Category Archives: Anki

Optimizing Anki Settings for Japanese Study

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Default anki settings are ok for learning general material, but sub-optimal for most people learning Japanese.  Many people are put off by the myriad of options in anki.  This post suggests some anki settings which should make things a lot easier and goes on explain how the settings work.  If you are studying another subject, scroll down a bit where I explain a little anki theory.

Anki Settings Quick Start

If you want the tldr and just want to plug in some settings that should work better for you, here you go.  Start with anki’s defaults and change these settings:

  • New Cards – Steps:  1 10 60 360
  • New Cards – Starting Ease: 180
  • Lapses – Steps: 5 75 360
  • Lapses – New Interval: 15

Theory

The settings above show cards to you more often than the default so that you fail cards less often.  You might be tempted to adjust the settings even more so that your accuracy is doubly improved, but there is a point of diminishing returns where more frequent study yields less additional knowledge acquisition.

Anki Settings resulting in 70-80% accuracy are most efficient

70-80% is most efficient with efficiency falling off rapidly outside this range.

The efficiency sweet spot seems to be in the 70-80% accuracy range.  The efficiency curve is roughly parabolic, so the difference between 70% or 80% is negligible, but setting your anki settings to attain 90% accuracy you would need to study the same words roughly twice as many times which is clearly inefficient.  85% is just a bit less efficient than 80%.

On the other hand, 70% accuracy might be efficient, but forgetting 30% of the words you study every day can be soul crushing.  Even 80% accuracy is dispiriting some days, and remember that this is average, so some days will be better and some days will be worse.  This is really up to you, but personally I target accuracy around 80-85% because I am willing to trade some efficiency to make studying more enjoyable.  But you should target a specific accuracy range to aid in adjusting your anki settings.

Understanding Anki’s Settings

The anki settings we are discussing today affect three different groups of cards.  The ideal settings would have your accuracy for each of these groups of cards falling in the range you’ve decided work best for your goals.

  • Learning cards are brand new cards that you just started learning.  These have never had an interval over 1 day.
  • Young and Mature cards that you’ve been reviewing for a while.  These have an interval over 1 day.
  • Lapses (aka relearn) are young or mature cards that you just failed.  These had an interval over 1 day, but are treated like a learning card again.

Learning Cards Settings

The setting to adjust learning cards is ‘Steps‘ in the new cards section.  Steps is simply a list of how many minutes to wait until you see the same card again with a space between each step.  E.g. if you go with the default of 1 10, anki will show you a brand new card and then show it to you again 10 minutes later.  If you fail, you go back to the beginning of the list.  If you answer correctly twice in a row, the card will no longer be considered new, will become young and you will see it again the next day.  I don’t know about you, but studying a foreign language word twice in 10 minutes usually isn’t sufficient for me to remember it the next day.  I need to see it a few more times.  So if you use steps of 1 10 60 360, you will see it after 1 minute, 10 minutes, one hour, and 6 hours before it becomes young and the next interval is 1 day.

The goal is to get your learning accuracy within the range you set. Take a look your anki graph called ‘Answer Buttons’ and if your learning percentage is lower than desired, you may need to add another step – something like 1 6 36 180 560.  Or if your learning accuracy is high, consider 1 10 100.

It is important to know that anki’s graph combines the learn and relearn stats.  So it is best to install this anki add-on which separates the two stats.

Young and Mature Card Settings

The setting which affects young and mature accuracy is ‘Starting Ease‘.  A card’s ease is the percentage by which the interval is increased for each successive step.  Anki’s default stating ease is 250, so if you pass a card with an interval of 10 days, anki will multiply 10 days by 250% so the new interval will become 25 days.  This setting will vary widely by person, but I find a starting ease of 250 to be a bit too high for me to remember 80% of my mature cards so I set my starting ease around 180.

Whatever starting ease you set, anki will adjust each card’s ease over time to account for the difficulty of each card.  Anki decreases each card’s ease factor every time you press ‘again’ or ‘hard’.  Anki increases each card’s ease factor every time you press easy for that card.  But ideally you set an appropriate starting ease so that you aren’t studying cards at sub-optimal intervals while anki finds it’s level.  So keep an eye on your mature accuracy and adjust accordingly.  Keep in mind that mature accuracy will take a month or more to reflect changes because the intervals are 21 days and greater.

