Back-to-back in reviews; am I harming my learning?

I found a setting on flaming durtles to make my reviews back-to-back, ie for a given item I’d get translation followed by typing, or vice versa, without any other kanji coming between.

Normally, when doing reviews on the website, I get all the available reviews in a random order. I could get the meaning for a kanji, then a bunch of other stuff, and then sometime later I’d get the writing of it.

Am I harming my learning by making the reviews go back-to-back? It does seem way easier, and that easiness I worry might make it so that in the long term it doesn’t stick as much.

A similar thing: the aforementioned app allows me to set review length, and I find it way easier to only do 25 reviews at a time, take a small break, then do another 25, and repeat until done. Takes longer, but I find my success rate to be slightly higher and I get less tired and frustrated when doing many reviews (today, for an example, I’ll be doing over 200, which, if taken in a single session, would not be fun).

Take into consideration that making the reviews feel less burdensome helps with actually doing them and not burning out.

Hope this is the right forum, and that I make sense.

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To answer simply - are you harming your learning? Almost certainly. Does it harm your learning to a degree which is significant? Who’s to know! I suggest if you worry about this just turn off the back-to-back stuff - taking the easy route rarely pays off, you know?

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Dang. Guess I’ll go back to normal. Not today though, it’s saturday and I have beer.

Thanks for the reply.

Would you consider chunking the reviews into 25 at a time to also be bad?

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Haha, sorry for the bluntness. I think we all do things which harm our learning - I certainly have! But at the end of the day we still learn, and I think worrying about whether we learn in an optimized way is more ‘harmful’ than just doing what works for you to be able to learn in a sustainable way, you know? And ultimately only you can really answer this. If back-to-back enables you to actually do reviews which you otherwise wouldn’t do, then they’re a good thing :slight_smile:

But anyway. I think chunking makes sense, currently at ~300 reviews per night and there is definitely a drop of accuracy towards the end as the fatigue becomes more pronounced. In general I would advise making sure you have enough time to ‘absorb’ the reviews, not just rush through them (speaking from my own experiences which has led me to the sorry place I am now :sweat_smile: ).

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How is it harmful? It certainly is efficient since you can concentrate on just one item at a time. You could argue that by having them appear in random order you’ll get to “review” each item twice which can’t hurt, but in the end, either you know the answer or you don’t, so why not do it the efficient way?

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Well, this is the point of SRS right - the more you have to ‘recall’, the better. So I’d argue that it is not as simple as either knowing it or not - every time you have to recall the meaning/reading you are creating pathways in your brain, and those pathways will be strengthened more when they’re not back-to-back, probably.

Edit: Spoken as a lowly non-enlightened person to a level 60, obviously. :bowing_man:

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Haha, nah, just because I’ve reached level 60 doesn’t make me more enlightened ^^

This topic about 1x1 has appeared before and I agree with this comment by @rfindley :

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Alright, these are good points, and something I hadn’t considered initially. I still believe that being forced to recall the meaning/reading (@Furiae yes, I don’t have the ability to separate them either - but that’s kind of the point, you’re essentially doing two reviews of the same thing!) twice in a session rather than once will have some beneficial effects (albeit possibly very miniscule), but I see that there might be beneficial effects to the back-to-back approach as well!

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Thanks for the replies. I have concluded that, all things considered, it’s worth it to do it back-to-back (changed to force reading before meaning).

Especially since I do the reviews every day (today is day 161 and I haven’t ever skipped a day, always complete all reviews I get before ~3) making them take less time and be less daunting is worth the potential minor hit to efficacy. I’ll be doing this for 3+ years regardless.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve 162 more reviews to do. And I already did 75. Sigh. If I were to do them all in a single setting it’d be rather quite daunting, and I’d get tired just thinking about it.

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How would that be the point? The point of SRS is to have as few reviews as possible :upside_down_face:
Doing two reviews of the same item is pretty wasteful in my opinion…

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Hmm, I guess it depends - I mean, the actual amount of reviews will be the same (you still have to type in the same amount of characters) but I suppose you will spend more time if they are spaced apart from each other. My argument is that this time is ‘well spent’ because it reinforces things more than they otherwise would be, and that would (presumably) make those pathways stronger after a given review session. But we’re deep into speculation land here :smiley: so it’s probably safe to conclude that whether you do reviews back-to-back or randomly spaced out has a minimal effect on your learning :slight_smile:

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FWIW: if you wanted you can configure Anki to test separately.

I don’t think you necessarily want to have Anki test reading/meaning separately, but I thought I’d mention it incase someone found it useful (typing on a cellphone so apologies for errors).

I also want to mention that Anki isn’t great at communicating this stuff >.>

So in Anki when you’re adding/editing information you’re adding/editing what it calls “Notes” - Notes are just a series of fields with names and values

An example note:
English: Internet
Japanese: インターネット

Anki will then takes your Notes and from them produce Cards, these Cards are what Anki tests you on. Cards have a front side (prompt/question) and a back side (answer).

