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Building And Maintaining Your Anki Wall — 8 Comments

  1. I love Anki! It’s been the single most important tool for me in terms of being able to power level to where I’m at today.

  2. If the cement isn’t mixed properly it won’t be able to hold the bricks in place. Which is my torture-the-metaphor way of saying that for Anki to be effective it may be necessary to tweak the settings somewhat. The defaults seem to work well for Adshap and ブドウブドウ and probably most other people, but they weren’t working for me, at least not as well as I would have liked. So, after the conversation in the second link I turned the interval modifier down and started using the “hard” button a lot more often. And, perhaps most significantly, after I finish my reviews I go to the “review forgotten cards” (under custom study) several times over the rest of the day and loop through all the cards I’ve missed over the two previous days until I can answer each correctly with no hesitation. Eventually I may be less obsessive about maintaining every brick, but I’m currently in what still feels like early days of the full monolingual transition and when every brick is supporting the weight of many others I really don’t want any coming loose.

    Anyway, all I’m suggesting is that people be willing to experiment with Anki’s settings and customize it to best fit their personal goals, mental strengths and weakness.

    • I’m happy I read your post! I finish RTK tomorrow (only 20 cards left)! Soon I will be on my journey to learning real japanese. I never thought of messing with the interval modifier too much. I’m aiming for 1,000 J-E cards and 10,000 J-J cards. By following your logic I will end up studying more in the beginning but re-learning a lot less down the road.

      • Congratulations on finishing RTK, and I’m glad you found this helpful! You may discover that you don’t need to change the interval modifier as much as I did, most people seem to manage a good retention rate with the default settings. But I figure it’s always good to know that options exist, if you find you’re having difficulty recalling cards (especially mature ones) there’s something you can do about it.

    • This might help some people.

      I use average ease to determine interval modifiers.

      Starting ease is set at 250% and avg ease can be found in statistics window.

      Example:
      My RTK deck was at 229% 2 months ago, while my sentence deck was at an average of 240%.
      After dividing avg ease by baseline (250), I’ve determined my modifiers to be 91% and 96%, respectively.
      225% is probably the lowest you can go… so 229% = always pressing hard/fail

      Anki uses something similar to the sm2 algorithm and based on my calculations normal interval multipliers range from 1.65x to 1.96x to 2.03x.

      However, the anki formula multiplies the interval multiplier by the interval modifier.

      E.g. ‘good at 90%. (0.9 x 1.96), assuming ease of 250%.
      The final interval is 1.76x.

      http://www.supermemo.com/english/ol/sm2.htm

      Use (Interval^8) to determine if the percentage seems practical.
      8 is a random number representing how many times you’ve passed it.
      1.76^8=92
      1.96^8=210

  3. I use the default intervals and they are working ok for me. Anki really is saving my life. I’m currently at 750 cards on RTK, looking forward to finishing it to start with sentences.
    And even on the days when I am completely tired and lacking motivation I open Anki, and get through what I have on the day. Anki is saving my life.

    • I am sure there comes a time when your wall is so solidly well built that for the most part it will hold it self up. (I didnt use anki to learn english.) At this point you can build it however you like. I haven’t reached that point yet. But even when I do I will probably still do my anki reviews even if I am not adding new cards. The reviews would be so easy It wouldn’t take more than a few mins anyhow. So yeah, I think you can maintain your wall through extended reading, provided you have a solid wall to back it up.

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