First off, I'm sorry if this has been asked before. I tried searching to no avail.
Ok, so I haven't been here in a while, and when I came back I noticed that the site has gotten a fancy update. I'm having a problem reviewing old kanji however. Use to be I could click on the green vertical bar on the "Review" page, and it would let me review any time I wanted. Are there restrictions on when you can review items now? Because nothing happens when I click on those green bars anymore.
I've tried in Firefox and IE.
torokun
Member
From: Tokyo
Registered: 2005-10-09
Posts: 32
I don't know what you're talking about. If people WANT to review old cards, they should be able to.
Sometimes, I just want to review a particular lesson, or want to go through the entire stack in one day to get a complete overview. Currently, this is impossible with the site. Unfortunately, this renders the site less useful than paper flashcards in that regard (flexibility of review).
SRS is great, but it doesn't do everything for everyone, and there are legitimate reasons one may want to perform a complete review of a lesson or their whole stack. I would LOVE to be able to do this with the site, but it's currently impossible. For me, that's a big weakness, because I frequently like to run through my whole deck when I have a big chunk of time.
Reviewing cards before they're due is certainly not impossible, but most SRS systems don't properly take it into account when scheduling the the repetition after the early one. Recent versions of Supermemo do, but that's the only SRS I know that has that feature. Typically, what happens is the next repetition is scheduled too late, so there's a good chance that your early review actually results in you forgetting. In either case, you're wasting time that can be spent learning new material.
For long term memory: follow the SRS. If you don't like its scheduling decisions, change the algorithm. If you need the ability to review early or to maintain different selections of knowledge at different levels of retention, then I think it's a good idea to pay for Supermemo (both by money and increased complexity).
ファブリス
Administrator
From: Belgium
Registered: 2006-06-14
Posts: 4021
Website
@torokun If you don't to follow specific courses, try to trust the SRS, utlimately it should free you time to study more vocab, more kanji.. also don't forget the principle SRS'es are based on: reviewing the same information every day is not only inefficient, but detrimental. Our brain learns not to store for a long time things we use everyday.
With that said, I agree you should be able to review specific lessons, or selection of characters, which is especially useful for users who have to accomodate courses and tests in which case the immediate goal takes priority.
PS: you CAN review green stacks if you want to but it's hidden now: replace "type=expired" with "type=fresh" in the url after you land in the flashcard review page.
torokun
Member
From: Tokyo
Registered: 2005-10-09
Posts: 32
If you review separately from the SRS, you will just end up reviewing them an extra time, but won't lengthen the SRS times. I agree that if you reviewed within the SRS many times in quick succession you'd break the paradigm...
However, I think there's a lot of value to reviewing a complete set of related characters, or the whole set of joyo kanji, at once, because it helps to develop your overall sense of the whole kanji space...
torokun
Member
From: Tokyo
Registered: 2005-10-09
Posts: 32
It is interesting, and you may be right, but I only have my own experiences to go on, which have been usually successful, but could often have been moreso with the help of SRS.
I did RTK about 12 years ago, and it was the first time I really had gone through and learned all the Joyo kanji well. I learned to speak Japanese fluently living there in elementary and junior high school, but still got stuck at a middling level with kanji, not having continued in Japanese schools...
Anyway, although I read Japanese all the time, books, newspapers, etc., my writing ability has waned over such a long period, so I am going through it again to refresh my memory for writing them, and fill in any holes...
When I did RTK the first time, I basically just tried to really make the stories stick, and reviewed only a few times... I think that if you get the mnemonics right, and you are using Japanese regularly, they stick pretty well. Then you don't really need _such_ a strict schedule for review, although it may help.
I am now starting to try using Anki and this site to experiment with SRS for all sorts of things, and it will be interesting to see how it goes. Here is one I memorized recently. 
e to 40 digits...
e = 2.718281828459045235360287471352662497757
much easier than the paper flashcard system i used to do 