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I basically ruined myself for Anki. I started like gangbusters, and also created some really cool jazz music theory decks for myself that have lilypond notation

I basically ruined myself for Anki. I started like gangbusters, and also created some really cool jazz music theory decks for myself that have lilypond notation snippets and sound samples of various chord qualities and advanced jazz modes. And this is on top of other subjects like ML, scala, logarithms, etc. And then... I hit this mathematical limit where I just couldn't keep up. You can't add 20 new cards a day for any length of time without the review cycle getting overwhelming. I'm not sure it's even physically possible to Anki full recall of everything learned in a college course - each class would need to be much longer than a term to keep up with the review. One solution is to just keep plugging away, reviewing what you can and hoping the things you answer correctly will relieve the pressure as they come up less frequently. But since you're late on many card, recall sucks and I never really made much headway. I also have a really hard time retiring cards. It's like deciding to cross things off your TODO list that you'll never do, you always want to keep it on thinking you might do it someday. Same with a not very relevant piece of info, it's right in front of you, it still feels like it might be useful to know...

s_m_t 7y ago
Why were you adding 20 new cards a day? IMO its better to adjust your new card rate based on your retention rate. Your ideal retention rate probably depends on how you react to the "stress" of missing cards. Personally it would majorly stress me out if my retention rate was below 80%, I ideally liked to keep it around 90-95% because for me this was where it went from feeling like work to actually being fun and exciting. I might go for a couple of days without adding anything, do a couple days adding 5, add 10, 15, 20, or even 30 depending on the circumstances.
- elliotec 7y ago
  20 new cards per day to review is the default. You can add as many or as few as you want but if you didn't change the default it will put 20 in your review queue daily.
  - s_m_t 7y ago
    Ah yeah, I'd typically create cards "just in time", so to speak, because I found that my retention would drop significantly without the context of what I was learning fresh in my mind.
    - andrewzah 7y ago
      Ideally this is how cards should be made. Most anki word decks neglect to have meaningful context, making them much less useful. Especially once you begin to study more advanced vocabulary. What I ended up doing was modifying a pre-made deck to have more fields, and I edit a card as it pops up into my new queue. This takes more time, but it makes it easier for me to learn a word seeing example sentences and other information.
  - sjy 7y ago
    It’s only going to put 20 new cards in your review queue daily if you have a huge backlog of unseen cards, which will only happen if you mass import a whole bunch of pre-made cards, which is not recommended. Actually creating 20 new cards a day would imply a pretty heavy study schedule.
    - andrewzah 7y ago
      > It’s only going to put 20 new cards in your review queue daily if you have a huge backlog of unseen cards Correct. However, using a huge premade deck is not a bad idea in the sense that it's a huge time saver. For me, creating an anki card takes between 1-2 minutes, depending on how slow the dictionaries (plural) are. So, 30-60 words per minute (45 avg) means it would take me almost 4.5 hours to input a measly 200 words. I can write down 200 new words from one episode of a tv show. You can see where this is going. For Korean, about 5-6k words are recommended to begin having non-basic discussions. 5k words at 45 words/hour is ~110 hours. Instead, I suggest using a parent deck that has a premade deck + your personal deck as children. This lets you have the best of both systems. You can use the Hoochie Mama! plugin [0] to properly randomize your review queue for child decks. Anki by default pulls cards in order from child decks. Note: All of this assumes that your pre-made deck is of good quality. I can't speak about other languages, but Evita's Korean deck (5.8k cards) is sorted by frequency. It's fairly good, at least until you get to more of a intermediate level. [0]: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1460733408 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1460733408
