Hi, I joined up a long time ago, but have only recently rolled-up my sleeves and started to use this site (which has come a long way, congrats).
I guess I’m confused by how reviews work. I signed up because I wanted a wanikani-style system that would allow me to manage my own word list (so I could enter words from my current textbook as I go along).
To keep things organized, I make a deck for each chapter of my book, but I don’t want to have to check in each day and pick a deck–I want the experience to be unified, such that there’s just one master review queue. New decks and words I add just get added to the feed invisibly, and I don’t have to pick a deck to study, it’s all just automated.
Is this possible, or did I have the wrong idea about how all this would work?
If you want one deck, then I suggest putting them all in the same deck and having a chapter tag as you enter (to distinguish or keep them organized). Assuming you are adding successively, the tag will automate from your last entry so you don’t have to enter every time. Though you have separate decks now, you can move them all to a single deck (see below). I’m not 100% if it hold your SRS progress if deck jumping, I never did while actively on a deck. But you may want to test it out first on a single card, note the SRS level before a mass move. And you may want to tag all your cards before your move so it’s already organized for the cards you have created already.
There are also other utilities you can do once you have your deck unified such as chronological or random order or even push certain cards to the front for lesson order. I would assume chronological if following a text book, that is in deck settings.
But I still feel like there’s a piece missing, here. I don’t think that it should be necessary to maintain one giant deck; this idea seems to undermine the crucial concept of using decks to categorize words. We might collect decks from multiple textbooks, or trade separate chapters from the community, and so on. Once you’ve got a collection of these word lists going, your options seem to be:
keep them separate. This makes organization easy, but it seems to mess with the careful pacing of SRS, as you now have multiple SRS schedules operating concurrently, which would disrupt the pacing of the algorithm. It also falls to me to remember to visit each deck. Again, compare with wanikani–it’s a unified experience. I don’t have to pick a deck, or fiddle with the SRS settings, etc.
Combine them all into a single deck. This seems to be the closest to the wanikani experience, but it doesn’t play nice with the idea of organizing words into contextual decks. I see that there is a new “Duplicate to deck” tool in the deck menu, and that’s what I’ll probably have to go with, but there’s still a problem, there–this creates a COPY of each card, such that any edits or fixes made to the original card don’t reflect in the copy.
Maybe I’m still missing some key concept here, but as a fresh outsider it seems to me that there’s a key piece of functionality missing. I would think that a “Link to Deck” option (alongside “Move to Deck” and “Duplicate to Deck”) could be one way of going about it. Even better would be to have some kind of built-in master review queue that sort of automatically has knowledge of all the decks and can merge them together into one unified review queue.
In the meantime, I’ll forge ahead with the new duplicate feature and see how I do. Thanks much.
I’m not following exactly what you are looking for or want to do, can you give an example? What is a contextual deck? And I’m not following the duplicate deck idea either because it doesn’t economical for the extra organizing.
WaniKani doesn’t really allow anyone to manage anything, the pace and content are gated and it’s a curated course that feeds the content a very specific order without any thought whatsoever (just like a single deck would do if you curate it as such with the intended order or you can make the order you want). The 10k probably does this best out of everything since it was built in the beginning with this in mind with content rich cards while still allowing a user to customize.
There are two thoughts on this: either a giant deck like the 10k where you have all focus or lots of separate decks when one can manage the content with alot more degrees of freedom in term of review schedule. I’m in the later group, because I like the freedom to focus on different areas of focus and managing each deck is pretty easy and if I get burnt/bored, I have new content to work on. I don’t see SRS religiously though as far as pacing, either I know the content or not at a given time and I don’t mess with the default settings. When I’m doing alot of content, it’s all a wash in the end and the system does exactly what it was built for in terms of long term memory building. I did the WK thing, I felt landlocked for 2 years where a missed day or two punished a big pile of reviews, I don’t have that with spread out decks.
With various decks, I don’t necessary review all decks daily and it hasn’t been an issue. I’m not necessarily recommending…it’s not for everyone, but it just works for me and I have different levels of difficult between all my content that keeps me engage rather than just grinding words (reviewing frequent content, advanced content, grammar, sentence reading, kanji writing, conversation based content, etc.)…this would be mess to organize just to have a ‘single experience’ that I wouldn’t have to think about…which would take alot more thinking and time than I would want to just a single deck with organize varied content.
BTW, not discouraging what you are looking to do…the system is designed with flexibility in mind so hope you find what you are looking for.
I want to maintain multiple decks (from a variety of sources, ie. custom, from community, etc), but only have one review queue that draws words from a pool made up of all my decks. That’s as simply as I can put it.
SRS is designed to carefully align with the brain’s capacity to efficiently memorize words. There is a practical upper limit to the rate at which you can learn words with this system and expect it to stick. That’s the whole point of SRS, it’s throttled to an ideal pace, and you’re not supposed to exceed it, because there are diminishing returns on extra study. So, if I set myself up with, say, 20 decks, I can’t simply activate them all, because then I either overload that practical limit, or I have to manually pick and choose which list I will work on each day. Either way, I’m violating the spirit of SRS.
Ok, I didn’t know you wanted to blend community with personal. Again, personal experience, multiple decks are not an issue at all. I’m working at least 6 active right now without issue will several others I completed in a dormant burn phase. I think it would be more way more work to organize a single deck like this than manage multiple decks, which I think most users have more than one deck they use
SRS is more of an axe than a scapel in my experience with ideals being extremely relatively to the type of content and exercise being worked on. It’s not an isolated experiment, I’m constantly reinforcing outside native material…this does not contaminate the SRS process but rather helps my learning (which is my real goal) and it’s an uncontrolled variable to the precision of the SRS concept that eventually muddies…and I don’t even live in Japan, that would be even more extreme. If there are diminishing returns to extra study, I haven’t seen them. Either way, best of luck on your study journey…hope you find something that works for you.
Due to the conflicting deck settings each deck can have, we currently do not support a combined queue for lessons or reviews. I know it would help users who have a lot of decks, so I’m still exploring other options for doing so.
As a kind of workaround, we do show decks with currently available reviews on the home dashboard (where you can view your streak and such). From there it’s one click on the count to start a session. Then after the session is done → go back to the home page → click on the count of the next deck → repeat.
This is perhaps the one big thing that I would like to see Kitsun have - like I could have my main Korean folder and then within I could have my sub folders etc. That way when I review it would review everything from within the main folder and then would practice the appropriate new amount from each sub folder.
I guess for me, the main reason would be as I progress through my respective books - say like a vocab book, korean made easy, ewha, whatever - as I add more, each folder progresses appropriately with me. It would also help target whatever goals I, or anyone really, has set for themselves on a daily basis.
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