Btw: there is quite a lot of people arguing that in most working environments another day off in the middle of the week would improve productivity. Or at least working Saturday and and Wednesday off. Especially if we are speaking about work that requires a lot of brain power. You need to be rested to do it well 
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I feel like that article is talking about a different thing. You mentioned a two day break, they are talking about months.
And they still encourage maintainance (“Of course, rest should never mean oblivion”), which is kind of what reviews are.
And it also doesn’t say that it’s absolutely necessary, just that it might have some nice effects.
I think to me the habit thing is just more important
(Especially because I’d honestly still consider my 10-review days break days if I don’t do anything else Japanese-related that day, because it only takes like one minute and practically 0 effort).
I think it depends on the person and on how much you’re doing and how well that’s working for you, etc etc.
Obviously if you’re noticing signs of burn out, you should definitely take a break.
Nothing against breaks, I’m just disagreeing that the consistent ‘little bit a day’ approach is somehow toxic 
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Oh, I don’t disagree with that - but that’s also a different scenario. In that case we’re talking about a lot of work every day, that probably takes quite a bit of effort - then of course breaks are important.
5 minutes of Japanese each day on the other hand is not the same thing as burning yourself out from working for hours every day.
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I will not look for researches to support my claim (for sure there are ones, as well as ones saying something opposite) but my logic is as follows:
To make any skill effective you need to push data into unconscious area of your brain. To do so you need to do 2 things: stop forcing it to be 100% conscious and time (and the data obviously…). You do it to some extend every day when you sleep. I am pretty sure that everybody here had a lot of breakthroughs when attacking the same problem after some sleep (we called “solving the problem with fresh mind” or something like that). To some extend it works similar with long breaks: you manage to forget how to consciously use the skill, so when prompted you brain has one choice: trying to reach to unconscious knowledge. I think similar thing is happening if you let yourself forget about conscious usage of the skill and give it 2-3 day break from time to time. It will have time to store that information deeper. And deeper is more useful to you since it does not require conscious processing (very brain expensive and slow process).
I think that is the main idea behind “forgetting is part of the process of learning”. You need to let yourself forget, but our brain almost never forget anything fully: every information make permanent change in the structure of your brain after all.
This is how I explain this experience to myself at least.
You can tested yourself. Take a week off if you study for over 6 month and come back and check if it feel a bit easier. I believe you will have noticeable easier time after reminding you brain every day that Japanese is something you do consciously. I maybe wrong though
People strange beings xD
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Yes, sleep is obviously super important, but not very relevant here because obviously I do in fact still sleep, even if I do my Anki reviews every day (kidding, I get the sleep thing, obviously)
Well, since you’re not backing this up with science, you may or may not be right about that 
It doesn’t even feel hard right now, though. 
I might one day if I feel like I need a longer break, that’s just not right now. Trust me, I’m the exact opposite of a workaholic, if anything I do too little, not too much.
I think the “getting to a point where you understand a language unconsciously” thing will come with lots of exposure (especially extensive reading and listening)
I don’t really think it has much to do with whether you completely ignore the language for days or not.
(And I’d still argue that only 10 random reviews still sorta count as a break…)
But oh well, I think we should leave it at that, otherwise we’ll just end up talking in circles. Agree to disagree 
E̶s̶p̶e̶c̶i̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶b̶e̶c̶a̶u̶s̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶h̶a̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶d̶o̶ ̶w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶a̶c̶t̶u̶a̶l̶ ̶t̶h̶r̶e̶a̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶p̶i̶c̶,̶ ̶o̶o̶p̶s̶
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You can easily find contrary researches if you want to. Psychology is a mess. It is not proper science yet, although they try their best to change it
I still can be not right about that. Research is not a prove - pretty much by definition - and we had some strange researches being establish mainstream in the past (for example researches about how cocaine is addictive to rats - over 99% success rate - before somebody sane decided to test what will happen if we try the same thing on “happy” rats with strong social network - almost not effect at all. And to this day we are keep putting people into prisons basically for clinical depression…)
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No worries: there seems to be no anti off-topic policy here xD
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That study is… also not really related to what we were talking about 
The exact link to the second study doesn’t exist anymore, but based on the first one and the summary you linked, they were testing a completely different thing.
The results just say that in terms of long term retention, cramming/overlearning is worse than some sort of spaced repetition. Like, instead of reading through the same material 10 times at once, you should take breaks in between and repeat the materials at certain intervals. And then that way you’ll remember stuff longer.
