Joined: Jul 2006
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Surely everyone reviews differently, but I wonder what people think is the best failure rate for a stack of cards, when does one learn faster?
When a system is designed with few reviews and large intervals, one forgets cards between reviews, fails most of them and learning is inefficient. On the other hand, if a system produces too many reviews, not increasing the review period fast enough, one will get close to 100% of the cards every time (because the well-learned cards clog the system) which would also mean that the learning is inefficient (imagine a system with just one box of cards as an extreme example).
My feeling is that something around 90% (perhaps ~95% for the well-learned cards, like those in higher stacks with a Leitner system) should be about right, but I wonder what other people think about this.
Joined: Jul 2006
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Funnily enough, this evening I found that I had 230 kanji to review, mostly in the last stack which included the very earliest frames (eg 一 to 十) I just did 137 of those and had a 95% score. I generally get between 80 and 95% except on very recently learned kanji and find the review rate very manageable. I only got this vast amount today because these are the ones I banged in en masse when I first started reviewing here. It seems like a long time since I had seen many of these up for review, and I was starting to worry that I might have forgotten a lot of them, so I was pleased with the 95% result. This seems to suggest to me that the system as I'm using it is working fairly well. Is this the sort of thing you are thinking about, or have I misunderstood your point?
Joined: Jun 2006
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When I first started using the site I reviewed far too heavily to get everything to the right as soon as possible and continued to review 100 from the final stack daily as well as adding 15-20 new cards Monday to Friday.
I started to get bored doing this coz I was remembering almost 100% from my final stack reviews. As laxxy suggests, I'm pretty sure this was due to the frequency of review.
To get back into the Leitner way of things, I asked Fabrice to remove all my cards so I could start again. Two benefits of this were I could start using the site as intended. This did mean that I had loads of reviews to get through before cards were back in the 4th pile again. However I'm just going through my first 1 month reviews now and I'm doing much better than I had feared. On average I reckon I'm at least over 90% successful from the final stack.
The second benefit to having all the cards deleted was that when I added them all back together, they were randomised.
So in my experience, using the site as designed utilizing the spaced repetition is more efficient time-wise and, I hope, better at forcing the kanji into long term memory.
Joined: May 2006
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My intuition also suggests that 90% is an optimal failure rate.
Joined: Nov 2005
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By the way, the topic seems related to KANJI's question regarding optimal learning schedules...
Joined: May 2006
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Just for reference, I've been tracking my success rate since Oct. 9 (a few weeks after entering all the RTK1 kanji), and it's averaged 84%. I think I'll eventually get up to 90%, but it won't be soon.
Mike
