Well I have a question for anybody who has fell behind on their reviews. So my story probably follows most who fall behind. I go on vacation and come back to find a pile of reviews, I slack, pile gets bigger. The question is now what?

Currently I have 650 cards piled up. I started reviewing them again, but I'm finding for about 100-200 of them (the newest ones I learned) I have a horrible retention rate. Some sessions I can have an 80-90% retention while others it gets as bad as 50%. So I'm wondering should I continue just reviewing piece by piece or any other advice?

Thanks

My advice: plow through with a set minimum of cards per session. If you fail one more than twice, really study it. Really work on the story. Make it really memorable. Just be sure to go at a steady pace. It'll work itself out eventually.

Overall, though, the best thing to do is to relax and continue on normally Nothing spells burn-out like stress over a big stack of imaginary flashcards.

If you use Anki, just suspend the cards and continue normally unsuspending as you have time.

If you use this site just continue normally while trying reduce the amount of cards due. You could for example write down the number of due cards and the following day you know that your job for the day is just to get back to that number.

Basically try to go back to a normal rhythm of daily reviews before you try to catch up with accumulated due cards.

Welcome "brother train". I do share the same issue: my Anki deck has 642 active cards after a 2,1 month study period. As I knew I would have very little time to study this week, I added about 80 cards in a row last Sunday. Before that, everything was ok, but I rarely added more than 15 cards a day. Since then, I have no less than about 100 cards to review by session and I fail too many of them compared to what I was used to.

Sorry for this question, but where can I see in Anki my failure rate for the last review session done?

I'm shared in between reducing the number of cards by review session or just stop addind new cards till I feel confortable with the review.

Another question: when reviewing, I only click the "4" button very rarely, that is only I'm able to recognize the kanji INSTANTLY as if the kanji was a word from my mother tongue. Should I consider being less hard on myself and validate more kanji as "4", for example if I can draw them within 3 seconds?

stop looking at your failure rates. just put in a set amount of time towards your deck and let it work itself out. within a month you will probably be back on track. maybe even less.

why dont you try setting up anki to show oldests cards first, whittle away at the numbers till you get down the the newer cards, and then work slowly from there?

zazen666 Wrote:why dont you try setting up anki to show oldests cards first, whittle away at the numbers till you get down the the newer cards, and then work slowly from there?

What I did ^^.

Thx for the tip. I feel like an adventurer now I start modifying Anki default settings

I returned from a 3 month abscence, all the piles were 100%-expired except the last one.

how I caught up again:
one evening I quickly ran through the expired cards, ended up with hundreds of failed cards.

now I do like this:
every day I do 15-20 of the failed cards to get them into the flow again and of course I continue with the expired cards.
Like that (little number) I wont get whelmed over by the oncoming expiering piles.
I don't mind if there are still a lot of failed cards, I just continue with them slowly but steadily.
I don't add any new cards at the moment.
I takes some time to get rid of the failed cards, it works.
my green piles on stack 2-4 are already growing. :-)

the red pile of failed cards does not shock nor horror me. it is there but it gets smaller from day to day.

btw: with this methode (learning only 10-20 failed cards per session and no more) my failure-rates went down rapidly!

As frlmarty says, I was in a similar position.

I started going through RtK really quickly, but as a result I was unable to make much of a dent in my "failed" pile - it ended up being just over 600 cards by the time I had "finished" RtK. What followed was a 2 month period of grinding down the failed pile which got very tedious. In the end, if I didn't remember a card, then I didn't remember it. I just stopped getting bothered about failing them.

Eventually after I had seen the cards about 10 times each, I knew them without having to remember the associated stories. So, the key is just perseverance. It might be dull as mud at times, but just keep at it and eventually it just 'gets' easier.

just wanted to let you know I am already down to 30 failed and 0 expired.
not too long and I will start adding new frames.