This came up back in this thread; Fabrice has added it to the RTK todo list but it's not possible at the moment.
There's an entry in the Anki FAQ that makes the argument that suspending is a bad idea anyway. (RTK's not Anki, of course, but if you buy the argument it applies here too...)

I'm still open to the idea, but I think "suspend" is a misleading name for such a feature.

An option to limit the number of expired cards could take care of this. If you set 10 cards per day for example, there would be no more than 10 expired cards when you resume.

I like that idea, Fabrice.

Tobberoth: If the pile is so big you can't do all the reviews in one day, it will ruin the system as well. Recently I had some computer problems and I couldn't do my RTK2 reviews that I do in Anki (I had a loan computer from work which didn't have the Japanese language pack installed, so even on Anki online all the kanji looked like blank squares). When I got my computer back after about 5 days, I had 357 reviews. That was too much to do all in one day; it took me about a week to get them done and I couldn't add any new things in the mean time either (no time). Totally messed up my review schedule.

Whereas if everything had been suspended for 5 days, I might have had more failed reviews for those cards that were rather new, but I wouldn't have had to review those cards that have been in my Anki system for months and that I know well enough (if which I would otherwise have had maybe 5 every day and now had loads more of). Now I had to do those as well, taking up time I could have spent on the less well-known cards otherwise. That's what I'm saying. If you suspend it for 3 weeks even; you might get more failed cards with the not-so-well-known, but at least you won't have to review almost every single card in the bunch. They're supposed to be spread out and they're not this way.

Like I said before; there should be a warning on it for newbies who might use it incorrectly (although they might also go on holiday and come back to a big pile, which has messed up their reviewing schedule anyway). But I think this can have many advantages for those of us who have long since finished and just don't want the hassle of having 300 reviews when we get back.

I felt suspending would be nice too, but when I thought about it, there really wasn't much point in doing that. The cards will show up in the order they were expired anyway so you'll be doing the same cards in the same order whether or not the deck is suspended. And if you suspend the deck, you will no longer be able to ever catch up with the correct schedule so the timing of the review of all cards will be compromised forever. It's better to just let them all pile up and do as many as you can a day when you come back. It's not a very nice feeling to see hundreds of review dues but I just ignore it and take all the time I want to get rid of them.

If you want to add new cards while you are catching up, how about creating a new deck and importing it to the original when you are done reviewing all expired cards?

Last edited by masaman (2010 July 14, 12:22 pm)

oregum wrote:

I was thinking of more of a pause than a suspend feature (such as in Anki). It would simply move the due date of all cards over until it is unpaused. So if a card is due in 1h:20m:30sec and I pause it for 3 hours, it would be due in 4h:20m:30sec.

Yeah, I was actually meaning that. If you pushed back the review time, you would no longer be able to catch up with the correct schedule. And you would still be doing the same cards in the same order, so it'd only make you feel better by not showing a large number for review dues with the cost of compromised review timing of the entire deck.

If you want to add new cards while you are working on the old ones, you can create a new deck and merge it later. That way, the review timing can/will eventually be back to normal.

I'm a slacker so I often have hundreds of review dues, It once went up to 700, but I think that's OK. I'll eventually catch up. If I push back the review timing though, I'm compromising all the cards in my deck so I don't think that's a good ides.

Last edited by masaman (2010 July 14, 1:04 pm)

oregum wrote:

masaman wrote:

Yeah, I was actually meaning that. If you pushed back the review time, you would no longer be able to catch up with the correct schedule. And you would still be doing the same cards in the same order, so it'd only make you feel better by not showing a large number for review dues with the cost of compromised review timing of the entire deck.

Forget correct schedule, whatever that means. Schedules are not the boss of me.

According to my pause-idea, you will just have a new schedule = old schedule + length of pause. All your cards get skewed equally by length of the pause.

So if a card was due 30 mins ago, and I pause for 3 hours, its still due 30 minutes ago when I resume, not 3h+30 ago.

Seems simple to me. I understand the logic behind leaving a suspend/pause feature out. I just don't care.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA7m8DGIFl0

I don't exactly agree with him, but I would like skip review days here and there to do other things.

I skip reviews all the time, I often don't work on it on a Saturday or Sunday, and I frequently take several days off when I take vacations, or when I just don't feel like it. Doing the reviews once a day or once 2 days or random 2 days of a week doesn't make much difference, unless you recently did a lot of new cards, in which case you really should do it everyday.

