Bucket-Hat Guide to Anki Buttons
OK. Another weird post I guess. But, another common topic I see bad advice on is how to answer cards in Anki (which of the 3-4 buttons to press when answering). There are a lot of one size all fits answers telling people to change their settings for calculating the intervals, or to never or almost never hit the "good" button. All of these suggestions suffer from a single fault; people remember differently. They don't provide a system for arriving at the right answer if you don't fit into their mould. And that is what I hope to do here.
Firstly, the right answer is elusive. There are 2 extremes you can go towards. You can be too strict on yourself and become horribly inefficient. Or you can be too lax on yourself and have the whole process fail.
For the sake of this discussion "efficient" here means optimizing your throughput. Striking that balance between a good retention rate and the number of reviews you can tackle in a day. In this way, becoming more efficient means either freeing up time so this becomes less of a burden, or freeing up time to increase the amount of reviews.
To illustrate that point. I bet most people could net an easy 100% retention rate on a small deck by having a single new card a day and only ever hitting the lowest value passing grade button when you get it. Conversely, you can easily get and maintain single digit retention rates by trying to plow through an entire large deck in a day and only ever using "Again" or "Good". Neither is particularly "efficient".
On the one hand you go so slow that while your retention is high, you're not learning very much. The flip side is probably better because your brain should be able to remember at least a few from each day, but ultimately, between the volume and the frequency most things never make it to long term memory.
As you might imagine, most advice favors leans towards pessimism. People look at higher retention as an automatic stat defining victory. But, this means larger review days reviewing cards you likely have no real chance of forgetting.
100% retention rate should not be your goal while you still have new and non-mature cards. In fact, you should view a 100% retention rate as a sign that something is wrong unless you have an insanely small number of cards. My retention rate is about 95% and this is a bad thing, but I understand why and will talk to that in a bit.
Basically, if your retention rate is 100% and you have a decent number of cards, it means you're SO aggressive that you're likely repeating them long before they actually need to be repeated.
Note: A 100% retention rate may be desirable IF you NEED to COMPLETELY learn something in a shorter period of time. But, this will likely also mean investing a TON of time if there is any real volume. The other time it would be a good goal is when you're out of new cards. But, few people are looking for this sort of advice AFTER they've completed the new cards.
Ideally, to maximize efficiency you'd be looking to strike that balance where MOST reviews succeed. Yes, this also means SOME reviews will fail. But, the exchange is the time between cards is longer, so you can complete more reviews (either increasing the new card limit or adding more decks) and still remain largely in the black.
Similarly, a retention rate which is too low would also be a bad thing. What is too low is also hard to nail down. It really depends on how many reviews you average a day. A person who averages 1 review a day should expect to typically get 100%. But a person with 100 reviews a day might aim for 85%.
Assuming you have a decent number of daily reviews I would say anything over 50% is positive. You're remembering more than you're forgetting. 50% would be scraping the bottom of the barrel though. I would say that between 75-85% is an ideal range. In this range you're pace is slow enough that most things are sticking most of the time. You know you're not going too slow because you're not getting 100% and the retention rate. Also, you're only failing a small percentage of the time on reviews which gives you a chance to see if there are techniques you can employ to improve your memory in general.
Anything under 100% means you're not spoon feeding your memory.
What to do if you're not hitting those numbers? Well, step and ask yourself "do I care?". If you LIKE the feeling of getting 100% retention rate and feel you'd lose motivation without it, you have no need/reason to try and adjust. If you don't mind less than 50% because it means you can power through your cards and sort it all out better once the new cards are done... that it fine as well.
If you want, or feel the need to address the numbers though, there are two ways; adjusting your answer style or adjusting the ease multipliers. Both are effectively doing the same thing. If your retention rate is higher than you'd like increase the multiplier or press the good and OK buttons more often. Both of these options will result in cards being pushed out further each time you see them, which would should make it harder for you remember, which should push your limits a little more and move the retention rate down.
To make it go up, do the opposite. Be more pessimistic, or lower the multipliers. These will force you to see the cards more often, which in turn will increase the odds for any given card that you see it again before you forget it. Which in turn will raise your retention rate.