Lapses

When you fail a card, the card will go through it’s learning steps (default 1 10) and it’s next step will be one day, just like for new cards.  But this behavior is adjustable separately from new cards.  Usually if you fail a card that has an interval of several months or years, after a relearn step or two, you will not need to reset it’s interval back to 1 day.  You can set a percentage of the old interval in ‘Lapses’ / ‘New Interval‘.  A setting of 10-15 is appropriate here.  So if you use 15% and your current interval is 6 months (180 days), the new interval will be 27 days after going through the relearning steps.

Lapses / Steps defaults to 1 10, but I prefer 5 75 360.  Again this should be adjusted based on your relearn accuracy and personal preference.

Recap

The settings at the top of the page are a decent starting point.  But to use your time most efficiently you should adjust them so that your learn, relearn, young and mature accuracy is within your target range.  The settings will vary considerably from person to person and for different types of cards.  For instance, my kanji cards need very different settings than my vocab cards and my grammar cards are different as well.  If you have any questions please leave a comment below and I will do my best to provide a thoughtful answer.

Analytics: Optimal starting ease for core vocab in Anki

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I’ve long wondered what the optimum starting ease settings are for learning vocabulary in anki.  Starting ease is the primary setting the affects accuracy, workload, and ultimately how much I can learn in a given time.  There’s supermemo’s theory page, but it’s not specific to japanese vocabulary or even language learning.  I want to know my personal settings for the deck I’m studying so I decided analyze my anki learning data to find out.

The first scatter chart shows the relationship between a card’s ease and my accuracy answering the card.  The blue data points are from when I first started studying core vocabulary and was using a lot of filtered decks.  I’ve since realized that filtered decks aren’t as efficient as simply using anki’s algorithm and sensible settings.  I’m also guessing that there’s a learning effect making it easier to learn japanese vocabulary once I’m a few thousand words into learning.  Either way, it seems that some combination of those factors is allowing me to be more accurate lately(red) as opposed to when I started(blue).

ease_v_accuracy2

 

The second chart shows what happens when I simulate my workload for various values along the combined best fit curve.  The blue line(left axis) is simply the combined line from the chart above.  The red line(right axis) is the simulated workload and the yellow line(right axis) is a smoothed version of the red line.  As you can see, on the left side of the chart, if I try for high accuracy, my workload is twice what it could be if I accepted a lower accuracy.  At an ease of around 210, my accuracy should be around 61%, but my workload is about half what it is with ease 130 allowing me to study twice as many cards in the same amount of time.
ease_v_accuracy_v_workload

 

The problem with the chart above is that the yellow line doesn’t accurately show how much of the vocabulary I actually “know” for any ease/accuracy setting.  In other words, if I am getting 60% accuracy vs 80% accuracy, I “know” 20% less vocabulary, but it’s counted the same in the chart above. So the following chart is the same, only the yellow workload line is adjusted to account for accuracy, so that every point on the line represents the same number of known cards.

ease_v_accuracy_v_workload2

 

Judging by this last chart, my most efficient starting ease for my core vocabulary deck is around 175 which should put my accuracy around 67%. Lately, I’ve had my ease set to rather easy settings because it makes the learning process a lot more fun when I feel like I’m winning. However, I realized that the slope of that yellow line is so steep that a small sacrifice in accuracy should result in a large decrease in workload, allowing me to add more cards. So, I’ve decided to slowly raise my ease settings until I find a good comprise between accuracy, efficiency and enjoyment.

Analytics: The difficulty of finding leeches

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When I first started thinking about leeches, I assumed cards that were easy or hard in the learning phase would stay easy or hard in the review phase.  I’ve noticed those problematic cards that I had a hard time getting out of learning and are still giving me trouble months later.  If I could just find the cards which were giving me trouble early on, I could just suspend them and learn just the easy cards.  Presumably I only remembered the cards that continued giving me trouble.  Because unfortunately, the next set of charts shows I was not a very good judge of what was actually going on.

