I recently returned to HanziHero after taking about two months off. During most of that time I was using “vacation mode”, but not for all of it. When I came back, I had some 1,500 reviews or so piled up. Cleared all of that, but somehow almost all items were in either the Expert or Journeyman category. Seemed a little odd then, because I thought more items should’ve been in the Apprentice or Novice stage.
I just went on with it but just now I came across a character that I thought I’d never seen before but which is already in the Journeyman category. I learnt it two days before I went on vacation and the statistic also shows it went straight from Novice to Journeyman
Is this a known bug? Anything I can do about it? I probably have hundreds of items with the same “condition” and while they will eventually come back to the lower SRS stages because I’ll get them wrong all the time, that seems a little inefficient
HH’s SRS is based on the SM2 algorithm. When you get a card right it doubles* the time until you see it again. If a card is due in 10 days, and you review it when it’s due you’ll see it again in 20 days. Except if you take 2 months off so you review after 60 days instead, it doesn’t double the original 10 day interval, instead it doubles* the ACTUAL time time since you last saw it (so it’ll go from 60 to 120). The theory is if you remember it after 60 then why ask you again in 20? You’ve already shown you can remember it after 60 … sooo just go for 120. So with two months off, even if a card was originally a 1d interval novice, if you didn’t review it, but you got it right after 60 days? Great, the interval is now 120 days, and instantly it’s Journeyman or Expert. So long breaks you basically skip all the cards you got right to a minimum of ~120 interval and they’re all Journeyman/Expert now.
This works great for cards you get right … you know them well, keeping their interval high is good.
But I’m not sure exactly how HH treats failures. Normally in SM2 failures just full reset to 0 interval but HH decided to just halve the interval. I’m not sure if they take the original interval (say 10d from example above) to halve (so 5d) or if they halve the actual gap (60d) … based on what you’re saying they might halve the actual interval not the previous interval so every card you get wrong will have at least 30 interval lol. I could be wrong, but from what you’re describing that’s it.
Personally I don’t like HH only halving the interval, I wish they’d just full reset the card on mistake, but it’s not a tweak-able you can change. So you just gota get them wrong a lot over the next few months until their intervals shrink enough.
(*To keep the explanation/maths simple I’m going to pretend getting something right doubles the time. Technically that’s not exactly accurate, but it’s close enough for this explanation)
Thanks a lot, that explanation is actually really helpful
I think failures were also treated similarly, maybe half the interval, like you said. They should’ve gone back to stage zero, but even though I failed a lot of reviews, hardly any were left in Novice or Apprentice once I was done with all of the reviews.
