Add a pause button

[KanjiGeorji]

Perhaps this undermines the whole point of SRS, but I think it could be really helpful to add a pause button to the SRS system. I don't study at weekends, but find when I come back on Monday I have a huge stack of reviews to get through, sometimes in triple figures. I spend the whole week trying to get this down before it happens again. This is quite demotivating and stops me from adding new cards. (This is my first time using GitHub, I hope this is all appropriate!)

[NumesSanguis]

Not Fabrice, but I have some understanding of SRS. Your guess is right, this would undermine how SRS works. Once you review a new Kanji, you know it at that moment. At some point in the future, you forget the meaning of the Kanji, however. Learning is most effective when you review a Kanji just before you would forget it. SRS tries to predict this moment of "when you would forget" and asks you to review it just before that moment. Every time you review it just before you forget it, the time-span of "before you forget" increases, which is what learning a Kanji is about. As you cannot pause your brain's forgetting of something it has seen, you cannot pause SRS.

One suggestion if you feel there is a huge stack on Monday, try to not review any new Kanji on Friday (and Thursday). Stick with reviewing Kanji you've seen.

From a system's view, the SRS could warn that the load will be too much in the near future, but that depends on individual study habits. It would also be possible to have a checkbox with "Don't review not yet encountered Kanji" or something like that.

[glopesdev]

@NumesSanguis Not sure we understand enough of how the brain works to comment on how two day "pauses" affect learning in the general population, much less to predict accurately when the brain "is about to forget something".

However I am fairly certain that if someone stops entirely because of lack of motivation their learning rate is likely to drop very close to zero.

[NumesSanguis]

@glopesdev Definitely motivation is a very important part. However, personally I don't think a "pause" button is going to help. Viewing new Kanji feels like you're making the most progress, so if you pause and after the weekend there are less cards to review, you think you can add new cards. However, if the old cards come up for review and you answer most of them wrong (you can't pause your brain), that would be even more demotivating to me.

While viewing new Kanji feels like progress, consolidating Kanji you have learned so you remember them years later is also progress. It's just not as apparent at first.

To me the problem here seems that early on too many new Kanji were added per week and too little time into consolidating, so the balance was off. Some "better to stop adding new Kanji for now" warning might have helped? Or only adding new Kanji on Monday (and Tuesday)?

[glopesdev]

@NumesSanguis If you make use of the pause feature as a crutch on a regular basis I would agree with you. However, sometimes you have random life events thrown at you that force you to stop studying for 1 or 2 months let's say, and then you come back to 900 kanji to review. When your work/life balance is such that you only have at best 10 min per day to study it can easily take you a year or more to catch up since SRS can easily throw 10 kanji a day into the pile for you to review, especially when you are advanced.

Once you spend two years of doing this and never make ANY progress despite remembering 99% of the kanji can be frustrating.

I am not arguing against SRS or its efficacy, just that believing that systems come before individuals and that there are one-size-fits-all numbers that somehow work for every single person and that it is the person's fault for not being able to handle them is part of what makes IT systems feel so horrible to individual people.

Small features like this pause button or some kind of rate control can go a long way to making automatic systems more inclusive and accommodating and compensate for their utter inability to understand our life context.

It is also still unclear to me how you would go about showing that adding rate control would destroy the usefulness of Kanji Koohii or somehow make it a worse learning tool.