| 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. |
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.