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Thoughts on anki review limiting. Please help!!
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Okay, i never thought I'd get to this point. I'm considering my options for putting a cap on anki reviews per day.
I've done anki by the straight arrowed book for the entire duration I have used it for Japanese. That means a 100% 'attendance' over 294 days so far, before this I had done to an almost perfect record all of RTK1 but using manual hand-held flash cards.
Here's my stats for 1mth & deck life:
http://i1088.photobucket.com/albums/i32 … 1378134455
http://i1088.photobucket.com/albums/i32 … 1378134447
Anyway I can't take it much more, I'm also a medical student full time which is a tough degree by itself.
I will be finished with the anki method (in terms of new cards) by the new year at the rate I go.
And my japanese progress has been a joy and I've come a massively long way.
But nowadays I must do over 400 reviews every single day and then 30 new cards a day, of which I can get done 200 without much hassle (while I'm walking to/from home), but the last 200 has to be done before bed.
I'm not getting enough time for other Japanese by simply reading my anki all day.
The stats say it takes 150 minutes, but in reality it's taking 4hrs a day to finish all my cards. I'm losing sleep recently cause I can't get it done as well as medschool stuff and sleep 8 hours, tonight I'm looking at just over 6.
What are people's thoughts on review limiting. Will it significantly slow my progress?
I really don't want to, and I've rolled with it until now but it's getting too much.
Last edited by AKITOD (2013 September 02, 10:17 am)
I take about 30 minutes for 600 cards... It is a bit too fast, but 150min seems slow (let alone 4h!). What is the format of your cards? You shouldn't have to list things, or read lots of text... keep it simple!
If they're already straightforward, maybe you think for a very long time? Try spending less time before hitting the Again button. Reviews will accumulate, but it takes less time overall. Btw, I've added 30 cards (15 facts) per day since like a year and I have, around 600 per day @~80% (then again, it's only the way I prefer to learn, not the best method!)
Putting a cap on your reviews while still adding 30 cards per day could start a nasty chain reaction of forgetting. Adding fewer cards per day is a better way of limiting your reviews. Doing your reviews faster is a better way of limiting the time it takes.
You take 4 hours for 400 reviews plus 30 new cards and you do 200 of them while walking to/from home? Just how much do you walk?
Vempele wrote:
Putting a cap on your reviews while still adding 30 cards per day could start a nasty chain reaction of forgetting. Adding fewer cards per day is a better way of limiting your reviews. Doing your reviews faster is a better way of limiting the time it takes.
You take 4 hours for 400 reviews plus 30 new cards and you do 200 of them while walking to/from home? Just how much do you walk?
I add (at most) 20 cards a day, while I set my review cap to 100. Are you saying that I'll suffer if I continue to do this? My correct ratio for mature cards is 87.50%... No idea if that's considered a good retention rate or not, but...
I learned the hard way that sometimes less is more. If I had done fewer new vocab cards per day I would have stuck with my reviews and I'd be more ahead than I am now. Instead, I crashed and burned and didn't much of anything for months. Now I'm taking a slower approach.
I've been doing about 20 cards/ day, but that's only during 4-5 days of the week so far (for maybe 3 weeks or so??). And I've told myself that once I hit 100 reviews per day I'll do less. It's easy to look in Anki and see how many reviews you'll have for the next day. So if I know I'm going to go over 100, I'll just add fewer cards.
And if I skip a few days in Anki reviews? Oh well. I just do a little more than usual and I get myself back on track. I don't want Anki to be a shadow over my life. It's a tool to help you, and it shouldn't be annoying to use.
This rate is perfect for me. I only spend about 30 min in Anki so far, and that includes learning the new words on days that I add. I don't dread it. I just do it and then do exercises in my textbook.
If you can't do 30 new cards every single day, I wouldn't worry about it. I honestly doubt all the people on here are actually doing 30 words every single day. If they were, they would be N1 in no time and that never seems to happen. It seems to be a short-term situation.
If you are frustrated and feel like Anki is taking over your life, slow down and go at pace where you still want to study Japanese. If we were robots, we'd have no difficulty memorizing 30 words or more per day. But we are human, and you have to listen to your "will power meter." We only have so much will power per day :-).
