Is there a 'best' way to deal with the red stack?

brose Wrote:As soon as I finish my review, I go straight to the failed kanji. I just think about the story for a couple of seconds and hit the "Learned" button. It's not as though you are going to get an electric shock if you fail the kanji again. It will come up in the review the next day, and it's hard to forget even a bad story that quickly. Failed-->Learned--> rinse and repeat until you know it. I never have any RTK1 kanji in my failed stack.

I've gone through phases of "learning" failed kanji as soon as I finished review for that day. In my case this certainly allows me to remember bad stories for a period of time. I just wonder if in the long term this almost drilling type method is good or not?

Sometimes the repetition seems to help. Perhaps a bad story morphs into something better. Other times I get to a problem keyword; start thinking of problem kanji; then just kind of get it from pulling up the primatives (sans story). Not sure if this brute force type of method will help when seeing the kanji in a text...

I think my way works if you are keeping you with the reviews every day. If you have 500 failed kanji, you need to treat them more like new kanji that you are learning for the first time. Of course if your story is counter-productive, perhaps because it keeps tricking you into using a similar but wrong primitive, it's better to come up with a new one rather than brute-forcing it.

I've got a nice rhythm going now where I review cards during the day, and then come back to the failed stack and clear them all out right before bed. Personally I treat the failed stack just like any other review and look at the keyword while covering the kanji with my hand and then trying to write it; it can't hurt to get another chance to recall and write, and these reviews are always very successful since I had seen it earlier in the day. Sleeping immediately after helps them stick in memory.

I always tackle my failed stack the day after I failed them. I just include it into the next day's kanji to be tested. I use the 'view all' option to see a list of the keywords and then try and write the kanji. If I remember them they count as 'learned' otherwise they stay in the failed stack for another day. This way, those that you remembered you'll see the next day as well, just to reinforce them...

@Mighty_Matt, nice ideas. I forgot about the view all page.

I don't know what the 'best' method is, but this is what I do right after a review:

If I remembered the story well, but missed a stupid stroke or mixed up positions, then I write the correct version down once, and click "Learned" immediately.

If there's a minor problem with the story, I spend a minute or two to make sure I've got the story/image down before clicking "Learned."

If I plumb forgot the story, I just keep the card in my red stack for a few days. Every day I'll come back to it and reinforce the story in my head. Once I feel it's solid, it's time to promote it.

synewave Wrote:In my case this certainly allows me to remember bad stories for a period of time. I just wonder if in the long term this almost drilling type method is good or not?

It is drilling, but you have to ask, what are you drilling? If it's just the primitives, then yeah, that's bad. However, if you're drilling stories, then the effects aren't that caustic. I, in fact, did this for most of RtK I: brute-force not primitives, but stories. While my initial recall was utterly pathetic, it has since improved to a respectable rate.

I actually pin my hideous RtK III performance on this: since there are, max, around two stories per kanji, I can't do the same tactic and I'm handicapped by the fact that I didn't make too many stories myself.

But to re-iterate, if you are randomly memorizing stories, then you shouldn't have too much of a concern. Right?

I have about 900 failed kanji, so I cannot realistically clear them all out each day. My strategy there is to reduce that stack by 10 each day. That way the review burden won't suddenly spike to hundreds of expired kanji a day.

But I keep my expired kanji up to date. That is the only way the SRS can be working correctly. The whole point of SRS is that you need to trust it a bit that it will bring up for review the thing that you need to be reviewing at that time.

There is this difference between reviewing/studying expired kanji, and working on failed kanji: with the later you can review your story, if there is a problem remembering the story, maybe the story has a problem....here you have access to other's stories, to see if there is something that might work better than the one you're currently using.

This site is great! It's much better than a physical card deck.

CharleyGarrett Wrote:IMy strategy there is to reduce that stack by 10 each day. That way the review burden won't suddenly spike to hundreds of expired kanji a day.

I'm going to start trying: I currently getting around 40-50 failed cards from RtK III each day and it looks like learning them all is just counter-productive in regards to my retention rate, especially since my already morbid performance plummets during several hundred strong review sessions.

CharleyGarrett Wrote:This site is great! It's much better than a physical card deck.

Amen, brother: all praise [kana]FABURISU[/kana]!