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A prioritized queue of stuff to learn may be a better solution than staring at "over 9000" things to review. Such a queue would mean you simply bite off as much

A prioritized queue of stuff to learn may be a better solution than staring at "over 9000" things to review. Such a queue would mean you simply bite off as much as you can chew every day and don't perpetually fall behind, assuming the priority queue has a small degree of randomness and is recomputed daily based on the decay rate of all modeled facts. Do you agree?

thrown_22 4y ago
It doesn't help. The rate at which you can add new items is the inverse of the review period. What you're effectively doing is increasing the review interval, but you will still run into the fact that the number of items you can remove from the queue is finite. Eventually you will have only interesting items on the end of the queue equal to the number of items you can review. You're now back at square one: you don't have the time to add any new items. The only way to deal with this is to review items a finite number of times and hope for the best.
- zozbot234 4y ago
  When you're working on clearing away a backlog, your review periods should get bigger because Anki will give you "credit" for recalling these items longer. So it seems like reviews should be manageable as long as you're not forgetting too much. And Anki will always prioritize the items you're at highest risk of forgetting.
  - thrown_22 4y ago
    It still doesn't work for the reason OP said. Your time between reviews reaches infinity regardless.
martindbp 4y ago
I think it can help to keep things less overwhelming. But what I'm trying now is to ruthlessly suspend any card that I get wrong even once after the learning phase (i.e. the day after). I've noticed that some words stick much easier than others, there might be an 80/20 kind of distribution where 20% of the words are responsible for 80% of the time spent. In that case it might be better to add a bunch of words every day and then suspend the ones that don't stick very easily. The idea being that they'll stick more easily at a later point, at least this has been my experience with Chinese. Actually I'm going to dig through my Anki database and see if my hunch is right. Edit: it's more like 25% of the cards are responsible for close to 45% of reps. But 25% of the cards are responsible for 58% of review time, and then it's 36/70. That indicates to me that dropping the something like 30% hardest cards would save you a disproportionate amount of time. Of course there's some nuance here where I should probably do this per card type, otherwise you'd just drop the hardest card types.

thrown_22 4y ago

It doesn't help. The rate at which you can add new items is the inverse of the review period. What you're effectively doing is increasing the review interval, but you will still run into the fact that the number of items you can remove from the queue is finite. Eventually you will have only interesting items on the end of the queue equal to the number of items you can review. You're now back at square one: you don't have the time to add any new items. The only way to deal with this is to review items a finite number of times and hope for the best.

zozbot234 4y ago
When you're working on clearing away a backlog, your review periods should get bigger because Anki will give you "credit" for recalling these items longer. So it seems like reviews should be manageable as long as you're not forgetting too much. And Anki will always prioritize the items you're at highest risk of forgetting.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  It still doesn't work for the reason OP said. Your time between reviews reaches infinity regardless.

martindbp 4y ago

I think it can help to keep things less overwhelming. But what I'm trying now is to ruthlessly suspend any card that I get wrong even once after the learning phase (i.e. the day after). I've noticed that some words stick much easier than others, there might be an 80/20 kind of distribution where 20% of the words are responsible for 80% of the time spent. In that case it might be better to add a bunch of words every day and then suspend the ones that don't stick very easily. The idea being that they'll stick more easily at a later point, at least this has been my experience with Chinese. Actually I'm going to dig through my Anki database and see if my hunch is right. Edit: it's more like 25% of the cards are responsible for close to 45% of reps. But 25% of the cards are responsible for 58% of review time, and then it's 36/70. That indicates to me that dropping the something like 30% hardest cards would save you a disproportionate amount of time. Of course there's some nuance here where I should probably do this per card type, otherwise you'd just drop the hardest card types.