The following charts show the relationship between how many reps it took to get each card to an interval of 7 days and how many reps to get the same card from interval 7 to interval 90.  I was fully expecting to see a nice relationship where difficult cards would stay difficult.  In a scatter chart, you would see a tight grouping of dots sloping from the lower left to the upper right.  Instead, what I got was the following set of charts where just as many easy cards became difficult as difficult cards became easy.  This exercise is making me think that it will be difficult to find leeches with any accuracy.

coresentence_ivl7v90 jfbp_ivl7v90corevocab_ivl7v90rtk_ivl7v90tk_ivl7v90

Anki Analytics: Card difficulty

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In a follow up on my post on leeches, I graphed the amount of reps it took to get each card to an interval of 90 days.  Again, the chart for kanji is the odd man out with it’s plot being more linear than the others, suggesting that different types of memories behave differently.  But even with kanji, we see that the most difficult cards take many multiples the number of repetitions that the median card takes.

By my calculations, the easiest 80% of my core vocabulary cards takes roughly the same number of reps as the hardest 20%.  In other words, I could learn 4 easy cards in the same time it takes to learn 1 of the harder cards.  It sure would be nice to identify those difficult cards early somehow.

low high mean median
Tae Kim 5 20 8.386740331 8
RTK 3 98 37.78409091 34.5
Core sentences 2 59 9.30834753 7
Core vocab 2 194 30.17112299 19
JFBP 5 164 19.59797297 7

rtk_ivl90 tk_ivl90 jfbp_ivl90 corevocab_ivl90 coresentence_ivl90

Analytics: Leeches

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This is a new series where I combine a few things that I am currently learning into a topic I have no business pretending to know anything about.  In addition to teaching myself Japanese, I am also attempting to teach myself programming and also data analysis.  Although it’s going very slowly, I am hoping to figure out a few things that will hopefully make the ankiing a little more efficient.

My first target is those damn leeches.  Leeches are what anki calls those cards that you keep forgetting over and over.  According to the supermemo site, around 50% of your time can be spent learning 2.5% of the material.  That 2.5% that is taking half of your time are leeches.  Depending on your goals, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to identify that 2.5% of material and spend that 50% of your time learning twice as much?  Personally, I would rather learn 97.5% of core twice as fast before spending the time to learn that last 2.5%.

Unfortunately we don’t know what those 2.5% hard vocab words are, and even worse, anki doesn’t give us nearly the tools to find them.  All that anki gives us is a setting that once you fail a card more than a set number of times (default is 7), anki will suspend that card.  The thinking being that you are more likely to learn a new card in less additional time than keep trying (and failing) to learn the one you’ve failed so many times already.  But I’ve always wondered what setting has you learning the most amount of material in the least amount of time?

This is the question I set out to answer.  I wrote a small program that counts the number of reps to either learn a card or become a leech.  I considered a card to be “learned” once it’s interval surpassed 4 months.  I did this for all cards, and averaging the reps to learn a card and the reps to become a leech for every card I’ve studied.  The result is the average number of reps it would take to learn a card assuming a given leech threshold in anki.
image (1)

The above graph shows the results for the 4 decks I’ve been studying.  The first thing to notice is that “core sentence”s and my” Japanese for busy people” decks are much easier than my “core vocabulary” and “kanji” decks.  The other thing to notice is that for all decks except for kanji, setting the leech threshold to the lowest setting results in learning the most number of cards in the fewest reps.  Kanji appears to be most efficient setting the leech threshold to 8, but any number higher than 4 appears to be just fine.  The final thing to notice is that all of the vocabulary and sentence decks appear to have a similar curve, and a very smooth one.  I take this to suggest that for all vocabulary decks I study, setting leeches to the lowest setting will result in learning the most amount of vocab words in the least amount of reps.  However this isn’t the only consideration.
image (3)

The second graph shows the ratio of learned cards to suspended leeches for each deck and each leech threshold.  As you can see with the “hard” vocab and kanji decks, at lower thresholds anki is suspending more cards than I would be learning learning.  In fact, setting the leech threshold to 1 for core vocab and kanji would result in learning only 18% of the vocab deck and 6% of the kanji deck.  This is hardly desirable, but finding a good balance between efficiency and completeness might make sense for some people.  For instance, setting the threshold to 9 for kanji and 6 for core vocab gets me in the 50-60% coverage range.  That still seems less than optimal to me, but something that I have to think about as there is no clear cut answer unfortunately.