- andrewzah 7y ago
  An ideal retention rate is about 80-90%. 95% means you could be challenging yourself more (if desired). https://eshapard.github.io/anki/target-an-80-90-percent-success-rate-in-anki.html https://eshapard.github.io/anki/target-an-80-90-percent-succ...
rudnek 7y ago
I've been using Anki for learning foreign language words for at least 2 years during my commute. At the start of using flashcards I could learn near 20 words for a day, but now, based on my experience, the number of learned cards decreases. At the same time repeat learning helps me do not forget words which were learned a year or so ago and rarely used. I also noticed, for me, the best approach for better remembering is practicing during the morning commute. It became my everyday routine :) Using Anki is very helpful if you need to repeat much information for a small period of time, e.g. before exams or interviews.
- andrewzah 7y ago
  I was the most consistent with anki when I had a 30 min commute by train every day. Once I started working from home it became much harder to consciously allocate 30-40 minutes for anki every day.
retrac 7y ago
I've been using Anki to memorize Chinese characters. It's near-ideal for the task. It's a pretty memory-hard task, and I find a sustainable average is only 2 - 3 new cards a day. I've done stretches where I've done 20 new characters and I pay for it in the reviews for weeks and weeks. It feels frustrating too since you keep reviewing the same 5 or 10 items that won't "stick". I find SRS software like Anki is best taken with a "slow and steady wins the race" approach. I only do new cards when I start running out of daily reviews now, and I find it a lot less punishing.
- zozbot234 7y ago
  > It feels frustrating too since you keep reviewing the same 5 or 10 items that won't "stick". I think the idea is that eventually you'll be recalling even those "leech" items, due to the sheer exposure you're getting in the meantime. Frustration is part of the game.
  - andrewzah 7y ago
    > due to the sheer exposure you're getting in the meantime. This helps less than you'd think. Many of my leeches are due to word similarities. Sometimes I'd have an issue of erroneously swapping two similar words, and my brain would get "stuck" following that circuit. If that makes sense? The fix that I found was suspending one or both of the words and making up a lot of sentences for them. And physically writing them.
    - Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
      I can relate, more than half of my leeches are due to word similarities as well. In particular, they tend to happen if two similar words start appearing at roughly the same time (if a word has had enough time to "consolidate" well in my memory before a similar word appears, I tend to be OK). When this happens, I find the Anki "leech" feature to be useful. I just let it remove (suspend is the word, I guess?) those words automatically. Flashcards are not my sole learning method, so I will probably learn them anyway by other means at some point, so spending lots of time on repetitions to get them right is not worth it.
zozbot234 7y ago
Strictly speaking, you don't need to keep up with any fixed review schedule. Anki understands when you're remembering a card that was part of a backlog, and gives you some "extra credit" for the added time interval that you've incurred as a result. This means that these cards will soon be scheduled with very long recall intervals, which in practice helps you clear the backlog fairly quickly. Sure, it's not optimal to miss a scheduled recall because then you might forget the card, which is quite bad. But most of the time you'll be doing OK, so it's always worth trying more cards.
jldugger 7y ago
There's probably a masterclass in the making regarding this, but the Anki defaults can and probably should be tuned. In particular, the multiplier for time between reviews should be tuned until you're hitting about 80 percent successful reviews. I've doubled mine and it really helped. I think there's also a setting to limit new cards based on review size, and that also helps avoid review hell. I imagine it's not the default because a popular use case is students in courses where there are high stakes deadlines.
- andrewzah 7y ago
