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This happens quite a lot when using Anki where you have to start doing it for hours. If you stop doing for weeks, and then try to come back, there are so many cards piled up that it would take so long to go through that you just don't feel like doing it anymore.

How would you solve this?




Get up and walk away, come back tomorrow. There are settings for maximum reviews per day, if you need assistance in doing this. The good news is that the longer you go between reviews and get the card right, the further out it will be until the next review.


I've been using Anki to learn Japanese for about a year now, quite successfully.

The largest factor determining your daily reviews is your daily new cards - it depends on retention somewhat, but in general daily reviews after a few months stabilize at around 10x daily new cards.

So the best way to use Anki is to limit your daily new cards to an amount where you can easily handle the reviews. And yeah, you basically can't take a day off ever.

Anki is very powerful, but you also need to structure your learning/routine around it somewhat, or maybe another way to look at it is that you need to make Anki work for you. I currently spend about 15-20 minutes a day on Anki, earlier on in my language learning it was over an hour a day.


There's absolutely no need to do all the cards for the day. The option to limit cards per day is just for psychological effect because completionists get demotivated by not hitting 0. Just do as much per day as you can and ignore that number.


Fun fact: when learning Japanese a decade ago I did 35 new cards a day for 2 years. I hit 400 reviews a day and review sessions were several hours.

One day I just stopped and deleted it all.


well, yeah. you shouldn't be doing 35 new cards a day. it's not anki's fault that you had several hours worth of reviews. it's your fault. anki scales to take up as much time as you tell it to. if you had done 5-10 cards a day you could have easily had it take like 20 minutes. also you should have cards set to leech suspend. there is no reason to having certain cards that you clearly aren't going to learn taking up an order of magnitude more time than other cards. just nuke those cards from orbit and move on. most people's bad experiences with anki is due to user error.

that said it certainly doesn't help that anki takes a non-trivial amount of time and study in and of itself to properly set up to be really efficient.


My fault? More like my consciously made trade-off of time vs speed.

And it worked stunningly well. You see, I figured that whatever I targeted I'd do about 80% of the time. So, 35 a day is about ~1000 a month, and I reckoned I could hit that 10 months in a given year.

My first year of Japanese was basically RTK + KO2001 and JLPT2 grammar study. I was a few points off passing JLPT2 inside 1 year of study. At the time it say I had around 2 to 3 thousand vocab, and could read all Jyoyou kanji, plus understand almost all sentence structure used in daily life.

My 2nd year of Japanese I acquired an additional 10k vocab. I passed JLPT2 and came a few points short of passing JLPT1.

6 months into my 3rd year of study I passed JLPT1 and never touched studying Japanese again.

It has always been a big part of my life since then, and I credit that brutal effort with me really turning my life around. It was an absolutely epic adventure.


Maybe user error is a bit harsh because it's difficult to find everything you need to know about using Anki properly in one place... but yeah, most people's dislike of Anki comes from not knowing how to use it.


How's your Japanese now?


See another reply in this thread for how that strategy worked out.


Categorize your cards, and when you come back focus on the categories you want to work on. I think Anki allows tagging. I use Memrise and it allows you to split courses into different “chapters”, which all share the same course database. In fact, it allows you to pull in data from all existing public Memrise databases.


Timebox it. Use no more than 'x' minutes per day on Anki; unless you're adding more cards than you are remembering, you'll catch up.




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