That’s it for now.  Please put you thoughts, criticism, praise and especially suggestions in the comments as I’m happy to make this better with your help.

 

Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge

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The supermemo website has a lot of useful information about learning strategies, theory and research.  The following is a summery of a page Twenty rules of formulating knowledge:

  1. Do not learn if you do not understand
  2. Learn before you memorize – build the picture of the whole before you dismember it into simple items in SuperMemo. If the whole shows holes, review it again!
  3. Build upon the basics – never jump both feet into a complex manual because you may never see the end. Well remembered basics will help the remaining knowledge easily fit in
  4. Stick to the minimum information principle – if you continue forgetting an item, try to make it as simple as possible. If it does not help, see the remaining rules (cloze deletion, graphics, mnemonic techniques, converting sets into enumerations, etc.)
  5. Cloze deletion is easy and effective – completing a deleted word or phrase is not only an effective way of learning. Most of all, it greatly speeds up formulating knowledge and is highly recommended for beginners
  6. Use imagery – a picture is worth a thousand words
  7. Use mnemonic techniques – read about peg lists and mind maps. Study the books by Tony Buzan. Learn how to convert memories into funny pictures. You won’t have problems with phone numbers and complex figures
  8. Graphic deletion is as good as cloze deletion – obstructing parts of a picture is great for learning anatomy, geography and more
  9. Avoid sets – larger sets are virtually un-memorizable unless you convert them into enumerations!
  10. Avoid enumerations – enumerations are also hard to remember but can be dealt with using cloze deletion
  11. Combat interference – even the simplest items can be completely intractable if they are similar to other items. Use examples, context cues, vivid illustrations, refer to emotions, and to your personal life
  12. Optimize wording – like you reduce mathematical equations, you can reduce complex sentences into smart, compact and enjoyable maxims
  13. Refer to other memories – building memories on other memories generates a coherent and hermetic structure that forgetting is less likely to affect. Build upon the basics and use planned redundancy to fill in the gaps
  14. Personalize and provide examples – personalization might be the most effective way of building upon other memories. Your personal life is a gold mine of facts and events to refer to. As long as you build a collection for yourself, use personalization richly to build upon well established memories
  15. Rely on emotional states – emotions are related to memories. If you learn a fact in the sate of sadness, you are more likely to recall it if when you are sad. Some memories can induce emotions and help you employ this property of the brain in remembering
  16. Context cues simplify wording – providing context is a way of simplifying memories, building upon earlier knowledge and avoiding interference
  17. Redundancy does not contradict minimum information principle – some forms of redundancy are welcome. There is little harm in memorizing the same fact as viewed from different angles. Passive and active approach is particularly practicable in learning word-pairs. Memorizing derivation steps in problem solving is a way towards boosting your intellectual powers!
  18. Provide sources – sources help you manage the learning process, updating your knowledge, judging its reliability, or importance
  19. Provide date stamping – time stamping is useful for volatile knowledge that changes in time
  20. Prioritize – effective learning is all about prioritizing. In incremental reading you can start from badly formulated knowledge and improve its shape as you proceed with learning (in proportion to the cost of inappropriate formulation). If need be, you can review pieces of knowledge again, split it into parts, reformulate, reprioritize, or delete.

See also: Incremental reading, Devouring knowledge, Flow of knowledge, Using tasklists

Adding a bunch of sentences without getting bogged down

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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.

Another few Anki Tweeks

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I’ve made a few new filtered decks in Anki.  Most of them I don’t even study, but they help me keep track of my progress:

The first filtered deck I do actually study from.  This deck vacuums all of the cards from various decks that are due today into one deck. The code is simply is:due  This is convenient, but it’s not the main reason I made this deck.  At the beginning of the day, I rebuild this deck and I can immediately add and study a few new cards.  That way, I can learn new cards first thing in the morning instead of waiting until I’ve studied all my reviews which is sometimes after lunch.  I feel I’m a little more likely to remember new cards the next morning after absorbing them over a full day.

