Quick Question for Anki Users

[Rotasu]

Say you're trying to learn more vocabulary. So you go find a book in your target language that looks interesting. You read the first chapter and there were 38 words you didn't know. You put them into Anki and then what?

A. Stick with your daily new card limit
B. Review all of them now
C. Review all of them later as a set (as in, maybe tomorrow you will only review those 38 cards as your new cards)

If A, won't you worry about forgetting the word by the time it shows up in Anki. Which means you wont be reviewing anymore but instead relearning that card.

[Tomás]

Relearning is not necessarily a problem. In fact, some pedagogical research suggests that forgetting and then relearning is an ideal strategy for building strong memories.

In your scenario, I would put them all in, and then use the pass/fail/easy buttons to tell Anki which cards are most important to me. I will sometimes mark "easy" for a card I failed, because it's a word that is not important to me and I can always come back to it later. Conversely, I will sometimes "hard" a card I passed because it's an important word and I want to review it sooner.

[Rotasu]

In your scenario, I would put them all in, and then use the pass/fail/easy buttons to tell Anki which cards are most important to me. I will sometimes mark "easy" for a card I failed, because it's a word that is not important to me and I can always come back to it later. Conversely, I will sometimes "hard" a card I passed because it's an important word and I want to review it sooner.

So you would review all of them once you put them in? Like on the same day?

[Tomás]

So you would review all of them once you put them in? Like on the same day?

No, because I already have a long backlog of words in my Anki. I wait until Anki throws them at me down the road, and then how I feel about that word on that day determines my next step.

I've learned that I need to become the master of my Anki instead of letting it make too many decisions for me, else my backlog gets enormous. And when that happens, the risk is that I don't do any Anki at all. I don't want to spend more than 30-40 minutes a day on Anki. So when it starts making me work too long, then I start marking more unimportant cards as easy even if I fail them, and start deleting or suspending cards that really are easy.

My main goal is to spend most of my Anki time looking at cards that I want to study right now. Just because they show up in my course book or something else I'm reading doesn't mean I have to master them right now. Or ever.

[jeff_lindqvist]

Rotasu - you can tweak Anki any way you want, but the default value is 20 new words per day, so if you add your presumed 38 words today, 20 will show up next time, and the rest the day after. No big deal. Of course you can review the words as much as you want outside Anki (even in Anki; I think I've seen a cram option).

[Rotasu]

Rotasu - you can tweak Anki any way you want, but the default value is 20 new words per day, so if you add your presumed 38 words today, 20 will show up next time, and the rest the day after. No big deal. Of course you can review the words as much as you want outside Anki (even in Anki; I think I've seen a cram option).

I know how Anki works xD Im just asking the people here which way they do it.

[emk]

Rotasu - you can tweak Anki any way you want, but the default value is 20 new words per day, so if you add your presumed 38 words today, 20 will show up next time, and the rest the day after. No big deal. Of course you can review the words as much as you want outside Anki (even in Anki; I think I've seen a cram option).

Anki's default "20 new cards per day" limit is there for fairly good reasons in my opinion. It's really tempting to learn 50 cards per day during the first week, when you're enthusiastic, and you don't have any cards to review. But if you learn N new cards per day, you can expect your review load to level off between 5×N and 10xN cards per day. So learning 50 new cards per day ultimately means reviewing between 250–500 cards per day, which can become pretty grim.

Here are my personal rules of thumb for how many cards to learn per day:

• 5 new cards per day (reviewing ≥ 25): Wanderlust languages. This gives me just enough exposure to feel satisfying without actually taking up much time.
• 10 new cards per day (reviewing ≥ 50): Leaves me lots of room for other activities, like extensive reading or courses. My favorite.
• 20 new cards per day (reviewing ≥ 100): Anki will begin to push my other study activities aside to a noticeable extent. But it's OK if Anki is my main study activity and if I'm seriously focusing on a language.
• 40 new cards per day: I only ever did this once, starting over a month before my B2 exam. I was studying full time, and I had a lot of useful sentences in Anki, and I wanted all the cards to be at least 20 or 30 days old by the time the exam arrived. Since I was already studying 6+ hours a day, and I stopped cramming after several weeks, I never built up a big pile of daily reviews.

My standard recommendation to first time Anki users is to learn 10 to 20 new cards per day, steadily, for a month. At that point, you'll have good Anki habits and you'll have a good intuition for how reviews pile up, as well as how cards mature. At that point, feel free to be as hardcore as you like; you'll know what you're getting into.

Of course, if you have more time to study languages, or if you can review cards very quickly, or if you delete cards aggressively (as Khatzumoto recommends), these numbers can obviously change. But if you've never use Anki before, there's a lot to be said for not adjusting the default new card limit.

[dampingwire]

A. Stick with your daily new card limit
B. Review all of them now
C. Review all of them later has a set (as in, maybe tomorrow you will only review those 38 cards as your new cards)

Generally, for vocabulary, I leave the daily limit alone. However, I have a backlog of maybe 5000 words right now. So when I need to prioritise some words, as I do right now ... I need to activate the vocabulary for the next chapter in my textbook by my next tutorial on Monday, I just use the Custom Study Session to activate one daily limit's worth of new and relevant vocabulary each day until I no longer have anything to prioritise. Then I go back to letting Anki pick.

I do sometimes fiddle with the daily limit. For example when I wanted to cram vocab for the JLPT N2 I was activating a few hundred words each week. However, these were mostly words I already knew but just didn't necessarily recognise in kanji form.

My problem is usually that I want vocab from the tutorial text book but also vocab from a different grammar book's example sentences plus vocab that keeps cropping up in this week's novel ... I have to stop myself from "just activating another 20 ... it won't do any harm" precisely because it leads to a rather heavy workload down the road.

[Rotasu]

My problem is usually that I want vocab from the tutorial text book but also vocab from a different grammar book's example sentences plus vocab that keeps cropping up in this week's novel ... I have to stop myself from "just activating another 20 ... it won't do any harm" precisely because it leads to a rather heavy workload down the road.

Ahh so it seems most people are more worried about the amount of reviews they will have down the road rather than forgetting the meaning of the vocabulary. Hmm I guess I'll just stick with the limit for now. It's hard because right now they're so easy that I spend around 5 minutes in Anki xD

[jeff_lindqvist]

I agree with emk. 20 new words is a number you can manage. More words than that will indeed result in a lot of reviews, especially if the words really are new, words you haven't seen before, don't know the meaning of and so on. Unless you have really good memory techniques, chances are small that you'll (honestly) grade 20 new words "Easy" the first time you see them.

Short answer:
A. Stick with your daily new card limit