Edit: of course, the title should read "Kanji"

Hi Peeps, need some advice here.

I'm currently hovering around 1200 in RTK1. My problem is that sometimes I miss a day due to RL busyness and I have to plough through 270+ reps just to be able to see my new cards I added that day. Any advice on this? I seem to be just stuck in a neverending "old card" loop.

Maybe i'm doing it wrong.

Cheers

Old cards should take priority over new cards. If you don't have time to keep up with the reviews you have, then you certainly shouldn't be adding any more to the mix. The nature of SRSs and Leitner systems is that over time, the review load will level out, so what you need to do is either take a break from adding new cards, or reduce the pace that you add them.

JimmySeal Wrote:Old cards should take priority over new cards. If you don't have time to keep up with the reviews you have, then you certainly shouldn't be adding any more to the mix. The nature of SRSs and Leitner systems is that over time, the review load will level out, so what you need to do is either take a break from adding new cards, or reduce the pace that you add them.

Yes, you're not doing anything wrong, eventually reviews naturally decrease, and then you can restart adding. I once did 2042 reviews. At any rate, don't mess with the algorithm (by saying only "yes" for example, because you'll fail them later, so you might as well learn them now).

what i'm doing to keep my reviews manageable is that i *only* add new cards on days where i have less than 100 reviews due. this encourages trying to get a high accuracy rate because you want to add new cards and in order to add new ones you need to learn the ones you know more solidly. it also keeps the reviews per day more or less stable (they hover either just above or just below 100), which is good for time organization since each daily session takes about the same amount of time. you could perhaps try some variant of this, since 300+ reviews for two days sounds like you might be going too fast, especially if you feel you don't have time for all the reviews.

for days when i don't feel like i can get to all of it, i set my cards in Anki to display longest interval first (the ones i *should* know) and set failed cards to review at the end instead of my normal 5 failed cards max and review failed cards soon.

i'd rather forget newer stuff than older stuff and it also makes it a bit more manageable seeing the total number going down.

Time boxing is key and do it early in the day(Most of the hard work gets done during the early day, while the evening is all about relaxing, well most of the time). Lately for me, I've been getting lazy on my srs reps(still do them everyday but adding cards is my problem now). I delete unnecessary kanji/uncommon ones.

What I suggest is, get motivated (everyone has different ways of doing this, for me it's motivational music or watching stuff I enjoy to get me to start and finish it off).

Also don't add to much cards, it will increase the reviews, instead add at a small pace and build it up from there(stick with the default)

I disagree that old cards are more important than new. You shouldn't let reviews stop you from making progress so if you're review pile is too big just pass a load of them. I'm not convinced it's acually efficient to review things as often as the Leitner system dictates, but even if it is you're not going find it matters that much if you've forgotten some of them when you move on to the next stage of Japanese learning. I feel the most important thing learnt from RTK is how to break down kanji and learn them for my self. Familiarity with the primitives is also very useful, but memorising specific kanji lags way back in third place.

Splatted Wrote:I disagree that old cards are more important than new.

I disagree with your disagreement!

While I take your point that -in the long run-, familiarity with all the components and so on is potentially more important, and -in general- Leitner system may have too many reviews... in the -short run- the task is to memorize the cards in front of you and in -specific- the first couple of reviews really do need to come the day after learning a new item and then only a few days later or recall rates drop through the floor and you're going to have to do extra reviews on the new cards anyway.

For this reason, having a pile of reviews too large to complete in a single day is a problem that needs to be addressed before adding new cards. If you continue adding cards and -not- completing reviews, you may not be reviewing new items the next day at which point you might as well not be learning them (at least for those of us with average or below average memories.)

The long run problem can be addressed by changing your habit on the 'ease' buttons or changing your timing settings, though, at least in Anki, so that the reviews are more like the right number. Or even by simply suspending cards that you don't want to review again until much later. Or by writing a superior SRS with a non-Leitner timing system that revolutionizes learning.

