On the broader topic of SRS, how do you deal with ever-increasing workloads? I’m a user for 4 years now and have been struggling with my current workload, unable to add any more cards.
To me this suggests that your cards aren’t well formed or you try to memorize before understanding. Spend more effort on learning a fact before you put it into the SRS and work on making the cards clearer.
I don’t quite think this is it. What I am learning is language (specifically, vocabulary) so there isn’t a lot to understand before putting a card into SRS, and the card can’t be much clearer than “biblioteca → library”.
What I mean about ever-increasing workloads is that at some point, even without adding new cards, you have long-tail cards that you have to review and give you a pretty consistent workload for a long time (because they’re long tail cards and have long intervals and are spread out). Right now, without adding any new cards, I do ~250 cards/day; this is barely less than what I was doing when I was learning new material 2 years ago (~300 cards/day).
Generally, if you follow the SuperMemo recommendations you first learn that library is the word for biblioteca and only after you have learned that you create a card and put it into SRS to avoid forgetting the card. You don’t just put that card into a SRS without having learned the word first.
Most of the time in SRS is spent because you forget cards. If you build a good foundation by learning before memorizing you reduce that time.
I have to be honest, your tone is coming off a little condescending. I am sure you don’t mean it that way, but please make it explicit.
These aren’t new cards that I’m studying. Like I said, I’ve been using Anki for 4 years now; I have learned almost 20k cards, and have about 465k reviews. I have done my due diligence and read the 20 SRS rules several times. Perhaps I’m just not being clear.
My current problem is that, out of ~250 cards I do each day, ~200 of them are mature, and that number doesn’t seem to be going down. Right now, I have about 18.8k mature cards, and only 850 young cards. My time is increasingly being taken up by the mature cards, and the more I study, the larger that corpus will become. So how does one deal with that fact? The cards seem to accumulate over time, and not spread out to infinity in a way that you’d eventually only do a handful of cards a day and still remember everything.
Sure. Caveat: I haven’t actually done any cards the past 8 days (finding it hard to motivate myself...) so this is likely low on young cards, but accurate on mature cards.
First image is desktop Anki, second is AnkiDroid simulations (which in my experience have proven pretty close to the truth). https://imgur.com/a/Swb6UjH
The second graph has a large spike in the first week because of the past 8 days. I’m also not sure what new cards AnkiDroid is seeing since I don’t have any new cards being added.
The number of reviews drops in about 5 months, but even a year from now, I’m not even at 2⁄3 reviews of what I’m currently doing (which would be ~160 cards). It’s a little unsatisfactory since it assumes I’m performing adequately during that whole time and my reward is being able to add maybe 8-10 new cards a day, after a year of strictly review.
Yes, I used to be a daily guy. Over a graduate degree it got much more difficult to keep that up so I did have a backlog coming out of that, but I’m caught up.
I do think partly it’s my settings that I haven’t touched much, but that doesn’t really help me right now of course, just me in a few years. It also mostly just pushes the problem further into the future.
Some advice I’ve seen thrown around is that at some point, one should just retire cards and rely on seeing the information naturally in the real world and not in SRS; that sounds like a risky thing to do to me, but when I looked back at the backlog I had and what my accuracy was there, I estimate I had ~50-70% retention even after nearly 2 years of barely any reviews. (there’s a lot of issues with estimating that, since Anki doesn’t tell you something was overdue—so I had to calculate it, but some cards are double counted, etc) So overall I think that that might be a viable option: to, at some point, filter cards out that have intervals greater than a certain length, as well as filter cards that you spend too much time/lapse too much on. I haven’t found any good anecdotal reports of this approach, though.
It’s possible you’re in Ease Hell. It has been a while since I got into the weeds with my settings but there are pretty good reasons to change the default ease settings and reset the ease on old cards, as I recall. I’m also in the camp of only using the “again” and “good” buttons, since the other ones affect ease iirc. Anyway you’ve been at it longer than I have but maybe the ease hell thing is new info for you or other anki users.
On the broader topic of SRS, how do you deal with ever-increasing workloads? I’m a user for 4 years now and have been struggling with my current workload, unable to add any more cards.