You won't get anywhere if you dread studying Japanese. What's the point then, right? So get to a point where you are happy and keep chugging forward. Slower, consistent progress is better than stopping and starting a ton of times and not getting anywhere, right?
Good luck! I know how you feel and I hope we all figure out what works best for us.
kaizer wrote:
I add (at most) 20 cards a day, while I set my review cap to 100. Are you saying that I'll suffer if I continue to do this? My correct ratio for mature cards is 87.50%... No idea if that's considered a good retention rate or not, but...
It's fine (if slightly suboptimal) as long as your number of overdue reviews doesn't get out of control. It's just that if you were to, say, add 20 cards every day, you'd need a great young card recall rate to sustain 100 reviews a day.
Last edited by Vempele (2013 September 02, 3:07 pm)
Vempele wrote:
Putting a cap on your reviews while still adding 30 cards per day could start a nasty chain reaction of forgetting. Adding fewer cards per day is a better way of limiting your reviews. Doing your reviews faster is a better way of limiting the time it takes.
You take 4 hours for 400 reviews plus 30 new cards and you do 200 of them while walking to/from home? Just how much do you walk?
I walk about 60 minutes a day, and yeah get 200 done (probably figured out that's more efficient than other cards). Basically when I'm walking I have less resources as far as seeing what is right/wrong (basically the phone's inbuilt J-J dictionary and google translate if i'm really desperate/stumped) so I spend less time considering a card.
Also when walking I have zero distractions. So yeah I tend to get 200 done just in walking time, also helps that the cards I do first in the day are the decks that tend to get done fastest.
I've actually been adding less, cause for the last several weeks I had been doing 40/day new cards (changed it 4d ago) which is probably how I wound up with this mess.
I'm putting a cap on my biggest deck to 200/day. Overall it means I'm going to do ~300/day which is more than manageable I think.
Okay I've tried doing it much faster today, on my walk towards uni (24min).
I got 231 reviews done in the 24 minutes. So I'm removing my cap and hopefully I can get another 200 or so on the way home (I will be slower due to being tired from uni).
Then bam I'll be done for reviews.
So we'll see how it goes, it would be awesome if I can maintain this speed from now on.
Vempele wrote:
Putting a cap on your reviews while still adding 30 cards per day could start a nasty chain reaction of forgetting. Adding fewer cards per day is a better way of limiting your reviews. Doing your reviews faster is a better way of limiting the time it takes.
You take 4 hours for 400 reviews plus 30 new cards and you do 200 of them while walking to/from home? Just how much do you walk?
Must thank you for your example, made me wonder if I can do it faster by concentrating properly. Yesterday I studied (review+learn+relearn) 595 cards in 65 minutes which was great.
This morning on my walk in 26 minutes I got 309 cards studied (inc' 266 review & 6 new).
So glad, cause means I don't have to ever cap my reviews at this pace.
Akito, congratulations for your drive!
Just remeber to give yourself some slack and reward yourself once in a while.
AKITOD wrote:
Vempele wrote:
Putting a cap on your reviews while still adding 30 cards per day could start a nasty chain reaction of forgetting. Adding fewer cards per day is a better way of limiting your reviews. Doing your reviews faster is a better way of limiting the time it takes.
You take 4 hours for 400 reviews plus 30 new cards and you do 200 of them while walking to/from home? Just how much do you walk?Must thank you for your example, made me wonder if I can do it faster by concentrating properly. Yesterday I studied (review+learn+relearn) 595 cards in 65 minutes which was great.
This morning on my walk in 26 minutes I got 309 cards studied (inc' 266 review & 6 new).
So glad, cause means I don't have to ever cap my reviews at this pace.
Wow thats really fast. How many cards a day do you add, I have about 500/hr for review, but I add a lot.
