This is the 5/6ths mark in the French Revolution, my personal quest to learn as much French as I possibly can in an hour or two a day for 30 days. I've learned so much about how to learn languages, as well as how to learn things in general, how languages work, how memory works. I've also learned a lot more about spaced repetition.
Today I'm switching up my study time. Normally I study in later evening, and today I'm studying soon after waking up. Why? Because today my wonderful sexy girlfriend is returning from Christmas overseas, and I want to spend lots of time with her!
I hadn't before considered it, but it's worth thinking about the ramifications of switching up study times. Is it better to always study at the same time, or is it better to study throughout the day, changing your schedule periodically as you go?
One side effect of using the spaced repetition software Anki to study, is that if you change your study times, the first day couple days, it'll widely screw with how many cards are scheduled for review. If you move your study time earlier like I am doing, you'll have far fewer cards to study at first, because of how Anki calculates the spacing in realtime, not in day long intervals. Move your study time later, and the exact same effect will force you to go through more cards than usual.
ANKI'S HANDLING OF FAILED FLASHCARDS
Yesterday I pointed out how Anki gives a huge amount of priority to cards in its failed pile, so that a failed card might be put on the screen 5 or 6 times before a regularly failed card even gets on appearance. I got a comment that you can apparently adjust that somehow through the preferences, changing the "failed time" to a higher amount. Apparently, by default, if a card is in the failed pile for X amount of time, it'll suddenly get priority over all the other piles. And you can adjust X through the preferences.
I think it would be best to set X to a million, for purposes of reviewing sentence flashcards. The whole point of the spaced repetition system is to optimize the order the cards are shown. If time is entered into the calculation, you get the weird phenomenon that the order depends on how you do your review. If you take a break to get clothes out of the washer, you'll come back to a slew of failed cards all in a row. But if you waited to finish the review before getting your clothes, you'll get a more natural, optimal ordering of the cards.
I think the failed time "feature" is meant for memorizing things like vocabulary words, where you're just rote memorizing raw data. In that case, if you're failing to memorize a certain word, the best way might be to just cram it into your brain by brute force, which means looking at it every 10 minutes until you get it. But when it comes to something like comprehending a sentence, or reading a sentence, brute force memorization is the least efficient possible way to go about it. Most of us would just memorize the sentence based on some distinguishing feature, long before we outright memorized it-- e.g., "Oh, this is the sentence with the three exclamation points which I keep failing, it must mean 'You shall not pass!!!'", without actually even reading the sentence. Granted, this is how the really hard failed sentences will eventually be passed anyway, but it should be a last resort.
With sentences, the real learning doesn't come while you're reviewing the flashcards. It comes as your subconscious mind takes the experience of reviewing the flashcards and processes it. As you review difficult sentences, raw info is queued up for the subconscious mind to analyze to try and figure out the underlying patterns. It'll get around to analyzing the failed sentence when it gets around to it-- there's no point queuing it up over and over again. This is why, often, you'll notice that after you go to sleep and wake up the next day, you can suddenly comprehend a sentence better, which thwarted you before.
With audio pronunciation sentence cards, the failed timing is even worse. Not only is it next to impossible to brute force memorize the exact pronunciation of an entire sentence, but it takes precious seconds for the audio file to play on Anki. Yesterday I found that with the failed time feature set at X=10 minutes, my audio pronunciation deck, where I recently added a bunch of full sentence cards, was pure torture, and it didn't even really give me any benefit, for the reasons above.
To change the failed time on the Windows version of Anki, I went to Settings, Deck Properties, then into the Advanced Tab, and changed "Again (Young)" and "Again (Mature)" to 99999 minutes. I'll test it and see how it works. I notice that same tab also has a "maximum failed cards" option, set to 1000 by default... I wonder how that works? I mean, if I fail 1001 cards, then I fail 1001 cards :)
This should not make it so that failed cards vanish from my sight forever. Once all the non-failed cards are finished, the failed cards should follow, regardless of their Fail Time. I think. I will soon see!
