I've started using a metronome when SRSing and the effects have been great so I thought I'd share: I set it to 2 seconds and give myself no longer than that to get the answer, and then no longer than that to decide if I got it right. If I don't need the full 2 seconds I move on and consider the time before the next beat as extra thinking time for the following card. (If I need it)

Of course I fail some cards I wouldn't normally, but this pales in comparison to the time saved. My day's correct mature is 76.6, which is actually pretty good considering I'm working my way through a pile of 1300 cards from a deck I'd basically abandoned.

Someone's mentioned something similar before, but it's so useful it bears repeating and iirc they were using much longer time limits. (10secs?)

Edit: http://www.webmetronome.com/

I really like seeing ideas to speed up reviews like this. Though whenever I try to speed through my reviews I always get a large portion of them wrong. How do you score a vocab card that within that 2 seconds you recall the meaning but slightly mess up the pronunciation? （例）挑発 read as「ちゅうはつ」instead of 「ちょうはつ」
Mistakes like these make up the majority of my misses.

By having separate cards for meaning and pronunciation. Limiting your cards to testing one thing each makes the whole experience quicker and easier, and allows you to spend more time on just the aspects that are causing you trouble.

A time limit is a great idea. It'd prevent me from dawdling stubbornly on cards I can't answer, which ironically causes my attention to wander.

Ideally I'd want to use an anki add-on that can set a countdown on review cards only. Anki does have a "show answer timer" option but it works more like a stopwatch to tell you how long you've been looking at the same card, but I suppose a metronome is just as well.

I think 2 seconds is a bit too fast, but something like 6 seconds would probably help keep lots of people on track. I tend to aggressively mark things wrong, and work through my reviews quickly anyway. I think my average time on production cards is like 4.5 seconds. On stuff like simple vocab it's around 2.5 seconds.

I do around 500 cards per day, though. So if I start to dawdle then my review time can spiral from 2 hours out to 5 hours if I'm not making sure to keep a fast pace.

Animosophy Wrote:Ideally I'd want to use an anki add-on that can set a countdown on review cards only. Anki does have a "show answer timer" option but it works more like a stopwatch to tell you how long you've been looking at the same card...

I like the idea of a metronome, and doing something like 6-10 seconds per card, but I agree with Animosophy, a configurable add-on would be sweet. Anybody good at writing these?

2 seconds is a completely arbitrary time limit so of course people should find what works for them, but it's more than enough time to read a word you know. There will be cards you fail that you could understand/pronounce if you had more time to think, but if you need more than 2 seconds to read a single word it clearly needs more practice.* By setting a short time limit you avoid wasting time where it's not useful and get more practice on the words that need it.

I admit that 2 seconds felt rushed to me at first, but now that I'm getting used to it I'm considering speeding up. Brains are pretty good at adapting so if you force them to review faster, they will learn to review faster.

*Beginners may well need more time for each word. I imagine if your sensible about adding level appropriate material you can still burn through reviews quickly, but you'll have to try and find out for yourselves.

Splatted, I'm really curious, what kind of cards are you reviewing? For a majority of my reviews, I average maybe 10 seconds a card, but I'm reading full sentences with a highlighted vocab word and audio on the answer side. I guess I can still work on getting my time faster.

Animosophy, There was a great Anki 1 audio timer addon that would ding after a set number of seconds. Sadly I don't think it was ever ported to Anki 2.

[RawToast]

Daichi Wrote:Splatted, I'm really curious, what kind of cards are you reviewing? For a majority of my reviews, I average maybe 10 seconds a card, but I'm reading full sentences with a highlighted vocab word and audio on the answer side. I guess I can still work on getting my time faster.

To cover a card in 2 seconds, I would imagine he is SRSing single word vocab recognition cards. Still I only average 7.9s on Vocab according to Anki. I'd say I get most cards under 5s, but the odd one has me thinking for longer.

You can set Anki to ignore answer times above a threshold. On Ankidroid you can set 'Automatic display answer' under 'Reviewing' for each deck. It's quite useful as you can set it how long you get to answer and how long you get before it moves on to the next card.

I SRS single word vocab recognition cards with sentences to help when necessary. My average time right now is 5.5 sec/card. That means roughly 20 minutes for +-200 cards. I rarely look at the sentences. My mature success rate averages around 88% and young card success rate somewhere above 90%.

