No reason to round: I’ll just do floating point math since the result is a float.
FWIW, I think you’ll be amazed with the results of more frequent repetition for radicals and kanji in stages 1 & 2. Mnemonics and effort are only half of the equation: sheer repetition is a huge, HUGE part of the process and I feel strongly that waiting 4 to 8 hours (or worse, 24 hours) for more repetitions of newly introduced (or recently returned) items is unnecessary (even counter productive).
In my opinion, you just want to get in as many reviews of new items as you can until they stick (the 4h and 8h intervals are an attempt to enable this, but unless you consistently review multiple times per day this doesn’t work). If, like me, you only do reviews once per day I think it’s mandatory to force yourself to do more reviews of early-stage items.
I highly, HIGHLY recommend trying my normal daily routine for a while:
Every single day I use @rfindley 's Self-study Quiz immediately prior to starting my “real” reviews. Most use this script for leeches, but I use it to go over the radicals and kanji in stages 1 and 2. Focusing on just those items repeatedly before starting my “real” review session provides serious dividends.
Don’t worry, I still miss them surprisingly often during the real review session when they are intermingled with other items, but the extra, focused reviews really help to stick things into my brain. The embarrassment of missing one of the new items when I’d just reviewed them a few minutes prior pretty much guarantees I’ll bear down and really cram it into my memory (creating a new mnemonic or whatever).
I use @prouleau 's awesome Item Inspector to launch the self-study quiz. Here’s how I configure and use it:
- In the settings for the Item Inspector, I created a table named “Current Apprentice 1-2”. I configured that table to filter on just radicals and kanji (ignoring vocabulary).
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After creating and saving that table in the settings for the Item Inspector, I then select the table and click on the “bullseye” icon until I get the tabular view. This view is sticky between sessions, thank heaven. The image below is what is currently displayed on my dashboard.
(I only recently started seeing new items in level 40. That’s as many items as I normally ever see for my “pre-review”. Toward the end of a level, I often have several days in a row with no items whatsoever displayed for my “pre-reviews”.)
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All of the above is one-time setup stuff. Every morning I just scroll down to the Item inspector and glance at those items. I then click the computer-screen icon in the upper right to start the self-study quiz for just those items.
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I then quiz myself on all of these items repeatedly until I can score 100% correct. Only then do I close the self-study quiz and start my review session proper. (Use the pull-downs to study all items from the item inspector, again this is sticky between sessions.)
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I then rapidly try to answer all the items, almost always missing at least a few. Whenever I answer incorrectly, I hit F1 to review the correct answer (one of these days I’ll submit a patch to @rfindly so that I can it “f” instead of “F1” so it uses the same keystroke as normal reviews).
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At the end of the first “pre-review session” I almost invariably have missed at least a few, so I just hit “enter” to repeat a quiz over all the items (not just the ones I missed):
- I usually improve with each iteration:
- Eventually, I get them all right. It rarely takes more than 2-4 iterations to get them all into my head. Once I do, I just hit escape and start my review proper.
Believe me, it’s much harder to write all that than it is to actually configure and do it. It rarely takes me more than 0-3 minutes of pre-review each morning before starting my review proper, but those extra repetitions of early-stage items make the whole process SO MUCH EASIER!
Seriously. Try it. You’ll like it. Don’t be surprised if you see a launcher for the self-study quiz with these settings show up within the Ganbarometer.