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!"
Conversation
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.
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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"
This substantially increased the % of readers who stuck with it, but there are many problems with this representation, too. Haven’t returned to the problem in the last ~year.
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