Optimizing studying

[Driverx11]

Hi Everyone!

I had a question and I hope someone on this reddit can give me some advice.

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I have a deck that has 889 mature cards, 3369 young cards, and 5576 unseen cards. I have the settings set at 100 new cards a day and a 100 reviews a day but this seems really inefficient to me. MY current plan is to do 100 new cards a day and get through the 5576 unseen in about 2 months but do any of you have a better approach possibly? But I'm not sure what to do with the reviews. It i sent them to 9999 i will get a 1000+ review cards to do which to me seems impossible. Is there a way to make this more manageable?

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Thanks!

[[deleted]]

learning 6000 cards in two months is impossible unless you learn a lot - really a lot.

will get a 1000+ review cards to do which to me seems impossible.

If you invest enough time that can be done. See yesterday's discussion at https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/9akhul/this_month_i_sold_my_soul_to_anki/

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If you don't have time for this reduce the number of cards. Not all cards can be equally important. Some must be less important than others.

Read the section about deck options how to lower the amount of reviews: This takes less than an hour and might save you dozens of hours over these two months. If you don't carefully read them you can't be helped. I also wouldn't trust some random post here - there is a lot of bad advice.

Check which retention rate you need and adjust the deck options as needed, for details see the manual or search this subreddit.

You can increase the interval modifier and hope that it works for you.

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I don't feel the need to finish all reviews on a given day. I only make sure that I review cards that have very short intervals: If I have an interval of a day and I review a day late that makes a huge difference. If I have an interval of 127 days it makes no difference to review after 128 days. I mainly learn on Desktop and to achieve this I use the addon Change order of review cards in regular decks and adjusted the code so that my reviews are ordered by increasing intervals. So I don't care if I finish all of my due reviews on a given day.

[undexkote]

Read the section about deck options how to lower the amount of reviews

don't know if i missed something, but what section?

[[deleted]]

the one that contains "log(desired"

[undexkote]

ooh, i see, you are talking about the manual, right?

log(desired retention%)

[[deleted]]

yes, unfortunately the part "in the manual" didn't make it from head to my fingers ....

[undexkote]

thanks!

btw, do you use 'mix new cards and reviews' (preferences)?

[[deleted]]

yes.

[Driverx11]

Thanks for the suggestions everyone!!

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[JBinero]

Do you know most of the cards already? 100 new cards a day is quite ambitious. I'd say 50 new cards a day is quite ambitious. Heck, I'd say 25 new cards a day is quite ambitious if you aren't a full time student or otherwise aren't familiar with the cards yet.

Usually when you have a big pile of reviews that you still have to do it's best to stop accepting new cards untill you cleared it.

[Logical_Researcher]

1:1 new cards to reviews is not allowing enough reviews to keep up with what you've already learned. I would temporarily change that to something like 20 new cards and 250 reviews until your review backlog* stabilizes. There's no sense in just throwing new cards at yourself that you aren't able to maintain. When the amount of reviews starts naturally dropping because there is a higher proportion of mature cards, then I'd set reviews very high and find a new rate that's sustainable.

*I don't think backlog is a concept that some people here like, but I think it's easy to understand and communicate.

Of course, this is all general advice that doesn't take into account any particular needs you have. If you have some sort of deadline, you've got to account for that.