That is what was pointed out to me in this thread, and which I didn’t consider in my first reply. Which led me to the half/half position you’re replying to. But I have a hard time understanding why it’s so controversial to say that trying to recall something twice, no matter whether you are linking reading/meaning or not, will somehow have a beneficial effect. And this can be true without diminishing what you’re saying about associative memory. It seems to me there are possible benefits to both approaches.
Just by observing my own mind while I’m doing reviews this seems pretty evident - having to dig up the reading/meaning pair for a given kanji twice is more hard work than doing it once per review session. That hard work, I imagine, must have some effect on the neural pathways - again, exactly how big that effect is is total speculation. But that it is >0 seems pretty clear to me, and I wonder why so many are reacting to that statement, because we’ve already seen that there are definite benefits to the back-to-back process as well
Edit: And in the end, neither of these distinctions matters more than learning in a way that keeps you learning, as also many people have mentioned here.
Well, I can’t speak for everyone else, but in my case, it’s the idea that random order is necessarily better/more effective that bugs me. I know that’s not necessarily your position, and you’ve certainly qualified your stance to allow for the possibility that each approach has its benefits, but you’re also not the only person who responded to this question, so my comment wasn’t only directed at you, and I’m sorry if it seemed that way.
That aside, I guess some people feel that it only makes sense to choose the more efficient method. Now, I’m not sure myself that random order is necessarily less efficient, but intuitively, putting readings and meanings together seems more structured, and therefore perhaps more efficient, which might lead some of us to ask, ‘Does it make sense to keep the other order just because streamlining things makes them “too easy”?’ I mean, I know this isn’t your intention, but that does smack a little of how some teachers teach horribly/make their lessons really hard to follow, only to tell students that they’ll learn better because they get to experience the ‘real difficulty level’ of the material. Maybe that’s what’s fuelling these reactions.
Finally, just on a personal level (and this is entirely me and my personal preferences), I’m a little irked by the idea of treating readings and meanings as separate things. (To be clear, I don’t use the WK SRS at all, so if anyone’s tempted to tell me to ‘stop using a system [I] don’t like then!’, there’s no need to do so.) I understand that many of the meaning and reading mnemonics are connected somehow, so it wouldn’t be fair for me to say that WK encourages users to separate them entirely, but my personal belief is that it’s better to remember meanings via readings where possible, possibly by using a mnemonic to force the reading to fit the meaning, especially since at some point, one would like to be able to hear the reading and automatically remember the meaning. If using linking the meaning directly to the reading isn’t possible, then remembering via the kanji itself will probably be necessary.
True enough, and I think studies have shown that more or less any sort of effort required for recall strengthens future memory, and that’s why testing oneself is one of the most effective ways of improving one’s learning outcomes.
Well, yes, and so it’s ultimately up to people’s personal preferences beyond a certain point, but I just felt the need to defend the idea that taking readings and meanings together is not necessarily harmful/less effective. (Your original post – not the one after you adjusted your original position – is not the only reason for this; another post included a study about mixed practice for maths problems, and while I’ve read a possible explanation of the effectiveness of such methods, I’m not sure if the situation with kanji meanings and readings is necessarily analogous. My post was meant as a response to the idea of dismissing structured reviews as necessarily less effective.) Everyone is of course free to choose and is probably best served by picking the method that they most enjoy, but I felt I should raise the importance of associative memory.
After some reflection, this is what I think: I’d like to advocate learning meanings and readings together for both the initial acquisition phase and any correction steps (i.e. when someone makes a mistake, both the reading and the meaning should be reviewed, though perhaps only at the end of a testing session in order to avoid giving away the answer for the other element). However, I suppose that it might not be bad to review everything in a random order, and perhaps the resultant increased difficulty will strengthen memory further, so using random order for reviews themselves might not be bad. Perhaps combining things this way will allow people to reap both the benefits of associative memory and those of making additional mental effort.
You’ve gotten some good responses so far. Personally, I tried it that way for a few levels and found that my recall after Guru went way down so I switched it back to random order.
You may have to just try it and see how it works for you in the long term.
Anecdotally, this is what I’ve found to be true. Mentally saying both meaning and reading during a review regardless of which one was asked, and having to do that twice with some time separation in between, greatly improved my recall once the SRS intervals got to a week or more.
One caveat is that I show the full answer after a review, so if I missed either but typed in the correct answer for that specific review, I would intentionally mark the same item wrong later on to preserve the integrity of the system.
I’ve been doing this for the past 4ish levels, and I’ve seen a big boost in actually connecting the reading of a word to the meaning. I don’t know if this is just me, but I tended to look at onyomi compounds more as two kanji connected rather than one whole word if that makes sense. Every time I would see certain words I would individually remember the readings for the kanji instead of actually learning the reading for the word. Because of that I had a lot of words where I couldn’t connect the reading to a meaning and vice versa. I would often find words in the wild that sounded vaguely familiar, and when I searched the meaning I had already seen them in WaniKani.
Judging by the other replies on this post, this seems to be a pretty divisive topic. For me personally back to back has been very beneficial. I’m seeing increased review accuracy, and outside of WaniKani I can recognize the words I’m learning.
