Hello all. I’m someone who has used Anki and Wanikani for a long time (including with flaming durtles) and I just had a question for you guys. What is your opinion of undo options in SRS applications for when you are tired and mess up on something that you “know”.
I’m actually asking this because, right now, I’m really tired and I keep messing up on stuff that I normally wouldn’t because I’m just really tired. That has made me wonder though.. what are your opinions on using undo buttons for these situations? One on hand I’ve gotten some stuff wrong that is dumb and that I go, “Damn.. I’m losing levels on stuff I have the Master level on that I know and was careless on. I’m so close to moving onto a new level too.” and on the other hand I’m questioning if that is at all a good excuse. lol I feel like a lot of people essentially get in the way of their SRS systems by overthinking it… and I technically did get the question wrong. If this was real life and I was talking, I would have to re-explain what I meant.
Do you think that using and undo button in these situations would be cheating myself, or do you think that it’s better to say “I know the answer, I just wasn’t paying attention” and then to use the Undo button?
6 comments
If you didn’t get it right, you didn’t know it and should mark it wrong. If you actually know it, you will continue to get it right the next times you see it.
Gaming the system because you don’t want to see wrong numbers go up does not help you learn Japanese. It just makes your (fudged) numbers look better.
I don’t understand what the issue is, are you more concerned about numbers over actually learning the language? If you want to feel better just mark everything you know as “Good”.
I actually do the opposite: sometimes I review too fast and hit “good” while still checking the answer, so I have to undo and hit “again”.
For words which I’m supposed to know but still fail, I always hit again. Not getting them right means I don’t know them well enough, so it’s still fail.
For newish vocab cards (Anki) and grammar cards (bunpro) I am strict. Can’t hurt to have it show up again more frequently so that I know it even when tired.
However, with my vocab/example sentence deck that served to teach me KKLCs 2300 kanji, I am way past the point of being obsessed with “correctness”. I don’t exactly have to use CTRL+Z as there’s no input field, but everything that I kinda know gets the pass. I’ll see it in context anyways.
I just take note if I am starting to forget the components of a kanji so that I can look it up in more detail later again.
It’s legitimately annoying that you can’t burn cards you know on Wanikani. I don’t need to be asked 三 over and over, my lord, I wasn’t a blank slate going in to it, and it’s so tedious it makes me not want to do my reviews at all.
It depends, if they are in Guru state I use the undo. Next time if I fail them again in Master I don’t undo.