I only spend more than 5 seconds on new cards. I'm sure I could benefit from focusing on individual words a bit longer but I'll let native materials sort out the weak spots.

You just have to focus on not getting stuck on a card and moving on no matter what happens. Every single word in your deck will become second nature sooner or later.

I don't use Anki, but controlling the duration of exposure to items (or like playing back lists of items in different ways) has been one of the biggest improvements to my learning methods.

I'm currently reviewing vocabulary by listening to audio files for the words (concatenated to a single audio file with pauses) while reading kanji versions and translations on an HTML page. I often also add pauses after groups of words and try to read the words in the group for a second time during them. Like I might add a 1.5 second pause between most audio files but an 8 second pause between every sixth audio file.

Reviewing 100 words takes about 2-6 minutes depending on the length of the pauses, but it can't really be compared to Anki review times.

(Relating topic to running...)

I listen to songs that are 60bpm during long runs. Although the average cadence for a runner is 90, any consistent beat helps you keep your rhythm/focus.

Daichi Wrote:Splatted, I'm really curious, what kind of cards are you reviewing? For a majority of my reviews, I average maybe 10 seconds a card, but I'm reading full sentences with a highlighted vocab word and audio on the answer side. I guess I can still work on getting my time faster.

I probably should have mentioned that, but RawToast guessed right; I use rikai-sama to create a vocab deck with separate cards for meaning and pronunciation, and no audio or production. Here's an example of the format:

Meaning

かお
顔
ーーーーーーー
Face

Pronunciation

Face
顔
ーーーーーーー
かお

People should definitely adjust the time to what suits their card type, and it may not be suited for sentences unless they're very uniform in length, but I suspect that some of those who think 30bpm is too fast would be pleasantly surprised if they tried it. Also, it's not 2 seconds per card, but no more than 2 seconds + any left over time from the previous 2 seconds for each side of the card. That normally means more time on the front than the back, and amounts to approximately 4 seconds per card, which is where I got my 100 cards in 6.6 minutes figure from. When a group of easy cards come up it's not unusual to go faster than the metronome though, so the actual review time is a little less.

For people using more than one sentence and monolingual definitions on the back of their cards it is impossible to process and internalise all the information on one card within two seconds.. Plus, I personally find the sound of the metronome extremely annoying.

Well I did say people should adjust the timing to suit their card type and that it may not be suitable for sentences at all, so I'm not really sure what your point is.

Reviving this thread because I've tried something like this and its making a huge difference. But first I gotta vouch for a few things:

- two seconds isn't enough, even for easy cards
-metronomes are annoying
-metronomes don't go slow enough (physical ones go down to around 40 bpm or 1.5 seconds)
-you need 1 tick per review because dividing ticks while doing reviews is too confusing
-this might not be for beginners because the cards need to be somewhat familiar already

So what I started doing is using the "marimba" alarm from my ipad. I just leave that playing in the background. It has a pattern that repeats in around exactly 10 seconds (I timed it), and it goes like '-..-' where - is a rest and . is the sound. So you aim for 1 review for each time the marimbas sound, and then there is a bit of a break for you to mentally prepare for the next two because it goes like '..--..--..--..--..--'. Sometimes I'll try to squeeze a review in during the two -- and sometimes I'll just get one review in for the two .. but the point is, it lets you know when you're stagnating. I don't automatically fail myself usually, but if its sounded 3 or 4 times since I started, I know its time to fail it and move on. And you'd think this might be strenuous, but it isn't really at all. 5 seconds is actually quite comfortable. I don't take breaks either, I just power through and finish all my old cards like this.

I find the marimbas less annoying as the incessant 'tick tock tick tock' of a metronome, but I think the sound you use could be anything with a repeating pattern. My old average was near 9 seconds per card, but it is rapidly dropping. I'm getting a steady 50 per 5 minutes now. That's around 6 seconds each. Might not sound like a lot but 6 to 9 is 50% more, and if you've got a big stack of reviews, that's a pretty big chunk of your day (especially considering I used to sometimes space out and go over 1 minute and that isn't even counted in the average).

So yeah, I'd recommend this to anyone who has large review pileups and difficulties maintaining focus. It made a pretty big difference for me.