[ApolloFortyNine]

Well yea, no program, no method of learning, will make it impossible to forget something. You should have >90% retention on mature cards however (it's what the default settings are configured for). There's plenty of charts that show the diminishing returns of aiming for higher retentions, and surprisingly aiming for 75% retention is actually much more efficient, however your sanity would likely take a hit from missing so many cards.

>Even people who stick with it 7 days a week for 50 weeks could use a 2 week vacation.

Then you'll need the discipline to do ~10x your normal daily volume when you get back (not doing new cards ever day makes it not a clean 14x).

>That is not a given. Just several days ago I lapsed on a 4.5 year card. The interval went down to 2.2 years or so; hopefully I will get it that time around.

The default settings set it to 10% of the interval after an again, so you must have messed with that. You can also configure that to be 0% if it bothers you.

[kazinator]

> Then you'll need the discipline to do ~10x your normal daily volume when you get back

I've seen curious comments like this in various past forum discussions on the topic of Anki vacation ideas.

A vacation is not a period of rest followed by double the amount of work to catch up.

A vacation is a pause in work, which delays all subsequent work by that much time.

> not doing new cards ever day makes it not a clean 14x

You can't do new cards everyday; eventually you will have seen all new cards of a deck. I'm still working decks whose new cards ran out years ago. The presence and scheduling of new cards is a temporary condition with little long-term significance.

[ApolloFortyNine]

>You can't do new cards everyday; eventually you will have seen all new cards of a deck. I'm still working decks whose new cards ran out years ago. The presence and scheduling of new cards is a temporary condition with little long-term significance.

My new cards comment was to explain why it's not 14x when you go on vacation.

>I've seen curious comments like this in various past forum discussions on the topic of Anki vacation ideas.

>A vacation is not a period of rest followed by double the amount of work to catch up.

>A vacation is a pause in work, which delays all subsequent work by that much time.

This is simply cheating the SRS. Some SRS programs do allow you to do this, wanikani does it for instance, but it is quite literally cheating. Instead of seeing it after 30 days, you see it after 44, but the program pretends it's only been 30. It's not a good feature, besides to make people feel better about themselves.

>I've seen curious comments like this in various past forum discussions on the topic of Anki vacation ideas.

It's cheating. And in this case, the only person you are cheating, is yourself.

[kazinator]

Yes, this is the "Anki lunatic" attitude I have seen in Japanese learning forums when Anki discussions come up.

One particular comment I remember was about the Anki feature of reviewing ahead. The poster said that you shouldn't do it because it will "mess up your stats". But, think about how idiotic that is. According to that reasoning, you should not read any native language material. Because if you read, you will encounter some of the words which are scheduled in your Anki, and recall them prematurely. And that will cause your Anki progress to deviate from what the SRS algorithm predicts, making it seem like you're doing better. Hence, reading native material is cheating: sticking to the algorithm is the goal, not learning the language!

SRS is just a tool; it's not a master to be served, but the servant. It's based on soft science, and is self-correcting. Any user behavior which leads to increased forgetting will result in more lapses, and an increased workload to make up for it.

Mature grown-ups with busy lives adopt the tool to best suit them, rather than to adopt themselves to serve the tool.

If the only way you can use the tool is less optimal, so that learning takes longer, well maybe that's the best it can be, in relation to everything else you have going on in your life!

The SRS implementation in Anki has a large number of parameters. The defaults are poor and don't work well for people. Good parameters are a matter of opinion. Someone taking a vacation according to a regular pattern, like one week every four months, is effectively just tuning another parameter.

You're making a mistake of inference. Someone getting a card right after 44 days, but getting only 30 days of "credit" for it in he program does not have a reason to feel good, other than to feel good about remembering the card after 44 days. You raise a good point there though. In fact, a correct implementation of vacation mode should not literally just make time stop; it should somehow give the user credit for recalling cards beyond their scheduled interval. The recalled cards should perhaps get a bit of a boost in their next interval.

The point of a vacation feature is simply to feel rested, not to feel gleeful about somehow "cheating". If someone misuses the feature to take a one week vacation after every week of studying, that's their problem, and not a reason why a reasonable user shouldn't be able to take a break.

[allenu]

Thanks for posting this. You hit the nail on the head. I've seen this dogmatic attitude as well, as if following how Anki does it is the One True Way and if you stray from it, you may as well quit.

It's just a tool, and if you miss some lessons, it's not like those cards immediately vanish from your head. If you fall behind because you weren't disciplined, no big deal, just pick it up again and carry on. Learning is a marathon, not a sprint.

For me, SRS algorithms try to model how memory works, it's not an exact match to it, so even missing a card deadline by a day or two or even a week isn't the end of the world.

[kazinator]

> I've seen this dogmatic attitude as well, as if following how Anki does it is the One True Way and if you stray from it, you may as well quit.

I suspect that the reason is that language-learning forums are full of children.

[ApolloFortyNine]

Hey why do you have to be a dick to try to get your point across?

Jesus christ, calling someone a child because they disagree about adding a cheat vacation mode to an SRS program? You gotta take a step back and look at your life.