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wrightak wrote:
So maybe prevention would be better than a cure. Would it be possible to produce simulations of what would happen if you take a break for a few days, or if you keep adding cards at the rate you are. That way, if you know that you're going on holiday or that you will be away from Anki for a certain amount of time each week, fortnight or month or whatever, you could run the simulation to see what your future workload will be like.
That's exactly what the "Cumulative view of due cards" graph does, isn't it?
Thanks for all the comments, guys.
If you go away for a week and come back to 700 cards, then you have a 100 card/day workload. No changing the order of the cards or trickery will reduce that workload - the cards need to be answered.
Someone mentioned being an adult and being able to decide how many cards they want to review by themselves. Well, that's exactly what Anki lets you do - you review as many cards as you want in a session, and come back later, as someone else mentioned.
Essentially we have two different topics going on here:
- reducing the psychological burden
- displaying the most important cards first
I understand the psychological aspect of it, and often my cards build up to 100-300 before I have a chance to tackle them. I rarely finish them all in one go, instead picking at them over a period of days.
Perhaps Anki could define a set session length as someone suggested, but I somehow doubt that will help. How is that any different from a person looking at the counter at '300', and saying "okay, I'll study until at least 250 today"?
If the cards produce an insurmountable burden after a week's holiday, then your workload is probably too high. By automatically rescheduling the cards to make it look like it's not too high, it hides the real amount of work from you, and instead you'll find yourself wondering why your recall ratio is less than it should be (because cards are being answered later than they should be). I'm not sure that dynamic rescheduling is a good idea.
I made Anki prioritize old cards over new ones so that you could add as many cards as you wanted into your deck, without giving yourself a huge workload. Even if you have 1000 new cards waiting, you can do 10 a day (or more, or less), and you'll never introduce more cards into the equation until you've reviewed all the existing ones first.
The longer the interval of a set of cards, the more spaced out they become, so that the highest concentration of due cards is made up of relatively new cards. You don't go away for a week and find yourself with 700 cards spaced at 300-307 days in the future to review. The large workload is due to a lot of short term study before the trip.
Perhaps Anki could remind the user if a certain percentage of the deck is comprised of young cards, that they are possibly taking on too much work. However, an option like in Mnemosyne where a maximum of 10 new words are introduced at once is not something I'm interested in. I don't want to baby the user with hard limits like that.
Regarding displaying the most important cards first, Anki uses neither of the scheduling systems people suggested above. The cards are displayed in deck order, a relic of very early Anki versions before any priorities were supported. In practice, this is not a problem until you have a large number of overdue cards, and even then it's not as big a problem as it sounds. Two alternatives have been proposed - prioritizing young cards as they are more easily forgotten, or prioritizing old cards as they are easier to get through. Both have advantages and disadvantages. The current Anki system doesn't optimize in either direction, so you get a combination of both types of cards when you review.
But ultimately such prioritization is not so important if people don't have huge piles of overdue cards. I realise that delays are a part of life and I frequently encounter them myself. But rather than try and patch the problem with ordering changes or hiding some overdue cards, perhaps the problem is better solved by reducing the workload, either manually or with help from Anki.
Last edited by resolve (2007 October 01, 10:11 am)
resolve wrote:
Regarding displaying the most important cards first, Anki uses neither of the scheduling systems people suggested above. The cards are displayed in deck order, a relic of very early Anki versions before any priorities were supported. In practice, this is not a problem until you have a large number of overdue cards, and even then it's not as big a problem as it sounds. Two alternatives have been proposed - prioritizing young cards as they are more easily forgotten, or prioritizing old cards as they are easier to get through. Both have advantages and disadvantages. The current Anki system doesn't optimize in either direction, so you get a combination of both types of cards when you review.
So I've been completely mistaken in believing that Anki prioritises the cards that were due the most recently. I apologise if I misled anyone. Having the cards in deck order has certainly made it seem that way.
I wasn't suggesting prioritising young cards or old cards, I believed that Anki prioritised cards whose scheduled time for review was the most recent. An old card or a new card could qualify therefore this is quite different isn't it?
The advantage is that if you have 100 cards to review, and you completely forget one and schedule it for 10 minutes. You don't want to wait until you've finished the 100 cards until you see it again. You want to have it on the 10 minute mark exactly. Do you agree? I guess if you completely forget then you could argue that this isn't important but if you very nearly remembered it then it would be better not to waste the effort that went into concentrating on the recall.
