Shoutout to all the Anki addicts like me who have done way too much repping and not enough reading.

This is an open discussion about limiting time in Anki/SRS, namely by employing two tactics:

1. Setting a leech threshold and (automatically or manually) suspending (or deleting) time-sucking cards.

2. Adding a "maximum reviews/day" number limit.

Which method do you personally think is better?/has the least drawbacks? Do you use both? Neither?

What do you think are the pros and cons of each one?

I want to cut back on the time I'm spending repping so I can interact more with native media, but I want to do it in a manner that does the least amount of damage to the current SRS data/decks I've worked so hard on for over a year. Leech removal and/or a daily rep cap seem like the two best options.

My problem with each one is that:

1. using leeches makes me feel like I've reviewed a card over and over for nothing, making the time I've spent committed to repping come to naught, and that by suspending it I let it indefinitely degrade further in my memory which feels like backwards progress.

2. adding a 'max reps/day' limit creates a backlog, which means that many words aren't showing up when they're supposed to and therefore creates a (slightly? significantly?) lower retention rate, which is of course undesirable.

I'm not asking for personal advice tailored to my own situation (which has gotten pretty bad in the retention rate department, dear me let's not even go there), but rather asking what everyone's general thoughts and attitudes are about these two settings and the ways you all like to employ them or view them. And of course, if you have an opinion, which one is superior.

Is one better in the long term? What are your own experiences?

And if you think a mix of both is the best solution, what numbers do you use (for leech threshold and review limit) and why?

Edit: And if you REALLY want to get detailed: Would your answer depend on the variables of the deck in question? What variables would you consider relevant? (sentence vs vocab deck, current retention rate, percentage of mature cards, whether new cards are being added and at what rate, whether the deck is premade or custom, etc)

Get rid of those leeches!

The fact that you are spending so much time reviewing them, and you keep forgetting them, means that there's something getting in the way of you learning them; sometimes it's that they're rare and you're not encountering them in reading/media, sometimes it's that the word is too vague and you can't learn it without more context, sometimes it's just too similar to another word you're learning.

Taking several months off is very likely to solve any of those problems. And I think it's better to hurt your retention for words that are probably uncommon and vague in the first place, rather than to hurt your retention for all the words in your deck.

Sometimes it's just impossible to make a word stick through SRS'ing. If you get Anki to suspend those cards it's easy to deal with them later (so it's not like you're giving up on them permanently). But simply SRS'ing them more won't do much good. There is only going to be a limited number of leeches so taking a different approach to these words will definitely be a better use of your time. You might want to try some kind of mnemonic.
Personally, when I encounter a word that just won't stick in my memory through SRS'ing, I usually look it up in a dictionary and read 10 or 20 example sentences. Often it's just a problem with the card: the example sentence might be a bit weird or the word might be exceedingly hard to translate one-to-one into English making the card really confusing. As was mentioned in the above post getting some context can be a great help!
There's no shame in suspending cards if they take up too much of your time, and it can certainly bring down your daily time spend on Anki.

I apologize if this is off-topic but subs2srs is a an awesome tool for bridging the gap between SRS and native materials. We want to eventually wean ourselves off of SRS and concentrate entirely on native materials, right?

Leech removal. Definitely no rep cap.

It's not even a better/less good proposition, it's a helpful vs. totally counter-productive, make yourself frustrated on purpose and ruin the point of the whole system proposition.

I just delete cards that annoy me as I do my reps. But you can also set your leech threshold low, if you wanna be more scientific about it. I guess my method depends a lot on my mood on any given day. Sometimes I delete a lot, sometimes I work my way through all the cards I fail.

Stansfield123 Wrote:Leech removal. Definitely no rep cap.

+1 on this.^

I hear you about the leeches. But once I noticed that I had a few leeches that had 15 fails and I was nowhere close to remembering it for good. I realized that after 7 or 8 fails, a card was likely to fail a bunch more times. Why not send that time learning something that sticks better. I can go back and study the leeches later. On top of it, it is a lot more fun to study a bunch of easy cards instead of a card that I still can't make stick. It'll probably stick better after learning a bunch of other words. Now I'm actually happy when cards get suspended as leeches. You can suspend them immediately by searching in the browser "prop:lapses>7" select all, and suspend.

