You can use flashcards and spaced repetition to memorize almost anything – so why did I come to hate my reviews? Explore the dark side of this amazing memory system.
In my last post, I shared how spaced repetition flashcards made my memory feel like a superpower. I learned to remember thousands of things that would otherwise have misted away.
How Did I Come to Hate Reviews?
But flashcards depend on daily reviews. And after a few years, I just couldn’t stand the reviews anymore. I started skipping days. Weeks. Months. Today, if I fire up Anki, I have over 2000 cards due.
What went wrong?
At first, I blamed myself. I lacked stamina. Determination. Something.
But the solution isn’t that simple. On reflection, I’ve realized that flashcards and spaced repetition have some inherent dangers and difficulties. We can work around them, but only if we step back and think about them.
Review Clusters and Adding New Cards
The first problem: spaced repetition is uneven. That’s the nature of the math. Some days will have only a few reviews. Others will have a ton of cards. Those huge days can be demoralizing. You fire up Anki, and you have hundreds of reviews.
There are several ways to deal with this.
At a minimum, if you have a ton of cards due, don’t add any new cards that day.
You can also break up your reviews into several short sessions. But I rarely did that. I wanted to get reviews done (more on that later).
Also, Anki has a feature where you can see which days coming up will be big days. If you know tomorrow’s going to be a big day, you could review some of those cards today, ahead of time.
But there’s a deeper problem: depending on how you add new cards today, you could be creating mammoth review days down the road. That math is just too complex for a normal person to do on the fly. I want to know: if I add 20 cards today, are they going to land on some day next week that’s already huge?
This seems like a problem the program could address. It can’t predict exactly how much you’ll need to review. But perhaps it could estimate, and warn you if new cards today will land on a day next week that’s already overbooked.
Boredom Bias
A much more difficult problem is the boredom bias. The more boring a card is for you, (unless it’s boring because it’s easy), the more likely you are to get it wrong.
But the whole point of spaced repetition is to focus your time on the cards you get wrong!
Pretty soon, you’re spending most of your review time precisely on the most boring and/or difficult cards.
Damien Elmes, the lead Anki developer, is aware of this problem. His “leech” feature will remove a card after you miss it a whole bunch of times. But when you have thousands of cards, it can take a long time to purge each leech.
Card Laziness
Of course, you can set leeches to disappear faster. But is that the answer? You don’t want to disappear a leech. You want to figure out how to learn it. Isn’t that why it’s in your deck?
Either it’s important, and you need to fix it, or it’s not important, and it’s been a waste of time from the start.
But fixing leeches is a pain. It’s especially a pain if you’re reviewing with AnkiDroid, or another mobile app.
Yes, Anki on your phone is tantalizing. You can slip life-changing memory building into the dribs and drabs of time that are otherwise “wasted”.
But when you trip up on a leech, the last thing you want to do is wrestle with your tiny onscreen keyboard.
Even if you have a usable mobile keyboard, fixing a leech feels like breaking the flow. I’m trying to review here. Get this done. I don’t want to slow down and … um … think?
Wait.
Flashcards As Tests
At last we poke the raw nerve. What exactly am I doing when I review flashcards? What’s the “flow” that I don’t want to break by fixing broken flashcards?
Am I taking a test?
I’ve spent about half my life (at this point) in school. School is about tests.
When I started doing flashcards, I was excited about how different they are from tests. Tests are a single snapshot of your recall at a particular time. Unfortunately, most students, including valedictorians, forget almost everything they ever get tested on. Traditional tests are a complete failure.
Flashcards are different, because you maintain knowledge. Spaced repetition ensures that you keep seeing things before you forget them.
But flashcards still feel a lot like school tests. Yes, in theory, it doesn’t matter much whether I get a card wrong, since I’ll see it tomorrow. But in practice, I hated getting cards wrong.
At first, I thought this dislike was an old school hangup. I expected that, in time, I would adjust to this awesome new world of gradeless reviews.
But the opposite happened. As time went on, my hatred for mistakes grew.
Spaced Repetition Collects Your Worst Cards
And because of the “boredom bias”, I was spending more and more time reviewing my least favorite cards, getting them wrong, and knowing I would have to see them again.
I began to amass a mental collection of cards that I could remember missing. The card would come up, and I’d think, “I always miss this.” And I would.
That is amazing. Think about that. Whatever I was doing, it was training my brain to remember that I couldn’t remember this. Somehow, I had spent enough time to make that connection, instead of connecting to the actual fact.
Why? Because I was mostly thinking about whether I’d get it right, not about what I was trying to learn.
Flashcards As Video Game
Flashcard review has an intense gravitational pull towards focusing on the actual flashcards:
- How many cards you’ve gotten wrong.
- How many cards are left.
- How long it’ll take to finish them, so you can get back to your real life.
As a friend put it, flashcards feel like a video game. Wow! They really do. And I like video games, but they’re fundamentally geared towards success. Points. Levels. Defeating obstacles.
Should memorizing be a video game?
No. Flashcards are a huge step forward from tests, but if you’re focusing on success, you’re still fundamentally focused on grades. And that leads to absurdities like, in my case, actually memorizing that you always miss a question.
It also leads to the flashcard flow. I wanted to get through these cards as fast as possible! The last thing I wanted to do is hit the brakes and reformulate some broken card. That felt like losing.
Atomizing and Randomizing Knowledge
Flashcards seemed to disconnect me from the actual knowledge. Instead of immersing myself in the knowledge, I found myself controlling a flashcard slot machine.
The knowledge was atomized and randomized. I’d get a Spanish word, then some obscure fact from Edible Forest Gardens, then a letter in Morse Code.
