Spaced repetition is all about optimizing your time invested in learning. Spend more time on items that give you trouble and less time on the simpler ones.
This process usually works well but if you’re like me you might have noticed that some items you get consistently wrong. A specific kanji or vocab that you have a especially hard time remembering and that is always like a thorn on your side.
Anki define these elements as “leeches” and I think the metaphor is quite apt, they’re the items that consume most of your learning time.
It would be nice to have a way of spending more time on these “leech” items.
The feature could look like this:
The user has the option to create a custom review queue (like the custom decks in anki)
It would show you all the cards that you got wrong more than n times.
You would need to answer the cards correctly more than once to be able to move on ( the exact threshold could be user defined)
These reviews would not affect your main reviews and would only serve as a way to memorize the nastier elements of your collection
I do support this idea but I’m not optimistic about it appearing soon. There are a couple features in place already that help a bit with what you’re describing. First, you can study problem items from your critical condition list on the dashboard page. Also, when you miss items, they don’t just hover at their current level but actually drop a level, so in theory a problem item will decrease in level until it’s getting reviewed multiple times per day.
What I do personally is spend a decent chunk of time reviewing all missed items from the page WK displays immediately after a review session, since it’s very convenient to self-test whether you remember them there with a quick mouse-over.
The link to instructions is easily missed out, but by pressing “Docs” at the top you’ll have full information on how to make use of the exported text files.
There are also two userscripts that might be of interest to you… One has something like “mark” or “marking” in the title, and you can flag during your reviews those pesky items you keep getting wrong. The other is something by rfindley, and I think it’s called “self study” or “burn manager”… Something like that. Check those out! : D
Yep! Those are the ones in was thinking of! Haven’t used either myself yet but I am seriously considering Self Study since a full reset wipes all your synonyms and notes.
Burn Manager I thought had some quiz feature too, but I must’ve mixed it with this in my mind. (The other one I will need to use in the future instead of a level reset.)
Too bad the exporter doesn’t allow exporting based on number of iterations a particular item has gone through… I think that is a better indicator of a leech than percentage. I’ve got items that I’m scared/embarrassed to look at how many times I’ve seen the card pop up. I know I’ve got a few pesky cards from sub level 10 that seem un-burnable for whatever reason.
OTOH, I’m unlikely to use this script anyway… I’ve expressed my opinions of Anki here plenty of times before, but this short video should summarize how I feel about it: