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The "piling up" effect | ||
Tags: Spaced Repetition (SRS) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| dairwolf Newbie Germany Joined 5154 days ago 6 posts - 6 votes Speaks: German* | Message 1 of 26 07 October 2010 at 4:47am | IP Logged | ||
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Hey everyone, right now I´m having a hard time with a problem I just can´t get solved. I used to work very successfully with paper flash cards, but now I´m doing an exchange year at a Japanese university and I couldn´t take my flash cards with me, so I switched to Anki. Everybody tells me that it is a very helpful tool and that I should use it, and from a logical standpoint it makes sense. There´s just one problem I have.
Let´s say I learn 30 new Words today. Then I learn 30 new words tomorrow, and I will still have to review the 30 words from yesterday. Now on the third day if I learn yet another 30 words it´s already ninety words. So the words just pile up to a huge review mountain that I don´t think I can cope with. Of course Anki will from some point on put longer intervals between older material, but that doesn´t solve the problem because I will have to repeat multiple sets of 30 word entries on one day anyway. I DO have the feeling that my idea about Anki is wrong though because a lot of people recommend Anki and the system definetely appeals to my logical sense, but somehow it still doesn´t "feel" as if I could cope with my problem. Has anyone ever had those same doubts about Anki or any other SRS? Or did they never arise and did you always trust in the programme? What can you tell me about my thoughts about Anki! Thanks & later, Tobi 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| GREGORG4000 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5514 days ago 307 posts - 479 votes  Speaks: English*, Finnish Studies: Japanese, Korean, Amharic, French | Message 2 of 26 07 October 2010 at 5:06am | IP Logged | ||
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Using Anki to initially learn words is really painful and causes you to miss lots of cards, from my experience. I use wordlists to get stuff into intermediate memory, then enter that into Anki. If I miss lots of cards and cause reviews to pile up, then I just stop adding for a while and make wordlists from the ones I don't know. Edited by GREGORG4000 on 07 October 2010 at 5:07am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| hypersport Senior Member United States Joined 5872 days ago 216 posts - 307 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 26 07 October 2010 at 5:16am | IP Logged | ||
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Start reading books. Vocabulary will quickly repeat itself in context and stick.
Start with childrens books and work your way up to novels with about 600 pages. Read them out loud to perfect your speech. After a year or two you'll have acquired a lot of vocabulary that you can use in every day conversations and reading will be as easy as reading in English. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rapp Senior Member United States Joined 5722 days ago 129 posts - 204 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Spanish | Message 4 of 26 07 October 2010 at 5:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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Those "longer intervals" you mentioned are the reason this problem doesn't occur, and they begin taking effect during your first review session.
So let's say that on day one you enter 30 new words into Anki and then you review them. As you review each word, you click one of five buttons to rate how easily you remembered the word. The worst one is "fail" and will schedule that word to be reviewed again later that same study session. The best one will schedule it to be reviewed in a couple of days. And those intervals get longer every time you "successfully" review a word (rate it higher than "fail"). So if you remember a word easily three or four times in a row, you won't see it again for several weeks. In your scenario of adding 30 new words each day, by day ten you will not be reviewing 300 words. You'll review the 30 new ones you entered that day, and a small number of previous days' words that just happen to have ended up being scheduled for that day. It wouldn't surprise me if your total number of reviews on day 10 was 35 or 40 words. So yes, the number of daily reviews does increase as you add words, but it increases at a much slower rate than you would imagine. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5372 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 5 of 26 07 October 2010 at 5:40pm | IP Logged | ||
I know how you feel, and I'm not necessarily an advocate of SRS, but I can perhaps add some information. Words that you don't know will indeed be added on to the new ones you must learn. However, the words you do know will not -- their repetition will be delayed to a much later date as a way of confirming that you still remember them in the long run. Out of the new words you learn, you will also know some already. Don't forget also that there is no need to add 30 new words when you haven't learned the first batch. Go at your own pace. Finally, there is usually a more or less finite number of words you will try to learn, so the number in your pile does not grow exponentially. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rapp Senior Member United States Joined 5722 days ago 129 posts - 204 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Esperanto, Spanish | Message 6 of 26 07 October 2010 at 6:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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"I will still have to review the 30 words from yesterday." That is the fallacy in your initial post.
The whole idea behind SRS programs is that there is an optimal interval between reviews of a particular card. The optimal interval is not just a constant 1 day between reviews. Rather, it is based on how easily you recalled the material during the most recent review. If your recall was poor, the next review will be scheduled very soon, maybe even during the same study session if you give it the very lowest rating. If your recall was good, the next review will be scheduled some distance in the future. On your very first review of a card that could be as much as 2 or 3 days. And that interval increases each time you rate your recall of a particular card highly. So it is easy for cards to end up scheduled to be next reviewed months or even years from now. Really, the best thing would be if you actually used Anki for a week like you proposed in your initial post. Enter 30 cards a day and do the scheduled reviews each day, and by then end of the week you will see that your daily reviews will have hardly increased at all, even though you will have a couple of hundred cards in the deck by then. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ALS Senior Member United States Joined 5795 days ago 104 posts - 131 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian, Finnish, Russian | Message 7 of 26 07 October 2010 at 9:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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This topic has made me think of something I never quite understood with Anki. When you add 50 cards of material you just learned, what then? You just learned it so you can't review it right then, but Anki treats it as a new card that you have to review before it enters the spaced rotation. Do you usually wait for the next day, or a few days later? This may be part of what the OP is talking about, since if you add 50 cards on day 1, you'll have those 50 cards to review on day 2. If you add 50 cards on day 2, you'll have those 50 to review on day 3, as well as some cards from day 1. It doesn't pile up every single card, but I think a lot of those immediate reviews of new cards would be unnecessary.
Also, OP, you posted essentially the exact same question twice on this forum. You should probably avoid doing that. Edited by ALS on 07 October 2010 at 9:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6900 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 26 07 October 2010 at 10:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's possible to edit the interval settings to show more (or fewer) new cards per day, to show failed cards early, edit the number of maximum failed cards etc. If you want, there is also the possibilty to "Review early" or "Learn more".
For the cards to pile up, you have to add more cards than you "should" (if you don't tweak the settings) and/or have a very bad memory. Bad retention will result in closer reviews. However, unless you fail every card, even just rating them "Hard" (the second lowest rating) will gradually delay the next review. So, if the words somehow pile up, tweak the settings to your liking/review early/learn more, or don't add so many cards. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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