Just wondering if my stats are normal. I have ~400 cards in with about an equal split in learning, young, and mature. Correct rate about 50%. 8 new cards a day taking 30-45min usually.
I often feel like if I saw the word in a multiple choice I’d get it right every time, but I guess that’s a different type of recall. I also often remember the meaning but not the pronunciation.
Are these stats normal or should I tweak my settings? I feel like it’s going ok but am wondering how others going through it went about it.
3 comments
Do you mean that you have a success rate of 50%, even on mature cards? Usually the recommended target is somewhere around 80-90% correct answers. 50% is very low. 30-45 min for 8 cards/day is definitely on the slow side as well, probably due to your low success rate on cards.
Do you review or learn new words first? Basically, how many previously seen cards you need to relearn daily? If you do 8 new cards in a day, then most likely you have 40-80 reviews? With 50% you basically have to relearn 20-40 cards outside of initial 8 new?
I’m asking, because maybe you got in a trap that at first you had to learn much, maybe in Anki, maybe somewhere else like grammar articles online, or maybe it’s not even Japanese, but something else like programming, so you couldn’t memorize all cards properly and it snowballed up to such point that you actually learn not 8, but more like 30-50 cards each day.
Another point is that it might worth to play with either settings or approach. For example, usually one or two fast reviews within first 20-120 minutes have a very good result on retention. If such early reviews improve the result a lot, then it’s about how your memory works and it’s better to adjust intervals. Also sometimes people have good results when they combine. Our brains can be like a gatekeeper that decides if something has value to learn or not. So when material appears in more artificial and abstract way like SRS, it doesn’t stick so much as seeing words in different situations like books+youtube videos (then our brain thinks that it’s popular and worth to memorize), or simply with a lot of context and some emotional value like we usually have with content.
As a general approach usually people aim at 85-95% retention. If you have 100% retention, then probably you could learn more. If it drops below 80%, then that means that probably you already have spend some excess time without practical output.
I would recommend you to read [this article](https://cademcniven.com/posts/20210410/) and try to implement suggestions from it.