How long do you give yourself to recognise a word before you mark it as unknown?

I want to give myself a short time but it keeps on drifting longer, ie I get slower and slower.

I know some people are super strict about this, but I am not. I think most of the time if I remember it even after a delay, I remember it with no problem the next time. So if I think I know it, I'll often think about it for a while before I give up.

The problem with this approach is that it reduces the number of repetitions you can do in a certain span of time. I would be interested to hear if people think that a more rapid review process is more effective in the long term.

James

for me it depends if it is a character that i never knew in previous reviews or not. In that case I would rather mark it as correct so i can reward myself and extend the time before next review which is going to be very short anyway. If I always remembered it, but I get significantly slower, I will mark it wrong so as to prevent it from showing up only after a long long time.

If my review queue is too long i am more lenient also since the reviews are not gonna be on the most efficient time anyway I think it is better to get the queue close to zero and then start to be more strict again.

Although I usually don't give myself that long... if I hit the end of the 30 second timer without a clue, it's wrong. That happens rarely, if something is on the tip of my tongue, so to speak, but most of the time I know I don't know it fairly quickly.

if it does not comes up in mind immediately, I mark it as forgot. This habit comes from Pimsleur - there also, time for think is few second - or you know it or you don't. No any mmmmm... this is.... :)

Wow. You all seem really methodical about this. I just look at it and know within 7 or 8 seconds if I know it or not. If it is on the tip of my tongue it gets a so-so. Don't know = a forgotten.

@west316 I wonder if you've ever had the following experience: you see a new prompt and don't think you know the answer, but before you get the chance to mark it wrong, you are called away from the computer for a moment. Then when you return after five minutes, you know the answer.

This happens to me on a fairly regular basis. I also often have the reverse problem, i.e. I am certain I know something when in fact I don't. I can only conclude that my knowledge of whether or not I know things is pretty unreliable.

Donald Rumsfeld had a nice formulation for this:

"There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don’t know."

James