  It's kind of well known that anki has some seriously bad defaults for long term studying. Not to plug myself but I've written about this at length. [0] There are a few big issues, but the easiest one to fix is the reset interval. When you forget a word that you're reviewing (that is, when you hit "Again"), anki resets the interval to 0%, as if it were a totally new card. This is bad for 2 reasons. 1) A lapse is not the same as learning a completely new word. When you review a lapsed card you're just refreshing that connection that you've already made. So it's wasteful to completely reset the interval unless you've really totally forgotten the word. 2) The interval reset can be huge (going from 7 months to 1 day) so it makes it tempting to just hit "Hard" instead. I know I've done that. The fix here is to set a more reasonable reset value like 40-60%. I use 45%. --- The other big issue is the algorithm works differently than you would expect. I discuss this in more detail in my post, but essentially anki gives each card a modifier value. Starting at 250%. Every time you hit Again/Hard/Easy, it -- permanently -- modifies this card. This is quite unintuitive! When people grade a card, they're really grading their own memory / ability to recall. Not how hard the card itself is. Why is this bad? Because if you hit "Hard" a lot, then you're seriously capping the interval growth rate for a word. In other words you'll see it way more often than you need to. Most people don't hit "hard", -then- "easy" once they learn it. A lot of people I know hit "hard" to be on the safe side instead of "good", purely out of habit. This picture explains why a low modifier is bad. [1] The way I fix this is by using 2 plugins: the first makes grading buttons not modify a card's modifier, and the second one resets ALL cards to 250%. Low-Key anki goes over this in detail. [2] However! This fix assumes a relatively homogeneous deck in terms of card difficulty. I.e. words for a language. If you're studying, say, algorithms or something where the difficulty may be heterogeneous, then you may want anki's default behavior. [0]: https://andrewzah.com/posts/better-anki-usage-guide-2019/ https://andrewzah.com/posts/better-anki-usage-guide-2019/ [1]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/andrewzah.com/posts/017/ease-example.jpg https://s3.amazonaws.com/andrewzah.com/posts/017/ease-exampl... [2]: https://massimmersionapproach.com/table-of-contents/anki/low-key-anki/low-key-anki-no-penalties-or-boosting/ https://massimmersionapproach.com/table-of-contents/anki/low...
kazinator 7y ago
> You can't add 20 new cards a day for any length of time without the review cycle getting overwhelming. 1. You have to take breaks from adding cards, and just be in review mode sometimes. 2. You have to tweak the settings. The defaults are bad. For instance, you probably want to adjust the percentage by which a lapsed card's interval shortens. If you lapse on a ten month card, you don't want it resetting to just several days, but say to 50%: five months. Another thing is to tweak the custom intervals to reduce the number of initial reviews for newly added cards, and also tweak the interval steps for lapsed cards to control how many times a card is reviewed before being returned into the deck.
gentleman11 7y ago
I have over 13k cards and kept up with it for a couple of years. I haven’t reviewed a card in months though. It’s exhausting to keep up! The real key is to have a long commute every day where you get to review on the train. My commute got shorter this year haha
jeffshek 7y ago
How large is your deck? I'm at 14k (which is considered a reasonable size). I definitely do average about 30 minutes + a day, but the productivity at work has helped me much more. I've thought about this quite a bit and written about strategies and tips here: https://senrigan.io/blog/everything-i-know-strategies-tips-and-tricks-for-spaced-repetition-anki/ https://senrigan.io/blog/everything-i-know-strategies-tips-a... A large part is also now using the proper visualization techniques (ie. using intensive memories, an anecdotal use case is I've memorized certain ideas behind neural networks by always putting them in a "closet"). This helps. Truncation of dumb cards is useful. Another really important thing is just to delete an entire deck (which I've done), when I realized I frankly ... just don't care about the subject any more (in this case, music composition).

