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Comment by t_mann | Hacker News Reader

It seems from the description that FSRS still puts an exact review date on each card? This feature was pretty much the reason why I stopped using Anki. I'm not in college and not doing exams, I just want to practice when I feel like it, maybe with large breaks between sessions, and not feel like there's a backlog building up.

I think Anki is a great app, I just wish there was an algorithm that would just randomly sample cards (with probability proportional to how urgently you need to review it) rather than put a review date on them. Something like https://github.com/fasiha/ebisu but available as an Anki plugin (if that supports custom algorithms on mobile yet?) or a similar app with an open format for cards.

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But that's not how memory works...you can't put your memory on hold like you're suggesting. There's a reason FSRS follows a personalized memory curve.

You can't, but I wager a student excited to doing a review but with a suboptimal method, will do better than a student who dreads the review with the optimal method.

Current algorithms/UI feel like punishment for over-learning, as if it was a suspicious thing that carried great responsibility to open a book and read a page without fully committing to forever maintaining reviews on everything you happened to come across. There should be no punishment and only reward.

Please don't make assumptions about my goals. I was clear about my requirements and asking for recommendations.

I haven't made any assumptions about your goals. I simply reminded you that memories kind of have "expiry dates", so that review dates are necessary. The backlog you mentioned is the memories you're about to forget if not "refreshed" in time. If you just want to practice whenever you feel like it, there are tons of apps that use a simple Leitner box, but you may soon find that it becomes a burden to review your cards if you add an important amount of them. Anki already has ways to do what you want, while still working according to your memory patterns, such as using filtered decks and lowering desired retention.

I already pointed out twice that Anki doesn't work for me, and your response is basically still 'you're holding it wrong'. I know of all the things you mentioned, and like I said, they didn't work for me, which is why I was looking for recommendations (which other posters have provided).

The point is that you're looking for something that accounts for your memory patterns while reviewing things haphazardly, which goes against the former. It doesn't exist. I wonder why you just don't use traditional study methods at this point. If you dread the backlog (and you shouldn't if you have well formatted cards, which may be why it didn't work for you) you will dread the alternative even more.

> I wonder why you just don't use traditional study methods at this point.

Because I'm not a student. Why is it so hard to accept that I know what I want and am just looking for recommendations that do that? If they don't exist, so be it. The point of my question was to find out what exists, not to get a lecture on what I should want.

>I just want to practice when I feel like it, maybe with large breaks between sessions

That's how SRS already works. But if you clear out the "backlog" you can no longer practice whenever you want and must wait for a period before you will be able to practice again.

I made a half-baked app that did something like that and it worked very poorly. For facts I remembered repeating them was annoying, and many of those I forgot, I forgot them completely. So repeating served little purpose and the progress was very slow. The key is to repeat when one _almost_ forgets and this can't be done without due dates and scheduling.

I'm working on Phrasing.app that does just this. We originally used ebisu, but ended up (heavily) modifying our own fork of FSRS.

We don't use due dates really (except for some analytics by request), but instead try to keep a user at various difficulty levels.

We care more about forward progress then making sure you're always 100% caught up (if a words really that important, you can either favorite it or you'll see it again).

It's not an open flashcard app, we're really also heavily focused on automatic sentence mining for foreign languages, but I'd be happy to answer any questions about my experience adapting FSRS.

You can see more about the product at https://blog.phrasing.app/phrasing-first-look/

Thanks, will check out.

You can use a filtered deck and sort cards by relative overdueness in Anki.

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