Comments on: About cheating, spaced repetition and learning Chinese

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 18:42:45 +0000

In reply to 罗升远. I don't think it counts as cheating if it's part of a strategy. :)

By: 罗升远

罗升远 — Fri, 03 Feb 2017 08:24:58 +0000

I understand this. I just as often downgrade a result as I might upgrade it. Certainly isn’t always easy to decide. I am always a bit worried that I don’t learn well enough with spaced repetition though. I’ll probably I talk about that in a future blog post – after I teach a class about the benefits of it. Still I really feel the one that has been most helpful for me is Skritter. Yet progress always seems to slow to a crawl with any SRS after a while, and perhaps that increases “cheating” as you say. I just like to vary up my learning – bored of one thing, try another approach. Might not be the best, but it keeps up the interest.

Robin

By: Trace your errors to the source > Skritter Blog

Trace your errors to the source > Skritter Blog — Fri, 08 Jul 2016 20:06:04 +0000

[…] before you start writing a character in Skritter, make sure you visualize it first. This avoids unintentional cheating and is a must for serious […]

By: Nihongo Joutatsu

Nihongo Joutatsu — Mon, 24 Nov 2014 11:04:14 +0000

Thank you for the wonderful writing Olle. I indeed also catch myself sometimes in cheating in such a way. This is especially when using Anki.

However in certain situation in Anki, I have the feeling that it is not cheating. You are just trying to take away the flaw in the software.

I want to give a very concrete example. Sometimes you just forget the correct writing of a Chinese character (in my case Japanese, but it’s all the same anyway). When that happens you have the click the “Again” button. If your card is quite new, it does not matter so much, but it is especially painful to click the again button when the “good” button would ask the card three months later. So it means just because you could not remember a small thing, you loose EVERYTHING. Sometimes I feel that it is one of the drawbacks of spaced repetition software. You can loose everything just because of a small error. So in my opinion spaced repetition software should build in options to make cards that you have studied earlier graduate faster.

By: PaulG

PaulG — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 03:40:50 +0000

Hi there
I’ve experienced this phenomenon and have “cheated” sometimes with SRS. I think there are two reasons for that: I have correctly guessed the word before (perhaps on numerous occasions), meaning this time was just a slip; the other reason being I want to get the queue down.

By the way, keep up the good work.

By: jblinguaphile

jblinguaphile — Thu, 11 Sep 2014 02:34:10 +0000

I sometimes give myself a “so-so”/”hard” or “good” even when I make a mistake in Anki or Skritter. I do this when I really *know* that it was just a momentary lapse (“a brain fart”). For example, when it’s a character that I know well and I just accidentally mistook it for a very similar one. These lapses tend to happen when I’m hurrying and I don’t give myself even two seconds to think about the answer.

The other major cases are when I can recall some but not all of the multiple meanings of a character or word. If I decide that I only really care about the most common usage, then I’ll give myself a “good”. But if I am being strict with myself that day, I might mark it “so-so”/”hard”. I think that’s kind of a gray area anyway, but it allows me to use the flexibility of my internal goals as an excuse.

By: shawn

shawn — Wed, 10 Sep 2014 01:56:24 +0000

Hey Olle,
When using SRS and the and the question is multiple choice, sometimes I catch myself using process of elimination. Is this cheating?

By: Jon Davies

Jon Davies — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 10:09:29 +0000

It’s odd. The desire to cheat ourselves. We built the concept of ‘tests’ into our corporate spaced repetition application ( Wranx.com ) that allows automatic or guided tests to alert you if you are cheating yourself.
The funny thing is, we only have to test you on the subjects you say you know well….. theres no point in testing you on the things you don’t know as you will fail!

By: jennifu

jennifu — Sun, 07 Sep 2014 14:22:08 +0000

Guilty cheater here! Reasons I cheat myself:

1) My queue can be unmanageably long sometimes (I want to get to reading practice) and if I mark a card as right, of course in an SRS it won’t show up as quickly, so I’ll save some time down the road…

2) This one is a little more justified perhaps; for characters whose English keywords are very similar to each other (either they’re synonyms or they look the same on a tiny phone screen and can easily be mistaken), I might come up with the wrong character, and I just think to myself “well, I PROBABLY would’ve got this right if I hadn’t gotten confused…”

3) Essentially what you said about defeat– sometimes I’m quite fed up with my slow rate of progress and I want something to show for my efforts. A high percentage of flashcards cleared feels quite good.

I 100% agree this is bad practice… It’s quite hard to stop! Hahaha.

By: Olle Linge

Olle Linge — Sat, 06 Sep 2014 10:31:40 +0000

In reply to KM. I agree, but in that case, you should probably start deleting words that aren't very important.