s_m_t 7y ago

Why were you adding 20 new cards a day? IMO its better to adjust your new card rate based on your retention rate. Your ideal retention rate probably depends on how you react to the "stress" of missing cards. Personally it would majorly stress me out if my retention rate was below 80%, I ideally liked to keep it around 90-95% because for me this was where it went from feeling like work to actually being fun and exciting. I might go for a couple of days without adding anything, do a couple days adding 5, add 10, 15, 20, or even 30 depending on the circumstances.

elliotec 7y ago
20 new cards per day to review is the default. You can add as many or as few as you want but if you didn't change the default it will put 20 in your review queue daily.
- s_m_t 7y ago
  Ah yeah, I'd typically create cards "just in time", so to speak, because I found that my retention would drop significantly without the context of what I was learning fresh in my mind.
  - andrewzah 7y ago
    Ideally this is how cards should be made. Most anki word decks neglect to have meaningful context, making them much less useful. Especially once you begin to study more advanced vocabulary. What I ended up doing was modifying a pre-made deck to have more fields, and I edit a card as it pops up into my new queue. This takes more time, but it makes it easier for me to learn a word seeing example sentences and other information.
- sjy 7y ago
  It’s only going to put 20 new cards in your review queue daily if you have a huge backlog of unseen cards, which will only happen if you mass import a whole bunch of pre-made cards, which is not recommended. Actually creating 20 new cards a day would imply a pretty heavy study schedule.
  - andrewzah 7y ago
    > It’s only going to put 20 new cards in your review queue daily if you have a huge backlog of unseen cards Correct. However, using a huge premade deck is not a bad idea in the sense that it's a huge time saver. For me, creating an anki card takes between 1-2 minutes, depending on how slow the dictionaries (plural) are. So, 30-60 words per minute (45 avg) means it would take me almost 4.5 hours to input a measly 200 words. I can write down 200 new words from one episode of a tv show. You can see where this is going. For Korean, about 5-6k words are recommended to begin having non-basic discussions. 5k words at 45 words/hour is ~110 hours. Instead, I suggest using a parent deck that has a premade deck + your personal deck as children. This lets you have the best of both systems. You can use the Hoochie Mama! plugin [0] to properly randomize your review queue for child decks. Anki by default pulls cards in order from child decks. Note: All of this assumes that your pre-made deck is of good quality. I can't speak about other languages, but Evita's Korean deck (5.8k cards) is sorted by frequency. It's fairly good, at least until you get to more of a intermediate level. [0]: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1460733408 https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1460733408
andrewzah 7y ago
An ideal retention rate is about 80-90%. 95% means you could be challenging yourself more (if desired). https://eshapard.github.io/anki/target-an-80-90-percent-success-rate-in-anki.html https://eshapard.github.io/anki/target-an-80-90-percent-succ...

rudnek 7y ago

I've been using Anki for learning foreign language words for at least 2 years during my commute. At the start of using flashcards I could learn near 20 words for a day, but now, based on my experience, the number of learned cards decreases. At the same time repeat learning helps me do not forget words which were learned a year or so ago and rarely used. I also noticed, for me, the best approach for better remembering is practicing during the morning commute. It became my everyday routine :) Using Anki is very helpful if you need to repeat much information for a small period of time, e.g. before exams or interviews.

andrewzah 7y ago
I was the most consistent with anki when I had a 30 min commute by train every day. Once I started working from home it became much harder to consciously allocate 30-40 minutes for anki every day.

retrac 7y ago

I've been using Anki to memorize Chinese characters. It's near-ideal for the task. It's a pretty memory-hard task, and I find a sustainable average is only 2 - 3 new cards a day. I've done stretches where I've done 20 new characters and I pay for it in the reviews for weeks and weeks. It feels frustrating too since you keep reviewing the same 5 or 10 items that won't "stick". I find SRS software like Anki is best taken with a "slow and steady wins the race" approach. I only do new cards when I start running out of daily reviews now, and I find it a lot less punishing.

zozbot234 7y ago
> It feels frustrating too since you keep reviewing the same 5 or 10 items that won't "stick". I think the idea is that eventually you'll be recalling even those "leech" items, due to the sheer exposure you're getting in the meantime. Frustration is part of the game.
- andrewzah 7y ago
  > due to the sheer exposure you're getting in the meantime. This helps less than you'd think. Many of my leeches are due to word similarities. Sometimes I'd have an issue of erroneously swapping two similar words, and my brain would get "stuck" following that circuit. If that makes sense? The fix that I found was suspending one or both of the words and making up a lot of sentences for them. And physically writing them.
  - Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
    I can relate, more than half of my leeches are due to word similarities as well. In particular, they tend to happen if two similar words start appearing at roughly the same time (if a word has had enough time to "consolidate" well in my memory before a similar word appears, I tend to be OK). When this happens, I find the Anki "leech" feature to be useful. I just let it remove (suspend is the word, I guess?) those words automatically. Flashcards are not my sole learning method, so I will probably learn them anyway by other means at some point, so spending lots of time on repetitions to get them right is not worth it.

zozbot234 7y ago

Strictly speaking, you don't need to keep up with any fixed review schedule. Anki understands when you're remembering a card that was part of a backlog, and gives you some "extra credit" for the added time interval that you've incurred as a result. This means that these cards will soon be scheduled with very long recall intervals, which in practice helps you clear the backlog fairly quickly. Sure, it's not optimal to miss a scheduled recall because then you might forget the card, which is quite bad. But most of the time you'll be doing OK, so it's always worth trying more cards.

