Once cards have an interval of several years, reviewing them is probably redundant. However don't make the mistake of thinking that just because you know it well now, you won't forget it after a while.

IceCream wrote:

It kind of feels like, once you've made a certain pathway, it's only a matter of reinforcing it through context. But, the pathway takes a little while to make so it doesn't disappear completely.

I definitely agree here. I'd also like to add that whilst you might pass something in Anki reviews you might not have actually learned it well enough to understand it in a different context in the wild anyway.

That article/essay about how extensive reading is needed in order to learn collocations of words really got me thinking about how we do learn to produce natural sentence patterns and the more I think about it, the less importance I seem to put on SRS. In saying that I'm definitely not against SRS though... just... how much is too much?

I think what I will do is review KO for one more month which is when everything hits 6+months and then it's out the window. Blazing that 2kyuu grammar deck worked like a charm too, I'm noticing plenty of it come up in the wild! Think i'll keep that deck around.

Codexus wrote:

Once cards have an interval of several years, reviewing them is probably redundant. However don't make the mistake of thinking that just because you know it well now, you won't forget it after a while.

I absolutely agree and would take it even further:  If you haven't actually used that knowledge within a year, there's no point in maintaining it in an SRS anyhow.  And if you have used it within a year, the SRS isn't needed.  It's obviously just slowing you down, and you can always look it up the once-every-few-years it appears anyhow.

So anything with an interval of more than a year should be an auto-delete.

thurd wrote:

What about Kanji decks?

My RTK deck is killing me slowly every single day. I have around 80 reviews a day with around 90%+ correct answers and it just won't stop... Maybe its because I don't use the easy button at all or maybe because I've 'finished' it too fast or maybe because I got myself in 900+ due ditch about a month ago and I'm still paying a price for that.

Thing is I'm supposed to learn all this Japanese but instead of that I'm still doing RTK most of the day... It's not that 80 reviews takes a lot of time (30mins usually) but its so hard to make myself do it. I usually read/watch something while doing that to help me distract myself and it works so well that I'm doing 80 reviews for 3-4h and then there's so little time for anything else.

To make matters worse usually I can barely notice the connection between a kanji -> keyword (I train RTK the other way around keyword->kanji) so when I'm doing sentences I see all those familiar kanji but if I want to recall their individual keywords I struggle or sometimes can't do it at all.

I deleted my RTK deck like a month or so after finishing it. Same as you, couldn't force myself to do it any longer, reviews piled up. So I freed myself. Has it been detrimental? To some extent yes but it's not that big of a deal for me to re-do RTK. You also mentioned that you can't even recall keywords when you see a kanji... try a quick run through RTK going kanji - keyword. Bet you all that will change.

One suggestion I read in another thread was to review some decks weekly... I thought that was a good idea to help ease review loads daily but problem is you need to get the decks to the point where weekly is an option... hmm.

Really interesting replies guys...

All righty, I guess I'll be the contrary one at this party.  I follow this rule:

If I dislike a deck, I indefinitely suspend every card I fail.  You'd be amazed how fast the reviews drop off.

(TL;DR: Conclusion at bottom.)

Let's see why.  Assume I just reviewed a card increasing its interval to one year.  This card, being well-formed, takes less 10 seconds or less to review.  It has an Anki ease factor of 2.4, the average from my RTK deck.  For now, assume I remember it every time I review it.

Review # / After interval / cumulative time retained
1 1.0y 1.0y
2 2.4y 3.4y
3 5.8y 9.2y
4 13.8y 23.0y
5 33.2y 56.2y

A sixth review will be required 135 years from the present. 

Suspending failed cards puts a maximum limit on the amount of life-time review time.  Let's say I start with the complete RtK 1, RtK 3, Core 2000, and Core 6000.  Two cards per sentence, one card per kanji gives 15,005 cards.  This totals no more than 12,500 minutes of review, or 208 hours.

However, if we let each review thin the deck by  permanently suspending failed cards, here's what happens (using my 77.7% mature card retention rate from my RtK deck):

Years in the future/ Pct reviewed / Cumulative reviews / Pct retained.
1.0y 100% 1.00 78%
3.4y 78% 1.78 60%
9.2y 60% 2.38 47%
23y 47% 2.85 36%
56y 36% 3.21 28%

Pruning the deck along the way, I can still retain at least 28% with 48,200 reviews (or 134 hours).  I expect that fraction to be higher, since retention rate should increase with time as difficult items are expelled.

