So lately I've been cheating on my Anki reps.

I know it sounds bad, but it feels so right. I've been doing it on both RTK and the Tae Kim MCD deck that I've gone through about a month ago. I don't do it when I completely miss something, but sometimes I align the radicals the wrong way for RTK, and I just shrug and press the good button anyway (I don't do this if it puts the Kanji more than a month back, but otherwise it's all fair game)

If I don't like a Kanji because it's annoying me, I do the same thing. (I actually don't do this anymore since I know them all well enough now that I don't have any Kanji anymore that are actually "hard" or that I struggle with)

As for Tae Kim, I take an even more leisurely approach. If I can fill the MCD, even if I have no idea what the sentence means, I consider that correct. Sometimes I even fill it out wrong and press the "good" button because I still feel I got the general gist of it.

Even though I do these things, I feel like I'm getting better and better (and I don't think it's a false sense either, since I understand more and more of everything I'm reading)

Do you guys cheat? Or do you think what I'm doing is stupid? I mean, I could just delete the "hard" cards, but I've found that even with this way of cheating, I'm somehow learning something from the cards. Seeing them again and again, even if spaced farther and farther apart, still sometimes anchors them in my brain somehow and I suddenly know them. It's kinda disturbing.

I cheat too~

Often I'll get a card wrong only to look at the answer and say "Well if I'd been thinking in THIS direction I would have gotten it right. I know this word..."
I figure I'll see it again later anyway in the wide world of using Japanese and I'm too busy to have my daily reviews build up any more. If you're using the language regularly I think you'll be fine. Leave it up to the feeling.. if you feel you'll be fine you'll probably be fine!

Anyway. I cheat and I turned out fine so.. as long as you're careful about it I think you'll be fine! It smooths the process out a bit and saves you from a ludicrous amount of reviews.

Sometimes I hit hard or okay (if it's already been failed in the same review session) when I probably should have failed it. Then again, they would be showing up the following day, so it's probably not all that much to too much spend extra time on them that day. Though if one turns out to be "oh, oh course; I knew it was that!" then I would fail it with the knowledge that because it was a stupid mistake, next time it comes around it will be nailed with the force of a thousand　祭り pallbearers.

There was one time I did a "Superclick" nearing the end of a particularly heavy RtK Anki review session. Around 800 deep in a 1100 card review and decided to mash the mouse click over the "hard" button, to postpone some of the cards for the next day or four.

[aside]How long have you done RtK for? Now that I'm finished, to be honest I don't think getting the "primitive" order mixed up happens at all. Sometimes I can't think of the kanji, or write the incorrect one down for the reading, but the actual innards of the kanji are usually pretty solid. Maybe it might be beneficial to re-read through some of the chapter introductions in RtK, as you may find (pretty sure it was in RtK- maybe I read it somewhere else though) that Heisig explains in a good way about how certain "radicals" will always be on a certain side, or hemisphere of a given kanji (aside one or two, which he makes a point of when you come across them). [/aside]

Er... back on topic. Whether or not "Cheating" in the past has make an impact on my current learning/retention during revision would probably be best left to current statistics, in a "clean" deck. This afternoon's Core 2000 review, I can provide numbers:

Core 2000 Japanese Vocabulary

Cards/day:
414
Time/day:
2.0h

Correct today:
91.8% (380 out of 414)

Results vary for individuals, but I feel that whether or not you "cheat" is the lesser important involved element at play to whether or not you are giving yourself a fair assessment of your abilities... which is a little circular, given the fact that using Anki as intended, providing accurate and entirely honest feedback, is probably the easiest way to accurately quantify your retention, which in turn provides a corollary for your knowledge base of a given subject, by taking into account the... oh no, I've gone cross-eyed.

A Catch-22 maybe?

I love my deck to much to cheat. :p

Also, my reviews (usually less than 100 reviews a day) takes only 15-20 minutes to go through, so there is no problem. The only cheating I've done is to not add cards, but that doesn't happen often. My Anki cards usually reminds me of wherever I got the sentence, so reviewing is kind of a "nostalgia trip" for me.

Today
Cards: 69 due + 10 new
Reviews: 87
Time: 16.3m
(I add between 10 and 20 new cards in term time - I can't allow the review number to escalate too much. Will start with 20-30 new/day when summer comes around)

EDIT:
uisukii, are you doing the core deck in the same brutal fashion as RtK?

Stian Wrote:EDIT:
uisukii, are you doing the core deck in the same brutal fashion as RtK?

....maybe...

uisukii Wrote:1100 card review

I'm afraid you're not human.

