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I've been using Anki to memorize Chinese characters. It's near-ideal for the task. It's a pretty memory-hard task, and I find a sustainable average is only 2

by retrac 7y ago

I've been using Anki to memorize Chinese characters. It's near-ideal for the task. It's a pretty memory-hard task, and I find a sustainable average is only 2 - 3 new cards a day. I've done stretches where I've done 20 new characters and I pay for it in the reviews for weeks and weeks. It feels frustrating too since you keep reviewing the same 5 or 10 items that won't "stick". I find SRS software like Anki is best taken with a "slow and steady wins the race" approach. I only do new cards when I start running out of daily reviews now, and I find it a lot less punishing.

zozbot234 7y ago
> It feels frustrating too since you keep reviewing the same 5 or 10 items that won't "stick". I think the idea is that eventually you'll be recalling even those "leech" items, due to the sheer exposure you're getting in the meantime. Frustration is part of the game.
- andrewzah 7y ago
  > due to the sheer exposure you're getting in the meantime. This helps less than you'd think. Many of my leeches are due to word similarities. Sometimes I'd have an issue of erroneously swapping two similar words, and my brain would get "stuck" following that circuit. If that makes sense? The fix that I found was suspending one or both of the words and making up a lot of sentences for them. And physically writing them.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
    I can relate, more than half of my leeches are due to word similarities as well. In particular, they tend to happen if two similar words start appearing at roughly the same time (if a word has had enough time to "consolidate" well in my memory before a similar word appears, I tend to be OK). When this happens, I find the Anki "leech" feature to be useful. I just let it remove (suspend is the word, I guess?) those words automatically. Flashcards are not my sole learning method, so I will probably learn them anyway by other means at some point, so spending lots of time on repetitions to get them right is not worth it.
- kazinator 7y ago
  But, stupidly, Anki's default behavior is to suspend leeches. 8 strikes and you don't have to learn it!
andrewzah 7y ago
The default leech threshold for Anki is 8. (You have to fail recall 8 times after graduating a card from new status). I recommend lowering this to 4. If you keep on failing to memorize a card, then you should suspend or delete it. I know this sounds crazy, but you end up wasting so much energy on those cards; energy that you could have spent on memorizing characters that you don't struggle with. When you do anki for years this really adds up. If that character is "important" relative to other characters, you can take it outside of anki and write like 15 sentences with it, etc. You can filter by suspended (or leeched, I think) cards easily. What I do is set aside time once every ~2 weeks to go through my suspended cards and see if they need to be modified to be simpler, etc. What really kills you is missing reviews. I did kanji study at 10-15 words/day for a few months, and then missed reviews due to work/life issues. Going back and slogging through that backlog of ~400 reviews was very demotivating. I recommend changing the defaults of mixing new cards and reviews, to showing reviews first. That way it's easier to focus on knocking out reviews, which only really takes like ~15-30 minutes. Even at 20/cards day.
- kazinator 7y ago
  The "leech" thing is not a useful feature in Anki. I have configured it so that cards marked as leeches keep being scheduled normally instead of being suspended. I have found in the past that (1) with sheer persistence, I busted through leeches. For instance 催促 used to be a leech, in a deck of cards where that is the front. Now I know the word so well I can recall it in the reverse direction: for instance to talk about how it used to be a leech. :) (2) given enough time, cards you know well will turn into leeches, simply due to occasional gaffes. The conversion of a card to leech is based on an absolute count of how many times you got it wrong, ever, regardless of how many times in between you got it right.
  - andrewzah 7y ago
    > with sheer persistence, I busted through leeches. Thats totally fine too, it’s just that energy could’ve been dedicated to other cards where there isn’t an issue. I also power through some of these occasionally if I don’t feel like busting out pen and paper, etc. > given enough time, cards you know well will turn into leeches, Yeah this is an issue. Particularly if you keep periodically doing Anki, with just enough time to have lapses. So I set Anki to mark leeches instead of suspending them, and when I go through suspended / leech cards I do an assessment.

by retrac 7y ago

zozbot234 7y ago

> It feels frustrating too since you keep reviewing the same 5 or 10 items that won't "stick". I think the idea is that eventually you'll be recalling even those "leech" items, due to the sheer exposure you're getting in the meantime. Frustration is part of the game.

andrewzah 7y ago
> due to the sheer exposure you're getting in the meantime. This helps less than you'd think. Many of my leeches are due to word similarities. Sometimes I'd have an issue of erroneously swapping two similar words, and my brain would get "stuck" following that circuit. If that makes sense? The fix that I found was suspending one or both of the words and making up a lot of sentences for them. And physically writing them.
- Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
  I can relate, more than half of my leeches are due to word similarities as well. In particular, they tend to happen if two similar words start appearing at roughly the same time (if a word has had enough time to "consolidate" well in my memory before a similar word appears, I tend to be OK). When this happens, I find the Anki "leech" feature to be useful. I just let it remove (suspend is the word, I guess?) those words automatically. Flashcards are not my sole learning method, so I will probably learn them anyway by other means at some point, so spending lots of time on repetitions to get them right is not worth it.
kazinator 7y ago
But, stupidly, Anki's default behavior is to suspend leeches. 8 strikes and you don't have to learn it!

andrewzah 7y ago

The default leech threshold for Anki is 8. (You have to fail recall 8 times after graduating a card from new status). I recommend lowering this to 4. If you keep on failing to memorize a card, then you should suspend or delete it. I know this sounds crazy, but you end up wasting so much energy on those cards; energy that you could have spent on memorizing characters that you don't struggle with. When you do anki for years this really adds up. If that character is "important" relative to other characters, you can take it outside of anki and write like 15 sentences with it, etc. You can filter by suspended (or leeched, I think) cards easily. What I do is set aside time once every ~2 weeks to go through my suspended cards and see if they need to be modified to be simpler, etc. What really kills you is missing reviews. I did kanji study at 10-15 words/day for a few months, and then missed reviews due to work/life issues. Going back and slogging through that backlog of ~400 reviews was very demotivating. I recommend changing the defaults of mixing new cards and reviews, to showing reviews first. That way it's easier to focus on knocking out reviews, which only really takes like ~15-30 minutes. Even at 20/cards day.

kazinator 7y ago
The "leech" thing is not a useful feature in Anki. I have configured it so that cards marked as leeches keep being scheduled normally instead of being suspended. I have found in the past that (1) with sheer persistence, I busted through leeches. For instance 催促 used to be a leech, in a deck of cards where that is the front. Now I know the word so well I can recall it in the reverse direction: for instance to talk about how it used to be a leech. :) (2) given enough time, cards you know well will turn into leeches, simply due to occasional gaffes. The conversion of a card to leech is based on an absolute count of how many times you got it wrong, ever, regardless of how many times in between you got it right.
- andrewzah 7y ago
  > with sheer persistence, I busted through leeches. Thats totally fine too, it’s just that energy could’ve been dedicated to other cards where there isn’t an issue. I also power through some of these occasionally if I don’t feel like busting out pen and paper, etc. > given enough time, cards you know well will turn into leeches, Yeah this is an issue. Particularly if you keep periodically doing Anki, with just enough time to have lapses. So I set Anki to mark leeches instead of suspending them, and when I go through suspended / leech cards I do an assessment.