Edit: Oh, -now- I see that you suggested simply 'passing' a bunch of cards... but... you still need to actually quiz cards for very recently learned characters. I don't know what I think of that solution as a suggestion for others ... I know -I- wouldn't do it that way, but for people with better memories who think they can get away with skipping a review on a recent item and still recall it on the next review, well, that's their call. For me, passing a day's worth of reviews without reviewing would guarantee that the last couple day's new cards are going to be failed soon.

Splatted Wrote:I'm not convinced it's acually efficient to review things as often as the Leitner system dictates, but even if it is you're not going find it matters that much if you've forgotten some of them when you move on to the next stage of Japanese learning.

Oh you mean you don't understand what the Leitner system is then? The whole idea is to efficiently review material. Easier cards will naturally come up less often. So there's really no need to monkey with things in order to avoid inefficiency. The system is there in the first place to avoid inefficiency.

As well, Leitner makes no real dictation about what the intervals should be. SRS systems vary in how they treat intervals, and you can fine tune the intervals all you like in Anki. You might quibble with the exact algorithm this site uses, but it's not bad. It's a decent, simple card box algorithm that works well for 2,000-3,000 cards.

I moved my cards into Anki around frame 1000 because I wanted more control over customizing my cards, but I would say actually that the Leitner system on RTK doesn't expire cards soon enough in the early stages.

yeah i think the site's algorithm is fine for most purposes, but there are two things i don't like about it:

- box 1 happens too late (3 days) -- i'd prefer 2 or even 1 day for the first box

- there aren't enough boxes, so that the maximum time period is 240 days instead of several years (which leads to at least 1/240th of all cards being shown each day, no matter how well you know them, even if you get all 3000 cards to the last box that's more than 10 reviews a day)

erlog Wrote:Oh you mean you don't understand what the Leitner system is then? The whole idea is to efficiently review material.

You're saying that just because it's intended to be efficient it is efficient? Fair enough, that is how the world works, but did you really think I didn't know what the Leitner system was for? What other use could it have? Maybe you assumed I was just using it to fill the long empty days?

I'll post why I don't adhere to the Leitner system later, but for now I want to make it clear that I'm talking about degrees of efficiency rather than saying it's useless.

Splatted Wrote:I disagree that old cards are more important than new.

well, i wrote that for several reasons.

-in real life, for most things it's better to be able to do something well for a long time than to keep doing new stuff just for the moment. i figure it's the same for vocabulary acquisition. just my philosophy on life.
-theoretically, you should clear old cards much faster than new cards... so instead of staring at 150 reviews, it looks more manageable at 75 even though the remaining 75 young cards might take much longer.

kainzero Wrote:

Splatted Wrote:I disagree that old cards are more important than new.

well, i wrote that for several reasons.

-in real life, for most things it's better to be able to do something well for a long time than to keep doing new stuff just for the moment. i figure it's the same for vocabulary acquisition. just my philosophy on life.
-theoretically, you should clear old cards much faster than new cards... so instead of staring at 150 reviews, it looks more manageable at 75 even though the remaining 75 young cards might take much longer.

mature cards should be done fast/well. My mature cards are done within a mature of seconds(vocabulary). Sure some I forget but that's only natural. My retention on mature cards is 87%. They say it's natural to forget 10% of what you put in the srs for the long-term. Remember, it's only once it reaches a mature rating that, it heads into your long-term retention. Which is vital for learning well.

Thanks for the replies.

My add rate is 15 new cards per day. It usually takes me a good week to start retaining new cards. I 'can' get through my reps for the day if I just plough through them so I guess I should just man up and do them when I can. I'll try not to worry about not adding for the day as you mention here when I can't due to being busy etc. I don't want to slow down on my add rate because i would ideally like to have seen all the RTK1 kanji sooner rather than later so I am ready to rep sentences.

Thanks for the insights shared here. It's good to see how everyone does things.

tarkonis, does Khatzumoto provide any guidance on your situation? What does he recommend? Or does he not typically provide this type of low-level detailed advice for Silverspoon members?

Splatted Wrote:I'll post why I don't adhere to the Leitner system later, but for now I want to make it clear that I'm talking about degrees of efficiency rather than saying it's useless.