The other decks vacuum up specific types of cards to give me an easy count of them.  I have one each for vocabulary, kanji, and sentences.  They all go something like this ("kanji deck 1" "kanji deck 2") -is:suspended prop:reps>=1  *Note that the iphone app has a bug where >0 produces zero results so you have to use >=1.

My Current Anki Method

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My last post was about tweeking my anki settings, but I’m not sure that I’ve outlined exactly how I use Anki to learn Japanese Vocabulary before so here’s a quick rundown:

Goals

As mentioned other places in this blog, my immediate goal is conversation and listening comprehension as soon as possible.  I’m interested in reading, but not nearly as much or as soon.

My current strategy is to learn and remember as much Japanese vocabulary as possible in the shortest amount of time.  To achieve that goal, I try to keep my accuracy around 90%.  If my accuracy falls too far below 90% I am spending too much time relearning the same material over and over.  However, once I get to 90% accuracy, the additional amount of time required for small improvements in accuracy begins to increase exponentially.  So I shoot for ~90%.

Decks

I’m using the core optimized deck and I’m only doing vocabulary.  Japanese kana on the front / english translation on the back.

I’ve decided to put kanji and grammer on hold for now and memorize as much vocabulary as possible as soon as possible.  This is phase 1.  Phase 2 will continue with vocabulary, but add sentences and listening comprehension cards.  I’m at about 1300 vocab in the  core deck and another 1000 from another deck.  There’s a fair amount of overlap, so let’s call it 1800 vocabulary.  When I get to around 1500-2000 in the core deck, I’ll probably start adding sentences again (I’ve already got ~410 sentences).  But of course I’ll keep adding new vocabulary.  When I added sentences before, I could fly through them rather quickly, so I’m hoping I’ll be able to continue with close to 5 new vocab per day for the foreseeable future.

Reviews

First thing every day, I finish all my reviews in my main Anki deck.  Finishing my reviews every day is the single most important thing and I make sure that happens 99% of the time.  I never think of adding new cards when I think I’ll be time constrained the following week.  Some days turn out to be pretty hectic so not finishing happens at times, but it puts me in a really bad mood, because I’m more likely to forget things I’ve learned recently and that’s the majority of the cards due each day.  On the rare occasions where I haven’t finished my reviews, I make sure to catch back up the following day.

After I finish my reviews, I either add a few new cards to the mix or move on to my filtered decks.

Filtered Decks

My main Anki filtered deck captures all of the cards that I answered wrong in the past 2 days(“rated:2:1 prop:reps<70”).  It also excludes all cards that I’ve seen more than 70 times because I don’t want to spend too much time on any single card.  I’m going for quantity for now so if they turn into leeches, I’ll come back to them later.  Steps are set to “1” so it’s either pass or fail.   I go through this deck 2-3 times every day until my accuracy is almost perfect.

I also have an Anki filtered deck which captures all of the new cards (“rated2:1 prop:reps<20”).  This is similar to the previous deck and captures some of the same cards, but it excludes the cards I’ve seen a bunch of times already There’s usually only a few cards in here, so it only takes a few minutes to go through.  Steps are set to “.25 1 10” so I have to answer it correctly 3 times before it’s retired.  However, if I feel I’ve got a decent grasp on a card I answer “easy”(#4) on a it to retire it early.  The first step being only 15 seconds means that even the most stubborn cards get into short term memory in the first pass or two, and the 10 minute step means that I should be able to answer correctly when I see it in the main filtered deck later in the day.  I usually go through this deck 2-3 times in the first half of the day until I can answer most of them correctly in the “2 day” deck.

There is another filtered deck that I don’t use very often.  This deck catches only the cards that I missed in the past day (“rated:1:1”).  I only use this deck if I’ve added too many difficult cards and my accuracy goes down too much(~<80%) in the main filtered deck.  Steps are set to “.25 1 10” so I have to answer it correctly 3 times before it’s retired.  However, I answer “easy” on a card to retire it early if I feel I’ve got a decent grasp on it.

Deck Options

The settings on my decks have been changed slightly as well.  I have my leeches set to suspend after 7 lapses because I don’t want to spend too much time learning a hard to learn word, when the same time could be spent learning 2 easier to remember words instead.  I’ll eventually come back to the leeches after I’ve learned the easier words.

