I’m trying to find a line of statistics that would help me measure my progress with my Anki decks. that would keep me motivated.
for the past few weeks, I’ve been focusing on my true retention rate and yes, it is improving. however, I am now adjusting my desired retention rate quite often, which inevitably influences my true retention.
so I’m now looking at difficulty (currently at 28% with quite a few cards above 95 and a majority below 5) but I read that what influences this number most is how often you hit “hard”, “good” and “easy”.
then retrievability (now at 95) ?
or maybe the percentage of mature cards ?
basically, what number should I follow to track my progress ?
Not Difficulty, I would think. Difficulty helps the algorithm schedule your cards more accurately – it’s not a measure of something you are doing right or wrong.
Whether your retention is meeting your goals is probably the best measure. That doesn’t necessarily mean comparing True Retention to DR one-to-one. Your retention can meet your goals in other ways – like are you happy with your workload, happy with your pace through New cards, happy with your ability to use this information outside Anki.
Not all of those things are numbers you can track. If you want proxies for them, they are things like True Retention, Avg Interval, %age of your deck/collection that is Mature – which are all measuring basically the same thing.
as always, thank you for your answer !
so far, so good, I’m extremely happy with Anki and I think it helps me a lot with my vocabulary in foreign languages. obviously finding a measuring tool would make me even more motivated but I understand it’s not easy.
sometimes a word is eluding me and memory lapses are something you need to accept but I wonder whether there’s a point where your memory becomes saturated (with new words in my case) and learning even more words becomes counter-productive. I’m not sure I can detect that as a learner.
my favorite way to track my progress is to just use the heatmap add on! it’s just a way of tracking a streak, so not as in depth.
i also think tracking via my card counts - i.e. how many are learning, mature, or new - is a good way of seeing my progress.
This is limited though and depends more on how well FSRS is performing than how you’re performing. It’s useful for looking at short-term fluctuations that you can have from settings/habits change, but not much otherwise.
Average retrievability stays the same over time. It’s not going to change much in the long-term.
I personally look at two things:
Card counts to gauge when will I finish new cards or when all cards will be mature etc.
Average stability which shows you how quickly memory decays when you stop reviewing.