jldugger 7y ago

There's probably a masterclass in the making regarding this, but the Anki defaults can and probably should be tuned. In particular, the multiplier for time between reviews should be tuned until you're hitting about 80 percent successful reviews. I've doubled mine and it really helped. I think there's also a setting to limit new cards based on review size, and that also helps avoid review hell. I imagine it's not the default because a popular use case is students in courses where there are high stakes deadlines.

andrewzah 7y ago
It's kind of well known that anki has some seriously bad defaults for long term studying. Not to plug myself but I've written about this at length. [0] There are a few big issues, but the easiest one to fix is the reset interval. When you forget a word that you're reviewing (that is, when you hit "Again"), anki resets the interval to 0%, as if it were a totally new card. This is bad for 2 reasons. 1) A lapse is not the same as learning a completely new word. When you review a lapsed card you're just refreshing that connection that you've already made. So it's wasteful to completely reset the interval unless you've really totally forgotten the word. 2) The interval reset can be huge (going from 7 months to 1 day) so it makes it tempting to just hit "Hard" instead. I know I've done that. The fix here is to set a more reasonable reset value like 40-60%. I use 45%. --- The other big issue is the algorithm works differently than you would expect. I discuss this in more detail in my post, but essentially anki gives each card a modifier value. Starting at 250%. Every time you hit Again/Hard/Easy, it -- permanently -- modifies this card. This is quite unintuitive! When people grade a card, they're really grading their own memory / ability to recall. Not how hard the card itself is. Why is this bad? Because if you hit "Hard" a lot, then you're seriously capping the interval growth rate for a word. In other words you'll see it way more often than you need to. Most people don't hit "hard", -then- "easy" once they learn it. A lot of people I know hit "hard" to be on the safe side instead of "good", purely out of habit. This picture explains why a low modifier is bad. [1] The way I fix this is by using 2 plugins: the first makes grading buttons not modify a card's modifier, and the second one resets ALL cards to 250%. Low-Key anki goes over this in detail. [2] However! This fix assumes a relatively homogeneous deck in terms of card difficulty. I.e. words for a language. If you're studying, say, algorithms or something where the difficulty may be heterogeneous, then you may want anki's default behavior. [0]: https://andrewzah.com/posts/better-anki-usage-guide-2019/ https://andrewzah.com/posts/better-anki-usage-guide-2019/ [1]: https://s3.amazonaws.com/andrewzah.com/posts/017/ease-example.jpg https://s3.amazonaws.com/andrewzah.com/posts/017/ease-exampl... [2]: https://massimmersionapproach.com/table-of-contents/anki/low-key-anki/low-key-anki-no-penalties-or-boosting/ https://massimmersionapproach.com/table-of-contents/anki/low...

kazinator 7y ago

> You can't add 20 new cards a day for any length of time without the review cycle getting overwhelming. 1. You have to take breaks from adding cards, and just be in review mode sometimes. 2. You have to tweak the settings. The defaults are bad. For instance, you probably want to adjust the percentage by which a lapsed card's interval shortens. If you lapse on a ten month card, you don't want it resetting to just several days, but say to 50%: five months. Another thing is to tweak the custom intervals to reduce the number of initial reviews for newly added cards, and also tweak the interval steps for lapsed cards to control how many times a card is reviewed before being returned into the deck.

gentleman11 7y ago

I have over 13k cards and kept up with it for a couple of years. I haven’t reviewed a card in months though. It’s exhausting to keep up! The real key is to have a long commute every day where you get to review on the train. My commute got shorter this year haha

jeffshek 7y ago

How large is your deck? I'm at 14k (which is considered a reasonable size). I definitely do average about 30 minutes + a day, but the productivity at work has helped me much more. I've thought about this quite a bit and written about strategies and tips here: https://senrigan.io/blog/everything-i-know-strategies-tips-and-tricks-for-spaced-repetition-anki/ https://senrigan.io/blog/everything-i-know-strategies-tips-a... A large part is also now using the proper visualization techniques (ie. using intensive memories, an anecdotal use case is I've memorized certain ideas behind neural networks by always putting them in a "closet"). This helps. Truncation of dumb cards is useful. Another really important thing is just to delete an entire deck (which I've done), when I realized I frankly ... just don't care about the subject any more (in this case, music composition).