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

~J

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

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.

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.

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！

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

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

Last edited by woodwojr (2009 March 13, 11:31 am)

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.

Last edited by mafried (2009 March 13, 12:00 pm)

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

Last edited by woodwojr (2009 March 13, 12:09 pm)

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'').

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！！

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

Last edited by HerrPetersen (2009 March 14, 4:09 am)