As I understand it right now, when you get an answer wrong, instead of rising an SRS level if you’d gotten it right, you’re dropped an SRS level. Is there a possibility that if you do get an answer wrong, that a check can be made as to whether or not you’ve looked at the Item Info? And if you haven’t and you get the item correct the second time, instead of dropping an SRS level, you still get the item wrong, but you remain at the current level?
4 Likes
That isn’t a bad idea in principle. Nevertheless, I believe it would be needlessly difficult to add. I say “needlessly” because one SRS level doesn’t really make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things.
It would also add an extra layer of complexity to the algorithm, potentially making it slower, adding bugs, etc. All the usual teething issues you get with new features.
2 Likes
You can kind of already achieve this by just leaving an item alone after you get it wrong. After 2 hours without being completed, an item resets its status. It’s as if you never even started the review at its current SRS level. This isn’t really the intended purpose of the resetting, I don’t think, but it’s the effective result.
4 Likes
This would fly in the face of scripts that automatically show the correct answer after you get an item wrong. And example of such a script is this one.
2 Likes
This approach resets the entire review session. OP wants just the item being left alone and continue with the other items in the session.
I think they have changed this timer. Recently I got sessions being timed out much more rapidly. I didn’t meter but it was in the order of 10 to 15 minutes.
1 Like
There’s no reason you can’t just continue with other reviews…?
I’m not sure if a session time out is the same thing.
There is. If you don’t answer an item Wanikani doesn’t proceed to the next review until you answer. There is no way to pause an item and proceed to the next one.
It is. An item doesn’t time ont unless the whole session does.
You can just refresh the page if you don’t want to use the reorder script. I mean, I guess you mean that you would lose the stats for that session? Guess it was never very important to me.
1 Like
I had never tried a refresh. I just tried it and it seems to do what you want to do.
The last time I had a session timeout the items that completed for meanings and readings were registered. It was the items that had only one of the questions done that were lost.
I don’t use these.
1 Like
You don’t but others do. If you want Tofugu to use you suggestion in Wanikani they need to take that into account.
2 Likes
Doesn’t this have the problem of letting you pass reviews where the reading is going to be one of two alternatives? Take something like the reading for 人 in compounds. It’s nearly always going to be either じん or にん, so if you fail by entering one you could just enter the other and pass, which is why I think it might be a bad idea to do it automatically. Other examples could be cases like rendaku’d characters or onyomi/kunyomi confusion, you’d easily be able to guess the right answer after getting it wrong once.
If you’re looking for something that can let you pass on things like typos or small mistakes because you weren’t paying attention, I’d recommend using one of the double check scripts instead and marking your answer right if it’s the one you intended, but having it as an automatic feature seems like a bad idea to me.
3 Likes
I’m not talking about passing reviews, I’m talking about failing them. I mean for the item to still be counted as wrong, just not drop an entire SRS level if you don’t need to take a look at the info. It’s a way to still be punished for wrong answers, just not as severely.
It’d still lead to to the same problem though. While this might work for stages like apprentice where the intervals are short. If you do this for an enlightened or burn review you won’t see the item for another month or 4, giving you a 50/50 chance to pass the item each time you do encounter it. I think giving you a penalty for getting the wrong answer here is pretty useful, especially since a lot of common errors fall into this category.
2 Likes
But on the current system, if you get an answer wrong, you get bumped to the previous level. So in order to get to the level if you’d gotten it right, you need to go through two SRS levels on the current system instead of just one which is what I suggest.
I’m thinking of cases like this where this might lead to a problem.
Say you come across the word 人口 as a review. Let’s say you don’t know whether the 人 here is にん or じん, which is a very common mistake. In the current system, if you type にんこう it gets knocked back, meaning you’ll have to be able to answer it right multiple times in a row again to actually burn the item.
However in your proposed system, the item would remain at the same level. If you still don’t know the answer by the next review, you essentially still have a 50/50 chance of getting it right without really knowing it every time, if you guess it right you pass, if you don’t you don’t lose anything. There’s no real motive to actually learn the word, you can essentially just keep rolling the dice again until you burn the item. It’s just a 50/50 chance all the time.
Knocking it back a few stages ensures that you really have to know the item if you want to get it out of the system, otherwise you could leave any word where you’re confused between two readings up to chance, and you’d have a decent chance of burning the item without ever having to resolve the confusion. That’s why I think this is a bad idea to implement as a default, it doesn’t force you to actually learn the vocabulary readings, you’d only have to limit it to one of two options, which for kanji readings is often what it comes down to anyways.
I’m not talking about keeping it at the same level regardless, I suggest that if you need to look at the item to know the correct answer, then you get bumped a level back. But if you know where you went wrong without having to look at the correct answer, then you get a less of a punishment while still getting the answer wrong. I know there are scripts that allow you to undo answers, but for people who feel like those are cheating, like myself, this is an alternative.
Yes, but this is a problem for certain items. If you type にんこう for 人口 and get it wrong, you don’t have to look at the reading to know it’s じんこう, there are really only two options. There are a lot of mistakes beside simply not knowing the entire reading at all, most of the time you can narrow it down to one of two options, and if it’s not one you can just fill in the other without looking.
3 Likes
I like the idea, but I think the effect is mostly psychological.
The drop in SRS level after an error is to make sure the item comes back more frequently to help cement it. You’re referring to a situation where you wouldn’t need the extra reinforcement because you already knew what it was.
The largest time save you could get from this would be for a burn review that now upon error comes back thrice in 5.5 months, and with this change would come back only once after 4 months. For lower stages the difference is substantially smaller. So the practical effect would be minimal (imho).
3 Likes
Actually, if an item is Guru or above, you get dropped 2 stages.
3 Likes