Hi all, I'm sure a variant on this has been asked a million times. My Anki stats as of now
are

Card counts
Mature cards: 468 (54.36%)
Young cards: 392 (45.53%)
Unseen cards: 1 (0.12%)

Correct answers
Mature cards: 86.2% (330 of 383)
Young cards: 71.6% (3799 of 5306)
First-seen cards: 70.3% (605 of 861)

I think both 86% for mature and 71% for young aren't good enough numbers- I'm not retaining enough. For the past two weeks I've been adding 20 a day- I'm trying to blitz through the remaining 1200 of so to finish by the start of June. But do you think I would benefit from getting these numbers up before adding more cards? Or can I do both at the same time?

Thanks for any advice

I'm pretty sure everyone is going to say keep at it, because you'll 'eventually learn the cards anyway'

So yeah, keep at it heh, those arent THAT bad stats.

Take Moscow by the end of August or not at all. You do not want to face Generals January and February.

~J

Your stats are fine, slightly better than mine. Just keep going and don't worry.

I don't have my deck now to check, but for old cards it is for sure bellow 70%, for young cards it is ~80%. So don't worry. You can do it even if your memory is not working so well. ;D

Anything above 70% is good if you ask me. No sweat. More than 85% for mature cards is perfectly fine.

While people have been pretty encouraging, and that's good, those numbers are not so great. You shouldn't stop, but you should try to make more visual stories with a stronger impression. Maybe you're not spending enough time coming up with something memorable.

That said, I do concur - keep going. Stopping and "solidifying" is a bad idea. Knowing 70% of 2000 is better than knowing 90% of 1000.

Yeah, to be serious, those are mediocre numbers. The reason this is important isn't because you're a horrible person for having low retention, but because with those numbers your SRS is going to murder you in your sleep with reviews. Don't stop, but pull back and try to get your numbers up.

For references, my stats (which have dropped a bit since I blew off reviews almost completely for most of a month):

Card counts
Mature cards: 1761 (42.20%)
Young cards: 284 (6.81%)
Unseen cards: 2128 (50.99%)

Correct answers
Mature cards: 97.2% (1131 of 1163)
Young cards: 82.7% (4789 of 5794)
First-seen cards: 79.0% (1787 of 2261)

(The deck is more than just RtK, to be fair)

~J

You cant compare stats if you don't know how much time someone spends with first memorization and reviewing. E.g. 99% doesn't sound that good if you invest the double amount of time than someone else with 80%. The difficult thing is to strike a (optimal) balance between investment (time wise) and return.

80% of 2000 is better than 100% of 1200.

Personally I find that young card stat in anki pretty annoying and I'd like to turn it off. If you get to a card and you don't know it, then you don't know it and that is all there is to it; there are of course varying degrees of failing a card from missing a single stroke, but more out of carelessness because you remembered your story and all of the primitives, all the way through to being genuinely surprised when you see a kanji and not knowing what some or all of its primitives are, the failed / succeeded stat doesn't tell you any of that.

The mature stat does matter because it tells you how well you are retaining things in the long term, I think the 87.5% is fine, it shows that once you have a kanji in memory it stays there. I also think that 20 per day is a good pace to go at; its managable and you can fit it around your life, rather than needing to make your life RTK. Don't stop to consolidate because you will have plenty of time for that after you get all the kanji into your deck. Stopping is the first step towards not starting again which will ultimately lead to you not finishing. Keep plodding on and you will get there!　頑張って！

woodwojr Wrote:Yeah, to be serious, those are mediocre numbers.

They're not. He knows 7 to 8 (almost 9) out of 10 cards and that's okay. We're all learning a foreign language and if you don't live in Japan you can't expect a much higher retention rate, even with lots of immersion. If I understood 70% (on average) of a Japanese text, I'd be happy.

So, again: don't worry and just keep going. Your stats are fine.

stoked Wrote:They're not. He knows 7 to 8 (almost 9) out of 10 cards and that's okay.

They are. This is independent of the material. He's averaging 72%, which means on a thousand cards he'll be expecting to push 280 of them to a short schedule every review cycle. Unless he's willing to devote a quickly-increasing amount of time to reviews, cutting back on new cards (but not halting!) is a good idea.

~J

woodwojr Wrote:They are.

Someone who studies all JLPT1 material and has got a 70% retention rate will pass the exam.

I don't know what standard you're applying but this can hardly be called mediocre. ;-)

I'm applying the standard of "when I think about dealing with that many reviews, do I shudder in horror?"

It's not about learning quality (directly, there are indirect effects but if that's all it was the numbers'd be fine), it's about SRS management.

~J

Don't sweat your young cards too much. If you have a high miss rate, you may not be learning them prior to trying to memorize them. There are other threads talking about everyone's different methods that are used for this part.

For the Mature cards, you're doing great. Remember, some things stick better than others for whatever reason. Let the SRS work for you in that case. With Anki, you can't improve numbers by force. You review only what's due. If you're done reviewing for the day, add new cards if there's time. If the review took too long, don't add cards. Let the time or number of reviews you did for the day dictate when you add new cards, not the pass rate.

For the people who are giving him a hard time... have you actually been in that situation yourself, are are you just parroting things that you heard? (EDIT: I (rhetorically) ask because I see that quoted everywhere, but it's never been useful advice to me). My stats are:

Correct answers
Mature cards: 73.0%
Young cards: 65.5%
First-seen cards: 50.8%

And you know what, I've never had any problems. I've used a combination of time-boxing and item-boxing since before this feature was standard in Anki, and together this eliminated any worry over efficiency. I regularly add 30 cards a day, except when reviews get out of hand and then time-boxing and item-boxing automatically corrects my pace. I'd much rather keep my 73% retention rate and make 6000+ reviews a month, than flog myself for a 90+ rate and end up spending more time for fewer reviews. More input is always better.

The stats you have are very good and you shouldn't worry about them.

You shouldn't wait until you have perfect stats to continue. Don't even look at the stats, they are meaningless. As long as you don't feel overwhelmed by an unmanageable workload you should continue. Getting cards wrong is just as valuable for learning as getting them right. That's the way it's supposed to work, we forget things a few times and after a while we know them.

Think about it this way, your brain has a natural tendency to remember things. At the same time it's doing its best to forget a lot so that you're not overwhelmed with too much irrelevant information. Enough repetition and you simply won't be able to forget anymore. You can't fail because *forgetting* is the hard part really.

mafried Wrote:I'd much rather keep my 73% retention rate and make 6000+ reviews a month, than flog myself for a 90+ rate and end up spending more time for fewer reviews. More input is always better.

For some perspective, I was in a similar situation, ended up getting overwhelmed with reviews, and stopped reviewing completely for six months after that. My scheduling at the time was pretty much totally unsalvageable. If you've got the liver to keep at it with that many reviews, more power to you, but it eats at the motivation as well as simple time.

With a higher retention rate causing longer scheduling periods it was more manageable to come back from a few weeks of partial reviews than it was to come back from a single week of partial reviews.

~J

woodwojr Wrote:For some perspective, I was in a similar situation, ended up getting overwhelmed with reviews, and stopped reviewing completely for six months after that. My scheduling at the time was pretty much totally unsalvageable. If you've got the liver to keep at it with that many reviews, more power to you, but it eats at the motivation as well as simple time.

Perhaps our stories are more similar than I thought at first... My first haitus from SRS'ing was 3 months, about a year ago. It took me a long, grueling month to clear out that backlog of reviews. That's when I adopted the time-boxing and item-boxing techniques. As for eating time and motivation.. I don't know. I just don't get caught up in the ups and downs of reviewing. I just let reps come in and wash over me, and don't think too much about it. If I get it right, fine, but if it's wrong, whatever. Either way I don't give it much thought. Just this morning I failed a card with a 6 month interval, and didn't think too much about it at all. I don't let it bother me, because I confused the meaning of one of the words. And I figure if I'm confusing/forgetting info on the card, then there's still something for me to (re-)learn.

On the supermemo site the guy mentions that remembering 100% takes 300% of the time it takes to remember 90% (read it a while ago so you might want to double-check). This to me me gives the impression that 90% is still not the optimal target. Maybe 70% is more like it. Keep on going. Your biggest enemy is not a percentage, but hesitation, lack of confidence, and thinking to much of strategy, when in the same time you could have been learning. DON'T SLOW DOWN! Just keep reviewing, including failed cards. (I am drunk now but this is what i think, in Holland we say: ''Children and drunk people speak the truth'').

zwarte_kat Wrote:in Holland we say: ''Children and drunk people speak the truth'').

This saying was created by someone who had not been around children.

Hey all! wow, only on this site can you leave a question overnight and get 19 responses! lol. anyway, thanks for all the words of encouragement.

I think the crux of the matter is, as one of the posters said, whether or not I'm willing to deal with an increasingly heavy workload of reviews- to be honest I know I'm not spending enough time learning new cards, as I don't have the time working full time and having other commitments as well. In that respect I think I'm doing pretty well. Its all about striking a balance, as someone said, and I think from now on when I learn 20 new cards I need to devote the time to it. If I can't do them justice, I should learn just 15 cards.

Anyway, 頑張ります！！

bodhisamaya Wrote:

zwarte_kat Wrote:in Holland we say: ''Children and drunk people speak the truth'').

This saying was created by someone who had not been around children.

Or around drunks Or how about:
"Children and drunk people always lie", said the drunken child.

@OP do those numbers correspond to learning RTK?
@drunk and truth: "In vino veritas" - so this rumor has been around for some time.