(Re)learn sister cards on the same day

[Peter Bienstman]

Mnemosyne currently has a configuration option '(Re)learn sister cards on the same day'. However, it's very misleading in the sense that as soon as you are running out of new cards to study, Mnemosyne will bring these sister cards into the queue to prevent it from running empty. In RC1, I've added a warning message to explain that this is happening, but it's proving difficult to prevent it from triggering spuriously.

So now I'm currently leaning towards removing that configuration option altogether and taking the behaviour when this box was unchecked. This means that when learning new cards, Mnemosyne will avoid showing you sister cards, unless you are running out of new cards. I'm not sure that preventing you from trying to learn the production card when you have memorised the recognition card is all that important, and people could get confused if they see the 'not memorised' counter non-zero, but still get no new cards to study. Sure, you could give a warning message in that case, or make the behaviour configurable, but I feel that then we're just replacing one combination of a confusing, difficult to understand setting and warning message with a different combination of confusing, difficult to understand setting and warning message..

Thoughts?

Peter

[Henrik in Oslo]

Simplicity and stability of the software is  more important than occasionally learning similar items on the same day. 

[Michael Campbell]

In general I agree.  In specifics, ... I think your proposal is fine.  If you're learning ahead of time you're "going off the reservation" and subverting the point of the algorithm, so you don't get to have all your comfortable notions about how things should work.  

It's like I read physicists talking about black holes; "the laws of physics as we know them break down inside one".  Same deal here; you're going into uncharted territory, expect some bumps.  ;-)

(My opinion only, of course; many reasonable people disagree.)

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[Peter Bienstman]

Actually, I was talking about memorising new cards, not learning ahead of schedule of already memorised cards.

 

But you've helped prove my point that this setting is very confusing :-)

 

Peter

[Michael Campbell]

Oh, Peter, I *EXCEL* at misunderstanding a point.  If you ever need anyone to misread or get a point confused, come to me first.  =)

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[Gnome]

So what your saying is that sister cards will not be displayed until
you have memorized all your cards, that means ALL activated cards, not
just the one scheduled?

[Peter Bienstman]

In essence, what I'm saying is that the current default behaviour you
have been getting since beta 1, with '(Re)learn sister cards on the
same day' unchecked, will be the behaviour for the future, without any
option to configure it.

Peter

[Gnome]

I'm voting for to leave the button as it is, but add a message box
when you activate it to explain expected behavior.

I think many people may get a bit baffled when their the sister card
is not shown until the end when all cards has been memorized, and may
leave lots questions on it on the forums.

On 10 Mai, 21:26, Peter Bienstman <Peter.Bienst...@UGent.be> wrote:

[Gnome]

P.S. I think it would be nice to add a message explaining the expected
behavior when the button is set to disabled also.

"You have disabled to relearn sister cards on the same day.

Sister cards will not be shown until you have learned all the cards in
the 'Not memorized' que"

"You have enabled '(Re)learn sister cards on the same day'

Sister cards will be added to your schedule, when you are done with
your daily schedule."

P.S PS:
I'm not sure what behavior I'm actually getting when it comes to
sister cards as a user. Most of the times I think I'm getting the
sister cards (both sides) during learning, or not? :P

[Peter Bienstman]

Actually, I had to think for more than 1 minute to figure out whether
your suggested tooltips really matched how it is implemented in all
possible corner cases, and I did not arrive to a conclusion :-)

So, that seems like a pretty good argument to me for getting rid of
that option :-)

Since beta 1 came out (last September?) nobody ever complained about
the default *behaviour* of that option. There only was a very valid
remark last week that the *description* of that option not matches the
reality very well, but as far as I recall, the default behaviour was
OK for that person.

Thanks for the feedback!

Peter

[Scott Youngman]

I think it is fine to do as you suggest below, Peter. Seeing that
configuration option actually caused confusion for me (as evidenced in
my two threads posted on the topic) because it highlighted the fact
that sister cards would not be presented on the same day -- and yet
they were anyway when I ran out of new cards. Rather than having the
setting plus an explanatory warning, it would be simpler just to make
it the default behaviour, plus add a help topic stating "When learning

new cards, Mnemosyne will avoid showing you sister cards, unless you
are running out of new cards."