Thanks, you've definitely given me a lot to chew on.
I definitely struggled with a lot of the same questions. I thought a lot about the question of "when do you know a word well enough, and prune it?" and I came to generally the same conclusion, that there's not a lot of benefit from completely removing a word. The cost of asking someone to review a word once every 3-12 months is so low, that it's best to just keep asking them.
And for all practical purposes, that's what Nihongo does. In order to naturally bring a word to level 5 (the level at which we no longer prompt for it), it would take almost 3 years. And that's assuming that you didn't ever get it wrong, and never missed a day where it came up. I'm definitely the only person who's reached this (starting from when I started development on Nihongo), and I think there's a very good chance I'm the only person who ever will.
So practically, the question is what to do when something reaches the upper reaches of level 3 and level 4. Do you keep showing these words to them once every 2-3 months? Or do you continue to space them further apart? I'm not sure I'm convinced either way, but it's something I'll definitely continue to think about and re-evaluate. I have a little bit of skepticism around your numbers - for example, I don't think it takes 100 seconds to re-learn a word that you knew very well at one point and just forgot how to pronounce - but I think the point is valid.
As for spaced learning, it's an interesting idea that I haven't heard about before. The key thing I worry isn't being considered though is motivation. Unless a user is familiar with the theory behind it, I think forgetting and re-learning each word would be terribly demotivating. I'm definitely going to be doing some more research though.
Thanks for pointing me at all this, I've got lots of reading to go do!
I definitely struggled with a lot of the same questions. I thought a lot about the question of "when do you know a word well enough, and prune it?" and I came to generally the same conclusion, that there's not a lot of benefit from completely removing a word. The cost of asking someone to review a word once every 3-12 months is so low, that it's best to just keep asking them.
And for all practical purposes, that's what Nihongo does. In order to naturally bring a word to level 5 (the level at which we no longer prompt for it), it would take almost 3 years. And that's assuming that you didn't ever get it wrong, and never missed a day where it came up. I'm definitely the only person who's reached this (starting from when I started development on Nihongo), and I think there's a very good chance I'm the only person who ever will.
So practically, the question is what to do when something reaches the upper reaches of level 3 and level 4. Do you keep showing these words to them once every 2-3 months? Or do you continue to space them further apart? I'm not sure I'm convinced either way, but it's something I'll definitely continue to think about and re-evaluate. I have a little bit of skepticism around your numbers - for example, I don't think it takes 100 seconds to re-learn a word that you knew very well at one point and just forgot how to pronounce - but I think the point is valid.
As for spaced learning, it's an interesting idea that I haven't heard about before. The key thing I worry isn't being considered though is motivation. Unless a user is familiar with the theory behind it, I think forgetting and re-learning each word would be terribly demotivating. I'm definitely going to be doing some more research though.
Thanks for pointing me at all this, I've got lots of reading to go do!