How to limit 'learning' cards

Anki Desktop
1

Hey, hope you’re all well.

I’m trying to limit the number of cards I study daily.

To that end, I’ve set up several options groups for decks.

For example, I’m often entering books into Anki, with parent/child decks, that have parent/child option group settings.

  • Book: 15 cards new daily / 15 cards review daily
    • Chapter A: 5 cards new daily / 5 cards review daily
    • Chapter B: 5 cards new daily / 5 cards review daily
      etc

This approach worked well for a while. I’m struggling with it recently, though.

There are several ‘book’ decks that I try to review through daily.

Recently, the “learning” cards for every deck has ballooned, and I’m not sure how to limit that number of learning cards.

I’ll have the parent deck max new/review at 5/5, and child decks all set at 3/3, but Learning cards will be at 30, for example. The amount of time I now spend trying to complete the study set for the day is much higher than I’d like to limit it at.

The ‘learning’ cards do not seem to be limited by new or review settings.

I’ve tried adjusting the limits of ‘Maximum reviews/day’ on parents and children decks’ group settings, to no effect.

One option that may be a cause/factor is I recently changed the Steps for new cards, to this: 10 1440 7200, and the Graduating Interval to 14 days.

I’d like to have more control on how to limit my daily study time, and therefore, how many cards I’m seeing daily.

Any ideas?

Running Anki 2.1.35 on Windows 10

2

Anki won’t let you limit learning cards because those are time-sensitive.
But regardless of new cards, your approach already has a huge flaw. If you don’t do a lot more reviews than new cards you will amass a giant backlog of overdue cards. That basically defeats the purpose of using a spaced repetition software because if you don’t do the scheduled reviews you can’t expect to remember the content.
The review cap is a dangerous setting and should only be used to soften review peaks. That is, it’s vital to set it to a value higher than the average number of due reviews per day or you will never catch up.

4 Likes
3

@Rumo is right, you bit off more than you can chew.

Some ideas:
Reduce your daily new cards to less than 10. The goal is you have to complete all review cards(most important) and learning cards, not new cards(least important).

When I started to use Anki 3 years ago, I learned 20 new cards per day. It’s been proved to be a mistake, and I reduced it to 15, to 10, then to 5, now it’s 7. And my daily review number is floating around 150~200, that I can finish in 30~45min.

1 Like