One small tweak I use to improve (young) recall rate:
Steps (in minutes): 6 30
(any duration > 11)
Unless the information were thoroughly encoded outside of anki, spacing reviews throughout the day would be more appropriate for long-term retention. imo passively reviewing information for 11 minutes isn't enough. I chose 36m on a whim because I'd be able to finish other work in that time frame
motor memory
(the implication is that I write out the target word during the initial learning phase)
Last edited by Aspiring (2013 September 04, 11:06 am)
Xanpakuto wrote:
Wow thats really fast. How many cards a day do you add, I have about 500/hr for review, but I add a lot.
I add 30/day (it was 40/day for a while). Each day my thing comes up with about 420 reviews + 30 new cards. After all the relearns put together it ends up being 590ish at the end of the day.
I've been doing it for almost 300 days on the anki, so of the 13630 cards I have in total I've made my way through 10028 cards. I'll be done the 13630 by early December (I'll up the ante when my holidays start).
After that I'll try quickly cram in another 1000-2000 pure vocab words in that I feel I may like/need. But by December 31st it will mark the end of "adding" for Japanese, not completely but from then on it'll be more adding as I see things rather than looking for vocab to add/decks.
Sebastian wrote:
Akito, congratulations for your drive!
Just remeber to give yourself some slack and reward yourself once in a while.
Thankyou, I really enjoy doing anki for a number of reasons. Infact doing Japanese is the break I have from medical school which in itself is a bit of a beast.
Though at this new pace I will be fine, I'm getting almost all my cards done just on my walking time. I was just freaking out before cause it was costing me sleep time and as a result I was starting to not enjoy it (cause I'd be so tired I'd rather sleep).
Last edited by AKITOD (2013 September 04, 5:05 am)
If you are reviewing on your Desktop, I would recommend the load balancer plugin, to make sure you don't have high spikes in your scheduling. Another thing you can do is increase the interval modifier so you see cards slightly less often. (Mine is at 110%, check the Anki documentation on what changing this really means to your retention and any math behind the change.)
Also, you can try to speed up your average time per answer by a few seconds. This will let you get more done in a session. When grading, if something is ridiculously easy, you can just suspend those cards instead of marking them easy.
Anyway, good luck.
AKITOD wrote:
Xanpakuto wrote:
Wow thats really fast. How many cards a day do you add, I have about 500/hr for review, but I add a lot.
I add 30/day (it was 40/day for a while). Each day my thing comes up with about 420 reviews + 30 new cards. After all the relearns put together it ends up being 590ish at the end of the day.
I've been doing it for almost 300 days on the anki, so of the 13630 cards I have in total I've made my way through 10028 cards. I'll be done the 13630 by early December (I'll up the ante when my holidays start).
After that I'll try quickly cram in another 1000-2000 pure vocab words in that I feel I may like/need. But by December 31st it will mark the end of "adding" for Japanese, not completely but from then on it'll be more adding as I see things rather than looking for vocab to add/decks.Sebastian wrote:
Akito, congratulations for your drive!
Just remeber to give yourself some slack and reward yourself once in a while.Thankyou, I really enjoy doing anki for a number of reasons. Infact doing Japanese is the break I have from medical school which in itself is a bit of a beast.
Though at this new pace I will be fine, I'm getting almost all my cards done just on my walking time. I was just freaking out before cause it was costing me sleep time and as a result I was starting to not enjoy it (cause I'd be so tired I'd rather sleep).
Dude thats awesome man! You don't have to answer this but, whats your motivation? You're losing sleep and all that which I'm cool with, I do as well on some days ^^
Xanpakuto wrote:
Dude thats awesome man! You don't have to answer this but, whats your motivation? You're losing sleep and all that which I'm cool with, I do as well on some days ^^
Motivation, I have a number of things.
1. I finished RTK doing the same thing (every day reviews + new - 100 new cards per week) with handheld kanji cards. Once I finished it, I was just so keen to get started. Also I feel when you finish RTK the sense of accomplishment and belief is very important for the rest of your learning imo. It takes a lot to finish RTK1 and is something everyone who finishes it should be proud of.
2. I'm half-Japanese, and was born in Japan. But I was raised in Australia and was raised monolingual in english. Because of this there's a personal part to it all. I like to think of myself as more Japanese than Australian, have since early teens (i'm 21 now). I love Japan and consider it the best part of who I am.
