Hi, I’m an anki beginner, can someone tell me if my settings are good? For context, I’ll be using anki for schoolwork and probably using it a lot.
Since you’re a beginner, start with the basics –
- Read Getting Started, so you know what Anki can do – and Studying, so you know how to use it. Skim the rest of the manual if you have time, so you will know where to find things when you want them later on.
- Enable FSRS.
- Set one short (5m-20m) learning step and relearning step.
- Optimize your FSRS parameters (and then come back monthly to re-optimize).
- Study all of your due cards every day – no backlogs, no long re/learning steps to carry cards over to the next day.
- Don’t introduce New cards at a faster pace that you can keep up with the reviews on. [Expect that your daily workload will be 8-10x your daily New card limit.]
As far as your current Options –
- If you’re leaving your daily New cards unlimited, hopefully you’re controlling how many New are introduced each day in some other way (like by unsuspending a certain number).
- You don’t necessarily need to use Auto Advance, and as a beginner, it might be more trouble than it is worth.
- Your Desired Retention (DR) is set a bit high. Do you have a reason for that?
- Your maximum interval of 60d is way too low. [See also, the warning message in your screenshot, which is a bit less strict than I am.] If you aren’t comfortable resetting it to the default of 100y (36500d), most folks seem happy with something in the 3-5y range (1000-2000d), but nothing under 1y (365d) is reasonable.
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- I don’t understand the new card/day limit, would it just stop me from adding cards?
- My DR is set high because I will be studying a lot and want to know the content very well.
- I was really confused about maximum interval, I set it at 60d because I want to see every card at least once every couple of months. I will be using anki to study for tests, which occur every 1-2 months, so how can I do cards with 60+ day intervals before my exam?
Thanks for the help
If you haven’t forgotten a card, why repeat it?
But if you still want to, there’s this helpful resource:
If you create one filtered deck to review all the material covered (without rescheduling), you can review it multiple times, or review the cards you couldn’t remember once and mark them with a red flag. Then create a second filtered deck and select only the cards with a red flag. Review them only, take a break, and review them again. So, if you review them three times, you can remove the red flags from the ones you know for sure. After rebuilding this filtered deck, you’ll be left with the cards you can’t remember, and you can focus on those. Well, if you can’t remember 5-7 percent of all the cards, then they may be unmemorable, so don’t waste your time on them. Study for another exam. If you don’t know 5-7 percent of them, you’ll likely get a perfect score on the exam anyway.
Something should stop you from introducing an enormous number of New cards each day, and overwhelming yourself with the Review cards they turn into. If it’s not the daily New card limit, it should be something else.
Okay, but if you find your workload too high for your liking, you might consider bringing that down.
One of the foundational concepts of Anki is that you should see cards you already know well less often and cards you’re struggling with more often. If you have a card that you’ll already remember for 6 months, it would be a waste of your time to study it every 60 days.
So if your parameters are well-optimized and your DR is set reasonably, you should let Anki do its job and schedule your well-known cards for longer intervals.
If you want a confidence boost before an exam, you can use Filtered decks to study cards that aren’t yet due.
I disagree with this though. In general, don’t disable reschedule-based-on in your Filtered decks. (The circumstances where you’d want to do that are pretty rare.) Studying a card multiple times, and hiding that from the algorithm will nearly guarantee that FSRS will do a bad job scheduling that card for you in the future.
And if you allow the grades to be recorded, you no longer need any of that flagging/rebuilding stuff. Let the algorithm do its job.
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