The Leitner system is just a less granular version of the modern SRS. If you're doing any sort of systematic spaced repetition then you're basically doing Leitner, and if you're not doing that sort of spaced repetition then I have trouble believing it's any more efficient than something like Leitner or an SRS algorithm.

erlog Wrote:

Splatted Wrote:I'll post why I don't adhere to the Leitner system later, but for now I want to make it clear that I'm talking about degrees of efficiency rather than saying it's useless.

The Leitner system is just a less granular version of the modern SRS. If you're doing any sort of systematic spaced repetition then you're basically doing Leitner, and if you're not doing that sort of spaced repetition then I have trouble believing it's any more efficient than something like Leitner or an SRS algorithm.

Are you having trouble understanding Splatted's comments? His point was that in his experience, the intervals on this site are shorter than they need to be and that broader jumps in card wait times would be more efficient in terms of time spent reviewing. Nowhere did he discredit the effectiveness or efficiency of SRS/Leitner in general. There is no single perfect formula for the spacing in an SRS, and this site's system is just one possible implementation.

mmhorii Wrote:tarkonis, does Khatzumoto provide any guidance on your situation? What does he recommend? Or does he not typically provide this type of low-level detailed advice for Silverspoon members?

We don't really get any directed support at all.

Questions are answered in a blog type agony aunt format if and when Khatzumoto deems it worth answering. I think working principles are inferred in that you have read the blog and are applying the principles therein.

What we get is..

Day X

Do this (Do reps for 5 minutes)
Wait for arbitrary amount of time
Do this (do reps for 4 minutes)
Wait
Do this (etc)

If you want you can do this but you don’t have to
(stuff)

I have asked questions in the past and once i did recieve a direct email once, but lately directed communication seems to have slowed somewhat. For example, I also study an unrelated academic subject and was asking how I can tailor the schedule to my needs. I haven't recieved a reply as of yet but i'm still hopeful I can continue with the program. To be honest i'm not even using the schedule anymore and am questioning wether or not I should stop using the system. The only reason i am still subscribed is i'm hoping for some holy grail type sentence SRS pack approach when I come to the end of RTK1.

However, i do not want to digress from the subject of how people deal with large number of reps, while still maintaining a high new card addition rate. I appreciate this may defeat the system somewhat, however I feel that I have momentum I don't want to dissapate by being stuck in an old card loop.

If your problem is that it takes you a week to start retaining cards, then you have a different problem than missing a couple days and needing to catch up... although your SRS will iron it all out in the end in brute-force memory ways. Still, I think you should consider getting a better imprinting when you first learn the kanji - a more vivid story, a wordlist style start before first reviewing them in SRS, whatever works for you.

While you -can- simply pile cards into SRS and eventually memorize them that way, it does cause mountains of cards to pile up.

SomeCallMeChris Wrote:If your problem is that it takes you a week to start retaining cards, then you have a different problem than missing a couple days and needing to catch up... although your SRS will iron it all out in the end in brute-force memory ways. Still, I think you should consider getting a better imprinting when you first learn the kanji - a more vivid story, a wordlist style start before first reviewing them in SRS, whatever works for you.

While you -can- simply pile cards into SRS and eventually memorize them that way, it does cause mountains of cards to pile up.

I think the context in which cards are retained is an important point to note in this instance though. Sure I can remember a failed card when it pops up again in 10 minutes time. I can also retain a card in memory after it has reappeared the next day. However, when a card appears after a larger interval, i tend to forget it. After about a week (give or take) I tend to have a solid grasp of cards that were introduced a week prior. My problem at this point is that adding 15 cards per day, then missing a day tends to result in a large build-up of reps of old cards. Hence, I never see any new cards and constantly rep old cards.

From what I understand from the advice that i am given here is, I should not worry about the rate of addition, because repping older cards will result in a natural decline in the amount of reps I have to do on old cards. I have observed also, that missing days results in a multiplication of total reps for the next day (by some factor of how many cards are in my deck) thereby increasing the amount of time it takes to substantiate this decline. I would like to at least have passed all the cards RTK1 in some fashion, in a timely manner, worrying about retention once all card are added (as you have stated) in a brute force memory way.

