I'm writing this to let out some of my frustration with my reviews the latest weeks.

The last three weeks my life has been unpredictable and busy, making it impossible for me to keep a steady review schedule.
I've simply had to do reviews in all kinds of situations. On noisy airplanes, in the car with my familiy, in rooms full of people expecting me to be social, in the bed right before I go to sleep, etc., etc.
These are all places in which I simply c a n n o t p o s s i b l y focus enough on the task at hand and I've had to do as much as 150 reviews because I didn't have time to review the last day, which of course leads to me making a lot of mistakes which I normally wouldn't have done.
My experience with this is that I regret doing my reviews at all on these busy days. I think that I would have directly benefited by not doing them. Instead of reinforcing my memory of the Kanji, I believe this has done the opposite thing because I had to rush through the reviews, not even spelling out my mnemonics that I'm supposed to use. I've forgot 案 at least three days in a row, and I've messed up the location of a lot of primitives. Instead of reinforcing a forgot Kanji I've had to rely on visual memory until the next day to pass them.

I've thought of something that I think I would've actually benefited from doing. I should have let reviews build up during these last weeks. Reviews would at least reach the 500-eds before I got to this point I am now. Then I should have done all the reviews in concentration. The cards I would fail I would spend several minutes reinforcing, whereas a good part of the remembered cards should be passed on as easy, being up to three weeks overdue.

Anyone else wanna share some thoughts about this?

[Zgarbas]

I feel you =(.
I try to keep a bit of balance. I do review even under unideal circumstances, but if I can't focus at all then I just skip a day. I try to not make it more than 3 days without reviews at a time, but then I start guilt-tripping myself (the guilt-trip of not doing my studies just adds to the stress). When doing reviews under stressful situations I also try to be a bit softer on myself. Read: instead of failing I just choose "hard". That way I do my reviews, do something, but without stressing myself too much about it.

Also, it's always depressing to face a gazillion reviews. And you start asking yourself "how much could I have progressed if I hadn't taken this break?". Your level also temporarily goes down due to lack of exposure.

One suggestion though... since you're doing your reviews on a mobile device of some sort, might I suggest using your bathroom breaks for it? No extra time spent, and there's something about being in a bathroom which gives you temporary focus .

I have got through hundreds of reviews in a day before, so I know it's possible. But it might be I'd need up to four days if I should be low on motivation.

Yeah, I do a lot of reviewing on my phone, so I frequently take up my phone on the toilet and try to do some reviews. But I use really short time on the toilet usually, so I usually don't make it to 3 reviews before I'm done

The thing about SRS scheduling is that once your reviews pile up to a certain point, one more day of putting it off doesn't make much of a difference, and all those "one more days" start to add up. Thus it would be really, REALLY easy for the skipped few days to turn into skipped few weeks which can turn into skipped few months, by which time you've--completely unintentionally, by the way--given up on them completely.

It's happened to me before. So I wouldn't recommend it unless:

A) You establish some sort of maximum time limit to go without repping and are secure in your willpower to stick to that number.
B) You're still continuing with other areas of study such as vocab, grammar, intensive immersion, etc, which makes it more likely you'll return to your kanji reps.
C) You've been studying Japanese for so long that the sheer inertia of it cannot be stopped by anything.

And ask yourself: Are these rushed reviews really DETRIMENTAL to your learning, or do they just feel that way because they're sub-optimum? Sub-optimum studying is 1000% better than no studying, IMHO, but it's easy to trick yourself to think otherwise.

Long-interval cards are less likely to be forgotten with a few days delay, and more frustrating to fail due to poor concentration. So I try to do a few reps each day, reviewing shortest interval first.

Anki can take away a lot of your stress. The software offers the option to set a maximum number of cards per day, old and new, and you can use this function to adapt to the circumstances you are in. When in stress, set it to a low and managable number, so you still gain something from doing your reviews.

Set the numbers to low, Anki will automatically suggests to raise the number, and you will do some more reviews. Set to high, Anki will eventually save some of the additional reviews for another day. So the best thing is to start low, because you can always raise the number if need be, until you feel comfortable.

In short, don't mind too much about review counts in the hundreds, but rather do away with as much you can handle any given day without affecting your recognition, leading to any amount of failed cards in a worst case scenario.

This can lead to additional stress, and ultimately to loss of motivation. Since you are going to review the cards many times over during the next months, and even with a minimum number of reviews and new cards in mind that you'll learn in the meantime, you always gain something of it.

@zurizu,
I've been studying Japanese for 1,25 years already, so, as you suggest, the pure inertia of that would make it impossible for me to permenantly end my Kanji studies. But I've had an unintentional 3 month break from Heisig before, so yes one might walk into that trap if care not be taken. I think if I were ever to do what I suggest here, for example in an exam period, I would focus on making myself a promise of continuing my reviews after the no-review-period. For my part that would help, as I am tenacious with anything I tell myself to do.
Regarding your last question: I am not quite sure if it could be considered downright destructive doing reviews on an unideal place and time, but I do honestly believe that one might forget a lot of older cards because one just can't focus on recalling a story. I guess that exactly is what my problem has been the last weeks. I've forgot cards like 案, 昭, 忍, 切, 刃, 州 and 歴, all of which I think of as pretty elementary.
With these cards I think it wouldn't have made any difference with reviewing them this week or in three weeks. Newer cards on the other hand might be more important to review. I know it's possible to review new, older and old cards separately here on Koohii, but I haven't seen any such option in Anki, which is unfortunate.