3. I'm a medical student. You may have heard the stereotype that medstudents simply study their asses off and can't have a life due to workload. Which is unfortunately true for a big proportion of medical students. But being able to defy that stereotype is another motivation for me to continue.
---
However nowadays, I'm just too far in to stop. I've done it every single day for 299 days on Anki, and before that I did it almost every single day for RTK for about 140 days. So I've been going every day for 439 days (there were a couple days gap in RTK somewhere). But after so long it becomes a part of everyday life that just can't be compromised.
Now that I'm going quicker I don't have to lose any sleep over it (my time needed is reduced by ~60%).
The most important is the first 3 things though for me.
Could you tell me about your anki habits and where you're up to if you?
------------------------
Sh!t i may have mislead you I just realised, by "add" I mean 30 new cards per day. Adding I mostly use pre-made decks that I've found put together cover all bases I need. I have a small proportion of personally made cards that I did for grammar and for some words which I noticed wasn't in my anki library beforehand.
Last edited by AKITOD (2013 September 06, 7:45 pm)
I'm not that far into the game yet, but I believe I got pretty far. I only finished one textbook (Genki 1), about 1000 in Core6k, 1000 self inputted words, and bits of Tae Kim grammar in about 2-3 months. For listening practice I just watch some variety shows of my favorite people, or history about them. It's really helpful but I need to stop relying so much on subtitles (Japanese), however my reading speed increased immensely because of it. Right now I just want to finish Core6k already than do some intensive reading, I also bought Genki 2 which I'll start in about a week or two.
Anki habits?
I have 6 Japanese decks o_o *Weird I know
-Core 6k (Production)
Kana ---> Kanji + sentence + audio
-Core 6k(recognition)
Kanji ---> kana + sentence + audio
-Sentence deck(For now just sentences from Genki 1, will add from Genki 2 and Tae kim in the near future)
Sentence in all kanjified words ---> reading, brief translation. (I try my best just to understand the sentence and not to think so much in English)
-Standard RTK deck
Keyword ---> Story + kanji
-Self found vocabulary (Books, articles, music, news, etc)
Kanji ---> reading
-Jouyou kanji by grade lists
When I was at Japan I bought this nice book that has all the Jouyou kanji all in order, from 1年生 --> 中学生. It's great ^^.
- I just study these kanjis by rote memorization, isn't that hard, in fact it's very fast.
On anki
-Kun yomi (with hint if similar to another kanji. ex 木 気）---> Kanji
So far it's been very fun, if I wanted to go hardcore. I wouldn't be watching so much Japanese TV and study more grammar (I already study way too much vocabulary a day).
Sounds like you're doing well for a start.
Don't worry about deck count, I have 10 decks in total (well actually 12, but 2 are yet to start). But I just lump them in as subdecks within 1 big "日本語" deck so it's easier to understand the stats for all my study put together.
Unless you're actually writing out the Core6k production version I don't see the need for it. If you are writing out the production one as your test for it then good on you (I don't cause it takes too much time).
For writing if I have the time I simply write out 20 of the new sentences for the day in kanji.
One question, where'd you find TV shows with Japanese subtitles? I don't bother with subs anymore mostly (1 show talks almost medieval-like and that one I do use subs). Though I'd love to know the resource for japanese shows with japanese subs.
For the core production deck I just write out the kanji from memory, I'd like to learn how to write rather proficiently.
As for TV shows with Japanese subs? Youku is your best friend. Not all shows are subbed, I'm sure you know that though. The shows I watch, like 75% of it is subbed in nice colorful font ^^
Last edited by Xanpakuto (2013 September 08, 6:59 am)
I would DEFINITELY stop adding new cards! Especially if you are considering limiting reviews. Try turning new cards down to zero until you get your reviews down to a manageable number, then start adding new cards again. There is no way it makes sense to add new cards when you don't have time to review what you've learned.
When I add more cards than I can review, I feel like one of those plate spinners with too many plates spinning. If I don't keep up everything is going to come crashing down and I'll forget everything. The hard truth is that there is a limit to the amount that you an memorize in a given time. If you find that you have less time, you will have to be satisfied with proportionally learning less.
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