I have 999 reviews on anki that I have left sitting for 5 months now. I only got to 999 (yes I know lol I could have added one more card but I was so burnt out) and quit.

So should I start a whole new deck and just do it over, or should I just try to review my way back through my old deck and begin adding cards when it's completely reviewed? The 999 reviews will probably take a while and I'm sure I forgot most of them.

This is, obviously, just personal opinion, but I would say review them anyway. But obviously not all at once. I have almost 600 reviews building up as well. But how I've been reviewing them is in one minute time boxes. I can't go for much longer. But when I do them for a minute then I "win" really fast by having my time be up. Then I just do A LOT a one minute time boxes. Well, for as long as I fell like anyway.
Who cares if you can't do them for more then 1 or 2 or 5 minutes here and there throughout the day, at least it's something and that's all that matters!

Good luck!

I finished RTK and then stopped reviewing for a year. After I felt like I was losing my grasp on some kanji I decided to go back to reviewing.... but at that point I had about 1950 reviews to do.

Been doing probably around 50 reviews a day... give or take. Basically going at a pace that doesn't put strain on the brain. Working pretty well. If I don't remember what a kanji is I usually just need to see it once and them its all good again.

My suggestion is try doing reviews at a pace you feel comfortable at. 999 cards to review is a lot more than just 999 reviews until its back to a low number. But it will probably be faster than just starting all over again.

From my experience, you'll probably fail over half of them, which can be very demoralizing if you let it get to you. That said, if you can ignore the damage to your stats and slug through it, you can leverage existing scheduling information:

1) You keep eases, which may help for dealing with stories that cause interference
2) You can use the mature failure multiplier to speed up the recovery of your timings.

I have less 20 per day now, been doing them for year and half now(almost). I think maintaining them is very important. Reviews are promotional to how much you add. You add a lot, you get a lot.

How long it will take will obviously depend on your level of Japanese and the difficulty of the cards, but if you just go to the library one day with no distractions and force yourself to get through them you should be able to get it done in under 12 hours (about how long the library is usually open).

I'm planning to start now. I have nothing to do and all I ahve been doing is worrying about my friends in Sendai all day, reviews might help me get my mind off things as well as give me something to do. I have livestreams in the background anyway. I'm so worried!

I may as well start now and see how far I get. I'll probably fail a lot but you know what, I expect that after slacking off so long.

I won't be adding any new cards until I get ALL these old reviews done.

Yeah, I wouldn't recommend restarting, unless your going to try a different method completely (like Jpn Keywords, Lazy Kanji, or whatever else).

Whenever I go to a big event or convention, I lose a week or two studying because of it. I have ~500 reviews built up between my vocab and rtk deck myself right now, because of GDC. So anyway, here is my advice.

Since your using Anki, make use of the different review order priorities. Do some small timeboxed sessions alternating between Largest Interval, Smallest Interval, Order Due, and Random. It will give you a bit of a change in pace. Largest Interval should be the easy stuff. Smallest Interval should be things you most recently learned and reviewed.

If your cards are tagged by lesson or part, you can suspend the later cards or give priority to the earlier ones so you can deal with it kinda in order. Myself, I have RTK Lite cards tagged, and those get priority over rest.

Also, spot leeches earlier then Anki detects it. If a fact is giving you a lot of trouble, just forget about it, bury it or suspend it, get it out of your way so you can focus on what you do remember. You can always come back to the hardest stuff later, that stuff might need an additional review outside of the SRS.

Anyway, don't give up and good luck!

Interesting so far. I did about 100 reviews.

I failed 75% of them, even when I looked at the story as a hint.

I passed 20% of them after looking at the story.

I passed 5% just by knowing the keyword.

I pushed the 'fail' button for all of them except the 5% I knew just by the keyword because I felt really uncomfortable even about the ones I looked at the stories.

So yeah my stats are BAD, but luckily it seems that when the ones I failed pop up again, I almost immediately remember them again (or maybe have to check out the story quickly).

I have 900 more to go and will probably fail most of them, but I'm alright with that. I'll just keep going. I only spent about 30-40 minutse and got through 100 reviews. I just wish I hadn't forgotten so many but it's alright. I won't make this mistake of not reviewing again, I took my skills for granted.

Sorry to double post but this is a pressing question I have now...

