wow that's ridiculous. did you make this deck yourself? either way it's obviously counterproductive. Personally, I wouldn't even get to this situation but... anyways I would suggest setting a duration that you can review like you can only review cards 20 minutes a day for that deck.
700 cards is really overkill. I have like 5 different decks and it's probably 200 or something at most in a day. Wow that's insane.

Last edited by howtwosavealif3 (2012 June 09, 2:47 pm)

Couple of suggestions.

Pick an arbitrary interval number and suspend the cards past that, like Splatted said. That will cut SOME of the review down, but maybe only 30-40% of what you do during a days review.

The other thing you can do depends upon what Anki you are reviewing in. Effectively the idea is to cut down the amount of reviews via tweaking the scheduling algorithm parameters.

Anki 2:
This is the new version in beta right now. It has a lot of new nice features and a lot of quirks that piss me off, but its something we'll all have to move to if we want to keep getting new updates/features. The thing of particular notice is that it lets you re-tune your scheduling algorithm. By default in Anki 1&2 its set with the belief that you want to remember 90% of your mature cards and forget 10%. This is set in stone unless you fiddle with the source code. In Anki 2 though, you can change it. It comes in the form of a multiplier.

Open your deck in question from the collection. Click options at the bottom. Go to "Reviews." You want to modify the "Interval modifier." By default its 1 meaning forgetting mature cards is assumed to be 10%. Typically you change this to reflect your actual forgetting (found by looking at the graphs/stats in Anki), say you have a deck with a lot of hard words, so your mature fail rate is something like 82% on average. You change this multiplier to reflect that. The equation to figure the multiplier is:

log(desired retention%) / log(current retention%)

Or in the above example log(.9)/log(.82)=0.53, this would be your new multiplier. It would affect how often cards are shown. (Explained here in the Anki 2.0 Beta User Manual)
(You can simply enter your calcs into a google search and it'll give you the result. Or use WolframAlpha.)

Example:
Without knowing your situation, lets assume you actually do hit that 90% dead on. Maybe you want to keep reviewing but don't mind forgetting some of your mature cards more often, this way you can keep up on some stuff and do other things you want to. Lets say you want to drop it closer to 80% remember on mature cards. Plug it in:
log(.80)/log(.90) = 2.11
This affects the calculation of ALL card intervals as a whole but is generally focused at re-tuning desired retention of mature cards.

Anki 1.0 & Anki 2.0
Unfortunately you can't tweak that interval modifier in Anki 1.0 but there is something else you can do in both versions that can make reviewing less of a hassle.

Default behavior in both versions when you fail a card is to reduce the interval to 0. Meaning that it restarts back like a new card. It'll still have its ease rating and will quickly climb back up in intervals if it was an easy card, but it'll still be an extra card you have to review often. If its material you WANT to know, then going back through all the reviews is considered important by general memory theory (I assume).

However, you want fewer reviews so we can fix it so that failed cards don't reset to 0 interval days.

Anki 1:
Open your deck. Tools > Deck Properties > Advanced. The field(s) we want to tweak are "Button 1 multiplier" and potentially "Mature bonus." If you never messed with this before, it should say 0 in both fields.
I'll explain this using an Example. You have a card with an interval of 100 days. You fail it. With the 0 multiplier, the card resets to 0 days. Then when you next review it again (in minutes) the answers will be small intervals like hours (hard/2), 3-8 days (easy/3), and 1 week (very easy/4); as an example. If you set the multiplier to something like 20% though, that 100 day card will now have an interval of 20 on fail. It will still ACT like a failed card though meaning you will review it again quite shortly; HOWEVER, when you go to answer it, the intervals for the answer now will reflect what a card with a 20 day interval might be. So a hard/2 answer might place the card ahead by 20-25 days, and very easy/4 will place it ahead by maybe a few months.
More info from the manual

Anki 2 has this option as well and as far as I know it works the same way. Its under Options for a deck, in the "Lapses" tab, as "New Interval."

One more thing for Anki 1, Mature bonus.
The "Mature Bonus" is only in Anki 1 I believe. Basically if you fail a mature card, Anki gives the card extra days if it was a mature card. Meaning if the multiplier (from just a second ago) is set to 0 and mature bonus is 10 days, and then you fail a mature card; that mature card resets to a 10 day interval and not 0.
Note: this does not mean the card will be placed ahead by 10 days, it merely means that when Anki calculates the intervals for each answer, it adds a bonus of +10 days to each answer.

This post is a bit haphazard but I hope it gets the idea across.

Last edited by vix86 (2012 June 09, 3:57 pm)

EratiK wrote:

howtwosavealif3 wrote:

wow that's ridiculous. did you make this deck yourself? either way it's obviously counterproductive. Personally, I wouldn't even get to this situation but... anyways I would suggest setting a duration that you can review like you can only review cards 20 minutes a day for that deck.
700 cards is really overkill. I have like 5 different decks and it's probably 200 or something at most in a day. Wow that's insane.

Not sure why you say all this. I'm making my second deck (first was premade, but so full of mistakes it's like I made it myself), and once merged I will have about 16 500 facts in there. How do you keep track of what you learn otherwise? I haven't reach the stage where I can read a definition and remember it (even in my native tongue, I think I need at least three encounters).

Anyway, one hour and a half every day (and only for vocab) is maybe too much, but one hour every couple of days seems alright. Obviously you can suspend half your deck without too much problem, and then you can add again, or do something else. Maybe you can tag what's suspended and do a quaterly run-through? I don't know...