You are right about the rep cap. Anki's algorithm is tweaked to show you the card at the right time. Why arbitrarily see some of your cards in a less efficient order? why? If for some reason you don't have time to study all your cards, stop adding new ones! If you still find that you can't get through all your reviews, here's a trick for you. Set anki to show you your cards "lowest interval first". This way, you'll see all your 1 and 2 day intervals first and who cares if you miss the 30 day card when you can do it in 31 days..but you'll still have the same overall workload.

So if you want to spend less time SRSing: Kill the leeches and stop adding new cards. Reps go down pretty quickly after you stop adding. There are no other shortcuts that Im aware of.

Yeah remove the hard cards, only review the easy cards, and make no progress ever!

Sorry but why are people encouraging this type of behavior?

FWIW,

In Supermemo 15 the default number of fails before a card becomes a leech is 6. When I moved to Anki 1 from Supermemo, I couldn't believe that the Anki count was 16(!).

The hardest thing for me to 'get' with Anki is that suspending a leech is NOT defeat. It's a tactical retreat..

Typically for a vocab sentence deck, I would actually make another new card that had a different example sentence for the leech word. Leeches just mean you need more exposure to it than Anki is currently giving you. So adding a new card with another example sentence can give you more opportunities to reinforce it.

So if you have both cards due on the same day then you fail it the first time you see it. You get it the second time, and you end up seeing it every day for a bit. Though, you see it in different contexts so it becomes less demoralizing.

If it's a kanji compound then you can also scaffold it in other ways. Add words that are similar in meaning or add other different words that use the same kanji and the same reading.

So instead of just deleting the cards the strategy I used is to add new cards that help reinforce the aspects you're having trouble with.

The other piece of advice I would give about leeches in Anki is that there's not really any science behind the details of how Anki implements spaced repetition. How you define a leech for yourself might very well be different from how Anki defines it. For some people who are insane a leech might be 3 fails in a row. For people like me who don't want to spend a lot of time micromanaging or worrying about Anki, the threshold is like 20+.

Some words are more difficult to remember than others. They take more exposures. Anki's definition of a "leech" comes down to however Damien felt that day when he added that feature. Think about whether or not you agree with the value judgement Anki is making for you.

I don't understand how you could be spending a lot of time on leeches. If 10 of your cards are leeches every day, and each card takes about 20 seconds then that comes down to only a few extra minutes. That doesn't seem like a big deal to me, and you will probably eventually learn them.

Doing your regular cards faster will decrease your average review time a lot more than whatever you do with leeches. My average time spent on a card in total is 35 seconds. 1890 out of 2057 cards are mature.

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zurisu Wrote:1. using leeches makes me feel like I've reviewed a card over and over for nothing, making the time I've spent committed to repping come to naught, and that by suspending it I let it indefinitely degrade further in my memory which feels like backwards progress.

Quote:Yeah remove the hard cards, only review the easy cards, and make no progress ever!

Sorry but why are people encouraging this type of behavior?

You're thinking about leeches in the wrong way, I used to have the exact same thought process

If you find yourself continuously failing a card (or getting it to 5-10 days and failing), then Anki alone isn't doing the job (at the moment) for that particular card. Then you end up in a cycle of failure, trying to remember the card again and again (insanity sounds familiar). Instead you should just let Anki suspend the card for now and continue with your deck -- don't worry about not being able to remember the word right now.

Once you've reached a certain goal or finished the deck, go back and enable the leeches. You will find that some of the leeches now stick -- perhaps due to native exposure, another deck (e.g. grammar/sentences), knowing the Kanji readings, similar words, etc.

Alternatively, as erlog suggests, add some more cards that help with the problem cards. For example, make some new grammar/sentence cards that include the problem word; or add words with the individual Kanji that have similar readings/meanings.

e.g. If 怪獣 is a problem, then try adding cards for vocab that contains the components, such as 怪, 怪獣映画, or 珍獣.

^That example reminds me of my constant struggling with the word 動物園 without knowing 動物 when starting out. :p

My solution, however, was deleting my decks and uninstalling Anki, because I felt that it became more effort that it was worth. I avoided extensive reading and listening and focused on more Anki-friendly immersion (i.e. with mineable sentences).

Stian Wrote:^That example reminds me of my constant struggling with the word 動物園 without knowing 動物 when starting out. :p

I recently added 蛍烏賊 (firefly squid, never having seen either word in kanji before) and split it in two the same day because I consistently failed to remember it for even 10 minutes.