Which is logical (that’s why both bunpro and anki are srs systems), but has pretty much zero to do with our discussion
Alright, I’m genuinely gonna leave now to study some Japanese instead 
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I feel like streak effectiveness depends on the content, to an extent.
Here’s an example: the other day, I dropped my 100+ Clozemaster streak. I felt awful about it for 5 minutes, before I remembered I was doing the absolute bare minimum I needed to do every day, and I would often do it last thing before bed because I just didn’t care enough. But I’d kept it up, because it was a streak.
In that case, I don’t think the streak served any purpose other than stress me out and add something uninteresting and useless to my studies.
But my BunPro streak? My invisible-but-I-know-it’s-there Wanikani streak? I would genuinely be gutted to drop them, because I know I get a lot from using the sites every day. Even if I only do 20 reviews here, I know I’ve done something useful that day, and I’ve set aside the time to do it. It’s lucky for me, because on weekdays I commute, and on weekends I do tend to slack a little more, but I do always make sure I get round to it.
Routines work incredibly well for me, and the reason I buggered up WK so badly first time around is I never set that routine and I never pressured myself to stick to it. I’d end up cramming with hundreds, and occasionally thousands, of reviews at one time. Eventually I quit. Then I picked it up again and here we are.
I know the value of having a day off, but it doesn’t really feel like work for me, so it doesn’t feel like something I really have to do (but don’t want to). I don’t allow myself too much time for frustration in studying any more though - if I’m really not getting something, and it’s starting to piddle me right off, I’ll go to bed and look at it in the morning. Half the time, I’m just sleepy, or I have brain fog, or I’ve just had a bad day. It’s never interfered with streaks though, because I keep up with them earlier in the day when I’m more of a person
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That a nice long break in my dictionary xD
The worst thing for me in being beginner is the fact that I can’t take meaningful break from learning. There is almost nothing I can do with my Japanese that does not trigger my brain to do some hard thinking. Best thing I can do is watching anime with English subtitles which is better than nothing but still…
I long term my plan for taking meaningful breaks - even weeks long ones - is to use Japanese to learn Chinese. Looks like quadruple win to me: I will be using Japanese, I will deeper my kanji knowledge, I will get more accustom to tones, and I will even get Chinese for free xD
But this is not looking like something that will happen any time soon…
To be honest I have no intention in changing your mind. That why I am not even huge fun of throwing psychological (to not be confused with “scientific”) paper at each others. Nobody will invest 20h in analysing methodology to make educated guess if given paper is worth anything…
But I think we agree on 3 from 4 things:
- Small breaks between sessions help (5-30 minutes between studying sessions).
- Sleeping breaks help (4-20h between studying sessions)
- You don’t agree days to a week long breaks can help.
- Very long breaks can help at least sometimes (weeks to months between studying sessions)
The only thing you seems to disagree is usefulness medium size breaks but you are not able to give any reasoning why that would be the case. It would be rather strange this kinds of breaks would have no positive effect at all.
And let’s not forget one thing: the only way to master a skill is using it meaningfully. SRS is maybe meaningful (only in a terms of usefulness though) but clearly does not count as using the skill. So I would not extrapolate usefulness of those kinds of systems in memorising stuff, to actually learning the skill. The difference is as big as between reading how to ride a bike, and riding a bike. I have never met anybody becoming fluent in any skill by SRS alone.
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Not really? I never said anything like “week long breaks are never helpful”. (I have no idea if they are or not)
You’re the one who made the claim that keeping up a daily streak is “toxic” and that you have to do nothing at all on some days.
I don’t think breaks are bad in any way, and if it helps you to not do anything (related to the skill you’re learning) for a few days or a week occasionally, great.
I just disagreed that it’s somehow toxic not to take those days off. That’s all.
The consistency that comes with a daily streak personally helps me stay on top of things. I like it. You might not need that, that’s cool. Different people learn differently 
Well yeah, of course. I agree. That’s also a different topic, though.
(I already said I only do like 10 minutes of Anki a day, so obviously I’m not trying to learn Japanese by SRSing alone )
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I only meant that using logic “Anki somewhat works in different way -> it constitutes an argument” is not valid.
Btw: neither of us seems to be interested in this debate, so we can call it a day xD
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Agreed!
I know what that’s like
Having a daily habit ingrained that you can stick to just kind of helps in the long term.
Same. I’m a very lazy person, if Japanese wasn’t so fun and felt more like work, I probably wouldn’t be doing it
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