Idea to reduce daily ticket amount

HanziHero
1

You probably already thought about this in case not here is some ideas:

When training words slowly increase the mastery level of the components and characters in that word. The same applies to the components when learning characters.

Right now I have lessons were I first do a bunch of words and then get the component and character lessons that make up those words. I know the characters because I already succeeded the words.

It seems to me that a word can be treated as a test for the characters and components. Or at least contribute to the mastery upon successfully guessing the pronunciation. We would skip them from the current lesson or perhaps the SRS could slowly increase mastery of components/characters that were indirectly trained during every session.

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As much as I’d love to reduce the daily review load (pls implement FSRS), I don’t think this it. I’ve been using HH <2 months and already have around 300 of the ~500 components with less and less of them showing up in my reviews each day. Just stick with it for a little while and you’ll stop seeing them altogether.

Edit: just realized you brought up words for characters as well. Thats a really good idea. My review mistakes consist almost entirely of words so if I get the word its pretty much a given Ill get the characters

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Yeah concretely it could consist of those usecases:

  • have characters contribute to the component learning mastery
  • have characters contribute to the sounds
  • have words contribute to characters

Contribution can be either:

  • A direct removal from the current daily desk,
  • or just add mastery points so they will be slowly pushed back in the backlog.

The same would apply in reverse where mistakes contribute to lower mastery.

Perhaps this solution can be implemented after a certain tasks reaches a certain level of mastery. E.g in the beginning HH may need to reinforce the item but over time the above contributions could be applied

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I was thinking about how the issue this could cause with components, because eventually you memorize the word itself and can easily forget components by the time another character uses it. Theres a few different ways that could be handled. (like asking if you remembered the component, handling more abstract components differently, etc)

Ultimately I do think the review process could be significantly more efficient. I started after SRS implementation though so Im sure theyve made great progress in this regard. I just hope it continues to be a priority bc theres definitely room for improvement and review load has such a large impact on the user experience

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Yeah, review load is definitely an area we would want to help out with somehow, whether that be making it more painless or less volume.

Grading items in a linked-together manner sounds like an interesting way to go about reducing the volume :thinking:

I can think of a few questions/edgecases, like what if you review the character and then later get the word correct in a later session.
I guess the calculation to add onto the character “mastery points” could be something like todays_date - character.last_reviewed :thinking:

What makes this “card-link” idea interesting is that not a lot of SRS system account for the relationships between cards. Usually every card is its own data point, even if it’s building off of previous cards :slight_smile:

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Yeah, to me the mastery points meant the input into the SRS system. Items can still be their own, you just have to fetch the individual characters and then add/remove to/from the score like you usually do when guessing correct/wrong. You can start of conservatively, like giving it 1/5th of the score of the current correct/wrong guess. So if you have 5 words with that character you will level up to the next level with that character. If you can have some stats on the review load one can observe the effect this has, if no big effect one can increase it or decrease it when it is to drastic. It requires some data analysis to find the right value for this, but perhaps could be a setting to so ppl can change it if they feel comfortable, but I think the main thing here is that we want to preserve the UX and decent learning rates, if we increase the learning rate to much may be negative.

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@phil one character task has both the pronunciation and the meaning, am I correct in observing that only finishing both correct changes the skill level of this character upwise? I often forget the meaning while knowing the pronunciation or the opposite. Not having that could potentially be an optimisation to reducing ticket number? What do you think?

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I suppose it depends on your objectives. I remember a previous request about only grading pronunciation and forgoing meaning.
The “interweaving” grading approach sounds the most promising for reducing the number of reviews :thinking:
It is a tough problem to solve, especially if someone ends up skipping a few days.
If you’re suggesting a “reduce the penalty for only getting one of them wrong” that may be helpful, though I would be afraid it’d cause a negative effect in the long run.

I think what would help a lot is a way to watch out for leech cards, or cards you keep getting wrong. What makes a lot of reviews painful isn’t always necessarily the volume, but running into cards that break your flow because you keep forgetting them and get stuck on them, dragging out the review process. I think there’s merit to tracking these cards and studying them separately or something so one can get through all of the cards they already likely know :slight_smile:

EDIT:

After thinking about it some more, here’s an alternative:

As of today, when you have an item in a review, it is not marked as “done” until you get both right. This hampers review time and can potentially remove any feeling of “progress” since you aren’t see the number of reviews go down while these already-answered items are still waiting for completion.

This makes sense in the context of some flashcard systems, and also it works as a way to check if you “got it” by answering correctly, but we have other answers for that – the Extra Study widget to capture the ones you got wrong.

So it may be worth experimenting with this assumed requirement of all flashcard systems: to review the card once again after you get it wrong within the same session.

So there could be a setting, something like “Complete Review Item” with options of:

  • When all questions are correctly answered (default)
  • When either one is correctly answered
  • On first attempt of the review item

So depending on which setting you choose above, if you get it wrong, the item doesn’t go back in the pile: it’s just marked as wrong and filed. And then if you want to review it again, you can go to Extra Study.

Something to think about :slight_smile: I do think there’s value in making sure you got it right after getting it wrong, but if it impedes enough to where it’s hard to get reviews done in a reasonable amount of time, then it may be helpful :thinking:

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This is 100% the most impactful thing to help backlog size. If you get everything right, the backlog will never get very large. SRS work incredibly well at making cards that you get right disappear far in to the future. The only thing that slows things down is getting stuff wrong. So the logical conclusion is “find the things that you get wrong a lot and fix that” as a way to reduce backlog size the most.

Personally I don’t think HH has a big problem at all with cards counts in general (at least not compared to any other SRS). But if you are going to focus on fixing anything, helping find+deal with leeches is 100% the way to go. Anki auto suspends them for a reason. The “you got this wrong recently” list is great but a “your % of wrong answers for this card is above some threshold” is probably more effective in terms of helping people fix problem cards that clog review sessions.

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Yeah, I think some sort of leech detection would be great for us to add!

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