We are on the 25th month?

Anki is far more grueling than beginners realize. And it’s very difficult to predict future work.

Adding new word isn’t just work today (maybe 5+ viewings to get Anki to make you think you’ve learned the word…), it’s also multiple showings over tomorrow, later this week and more.

You must change your words/day to something that is doable. Keep an eye on your Anki usage, if it’s longer than you want then cut down on your new words/day until you master your current review set.

And always be careful with the new words button. It’s more work to learn 20 words than you might realize, so don’t double or triple it to 40 or 60!!!

20 words/day is about 30 minutes of Anki for me, because 80 reviews + 20 new words == 100 cards. But I need around 300 flips to finish Anki.

That’s 30 minutes of Anki in practice (a card flip averaging 6 seconds, 10 cards per minute and yes 30 minutes/day).

If I drop down to 0 new words/day, I still have the 80 reviews per day (at least until those old words are mastered). Eventually I get quicker and Anki believes I’ve learned the words but it can take literally days before your workload decreases.

You must also remember that Anki / Flashcards is rote memorization. Its your “brute force cudgel”. You can never truly reach mastery with Anki alone. Anki is great for spelling practice, pronunciation practice (if you have included real-world audio .mp3 with your flashcards)… and if necessary is a forced German -> English vocabulary memorization tool.

Useful skills yes, but language mastery can only happen with reading, writing, listening and speaking. Aka: “Immersion”. Anki is great because it helps minimize the time spent on flashcards. If you aren’t saving time but instead feel like you’re wasting time, then you need to change Anki settings to something more useful.

Anki has been used to master Jeopardy, and is also becoming a popular tool in the medical community.

Anki may have been invented for language, but its useful for almost any studying.

Another small note on FSRS settings - adjusting the desired retention a little bit can be helpful. Defaults at 90%, turning it down makes review intervals longer, up makes them shorter. For large decks (vocab lists), I prefer it down at mid-high 80s. You want familiarity, not perfection, so less overwhelming reviews can be better.

Depends really. If you are drilling der/das/die genders and spelling, you might want perfection.

But yes, drop the FSRS setting to 80 or even lower for familiarity. If you are focusing on reading/consuming, it’s better to focus on familiarity instead.

But if you are studying writing/speaking, you need to set that retention back up to 90 and also aim for perfection on each card.

In general, 90% is closer to perfection and the highest you typically should go. However, medical students have been known to aim for 95% or higher (!!!) because they want to pass an exam and then forget about it later, lol.

So even going above 90% makes sense for some communities out there.

Medical students are willing to drill 4-hours per day on their subjects and want near 100% memorization in time for their exam. It’s a different kind of learning, but Anki does support that.

I wish Anki existed during my SAT days.

Do you know hard it was to learn 1000+ SAT words without Anki back then? I had to use like, a book. And index cards written by hand. My hand cramped up just writing all those words down.