So, that gives a rough estimate of the review time required.

Next century: 134 to 208 hours (28% retention or greater)
Next decade:  99 to 125 hours (47% retention or greater)

Remember, these are time estimates starting with 6000 sentences (read and listen) and 3005 characters.  Learning that much material to the 1-year mark that wccrawford mentions is going to be something like 90k to 150k reviews, or 250 to 416 hours worth of study time.

Conclusion

If you can find the time to finish huge SRS crusades like Core 6000, you sure as hell have time to review just the easy stuff!  As I've mentioned before, SRS focuses your attention on your absolute weakest points, giving you a false view of how difficult a deck is.  If your goal is no longer 100% coverage, that's fine.  You just have to use the SRS differently.  Keep only the easy cards, indefinitely suspending everything that you fail.  That way, the SRS will trace your metamorphosis from "Super Kanji-Sentence Ranger" to "Just Maintaining," keeping track of the difficult subset of cards to which you've said "not now."  If you ever change your mind and thirst for a targeted micro-crusade, it's just an unsuspend and reset away.

No need to ever "re-do RtK."  Seriously, that would suck: mountains of reviews of characters you already know, wasting your precious time.

P.S.:  Please use the Easy/簡単 button before complaining about Anki having lots of reviews.  Good/普通 really means "thank you sir, may I have another?"

P.P.S: Review daily.  Weekly habits are much harder to keep than daily ones, and the cost of missing a review session is higher.  If you have multiple old crusade decks, merge them, so you only have to open one deck for review, but do review daily.  It'll make cute little puppies happy, I promise.

I'm of the "Let the SRS obsolete itself". I'm also like Nyanda in that my decks tend to evolve either in what it contains or how I test it. My vocabulary deck started with UBJG, then moved onto Tae Kim, then Cloze Deletion Tae Kim, and now I'm adding Kanzen Master sentences. My RTK deck started on RevTK, then moved onto Anki with a more verbose card set (Katsuo's spreadsheet with yomi and various meanings) in addition to recognition cards. My vocab deck started with 2k1KO but became Core then Core 2k and 6k, then both recognition and writing, then I added Tanuki list, now I removed the Core 2k photos.

The benefit for me in all this is I'm introducing more and more Japanese into my life, just slowly. For someone like Icecream that's getting a much more major dose of real Japanese can handle deleting decks cause she's likely to run into the material more frequently.

So, if you're going about it slow, do not delete. If you're the 24 hour always in Japan mode, then deleting is not a big hazard. Know what's right for you and your lifestyle and learning style.

Some people say you can't learn through the SRS and I used to disagree but now I agree in part. One thing that's really hit home lately is that you can use SRS to actually learn new vocab items crusade style where Anki is the first place you see the word. You can't however learn the words collocations through Anki which is 50% of the knowledge you need to truly (and I mean truly) know a word. Which brings me to my point and i'll use Icecream as an example.

"Learn 6000, retain 4000 solidly, re-learn 1000 with bit of exposure, completely re-learn 1000".

The second, very important step of learning those words is to learn their collocations which only happens through exposure so the amount of reading (thus exposure) one must do to pick those 2000 words back up will be far more beneficial than reviewing the entire deck in Anki til you have a "95% retention rate" (which is isn't a true representation of anything).

The notion of suspending something that was too hard kinda surprised me at first because I thought well you won't learn it if you just suspend it. Then I thought back to when I did KO and there were times where a word was giving me too much shit and I just clicked easy and said "it's not important" turns out when more than half those cards hit maturity I knew the word by then haha then there's the rest of those cards where I'm like ahhh it's a word I didn't give a shit about. So I guess that was my way of doing that and yeah it wasn't so bad. Definitely a good point that you could work through your suspended list to pick back up on some rarer items at a later stage in your learning.

thurd wrote:

It's not that 80 reviews takes a lot of time (30mins usually)

Actually, since (if I understand correctly) you're only maintaining your existing kanji repertoire, I think you're spending too much time -- 80 reviews in 30 minutes puts you at 23 seconds per card!

