Can I do additional reviews?

I’ve finished my reviews and lessons for the day.

Is there a way to ask to review again (i.e. in advance of the normal schedule) ?

2 Likes

At the moment you generally wait until the next day to do your reviews :slight_smile:

There have been previous discussions about adding an “Extra Study” option as well as a way to see the the ones you got wrong. “Extra Study” under the condition that it doesn’t count toward your reviews.

Both are something we would like to add, but we haven’t given much thought to it. I would be curious how many others would want something like this :face_with_monocle:

AFAIK, there is not. I’d ask why do you want to? This will not be a short post, but I’ve been wanting to write down some thoughts on this topic.

If you want more work - trust me it will come. The number of reviews increases the longer you use the app. So you may have only reviews from the cards with 1d or 2d interval in the first week. I’m 3 months in and have 1,2,4 day + 1,2,4 week interval cards coming in, and I have 100-150 reviews everyday. In that case, I’d say just wait, and enjoy that you don’t need to spend 0.5-1 hour everyday on SRS (yet).

If it’s because you’re afraid you forget the items, I’m kinda torn.

  • On one hand, I kinda wish we could. I think the first interval of 1d is way too long, but the whole system seems to be built on day increments. I personally will sometimes just look at the list of words I just took a lesson on later that day.
  • On the other hand, it’s okay if we can’t. The SRS is not designed to have you perfectly remember 100% of the vocab. As long as you are 80-90% you are doing well IMO. You have to let go of the fact that you cannot remember everything, especially new items. I spend hardly any time on lessons and actually completely ignore the mnemonics part. I’ll often have ~%50 retention on brand new characters. But I let the SRS do it’s magic and they within a few days jump to 60, 70, etc. retention until they are quite familiar. If I’m focused and not rushing/typoing, I usually have a retention of ~93% for all items.
  • Even stronger, we probably shouldn’t. One of the points of the SRS is you’re trying to train yourself to have longer intervals of being able to remember something, without study. This is kinda armchair-science, but I believe the act of trying to remember something when it’s weaker stengthens that mental muscle way more than if you try to refresh something already top of mind. How many people take out their credit card to enter the digits on a payment page all the time and never commit it to memory? If they tried to remember what bits they did know, and just fill in the gaps, they’d probably have remembered it. Frequent quizing tells your brain “I don’t actually need this in long term memory”. If you want to remember something for long periods of time, practice studying after long periods of time.

TL;DR such a feature is probably bad for you long term.

That said, I wish there was an option to redo the days lessons.

  • don’t let it effect whether or not it shows up in tomorrow review
  • let me do them as many times as I want
  • it would be nice to do this for any arbitrary set of cards, but even if we had to do all the lessons again, that’s still fine
3 Likes

Yeah the two main “extra study” options I can see us adding for sure:

  1. Studying newly learned cards. Probably defined as any that are not yet a familiar item.
  2. Studying often-wrong/recently-wrong cards. Maybe defined as anything wrong within the last 1 or 2 days.

Both are features I could see myself using, especially the lessons one. We’ve been planning to add both for a while. Not sure when we will get to it, but it is one of our higher priority features to implement. :+1:

2 Likes

I would add to these studying “diamond” level items that are out of your reviews.

Still far from here now myself, but it’s the extra study I used to do the most in WK to check if “learned” items were actually learned.

2 Likes

That’s precisely what I thought yesterday after completing day 2 so far. Noted your points about just relaxing and letting the SRS do its magic over time but nevertheless, it does feel a bit strange (for me at least) to be shown something just once and then being told to come back tomorrow. In real life, I might glance at something a couple of times at least before moving on. In the end, I solved the “problem” yesterday by just bringing up the curriculum and seeing what I’d learnt that day.

yeah either of those sound pretty nice.

What is your lesson batch size? I think spending more time between seeing a card and answering it in the lesson can help with this. When I have time, I like to look at the lesson, then come back 15min later and actually answer them. Having a 15min memory challenge is a world of difference vs just like 1-2min.

The vast majority of my cards are characters and vocab. I just use https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/zhongwen-chinese-english/kkmlkkjojmombglmlpbpapmhcaljjkde to scan over them on the front page of the Dashboard.

That’s a good idea for me to lengthen the timing. I’m just on day 3 so far and my lesson batch size is the default of 5. From only these few days’ experience, it seems to be spend a few minutes looking at the batch of 5 lessons and then immediately get tested on it (which is easy as I just looked at it a very short while ago) and then nothing until tomorrow which made me think that I might want to test myself again an hour later or later that evening etc.

How many items do you do a day? you can adjust the lessons per day and the batch size up to 20

1 Like

I agree with @lorentz “we probably shouldn’t” thoughts, and that same day reviews, very new items and “burned/diamon” level items also would be nice to review (if I get there :eyes: ).

@jman I was also very bored at the start, but I started doing 20 (the max) new lessons each day, and in some weeks I started getting 100-200 reviews some days - and at that point I didn’t want to do extra bonus reviews :sweat_smile: I think it’s more of a problem with being very motivated at the start and the fact that the start is not very fun/interesting when you have very few reviews. This could maybe be “solved” by allowing more than 20 new lessons in the X (7-14?) first days. To make it more interesting for beginners, but that’s not a very well thought through suggestion.

Atm I’ve been lazy and doing other stuff and I have 611 reviews :see_no_evil: And it’s less motivating doing reviews when the task seems so heavy :see_no_evil: But I should probably think of it as one piece of the cake at a time :cake:

1 Like