That is fair, and I think that is partially what’s going on as well. I certainly know that I tend in this direction myself, i.e. believing that being exposed to difficulty will make you somehow more robust in mysterious ways. I am trying to separate this pull (fetish?) in myself from the subject at hand in this case, but of course it’s hard to completely account for all the subconscious things one might believe.
As for meanings/readings being connected I am actually a bit curious what you mean. I can certainly see that it’s very beneficial to do this with words, compound kanji, since they actually make up a quite unique reading. But when you have about a hundred kanji (lol) that reads ‘kou’, is this still something that is possible? In the case of kanji, to me it makes more sense to connect the reading/meaning/actual shape together in a sort of trinity - the reading without the actual shape of the kanji seems not so useful to me.
For example what @weirdconnie is talking about here - is that kanji and vocabulary, or vocabulary only?
There’s plenty of research about where having shorter SRS intervals doesn’t prevent leeches or lead to better recognition in the end. I think it’s pretty comparable to this comparison. So you are more or less just wasting your time drilling that same item twice while it’s still in your short term memory. It doesn’t lead to better long term retention. I did WK normally, though.
Anki tests both together, as well. In the end SRS only gets you maybe half-way to ‘knowing’ the word, so doing it back-to-back doesn’t really have a significant effect, IMO.
Yeah, I agree with the idea of a ‘trinity’ approach, actually, but what I meant is that there ought to be a way to connect the reading fairly directly to the meaning or the kanji, or both at the same time, if possible. Since you raised the example of ‘kou’, here’s how I do it with 口, whose on’yomi is こう (and is pronounced kǒu in Mandarin):
As a result, I remember that it means ‘mouth’, and the reading, meaning and kanji are all connected.
Of course, this is easier to do with simpler kanji that literally represent what they mean, but you can seek out a unique way to associate each reading with the kanji and meaning at once.
Here’s another pair of examples to demonstrate how you can do it even when two characters share the same reading:
I don’t know exactly where all these ideas come from. A lot of it is etymology-based, or at least runs on pop etymology (i.e. stuff that seems to make sense that I make up myself even though I know it’s probably historically false), and much of the time, it’s something my brain comes up with spontaneously. Also, in some (perhaps most?) other cases, I don’t use mnemonics at all and just focus on learning how to write each kanji, but that might just be because I’m a Chinese speaker and I’ve been writing these for years. Nonetheless, I do tend to find that my brain automatically ‘assigns’ the sounds I need to pronounce to parts of kanji when I learn them, so I’m just expressing roughly what goes through my head in the mnemonics above. Either way though, I’m just saying that there is a way to do this for almost everything, even for something as common as 今日（きょう）, which I think of as being linked to ‘today’ via the O that each word has: ‘kyOu’ and ‘tOday’. I see a curved tunnel running between them, and I visualise the kanji as I pronounce the sound きょう. Very little of what I do relies entirely on logic, however: my aim is to make all this vivid, emotional and visceral. I prefer to feel kanji and sounds as opposed to thinking about them, because emotions are more memorable than chains of words or sentences.
Wow, that makes sense. Wish I had come across this a bit earlier than level 59 I like that approach, seems to tie things together in a more tight-knit way.
Read the design study; I am saying reviewing twice has benefits as it has been done in a study. You claimed that it does not lead to better long-term retention. Anecdotal, or is there any study based on your claim?
That study doesn’t measure the effect of reviewing twice vs. once in a session. All the groups had the same study sessions with different gaps, so it doesn’t really say anything about reviewing the item twice in the same session.
I definitely agree with @morteASD , I don’t think we’ve seen any relevant studies to this questions posed in this topic. The whitepaper’s conclusion is simply that longer study intervals are better for long term retention, which is basically the concept behind SRS, nothing new here.
In the first study, for the first review sessions, they did require 2 correct answers for each item as part of the successive testing review cycle before it was removed from the list, but when they got to the 10 day interval, they stopped doing that. The paper doesn’t quite explain the intent, but i assume based on the short interval it had some rational to initially learn the material.
The overall takeaway from the paper is that re-reviewing something on intervals in the order of seconds and minutes is not helpful, so you could argue that it agrees with the 1x1 method except for the fact that none of the tests in the paper separated out related information as part of the testing process in any method (e.g., meaning and reading) so i don’t understand how its relevant at all.
I personally switching to 1x1 because like others have indicated, i feel like seperated out the reviews actually prevents the correct connections from being formed as its follows the meaning of one work with the reading of another instead of reviewing in pairs. I think this causes alot of problems for me. I don’t believe its equivalent to reviewing twice unless you’re doing it wrong, since you are only tested on half at once. Another problem is that we are tested on multiple related things, so sometimes i get one side of a card right (maybe meaning) but i forget the reading, and it isnt until i do another related card that i remember the reading of the first card. This means i’m getting some cards correct that i would have failed if they were back to back.
At the end, I’m not going to pretend to know what’s right, but given an equal amount of time. I’ve started going 1x1 for faster reviews, and then rereviewing failed cards from the last 24 hours using the self study scripts. This seems to use time best to rereview the items that haven’t been retained.
I like that approach, seems to tie things together in a more tight-knit way.