Hi, I’m currently dealing with a huge backlog in a deck that I had to stop reviewing for several months. Initially, I chose to sort the cards by descending retrievability, the order which is usually recommended. I read that it’s recommended because data showed that it gives the best results in terms of average retention.
However, I’m not sure whether these data take into account that cards may be interconnected. If this is not the case, that could be an important limitation.
After starting the backlog, I decided to switch to sorting cards by the order in which they were added, and this approach looks to me more time-efficient. When using descending retrievability, the cards are more scattered, and so without much logical sequence or context. Although studying without context has its own advantages, in this case it seems an issue, because many of the cards I reviewed made little sense after I had completely forgotten the surrounding notions that originally supported their recall.
By reviewing cards in the order they were added, I encounter fewer of these problems. In my deck, earlier cards often provide the context needed to understand later ones, making the review process smoother. I don’t know how this impacts average retention, but this doesn’t affect my considerations.
The optimal sorting order likely depends on several factors. But in cases like mine, sorting by “order added” may offer important advantages that outweigh the disadvantages.
I would like to hear your thoughts on this. Or also, if you know about data/simulations/analysis that address this topic I would appreciate.
I agree with this. Anki’s algorithm is perfect, meaning the cards should be perfect too. These are cards that have no connections to other cards. But in reality, this is often not the case.
So if we add cards as the subject becomes more complex, then reviewing forgotten cards becomes more effective as the subject becomes more complex. It’s more likely that even if the early cards are forgotten, they’re not that difficult, and you’re less likely to forget them immediately after reviewing them, meaning you won’t be asked to study them again.
Let’s say you’re given a deck where all the cards are shuffled. Even worse, let’s take the deck and start studying from the back. Since all the difficult cards are there, you’ll forget them more often, but even so, you can learn them and eventually get to the first, easiest ones. After studying them, you’ll understand why you forgot those difficult ones.
So you’ll still learn the cards, but at what cost?
So even if you shuffle the cards, the algorithm will figure out the difficulty of all the cards after many showings, but this could take up to a year (if you’re working on 10 cards a day, and you have over 3,000). Then, by sorting such a deck correctly and passing it on to someone else, you can see how much easier it is for them to learn.
My opinion is that it will be easier for them, since everything is learned from the simple, that is, the understandable, to the complex, that is, the obscure.
Thank you for developing further the reasoning I had started.
Sorting cards according to the order in which they were created seems particularly useful when one has to begin from scratch, whether because 100% of the material has been forgotten or because the topic is being studied for the first time.
This intuitively makes sense. Most people would probably agree that studying a subject for the first time in a completely random order is far from ideal. Descending retrievability is certainly preferable to a purely random order, since it still prioritizes easier cards, which is beneficial. However, in many cases it may still be more scattered than the original logical progression in which the cards were created.
In my specific situation, the backlog is so large that reviewing feels almost equivalent to studying the material anew — even for cards that currently have the highest retrievability. If that is the case, then the advantage of sorting by descending retrievability may be significantly reduced, since i am unlikely to remember the card in any case.
The reason that sort order was the most “efficient” is all about retention – so if you aren’t concerned with that, there’d be no reason to follow that finding. You can study your backlog in whatever order works best for you.
Thank you for replying. What I truly care about — and I think this is true for many Anki users — is learning what I need to learn in the shortest time possible. Average retention is probably a good proxy for that. Another important parameter, however, might be the average time required to review cards.
In my case, which may also apply to other users, studying cards in a scattered order was costing me a lot of time because I often had to reconstruct the surrounding context to make sense of that card. I suspect that this fact is quite difficult to measure. This may also indirectly affect average retention: the longer it takes to review, the more days the backlog persists, which is of course not desirable.
That’s efficiency! But it means you do care about your retention outcomes, because that’s how you measure that.
Inherent in the rationale for why Descending R is the most efficient, is that you will be sacrificing some cards that already have lower R in order to rescue cards that still have higher R. That’s not a bargain that everyone is willing/able to make – and it sounds like you’re not.
That’s usually a sign that you have poorly made cards. Each card should be able to stand on its own without the surrounding cards.
Inherent in the rationale for why Descending R is the most efficient, is that you will be sacrificing some cards that already have lower R in order to rescue cards that still have higher R
That’s great, but I fear this assumes that the R of each card is independent from the rest of the deck. In reality, even if cards are designed to stand alone, knowledge itself is a network. The probability of recalling one fact often depends on remembering related facts stored in other cards.
To take a simple example: if you have a card asking for the end date of the First World War, you are likely to recall it more easily if you have just reviewed the beginning date. Of course, one could argue that the reverse is also true in this specific case. But more generally, when a professor or a textbook presents information in a certain order, it is usually because earlier notions provide the background knowledge needed to understand and remember later ones.
My hypothesis is that when much of that background knowledge has been forgotten, as in the case of a large backlog, restarting reviews in the original logical order might lead to higher average retention than descending R. This is because reviewing earlier cards may increase the retrievability of related cards that come later.
This isn’t just a hypothesis. It’s been a fact for thousands of years. We remember things in order, not backwards. Everyone learns the alphabet in order, but try reciting it just as quickly in reverse order? Every image, emotion, thought, generates another thought, emotion, and so on. That’s how neurons work. Moreover, often more than one signal is needed to trigger neurons; the switching potential must be increased, and several repetitions are needed, or better yet, signals must come from several directions. For people who are learning, this means learning not just the word, but everything together: seeing, hearing, more emotions, and so on. This doesn’t mean you should always do this; there is a method for concentrating on just one thing, but that only works when a person is more interested. At the initial stage, you need to convince the brain of the necessity of this knowledge, and the more frequent the signal, the more it is connected to other neurons (facts, images, sounds), the better it is remembered. Let this be my opinion, otherwise they will ask for facts again… but these opinions are formed after reading dozens, or even hundreds, of books about memory, where each author tries to understand what our memory is and how it works.
Since all the difficult cards are there, you’ll forget them more often, but even so, you can learn them and eventually get to the first, easiest ones. After studying them, you’ll understand why you forgot those difficult ones.