Long story short, as the title says I have a HUGE pile of expired cards in Anki.
My excuse is that I found myself without energy due to a combination of a part-time job and the writing of my MA thesis, but the fact of the matter is that I haven't touched japanese since december.

I'm finishing now the last pages, so I have a little more time, but we're talking about 3000-4000 vocab cards, 1500-2000 rtk, and a bunch of grammar ones. I've found myself in this situation before, but with a much lower amount, so it took just a few days of total immersion to get back to the normal routine. Now I don't know if it's best to do all the repetions as quickly as possibile (oh god, the dullness of the weeks ahead ), or to do a fixed amount every day and meanwhile restart the normal reading-adding-studying procedure. I guess the latter option would mean I'll catch up in a century or so...
What's your opinion? The involvement of Anki is the tricky part, I know it's not designed to handle such long (and silly) interruptions.

My advice used to be, "do them all as quickly as possible!!!" But I personally have found that I'm not doing a useful review if I review at a rate of 60-80 cards per minute-- especially after not seeing them for a long time.

My method is simple: Look at how many incoming "to-review" cards are due tomorrow, and then do more successful reviews than that.

If you leave your deck alone, the incoming cards to review is probably very low, so this is an easy method to start shrinking your deck of queued cards. Beyond that, a majority of your cards that you remember will be scheduled for at least a month later if you still remember them all this time, so it's easy to knock them out at a moderate pace.

Anki is about steady, long-term remembering, so don't feel bad if your plan to reduce your queued cards is also steady and long-term.

Oh one more tip! Just suspend/delete those cards that you know you won't remember after two reviews. It's stupid to get bogged down in day after day with words that you can't remember when there's so many words to show anki that you do remember!

[ファブリス]

It doesn't matter just review N cards each day, with whatever time you have. On RevTK you'd "fail" (answer: No) any cards you don't remember, so you don't need to reset the cycle of the ones you still remember. And then you'd go through the failed cards in the Study page as time avails.

On Anki I don't know how you'd separate the ones you want to re-study, but likewise there's no need to reset everything unless after a run you find you don't remember 90% of the characters.

datrukup Wrote:My advice used to be, "do them all as quickly as possible!!!" But I personally have found that I'm not doing a useful review if I review at a rate of 60-80 cards per minute-- especially after not seeing them for a long time.

My method is simple: Look at how many incoming "to-review" cards are due tomorrow, and then do more successful reviews than that.

If you leave your deck alone, the incoming cards to review is probably very low, so this is an easy method to start shrinking your deck of queued cards. Beyond that, a majority of your cards that you remember will be scheduled for at least a month later if you still remember them all this time, so it's easy to knock them out at a moderate pace.

Anki is about steady, long-term remembering, so don't feel bad if your plan to reduce your queued cards is also steady and long-term.

Oh one more tip! Just suspend/delete those cards that you know you won't remember after two reviews. It's stupid to get bogged down in day after day with words that you can't remember when there's so many words to show anki that you do remember!

Yeah, I've also tried that route before, there's only frustration at the end of it, when in the weeks after every repetition takes half a minute due to the fuzziness of your memory.

Anyway, I like your suggestion! I think I'll review the whole rtk deck and the oldest vocab one, cause I remember those best, then I'll do the rest of the work slowly along with the new stuff.

Thanks to you and Fabrice for the answers, yesterday I was a little scared in the face of the Anki Monster.

Yeah, it's doable. I've whittled down 5-6000-card backlogs before. It took 2-3 months, but it's doable. Answer truthfully. Anki only wants to help you remember, and you don't get a prize for the highest percentage.

Conferences where you have to sit for a whole day or three are great for getting a lot of reviews done. Not that I've EVER done that before.

If you still want to add new material, then you can create a separate deck for the new stuff, so you can keep learning, and you won't feel like you're treading water. That was the main mistake I made when I went through that massive backlog-- I didn't add any new cards until I took care of all the old ones, and I felt like my progress slowed down a lot, simply because I wasn't adding cards.

Another idea-- don't let decks get too big. Sure, having one massive deck is useful, but if it's only 500 cards, then you can let the whole deck expire, and you only have to do 500 reviews. Is it a bit dishonest? Yeah, but knocking out two 500-card decks a week feels more motivating to me than going from 6000 in the hole to 5000 in the hole in one massive deck. I feel like I'm getting stuff done when I can cross things off of lists, and this feels like that.

I think that's a little bit of a red herring. That is, the very idea of Japanese being divided into "decks" is misleading.

There are tens of thousands of important words in the language, and you're probably missing a lot of them (as we all are). So even if you caught up with this deck, you'd still have a "backlog" of tens of thousands.

You could just as well think of the Japanese language as one massive deck, and if so, then yeah, you've got an immense backlog.

With that in mind, I'd say forget about the past. And the future as well. Just study every day with a manageable number of cards, and keep going. The way I figure it, I'd be lucky to clear the backlog by the end of my life.

rich_f Wrote:Yeah, it's doable. I've whittled down 5-6000-card backlogs before. It took 2-3 months, but it's doable. Answer truthfully. Anki only wants to help you remember, and you don't get a prize for the highest percentage.

Conferences where you have to sit for a whole day or three are great for getting a lot of reviews done. Not that I've EVER done that before.

Unfortunately I've finished my university classes. Some of them were so boring, that even doing Anki reps seemed fun!

Quote:If you still want to add new material, then you can create a separate deck for the new stuff, so you can keep learning, and you won't feel like you're treading water. That was the main mistake I made when I went through that massive backlog-- I didn't add any new cards until I took care of all the old ones, and I felt like my progress slowed down a lot, simply because I wasn't adding cards.

Yeah, that was my idea too, in the end I think I asked here hoping somebody would respond like you just did... I need justifications!

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:I think that's a little bit of a red herring. That is, the very idea of Japanese being divided into "decks" is misleading.

There are tens of thousands of important words in the language, and you're probably missing a lot of them (as we all are). So even if you caught up with this deck, you'd still have a "backlog" of tens of thousands.

You could just as well think of the Japanese language as one massive deck, and if so, then yeah, you've got an immense backlog.

With that in mind, I'd say forget about the past. And the future as well. Just study every day with a manageable number of cards, and keep going. The way I figure it, I'd be lucky to clear the backlog by the end of my life.

I think I understand what you're saying. The whole "studying decks with Anki" story is a bit artificial anyway.
There's a tendency to consider the deck and our knowledge of its content like they're the same: for example, I'd hesitate to delete a deck, even if I didn't remember anything of it. Though really, what's important is what you actually know.

Anyway, I think I'm going to do this specific backlog: those vocabs are so common, I have to memorize them sooner or later, I might as well do it know with an existing deck.