For above I might generate 2 cards

Front: インターネット
Back: Internet

Front: Internet
Back: インターネット

You can configure what fields your Notes have, and what Cards Anki should make from them

For a longer example, I suck at remembering verb conjugation so I have Anki test me on it, here is an example note for that:

Verb: To go
Dictionary: 行く
Dictionary reading: いく
Masu: 行きます
Masu reading: いきます
Te: 行って
Te reading: いって

And then from this I have Anki generate 9 cards, here are some rough ideas of them (simplified):

Front: Te form? To go
Back: 行って (いって), 行く

Front: Masu form? 行く
Back: 行きます (いきます), To go

Front: 行きます
Back: To go, いきます, いく

Front: いきます
Back: To go, 行きます, 行く

For vocab normally I tend to test meaning and reading at the same time, but I have different prompts for the “word form” (including kanji) and “reading” (kana only), example (simplified):

Vocab note
Meaning: Book
Word: 本
Reading: ほん

Vocab cards
Front: Book
Back: 本 (ほん)

Front: 本
Back: Book, ほん

Front: ほん
Back: Book, 本

Anki manual on notes

Edit: (related to above discussion) Anki can automatically “bury relayed cards” if you want - when this setting is enabled it’ll take cards due for review and delay some of them to the next day so that you aren’t being tested on lots of related cards in a short window - e.g. that you aren’t seeing a card (En->Ja) and it’s reverse version (Ja->En) on the same day.

[I hope some of this was interesting, apologies if you already knew some/all of this, or if I’ve missed someone else replying, typing from a cellphone at … 12:30am? Yikes…]

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I love back-to-back reviews

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Probably makes you more Burnt though :eyes:

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I think you answered your own question there. :slight_smile:

To add to the informal poll : I also do back-to-back but it’s random which comes first. I figure my brain ideally pops up meaning and reading when I see the kanji, so this reinforces both. It also corrects me right away if I have one of them wrong!

I agree with @schtitt
I’ve tried using them and found that it greatly increases the review clearance speed.
However, when making mistakes, it is harder to correct and sink them into memory. I suspect because there is not enough time to correct the wrong in my head, unlike random order.

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As someone who’s fairly close to finishing WaniKani after a long journey, I will say this: the main goal of your learning should be to do whatever it takes to continue to learn.

There’s an adage in software development that goes something like “the last 10% of the work takes 90% of the time”. In the context of learning a language and depending on your goal, seeking absolute perfection may actually be a detriment to your overall learning. Switching my reviews from “scrambled” to back-to-back reading/meaning was one of the best decisions I made because it significantly decreased the amount of time I was spending on reviewing at the detriment of maybe failing to recall 10% more items. In the long run that doesn’t matter to me, because eventually if I need to learn something, I’ll learn it in the context of an article, or a game, or a show, or a conversation.

For about half my time using WaniKani, I used it without any scripts or modifications, and found myself getting derailed and discouraged by vocab I’ve basically never had to encounter in the wild again. Not to mention, WaniKani is an isolated flash card system, meaning you’re recalling meaning and pronunciation without any context. I found myself spending an excessive amount of time working on reviews in a way that I knew I wouldn’t be asked of when I wanted to read or play a game or watch something. And so using scripts or modifying the way I used WaniKani allowed me to learn MORE, even if I still get stuck on a vocab I learned at level 20. Because in the end, who cares? Especially if in the time it would’ve taken me to learn that, I actually solidly learned 50 other words and kanji that I encounter much more frequently in the wild.

Any way that’s my 2 cents. I’ve spent years learning Japanese and I kind of wished that I didn’t stress so much early on about “how” I was learning, and just allowed myself to make mistakes and immerse more.

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There’s a reason why WK uses random order. The developer definitely cares. What works for you might not for everyone. Learning is better using random order than systematically group them. Grouping is easier but less effective. Sure it doesn’t make sense and harder for the brain, but it’s more effective for learning. If you feel wasting time using WK, why use it in the first place? Just use another system that uses contextual SRS instead, for example.

Here’s a reference I found: The shuffling of mathematics problems improves learning | SpringerLink

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I can’t read the full article because it’s behind a pay wall, but from reading the abstract, I’m going to respectfully disagree. I don’t think this study is supporting your claim. This study is evidence spaced repitition works, in that reviewing old material with new material is more likely to retain memory than if you were to bunch all the reviews from a single lesson at once.

Experiment 1, college students learned to solve one kind of problem, and subsequent practice problems were either massed in a single session (as in the standard format) or spaced across multiple sessions (as in the shuffled format).

The way Wanikani works isn’t analogous to a Math textbook. In the standard math textbook this study is critiquing, you would learn something in lesson 1, review it all at once at the end of lesson 1 in the form of X number of questions, and then never return to those reviews as you progress through the book. From what I can gather, they’re arguing if there are 10 questions at the end of Lesson 1, the student should study 1-2 of them, and then the other 8 will appear at the end of other lessons. While not exactly spaced repetition, this works for similar reasons. Over time as they progress through the book, they review old material. They’re not cramming, they’re spacing their reviews.

