Spaced repetition for teaching two-year olds how to read (Interview)

This father has been using spaced repetition (Anki) to teach his children how to read several years earlier than average.

Michael Nielsen and Gwern¹ tweeted about the interesting case of a reddit user, u/caffeine314 (henceforth dubbed “CoffeePie”), who has been using spaced repetition with his daughter from a very young age.

CoffeePie started using Anki with his daughter when she turned 2, and he continued using Anki with his son starting when he was 1 year 9 months. Here's his daughter’s progress as recounted in January 2020:

My daughter is now about to turn 5 in a few days… She's still going strong -- she uses Anki every single day for English, Hebrew, and Spanish. She's very confident about reading, and moreover, she reads with ... "context". Many kids her age read mechanically, but she reads like a real storyteller, and that comes from her confidence. At the beginning of the school year her teachers said she definitely has the reading ability of fifth grade, and if we're just going by the ability to read and not focus on comprehension of abstract ideas, her reading level may rival an 8th grader.

(From Update on my daughter and Anki)

For reference, fifth graders are usually 10 or 11yo in the US, and 8th graders are usually 13 or 14yo, so this puts her ~5–9 years ahead of the average child.

You can see a video of his daughter reading at 2 years, 2 months later in this post.

CoffeePie has made several posts about their experience but I still had questions so I reached out to interview him back in January.

Interview

Responses have been edited for clarity.

What did you learn in going from using Anki on your daughter to your son? How has it gone with your son?

It's a hard question, because I got so much right. We were so wildly successful that I "cloned" just about every aspect with my son.

A couple of things I can think of:

• With my daughter, I held back on lowercase letters for a long time because I thought it would confuse her, but when I started to introduce lowercase to her, to my extreme shock, she already knew them, down cold!

  • I think what happened is that she learned them just by looking at books, TV, magazines, storefront signs, menus, etc.

  • So when we started with my son, I started doing lower case letters the very day after we finished capital letters.

• Another difference is that we did numbers the very next day after lowercase letters.

  • I really, really thought I was pushing too hard; I had no desire to be a "tiger dad", but he took it with extreme grace. I was ready to stop at any moment, but he was fine.

• Another difference is that our expectations of what the kids were getting out of it had changed, as well. At first, I just really wanted my daughter to get a jump start on reading, but stupid me, I didn't realize there were unintended consequences. A four year old with a 3rd grade reading ability learns about a WHOLE lot more -- it opened up politics for her. She would read our junk mail, and learn who our council member was, who our representative is, the mayor, current events, history, etc. I know it's stupid of me to say, but I underestimated the effect that reading early would have on her breadth of learning.

• One last thing is math. I mentioned that we started numbers early with my son. But we also started arithmetic. He wasn't reading by 3 the way Hannah was, but he knew all his multiplication tables up to 12 by 12. This year we tackled prime factorization, Fibonacci sequences, decimal and place values, mixed, proper, and improper fractions, light algebra, etc. I was much more aggressive with the math, and again, he handled it with grace. I was ready to stop at any moment.

Do you still use Anki with your daughter now as she's gotten older?

We pretty much stopped Anki with my daughter. She hasn't been tested lately, but I'd say her mechanical reading is high school level, easily. Her understanding / comprehension is still advanced, but more aligned with her age. That's not something Anki can help with, easily. Between school and her extracurricular activities, I didn't want to steal more time from her, so we stopped Anki on weekdays. We still do Anki -- Hebrew only -- on non-school nights (weekends and holidays). I felt we were being unfair since she's now in 2nd grade, and is spending significant time on homework and stuff. I wanted her to be a kid.

To clarify- did you stop using Anki with your daughter in large part because you ran out of topics beyond reading/language/math?

I think that's what it amounted to with Hannah. Mechanically, she reads at high school graduate level. But her reading comprehension is more age-appropriate. She's been tested by the BOE, and her reading comprehension in Kindergarten was 4th grade. 

I don't think there's much that Anki can do for reading comprehension. She's missing the type of knowledge that comes with experience. Occasionally we'll come across something that shockingly reminds me she's still 7 -- like not knowing what giving someone a cold shoulder is. She's such a good reader, it's ... a jolt when we come across stuff like that. I think Anki reading ran its course with her.

As for math, she could be better at the times tables. Still knows them better than anyone in her class. But here, again, she needs the kind of info that Anki just can't test, like thinking about 87-8 as being the same problem as 80-1. Oddly enough, a long page of problems is probably more conducive to that sort of thing.

I'm curious if you've seen the experience of Larry Sanger (cofounder of Wikipedia) in teaching his kids to read early. What do you think of that?

I never heard of Larry Sanger, but that is precisely our experience, to a T! Here's Hannah reading Rollie Pollie Ollie at 2 years, 2 months: 

Do you think using Anki ever felt coercive to either of your children?

Hannah went through a phase where she didn't want to do it. We tried to compromise and work through it. Eventually, it became part of her "job" -- we told her that every human has a job, and her job was to do Anki. Other than that, we never had to coerce any of the kids.

Do you have any other interesting or unusual plans for educating your daughter in the next few years?

Interesting question. I feel like a bad parent writing "no", but being such an early reader gave her access to advanced learning at an earlier age. She has such an advantage compared to her classmates, I think I'm going to let her be for awhile. She's a curious person, and she has the tools to follow her own interests, and I trust her. We did start some high school algebra -- I've been showing her the properties of algebras: commutativity, associativity, identity, distributivity, etc. We've been looking at symmetries -- mirror, reflexive, rotational. Highfalutin math topics that don't really require hardcore calculations. But it's always in the context of "hey, I have something interesting I want to show you" rather than "please sit down and work on these problems".

Actually, if YOU have any suggestions for interesting education opportunities, I'm all ears!

Update: video of his son practicing Anki

A few hours after posting this, CoffeePie sent me this video he found of his wife practicing Anki with his son. His son was 2 years 6 months old at the time. The video is very cute.

Closing

That’s everything I’ve asked CoffeePie so far. If you have anything you want me to ask him, or any suggestions of things he could try with his children (who are currently aged ~5 and ~8), let me know and I’ll tell him!

One confounder here is that CoffeePie used to be a physics professor, so some of this effect is likely genetic.

CoffeePie also runs a tutoring business, Brooklyn Tutoring and Test Prep.

I will be posting more about parenting soon:

Thanks to

Priya

(@Prigoose) for turning the draft into a final post after I sat on it for far too long!

• See this post on Twitter

• See this post on Hacker News (Derek Sivers responded!)

1. Gwern’s twitter account is private; the tweet reads:

@michael_nielsen https://reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/8iydl7/using_anki_with_babies_toddlers/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/a9wqau/using_anki_with_babies_toddlers_update/ Neatest spaced repetition use I've seen in a while.