To me this suggests that your cards aren’t well formed or you try to memorize before understanding. Spend more effort on learning a fact before you put it into the SRS and work on making the cards clearer.
I don’t quite think this is it. What I am learning is language (specifically, vocabulary) so there isn’t a lot to understand before putting a card into SRS, and the card can’t be much clearer than “biblioteca → library”.
What I mean about ever-increasing workloads is that at some point, even without adding new cards, you have long-tail cards that you have to review and give you a pretty consistent workload for a long time (because they’re long tail cards and have long intervals and are spread out). Right now, without adding any new cards, I do ~250 cards/day; this is barely less than what I was doing when I was learning new material 2 years ago (~300 cards/day).
Generally, if you follow the SuperMemo recommendations you first learn that library is the word for biblioteca and only after you have learned that you create a card and put it into SRS to avoid forgetting the card. You don’t just put that card into a SRS without having learned the word first.
Most of the time in SRS is spent because you forget cards. If you build a good foundation by learning before memorizing you reduce that time.
I have to be honest, your tone is coming off a little condescending. I am sure you don’t mean it that way, but please make it explicit.
These aren’t new cards that I’m studying. Like I said, I’ve been using Anki for 4 years now; I have learned almost 20k cards, and have about 465k reviews. I have done my due diligence and read the 20 SRS rules several times. Perhaps I’m just not being clear.
My current problem is that, out of ~250 cards I do each day, ~200 of them are mature, and that number doesn’t seem to be going down. Right now, I have about 18.8k mature cards, and only 850 young cards. My time is increasingly being taken up by the mature cards, and the more I study, the larger that corpus will become. So how does one deal with that fact? The cards seem to accumulate over time, and not spread out to infinity in a way that you’d eventually only do a handful of cards a day and still remember everything.
Can you show us what your future card distribution looks like (# of cards vs days in the future)?
Sure. Caveat: I haven’t actually done any cards the past 8 days (finding it hard to motivate myself...) so this is likely low on young cards, but accurate on mature cards.
First image is desktop Anki, second is AnkiDroid simulations (which in my experience have proven pretty close to the truth). https://imgur.com/a/Swb6UjH
The second graph has a large spike in the first week because of the past 8 days. I’m also not sure what new cards AnkiDroid is seeing since I don’t have any new cards being added.
The number of reviews drops in about 5 months, but even a year from now, I’m not even at 2⁄3 reviews of what I’m currently doing (which would be ~160 cards). It’s a little unsatisfactory since it assumes I’m performing adequately during that whole time and my reward is being able to add maybe 8-10 new cards a day, after a year of strictly review.
This is really weird. Have you done cards regularly since adding them a few years ago? Or did you catch up from a backlog recently?
I had a deck with 10-13k cards and I was able to get down to like 40 cards/day after a year or two.
Yes, I used to be a daily guy. Over a graduate degree it got much more difficult to keep that up so I did have a backlog coming out of that, but I’m caught up.
I do think partly it’s my settings that I haven’t touched much, but that doesn’t really help me right now of course, just me in a few years. It also mostly just pushes the problem further into the future.
Some advice I’ve seen thrown around is that at some point, one should just retire cards and rely on seeing the information naturally in the real world and not in SRS; that sounds like a risky thing to do to me, but when I looked back at the backlog I had and what my accuracy was there, I estimate I had ~50-70% retention even after nearly 2 years of barely any reviews. (there’s a lot of issues with estimating that, since Anki doesn’t tell you something was overdue—so I had to calculate it, but some cards are double counted, etc) So overall I think that that might be a viable option: to, at some point, filter cards out that have intervals greater than a certain length, as well as filter cards that you spend too much time/lapse too much on. I haven’t found any good anecdotal reports of this approach, though.
It’s possible you’re in Ease Hell. It has been a while since I got into the weeds with my settings but there are pretty good reasons to change the default ease settings and reset the ease on old cards, as I recall. I’m also in the camp of only using the “again” and “good” buttons, since the other ones affect ease iirc. Anyway you’ve been at it longer than I have but maybe the ease hell thing is new info for you or other anki users.