Sometimes during reviews, you come across a kanji that you KNOW you recognise, and you have the reading/definition on the tip of your tongue. You don’t want to guess and risk an incorrect answer, but you also don’t want to sit there and stare at the same kanji up until WK times out and you need to refresh. And sometimes you feel that coming back in a few minutes to look at it again with fresh eyes will flip that switch in your mind you needed to remember.
What if there was a button to “Hold” a kanji for later on, so you can mull it over and come back to it a bit when you’re ready. Or even just to reshuffle it into later in the review. I feel like this would be a good function for when you want to say “I KNOW I can get this, but in the meantime I want to continue with the review”
I do this on Tsurukame by inputting a wrong answer deliberately and clicking “Ask me again later”. People can yell at me about how it’s not how they study and it’s therefore wrong, but I find it helpful to just save it for later, especially for words that make no sense. (I’d like to have a… civil discussion with whoever decided that “energy part” means “mood”, for example.)
If you refresh the review page, your remaining reviews (including the one displayed) are reshuffled. I refresh sometimes when I hit the hour and I want to have the next stack of reviews shuffled in, but it works for this, too.
If it takes you so long to remember a kanji, that the page times out, I would say you don’t know it. Take the hit. Reviewing it more, and sooner, will be beneficial in the end.
Well I disagree. I sometimes spend a lot of time trying to remember or construct a way to get my brain to remember a kanji and that effort invested helps me indeed remember the kanji better (and faster) next time. I also have suffered from time to time that “well I guess I’m gonna have to be here a while because I definitely know I know”
I can recognize what he is talking about because it’s similar to the typical test strategy of “if you don’t know the answer right away but you know you can get to it, skip it and keep doing the test and circle back to it later”
He was giving out a suggestion (which I particularly found useful) and I’m guessing such a script probably exists already or is able to do what he says but can also be abused… I honestly don’t know.
Sorry if this comes off as a little hostile but I think everyone has different ways of approaching things and I get ticked off when someone posts something like “what’s the best way to carry 20 apples in a bag pack?” and people reply like “oranges are better” or “don’t take so many”.
I would love a break function in general to prevent a timeout. I do it at work and if a customer interrups me it always times out. With that button I could freeze my review and continue it later, that would be lovely
As @Marrex said, I find that (in the apprentice/guru stages), the harder you work to recall the answer, the stronger that connection will become in your mind. I remember reading that it’s not good practice to give up on a review if you don’t get it straight away, because the process of trying to recall it will strengthen the link between neurons, and make it quicker to recall next time.
On top of that, I sometimes find that I see something and start with it on the tip of my tongue, but the longer I look at it, the more abstract and obscure it becomes. Like it starts off being almost formed in my mind, and then turns into a bunch of lines and squiggles that make no sense. I need to look away, focus on some new kanji, and come back to that one to go “Oh, yeah, duh, it’s…”
Everyone’s different, but I think this would be a function useful to many. Maybe exploitable, but I can’t really see how. It’s not giving you a free skip, it’s saying “Ask me again later”
It could potentially be abused if you don’t promise yourself to get it right or wrong on that same batch. You do need to take the hit if your destiny is to take the hit
If you push it to the end and it’s the last item and you are still there like… I’ll get it… 5 more min… to the point where more reviews come then I think at that point you might be messing with the beauty of SRS itself.
PS: This is me in my unending pursuit of fairness contradicting myself in the same thread lmao.
Very true. Perhaps it’s just limited to one “hold” per kanji per review session. So once you’ve held it the first time it gets “marked” as held. Next time it comes up the “hold” button would be greyed out meaning you HAVE to give an answer
I agree and subscribe to this, tip of tongue doesn’t count for me. I don’t use a timer script but if I take too long, I’m marking it wrong. Unless it’s personal reading material of self study, the buffering time for real time world application is usually blitz chess speed. Nothing wrong with marking it wrong either IMO, I figure that is what the SRS is for.
Not saying “if you can’t remember within 5 seconds, you fail”. Not sure what WK’s timeout is, but its multiple minutes. There should be an upper limit to recall time. If it takes you 5+ minutes of thinking, wouldn’t further reviews be good, especially at higher levels? Takes you 5 minutes to remember, then you’re not going to see it again for months, is that couple minutes you spend thinking about it really going to burn it into your memory that well? I feel like if a kanji recall is that hard, you’d need some more practice with it. It rather see if a couple more times, and get that practice, than to get a burn faster.
Also a fair point. I do agree that it’s counter-intuitive to have a LONGER break after a kanji you’re having consistent problems with, but there are some times where you just have a momentary brain fart and your mind seems to block that connection temporarily.
Like I said, it’s all about different learning styles. If this function were implemented, it wouldn’t necessarily have to be mandatory. It could be a function that you can turn on or off if you feel it helps. Part of the whole process is recognizing your style of learning, what works best for you, and tailoring your experience to suit that.
If you do add-ons, there is a delay one available where you can skip it and it’ll come back once in awhile. It adds a skip and delay button to the bottom of the review page. I find it really helpful if I have to think about something for awhile. If you have to, just keep hitting skip.
When learning kanji specifically, I try to recall the entire mnemonic with all the radicals in the kanji and for the reading, even if I already know what the kanji means. Then later on, if I come across a kanji I’m taking more time than usual on in reviews I’m still able to piece together what it means thanks to the mnemonic.
Spending the extra time to recall it instead of getting it wrong strengthens it in my mind, I find.
Honestly, this would be a good feature… well, If I’m understanding the “hold” in your Title. If you mean, “Push it to the back of the current queue”, then yes. I’m also not into this, “If you don’t get it in X time unit, mark it wrong. The SRS will sort it out eventually.”
If the answer is on the tip of your tongue, and you try to force it, sometimes it just moves further away. The best thing would be to move on, and hopefully, by the time you get to it again, things will be better. Just like someone here said, it’s like when in an exam and you can’t get the answer to a question immediately. You move on and go back to it later. Something along the way may jog your memory.
