(2016-02-15, 12:50 pm)Raschaverak Wrote: I have been meaning to ask, but: according to the official Anki site a card becomes mature when the interval between two shows are greater or equal to 21 days. Now, does that mean that when a card is mature you have actually learned the card, meaning that it will be in your long-term memory, and you can recall it anytime at will? It just seems a bit too quick to me, but whatever. I guess it's just a fun fact
I don't think it's a binary system where a fact goes from unknown to known like a light switch. Any criteria that you use to gauge progress is going to be somewhat arbitrary. But as long as you're consistent about the criteria that you use, I think you can at least tell whether or not you're making improvements. There's certainly no real difference between how well you know a 20-day-interval card and a 21-day-interval card, but longer intervals do correspond to longer retention times in memory, and having more cards with longer intervals indicates some form of progress overall.
In terms of recalling facts any time at will, that seems like a hard metric to get a hold of. For one thing, personally, I always study recognition cards (seeing a word in Japanese and trying to remember what that word means) as opposed to production cards (trying to think up a word based on a meaning). So I'm not actually practicing the skill of recalling words, but practicing understanding meanings. This basically means that I'm practicing building passive vocabulary, not active vocabulary, which results in me often times knowing that I know the word that I was to use, but not being able to think of it (like having it at the tip of my tongue). But, I can almost always understand words that I've studies when I encounter them in native material (at least reading).
And actually, even studying production cards (trying to think up a word based on a meaning) would not perfectly solve the "tip-of-the-tongue problem", because your brain is always using as many tricks and shortcuts as it can, Just the fact that you are flipping through flashcards can be enough to prime your brain into being able to come up with a word that you might not be able to in any other context.