Not like you have a real teacher and not like you have a real grade. You still going to see the card again if you press the good button, so who cares? The beauty of self study is you get to pick what you focus on.

Sometimes I fail a card and am sick of it, so it gets suspended. Sometimes I decide I don't wanna see it for a week and hit reschedule. And sometimes I'll fail it like normal. Just depends on my mood and what I think is most fun at the moment.

frony0 Wrote:

uisukii Wrote:1100 card review

I'm afraid you're not human.

That stopped scaring me a long time ago.

This is a good thread to post my problem. I am addicted to adding cards. I'm doing the core deck, and I add at least 50 new cards per day, but recently it's been almost 80 a day. The problem is I hate doing my reps every morning. It's painful. So far it hasn't even passed 300 per day, but today was really close like 287 or something. The thing is, I don't cheat at all with my reps, and I'm pressing good on a lot of them, but the reviews keep growing. My retention doesn't seem terrible either, for example today I got 96% correct, which is a lower score then usual. I'm only like 1300 cards in though. Started less then a month ago. Any advice? The thought of not adding cards for a few days makes me nauseous, but the thought of doing my reps every morning also makes me nauseous.

egoplant Wrote:This is a good thread to post my problem. I am addicted to adding cards. I'm doing the core deck, and I add at least 50 new cards per day, but recently it's been almost 80 a day. The problem is I hate doing my reps every morning. It's painful. So far it hasn't even passed 300 per day, but today was really close like 287 or something. The thing is, I don't cheat at all with my reps, and I'm pressing good on a lot of them, but the reviews keep growing. My retention doesn't seem terrible either, for example today I got 96% correct, which is a lower score then usual. I'm only like 1300 cards in though. Started less then a month ago. Any advice? The thought of not adding cards for a few days makes me nauseous, but the thought of doing my reps every morning also makes me nauseous.

Sounds like a case of answer quicker and fail more often to me.

Zlarp Wrote:Sounds like a case of answer quicker and fail more often to me.

What does that mean?

egoplant Wrote:

Zlarp Wrote:Sounds like a case of answer quicker and fail more often to me.

What does that mean?

Put a time limit on answering a card. So, if you see a card and don't answer within 5 seconds, fail the card and immediately go on to the next one. This will help you get through your reviews much faster.


The way I see it, you have two options.

1) Use Anki the way it was intended. In my experience, you end up getting about 12x as many reviews as you've been doing new cards per day. So if you're doing 80 cards per day, you've eventually going to end up with about 1000 reviews per day. Your reviews per day will steadily start to decrease after you stop doing new cards every day.

I completely understand that you want to be doing new stuff everyday. Everyone wants to make progress. A lot of times you just don't feel like you're making progress if you're not learning new stuff.

However, that's just not how memory and language learning works. It's arguably much more important to do your reviews. I've been studying Japanese for a while now, relying heavily on Anki, and I feel the complete opposite of you. I don't care at all if I don't add new cards on a given day. However, I feel terrible if I don't do some reviews on a given day*.

Learning a language is usually a long process. It's not normally something you can cram. Sometimes you see people on this forum who do dumb things like RTK in 2 weeks, or Core6k in 1 month, but the vast majority of successful people probably add on average less than 20 cards a day. The secret to learning a language is continual effort over a long period of time (think 3+ years). If you have a lot of free time and an iron willpower to grind on anki, you can reduce this length of time, but I wouldn't really encourage it.


2. Your other option is to ignore everything I said. Don't be afraid to experiment with learning. Maybe you'll find a way to learn Japanese that is 10x faster and 10x more enjoyable than any other way.

Here's a couple ideas:

- Always press "Hard" on your reviews instead of failing cards. This should make your review amount go down. (There are some obvious downsides to this.)
- Aim for a much lower recall percentage. Go for something crazily low like 50%. (This probably isn't actually a good idea either.)
- Ditch Anki like that one guy(girl?) on this forum who is really against anki. I think it's natadims or NukeMarine or that guy whose name starts with a "b" who always talks about his grandmother. I think they really like that parallel reading stuff. (Hopefully I didn't just make all this up.)
- If you get a card that's hard or you don't like, just delete it. And then delete the next card that pops up. Be ruthless.
- Some people have two decks. A learning deck and a learned deck. They move cards between them based on how well they know them. I think stuff like this is easier with Anki2.
- Timeboxing.


* This is actually not true.

All wondering aside- I can vouch for pressing hard instead of fail on cards that you're pretty comfortable with despite not answering correctly. That's how I do!

I just hate thinking too hard. Throws my groove off. Kills my learning.
Go with the flow, man. #hippylanguagelearningadvice(thattotallyworks)