While on a streak I can easily handle 20 new vocabulary per day and doing the approximately 200 reviews and be finished with it in about 20-30 minutes. My retention for very old cards (next step pushes the card to over a year) is not that good though. I have an overall retention rate for learned cards of about 75%.
I was in vacation for a week now and when I came back I was greated with 700 due reviews. Having to directly go back to work while being jet lagged, I decided to postpone this mountain of reviews until the following weekend. When sitting down for the now accumulated 900 reviews, I felt like my brain just reset in the two weeks I didn’t do my reviews. My retention rate fell to a mere 45% and it felt like I would just make the review mountain even higher for the days to follow. Naturally I did not finish the 900 reviews but only got it down to around 550.
What should I do for this current problem? I thought about just passing every card so I would get back to my usual 150-200 reviews per day and deal with the forgotten cards when they next show up. I feel like there is a decent amount of anxiety going on with this huge number of reviews looming making me fail more cards than I would usually do.
What should I do to avoid this in the future? Should I aim to increase my overall retention rate in hope that I will be able to do better next time I take a break?
In all honesty, I’m thinking of just abandoning Aki at this point.
Hope you can help me and thanks in advance.
5 comments
Dropping Anki because you got behind on practice seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water. Don’t panic, you’ll be fine. 🙂
What I’d recommend is just adjusting the reviews to be a bit higher than normal. If you usually have 200 reviews, cap it at 225 or 250 and reduce the number of new cards to 0. You’ll gradually catch up and can add in new cards once you’re fully caught up on the reviews.
In the future, you can use Anki on your phone to stay in practice. If you want to reduce the time it takes, just remove the new cards being added. They’ll still be there when you get back. Or, just plan on doing what I suggested above so you’re not overwhelmed when it does happen.
If anyone else has any thoughts I’d be glad to hear them too, I’m no Anki expert. But anyway, the important thing is to not panic. Language learning shouldn’t be stressful.
– Set new cards to zero until you are back on track.
– Do all those reviews over as many days as necessary to catch up before adding new cards again.
– If you absolutely cannot do your reviews then sort your cards in the Anki browser by how well you know them (ease factor) and set as many due cards as necessary with low ease factor to “forget”. Anki will forget you ever knew those words and show them to you again as new cards once you got back on track.
>What should I do to avoid this in the future?
Anki works best if you never take any breaks. Next vacation plan ahead and stop adding new cards for a few days in advance to make the number of reviews come down. You can use the Anki simulator add-on for this. Then deal with the resulting low number of reviews while on vacation.
My advice is to set your new cards to zero as other people have suggested and then create a filtered deck of the cards that are overdue sorted by increasing interval. There are instructions on how to create filtered decks of overdue cards elsewhere online, so try googling that.
Anyway the advantage here is that you then have a separate deck that has your overdue cards. Once you review them in this deck they go back into your main deck. So the idea is to just keep up with your reviews for any given day on the main deck, which should be pretty low since you have a bunch of your cards in the filtered deck and you’re not doing new cards. And then on days where you have the time and energy just do a bunch of reviews from the filtered deck.
I should note that the purpose of sorting by increasing intervals is so that you see the cards that are least well known to you first and better known cards later, since the less well known cards are more in need of review. As a result the first chunk of reviews will feel very hard, basically as if you’re relearning a whole pile of words. But it gets much easier as you get towards the end.
Other have already explained what to do now.
In the future, you should also reduce the amount of new card to a low number (or even 0) a few days / week *before* your vacations. This should quickly reduce the amount of daily review, down to a level that’s doable during your holidays.
I think I would be more concerned with your normal retention rate being 75%. that’s an indication that you’re studying too many cards at once without learning them long term. Your overall accuracy rate should be closer to 90.
It’s perfectly normal to feel some burnout and some tiredness several times while learning a language,. You’re not in a competition with anyone, it’s ok to just take it easy and not focus on the numbers.
You should think about focusing on the other aspects of japanese learning that interest you and return to pushing anki when you have more motivation. If you keep your normal routine of 200 a day, you should be back to normal in about a week or two.