more especially in the specific tools *you* wish existed in the world. I have my own such lists (and my ultra simple design sketches, though I'm not a designer), but knowing your areas of focus I'm quite curious about yours. Thanks as always for sharing your process and journey in interesting and insightful ways!
Eric 'Siggy'
Andy, Boy do I resonate with this post! I've been going through much the same epiphany as you for the last few months. - I am living the exact same trajectory on the piano: love to play my memorized Rachmaninoff, but trying to pick up new material—even the easiest of Mozart's sonatas—leaves me stuck at a snail's pace. - I have about 12,000 Anki cards for Spanish (build over 5 years), but still can't really watch TV worth beans, read comfortably or converse above a child's level. - A few thousand computing & mathematics cards have clearly done wonders for my professional development (it's clear I learn more with spaced repetition as a professional than I would by relying on "implicit practice" for everything)—but there really is no field that I am comfortable, say, writing novel mathematical proofs in. To say nothing of "invisible" skill failures—like getting better at research management or proposal writing skills, which one normally advances in just by doing a handful of novel projects each year. Personally, the two insights that have been a breakthrough for me this year are 1. Using Anki to schedule (non-atomic) performance practice, and 2. Don't be afraid to practice "embarassingly easy" things over and over to build up a repertoire of fluency. ——— (1) surprises me because I've said for years that SRS is good for declarative fact/concept/intuition building, but not for **procedural memory** tasks (like a piano performance). The closest we can get to the latter, I though, is a tiny bit of context (ex. a 4-5 word sentence fragment for language learning with a nice text-to-speech clip for audio reinforcement). The trick to scheduling performances in Anki, I've found, is to **bury** cards when a performance is rough. For example, say a Beethoven piece comes up that I haven't played in 2 months. I can pay it, but it's **very rough**. Needs practice. So I might bury the card two or three days in a row, so I can practice it smooth—and only then will I hit "good." (I also configure the deck so that intervals don't grow unless I hit "easy," but I digress). This has been revolutionary, because it allow me to ascend to the same kind of superhuman practice habit that SRS allows in other areas: because it spoon-feeds me material that is not too hard, but not too easy, Anki always has a degree of "flow" (to borrow a term from video game design), and thus is the *only* skill-building habit that I can maintain on a daily basis over a scale of years (rather than weeks or months). If I have to *decide what to practice* before sitting down to make progress, then I find simply won't sit down at all (except in a rare surge of energy every few weeks or months or—meaninglessly—years). Anki is a force multiplier, because I can create new cards in those natural "surges" of curiosity, but then practice them every day. ——— (2) I picked up from the language learning community, when I realized that some people interpret "comprehensible input" much like you describe sight reading practice: practicing a large repertoire of easy material over and over. Before this, I had thought that to reach that magical "98% vocab mastery" so often sighted as a prerequisite for extensive reading, I had to master 98% of common Spanish vocabulary (for example) by brute force. Now I realize that no, I should be mastering individual texts and videos that feel far "below my level," and then *reviewing them* regularly. At the beginner & intermediate level, comprehensible input is created, not found. - I now spend much of my Anki time each day reading easy texts in Ancient Greek and watching easy videos in Spanish—as scheduled by the app. "New cards" in this paradigm are text/video/audio I don't yet have the vocabulary to understand: the task for those is to keep creating flash cards from them bit by and burying them (so they appear the next day) until they are comprehensible, at which point they can exit the learning phase and become part of the regular review schedule. This is what I mean by "creating" comprehensible input (I suppose it has something in common with incremental reading). - On the professional side, I have extended this to **proof writing** and mathematical **exercises,** chosen to align with my current research projects at work (and to exercise definitions/theorems that I have previously memorized with a traditional Anki approach). This allows me to build up my own training repertoire over time, even when the skills in play are not *extremely* well characterized (though yes, I still rely on exercises from mathematical textbooks). It's been empowering. I already had SRS of declarative knowledge as a "secret weapon," giving me a way to consciously practice and grow my professional skill beyond implicit practice. But adding longer-form performance exercises, scheduled by an app to keep me in the "flow" zone, feels like a new secret power. Sight-reading for piano is the natural next domain for me to apply this strategy to...
Jarrett Ye
Maybe it is off topic, I associate to the Extensive Reading and Intensive Reading in second language acquisition. Extensive Reading provides plenty of comprehensive input for acquisition. It is similar to the practice of sight reading.