REVIEWING SENTENCE FLASHCARDS
There were 161 sentence cards scheduled, 91 old and 70 new. If you've been following the progress, you'll recognize that's about half the normal size. It's the side effect of switching up study time using Anki. Tomorrow if I decide to study in the late evening again, I will have about 150% as many cards as usual to study :)
I began the review at 9:44AM. I ended at 10:26. That's about 3.8 cards a minute. The trend of the past few days continues: significantly reduced performance on sentence cards, even when I have had adequate sleep. I think the problem is that the sentences I've been mining from the tense-mood chapter of Tex's French Grammar are just too long. While it's a convenient sentence source, Tex's Grammar was obviously not intended for sentence mining-- the example sentences were intended to be read once, maybe twice each, as just that, example sentences. Good sentences for sentence mining should be short and sweet, big enough to contain whatever grammar they're meant to show, but not too much bigger. In further mining, I might have to cut up sentences into smaller clauses. That makes the mining process take longer, but makes the reviewing process much smoother.
As I suspected, when I bumped the failed time on Anki up to 99999, the failed cards were all saved for the end of the review.
AUDIO PRONUNCIATION FLASHCARDS
I began the audio deck review at 10:36AM. There were 41 cards to review: 11 failed, leftover from last time, and 29 old cards.
I repeated the "failed time" adjustment just like in the sentence deck, but it doesn't seem to have worked. Anki is showing me all the failed cards first. Maybe since they're a day old, they get priority for that reason? It looks so, because after I went through them all, Anki then went through all the regularly scheduled cards before returning to the failed pile.
I finished the review at 10:46, leaving 5 failed cards still in the failed pile.
MOTIVATION
My motivation is pretty low today. I'm feeling like if I weren't blogging this whole process, I'd be tempted to stop. At the same time, I consciously know that my motivation varies from day to day. Some days like this, I'll be unmotivated, and other days, I'll be highly motivated. Writing about the process here and sharing it with you, really helps me push through the "danger days".
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 24
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 26
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I wrote.
Skills And Metaskills
Getting Motivated To Go Lift Weights
What I Gained By Traveling
Meeting The Geisha
The Nimbus Quest: Introduction
Today I'm switching up my study time. Normally I study in later evening, and today I'm studying soon after waking up. Why? Because today my wonderful sexy girlfriend is returning from Christmas overseas, and I want to spend lots of time with her!
I hadn't before considered it, but it's worth thinking about the ramifications of switching up study times. Is it better to always study at the same time, or is it better to study throughout the day, changing your schedule periodically as you go?
One side effect of using the spaced repetition software Anki to study, is that if you change your study times, the first day couple days, it'll widely screw with how many cards are scheduled for review. If you move your study time earlier like I am doing, you'll have far fewer cards to study at first, because of how Anki calculates the spacing in realtime, not in day long intervals. Move your study time later, and the exact same effect will force you to go through more cards than usual.
ANKI'S HANDLING OF FAILED FLASHCARDS
Yesterday I pointed out how Anki gives a huge amount of priority to cards in its failed pile, so that a failed card might be put on the screen 5 or 6 times before a regularly failed card even gets on appearance. I got a comment that you can apparently adjust that somehow through the preferences, changing the "failed time" to a higher amount. Apparently, by default, if a card is in the failed pile for X amount of time, it'll suddenly get priority over all the other piles. And you can adjust X through the preferences.
I think it would be best to set X to a million, for purposes of reviewing sentence flashcards. The whole point of the spaced repetition system is to optimize the order the cards are shown. If time is entered into the calculation, you get the weird phenomenon that the order depends on how you do your review. If you take a break to get clothes out of the washer, you'll come back to a slew of failed cards all in a row. But if you waited to finish the review before getting your clothes, you'll get a more natural, optimal ordering of the cards.
I think the failed time "feature" is meant for memorizing things like vocabulary words, where you're just rote memorizing raw data. In that case, if you're failing to memorize a certain word, the best way might be to just cram it into your brain by brute force, which means looking at it every 10 minutes until you get it. But when it comes to something like comprehending a sentence, or reading a sentence, brute force memorization is the least efficient possible way to go about it. Most of us would just memorize the sentence based on some distinguishing feature, long before we outright memorized it-- e.g., "Oh, this is the sentence with the three exclamation points which I keep failing, it must mean 'You shall not pass!!!'", without actually even reading the sentence. Granted, this is how the really hard failed sentences will eventually be passed anyway, but it should be a last resort.
