Still keeping at it with the FSRS test deck.
I’ve realized the reason I use “Hard” as an interval-shortening button in SM-2 is probably because SM-2 increases the intervals too quickly for me. And that even with SM-2, Hard as an interval-shortening button doesn’t work once I hit longer intervals, which is probably why my retention for mature cards isn’t as good as for young cards.
If FSRS can learn not to give me too-long intervals in the first place, I won’t need to worry about wanting “Hard” to work as an interval-shortening button.
I’ve also put the FSRS test deck in its own profile, and hidden the times shown above the answer buttons for that profile. That will make sure I give it a fair try and don’t try to fight the algorithm.
I have two test decks, one where I use “Again” if a word doesn’t feel strong enough in my mind, and another where I use “Hard” for that and reserve “Again” for words that I have actually forgotten.
There has been some unpleasantness along the way:
- With the default setting of one Relearning step, cards are shown once 10 minutes after I fail, then not again until the next day. Apparently that’s a built-in Anki behavior, but it was really causing problems for me. If I forget a card the day after I learn it, reviewing it once per day doesn’t make it stick. So then I tried removing the default 10m relearning step and letting FSRS manage relearning, but that seemed to cause Ease Hell++++ with cards being stuck at what felt like 1-4 hour scheduling for multiple days. That got bad enough that I started the test deck over with new cards and am trying not press Again quite so much this time around.
- I feel like I see some cards twice, don’t see them again for days, and then forget them. That’s very frustrating, but hopefully with time and parameter optimization it will stop doing that.
But hopefully test deck version 2 will go better.