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Your Anki setup? My reviews are taking up a lot of time! Tweet

2011-03-21, 12:55 pm #1
joeschmo88 Joined: Mar 2010
Junior Member Posts: 8
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Hi folks, just wanted to know how is your Anki study options setup? Currently I'm at 640 kanji and I am using
the default settings of Anki. However, recently I noticed that my reviews are taking really long now. Maybe in
total about 4-5 hrs (with timeboxing). Obviously the more cards, the more reviews. But I noticed that it is due
to the Max Failed cards. Whenever I hit the 20 failed cards, Anki goes back to the failed cards, tests me,
however I don't remember any of them so I keep looping around these 20 cards until I nally remember one.
Now my failed cards are at 19. Then Anki switches over to the review pile and I don't that one either. Now I'm
at 20 failed cards again and the loop starts all over. This is frustrating and time consuming!

Is it best to just review all the failed cards at the end? I guess my overall question is how is your review setup?
And what is your routine for reviewing? How long on average were your reviews in total (without breaks)?
What worked for you?

Hopefully I can implement what advice you have and see if it works for me. It really is de-motivating knowing
that my reviews take up most of the day with my current setup.

Thanks!

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2011-03-21, 1:02 pm #2
jettyke Joined: Apr 2008
Posting Freak Posts: 1,185
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http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...5#pid59295
might help you

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2011-03-21, 1:25 pm #3
KMDES Joined: Sep 2009
Senior Member Posts: 304
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Here's a little advice involving science. I've been studying about ecient ways to SRS and studies have shown
that you can forget something in as little time as under 30 seconds (right down to a few seconds) and these
should be repeated within that time frame lest they be lost. Also, you tend to only remember 7 things at one
time (closer to 3-4 when we're talking words and not numbers.) Also, after you've forgot something, your
neurons eectively basicaly reset and it's like you've never learned it at all (because according to your brain,
you haven't) and have to start from scratch for the learning process (this isn't including stu like "I knew it! It
was just on the tip of my tongue" or cue dependant forgetting)

So let's do the math. You have 20 failed cards, that's more than 3-4 let alone 7. It's also gonna take you much

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longer than 30 seconds before see the rst card you failed again, which then you brain gures was
unimportant and has reset that neuron basically causing a vicious cycle which you are experiencing.

My advice? If you run into a card while reviewing and you can't remember it at all and are basically just
straightout failing it, treat it like as if you've never did that kanji before and do your RTK learning method again
like it's your rst time ever doing that kanji. You may think this s a waste of time, but consider how much time
you're wasting on failed cards. It shouldn't take you more than 5 seconds a card if you've been encoding them
properly as it's more of a matter of how fast you can review than how hard it is to remember if done properly.

Edited: 2011-03-21, 1:26 pm Reply

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2011-03-21, 2:11 pm #4
prink Joined: Nov 2010
Member Posts: 198
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Mine used to take a little over four hours as well. I'm down to about two hours now. I changed my reviews to
largest interval rst (to clear out the ones I don't have trouble with), and I set it to no limit for failed cards. I
don't let Anki suspend leeches on its own, but I do suspend leeches on my own (very, very rarely). I set failed
cards to reappear every ten minutes, and I often have 10-20 cards in my failed cards at the end of the day.
When I'm done with reviews and new cards, I go through my failed cards until Anki says I'm done. When I'm
done, I sometimes still have 10-20 failed cards. Sometimes I leave them for tomorrow. Sometimes I come back
in ten minutes or a couple hours depending on how I feel. I add 40 new cards daily (I'm trying to pass a test in
the fall), and my averages are 2.1 hours a day and 258 cards a day.

Oh yeah, when I'm stuck on a card, a lot of times I'll practice it for several minutes before trying to move on.

Edited: 2011-03-21, 2:13 pm Reply

2011-03-21, 3:36 pm #5
IceCream Joined: May 2009
Banned Posts: 1,319

if you go into -settings, -deck properties, -advanced, you should see a line saying "maximum failed cards". If
you set that at a lower number, (say, 5), and then play with the show failed cards setting until it doesn't spread
them through the reviews (i think it might be "show new cards after all other cards + show failed cards now,
but i'm not sure), that should x your problem

Edited: 2011-03-21, 3:37 pm Reply

2011-03-21, 4:13 pm #6
kainzero Joined: Aug 2009
Posting Freak Posts: 947
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When I did RTK...

I used default settings.

At rst I did not make stories. Horrible mistake, my retention rate was 50%. Once I added stories it got back up
to 70-80%.

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Every time I was presented with the keyword, I write the kanji on a piece of paper. If I had 20 fails, well, I could
look on my paper and see all the characters. If I failed, I would refresh the story in my head.

