Yesterday I was so busy with work I didn't touch anki. I can't remember the last time I truly did 0 reviews in anki - it's probably been over a year. 

Anyway, today I woke up and was like "I'm still busy with work. But maybe I can watch or read something in Japanese to get some fun practice." 

But the anki reviews have, of course, stacked up. So I feel like "I really should" be working on the anki reviews, even though I'd rather just have some fun practice. But if I do that, the reviews, of course, will just stack higher tomorrow.

I'm guessing I'm not the only person who's had this problem. How have you guys handled it? I just decided to change it so I'm not adding any new cards for a while.

There's a couple of things that have helped me.

* More frequent step intervals. yogert909 and others gave really good advice on this here: http://forum.koohii.com/post-221597.html. These settings help your retention rate, and thus you fail fewer cards, and thus your reviews don't pile up as badly.
* Controlled add. I don't add any new cards by default. I finish my reviews, and add 5, 10, or 20 cards a day as I feel I have time. I don't add any new cards if my review rate dips below 90%.
* Incomplete cards. Related to Controlled Add, it helps here that my cards, as added, are unfinished. I import just the word and the English def from Midori. I don't add new cards unless I have time to add Japanese definitions and research example sentences on yourei.jp. I initially did this because I didn't like some of the auto-defs and examples that I was getting with Epwing2Anki. But a positive consequence of this is that I spend more time studying new words and seeing them in context as I add them to Anki, which also lowers my failure rate.
* Limited add. I don't add things into Anki I find frequently in my reading, as those will already be reinforced by extensive reading.
* Low leech setting. If I fail a card five times, it's suspended. I can always un-suspend later if I run out of new words (HA HA HA).

Basically, I take the attitude that Anki is an assist to my learning, and that my main work with Japanese is extensive exposure to the language. If daily Anki usage pops over 30 minutes, I control for it by not adding new cards, suspending leeches, etc.

More advice here: http://forum.koohii.com/thread-7513.html

I just suck it up and do them. Of course, my reviews only total up to about 80/day, so it's not that bad if I miss a day.

I always hated the idea of limiting the number of reviews though; if I'm not going to do all of them, then I'm going to let those numbers stay in the counter. It ends up the same either way, but limiting the reviews just feels like I'm lying to myself.

I've all but stopped adding new cards since I finished adding from Core10k and my grammar decks, and it's nice to not have to worry about Anki so much...

So yeah, I suggest lowering the amount of new cards for a while, if you want to decrease the time spent on Anki. Of course, this is more or less effective, depending on how many cards you add now.

How much time do you usually spend in Anki? I usually only needed around an hour, depending on how many new cards I was adding.

(9 hours ago)gaiaslastlaugh Wrote: There's a couple of things that have helped me.

* More frequent step intervals. yogert909 and others gave really good advice on this here: http://forum.koohii.com/post-221597.html. These settings help your retention rate, and thus you fail fewer cards, and thus your reviews don't pile up as badly.

With that many steps, doesn't adding cards become quite the chore? I mean, do 600 learning steps even help that much in the long run? I'm not saying that doesn't help, but at least in my case I almost never fail new cards the day after I added them. It only gets tricky a little after that depending on the word.

My learning steps currently are 1 30 31 32 and think that's a lot of steps sometimes. So if I don't have any easy cards anymore, I change the easy interval to 1 day to skip whatever feels unnecessary to review yet again. This gives me room to choose, otherwise it's impossible to review more difficult cards one extra time unless you fail them and start over.

More often than not, I take a lot longer than 30 minutes to see a new word again. It could be 1h, 2h, etc. 30 minutes is really the minimum threshold to avoid reviewing new words a second time before I finish the other ones. If I'm adding a ton of new words, like 50+, I make sure to change these steps to 50 51 52 or something appropriate. This also gives me some time to think up a couple of mnemonics to recall new readings if I feel the need and happened not to have done so in advance.

(8 hours ago)FlameseeK Wrote:

(9 hours ago)gaiaslastlaugh Wrote: There's a couple of things that have helped me.

* More frequent step intervals. yogert909 and others gave really good advice on this here: http://forum.koohii.com/post-221597.html. These settings help your retention rate, and thus you fail fewer cards, and thus your reviews don't pile up as badly.

With that many steps, doesn't adding cards become quite the chore? I mean, do 600 learning steps even help that much in the long run? I'm not saying that doesn't help, but at least in my case I almost never fail new cards the day after I added them. It only gets tricky a little after that depending on the word.

My steps are 0.5 15 60 180 600 1440. It hasn't proven to be a chore with the current deck, and I find the more frequent exposure early on to be very helpful. 

I never fail them on the first outing either.

If I get frustrated with Anki and want to take a break, it's okay. I can put it down for a couple of days, and come back to it.

If the deck is a pain in the neck to review, then it's on me to structure the deck in a way so that it's faster/easier to review. My current deck is really easy to review, as in 15 reviews/minute fast, so I can get 500-800 reviews behind and not really get too worked up about it.

I learned this lesson the hard way: I used to have long-ass sentences for cards. Reviewing was brutal, I hated it, and I quit Anki for a couple of years because of it. Now reviews are mostly vocab with an optional short sentence if I want, and it's like butter.

If I get burnt out on anki I usually "take my temperature" to determine exactly what is causing me to feel that way. Am I getting discouraged by failing a lot of cards? Is it taking too long to finish reviews? There are a few parameters that you can change to make things a little better.

