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!

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.

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).

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!

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.

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?

Last edited by zachandhobbes (2011 March 13, 3:36 pm)

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.

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

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 >

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.,

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/05021772e58310 … 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?

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.