Make it fun! I'm currently drinking home brewed beer while doing my 1100+ Anki reviews

A whole day?! You're pushing your luck bro. Here's some definitive science to discourage you from ever taking breaks again:




The only way is to just do them. Don't add any new cards, and you will be done with your reviews eventually. Also, in Anki's settings, sort by ease and you'll usually trim the top 30% or so effortlessly, making it appear less daunting (but hopefully you'll be on a roll at that point and just finish the rest off while you're in the mood).

The only problem with approaches like this is that it may not be terribly efficient if it happens regularly. If it's not fun at all, and you resent doing reviews to the point that you are not making any progress, then perhaps this technique is not the right one for you. For a lot of us here, not knowing the kanji is more painful than the journey to learn them, so we just do it and pretend we're enjoying it.

I personally recommend two approaches:
1 - Study some Real Japanese alongside RTK, while maintaining a pace that doesn't overwhelm you. 6 kanji a day and you'll be done in a year. Meanwhile, you won't be bored out of your mind drawing thousands of lines each day since you'll be exposed to the actual language in use. You'll even learn some of the kanji before you get up to them in RTK, making it a little easier.

2 - Do 150 a day and be done with it as soon as possible. It'll take you 25 days or less (allowing for some "consolidation days", as I call them). The finish line being so close will fuel your kanji hysteria, bestowing upon you the holy Clawed Grip and Leaky Pen, allowing you to tame these rectangular Chinese Dragons with maddening ease. Seriously, having all the characters buffered in your short-term memory will make learning all of them easier.

You said you're in school. That sucks. Perhaps #2 is something best left for the holiday period. I think most people here do something like #1. The import thing is to always be making progress, but make sure it is realistic progress. It's a waste of time if it's going to take you 2 years just to get started.

I gotta admit, that graph made me giggle.

Omoishinji wrote:

I might be looking at this wrong. 1000 Kanji to review because of one day missed in studying seem strange. Without using the system the number seems way too high. Maybe someone can add some more information.

Nobody said they had 1000 kanji reviews to do. Jombo didn't say how many reviews he had piled up, and Tori-kun and Zorlee were probably talking about vocabulary or sentence decks.

Like everyone else, I'd recommend just setting time to reviewing and making sure to get through most of, if not all your views for the day. I went through a spell like that, going into the 1500s where just school stuff piled on and made it hard to review. So I decided to just stop adding new cards and took a few days to go through old cards, reviewing so that I refreshed what I had retained. Right now I've reached the 1800s, and I say that if you don't keep on studying all that progress will disappear quite easily.

1000 reviews represent a 1000 cards created. So you have still learned/reinforced something when you first made the card or looked up the word or whatever. Don't worry about clearing a massive backlog of cards. The most useful items will pop up again and again in your reading/listening, so any extra review is just going to be redundant 'going through the motions' anyway. The items you've truly forgotten can be returned to at any time. There is no hurry. Personally I think I've always created new material to review faster than I review the old material (and this is despite using a system that is faster than SRS). This really doesn't matter as long as my knowledge is on an upward trajectory.

Inny Jan wrote:

The maths in SRS is actually quite simple. On every day you are scheduled to do such and such number of repetitions. Typical numbers, depending on how fast you add new items, are in range 50 – 200 repetitions a day. So, depending on your daily load, after a break of a week you will have to catchup with ~350-1400 repetitions (this is without adding any new items, mind you).

Unlike netsplitter is showing it's a linear relationship – not an exponential one.

I'm pretty sure he was kidding.
Hence the graph saying "completely erased".Poking fun at people who think its the end of the world if they miss a day of reviewing. Or at least that was what I got from it

blackbrich wrote:

Poking fun at people who think its the end of the world if they miss a day of reviewing. Or at least that was what I got from it

Of course. You're going to be doing this for a few years. Missing a day or two will be a regular occurrence that you will grow accustomed to. Besides, the SRS algorithms aren't magic; they aren't predicting the precision of your memory down to the exact day you'll forget a fact.

From the Anki docs:

Anki docs wrote:

For example, the default range for cards answered with the 3rd answer button is 3-5 days. When you answer a card, a random value is chosen within that range, so you may get a next time of 5 days, undo the card, and get an interval of 3 days the next time, or vice-versa. The range is designed to reduce spikes in the number of reviews you have to do each day.

...

While Anki stores a card’s next due time in seconds for the sake of ordering, the scheduling algorithms are an approximation of your memory, and are not accurate to such a precise time. Answering a non-failed card a few hours earlier or later than it is due will have no noticeable impact on your memory.

It's all ballpark figures. You're even rewarded for skipping reviews!

Anki docs wrote:

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.

Anyway, I think this all might be off-topic. I think the problem Jombo was having was that it is just plain boring. Sadly, some parts really are boring and there's no way around that. Nobody said it'd be All Fun and Games All The Time.

Well, one guy did, but we don't like him anyway.

netsplitter wrote:

Sadly, some parts really are boring and there's no way around that. Nobody said it'd be All Fun and Games All The Time.

Well, one guy did, but we don't like him anyway.

LMAO