Learning a language with Anki is effective and frustrating for precisely the same reason: they test vocabulary at just the right time, when you're just about to forget the word.
Review sessions become one long beating-yourself-up. "I know I know this!"
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This is a significant (and underappreciated) design challenge!
For me a key insight is that we haven’t found good representations of progress. You need to see/feel your overall progress; emphasizing individual items produces the problem you describe.
I sometimes try to talk myself into marking something right when I shouldn't. Who am I trying to impress??? 😂
Anki's visualizations can help with a sense of progress. I'm interested to hear other ideas though.
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On Quantum Country, our approach was to frame progress in terms of a series of “levels” of demonstrated retention—e.g. “I’ve just finished the two-week level”, meaning 95% of the essay’s prompts have been remembered across a 2-week span. Or “I’m 65% complete on the 1-month level"
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What's wrong with making a simple adjustment to test slightly earlier? It seems like somewhat reduced effectiveness is a fair price to pay for somewhat improved user satisfaction. Especially if that user satisfaction reduces drop-out, and thus improves global effectiveness!
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Yes, that might be a reasonable strategy!
My analyses of Quantum Country suggest questions follow a strong power-law distribution; 12% of questions cause most lapses. Most reviews are probably already “wasted time”! Improving this would exacerbate the problem we’re discussing.
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Do you think it's possible to represent progress for language learning within the system, when the ultimate measure of progress is defined by interactions outside of the system (convos with native speakers, understanding foregin language media etc.)?
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Yes, I think some decent interim measures of progress are possible. For instance, if we know that conversation becomes much more rewarding and fluid when the first 200 vocabulary words and grammar rules are fluent, that would be a meaningful measure.