How Much Time to Spend on Anki Reviews
You see a flash card and the timer begins. How long till victory and on to the next battle?You have 2 main decisions to make on every card: 1) Do you understand it and 2) How much time will you devote to it?
The latter can be stressful because of the J-bragger: “I became fluent in 3 months without any formal studying in just 10 minutes a day, by watching Japanese TV from my iPhone, while resting on a beach in Fiji drinking martinis.” Or the Anki-bragger: “I review 300 cards an hour while watching Game of Thrones and eating potato chips on the toilet.”
I understand the concern. Your speed affects your time to fluency. Your time to fluency affects your motivation. Do you need to go at exactly 8.7291 seconds per card, or is there something more to this?
Is there a best Anki speed?
I’ve been working with Anki cards for a longggggg time, and have gone through a lot of different study/review time approaches. I’ve also seen what works well for other people and what keeps them from hitting an Anki wall. What’s most important is that you think about speed/time once, and then not again.
Here’s the general time pattern:
1. Learn a card the first time
Average time: 1-5 minutes
Task: learn the kanji, kanji reading, pronunciation, word meaning and sentence meaning.
Warning: Do not obsess over immediate memorization. Learning a flash card doesn’t equal memorizing it. Don’t sit there repeating it out loud a dozen times in a row.
The lion-share of Anki time takes place here. This is why you can review hundreds of cards in a day, but can only learn dozens. Do not expect to be able recall, or produce, or master the card in one go.
2. First review of that card
Average time: 20-60 seconds
Task: try to recall what you learned, but be prepared to relearn/think a little bit.
Warning: don’t beat yourself up if you can’t remember it that well.
People expect things immediately from their first review, but it’s just not realistic. You may have forgotten it, or it is hazy, or you didn’t have a great understanding of it in the first place.
3. Every consecutive review of that card
Average time: 5-20 seconds
Task: try to recall what you learned.
Warning: don’t expect every card to take the same amount of time. Don’t stress if you forgot the card and need to restart its interval.
Review 2+ is where you increasingly develop your relationship with that card. The more you review it, the quicker your next review will be.
4. Cards marked incorrect now appearing again
Average time: 5-60 seconds
Task: try to recall what you learned, but be prepared to relearn/think a little bit.
Warning: everyone gets cards wrong. Don’t get frustrated. Don’t think you need to now completely start the card from scratch.
Regardless of whether your incorrect card was on a high or low interval, you will forget things. Cards marked wrong vary in length significantly. It may be a small lapse or something minor thing you forgot, and it will only take you that quick 5-20 seconds. Or it may be something that you were completely off on, and need to spend 20-60 seconds refreshing yourself of the information. Adjust accordingly.
The secret to speed
Don’t overthink the numbers. The above speeds are estimates that can be influenced by:
- Card difficulty
- Thought speed
- Your Japanese Level
- Where you are studying
- What time of day you are studying
- Your mood
- Your energy levels
Don’t think about whether you truly understood the card, or why you didn’t understand it. Cards become easier just by continued repetition over time and seeing other cards using similar components. Your speed is guaranteed to increase.
What’s your speed now?
Can’t help but think about numbers? In the comments section below, let us know how long you’ve been using a flash card system, and list your speed for each of the following:
Been using Anki/NEXT for:
Initial learn:
1st review:
2nd+ reviews:
Card mark incorrect now appearing again:
Founder of Jalup. iOS Software Engineer. Former attorney, translator, and interpreter. Still watching 月曜から夜ふかし weekly since 2013.
I have been using SRS for 15 months.
This article seems spot on. The numbers the article cites are about right for me. My review/learning/relearning times vary, but stay within the ranges this article suggests.
Currently I’m mostly going through the Jalup Next Decks (Intermediate right now) and it really depends a lot. I did spend quite a bit on vocabulary building before starting Jalup (the traditional textbook way) so sometimes I just read a sentence and get it right away. I still make sure to read the explanation because they are nice practice as well. But essentially if that’s the case it’s only slightly longer than the consecutive reviews.
However of course for really new items that’s a bit different. Funnily enough I think I usually spend the most time on the first and second review and not on the initial learning of a card… For the initial learning I just try to get a rough grasp and to “kind of” get it. Read the card out a couple of times. Maybe click on a few links if I’m a bit unsure of something there, but in general I don’t think I usually spend more than a minute there…
And then for more or less easy cards, the first and second review might be somewhat similar (I might be able to read it or roughly understand it, but make sure do go over the explanation properly again etc) and then it usually starts sinking in.
For more difficult cards, I start out doing the same, but if I get to the point of “…. -> flips card, look at the explanation …… I still don’t get it -> fail” and the cards then pop up in the same review session at the end, that’s where I usually put in more time. I don’t have an exhaustive kanji knowledge (tried multiple ways, but compared to reviewing normal Japanese sentences I just burn out way easier on reviewing kanji standalone, so I’m going reeeeaaally slowly at that, so they mix in nicely) and that sometimes poses a problem. So I might look up the kanji on their own, and maybe see if I know other words with it. I might write the word down in my notebook with its kanji and the reading. Look up some more example sentences for the word, to get a better grasp and try to relate that to the explanation again. Work through the explanation more in detail again as well. Read the sentence a few more times, stare at the problem word while pronouncing it. etc pp. And then I move on (understanding will probably still be hazy, but you know~) It’s not like I do that for every card or sometimes I only do one thing or the other, depending on where the difficulty is for me. But I’d say in general, that’s probably the time when I’m really putting the learning effort in. (I think the 1 min to 5 min estimate seems about right for that)
I guess part of that has to do with using a premade deck. I imagine that would probably be somewhat different if I were to make my own cards. (Then the most time would probably be put in during card creation and that would serve as the first learning) but I’m currently too lazy for that. However for the premade deck this does seem to work out so far. I feel like on the reviews I actually do get a better feel for what my problem with the card really is (is it actually the new word or am I struggling with an old pattern? Do I confuse some kanji? Get the reading wrong all the time but get the meaning? do I feel like I get the main sentence but the explanation keeps confusing me?) so yah, I guess I prefer doing it this way :)
I created an anki plugin to streamline the process of creating new flashcards from native materials, and have posted it for download. It has cut the time I spend entering new flashcards into Anki by a factor of five, so I hope some of you find it useful.
https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1545080191