Given this, and personal experience, I feel that the behavior of the hard button with (re)learning cards is problematic. For example: If I find a complex Japanese sentence, with several new words and/or kanji, difficult to parse when I hear it or read it, I want to just answer honestly and select hard and have Anki do the best thing. But this will not usually change over the course of one day. It takes multi day settling in my mind for cards like this to go from hard to good. So if I answer honestly without strategizing, those card just don’t graduate and I have to spend time again and again and again reviewing them with no benefit.
Describe the solution you’d like
I’d like an option that makes it so that when on the last, including single, (re)learning step, selecting hard works the same way it would have if it was a review card, increasing the difficulty of the card, and scheduling it for another day in accordance with that difficulty.
Describe alternatives you’ve considered
I’ve considered, and tried, just choosing good for such cards, but with the many hundreds of cards I study every day it requires significant effort to try and remember which are in (re)learning. I don’t want to spend my mental effort on that instead of on learning. Also, that is literally lying to the algorithm and that just cannot be optimal. Also I would surely regularly hit good on review cards by mistake, which again just cannot be optimal.
I really don’t want to have to spend effort on manually strategizing, I want to be able to just answer honestly and have Anki do the best thing.
To rephrase all of this, hard repeating the current step in Anki means you cannot graduate a card with hard. This means unnecessary reviews for consistent 4 button users. Also, users having to calibrate their behaviour to be different for review cards and learning cards.
My only concern for now is sub-day stability as FSRS at minimum can only set 1d interval. Although, I think this shouldn’t be a huge problem for most people (gauging from default params). In fact, I suspect such cards can easily have 1d stability for many 4 button users.
For most steps, hard can still follow current logic, but when at last step, it might be worth considering hard graduating the cards instead.
I’m not against it, but I have a feeling this will require a lot of work just because learning steps are learning steps and everything about them is jank @dae
Currently, hard always repeats the previous step, if there was one. Adding a rule where it behaves differently on the last step makes that inconsistent, and adds a different kind of cognitive overhead.
In your answer stats, what % of new and learning cards are you answering hard on? Hard and easy and intended for outliers, and if you’re using them significantly above 5-10% of the time, I’d recommend you consider adjusting your delays so that you can comfortably answer ‘good’ the majority of the time.
“In your answer stats, what % of new and learning cards are you answering hard on? Hard and easy and intended for outliers, and if you’re using them significantly above 5-10% of the time, I’d recommend you consider adjusting your delays so that you can comfortably answer ‘good’ the majority of the time.”
The percentage depends very much on the difficulty of the source Japanese. But also, the numbers will be quite misleading now because of exactly the problem I’m describing here my stats will show me hitting hard a lot, because I see the same cards time and time and time again. That said, for the hardest deck I use hard 9% for learning cards. Less for other decks.
Also the intervals matter much less that you might think here. The card is intrinsically hard. I remember what the sentence means because I heard/read it just minutes ago, but I do not actually understand it when I read it or hear it, I just recall what it means. To actually make sense of it I must spend significant time each time untangling what the different words and kanji mean. To me that absolutely places the sentence in the hard category even though I could tell you right off what it means from memory without actually understanding it at all. Hopefully you understand what I mean. These cards cost a lot of useless effort and frustration to me.
To summarize. No matter the learning steps, cards like this remain hard for days or weeks for me and I want to be able to answer hard when a card is hard. Now I can’t.
With all due respect, perhaps reformulating such cards to make them adhere to the minimum information principle/N+1 might be more productive than forcing them to advance when you still find them difficult.
I studied Japanese in the way I believe you propose for years and made very little progress in actually understanding real Japanese. I’ve now switched to immersion in real Japanese rather than cleaned up easy school “Japanese”. I’m now studying my way through anime subs2srs decks one line at a time, and the speed at which I’m learning Japanese that way is simply amazing. After years of studying the way I think you propose the list of anime episodes I could understand even decently numbered exactly zero while the list of words I knew in the abstract kept growing uselessly. Now, in just a few months, the list of episodes I can see from start to finish and understand everything is in the double digits and is growing faster and faster every week.
Cutting my budding essay short: The whole idea that I should learn content I already find pretty easy and stick to doing that and eventually I will get the complex stuff is now something I consider a profoundly counterproductive strategy of language learning. Immersion in the real language is THE way to learn a language in my opinion. The difference in progress and motivation is night and day. I’ve completely stopped studying individual radicals, kanji and word cards and that was the best language learning decision I ever made.
Edit: I do of course still study radicals, kanji and words, but only in the context of real sentences with real context that I know from an anime.
In practice, having every card be N+1 is very often not realistic and I don’t think Anki should be limited to only work really well in a studying utopia where all cards are N+1 when a simple change could make it work equally well for other cases too.
The problem isn’t really n+1 or OP just makes wrong cards. The problem is you can find a card harder than your usual levels but it still might be worth it to graduate the card.
And as it often happens, learning a card might be harder than to retain it. It’s presumptuous to blame the cards.
@dae If you keep repeating a card, clicking good each time, will that card become easy for you on the same day?
For the record: My real opinion is that the behavior of the hard button is very strange altogether for (re)learning cards. I mean, it repeats the card at the same short interval forever no matter how many times I pass the card. Is that even spaced repetition?
What I really think should happen is changing the default to have the hard button always pass the card but with a shorter scheduled interval than good. For learning steps that might mean half a step and when on the last step it would graduate. Perhaps an option in settings that would allow those that want the current, inconsistent, behavior to keep it might be a good idea too.
I just thought that it was more likely to get this small change through. But since that seems unlikely I figure I might as well put my real feelings on the matter out there.
If you don’t mind, let me add that, given the default learning steps, the hard button already does precisely what I propose the first time one uses it for a learning card: schedules it half way to the next step. But after that hitting hard again stops spacing dead. So this change would actually make it far more consistent for learning cards as well, not just more consistent between learning and review cards.
Easy == pass-with-longer-interval-than-good
Good == pass
Hard == pass-with-shorter-interval-than-good.
Again == fail
All buttons now always behave in a consistent way that is easy to understand, document, and use. What’s not to like?