Wanikani doesn’t present you all of Lesson 10’s items and force you to review them once and only once. By design you’re reviewing them over time, as the reviews become available again. It’s just not analogous to this study at all. Similarly, reviewing the meaning and reading at the same time isn’t the same as “bunching” your reviews, because you’re still reviewing the context multiple times over time, exactly what this study is arguing for.

In Experiment 2, students first learned to solve multiple types of problems, and practice problems were either blocked by type (as in the standard format) or randomly mixed (as in the shuffled format).

This experiment might support your claim, but I don’t know what they mean by “types of problems” and so I really have no idea what the equivalent would be in Wanikani. Does this experiment imply a type of problem is subtraction, and that grouping a bunch of subtraction problems together is detrimental? In the case of Wanikani is “reading” in general a type of problem? Or is the reading of a particular word a “type of problem”. If it’s the former, even if you’re reviewing meaning and reading of a word back to back, you’re still shuffling both those “types” of problems over the course of a full wanikani review. You’re not just doing reading over and over, and then moving on to meaning. If it’s the latter, a math problem is structured completely differently than recalling vocab of a particular word. I just can’t see how you could try and get this granular with this particular study and try to apply it to learning a language without actually conducting the study with language learning. Many other SRS systems provide reading and meaning back to back and yet people overwhelmingly report success using something like Anki.

To your other point, I hope I didn’t imply that the developers of WaniKani haven’t thought through their system. But I also don’t think WaniKani is a perfect system. There’s no such thing. For example, Wanikani uses spaced repetition, but on reviews, doesn’t present you with the review that is most important to review first, it just gives you them in a random order. Here’s a user script that attempts to fix this: WaniKani SRS Reorder Button. There’s plenty of evidence that timing matters in SRS. If you learned something 3 hours ago, and something 6 months ago, it’s more important you review the one from 3 hours ago sooner, because you’re approaching the time when your brain is most likely to forget it. A mature review can wait another day and the difference in recall will be negligible. The reality is everyone is limited in their time. Maybe you have 200 reviews and only have time for 100 of them. In that case it’s in your best interest to prioritize accordingly.

All this being said, I use (and LOVE) WaniKani because it offers a structured way to learn kanji and vocab, and provides built in reviews in the form of spaced repetition, which is one of the most effective ways to commit something to memory. In other words, it’s an amazing, incredible tool in my language learning repertoire. To my original point, just because I might think forcing yourself to agonize over perfecting learning specific words is a waste of time doesn’t mean I think WaniKani itself is a waste of time. Leeches are a common concept in SRS. Many other SRS systems will just bury a leech item for this exact reason, because it’s not a good use of your time to force yourself to memorize something using flashcards if you’re spending too much time on it. More likely than not, if you eventually need to learn a word, you will do so in another context. This is not an argument against WaniKani by any means, and offering critique of it doesn’t imply it’s not a good resource.

In the grand scheme of things, if your goal is to learn a language, and because of the design of a particular system, that person is discouraged and eventually drops off learning, then this is all for nothing. That’s what I was trying address in my reply to the OP. Literally none of this matters if they don’t continue their learning journey. And if modifying WaniKani so that you choose to do your meaning and reading reviews back to back enables you to learn more and experience more of WaniKani, and in turn learn more Japanese, then that’s a no brainer to me. People get hung up on perfection and optimization. None of that matters if you give up in 3 months.

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The main advantage I’d expect is just the chance to correct a reading or meaning mistake in the same session by attempting to recall the correct version when seeing the same item the second time, albeit for a different purpose (e.g. to enter the meaning first in the review dialogue, then to enter the reading). However, for all the random order advocates here… you do realise that it’s a known fact that associative memory is a very powerful tool, right? Associating something new with something you already know is a very helpful way to remember it, and I think that structuring knowledge and linking pieces of knowledge is similarly helpful. Now, perhaps none of this matters if you have no intention to link the meaning to the reading, or to link the mnemonics for the two, and that’s certainly quite possible, but if you are trying to do so, then I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to group reading and meaning reviews for a given kanji or vocabulary item. If nothing else, at the very least, reviewing the two together should help you create links purely due to repeated appearances in the same context.

Case in point: today, I decided to start learning the lyrics for 残酷な天使のテーゼ (The Cruel Angel’s Thesis, the OP for Evangelion), and one thing I did was to sing it while watching a karaoke video. Just because of the sheer number of times I repeated the video, I now remember that there was a segment where the background video looked like it had been filmed from a bicycle or moving vehicle just around the point where「あなただけが夢の使者に呼ばれる朝がくる」is sung, so now everything I sing the song (at least until the lyrics themselves are perfectly memorised), that video will be triggered in my mind and help me to remember the words, or at least give me a context from which to recall what I need to sing. (That’s also helpful because, as is the case with many songs, The Cruel Angel’s Thesis contains many repetitions of similar melodic elements, which could lead me to confuse parts of the song if I don’t have other markers.) I don’t see how doing something similar in the context of an SRS would be disadvantageous, especially because one’s ultimate goal is to be able to look at a kanji, pronounce it and remember what it means immediately. That’s all the more reason to associate these three elements as closely as possible, in my opinion.

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