What is bugging you is probably the mere fact that you see a big number next to "review due" and you feel like you NEED to finish all of them. You should forget about it. You don't get annoyed having 1000 "new total", right? it's the same thing. You be the boss and do whatever number of reviews you want to do. I usually set the goal for the number of the reviews per day to a nice round number like 100 or 200, and I eventually catch up. I've only been using Anki for a bit over a year now, but trust me, it works if you follow its logic. I learnt 3000 English words in a year, up to around 19000 words(an average American college student level). That's a lot considering I had learnt only 9000 or so in the 11 years working in the states before that. And I just worked on Anki an average of 15 min. a day. Mind you though, I did a lot of reading along with it, but I was doing that for a couple of years before using Anki too.

JimmySeal wrote:

The cards in your SRS are scheduled to be at the optimal interval where you near the threshold between remembering and not remembering the cards' content.  Delay it much further and you run the risk of forgetting the content and having to expend extra time and mental energy to get back to where you were.

This, sir, is plain rubbish. There is limited quantifiable research on SRS. The only thing conclusive is that the spacing effect is effective for learning/memorizing. And this research was done in the 60s. Further, there is no actual research on the effectiveness of the various algorithms that are used to determine intervals (most of them are based on supermemo). That is why one can set the interval multiplier to anything s/he desires in many SRS programs.

To believe that any SRS algorithm can predict an "optimal interval" is ridicules. At best it can approximate. Every algorithm throws in a randomizer, doesn't that tell you that its an approximation.

I've read the Anki no-postpone argument/article that you mention 2 years ago. I think I mentioned that I read it, twice. I also mentioned that I simply do not care. Because I'm a REBEL like that, and what? FREEEEEDOM!!!

I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. If you believe what SRS algorithm you are using is canon, alrighty then. I'm just stating what I think, in response to the OP. Please don't try to convince me otherwise.

Btw, I've been using Anki for quite so time, and my reviews are 20-50 kanji, 80-120 sentences per day. It's not too big a deal. I finish the kanji in about 15 minutes, and the sentences in an hour+. For now I deal, and don't complain.

Last edited by oregum (2010 July 15, 12:00 am)

oregum wrote:

To believe that any SRS algorithm can predict an "optimal interval" is ridicules. At best it can approximate. Every algorithm throws in a randomizer, doesn't that tell you that its an approximation.

I apologize if I gave you the impression I thought SRS algorithms were exact.  I'm well aware that the intervals are approximate but in my experience they're darn good approximations.  It still stands to reason that the longer you delay your reviews, the higher the probability that you will fail them and have to start all over.  If you delay your whole deck you increase every single card's likelihood of failure, and I think wanting to do that is ridicules[sic].

I'm not trying to convince anyone of anything. If you believe what SRS algorithm you are using is rubbish, alrighty then. I'm just stating what I think, in response to your posts. Please don't try to convince me otherwise.

oregum wrote:

For example, there are days when I wake up, and feel like taking a day off from Anki. Perhaps to sleep in, perhaps to go out, perhaps to read in L2 instead.

So take a day off? It's this easy: You don't start the program. Done. No suspension or anything needed.

What people don't seem to understand I'm not talking about suspending them because I don't want to do them or whatever, but there is no possible way I can do them, since I will be on holiday!! *sigh*

I am not adding any new cards since I finished RTK1 six months ago. I just don't want to have an enormous pile of reviews when I come back from my holiday all jet-lagged and relaxed and immediately get into the stress again. I am also not talking about Anki, but this site.

Thanks to someone for mentioning Anki has a pause mode; I'll definitely be using that.

I totally understand it's super annoying to see a huge pile, but like Tobberoth said, it's just a number. Let's say you have 565 due cards, and you do reviews so the number stays 565, that's pretty much exactly the same as pausing. If you do 1 card more, and make it 564, you are 1 card ahead. It's not hard at all to do 5 or 10 more reviews a day, so pretty soon you'll catch up. If you pause though, you will lose the chance of ever catching up.

I just wanted to point out that you won't get anything from pausing. It just hides the number while screwing up the review schedule. If you still wanna hide the pile though, I understand.

Last edited by masaman (2010 July 16, 2:56 pm)

In Anki you can choose what order to review them, and sounds like you want "order due". I'm not quite sure what the RevTK site does. My rather subjective impression from the times I reviewed after a few days of slacking was "order due with cards for the same day randomised", but I never got around to asking about that yet.

On the other hand, I now favour "shortest interval first" when playing catch-up, or any day I don't feel up to doing all the reviews due. This can be done on RevTK by clicking on the bar chart.