Sebastian Leitner

The Austrian Sebastian Leitner was born 1919 in Salzburg.

He started to study law in Vienna, but was interrupted in 1938 because of his opposition against the annexation of Austria into the Third Reich. He spent some short time in the Nazi prisons. After that, he moved to Frankfurt (Germany) and intended to finish his studies. He was however recruited by the Wehrmacht and sent to Russia, where he was captured and spent several years in Soviet prisons. Only 1949 he returned to Germany where he became a commentator.

In his early working years he wrote mostly about legal and sociological subjects. In his later years he also included more science oriented topics such as medicine and psychology.
He was also working as a translator and translated the book “Gute Mutter (Good Mother)” by Marie de Sales Chappuis and “Eine Welt zum Verlieben (A world to fall in love with)” by Michel Tournade from French to German.

Sebastian Leitner became widely known for publishing his bestseller “So lernt man lernen (learning to learn)”, which is a handbook of the psychology of learning. In his book he popularized his Leitner System — a spaced repetition system.

He also published another book “So lernt man leben (learning to live)”.

Sebastian Leitner was married to Thea Leitner, an Austrian journalist and book author.
He died in 1989.

How does the Leitner System work?

In his research on the psychology of learning in the early 1970 Sebastian Leitner conducted a series of experiments with the goal to improve his own learning and retention potential.

Leitner used a physical box to store his flashcards. The box contained several compartments. Flashcards, which were new, were put into the first compartment. This compartment contained the flashcards, which were repeated every day. Flashcards that have been correctly answered moved to the second compartment. The repetition interval in the second compartment is set to two days. Flashcards that are successfully answered in the second compartment move to the third one etc.

Thus, the Leitner system can be summarized as follows:

  • Correctly answered flashcards move into the next compartment.
  • The higher the compartment the bigger is the repetition interval (in days).
  • Incorrectly answered flashcards are moved to the first compartment where the repetition cycle starts all over again.
  • The better you know the flashcards the more infrequently you repeat them.

With the Leitner-System it is possible to separate the flashcards into distinct groups of your current retention potential. You spend the most time on learning and repeating the flashcards which you don’t know well.

The Leitner-System is a very simple spaced repetition algorithm. There are many flashcard softwares, which include it. There are however some problems with the Leitner-System, which are discussed in the article: What is spaced repetition?.