This is another one of the questions I had where I didn’t even know how to google it, but I nosed around these forums and the FAQs for a while and I couldn’t see a direct answer. I’m not even 100% sure if this is an FSRS thing either and I’m also not even sure if it’s a problem in itself
In most of the decks I’m using, my relearning step is thirty minutes, and my learning step is ten. This system works completely fine; I don’t use the decks longer than about twenty minutes a day before I go to sleep, so I press again I won’t see it again that session. One of my decks I have set to a ten minute learning step, which means that basically every single time I get something wrong it will come back for me to try again. The deck is more difficult than the others I use, so I like it that way. But the way that this works, it means that if I press again, and when the card comes up again and I get it right quick enough to mark it as “easy”, it’ll have a delay longer than the delay of cards that I took a couple of seconds to answer and marked as “good”, even if it takes me three or four times that session to get it correctly. This seems a little strange to me, and like I said I attempted Googling around and found nothing, so just in case I thought I would ask
To clarify, if I got it wrong and it came up again within the same time frame and I answered quickly and well enough that it would be labeled as “easy”, would I still press easy? Or would I take into account that I had gotten it wrong prior?
Ordinarily you should grade the card based only on what is happening this time, not last time you studied it. But no, if you only saw the card a few seconds ago, you shouldn’t grade it as Easy.
If your re/learning step is so short that the cards come back too soon, make your step longer. If you’re at the end of your study session, you’ve got the same few cards coming up over and over, and you need to get a little distance from them – you can take a break from studying and come back later.
I hate to ask another question but it’s a follow up to this one so it would be absolutely worse to make a new thread; based on the advice I was given here (and in that wiki link you gave me, I realized I was using easy and good completely wrong, where easy was my default), I changed my rating habits pretty drastically in multiple ways (getting rid of pressing easy for everything was the big one, although I will confess I was accidentally still pressing easy on reappearing wrong cards for longer than I would like to admit) ; which appears to have caused a gigantic spike in reviews. Is this a temporary thing, as the algorithm gets used to me not pressing easy as much as I was? Or should I lower my retention?
Just start pressing the buttons correctly, the algorithm will adjust, probably pretty quickly since you haven’t been using it as long. The algorithm still noticeably adjusts for me month to month, and I have over 10 years of data on it.
Always answer what is true to your subjective experience in that moment. I think cards in the learning and relearning phase are the one exception to that rule: of course a card is going to be easy if you just saw it 10 minutes ago. Don’t use Easy for cards in those phases of study. If you just got the card wrong earlier today, it’s not easy for you.
In general, you probably should have a fairly strict definition of Easy anyway (and Hard, don’t overuse either one). I think of Easy as “I’m seeing this card too much” or “I know this so well I didn’t need to see it this soon.” Those are fairly rare. Hard is less rare for me, but I try to keep that strict too. If I’m making a bit of a guess, even if I get it right I hit Again. I want to know the information, not be able to vaguely guess it. Hard for me is if I came to the correct answer and I knew I did, but it just took a little too much mental energy for my liking.
Okay! If I just saw the card after getting it wrong in the same session but still got it “right?”, should I mark it as Hard? I decided yesterday I would set the relearning step for 30 minutes (i kept the learning step as ten minutes though, should I change that as well?) ; is that gap large enough to justify being able to press Good if I get it right? My sessions for some decks go up to like forty minutes to an hour. Should I be using the built in FSRS function to have it manage how long the (re) learning steps are?
I was using easy as my main button for quite a while, so there is going to be some time having to get used to having the main button be “Good” as well.
Sorry for the lots of questions, I just want to make sure I’m not forgetting anything so I don’t have to make another thread. But I think this time i have everything.
Good should be your default button for a correct answer. It means “correct” – but it also means “pass,” “acceptable,” etc. When a card is in Learn/Relearn, Good moves it to the next step and graduates it to Review. For a correct answer, it will always be appropriate to grade it Good.
No, a couple of seconds isn’t usually long enough to really check your memory of them. But that will only happen if you get down to the last few cards in your study session. When that happens, you can also just stop. You can come back later in the day if you like, or you can bury them and finish studying them the next day.
For the time being I will set the relearning and learning steps to 40m as well as make it so new cards appear first. 40m sounds like a big enough gap that I can judge how well I know it at the time without factoring me getting it wrong forty minutes prior, (my kanji writing deck usually takes that amount of time to get through reviews so they’ll be waiting for me at the end), and also should never put me in a “loop” if I get it wrong again, because it’ll have to show up another forty minutes later, and I’ll be done with the deck at that point. At the very least, this is what I think is the solution to the problem.(If I’m somehow wrong please let me know).
Thank you for your patience in helping me. Hopefully this will work and be the end of this thread.
I used the add-on that suggests learning and relearning intervals for a while, and after following its advice and changing it constantly, I just settled on 3m 4h for learning and 4h for relearning.
I like having two reviews in the first day with a brand new card, 3m is about right for that first review.
The add-on’s suggestions were creeping up to over 8 hours for relearning, but I want to be able to review cards 2-3 times if I get them wrong a couple times in the day. 4 hours gives me a chance to get it wrong more than once and still see it within the same day. Just my two cents on those numbers. Everyone will have a different preference though, just experiment if you like to.