I’ve started studying a bunch of new Japanese sentences lately, but I don’t want to get bogged down because I’m still adding 5 new vocab cards per day and I want to make sure to keep up with my reviews.

Since most of the new sentences I’m adding won’t give me too much trouble, I used the reschedule function in anki to randomly assign intervals between 15 and 45 days.  That way, I only get a few per day and I won’t see them as often as “fresh” cards.  In other words, if I added 150 cards with a 15 day interval, I would only see 10 extra cards per day – which I probably wouldn’t even notice.  Unfortunately, the way the function works in anki, if I set them all to 15 day intervals, they will all start on the same day, which is why I used a range of 15-45.  Now I get a few every day.

Even though I’m using the n+1 optimized deck, for some reason I’m getting a lot of words that I don’t know. Probably because I started out learning in non-optimized order.  Whatever the reason, now I’m suspending those cards because I’d rather study the ones that I can read and understand because there’s a lot of them to study.  I’ll sort out the suspended cards once I have a need for more sentences.  Starting out with the optimized deck would’ve made everything a lot easier.

I’ve also added another filtered deck..  “New Core Sentences”  filters all of the new sentences that I haven’t seen.  Here’s the code: card:sentences prop:revs>0  and I set the deck to reschedule.  This works out well when I have some extra time.  Instead of going over and over my 2 day deck for dubious gains – I go through my new sentences.  It’s basically a filtering operation.  If there are words on the card that I don’t know – I suspend it.  If I know all of the words, but can’t produce the closed word – I fail it.  If I know all of the words, but I don’t understand the grammar – I fail it.  If I know what the sentence means, I pass it.  Since I set my “new interval” to 15% even the failed cards won’t go to a 1 day interval, but somewhere between 2 to 7 days.

The effect of all this is that I get a large number of new japanese sentence cards in play quickly without adding a huge burden to my daily workload.  Also, the cards start their lives with useful study intervals so I’m not spending too much time seeing the same cards too often or not often enough.  I can already feel that I’m learning new grammar and I wish I’d done this earlier.