If you're already pretty liberal with the good button and want lower rates, or liberal with the bad button and want higher rates... you need to modify the multipliers. Just... be careful. These changes are compounding. Larger changes will make increasingly larger changes over time.
The other thing you can do is tweak the number of new cards. Adding more new daily cards should put more stress on your brain to remember and push the accuracy down. And reducing the daily new cards should have the reverse effect. But, like tweaking the multipliers, this can have a huge effect. But, worse than multipliers, this often take a long time to play out. I can take weeks for you to even START feeling the impact of increased or decreased daily reviews.
Back to my 95% retention rate. I'm fine with this. I would prefer a lower one. But, I know my decks and I know that there are 3 factors causing this higher than expected rate; overlap, understanding and external learning.
I have multiple decks, and there is overlap, so some of my new cards actually repeat vocab or grammar from other decks which means that they A) aren't new, and B) artificially increase my frequency of seeing those points. This is turn acts to drive up my retention.
An increase in my understanding is the next point. I'm far enough along in my learning that I have some amount of fundamental understanding about the language which assists in remembering or deciphering and even in guessing new cards. This again, artificially inflates my retention rates. I'm not necessarily recalling from memory in many cases. And, that isn't a bad thing. At least, not for language learning.
Lastly is, I'm learning from multiple sources. As my exposure grows, the amount of learning I can receive outside of my Anki decks improves. So, while some cards may new to me within the app, the words or concepts may be old news.
I COULD address this by eliminating the duplicates, changing the way things are presented and so on. But, I have over 20000 cards. Some of them have curated images and professional voice actors.
So, enter the secret final point. There are factors about your learning materials which may affect your performance as well. Try and understand these as well. They may provide a better idea of why you're seeing the performance numbers you're seeing.
For instance, while I accept that this means a higher retention rate than I want to see, I acknowledge that this means that I will get a higher retention rate and that it means that I can answer most cards fairly quick. Which is why, I also deal with between 200-300 reviews a day. My 95% retention rate still amounts to 15 or so misses a day, or about the same you might see with an 85% retention rate on 100 cards.
As for getting to 100%... you should start getting closer and closer to this one you stop seeing new cards. If you have no new cards, your expectation should be that, over time, retention will creep upwards. But, this will also be a slow process.
Firstly, the right answer is elusive. There are 2 extremes you can go towards. You can be too strict on yourself and become horribly inefficient. Or you can be too lax on yourself and have the whole process fail.
For the sake of this discussion "efficient" here means optimizing your throughput. Striking that balance between a good retention rate and the number of reviews you can tackle in a day. In this way, becoming more efficient means either freeing up time so this becomes less of a burden, or freeing up time to increase the amount of reviews.
To illustrate that point. I bet most people could net an easy 100% retention rate on a small deck by having a single new card a day and only ever hitting the lowest value passing grade button when you get it. Conversely, you can easily get and maintain single digit retention rates by trying to plow through an entire large deck in a day and only ever using "Again" or "Good". Neither is particularly "efficient".
On the one hand you go so slow that while your retention is high, you're not learning very much. The flip side is probably better because your brain should be able to remember at least a few from each day, but ultimately, between the volume and the frequency most things never make it to long term memory.
As you might imagine, most advice favors leans towards pessimism. People look at higher retention as an automatic stat defining victory. But, this means larger review days reviewing cards you likely have no real chance of forgetting.
100% retention rate should not be your goal while you still have new and non-mature cards. In fact, you should view a 100% retention rate as a sign that something is wrong unless you have an insanely small number of cards. My retention rate is about 95% and this is a bad thing, but I understand why and will talk to that in a bit.
Basically, if your retention rate is 100% and you have a decent number of cards, it means you're SO aggressive that you're likely repeating them long before they actually need to be repeated.
Note: A 100% retention rate may be desirable IF you NEED to COMPLETELY learn something in a shorter period of time. But, this will likely also mean investing a TON of time if there is any real volume. The other time it would be a good goal is when you're out of new cards. But, few people are looking for this sort of advice AFTER they've completed the new cards.