HelenF Wrote:Long-interval cards are less likely to be forgotten with a few days delay, and more frustrating to fail due to poor concentration. So I try to do a few reps each day, reviewing shortest interval first.

Yeah, I'd love to do that if I were still using the koohii SRS system.
But I switched to Anki a few weeks ago because I found that Koohii consistently made the review intervals too long for me.
Do you know if it's possible to set Anki so that it prioritizes newer cards over old ones?

Nagareboshi Wrote:Anki can take away a lot of your stress. [...]

Yeah, I use Anki already but I never use that function. I’ve set max reviews to 1000 so the last week I’ve been looking at a looming mountain of 200 reviews towering over me. I do consider doing what you suggest. But some days the problem has been that I just couldn’t muster any more concentration beyond a certain point. So for some old cards it was absolutely impossible to recall their writing.
But now that my one year compulsory military service has ended, I do not sleep on a room with six other people anymore, which means I probably will be able to get the ideal study environment whenever I want now.
But let's say I go through a period where I can at max do 20 reviews a day, so I set the limit at that. Do you know if there is a way to tell Anki to prioritize newer cards above older cards?

In Anki 2, to review 20 cards with the smallest intervals (the least time between reviews), that -also- are actually due to be reviewed,

- select the deck you want to review
- go to 'tools->create filtered deck'
- edit the text in the 'Search' box and add the term 'is:due'
- edit the 'Limit to:' field to 20
- in the dropdown for 'cards selected by' choose 'Increasing intervals'
- click 'Build'
- review the cards in 'Filtered Deck 1'
- delete the filtered deck when you're done reviewing to send the cards back to the original deck.

( So much easier than choosing 'smallest intervals first' from Options in Anki 1.</sarcasm> )

Ah, thank you. I can't believe it has to be so difficult though.

I have the opposite opinion on this from you OP. For learning new material I think conditions are important, but for reviewing old material I think diversity in environments helps. Studying and practicing even in unideal conditions is really important. Otherwise you might fall into the trap of state-dependent learning, and only being able to function in Japanese in that ideal environment.

I study when tired, drunk, hungover, agitated, in bars, at restaurants, on trains, etc. I know that in the future I'm probably going to want to use Japanese in those unideal situations too, and so I want to practice to make sure I can do it in those situations.

Also, your thinking on here stems from thinking of failing flashcards as some kind of failure. It's not failure. You just didn't remember a thing. You'll get it next time. You'll learn it better. You really shouldn't care so much about failing a mature card. Let go, and just trust Anki, and trust your brain.

By sticking to your need for your ideal study situation because that's where you do better, you're giving the algorithm a false picture of your actual performance. You're only feeding in your very best performances rather than being honest with the algorithm and with yourself.

Northern_Lord Wrote:Ah, thank you. I can't believe it has to be so difficult though.

Hnnh, you may be right. I guess you can do it just once and keep the same filtered deck around and refill it. Anyway, check the 'filtered decks & cramming' section of the Anki manual.

erlog Wrote:Also, your thinking on here stems from thinking of failing flashcards as some kind of failure. It's not failure. You just didn't remember a thing. You'll get it next time. You'll learn it better. You really shouldn't care so much about failing a mature card. Let go, and just trust Anki, and trust your brain.

Quoted for truth. This has been reiterated time and time again here, and deserves to be reiterated once more. Don't think of answering incorrectly as a kind of failure. You use flashcards to easily and efficiently identify the items which you have not mastered.

Think of your SRS program as a kind of sorter that divides your knowledge into that which you've mastered and that which you've not. Answering incorrectly should not be thought of as a failure, but as an incredibly helpful indicator of where you ought to devote your efforts.

On a side note, a good pace is 100-200 reviews/10 mins for vocabulary cards and 40-60 for sentence and grammar cards. I usually have 300-400 reviews every day, and I typically finish reviewing within half an hour.

Ignore decreasing pass rates (e.g. your correct mature answers drop from 90% to 84% after increasing your review pace). The jump in efficiency (not to mention, motivation) completely compensates for the reduction. Plus, would you really feel confident with your knowledge if it takes you 7 or 10 seconds to correctly recall it? If the answer doesn't come up immediately, hit the fail button.

@Erlog
I see your point and I'm not going to argue just for the sake of arguing. Maybe I'm too negative about failing cards. At any rate I still think it can be destructive to stressfully rush through reviews if you don't focus on what you need to recall it again later. Relying on visual/brute memory until the next review is a sure way to eventually fail again if you're not very good at those.

@SomeCallMeChris
Thanks again!

@vileru
100-200 reviews in 10 mins sounded crazy to me for a second there but after doing 140 core 2000 reviews just now, focusing on hitting the fail button if I had to stop and think too long, it actually went pretty fast (14 minutes). I'll take this advice and see if I can set up the pace.