Please consider implementing a Delay Overdue Cards in Anki Mobile. Perhaps it seems like only a slight inconvenience to have to open the desktop version in order to use the Delay Overdue Add-on, but in actuality it can be a major inconvenience when I’m busy and particularly when I’ve traveling, which I do a lot for work. In fact, some days it’s enough of an inconvenience that I end up going several days without studying rather than just one. Delaying any possible overdue cards directly from the mobile app would increase my productivity significantly. Thanks in advance for your consideration.
It’s a bad idea to use that add-on at all – and a terrible idea to use it regularly.
When you’ve missed a couple days, and you have a backlog, there has been a certain amount of decay related to your memory of those backlog cards, but the damage is limited to just those cards. Each time you use an add-on like that, you extend that damage to every card in your collection. The sense of relief you feel by not having a visible backlog should be immediately followed by a sense of dread at how many more lapses you’ve just created for yourself.
There are far better ways of dealing with a backlog than this, so don’t expect it to be implemented as native functionality in any version of the app.
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Perhaps I’m misunderstanding you, but it seems like by “a certain amount of decay” you are implying that each memory has a sort of health-bar like as in a video game. This might be the case when learning hard facts or concepts, but this idea doesn’t seem to accurately depict how language is acquired, and that’s primarily what I use Anki for. Language learning is about making a web of connections between vocabulary and grammatical structures. And if you’re efficiently T1 sentence mining like me, then you know that it doesn’t matter if you know each card all that well. The SRS is really just an artificial means of increasing the frequency of exposure to words that don’t naturally appear at a high frequency “in the wild”, so to speak. So reviewing these new words is particularly important within the first few intervals, but it less important as the intervals increase because by then you’ll likely have reencountered that word naturally through immersive exposure to the language anyway. So Anki is best used as a supplementary aid to language learning and should not be the primary focus. Therefore, missing days here and there and then delaying cards doesn’t pose much of an issue if you’re properly immersing in your target language. So yeah, for my purposes, the delay cards function is perfectly useful when needed, though of course I try not to miss days if I can help it.
Memory is memory. Learning is learning. It doesn’t matter if you’re memorizing the actual text/sentence of the card, or memorizing how to use a grammatical structure – whatever you can remember you can also forget.
There are plenty of subjects where you are exposed to the material in more ways than just studying it in Anki. Language learning and sentence mining are not special in that regard. But there will also be words on your cards that you don’t happen to come across “in the wild” between one review and the next.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. Regardless of what you’re learning – cards with shorter intervals are going to be more impacted by being moved. Just as you said, it’s important to get those early reviews done on-time. We’re agreeing!
You might not be disturbing a long-ish-interval card very much by using this add-on once. But consider – if you do this often, you’ll be gradually be shifting those cards further and further away. By the time you get to them, they could be too overdue to recover.
Of course, I don’t need to talk you out of using the add-on yourself. Go crazy! But it would be terrible for this to be implemented as native functionality and more widely available.
I suppose we are agreeing to some extent, but maybe I didn’t explain myself well enough because I didn’t really mean that it’s absolutely vital to hit every interval in the beginning stages of a card’s life (though this is of course ideal). Perhaps it is absolutely vital for some learners, but for me it’s generally enough to just catch exposure that card a few times within a few week period in order to have a pretty decent idea of what the target word on the card means, and then I’ll gradually start to solidify my knowledge of that word as I’m naturally exposed to it periodically through immersing in the language.
With that said, I understand your concern. It can be dangerous if one is using a delay card feature regularly, but I do think that it’s useful enough, and at the end of the day I think it’s better to give users more freedom and versatility (in whatever form that could take) and then let them ultimately decide how to use something according to their own preferences and needs.
If there is such a function, it will be abused. In this case, lack of freedom is better than freedom.
Some functions from the FSRS Helper add-on have been implemented in anki. If they ever do a “Postpone”, then you will get the solution you are asking for.
Using filtered decks in such cases is no worse and maybe even better.
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