This randomization is essential to spaced repetition. I needed to see that Spanish word, on that day.
For vocabulary, this might have been fine. Words are tiny bits of information that need to be random. We want to be able to reach for any word at any time.
It’s interesting that both SuperMemo and Anki were developed by programmers who were trying to learn a language. Despite all my problems with flashcards, I still think they could be an essential tool for mastering large quantities of vocabulary.
But what about the facts from books? Does it really help that a particular fact is only associated with the question on one flashcard? Is that really how our minds work?
Flashcards Kill Clustering
No. Our minds use chunks and clusters. You want more connections to each fact, not less.
Flashcards work directly against this mental need. Flashcards atomize each fact completely out of any context, except its context as a random flashcard.
Think about your friends, or even acquaintances. You think of a name, and instantly you get a face, hair color, voice, an outfit, the rooms where you see this person – and that’s all in less than a second. If you focus, you can pull tens, hundreds, probably thousands of discrete facts that cluster around this single person.
Spaced repetition and flashcards kill clustering. Instead of associating multiple facts from the same book with one another, you split them all up. Divide and forget.
For me, almost all this knowledge began to have no other meaning than as a flashcard. The only time I thought about it was when I was testing myself.
Solution?
In short, this tool for remembering more of reality had morphed into an oppressive, self-contained computer game. The only way to win was to finish as fast as possible.
How can I fix this?
By questioning my underlying assumptions about the whole method.
Next time: Reviewing as Thinking
Comments
Flashcard (SRS/Anki) problems
Dear Bill,
This is a really interesting post about using SRS flashcards. As a heavy user of Anki to study Japanese here in Tokyo, I have spend countless hours creating and studying cards over the last three years. It is easy to relate to many of the things you said.
I don't have much constructive to add in terms of flashcard fatigue or other similar problems. Perhaps we are so eager to learn that we add too many cards too quickly. At the beginning, it seems very doable, but with time, decks can become very large, and they can easily slip out of control.
In terms of randomizing and clustering, I have had similar problems with the decks I have made from my Japanese - Rosetta Stone materials. Some of the decks are very large, and reviews can feel disjointed and disconnected, all of which can be very discouraging...
However, recently I tried something that might be helpful. With a deck with almost 3000 cards, I had gotten behind in my reviews to the tune of almost 1500 cards. It seemed hopeless. So I decided to use the tags to only study the cards from the most recent lesson - about 260 cards. This did two things that really seemed to help.
One was psychological: suddenly the number of reviews did not seem overwhelming, and I felt empowered to study in a dedicated fashion. I know all the other reviews are waiting out there for me, but reviewing now felt like a positive experience.
The second thing was that now all the cards were from the same lesson: all about food, cooking, tools, building, etc. They were clustered again and helped reinforce each other, again making it all feel good.
So perhaps the key is to break up large decks into more manageable chunks, both in terms of number and content?
On a similar note, I have a review deck for the first 2000 kanji that I keep chipping away at. I also have a deck of new kanji with 330 cards and climbing that I am able to zero out every morning - a small victory that keeps me motivated!
I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on any of this. Good luck with all your memorizing!
Cheers,
Rich Bailey
Tokyo, Japan
teachingwithanki.blogspot.com
Rich, thanks for stopping by!
Rich, thanks for stopping by! I just found your site through Damien’s Twitter feed, and I’ve been looking forward to digging in and working my way through your posts. Now here you are!
It’s extremely helpful for me to hear that another Anki enthusiast has faced similar problems. What a relief!
But I think you’ve started to solve these problems too, with the clustering that you describe. What if Anki could do this automatically? Probably, we’ve only begun to understand spaced repetition – imagine if the Anki algorithms took into account cards with similar tags? If we thought of ourselves as reviewing networks of cards, not isolated facts? We might review “easy” cards a bit more often, but find ourselves remembering “harder” cards much more often.
Still, as I say in my next post, I think the solution (for me anyway) also lies in radically rethinking how I approach the whole process of “reviews”.
Thanks again for your thoughts!
Bill, I too had problems with
Bill, I too had problems with clustering, until I found the cure. The trick is to limit the number of new cards that you are seeing to a fairly low number each day. eg. 20. This allows you to build up a back log of new cards and not have to worry about "lumps" nearly as much.
If you want to get deeper into efficiency for flashcards, Super-memo does just what you describe for clustering, in fact, though careful testing, the author has found roughly the optimum formula for memory. The reason that I use Anki like you do instead is that it's simpler and less prone to the weird types of failure that the super memo algorithm is.
Thanks for the comment! I
Thanks for the comment! I agree that limiting the number of new cards is crucial. But I found that, for me, even 20 cards per day would eventually add up to a lot.
What kind of topics do you study with Anki?
Leeches
Hi. As a heavy Anki user (almost 300,000 reviews so far), I've faced the same problems as you. When we face a difficult card and try to remember the answer, we begin to travel along the well-established neural pathways that lead us to the wrong answer or to nowhere, and this attempt to remember strengthen those incorrect paths, creating a vicious circle of error. Here's what I do with leeches now: I put a mnemonic on the question side. If even that doesn't work, I put the answer on the question side. At that point I'm obviously not testing myself, but I realized that testing myself isn't the goal. Every time I see that now-easy card, I'm reviewing it anyway. It will probably end up forming a memory. If it's truly useful, I'll see it in the real world and will later associate it with that encounter.
Hmm, putting the answer on
Hmm, putting the answer on the card – very interesting! The usual advice is to rework the card, simplify it, perhaps break the material into multiple cards. But your approach intrigues me. Instead of reinforcing that mysteriously broken “vicious circle”, you’re at least seeing the material on regular basis. Thanks so much for sharing this.