Thanks for sharing---to me those statistics are very interesting and show some possible limits on what memory can achieve in the long term. But having to review 175 cards a day seems rough to me. I guess it's all about how difficult the things are that you memorize.
Here's the way I was looking at it, as summarized by Sherlock Holmes in "A Study in Scarlet": "You see," he explained, "I consider that a man's brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones." At first I thought Holmes was being too pessimistic, but there is a sense in which he's right---you can only remember so many "things", even with spaced repetition. After that you spend too much time reviewing cards every day. Now, if I only wanted to review, say, 50 cards every day, then I was hoping that I could still have 10K cards in my deck. This corresponds to a 0.5% (=50/10K) "review rate". But Peter has a review rate of 175/8500 = 2%, which seems pretty high to me. In order to determine how big my practical mental attic is, it seems useful to know whether achieveable review rates are more like 2% or 0.2%. I realize it's probably all about how hard the things are (e.g. most people have a vocabulary of 10000+ words, and they manage to remember them without any software at all) but perhaps in practice users' long-term review rates cluster in a narrow band. -- Ben ----------------- Original message ----------------- From: Peter Bienstman <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 09:38:34 +0200 On Tuesday 30 June 2009 02:08:54 am Oisin Mac Fhearai wrote: > I can't speak for others, but I fell behind over a couple of weeks, > only doing 50-100 of the ~200 reviews scheduled each day. When it got > to about 1500 due cards, I finally lost any remaining motivation and > stopped studying. That was about 4 months ago, and I've been using > srses for over 4 years. > So I would say that there is a strong chance that others, especially > newbies, have fallen into the same trap. > > Even at 12 new cards per day, the reviews creep up to well over 100 a > day within a few months, and if answering a card takes 20 seconds (eg > scribbling Chinese chars on a tablet), you're talking 30-60 min > sessions daily. If you take a week off, that's four hours of backlog. > > I'd recommend a clear limit for new cards daily as Anki does, tweaked > by the user conservatively, so they don't get proportionally bogged > down 6 months later and quit. When I return, I'll probably only take > on 5 or 6 new cards a day to avoid burnout again. Interesting observation, thanks! It's easy to add a warning + explanation when you reach e.g. 10 new learned cards. I'd prefer this more gentle approach as opposed to a hard limit where you forbid people to go on. On a more personal note, I've been using (the predecessor of) Mnemosyne since 2003, learning roughly 5 cards a day. I'm now at 175 scheduled cards a day on average, and 8500 cards in my database. There is still plenty of stuff I want to learn, and if I keep up what I think is this steady, gently pace, I could be at 350 reps daily in 5 more years... This very long term aspect is definitely something that needs thinking about, either by making a more thorough analysis of the logs and tweaking the algorithm, or by pruning the cards in my database. Peter --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mnemosyne-proj-users" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mnemosyne-proj-users?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
