I always thought it would be nice to "review" the failed stack. As in, cards get shuffled and you review them like any other deck until you're ready to promote them. Then I could keep all my troublesome cards together in the failed deck and review them as a deck until they are no longer an issue for me.

If you just review the failed kanji without going back to fix your stories, the chance of failing the same kanji again is quite high, I think.

The thing about the system is that you should take time and review your stories for the failed kanji. Alter it to make it stick better, or maybe make up (or pick) a new one.

It's pretty funny, today I was thinking on how Anki is different from this site, and noticed the failed pile. Anki just asks you w.e. card you failed again and again in closer intervals than the cards you passed.... I agree, this needs to be fixed.

The reason I would like to review the fail pile is this. If I fail a card, it goes to the fail pile to await a story revision. I revise my stories until I feel like I've "learned" the kanji again. Then if I clicked "learned," the kanji will go to the green pile in the next stack to await another revision in 3 days. I would prefer to review these troublesome cards again the following day rather than wait 3 days to see if my story stuck. I'd like a quick fail pile review at the end of my brainstorming session, and another the next day before I decide promote them to the true "learned" pile. I can't really tell if my story was good enough or not until I sleep on it.

Currently, I end up reviewing the cards that are up for review and see them get promoted through the stacks while the cards giving me problems fall to the fail stack and take up a long term residence there. I know this was not the intent of the creator, but it is what I end up doing although I'm not sure quite why. Oh, the shame!

But to sum that all up, I'd like to be able to review the fail deck so that I won't have to wait another 3 days to see if I really learned them this time. But anyway, I'm gonna check out that greasemonkey script now...

Henke wrote:

If you just review the failed kanji without going back to fix your stories, the chance of failing the same kanji again is quite high, I think.

Yeah, but that's the beauty of it--failing it again is what lets you know that you need to go back and fix your stories, the ones that you've failed again are still available in a special place to see and fix your stories, and ultimately, failing it again doesn't hurt.

There are actually about three kanji whose stories I can't remember for the life of me, but during a period in which I didn't have the (time/discipline) to do a solid review of failed cards, they just came up often enough that I now know them cold. It's too slow to do all >2000 kanji by that method (which, after all, is why we're using Heisig's method in the first place), but it lets you pick up a few here and there.

Basically, the only drawback I can see is if someone is actively discouraged from reevaluating the failed cards--but I see letting a big failed stack rot as being more likely than that, and more damaging besides (repeated exposure will eventually bring learning, nonexposure will not).

~J

Last edited by woodwojr (2008 June 21, 1:01 am)

My contention is that that "as long as" is a big enough caveat that it makes it not ok anymore, but your mileage apparently varies.

Edit: I should add that, at least in my experience, it's not always even the card in the "failed" pile that needs a story review--I've had some reviews where I'll fail a card because one of the components has a bad story (or one I've forgotten), while the component comes up sometime in the next few days and I ended up learning it from the card that failed.

Anyway, I think I've presented about all of the anecdotes and opinions I have that are relevant to this. Any other opinions?

~J

Last edited by woodwojr (2008 June 21, 5:13 am)

I've posited in other threads we need both options for the "study" pile (my term for the more negatively termed Failed stack).

One is you can "study"/"review" your missed cards similar to before. The other is you can "test" it as if it were a stack of new cards.

In addition, this would apply to the new card stacks. You can either do an initial review (like now), or go through clicking "learned" on new cards that move them to stack 2 for review in 3 days.

Seeing that I'm now adding in more new cards from RTK3, this has come to thought again.

Having read the article, I think it goes more towards supporting the current implementation than the other way, actually.

I think what the article is saying, when applied to RtK, is that if you try to "dig" too long you reinforce stories that don't work well. Thus everytime you try to remember a "difficult" kanji you go through memory links that don't work well. So it's best not to reinforce it, and go for a completely different story (this goes also beyond the fail pile issue, in that you could also answer "No" to something you remembered, but took a long time to recollect).

I think we've all experienced and verified this : a so-so story never gets better by repetition. Failing and reviewing a kanji straight away gives the false impression that we know it better because the reviews intervals are short. Soon as the intervals get several weeks, the "tip of the tongue", or long memory retrieval, comes back.

Remaking a story can be difficult, once you've made a mental association, they can take a while to fade away. So the article here is saying, the sooner you can let it fade away the better!

So I'd conclude that that article does in fact support for encouraging users to rework a story after they answer "No" rather than force on with early repetitions.

I think the fail pile needs a better "flow" in the review cycle, and also the information on the failed kanji list needs to be improved to become directly useful rather than a reference list. Ie. to be come functional rather than informative. However I think turning the fail pile directly into a review pile doesnt address the "tip of the tongue" problem.

I sensed the same as many people here, the lack of a "1 day review" for failed kanjis.
But I found a shortcut to solve this problem:

When I review, and tick a failed kanji, I study the failed one on the spot. So, the next day when I check the previous day failed list (I never do it the same day after reviewing), I am getting a "1 day review".

We're assuming that we're failing the card because we completely forgot it. Some of us have failed cards: accidentally, for minor stroke mistakes, realizing we forgot it as a primitive in an earlier kanji tested that day (ie, it would have been a miss had it come up first), etc. Not all are to do with a poor story or complete forgetting.

That said, with RevTK, going to the study pile is not too bad but not too good either. We want to discourage brute force memorizing, but we also want to continue the flow. Hence, three implementations (which seem simple enough) fix a majority of complaints.

1. Downgrade missed kanji in higher stacks instead of going straight to the study stack.
2. In "study" pile, missed cards can be tested the next day if you click on a link (sort of like the link for testing new cards). So, there may need to be a third box in the first stack (missed reviews that have aged a day or more).
3. In the "study" pile, missed cards can be studied, which moves them to three days away.

To be honest, RevTK could stay as is and still work. Users need a way to be reminded that some of their stories are lacking. However, I remember the feeling of a 300 card failed stack. Before finding my flow, it was a big ego buster.