Curious…Anyone else not “studied” or used Anki in a few years?
I haven’t “studied” since I finished my study abroad in July 2023. I actually enjoyed using Anki up until then and liked sentence mining, but my study abroad uni kanji class killed any Anki enjoyment for me. Our kanji classes were just “here are the 8-15 new kanji we’re learning this week, here are a list of 5-15 words for each kanji. you must learn all of these (reading, handwriting, meaning) for your test first thing tomorrow morning” . AKA, a job for Anki and nothing else. It was miserable!
They weren’t sequential either, so you could be learning 炭 and have 二酸化炭素 as one of your words, but you don’t know how to handwrite 酸 yet, so you’d have to learn that too. My other JP study abroad classes were very good, but the kanji one was an absolute mess.
Anyway, haven’t used Anki in a few years. I know in the back of my head that it’s probably a good idea for me to start again, but opened it to 5,000+ due cards!! A good chunk of these are ones I made for study abroad exams & kanji class, so those could be deleted/archived.
Removing those & the Kanken deck I used for a while would leave me with these, basically:
Remove everything except the mined vocab and try to get through the more manageable ~700 backlog
Anyone else been through this before? What would you do in this situation?
I also now basically only read on a physical kindle, so I know that sentence mining is going to be a major pain in the ass compared to before the kindle DRM change when it was much easier to use yomichan & the anki extension!
I’ve restarted Anki before. I made new decks and retired the old one. I got one for cards mined from video’s (Youtube/Netflix) and one for cards mined from books. I recommend you forget about your old cards, you probably forgot the context you mined all those cards in anyway. And you can always mine the same words again.
Yea, ereaders aren’t made with language learners in mind. I got around this by buying an older model kindle second-hand, jailbroke it and installed KoReader. (note that Kobo devices don’t require a jailbreak to install KoReader I hear). I then use an extension to make Anki cards directly from my kindle device.
It’s a real pain to set up and it has some quirks but it has made making Anki cards a two button process.
I didn’t quite restart, but I did start using jpdb after having not done much with anki for ages except basically maintain a core10K deck. What I did was to import my old deck but mark everything as “I will never forget this, don’t do reviews on it” (I guess the anki equivalent is suspending the cards). Then I add new words from decks for books I plan to read plus words I encounter and have to look up. If one of those encountered words is something I had marked “never forget”, I mark it “I don’t know this” so it gets added back into reviews.
Some of that won’t apply to anki, but I recommend the basic principle of “default to assuming general reading and language exposure have been enough to teach you anything you had in your old decks, and pick up the exceptions as you go along”. I think it’s more useful use of time to focus on new words: I found SRS study helpful in moving me up from “know about 10K words” to “about 25K” because a lot of the words in that range are ones it’s easy to just skip past when reading because they don’t really affect the core meaning of a sentence and you can still understand what’s going on in a book without them.
I’ve been on and off with Anki over the years and I’m currently in a stage of declaring bankruptcy on my Japanese vocab deck and deciding what I want going forward. I made a lot of those cards multiple years ago and many I already know and others I can’t remember why I cared (do I need to know this niche Buddhism term?)
If you’re like me and have a pretty comfortable reading base for vocab already it might be worth evaluating what you want from Anki/SRS if not mass vocab input. The words you’ll encounter are rarer and so you can afford to spend more time per card adding examples, making clozes if you struggle with the reading but not meaning, etc.
Anyways I vote alongside @Snappie to just retire the old decks, but with the added suggestion of evaluating if your needs as a learner are exactly the same as they used to be.
I’m also in the “archive everything and start fresh camp”; you don’t realize how much those old cards are weighing down on you until you’re free of them. I did that a year or so ago and don’t miss those cards at all; if I need to add one again I’ll do so, no problem.
I did jailbreak my kindle a few months back actually! Haven’t actually used it jailbroken though. That sounds interesting but I’m assuming you need to be connected to the internet when making the cards (I usually read underground on the train where there’s no internet) Will look into it though!
Actually, you the Extension stores the cards offline if it can’t reach the server. And you can then sync it when you’re home. I read in the local forest, make cards, then come home and sync the cards.
Frankly, I wouldn’t expose AnkiConnect to the internet anyway and just connect to it through your local network at home. I doubt it has been tested thoroughly for security bugs.
The addon does have some display issues, one of the labels in the connection settings says the wrong thing and the settings for anki connect are in a random spot in KoReader but once you overcome that hurdle it works like a charm.
I nuke Anki all the time. I can’t imagine trying to tackle my old deck reviews from previous years. That sounds like torture.
My usage of anki is probably unusual (sentence mining sounds like a lot of work):
I use Jo Mako anime decks to go through anime series subtitles in chronological order
I go through each subtitle, shadow / repeat, and suspend as I go along
That’s right, zero reviews. Unless there is a really funny moment or line then I might save the card
The anime is “complete” for me when all cards are suspended…
It is my way of trying to plow through native content somewhat naturally and not trying to remember or learn anything specifically. The goal is to find and enjoy content.
Making a filtered deck named “Catching up: Due Today” with the following search term: deck:"Active" is:due prop:due>-5.
Make a group out of the others and set “Maximum reviews per day” to whatever you think is reasonable.
Then, every day:
Study the “Catching up: Due Today” deck (if it contains anything; it’ll get fuller and fuller the more you start catching up with the other decks).
Do the others until maximum reviews per day are met.
This way you’ll
Whenever possible, do cards when they are due.
Slowly catch up with the others without having to nuke anything. Who knows, maybe you’ll remember some? And if not, they’ll naturally show up in “Catching up: Due Today”.
That’s the strategy that I used to slowly catch up to like… 1000-2000 cards or something?
Of course then I dropped Anki again almost exactly a year later, but that’s neither here nor there
I’m actually in the “delete everything, uninstall Anki, never look back” camp. You don’t realize how much Anki is weighing you down until you are free of it too
(I know, I know, SRS is super useful and effective. But it’s soooo annoying.)
Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I need to think a bit longer on what I’d like to get from Anki if I did return.
Fwiw the main things I highlight in books are:
Passages I want to comment on in review/book club/etc.
Sentence structure that I really like and want to steal
Words I like and would like to use
But admittedly for points 2 & 3 I never actually go back and look at them. I suppose if I did use Anki again it’d be for point 3, which wouldn’t be a ton of cards, so it’d be very manageable I’ll think about it anyway!
6 Likes
As an Amazon Associate, Natively earns from qualifying purchases through any Amazon links on the site.
Will look into it though!