Failing too many cards: Look at your "Answer buttons" chart to see if it's mature cards or learning that are causing the problem. If mature card accuracy is lower than learning, then adjust starting ease and/or interval multiplier to increase your mature accuracy. If it's learning cards that have a lower accuracy, increase the number of learning steps. It will increase the number of reviews, but your accuracy will improve partially offsetting the extra number of reviews, and overall it will be more fun to review.

Reviews taking too long: Stop adding new cards. If reviews don't fall fast enough, you can adjust your settings to see cards less often. Basically do the reverse of what I suggested above. Number of reviews will decrease, but so will accuracy. Peak efficiency is around 70% accuracy, so you can learn more cards by keeping your accuracy low, but it's a trade-off between less workload and feeling good about better accuracy.

Reviews still taking too long but I don't want to forget anything: Now you have to triage which cards to study. If you don't study cards you just learned, you will forget them. If you don't study long matured cards on schedule you'll probably remember them if you study them a few weeks later. So why not create a filtered deck with ivl<21 to skip the mature cards for now. You'll have to study the backlog eventually, but it'll give you a break and anki will take the actual interval into consideration when setting the next interval, so the overall workload end up being less.

Reviews still taking too long and I'm ok with forgetting a few cards to lower my workload: Triage the cards the opposite as I mentioned above and only study the mature cards (or ivl<10 or whatever). The majority of the cards in your deck are mature, but thanks to the magic of srs, make up a tiny fraction of your daily workload. You can study the mature cards assured that you won't forget most of your cards. Young cards make up the bulk of your daily workload, but comprise a tiny fraction of your known cards. If you are going to skip some cards for long periods of time it's probably best to risk forgetting these cards and simply re-learn them when you are feeling more up to it.

I hope this gives you some ideas.

I've set a 200 review cap so that I don't have to see the backlog. As long as my reviews are max, I don't really worry about adding cards at all. Mostly I just don't, but sometimes I do if I stay backlogged for a long time, just to make the deck feel fresher.

I used to get motivated to clear my backlog and add more cards when I hit a particularly rough patch of native material where it felt like I was looking up tons of words, but that doesn't happen very often anymore. Which is good that I've made that progress, but I need to find some new motivation now because I'm pretty sure I could still benefit from regular reviews and building my deck (I don't read enough per day to feel comfortable that I can maintain my knowledge without SRS.)

(7 hours ago)rich_f Wrote: I learned this lesson the hard way: I used to have long-ass sentences for cards. Reviewing was brutal, I hated it, and I quit Anki for a couple of years because of it. Now reviews are mostly vocab with an optional short sentence if I want, and it's like butter.

This too. Although my sentences aren't optional, some time ago I stopped trying to 'mine' sentences from native material or whatever. Almost all the sentences I use now come from the Shogakukan progressive dictionary, because it's the one that is used on dic.yahoo.co.jp and dictionary.goo.ne.jp ... and using an online dictionary lets me auto-add with Rikai-sama

The dictionary is a great source of short, concise, illustrative sentences. My ideal sentence is around 5 words (including 1 or 2 particles), and demonstrates usage without giving enough context to give away the meaning of the word completely.

Long sentences from native material were very interesting and motivating for the first few times I reviewed them, but eventually just became a burden. I could just ignore the sentence (the word is highlighted after all), but then the sentence isn't doing me any good at all!

Throw away your pride and review. Mercilessly mark cards wrong. Accept that you are ignorant about many things, and you will learn many things...

...is what I tell myself all the time when I flunk a bunch of cards I should know already!

I would LOVE to add sentences from my favorite e-books or Kindle books, but that sounds like too much of a PITA, and it falls too far to the extreme part of the, "Spending more time making cards than reviewing them" curve. (Or worse, "Spending more time researching HOW to make cards than making OR reviewing them.")

Thanks for all the replies guys.

What I realized is just that I have a very difficult, high pressure project at work right now, and it's just a lot more important to me than Japanese. I might just have to hold off on all reviews for a while until this project is done.

C'est la vie.

(4 hours ago)rich_f Wrote: I would LOVE to add sentences from my favorite e-books or Kindle books, but that sounds like too much of a PITA, and it falls too far to the extreme part of the, "Spending more time making cards than reviewing them" curve. (Or worse, "Spending more time researching HOW to make cards than making OR reviewing them.")

If you just want to bulk add an entire text with one sentence on each card, it's is very easy. Just convert with an online ebook converter then open in a text editor and replace all of the periods with a period followed by a return. (You can copy paste the return character from somewhere). Then save the text and import into anki.

If you want to quickly add google translations, an easy way is to paste into a google spreadsheet and type =googletranslate(A1) into cell B1 (assuming your sentences are in column A). Then copy cell B1 and paste it into all of the other cells in column B. Then copy all and paste back into a text file and import that into anki.

It's truely only a few minutes.

(3 hours ago)ariariari Wrote: Thanks for all the replies guys.

What I realized is just that I have a very difficult, high pressure project at work right now, and it's just a lot more important to me than Japanese. I might just have to hold off on all reviews for a while until this project is done.

C'est la vie.

I know what you mean.  I just had one of those projects last month.  Luckily it was only 9 days, but oh what a 9 days it was.  Basically only sleeping a few hours a night and then rushing back to work to play catch-up.  It took my anki decks close to a month to recover and I'm still feeling the lingering effects of it.  At least the project was fun, I hope yours is too.