Ive read the post in the FAQ about intervals after taking a break and found it very helpful / enlightening but i still have a few questions.
As my last time using my deck was 2 years ago my intervals are 4.2 years for most of my cards. I dont even know if ill still be doing Anki in 4 years time never mind anything else. I never mark cards as easy only good or fail. I do basically aggree with the sentiment of the idea that if i havent reviewed a card in 2 years and i am still able to get it right then my next review doesnt need to be for a long time but this doesnt account for when i dont feel particulaely certain about a card. When i know a card well (im learning Russian) i just click good and send it into the deep future lol but when i am still correct but far less certain or i only got a vague sense of the meaning of a word or phrase, i am feeling my only other option is to mark it as failed so i see it again sooner.
Is this really my only option other than resetting cards to forgotten? I think thats also an extreme option considering i have seen most of these cards multiple times previously.
Sorry to tread old ground with this. Ive read a bunch of the other posts about this too.
The other obvious option is to mark those Hard – you got them right, so that’s what the button is there for. If you don’t want to do that, the test I apply in language learning is – was that good enough? If I encounter that word in the wild (in reading, listening, conversation, etc.), and I think that’s the meaning, will I be close enough or will I be misunderstanding? That might help you divide the Again from the Good.
Since you’re just returning to Anki now, I don’t know if you’ve enabled the FSRS algorithm, but I think it will really help you here. When you click Again on these very old cards, you’ll go into your relearning steps, but when you graduate that card to Review, you’re going to get a lot of that interval back. The logic in FSRS considers that it would be surprising for you to get cards right when they are 2y overdue, so you aren’t dinged as badly for getting a card wrong in that circumstance.
If you decide to enable FSRS and you want to learn more about it, all of the main resources are linked here, but feel free to ask questions. The only thing I’d say is different in your case is that it probably won’t hurt you to “reschedule” all of your cards when you enable FSRS for the first time [despite the recommendation against that in the tutorial] – since all of your cards are already overdue! You might as well get the benefit immediately of how FSRS schedules them.