With sentences, the real learning doesn't come while you're reviewing the flashcards. It comes as your subconscious mind takes the experience of reviewing the flashcards and processes it. As you review difficult sentences, raw info is queued up for the subconscious mind to analyze to try and figure out the underlying patterns. It'll get around to analyzing the failed sentence when it gets around to it-- there's no point queuing it up over and over again. This is why, often, you'll notice that after you go to sleep and wake up the next day, you can suddenly comprehend a sentence better, which thwarted you before.
With audio pronunciation sentence cards, the failed timing is even worse. Not only is it next to impossible to brute force memorize the exact pronunciation of an entire sentence, but it takes precious seconds for the audio file to play on Anki. Yesterday I found that with the failed time feature set at X=10 minutes, my audio pronunciation deck, where I recently added a bunch of full sentence cards, was pure torture, and it didn't even really give me any benefit, for the reasons above.
To change the failed time on the Windows version of Anki, I went to Settings, Deck Properties, then into the Advanced Tab, and changed "Again (Young)" and "Again (Mature)" to 99999 minutes. I'll test it and see how it works. I notice that same tab also has a "maximum failed cards" option, set to 1000 by default... I wonder how that works? I mean, if I fail 1001 cards, then I fail 1001 cards :)
This should not make it so that failed cards vanish from my sight forever. Once all the non-failed cards are finished, the failed cards should follow, regardless of their Fail Time. I think. I will soon see!
REVIEWING SENTENCE FLASHCARDS
There were 161 sentence cards scheduled, 91 old and 70 new. If you've been following the progress, you'll recognize that's about half the normal size. It's the side effect of switching up study time using Anki. Tomorrow if I decide to study in the late evening again, I will have about 150% as many cards as usual to study :)
I began the review at 9:44AM. I ended at 10:26. That's about 3.8 cards a minute. The trend of the past few days continues: significantly reduced performance on sentence cards, even when I have had adequate sleep. I think the problem is that the sentences I've been mining from the tense-mood chapter of Tex's French Grammar are just too long. While it's a convenient sentence source, Tex's Grammar was obviously not intended for sentence mining-- the example sentences were intended to be read once, maybe twice each, as just that, example sentences. Good sentences for sentence mining should be short and sweet, big enough to contain whatever grammar they're meant to show, but not too much bigger. In further mining, I might have to cut up sentences into smaller clauses. That makes the mining process take longer, but makes the reviewing process much smoother.
As I suspected, when I bumped the failed time on Anki up to 99999, the failed cards were all saved for the end of the review.
AUDIO PRONUNCIATION FLASHCARDS
I began the audio deck review at 10:36AM. There were 41 cards to review: 11 failed, leftover from last time, and 29 old cards.
I repeated the "failed time" adjustment just like in the sentence deck, but it doesn't seem to have worked. Anki is showing me all the failed cards first. Maybe since they're a day old, they get priority for that reason? It looks so, because after I went through them all, Anki then went through all the regularly scheduled cards before returning to the failed pile.
I finished the review at 10:46, leaving 5 failed cards still in the failed pile.
MOTIVATION
My motivation is pretty low today. I'm feeling like if I weren't blogging this whole process, I'd be tempted to stop. At the same time, I consciously know that my motivation varies from day to day. Some days like this, I'll be unmotivated, and other days, I'll be highly motivated. Writing about the process here and sharing it with you, really helps me push through the "danger days".
Previous Day in the French Revolution: Day 24
Next Day in the French Revolution: Day 26
You can also go to the French Revolution Table Of Contents...
...or to the French Revolution Introduction.
Here are some other articles I wrote.
Skills And Metaskills
Getting Motivated To Go Lift Weights
What I Gained By Traveling
Meeting The Geisha
The Nimbus Quest: Introduction
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