I'd say for any card except ones you've recently learned, you should spend 5-10 seconds maximum. If you're still completely blank after 5-10 seconds, just turn it over, mentally recall the story when you see the kanji, and fail the card.  For easy cards, try to do it as quickly as possible; if the stories fade and you start doing recall without stories, great!

An 8 second average means 11 minutes for 80 cards -- much better, right?

To make matters worse usually I can barely notice the connection between a kanji -> keyword

I'm planning to quickly (5-10h total study time?) go through the complete deck in the opposite direction (kanji -> keyword) when I'm done with RtK 1, so why don't you give that a try?  While most kanji will be fairly easy, it might be a useful thing so spend your time on.  (I'm waiting until I'm done learning RtK 1 because I don't want recently learned kanji popping up as recognition questions -- I'm worried my visual memory might take over and make the whole process less efficient in the long run.)

I don't think it's possible to practice recognition (kanji -> keyword) using this website, but here's how you do it with Anki:

1. Open your Heisig deck (or click the Download button in Anki and select RtK from the list if you haven't used Anki before).
2. Go to Settings -> Deck Properties -> Edit Model -> Card Templates, and create a "Recognition" template (be sure to keep the Heisig number out of the question box when you copy-and-paste, or it'll serve as an undue memo aid ^^).  Close the dialog boxes.
3. Go to Edit -> Browse Items, Actions -> Generate Cards, and generate cards for the new "Recognition" template.
4. In the card browser, select "Recognition" from the filter, mark cards 1-2042 (or 1-3007, or wherever you are in RtK), and hit Actions -> Reschedule to randomly schedule the cards for a 0-28 day window or so, so they don't hit you all at once.
5. Hint: You may want to mark and suspend (Actions -> Toggle Suspend) the remaining recognition cards.

Happy reviewing!

Last edited by epsilondelta (2009 December 01, 6:22 pm)

Gambit,

Here's how I recover a neglected deck with Anki. 

1) Pre-test.  Set show failed cards last.  Get through the reviews, but don't start re-learning failed.  If you have to do 30 minutes a day for a week failing 70% of them, that's how it goes.  (But, in my experience it will probably go better than that.)

2) Once you have just failed cards due, reset them by opening the browser, selecting all due cards, and using the "reschedule" option. 

3) Pick up where you left off.  By default, Anki will display new cards in the order they were added, which should be RtK order.

With some luck, this will require only a few days but save you re-learning something like 300-500 kanji. 

Capital, Mezbup,

Totally agree.  Fast progress happens when you mix SRS-organized study with extensive input.  I've found a good pace at 30 minutes of Core 2000 per day and another 10 to 15 minutes of RtK.  In practical terms, that does translate to about 30 sentences and 10 kanji a day.  Fast?  I dunno.  'tis certainly comfy.  Flying through easy listening cards is really fun.

I am considering an RtK 3 + 人名用 + '10 常用 blitz at 50 characters a day, but I now know I don't really have to do something like that to make real progress.  I think a higher priority, though, is taking a couple weeks to get more comfortable with a monolingual dictionary.

mezbup wrote:

@captal:

The idea behind the crusade mentality is to bootstrap you to a point where bombarding yourself with native material all day long doesn't stress you out because you can read, listen and understand enough to get by and really begin learning things in their proper context.

I see- I'm already at that point so I guess doing the KO deck at a slow pace is more comfortable for me. I don't think I could have handled what you and others did- trying to swallow 4-5+ new words per sentence would have put me off rather quickly. That took some perseverance on your parts.

I do remember when it was frustrating to watch/listen to native material- it lasted quite a while- so perhaps your method is better.

Last edited by captal (2009 December 01, 10:49 pm)

I'm still going through RTK, but I already have a single deck which starts with kana, then RTK, then Tae Kim waiting for me when RTK is done. With Anki it's easy enough to tag things, do bulk operations etc., so I don't see a need for more than one deck - that keeps everything simple in terms of syncing between Anki and AnkiMini etc.

Maybe this view will change when I start getting past the 5-10,000 mark on cards - might get a bit more complicated, but by then I could just delete individual cards due over a year or whatever, or move them to an archive deck to save space.

That's a good question.  I've been thinking about this too; is it best to keep SRSing the same cards forever, or does it make sense to discard them after a point.  I mean after a while, you should be able to maintain things almost indefinitely without SRSing like with your own language.

Last edited by vosmiura (2009 December 12, 7:03 pm)