Hacker News Reader

I've used Anki for about ten years, and I'm going to tell you a huge secret...

There's absolutely no need to "reset". Ever.

If you have only ten minutes to devote to Anki, then only spend ten minutes. If at some later point, you have more time, then spend that time.

Set the maximum reviews per day to something you can do most days -- for me, that's 250 cards. If you're behind, turn off 'new' cards. And eventually, you will catch up.

What if you don't do Anki for a month or two? You still don't need to reset. Anything you remember after that month will have a much longer time until you next see it.

Only use Anki as much as you have time for it. Let it figure out which cards to show you. Resetting messes with the algorithm for which cards to show.

I'm also over ten years on Anki, and I've racked up 2/3 of a million review during that time. I've taken too-long breaks several times over that time period, on a variety of subjects (decks in Anki). Sometimes years.

Each time I've gone back to a deck, I've just slugged out the few days of heavy reviews and let Anki take care of the rest. The stuff that I've forgotten, Anki will nag me with. The stuff that I've retained for years, stays retained.

One thing that I do suggest is to limit the maximum interval to 365 days, and to remove the review limit. I also tend to use the "hard" answer on cards that I've retained in decks that I've ignored for some time.

Having used Anki for 10 years, reset is definitely the best option.you fly through the cards you remember at the start, and don’t get bogged down by cards your ‘supposed’ to remember.

(SRS fails in this regards)

There are a couple ways to do it that I've found. None of them is perfect for every situation I've encountered. I think that part of the reason why there's no clean way to do it is that there are so many specific things someone might want to do:

- If you want to just push cards to the back of the queue, but remember timings and history, there's a built-in command to do that.

- If you want to change the current interval of a card, but keep your history, there's also a built-in command for that.

- If you need to do the above in bulk, the "Reset Card Scheduling" plugin can make this a lot more convenient.

- If you really do want to completely reset a card, forget all history, etc., and treat it as a new card, there's the "Remove Card History" plugin.

Finally, when returning to old decks, I found I usually get the most mileage by leaving all that stuff alone and just suspending the whole thing, and then un-suspending them at a steady pace. I neglected my Kanji deck for months, and I used that approach to get myself back up to speed by doing the catch-up review in the original (RTK) order I originally learned them rather than based on Anki's priority.

User plugins are a cool feature that let users do all sorts of things you couldn't forsee as the app developer nor want to encumber the UI with every possible feature.

But it feels so hacky when you need them for things that seem like rather elementary functionality like resetting a deck.

Calibre feels the same way like needing a plugin just to estimate page count. I feel lucky when a plugin actually works.

For what it's worth, I keep everything in a single deck. I never stop reviewing stuff and "interleaving" makes learning more effective than "blocking" (studying things in blocks). Source: Bjork et al 2013 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/231610455_Self-Regu...)

Same: single decks are nice. It’s still hard if you break your habit though...

I took a modified approach to this in university, though nowadays I mostly do the same.

For each new class, I would start a new deck, and after the course was over I would move it over to my main (huge) deck, and it's worked surprisingly well.

Typically (now that I'm out), I add small cards from time to time to my deck, but if there's a large quantity of things I am working on learning at any given time (say I'm going to add 50-100 new cards), I'll put them in their own deck for a little bit.

Ultimately, my repetition does end up being a wide array of subjects though.

This is why tagging is useful. Anything cards I added for United had the tag of the class it was from. You can then do a custom study session with just those tagged cards.

I'm kind of new to Anki myself (started a couple of weeks ago) so I might be wrong, but I think you can limit the amount of cards you want to review on a per-deck-basis. The default-number is quite high (200 per day I think?).

If you make that number the same as the "new cards per day"-number, that might be a work around for your issue?

From a different (but really probably the same) angle, this is the frustration I've had with Anki as well.

I just want a "dumb" flashcard application that doesn't try to apply "smart" techniques/heuristics.

I was just looking for a way to do the same paper card quizzing digitally without having to actually carry decks on my person.

Every app I've tried over the years powered under the hood by Anki had this issue.

It's been a few years since I last checked it out, but an option for a dumb mode would have had me throwing money at it just to even try it out.

I use Anki for that all the time

There’s a “cram seen cards” feature under custom study that’ll just give you a temporary brand new deck you can run through in random order

I don't know. I just tried to briefly check it out again. I'm sure I could be giving it a fairer chance.

Clearly, millions of people are benefiting from this app.

I'm just finding the features and interface very bombarding. And, the sheer number of screen taps just to study the flash cards in the manner that I'd like (and even then, not fully within my perceived control) is pretty repelling.

Thank you for pointing that out that feature. It might help eventually with conversion.

What's the use case for this dumb mode? Does Anki not have a "cram" mode that just goes through all flashcards with none of the fancy interval logic?

One of the wonderful things about software assisting with spaced repetition is that it automatically selects and remembers efficient intervals. It's crazy how little time is spent per flashcard with this automation.

I don't see that there's any difference in responding "Again" to an expired card vs reclassing that card as new. When I'm catching back up on an old deck I just turn new card off and limit my reviews until I've worked through the backlog this way.

Suppose you have 50 unseen cards, and you have it set to show you 5 new cards every day, and energy for about 10 reviews.

Then on day 1 it will want to show you cards 1-5; day two it will show you 1-5 again and also 6-10; day three it will show you 6-10 again and also 7-15 (to simplify somewhat). So you're having some cards you know and some that are new.

If you have 50 cards you've forgotten, then on day 1 it will show you 1-10; on day 2 it will show you 11-20; day 3 it will show you 21-30, and so on -- all completely new. That makes it far more of a grind.

I ended up with similar problem. Started wondering if there’s some parameter you can tune to avoid this ”giant loop” issue?

I would prefer to iterate over small set of cards until I know them quite well.

Would it be possible to share the deck? I would love that (for poker).

You can do custom study of all the cards.