One property of using the deck order is that a card marked for 10 minutes will appear again in exactly 10 minutes, unless any cards before it expire in that time. Since you are essentially working from start to finish through the expired cards, any cards which you get wrong will crop up again as soon as they've expired.
I'm sorry, maybe I'm being really thick. What exactly does "deck order" mean?
The order of cards in a deck :-)
Put a pile of cards on the table. Pick up the first one. Is it due? If not, put it back and pick up two cards. Is the bottom one due? If not, put it back and pick up three cards. Repeat.
I'm probably quite a statistics freak myself but thinking about the whole discussion about piling up cards and the psychological impacts maybe the most simple and elegant workaround would be to make status bar at the bottom optional!
What the eye does not see, the heart does not grieve over...
Last edited by Kurosawa (2007 October 01, 3:12 pm)
I do understand the hesistancy toward revamping the alogorithm to accomodate all different variables. But, personally, I can't see what would be negative about having a simple pause (freeze, suspend) option. It could be initiated in the preferences or someplace like that. People who want to use it can and those who don't are free not to. Just would add to the versitility of Anki.
Last edited by kurojohn (2007 October 01, 5:12 pm)
I guess you're not a programmer :-)
There's a saying that every application, given enough time, evolves into having a complete editor in it. If new features aren't evaluated for their merit and included just because they can exist, elegant code turns into a difficult to maintain mess. I have to see the real value (for me, or for someone else) before I will add new code. "Just add it as an option" is a slippery slope.
resolve wrote:
Regarding displaying the most important cards first, Anki uses neither of the scheduling systems people suggested above. The cards are displayed in deck order, a relic of very early Anki versions before any priorities were supported. In practice, this is not a problem until you have a large number of overdue cards, and even then it's not as big a problem as it sounds. Two alternatives have been proposed - prioritizing young cards as they are more easily forgotten, or prioritizing old cards as they are easier to get through. Both have advantages and disadvantages. The current Anki system doesn't optimize in either direction, so you get a combination of both types of cards when you review.
But ultimately such prioritization is not so important if people don't have huge piles of overdue cards. I realise that delays are a part of life and I frequently encounter them myself. But rather than try and patch the problem with ordering changes or hiding some overdue cards, perhaps the problem is better solved by reducing the workload, either manually or with help from Anki.
As far as I can see pause is inferior to the current system as long as the current system takes note if a card was successfully answered with a longer interval that was originally scheduled. Something like this:
Go away for 10 days, come back review a card that should have been seen 1 day later. However because the current interval is now at 10 then your options will allow for higher spacing. The system as it is will also deal with cards that you have forgotten. Along the same lines, I think that not prioritizing young cards(excluding new cards of course) over older cards should be viewed as just as big a violation of the SRS methodology as a pause feature. These absolutely should be the cards you see first. It shouldn't matter how long it has been since you reviewed nor should it matter the size of the workload.
Last edited by dilandau23 (2007 October 01, 7:52 pm)
as i tried to say before, coming back from something like a business trip and facing a huge pile of cards is not merely a "psychological barrier" and shouldn't be discarded as such. it can be a very real and practical hinderance in the balance of a professional life and should be considered as such.
anyway, as things stand now, of course i can just try and whittle away at the huge stack of cards while other cards continue to expire on their schedules, hopefully doing something like two steps forward for every step backward. but throw in three business trips during one month, and that can start to become quite a burden practically speaking. furthermore, if i have a light day at the office one day and bust out 300 cards to catch up, that creates a huge lump of cards that might come back to haunt me again later.
it's ok. but i just really like the idea of pausing the entire system for a couple days, thus preserving the schedule relationships that the cards have with each other. does that make sense? it doesn't create any lumps or bumps for me to have to try and iron out.
--i know a pause feature would disrupt the idea of having an SRS system in the first place...
--but missing three days already is a disruption of the whole SRS system,
--and spending a week or two trying to slowly recover, as other cards expire and grow old is just that much more of a disruption of the idea of an SRS system.
by the way, Resolve, please don't take this as a criticism of ANKI specifically.
it is simply a feature that i would like to see in any SRS system (and haven't seen yet), because Real Life (tm) just doesn't follow a strict SRS schedule, and i feel a global suspension would actually impact the SRS schedule less (and be more simple) than other methods for those occasions when life unavoidably does interfere.
facing a huge pile of cards is not merely a "psychological barrier" and shouldn't be discarded as such.
Actually it is for the most part. Whether you put the system on hold and resume later, or come back to a big pile of cards and whittle away at them for a while before clearing the stack, you are still offsetting cards from the time they were supposed to be reviewed. It's just less visible if you can pause the deck.