I set my “new interval” to 15%.  This stops Anki from rescheduling cards that I know quite well back to an interval of 1 day.  Sometimes I miss a card that has an interval of several months and I don’t think it’s appropriate to set it back to square one.  Since the progression of intervals isn’t linear, a “new interval” of 15% probably cuts the actual number of reviews for the card by 50% depending on its “ease”.

And finally, I’ve been answering most cards with “hard”(#2) instead of “pass”(#3).  This has me seeing each card more often than if I pressed #3.  I’ve experimented with adjusting the interval modifier, but it didn’t seem to increase the frequency of the cards that I wanted, but also resulted the unwanted behavior of some cards having the same interval regardless of which button was pressed.  So I press #2 unless I either don’t know the answer, or know it so well that I don’t want to see it very often.

I also spend as long as I need to come up with an answer if I think I know the right one.  I feel like the process of trying hard to remember the correct answer makes it a lot more likely that I’ll remember the answer into the future.   So I act a lot like I’m taking a final exam and make sure to come up with the answer if I think I know it and make sure the answer is correct.  Although, If I feel that I really need to study a particular card, I’ll fail it even if I get the answer correct.

Schedule

I try to add my new cards as early in the day as possible.  Research has shown that we are better learners early in the day when we are well rested, and not as good later in the day.  Also, getting my first exposure early in the morning lets me reinforce them better throughout the day.  Unfortunately Anki won’t let me add new cards manually until I’ve done all of my reviews, but that gives me added inspiration to finish my reviews early.

I add new cards in batches of 5.  Most days I only add 5 because I only have about and hour per day and I can only keep up with my reviews if I only add 5 new cards.  But sometimes I add 10 or 15, but only 5 at a time.  If I add more than 5 at a time, I usually end up going over and over them before I can remember more than a few for more then a few seconds.  So I make sure to commit 5 to short term memory until I add 5 more.  After 10, I’ll probably go through my “new” deck or my “2 day” deck  depending on how many cards in those decks.  I’m shooting for decent(80~90%) retention while increasing the interval for each card (by mixing them with other cards).

After doing reviews and adding new cards, I go through my “2 day” deck and my “New” deck at progressively longer intervals.  As noted, the “new” deck is a subset of the “2 day” deck, so they overlap.  I’m trying to get 90% accuracy on both decks, and the new cards need to be seen more often, so that’s why there’s 2 decks.  If a few hours have passed and I haven’t seen the new cards, I’ll go through the “new” deck.  Whatever helps keeping my accuracy up.  But as the day progresses, I’ll need to study less to keep my accuracy at acceptable levels.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, I only have about an hour per day to study.  So try to maximize that short time, while keeping my reviews to a manageable number.

Tweeking my Anki settings

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This past weekend I added an extra filter to my main cram deck.  It used to be “rated:2:1” to which I’ve added “prop:reps<70”.  This makes sure that I’m not spending too much time studying cards which are probably going to end up being leeches anyway.  When I added this filter, my cram deck went from 66 cards to 55 which is a 17% reduction.  When I consider that about half of my time is spent cramming, I estimate I can spend 8.5% more time studying cards more likely to stick in my memory.  Hopefully that translates to me being able to add more cards.

Two weekends ago, I consolidated my sentence deck with my vocabulary deck and updated the combined deck to optimal order.  Unfortunately, since I had an overlap between them I ended up with duplicate cards and that threw off my card count for progress tracking.  I’ll eventually figure it out, but It’s hard to keep track of my progress for now.  Fortunately with the new order, the cards I’ve added in the last week have been easier to remember, so I’ve been adding more than normal.

I’m also considering adding sentences (and maybe audio recognition) to the mix again now that I’ve synchronized vocab and sentences.  I won’t have the problem I had before where sentences contained a lot of unknown vocabulary.  *edit:  I’ve unsuspended 77 sentence cards as a test.  I used Anki’s reschedule function to set their initial interval to 30-60 days.  That means that I will only see 2-4 at a time, so (hopefully) it won’t set my vocab study back at all.  And if I answer it correctly, I won’t see it again for 3 or 4 months.  If this works out as expected, I’ll filter in more sentences this what until I’m adding sentence cards along with their sibling vocabulary cards.