Koos83 wrote:

But by taking weeks to catch up it also screws up the review schedule! At least when you pause, you get the cards that are due sooner, also sooner.

I do pause, card A comes up for reviewing first, card B later and card C even later; as it was intended to.

(While I would like to see an implementation of a pause feature,) I think you are missing the broader implication of pausing.

Lets say you come back two weeks later and unpause. Then spend the next two weeks reviewing cards. The problem is that by the time you finish 2 weeks of reviews, the cards that will begin to expire should have expired two weeks ago, and you will find that you may not know them, and so on and so on. You will begin a catch up game where you never catch up to reviewing cards before you forget them. That is the theory at least. (And that my friend, will trigger a chain reaction that will rattle the very foundation of reality, culminating in the ultimate negation of all matter and anti-matter, bringing the ultimate destruction of all existence.)

Some people buy this logic, and adamantly protest the pause feature. I don't particularly buy into this logic for 3 reasons.

(1) I do not use Anki in isolation. For example, I may have cards due in 2.5+ years that I may not be totally familiar with today. However, I guarantee that by the time they expire I will think they are uselessly-easy. Why? Because I will have run into them in 100 and 1 times, and in 100 and 1 way (contexts). So by the time the card expires I will know it.

(2) We learn different things, at different rates, for different reasons. This means that some words will stick, while others will not. Further, cards that are easy today, when due in a month-or-two may be forgotten, despite SRS-predicted reviews. Lots of young cards are failed when they are on the verge of becoming mature.

(3) Short breaks do not affect mature cards in the same way they affect young cards.

Last edited by oregum (2010 July 17, 10:16 am)

Koos83 wrote:

(...)
I don't pause, card A, B and C all end up in my due pile when I get back after 3 weeks and I'll have to review them all roughly at the same time.(...)

You made a good point there. The rest of posts it seems is the same old debate, and I think you already know about that.

I can confirm to you now by looking at the code that the behaviour you expect is working.

Expired cards are selected ordered by expiry date, and then simple randomization (that is within the same expiry date, there is a randomization). So if you choose to do only 10 reviews today you definitely get the most urgent cards (cf. code on Github repository).

I reckon the UI does not give any feedback on this though. But until I implement something like a "max. reviews per day" feature, that may make you feel better about coming back to a big pile of expired cards.

I understand though, it is about user experience. So in my opinion the rhetoric about "you shouldn't pause a SRS" is moot. But I have no idea when I'll implement an option to limit the review load.. I'm currently in Helsinki Airport, just returning from India

PS: I'm in lack of sleep so don't quote me on this, but I have this vague idea that "urgent" cards may be slightly more complicated. The SRS could decide that some cards are way overdue, and thus are considered likely failed, and other cards which are less overdue or reviewed on time may be more urgent... but I'm not sure that would make a significant difference in results seeing, as you said, that well known cards are less likely to be forgotten and don't need urgent review.

563 reviews due. ><

As I've said before; not suspending them and just not doing them for 3 weeks messes up your SRS way more than suspending them, because the cards will not come up in order due! They come up randomly. So the moment you miss a day or two of reviewing, your SRS is already messed up, because a card that was due today in the SRS will not be reviewed today, but 3 days later, along with the cards that are due on that day. So if you wait three weeks, all the cards that were due on all of those 21 days will be reviewed three weeks later, along with the cards that are due then. So it messes up your SRS completely and utterly.

However, if you pause them for those three weeks, they will all be reviewed in the order in which they are due, thus keeping your SRS spaced out more, as it's supposed to be.

I've noticed that when you go on holiday and are surrounded by a completely different environment and language, your memory does pause. I got back to my house, it felt like I hadn't left at all. And I didn't think of reviewing once when I was on holiday, not until I was back in my 'regular review surroundings' at home. So yeah, in a way your memory does pause, definitely.

You say it is not detrimental if you don't finish all of your reviews every day? Well then why do an SRS at all? It spaces out your reviews in an optimal way of learning. So if you don't finish your reviews on the day they are meant to be reviewed, you've already messed up the SRS, which put them for ideal reviewing on that day.

Anyway, this pause/not pause discussion can go on forever. Just making my point again for whoever didn't understand it when I made it before, up there.

Koos83 wrote:

563 reviews due. ><

This is your huge scary pile of reviews after a long holiday?? I used to have daily reviews around this number (1000+ if I was ONE day late). Get yourself an Android/iPhone, decent data plan for sync and embrace huge piles of reviews Currently I'm doing 3/4 of my daily "load" during commute, in queues, boring meetings etc. and since I stopped adding cards like crazy I'll soon have to figure out what to do when reviews are finished...

563 is nothing if you spread that out over 20 days. only 28 more reviews per day. It's not that scary is it? I usually obligate myself to do 50 more reviews a day after a vacation. Even that is so easy I usually end up finishing the pile way before my set target. I think the key is how you fool yourself to make it look like it's a piece of cake. And it is a piece of cake when you think about it. 28 reviews only take 2 - 3 minutes.

Last edited by masaman (2010 August 23, 4:50 pm)

I find that I'm not terribly fond of Anki, because I prefer to study away from a computer, with a book and a pencil and paper.  Still, I incorporate Anki into my suite of study tools, and I use it perhaps once a month when I feel like incorporating a bit of electronic flash card study.

Maybe it's because I use it so seldom, and am not used to it, but it seems like it's much harder to browse and study material with it than with a book.  (I really prefer to spend more time away from a computer than on one.)  It looks like it would be an excellent quizzing / evaluation tool, however.

I don't think doing all your SRS reviews in spaced out groups is any worse than suspending them, but obviously I am beating a dead horse so I will exit this thread with apologies.

I appreciate this is a very old topic but I am going to be without internet access for a couple of extended periods and would also like to suspend/pause my cards. The topics I have found on the forum all seem fairly old, was a consensus reached at all? Is there a way to do this?