In all likelihood if your professional life is such that you can't clear your expired cards in a reasonable amount of time after a business trip, your study load is probably too high and you need to back off a bit. Turning 5-day cards into 15-day cards and 10-day cards into 20-day cards will just wreak havoc on your retention rates.
furthermore, if i have a light day at the office one day and bust out 300 cards to catch up, that creates a huge lump of cards that might come back to haunt me again later.
Since the review times include randomization, this shouldn't really happen. A 300-card review day followed by two 0-card review days should have essentially the same effect as 3 100-card review days.
But I think one improvement would be to present cards in order of shortest-delay-time first. This way, when the cards do get neglected, the ones that need the most attention get it first.
Last edited by JimmySeal (2007 October 02, 3:04 am)
I'm not taking it as any criticism against Anki, I'm just arguing the theory behind it.
I think the idea of pausing is flawed. Say you go away for 20 days. Without pausing, 50 cards (set A) will appear tomorrow, 50 cards (set B) will appear in two days, set C in three days, etc.
Let's say we pause. When you come back, you expect to be shown set A, as if only a day had passed. So you answer the 50 cards, all of which are twenty days overdue, and then finish studying for the day because there is no more work to do.
The next day, the set B cards become due. They are also 20 days late now, since you had an extra day to wait. On the third day, set C cards appear, all exactly 20 days late too. This process continues until the paused time has been exhausted, meaning that all the cards you missed during the time you were away will be delayed for as long as possible, minimizing your chances of remembering them.
If I understand correctly, what most of the proponents of this modification are requesting is that every card be reviewed X days after they were supposed to be.
C'mon guys, don't you see that's bonkers?
resolve, thanks for giving a really clear example.
it is bonkers.
i really wasn't envisioning a 20 day pause.
just a 2 or 3 day pause. but now i realize that using a short pause too often would add up to increasingly larger delays on those cards that have long review intervals (short-interval cards wouldn't be effected as badly).
so, for the short term, a pause feels like it would work pretty simply. but if it effects some of the cards really badly (those longer-interval cards) that is really bad, and inconsistent, and not such a simple solution. so nevermind.
i guess SRS and my inconsistently busy life just aren't destined to get along very well.
Pause = bonkers, well said Jimmy!
JimmySeal wrote:
But I think one improvement would be to present cards in order of shortest-delay-time first. This way, when the cards do get neglected, the ones that need the most attention get it first.
I would love to steer the discussion in this direction. To be honest, I was quite shocked to find out that Anki doesn't do this already. Resolve, I saw you mentioned "advantages and disadvantages" to doing this, could you elaborate?
dilandau23 wrote:
To be honest, I was quite shocked to find out that Anki doesn't do this already.
I think this probably isn't a priority because it doesn't matter as long as you clear your expired cards completely each session.
dilandau23 wrote:
Resolve, I saw you mentioned "advantages and disadvantages" to doing this, could you elaborate?
One possible disadvantage is that it adds to the "pain factor" of starting to dig into the neglected stack. Every time you start working on it you are faced with the hardest cards first, adding to the psychological hurdle since you will likely plow through quite a few forgotten cards before reaching ones you have a better chance of retaining.
Personally, I would prefer to start with the longest delay time cards, which minimizes the psychological barrier. This also allows me to work on all of my difficult cards at once at the end of the session. It does, however, muck up the 10-minute delay quite a bit.
In my mind, this seems nice and orderly, but from a memory perspective I have no idea which way would work better. Maybe having the shorter cards first makes more sense after all since you get maximum use out of the 10 minute delay, giving you time to fail a card a couple times in one session and still get to see it again.
Last edited by shaydwyrm (2007 October 02, 8:58 am)
Maybe the current way of showing them in random order is after all the most beneficial: you get a mix of hard and easy cards, which might be the best motivationwise. By sorting them according to due order, no matter in which direction, you finally run into a (huge) pack of hard cards, which you all have to do before you can get to the new/easy ones. I think in its present state the reviewing is more "fun".
Ok, a 20 day pause does suggest you want to review those cards that fall within the review window the day of the review first. Theory being you may have already forgotten the one scheduled and missed 20 days ago, so why not hold that one off till you catch up since it will likely be missed anyway and have to start over on the remembering process.
