Difficulty Hell in Anki
This was discovered by paragon_dissonance in The Moe Way Discord Server.
For some people using Anki with FSRS you will have a very high Anki median difficulty:
Something like 95% (before mine was 98%).
This means cards mature super, super slowly. I was doing 30 new cards / day, and maturing 28 on average a week.
Anki would pile them all up into my young cards, and they would hardly ever mature.
This is caused by optimising your FSRS settings:
For some reason, for a very small portion of users optimising your FSRS settings made the parameters operate in such a way that you enter difficulty hell. Your average difficulty is very very high and your cards never mature.
This is because your brain doesn't retain information very well, so Anki tries to fix it by spamming you with very high difficulty meaning the cards never mature.
This mean I was doing around 2 hours of Anki a day, only to mature maybe 5 cards a day despite doing 30 new a day!
This caused me to spend significantly less time on immersion, as I was both incredibly tired after Anki for 2 hours and never maturing cards.
Para suggested resetting them back to the default. You click this reset button to do that:
I clicked that and then using FSRS helper rescheduled all my cards. Then after a while:
Suddenly my difficulty went down.
I matured a lot of cards.
I'm now maturing cards at a normal pace, and I am doing slightly less reviews than before.
Instead of spending 2 hours doing Anki, I now do Anki in 30 minutes!
HOWEVER the downside is much low retention in Anki.
This is my retention (read it and weep for me):
I'm not seeing many mature cards, because Anki previously did not mature my cards at a normal rate.
My retention is much lower, however this isn't a bad thing.
Instead of being exhausted by Anki, I can now spend HOURS reading visual novels!
- I can read much much more now due to less Anki
- I increase the amount of words I come across and read
- This increases my retention on those words naturally
- Overtime Anki retention will become okay again
Spaced repetition systems are not where you learn words, they are there to prime your brain to recognise them in immersion.
You only learn words by immersion.
I highly suggest reading this post on SRS-less learning:
khatzumoto