Suggestion for more effective ghosts

Bunpro
#1

I’d like to get some feedback on this from people that have a fair few ghosts. Personally, I think ghosts would be far more effective if the grammar point itself was ‘ghosted’ as opposed to the sentence.

Unfortunately I am finding all too often (90% of the time) that I get ghosts right because my brain memorizes the sentence… Not the grammar point. I mean that I read the first few words of a sentence and know what the grammar point is simply because I have seen that sentence a few times subsequently, not because I am ‘understanding the grammar point’ like I should be.

Wouldn’t it be more effective if the ghost pulled a random sentence from the problem grammar points catalogue of sentences? Forcing the user to work to remember the grammar point, rather than the brain memorizing the one sentence.

I have found a few times that I have eliminated ghosts only to create a new ghost a day later in the same grammar point because all I learned was a sentence, not grammar. You may say ‘well dont eliminate the ghost until you know it then’, but that isnt possible, once you have memorized the sentence, you cant learn anything from it because your subconcious will instantly tell you the answer everytime you see it without requiring you to think about it.

What do you guys think?
(if this is already an option and I have missed it… Oops)

16 Likes
#2

I have made the ssme experience.

2 Likes
#3

Thanks for the feedback!

The big reason we did ghosts like we did them is to drill the grammar with special rules, like needing だ or な between なAdj/Nouns and the grammar (暇だから, 明日なので etc), or similar rules. It is less about drilling the grammar point as a whole and more about making sure you get exposed to those special rules more.

One improvement I think we will make is to actually pause the normal reviews for that grammar point until you clear the related ghost. Right now you could basically get quizzed on the same grammar point multiple times in a single session or a single day if you have multiple ghosts + the main review, and I think that is sub-optimal.

17 Likes
#4

At first I put Ghosts on Minimal. Now they’re Off. 'Nuff said.

1 Like
#5

wouldn’t pausing the normal reviews for that specific grammar point be a little bit counter intuitive. That would mean that until you get that one specific sentence right, you’re going to see that grammar point even less than you already would, making it even harder to remember.

I personally like when I get quizzed on a ghost grammar point in the same session as I do the ghost. It is instant feedback that I am either understanding it correctly or incorrectly. Seeing a difficult point even less seems odd?

Perhaps in the lower levels when you are smashing through over 100 reviews a day it isn’t necessary. But with the more difficult content, seeing it more often is helpful.

3 Likes
#6

I agree. I don’t see any problem the way it is now. If you get quizzed more often on a specific (difficult) grammar point, you’ll only learn it faster.

Would you mind to explain your reasoning?

I also experience that if I see the same sentence very often, I will memorise the sentence. But for me, this is not a problem. If anything, it is helpful.

When I get quizzed on a different sentence of the same grammar point, I often find myself scanning for memorised sentences and trying to abstract the grammar rule from these sentences. If that does not work, it could just be that the given sentence is some sort of exception which I have to memorise separately.

4 Likes
#7

You can have 3 or even more sentences for the same grammar point in one session. My maximum was 4 (1 main and 3 ghosts) I think in a session with maybe 20 reviews. That’s ridiculous, I was answering the same grammar again and again in that session without needing to think for a second. In that scenario it would make more sense to stop the main grammar point until the ghosts are finished, so that you can’t create more and more ghosts for the same grammar point.

So I would clearly vote for that: suspending the main review until the ghosts are finished.

But I also see the problem that it’s very likely to just memorise the ghost sentence instead of the grammar rules. So I’d also vote for changing the ghost sentence every time (first time the same sentence, after that 3 new sentences)

7 Likes
#8

Good point. It is a bit of a double edged sword. Perhaps randomizing the sentence at the same time making it impossible to create more ghosts from that point.

Basically if you ghost a grammar point, you can’t ghost that grammar point again until youve cleared it, and instead of one sentence, your ghost picks from all.

7 Likes
#9

Personally I would find it very annoying if ghosts suspended the grammar point, especially when the grammar point is in its early SRS, because then I might still just be trying to remember the words of the grammar, and then the additional showings with ghosts really help.

Another reason why I don’t like it is because I usually only do reviews once per day, that means that every ghost stays at least 4 days for me, sometimes 5 or so if I’m not reviewing at my normal time one of those days. That means I tend to really memorize the sentence, so after the second review I tend to not even have to think about the answer. And if the original point is suspended for all that time, then I’m just memorizing a sentence of that grammar point rather than actually practicing the grammar for half that time.

If the original grammar point gets suspended, I definitely vote for ghosts changing sentences (maybe even just going back to previously studied sentences, except that only works if there are any and if they weren’t ghosts in the past too).

Right now I definitely find ghosts very useful for about 2 reviews, the fourth one is just annoying because by then the sentence is memorized for me and I just want to stop seeing that sentence. So even with no change to ghosts, I wonder if 4 reviews of the ghost is one too many and/or if the ghost should change sentence (maybe at SRS 2, then change, and keep the new sentence for srs3-4, I don’t know. Throwing out ideas).

10 Likes
#10

Well thought out reply, thanks for your input! I agree with pretty much everything you said.

3 Likes
#11

I agree.

For me it’s the opposite. I get items wrong early in the SRS often, and it quickly became overwhelming to have 2-3 reviews for the same grammar point in the same session.

6 Likes
#12

I think that’s a good suggestion. The ghost sentence should change to another sentence of that grammar point, but not forward (like the normal review) but backward. Since a grammar point is normally added via the quiz in study mode, ghost reviews can only be generated from the second sentence and above. So there is always at least one sentence (the first) to which the ghost sentence could change to.

For me, the first two ghost srs are way too simple and not helpful. Especially users who do more than one review session per day will see that sentence 4 times within one day (first the normal review that got a wrong answer, the second time at the end of the same session, then 4 hours later again and after another 8 hours).

Only srs 4 is a bit more challenging because of the longer time between the last review, but for me it’s still to close and I’d prefer a longer srs interval for the last ghost.

5 Likes
#13

Currently the same sentence is showing up for a ghost and the devs said its to drill a certain grammar point for this grammar. Since most of us just recognize the setence wouldnt it be possible to get random sentences especially for this speciality in this grammar point?

2 Likes
#14

I would like to get ghosts for when doing reviews and get “another way of saying it” hint :sweat_smile:
Like there’s a lot “but” and I still can’t memorized them all.

2 Likes
#15

Yeah, it would be nice if when you got one wrong, it paused there(or went down in rank, however it’s handled here. I don’t like the idea of continuing to get new sentences and increase its level on a point I got wrong while it’s in ghost mode) and went into multiple random ghost review sentences on that particular grammar point.

Like have an extra set of sentences that are just for ghost reviews so we don’t just memorize the sentence.

1 Like
#16

I think that ghosts being a sentence rather than a grammar point kinda makes sense. I often get things wrong not because of the grammar, but because of my inept conjugation. In that case, I would like that specific case to come by more often. For me it is very handy.

1 Like