SRS question - relearning old cards

[Guest realmayo]

I have a question for people who SRS. It's about cards that you have learned, may have answered correctly several times in a row in your deck, then after 6 months or a couple of years or whatever get wrong and then go through a period of getting it right a few times, then wrong, then right a few times, then wrong.

Do others have this happen to them? Do you ever say I'm gonna pull this bad boy out of the queue, really learn it (re-learn it) this time, then go back to SRSsing it as normal? Or do you just leave it in the SRS and repeat the four-or-five-times-correct-then-one-time-wrong cycle until it "naturally" becomes easier to remember longer-term?

[WestTexas]

Or do you just leave it in the SRS and repeat the four-or-five-times-correct-then-one-time-wrong cycle until it "naturally" becomes easier to remember longer-term?

I do this. It's not really that it 'naturally' becomes easier. Anki, and I think every other SRS system, changes the difficulty of the card when you miss it. What does this mean? Essentially, when you get a card right, the new interval (ie, time until you see the card again) is equal to the old interval times the difficulty factor. So:

New Interval = old interval * difficulty factor

So when you miss a card, and in anki when you select that the answer was 'hard' (number 2), the difficulty factor goes down, resulting in shorter intervals.

Some SRS systems have slightly more complex algorithms, but this is basically how it works.

Also, selecting 'easy' (4) will increase the difficulty factor/multiplier (signifying that the card is easier), resulting in longer intervals in the future.

For people who are bad at math, this means that how you answer a card has a significant effect on the next interval as well as all future intervals, and over time, the effect can be very significant.

[laurenth]

Doesn't Anki suspend such cards, i.e. leeches, by default?

From the manual:

By default, leeches are cards that have over 15 failures. When Anki detects a leech, it will suspend the card, tag it with 'Leech', and show a message that it has been suspended.

I've lowered the threshold to 6, so I see that happening quite often... With one of my decks (characters), after having studied the whole deck once, I rescheduled all leeches as if they were new cards. Then I configured Anki to show me 2 of those "new" cards/day, which gives me an opportunity to study them better, find a mnemonic, find a word that illustrates the meaning really well, etc.

[WestTexas]

If you miss it 16 times (by default), it suspends. But if you only miss it 4 or 5 or however many times, you just get shorter intervals so that you see the card more often.

[Guest realmayo]

It's not subtle reductions in the interval time that seems to be at issue for those types of cards. I think I they need relearning but I'm too lazy to bother.

Laurenth, I think your idea is a really good one. Automate one part of the process (by redefining a leech as only 6 failures) and then drip-feed the troublesome ones back in. Presumably it has worked well for you? I've been a bit too lazy to do something similar, plus during the week I use the web version of Anki, where it's hard to suspend cards or play around with the deck in any real way so when I come across a troublesome card I don't have many options.

[Silent]

Do others have this happen to them? Do you ever say I'm gonna pull this bad boy out of the queue, really learn it (re-learn it) this time, then go back to SRSsing it as normal? Or do you just leave it in the SRS and repeat the four-or-five-times-correct-then-one-time-wrong cycle until it "naturally" becomes easier to remember longer-term?

I've it happen all the time and can't really be bothered about it any more. Actually in general I don't really learn cards. I oftentimes go through them and answer without (too much) thinking. Off course this often results in 'false' scorings as in a long row of rights or wrongs I may press the button a bit too fast. In real reading you need instant recognition too so having a good look/thought about a character is not a very practical in real life. Also really thinking about a character takes a lot of time and in my experience doesn't commit it very well to memory. At least not for instant recognition, it requieres me to think about it for recognition too. The extra repetitions it uses to learn a word just by repetition is much higher, but with shorter review times. What's more efficient in the long run I don't know.

I only have a good look at cards if I tend to confuse them over and over again. Then I really compare the content of the cards, look at the differences and try to find an easy way to distinguish them.

[WestTexas]

I'm pretty much the same as Silent. I basically do it as fast as possible and don't worry about missed cards. It's part of the process. I don't go back and re-examine a card until it is a leech. Even then, if the leech is uncommon, I just delete it. You're never going to learn every Chinese word, so if a word is unimportant, there's no reason to waste time trying to get it right when you could learn 4-5 other words in the same amount of time.

The supermemo guy, the crazy genius who designed the algorithm, says that you will always have at least 1-3% leeches and that an SRS user will basically spend 90% of SRS time on 10% of the items that they are having trouble memorizing. He also stresses that you can only learn so much information, so you should prioritize what's most important and not waste time on items that you're having trouble with. That's actually the rationale behind suspending leeches. They get suspended so you can learn something else, or ten other things, and not use so much time on the leech.

[laurenth]

Automate one part of the process (by redefining a leech as only 6 failures) and then drip-feed the troublesome ones back in. Presumably it has worked well for you?

Too soon to tell. Note that it's only possible because this particular deck is "closed", i.e. there are about 2500 characters therein and I won't add anything until I know, say, 90 % of those.

After the first pass, almost one third of the cards were leeches, but that's not a problem, because (1) in the process I've learnt many of those characters "somewhat", e.g. I know their meaning but not their pronunciation; (2) the whole purpose is to avoid wasting time on stuff that is not "ripe" and concentrate on stuff that I can really learn for now. Hopefully, after the second pass, I will know 2/3 of the previous leeches. Then I can start again if I want.

I use the web version of Anki, where it's hard to suspend cards or play around with the deck

I use it often too but you're right, it's a bit simplistic and it lacks features (e.g. leech suspension). However, sometimes, I've no other choice.

[Guest realmayo]

Thanks for the replies. I've lowered the leech settings, reset as new a few hundred of the worst offenders, and am drip-feeding them back into the daily decks. I'm assuming that not all leeches are created equal. There may be some facts that are just difficult to remember, plain and simple. But I think there are others which I've got into the habit of getting wrong, so each time I see it my brain isn't asking what the word means, but is thinking: this is one of those ones I always get wrong, panic! I think I'm already benefitting from seeing them as new cards, trying to treat them as such, 'breaking the cycle' as it were.