I presume the Anki’s scheduler (SM-3 or whatever) and default scheduling options are designed for a student aged brain. Memorizing gets more difficult with age and requires more reviews. Tweeking the scheduling options takes a lot of time with haphazard results. Has anyone got recommendations for different age groups?
You really have to tune it yourself, learning whether you retain it well or not, as you learn.
See the attached image; I have found these work for me, after looking all over the place on the web and trying each recommended group of settings for several months each.
If you find that you cannot remember most of the cards, when they come due, then you need to shorten the interval or give yourself one more interval while the cards are still in learning.
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Thank you for your suggested settings. However my fears are confirmed. These settings are just trial and error and guesswork for users. Everyone has different abilities for memorizing so there is no one size fits all, but I was hoping that there might be a range of suggested settings, or recommended combinations of settings. My idea is that when first installing Anki or when opening a new user profile a questionnaire would pop up asking age and study preferences and the answers would determine appropriate settings.
Not likely to be implemented soon!
There are too many variables.
Age is just one — and not the most likely to affect learning ability.
You would have to take into account prior education, whether the individual continually learns in other ways and areas of their life, do they use information that they have learnt, or do they never test their ability to recall, do they speak other languages and have they learnt any as an adult, does their learning style match the deck chosen (e.g. visual, text-based, logic), etc.
Try for a few months on common settings and work from there. That is the best advice from people, who have a lot of experience with this and similar products. You must tune the settings to suit, who you are and your needs.
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Yes, I agree. There are not “best” or recommended settings, since what works well for you might not work at all for another person, or even might not work for you if you’re using another type of cards / learning material.
I recommend just using the standard settings until you get more confident with tweaking the deck options. If you see that the intervals become too large for you too quickly, there’s a single seeting that might help: try to make the interval modifier smaller:
https://docs.ankiweb.net/deck-options.html#interval-modifier