JimmySeal Wrote:

erlog Wrote:

Splatted Wrote:I'll post why I don't adhere to the Leitner system later, but for now I want to make it clear that I'm talking about degrees of efficiency rather than saying it's useless.

The Leitner system is just a less granular version of the modern SRS. If you're doing any sort of systematic spaced repetition then you're basically doing Leitner, and if you're not doing that sort of spaced repetition then I have trouble believing it's any more efficient than something like Leitner or an SRS algorithm.

Are you having trouble understanding Splatted's comments? His point was that in his experience, the intervals on this site are shorter than they need to be and that broader jumps in card wait times would be more efficient in terms of time spent reviewing. Nowhere did he discredit the effectiveness or efficiency of SRS/Leitner in general. There is no single perfect formula for the spacing in an SRS, and this site's system is just one possible implementation.

It seems I need to learn to write more clearly, SomeCallMeChris also had to re-read what I wrote. I was talking about the Leitner system in general, but I'm not trying to say I have a better system. I do study differently but I consider that to be a personal choice rather than a better method. The reason I'm posting about it on this thread is because I think it will help the OP decide how to deal with his situation. If you think about how inexact/ ineficient the spacing system is then you stop worrying about missing a review session. Passing all the cards basically just spreads the cards out out so you can deal with them while still making progress. I'm not suggesting this because I have a brilliant memory and don't need to review things as often as other people. In fact it's the opposite. I struggled to maintain good percentages when I was more focused on SRSing.

The main problem I have with the system is that it treats pieces of information like they are completely unconnected. It's much easier to remember a fact if it is part of a web of connected pieces of information, so it seems logical that if you want to memorise something you should aim to learn related facts and experience it in a variety of different contexts. This creates much stronger memories and also means you don't have to worry whether you'll remember it in different contexts. I'm not advocating searching out specific examples though, because if you keep consuming Japanese these examples will occur naturally.

This is why I prioritise new material over reviewing the old. You get the advantage of learning new stuff and strengthening old memories, but there are two obvious problems. Firstly, the OP is working is still working through RTK, so although there is overlap in shared primitves etc, he basically is studying each kanji in isolation. This could be seen as a reason to make sure you don't miss your reviews, but bearing in mind my next point, I would see it as reason to get through RTK quickly.

The second obvious problem is that you can't be sure how often things will repeat if you just keep learning new material. This is why the SRS was created, and it's why I still use it, but the issue of timings is also one of the reasons I don't like the SRS. For the purposes of an SRS a fact is forgotton if you can't actively recall it, but this is obviously not the case. You can afford to wait longer than the SRS wants you to in order to review an item. You'll obviously fail to recognise it, but you can still build upon your previous memory. I use the SRS mainly to make the initial memory last long enough for me to encounter it again, so I usually delete cards after one or two reviews. I figure that gives me at least a few weeks in which to see it again, and at my level if I don't see it that often it's not a high priority.

Obviously, even if I'm right this isn't for everyone, but the OP seems to have a lot of the problems I had. So I thought I'd share what's working for me.

Hi tarkonis, thanks for the info! Looking forward to your next blog update...

mmhorii Wrote:Hi tarkonis, thanks for the info! Looking forward to your next blog update...

Your welcome. Sorry again for the lack of updating. I've got a lot of studying to do at the moment. Plus there isnt really much change in procedure of anything of note to mention. I'm still working through RTK1. Another RTK post at this venture might seem superfluous.

Hey, actually I might have missed this advice, but how do y'all get through kanji reps without chewing up most of your day? Do you not write them all? I am still drilling using this website, and when it gives me, say, 80 new cards and 30 restudy cards, it takes me about 3 hours. This morning, when I have a full day of meetings I need to bang through that in one sitting if possible. But yikes, it takes so long

What are you doing that takes so long?
That is 110 cards in 180 minutes.
You are spending more than one minute per card? Even writing the character it should be taking about 10 seconds (either you remember and write it in 10 seconds or you give up after 10 seconds and fail it).