Optimizing My Anki Deck for Long-Term Retention – Best Practices?

Anki Learning Effectively
1

Hello Everyone :hugs:,

I’ve been using Anki for a few months now, and I’m amazed at how much it’s improved my retention in subjects like language learning and general knowledge. However, as my deck grows larger, I’m starting to feel overwhelmed by the increasing number of reviews, and I’m unsure if I’m managing my deck in the most efficient way for long-term retention. I have a few questions that I hope some experienced users can help me with:

  1. Balancing Review Frequency and New Cards: I often find myself focusing more on reviewing older cards and neglecting the introduction of new cards. What’s a good balance between daily reviews and adding new material to ensure consistent learning without burnout? :thinking:
  2. Customizing Deck Settings for Retention: I’ve heard that adjusting the interval modifier, ease factor, and lapse settings can greatly affect retention. Are there any specific deck settings or strategies you recommend for someone aiming for long-term retention, especially for a large deck? :thinking:
  3. Handling Mature Cards: What’s your strategy for dealing with mature cards that seem too easy? Do you recommend suspending or deleting them, or is there another approach that works better for maintaining memory? :thinking:
  4. Reducing Burnout: Lastly, as reviews pile up, I’m feeling a bit of burnout. Any tips on how to manage large decks while keeping Anki enjoyable and preventing review fatigue? :thinking:

I’d love to hear your thoughts or any resources that helped you manage your Anki decks effectively. Thanks in advance!

2
  1. The general rule is review per day is going to be 10 times more than new card limit. It’s upto you to decide if that amount will be manageable. Given that you’ve been using the deck for months you sure already have some idea about whether to reduce new card limit or not.
  2. I mean I gave you this one last time. I don’t want to sound pedantic suggesting the same things again and again but Expertium did a simulation where FSRS on average gave 30%-50% less reviews than SM-2. It’s also easier to use. Too many reviews simply means you reduce your desired retention (and not deal with 10 different settings you don’t half-understand).
  3. Suspend them. But most importantly, if you’re learning languages, suspend all vocabulary/sentence cards that are too hard for you. Pareto’s principle. Skim off that 1% of your collection you spend too much time with, and you’ve freed your time for learning things that are easier for you. Sometimes, you’ll also find after coming back to previously suspended cards that they’re easier to learn now.
  4. Good template. Also some nice options in Deck options > Auto Advance. Helps keeping yourself in check if you sometimes find yourself spending too much time on recall. A good rule of thumb we use is “If you can’t recall a card in 10 seconds, move on”.
    There’s also timeboxing feature that comes with Anki. See Preferences. There’s also add-ons for that, though I don’t use any.
    The general advice here is don’t use too many subdecks. But I use subdecks too divide my content/workload into chunks. You also have the option to use filtered decks for that purpose.

One more thing: for language learning, sentence cards are easier to do, so even with the same content you’ll feel less burnout. I personally never use them but a lot of people do.

3

  1. If you’ve got enough Reviews right now that you don’t have room/time/energy in your study-day for introducing New cards, your instinct to turn down the number of new cards is exactly correct. Perhaps your New card allowance was a bit too high in the past, or maybe you’re just in a study-doldrums. The best way out of this situation is to turn your New cards to 0 for now, and focus on your Reviews until your workload decreases. Then you can start introducing a reasonable number of New cards again – start with half of whatever you had it set to before.

  2. Just use FSRS. You could spend the rest of your life trying to hash out the perfect settings for the original algorithm, and they would still be nowhere near as good as FSRS is. fsrs4anki/docs/tutorial.md at main · open-spaced-repetition/fsrs4anki · GitHub

  3. I just leave them be. Easy cards take up barely any study time, and they give me a little boost of victory when I get them right. The time you’d spend thinking up and implementing a plan for dealing with them, figuring out which ones are “easy enough” to get that treatment, and then worrying about if it was the right plan? That’s way more time than what you’ll spend just studying them when they (rarely) appear.