For review time, I would do about half an hour at work during lunch, and another half hour at home. It would
never take more than that. There were times when I'd take breaks and be faced with 300+ kanji, but adding
extra 15-minute sessions took care of that.

As I've switched to vocabulary and no longer do RTK, if I fail a sentence because I didn't understand a word, I
write that word down.

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2011-03-21, 4:40 pm #7
erlog Joined: Jan 2007
Senior Member Posts: 668
Thanks: 2
Website

kainzero Wrote:

As I've switched to vocabulary and no longer do RTK, if I fail a sentence because I didn't understand a word, I write that word
down.

To expand on this idea. There's some words like, for instance, that I just cannot ram through my head.
What I do in cases like this is try to add more exposure of them to my deck. So instead of there just being 1
out of 1200 cards that has a word with that sentence on it, now there's 2. So I'll encounter it just slightly more
often, and a lot of times this is enough to push a word like that over the edge into "known" territory.

I'm not sure how to apply this to RTK at all, but I thought it was an interesting way to go about it.

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2011-03-21, 6:19 pm #8
aphasiac Joined: Mar 2009
Posting Freak Posts: 1,017
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joeschmo88 Wrote:

Is it best to just review all the failed cards at the end? I guess my overall question is how is your review setup? And what is
your routine for reviewing? How long on average were your reviews in total (without breaks)? What worked for you?

I recommend changing to the setting "show failed cards soon". This means failed cards pop up again 1-2
minutes after you've failed them, while they're still fresh in memory. This re-learn -> re-review helps me learn
even the trickiest cards.

Also how is you leech setting now? Maybe set it to suspend cards after 5 failures; there's no point spending so
much time on only a few problem cards in your deck.

Personally my vocab deck is really quick - maybe 15-20mins to review 120+ cards and 20 new ones (set to
"spread new cards out through reviews"). Sentences take longer - maybe 1 hour, but I usually do them in 2
sets (as they're quite tiring/dull).

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2011-03-21, 6:53 pm #9
Cranks Joined: Oct 2010
Senior Member Posts: 468
Thanks: 0

A lot of it is how well you remember the item you're learning. Personally, when I was repping a lot of
vocabulary I used a cram deck. I'm not really sure though if that is a good idea anymore, but it did create a

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strong memory, which made my reps a lot easier.

Other things you could do is reduce the number of reps you do by adding less and deleting everything over a
certain interval that you don't think you'll forget.

If you are truly overloaded, you could also start again by rescheduling all of your due cards as new cards.

Whatever you do, good luck. I think that Anki burnout is all too common among those that use it and it is
probably something that is a part of using such a system of learning (it oers great gifts, but takes from us at
the same time - much like alcohol.)

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2011-03-21, 6:58 pm #10

Cranks Joined: Oct 2010
Senior Member Posts: 468
Thanks: 0

Looking at your specic problem, I would say you might want to try to set anki up so that you show failed
cards last. Then do your reps and go through the failed stu. Do this for three days and whatever is left in
your failed pile on day 3 are reset as a new cards and marked. This way you can cut out the 20% of cards that
will likely be the ones that you keep getting stuck on and keep having to re-review until you understand them
and make progress on the cards you are doing well with, which will cut down your overall rep time.

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2011-03-21, 7:31 pm #11

prink Joined: Nov 2010
Member Posts: 198
Thanks: 0

aphasiac Wrote:

joeschmo88 Wrote:

Is it best to just review all the failed cards at the end? I guess my overall question is how is your review setup? And what
is your routine for reviewing? How long on average were your reviews in total (without breaks)? What worked for you?

I recommend changing to the setting "show failed cards soon". This means failed cards pop up again 1-2 minutes after
you've failed them, while they're still fresh in memory.

I think he'd be more likely to forget it the next day though.

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2011-03-23, 3:52 pm #12

joeschmo88 Joined: Mar 2010
Junior Member Posts: 8
Thanks: 0

Thanks guys for all your advice. I've been doing a lot better after setting up Anki to show all the failed cards at
the end. Starting out with the new setup (about the same day I started this thread), I was around 80-90 failed
cards out of maybe 130-150 initial reviews. Kainzero, I followed one of your advice to just simply refresh the
story in my head for the ones I failed. It took a while to do but in the end it was denitely worth it! Now after a
couple of days, my review today ended up with 33/133 failed cards. That's about 75% retention. A lot better
than before. I'm also breaking up my reviews into 30 card chunks throughout the day after reading the link
about SRS workow.

Oh I forgot to mention that I was trying to do the "Lazy SRS Method" on AJATT, apparently the lazy way was not
working for me.

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