Six months in. A card with a nine month interval came up yesterday and I had absolutely no idea. Not a hazy memory, nothing. It shook me because I thought the whole point was that this stops happening. Is this expected or have I set something up wrong?
Some memories are also genuinely context dependent. If you learned it at a desk in winter and met it again on your phone on a bus, you can miss something you would have got at home. Not a scheduling fault.
This happens to me with anything I learned while listening to the same album. Weirdly specific and very real.
Normal. I keep a note of any card that dies after a six month plus interval and rewrite it that evening rather than just pressing Again. Turns the failure into an edit.
Look at the card. Nine times out of ten the twenty successful reviews were passes on a prompt with a giveaway in it, and the one honest test failed. Long intervals expose lazy cards.
Six months in and you have cards sitting at nine months. That is the thing to notice here.
@proof_pilar · 2mo ago · 3 replies
Completely expected, and the software is doing exactly what it should.
The scheduler aims for a target retention, often around 90 percent. That means one card in ten is supposed to fail at the moment it comes due. If nothing ever failed, your intervals would be too short and you would be spending your life reviewing things you already know. A card that survived to a nine month interval and then died has bought you eight months of not thinking about it.
What would worry me is a pattern: same card, dies at every long interval, twelve times running. That is a leech and the card is badly written. One-off blanks are the price of long intervals.
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@shoe_resole · 2mo ago
That reframes it. So a failure at nine months is the system finding the edge rather than me losing the fact.
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@proof_pilar · 2mo ago
Yes. It is a measurement, not a punishment.
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