Lots of discussion about this in old posts. There are some links in the Anki FAQ page, quoted below
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"1......... I’m going on holiday. Can I pause/freeze the scheduler?
If you take a break from using Anki for a few days, it can be quite demotivating to be faced with a large number of cards to review upon your return. It is very natural to want to pause the scheduler, so that you come back to find Anki in the same state as you left it. However, a pause feature would actually do more harm than good, as while it’s easy to pause a computer program, it’s impossible to pause human memory.
Consider taking a week long break, pausing the scheduler just before you leave and un-pausing just after you come back. Since the progress of all cards has been "frozen" for a week, a delay is applied to every card in the deck. In order to avoid catching up on the work you would have otherwise done during that time, you’re increasing the chances of forgetting cards for every single card in the deck. Not a great tradeoff.
Anki schedules cards for review close to the time it thinks you will forget them. If you come back from a vacation and find there are 200 cards to review, Anki is telling you that those 200 cards need to be reviewed soon or you’ll forget them. There is no way around this - the cards need to be studied or you’ll forget. The best thing you can do is put on some good music and get stuck into the reviews, motivated by the knowledge that your hard work will pay off in the future.
Note there is a postpone plugin available that reschedules the due cards over a specified number of days. It allows you to divide a large number of cards up over a period of days to work through, but you can accomplish the same thing by simply setting a quota of cards to study each day and studying them.
Anki works best if you can use it for a short period of time every day. Taking breaks means that you will inevitably have to do extra work when you return. The following tips can help you use Anki effectively:
1. Don’t add too much material at once. Studying a large number of new cards in one go creates spikes in the due cards graph. Anki sets the maximum number of new cards per day to 20. You’re free to change this limit, but bear in mind that the more cards you do per day, the more reviews you’ll have to do in the short term.
2. Consider doing no new cards in the week prior to your vacation, and only keeping up with your scheduled reviews.
3. Try to take Anki with you when you go away. Anki can be used on portable devices such as iPhones, PDAs, mobile phones etc.
This issue has been talked about many times on the forums already. Please read those threads instead of starting yet another discussion on the issue.
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http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?pid=9890#pid9890
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http://groups.google.com/group/ankisrs/b...94333177e8
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http://groups.google.com/group/ankisrs/b...64a8238660
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http://groups.google.com/group/ankisrs/b...479c0fd827
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http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=707&page=1
2.............. I haven’t studied for a while, and now the next due times are too big!
When you use Anki every day, each time a card is answered correctly, it gets a bigger interval. Let’s assume that good about doubles the interval. Thus you have a 5 day wait, then a 10 day wait, 20 days, 40 days, and so on.
When people return to their deck after weeks or months of no study, they’re often surprised by the length intervals have grown to. This is because Anki considers the actual time the card was unseen, not just the time it was scheduled for. Thus if the card was scheduled for 5 days but you didn’t study for a month, the next interval will be closer to 60 days than 10 days.
This is a good thing. If you have successfully remembered a card after a one month wait, chances are you’ll remember it again after a longer wait, too. The same principles which make SRS effective in normal use apply when you’re studying after a delay, too. It also makes little sense to schedule a card for 10 days in the future if you were able to easily answer it after a whole month’s wait - you’d be going backwards.
Resetting the deck is an even worse solution. When returning to a deck after a long absence, you may have forgotten many of your cards, but chances are you haven’t forgotten them all. Resetting the entire deck means you have to waste time studying material you already know.
Now you may find cards that you were able to recall, but not comfortably, since they were not reviewed when they should have been. To counter this, Anki treats the delay differently depending on your answer. If you find a card easy, the last interval plus the full delay are added together, and then used to calculate the next interval. When you answer good, only half the delay is used. And when you answer hard, only a quarter of the delay is used. So if a card was due in 5 days, and it’s answered 20 days late, the next times you’d end up with are approximately:
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Hard: (5 + 20/4) * 1.2 = 12 days
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Good: (5 + 20/2) * 2.5 = 37.5 days
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Easy: (5 + 20) * 3.25 = 81.25 days
(the factors will actually vary depending on your performance in the deck)
If you find a card hard, the next interval is quite conservative and is less than the last wait (25 days). If you find it good, the next interval is only about 50% higher. And easy increases the interval aggressively as usual.
So it is recommended that you study as normal when you return to Anki after a period of absence. But if you absolutely must reset the deck, you can select the cards to reset in the browser, and use Actions>Reschedule."
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This FAQ section (? written by Damien Elmes) mentions a 'postpone' plug-in. There is also a newer and probably better 'cheat' plugin -
http://groups.google.com/group/ankisrs- … fe0d76bef9
However, if you do the just catch up a bit each day thing, as Damien, kerecsen (above) and others suggest, you may find it psychologically helpful to turn off the display of cards due.
At the risk of sounding condescending, I think the most important thing is to HAVE A GOOD HOLIDAY. Learning Japanese is, after all, a pretty long-term project, a week or a month or 2 won't matter in the long run. People traditionally do take breaks from studying, and for good reason. Don't feel guilty or worried about it.