So far I have been failing cards that I have to look at the story at to get them right, even if I can craft the Kanji from the story.

Do you guys think I should just push 'hard' on those ones? if I can get the Kanji from the story?

I would normally do that, but my worry is that because my intervals are so large from when I used to do them, I may be falsely rating them.

When I push 'hard' it usually sends cards 1 or 2 months forward.

So... What should I do? I'm already 250 cards in and at this rate I'll have 200 cards tomorrow. I feel regrets for pushing 'fail' on all the ones I sort of knew (look at story -> know) so far.

personally I would just hit hard and get them back into rotation again
you're gonna have lots of reviews anyway you cut it

at least they are in the pile,
after a few reviews of a card and when you think you should know it
then be a bit harder with scoring
just get that demoralising stack down

Thanks for the input, I'll probably do that. I guess I'll see in a month if I start failing those ones again haha

Even before I quit I often had a hard time deciding whether looking at the story was fair or not. If I have to look at the story, is that cheating my way to the answer? Should I push fail or hard?

If you need to look at the story, you can't write the character, and I hit fail, personally.

when you're trying to remember a character when you're writing in the wild, you don't get a popup to tell you the story, you've gotta know the character from memory based on the word you want to write.

Because of this, I never even look at a story until after I've already decided to fail the card.

i was being really hard on scoring, then i realised this method is not to learn the kanji really its to get used to them writing and seeing them and get a general feel for them
the real learning starts after heisig

just my two penneth
after being at 450 cards for a few months with no motivation (luckily i kept reviewing)

at the end of the day
大　doesn't mean big or large (thats a concept)
it means だい (dai) or おお　(oo)

now if your keywords were japanese it would be a different thing


like i said its my opinion and may be wrong all views are the views of the holder and not the RevTK forum

ugh now I can't make up my mind QQ

Previously I would do it:

Good - Immediately came to my mind from keyword
Hard - Had to look at story
Fail - Even with story, couldn't think of it

I thought that was a pretty good system.

If you are failing cards that you have to look at the story at, then when would you push 'hard'?

edit: oh woah I deleted my post... I thought they disabled that... curiosity kills the cat

Are you using Anki, or this web site? For Anki, I push hard when I have to think much about the answer, which is a bit subjective, but that's what it's supposed to be. "Good" is when it comes quickly, and "easy" is when it's like reading my native language.

I'm in Anki. Perhaps I should move my story to the 'answer' side.

However that means that in context to my situation right now, I'm basically going to 'fail' every single card in my deck of 999.

I guess that's my punishment >

If you're really going to fail most cards, I think you may as well start again so you get the cards in the correct order... but yeah writing the kanji with the story isn't really getting the card correct easliy or not

I wonder if there is a way to review cards in order of added. It doesn't really make sense with how SRS works but maybe the option is in there

I don't really want to start all over because then I'll have to go find / make up all my stories again which would suck.,

Yeah, your stories should be only on the answer side.

You should fail every card if you need to look at the story.

You should press hard if you remembered the kanji, but it took a really long time (like, for example, if you were stubborn and kept thinking about it for two minutes, then finally got it right). Or any similar situation when you got it but it was harder than usual.

I'm reviewing a big stack of 1800 that got saved up after I stopped keeping up with my reviews. Going pretty well actually. If you find it really really difficult though, it might be best to restart.

It's kind of a mixed bag.

When I said I can't think of them 75% of the time I was not lying.

However, day 2 (today) results seem to be that the second (or third) time I see the keyword I have way better retention, like I've refreshed the memory in my head again. IT was just lurking back there somewhere.

I'll just continue doing this, and I have put my story on the back of my card.

Just curious, how do you guys do your card formatting?

http://ploader.net/files/05021772e583105...d91b17.PNG

That's how mine looks, and I have to push the little blue 'show story' for the story to appear. Any suggestions or input?

pretty much like that but the story is there without the need to do anything. Also I have a main use in japanese on the front with the English keyword, eg for 友　I would have 'ともだち　の　とも - friend' on the front.

That is a really good idea with the main use thing.

I would do that but aside from the obvious ones (as in ともだち etc lol) I probably wouldn't be sure what the 'main use' of it was so it would be more difficult for me.

yep it depends where you are in learning vocab and stuff, but it's really helpful for keywords that are super similar.