Personally, I had 300 cards backed up with 200 in the missed section on this site. I just did 100 a day then studied only 40 of the missed deck. That takes me upwards of an hour or two. After a week, the missed deck did not get any smaller (I'm always adding cards, missing cards and reviewing only 40 missed per day) but the cards up for review were only for that day. If you're disciplined enough to use an SRS, I think you can handle limiting the number of cards per day you'll review if you get backed up. In time, the SRS system will smooth out the cards scheduled per day.
Not sure where to start with this. I am using Anki, and have found it a really good system. I like the flexibility of choosing how well I know a card, as well as the ability to use it on and off line. It has been working for me--it sure beats just using paper flash cards as I had been. However, I can see the benefit of have a pause function. When I first heard of it, my reaction was...I would like that!
I haven't needed to take a break, but if I for some reason had to, it would be a lot nicer to just pick up where I left off, reviewing a relatively small amount each day before moving on to new cards. When I started using Anki, I had already learned several hundred of the Kanji. I wanted to continue learning new cards, but I also didn't want to put in too many old cards in at one time. Why? Even considering there is a several day span in which the correctly answered cards come back up, having to review all of those on one day before I could enter in new Kanji was more than I wanted to do at that time. Because I knew I couldn't choose to add new cards until the old ones were finished I spaced out those initial few hundred, and used a different program to review the new cards. It wasn't ideal, but it was okay. What it did, however, was help me see the benefit of being able to pause it so that sort of thing wouldn't have to happen again.
As a side note (actually I think it is kind of important to this whole discussion): one thing everyone is forgetting in all of this is the Heisig system. Yes, review is necessary, and yes, if you put off review for too long, you will probably start forgetting things, but if you are actually following his advice, you aren't going to completely forget all those Kanji if you put your reviews on pause for a few days or a week. If you do, you probably aren't creating good enough stories for them in the first place. We seem to be playing down our ability to remember them if we just put them all on hold for a week or so.
Like I said, I just know that not being able to get to new cards until all the old ones were finished was an inconvenience for me, and a pause function (or some other option?) would be a big help. Other than that, I love the program!
so what about this: instead of having a pause button, why not have a scheduled break feature. so, you say: in 10 days, im going to be gone for 5 days. so, Anki starts phasing out the newer cards that you would probably forget anyways in the 5 days, and instead focuses, in the time you have specifically on the medium cards, that are the biggest pains in the ass, as you can still forget them, but you also have put a good deal of time into remembering them. so maybe there could be some way of bolstering the memory of the cards, maybe even as a function of time spent on each one and the amount remembered. i think that this would satisfy many of the requests that people have, as well as still fit within the idea of SRS. so, you just basically give up on newish cards until you come back, and just focus on the cards whose due dates fall within the interval when you are gone, so you dont forget them.
what about that?
i've seen many mentions of the reading field being automatically populated with hiragana while entering into the expression field. this doesn't happen at all for me. am i missing something? using anki 0.3.6, mac os x 10.4.10 on a powerbook g4.
I have a question about the suspend function. What actually happens when a card is suspended? Is it frozen in its current due date (for example: due in 3 days), or does the clock keep ticking, but it just doesn't show up in my reviews until I unsuspend it? I have never used this, so I don't quite understand it. Do you have to suspend cards individually, or can you do a whole section or deck? I was just wondering if the suspend fuction could be used on the whole deck as a kind of pause.
I just know personally that when I am able, I am learning new cards. If I would go away for a week, the day I got back, I would review, but I would also start learning new cards, too. That is just my study system. In the current anki, there isn't a way to put those cards into my review until I am done reviewing all the old ones. (The cards are already in my Heisig deck...I just can't study them.) Normally it makes sense not to introduce new cards until reviewing is finished, but obviously some of us have situations where we would like to either do so, or pause the reviews so that is not a problem when we return. Whether anki lets me review those new cards or not, I am still learning them, and it would be nice to be able to have them show up in my reviews as well.
wasurenaide wrote:
i've seen many mentions of the reading field being automatically populated with hiragana while entering into the expression field. this doesn't happen at all for me. am i missing something? using anki 0.3.6, mac os x 10.4.10 on a powerbook g4.
From the Anki wiki bug tracker:
known bug for PPC macs. I'll fix it when I get a chance
wynterp wrote:
wasurenaide wrote:
i've seen many mentions of the reading field being automatically populated with hiragana while entering into the expression field. this doesn't happen at all for me. am i missing something? using anki 0.3.6, mac os x 10.4.10 on a powerbook g4.
From the Anki wiki bug tracker:
known bug for PPC macs. I'll fix it when I get a chance
thanks wynterp!