Ideally, to maximize efficiency you'd be looking to strike that balance where MOST reviews succeed. Yes, this also means SOME reviews will fail. But, the exchange is the time between cards is longer, so you can complete more reviews (either increasing the new card limit or adding more decks) and still remain largely in the black.
Similarly, a retention rate which is too low would also be a bad thing. What is too low is also hard to nail down. It really depends on how many reviews you average a day. A person who averages 1 review a day should expect to typically get 100%. But a person with 100 reviews a day might aim for 85%.
Assuming you have a decent number of daily reviews I would say anything over 50% is positive. You're remembering more than you're forgetting. 50% would be scraping the bottom of the barrel though. I would say that between 75-85% is an ideal range. In this range you're pace is slow enough that most things are sticking most of the time. You know you're not going too slow because you're not getting 100% and the retention rate. Also, you're only failing a small percentage of the time on reviews which gives you a chance to see if there are techniques you can employ to improve your memory in general.
Anything under 100% means you're not spoon feeding your memory.
What to do if you're not hitting those numbers? Well, step and ask yourself "do I care?". If you LIKE the feeling of getting 100% retention rate and feel you'd lose motivation without it, you have no need/reason to try and adjust. If you don't mind less than 50% because it means you can power through your cards and sort it all out better once the new cards are done... that it fine as well.
If you want, or feel the need to address the numbers though, there are two ways; adjusting your answer style or adjusting the ease multipliers. Both are effectively doing the same thing. If your retention rate is higher than you'd like increase the multiplier or press the good and OK buttons more often. Both of these options will result in cards being pushed out further each time you see them, which would should make it harder for you remember, which should push your limits a little more and move the retention rate down.
To make it go up, do the opposite. Be more pessimistic, or lower the multipliers. These will force you to see the cards more often, which in turn will increase the odds for any given card that you see it again before you forget it. Which in turn will raise your retention rate.
If you're already pretty liberal with the good button and want lower rates, or liberal with the bad button and want higher rates... you need to modify the multipliers. Just... be careful. These changes are compounding. Larger changes will make increasingly larger changes over time.
The other thing you can do is tweak the number of new cards. Adding more new daily cards should put more stress on your brain to remember and push the accuracy down. And reducing the daily new cards should have the reverse effect. But, like tweaking the multipliers, this can have a huge effect. But, worse than multipliers, this often take a long time to play out. I can take weeks for you to even START feeling the impact of increased or decreased daily reviews.
Back to my 95% retention rate. I'm fine with this. I would prefer a lower one. But, I know my decks and I know that there are 3 factors causing this higher than expected rate; overlap, understanding and external learning.
I have multiple decks, and there is overlap, so some of my new cards actually repeat vocab or grammar from other decks which means that they A) aren't new, and B) artificially increase my frequency of seeing those points. This is turn acts to drive up my retention.
An increase in my understanding is the next point. I'm far enough along in my learning that I have some amount of fundamental understanding about the language which assists in remembering or deciphering and even in guessing new cards. This again, artificially inflates my retention rates. I'm not necessarily recalling from memory in many cases. And, that isn't a bad thing. At least, not for language learning.
Lastly is, I'm learning from multiple sources. As my exposure grows, the amount of learning I can receive outside of my Anki decks improves. So, while some cards may new to me within the app, the words or concepts may be old news.
I COULD address this by eliminating the duplicates, changing the way things are presented and so on. But, I have over 20000 cards. Some of them have curated images and professional voice actors.
So, enter the secret final point. There are factors about your learning materials which may affect your performance as well. Try and understand these as well. They may provide a better idea of why you're seeing the performance numbers you're seeing.
For instance, while I accept that this means a higher retention rate than I want to see, I acknowledge that this means that I will get a higher retention rate and that it means that I can answer most cards fairly quick. Which is why, I also deal with between 200-300 reviews a day. My 95% retention rate still amounts to 15 or so misses a day, or about the same you might see with an 85% retention rate on 100 cards.
As for getting to 100%... you should start getting closer and closer to this one you stop seeing new cards. If you have no new cards, your expectation should be that, over time, retention will creep upwards. But, this will also be a slow process.
Comments
Post a Comment