I don't get what you're implying with "How do you keep track of what you learn otherwise?" are you assuming my deck is really small just because I don't get anywhere near 700 cards a day?

Last edited by howtwosavealif3 (2012 June 09, 5:10 pm)

dizmox wrote:

That's odd, my vocab deck has 16500+ cards and I never got anywhere near to 700 reviews a day. I've plateaued at 50 per day. Are you still adding lots?

That's my question. 700/day is way high for a 15k deck; that means you're going through each card in your deck every month (and some 2x).

This could makes sense if you add cards like crazy and have lots of young cards, but if that's the case, keep in mind your review time will die down to like a quarter of what you're doing now...

dizmox wrote:

That's odd, my vocab deck has 16500+ cards and I never got anywhere near to 700 reviews a day. I've plateaued at 50 per day. Are you still adding lots?

Till Zorlee replies, its hard to say. The OP says he/she hasn't added any new cards in a while. But its possible Zorlee added/reviewed too many new cards and that created a huge back up. Honestly though, if you figure that Anki will have you forgetting 10% of mature card, and you mature all 15k, 10% of that is 1500 cards. So you are looking at maybe 200 reviews a day of young cards at most, plus any mature cards due that day. I suspect that either Zorlee doesn't keep up on reviews everyday OR they grade quite conservatively meaning they fail a lot of cards; this would be reflected in the % correct of the mature cards.

Zorlee wrote:

I guess I'm just really conservative in grading my cards, and fail a lot of cards other people probably would've rated hard etc.

There's your problem. It's very inefficient to not use the whole range of grades in Anki.

You are doing a whole lot of work for little gain.

Betelgeuzah wrote:

Zorlee wrote:

I guess I'm just really conservative in grading my cards, and fail a lot of cards other people probably would've rated hard etc.

There's your problem.

No, that doesn't sound like the problem.

Zorlee wrote:

Well, I added pitch to my cards a couple of months ago and fail cards that I can't remember the correct pitch for.

That sounds like the problem. 

Zorlee, why didn't you just create a new model (template?) for pitch, create "pitch" cards for all 15,000 of your vocab words, and then go through those separately.  That's what I plan on doing when I start studying pitch.  I imagine that will keep your reviews down.

Hm, I had a similar problem, Zorlee. Then I pushed myself pressing more often 'easy' instead of just 'good', as vix86 advised me (Thank you man! You saved me from many many unnecessary hours reviewing!)

@kaamaru: If I hurry I get 600/hour straight. It depends on how you review really and in what mood you are. I'm feeling burnt out after about 700 reviews, that's why I review simply every day about 250 and add 20 new cards a day.

EratiK wrote:

kaamaru wrote:

Am I doing something wrong then? It can take me 30 or more seconds to remember the kanji. Even If I remember it right away it still takes me about 15 seconds to write it and press "good".

We're discussing vocab reviews here (see OP); kanji reviews are longer (since you have to write the kanji), and something like an average would be 150 an hour, but while still learning, it can be much less of course, no pressure!

Ah cool! I thought I was doing something seriously wrong!

Lavasioth wrote:

Same problem, have no idea what to do. I frequently don't even finish cause I keep getting stuck not knowing cards for new words and never get through them.

Occasionally can have as much as 800 reviews, in addition to new cards.

I think the main problem is I have no clue at all how to handle vocabulary. I just don't know the best lay out for actually remembering new words. Kanji is ok, but once I get to the vocabulary decks it just flat out stops. I don't even have any grammar decks.

Kanji deck, 2 decks for vocab, and 1 deck for core 2000.

Put your new cards at the end. Don't start new cards until you have finished all of your reviews. This will help you judge whether you need to back off on the number of new cards you are adding or not. If you are adding too many and not raising enough cards to mature status, you'll find it increasingly difficult to get through your reviews and work on new cards, in a day.

As to layout. The answer to that is simply whatever feels good for you. What works. There are 3 basic designs, I think, to a vocab card and most people do 1 or 2 of them.
FRONT / BACK
1  纏う  / put on, clad in
2 乞食はぼろを纏っていて。 / The beggar was clad in rags.
3 乞食はぼろを纏っていて。 / The beggar was clad in rags.

Lots of people do 1 for quick exposure 'priming' of new vocab words; sort of to keep them fresh in their memory for use in their reading. 2 is the usual sentence and 3 is a hybrid which I've come to like a lot. 2 forces you to read the sentence, but 3 lets you focus the word (Front font is like 58 point font, so bold and underline stands out) but have the sentence if you need it. Though, I add a bit more to the back of my card (example card).

And don't get too caught up on trying to remember cards. I realize that sometimes cards come to you if you think about it for like 30 seconds (happens to me all the time). But this means you'll do far less cards in an hour as well. Aim for something like 8-15 seconds on each card.

EDIT: Something else I just thought of that is important. If you put the meaning of a word on the back. Make sure you limit it to 1-3 good definition words. Don't overload your cards, because it'll overload your brain and nothing will stick. If its a word with multiple definitions, then add those separate definitions as new cards as you encounter them or as you see fit.

Last edited by vix86 (2012 June 10, 7:20 pm)

If you use Anki and know how, you could set you leech threshold lower. Then problem cards would get thrown out quicker. Because it's probably better to temporarily abandon 1 card and succeed with 3 more.