If you look at top chess players, they can tell you all the moves that were played in a huge amount of historical chess matches. However, they way they get there is not by putting all moves through Anki cards or doing something that would look to a layperson like memorizing. It’s more that for them going through the moves of a game is like reading a highly memorable story with a lot of drama where each move has a lot of meaning. Their brains see so much meaning in the individual moves that they are remembered easily.
I think a lot of times rote memorization is recommended because people don’t see a way to order the information in a way that’s actually meaningful.
Alternatively, I most often see rote memorization recommended by people studying fields that are inherently somewhat organised.
It’s easy to see why anki might work well for something like “memorizing lots of words in kanji” because the work of organising concepts into buckets is already embedded in the kanji and kanji radicals.
It’s less obvious to me how you could, for example, learn optimal riichi mahjong with this type of method; and probably because of that I’ve never seen someone recommend that.
If you look at top chess players, they can tell you all the moves that were played in a huge amount of historical chess matches. However, they way they get there is not by putting all moves through Anki cards or doing something that would look to a layperson like memorizing. It’s more that for them going through the moves of a game is like reading a highly memorable story with a lot of drama where each move has a lot of meaning. Their brains see so much meaning in the individual moves that they are remembered easily.
I think a lot of times rote memorization is recommended because people don’t see a way to order the information in a way that’s actually meaningful.
Alternatively, I most often see rote memorization recommended by people studying fields that are inherently somewhat organised.
It’s easy to see why anki might work well for something like “memorizing lots of words in kanji” because the work of organising concepts into buckets is already embedded in the kanji and kanji radicals.
It’s less obvious to me how you could, for example, learn optimal riichi mahjong with this type of method; and probably because of that I’ve never seen someone recommend that.