More than one Anki user has excitedly studied hundreds of new cards over their first few days of using the program, and then become overwhelmed by the reviews required.

  1. It’s common for there to be a bit of rebound after the first burst of excitement. It also sounds like you might have swamped your boat a bit in these early stages. Just keep studying. If you have a backlog, deal with it. But if you need a not-finishing-everything-today day, take it! It sounds like you’re a recreational learner, so you should do whatever you need to make sure it stays fun!
4

I also study languages ​​on Anki and what has helped me a lot is the way to make cards, the configuration, when to study and 2 addons I made.

The cards I make are based on the 20 rules of Supermemo, if you haven’t read it, I recommend it. I even have prompts for the AI ​​to make new cards for me of the basic type.

I mainly use the principle of minimum information, colors and simple tips on each card, sometimes using emoticons.

When I say colors, it is usually only on the word or words that I have the most difficulty with, but usually just one color (red).

So it is the sentence that has a maximum of 50 characters, the most difficult word to remember in bold/red and some tip in the form of an emoticon.

Note: I make the same card front and back to make sure I know how to translate it too.

Sometimes I add images too, but it is rarer.

I usually add new cards every month in a new profile to see how I am doing in this new profile. Studying has to be done daily. The cards can’t be too long, they have to be simple.

If I have 500 cards to review in a day, then I’ll review all 500, no matter how, but I have to do it or at least as much as I can.

In the case of languages, there’s no point in writing complex sentences if you don’t even know the basics. Maybe this is valid for any subject. So if you want to understand something, start with the simplest ones until you get to intermediate-level sentences and then more difficult ones. It’s a process of constant evolution.

As for when to study, it’s better to take short breaks of 20 minutes during the day than 2 hours straight. This helps to rest your mind and keep you more focused. So if I study from 8:00 AM to 8:20 AM, I go back to studying from 9:00 AM to 9:20 AM, and so on. Always have time to rest, without noise and with a calm mind (emotionally balanced). It’s the style of the Pomodoro technique, to avoid mental exhaustion.

In the configuration, I leave FSRS activated, in 120 days with 0.92 of desired retention and every month I click on optimize.

The addons are in Portuguese, but it’s very easy to understand how each one works from the images. I explain how each one works below.

Show the number of hits and errors in the Review and Suspend certain ones
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/752880974

Suspension menu to configure how many times you need to get it right in a row before a card is suspended.

When you review the cards, it checks how many correct answers you got and, if the number reaches the configured limit, the card is paused. In addition, it shows a legend with colored dots that indicate your recent answers and evaluates your performance with words like “Great”, “Terrible”, among others. There is also a keyboard shortcut to turn this legend on or off, “Ctrl+D”.

Mnu to suspend cards in a row in Tools > Suspension
In the same way that there is the leech, now you can suspend the cards that you hit the most in sequence
Default value is 20, that is, after hitting the same card 20 times in a row, it automatically suspends the card. You can change this manually in tools and suspension

This addon shows the number of clicks on the cards in again (1), difficult (2), good (3) and easy (4)
Average = (good + easy) / (again + difficult)
Total number of times the card was hit
You have to hit the same card at least 8 times to reach the optimal level, even if you don’t miss it once before
Ratings: Terrible <= 1, Terrible <= 2, Disappointing <= 4, Unsatisfactory <= 5, Reasonable <= 5.9, Satisfactory <= 7, Great <= 10 and Excellent > 10
Shortcut: ctrl+d to show or hide the screen

Decks Stats
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/198031496

Decks Stats; Displays deck information such as total cards, revisions, and errors from the Anki database.
Retention-Based Colors; Applies different colors to table items based on retention rate.
Action Buttons; Buttons to refresh data, search, export to HTML, and display deck information.

5

Best Practices in my opinion:

  1. Use images more often
  2. Make cards simple so that you don’t spend too much time on them
  3. Use more “Cloze” and less complex structures "e.g., lists)
  4. Deliberately suspend cards or even decks if you feel overwhelmed
1 Like
6

This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.