I’ve really been struggling with learning Chinese, and I’ve been trying to find ways to make it easier for myself. A common test-taking strategy is to skip hard questions and come back to them when you’re done, and I’ve been wondering if a similar strategy could apply to Anki. Specifically, what if you could have Anki automatically bury a card if you take too long to answer it?
I looked around for an auto-skip/bury add-on (couldn’t find one, but I did find this interesting post about the benefits of skip/bury functionality), but then I remembered the auto advance feature. But unfortunately, burying a card is only available as an answer action, not a question action—maybe it could work for both?
(Of course you can ask: Why not just use the notification feature and bury it yourself? The answer is that even with a notification, I often forget to bury the card and just keep staring at it… and then I end up focusing on remembering to bury the card, rather than trying to remember the actual answer to the card.)
(And you may also ask: Won’t you just end up burying a ton of stuff if you automate the burying process? To which I’d say that the time limit should be high enough to avoid that—and hopefully I would be encouraged to answer more quickly by the threat of imminent burial. Then when I’m done, I can just run the second session without auto advance, and take my time.)
Anyway, learning Chinese is making me lose my mind.