SRS flashcard amounts

[insighter]

I have a general question about SRS flashcards; how many cards is too many? Well, maybe it's more complex, how many cards over a certain amount of time is too many? I already am working through a character frequency list and a textbook series vocabulary list. I am only testing on maybe 1500+ cards right now but I already have to do 100+ daily to keep from falling behind. That amount is now manageable, especially because they are mostly review and I could add a little more, but now I am wanting to add all the other vocabulary lists I've created into the SRS system (成语 lists, my vocab lists from nciku.com, etc.) What I'm afraid of is daily flashcard queue of like 800 cards which would not let me work on other aspects of Chinese...or anything else in life.

So I'm looking for ideas for how this is done. I know that some people have Anki decks numbering over 10,000 so my own lists totalling maybe 4,000-6,000 should be do able. Any suggestions for how one proceeds? Should I do this very slowly...maybe adding one list every two weeks so that it doesn't become overwhelming. Or could I just kill myself for a week and then it would become a more manageable load over time? Maybe I'm focusing on SRS too much? Perhaps Pleco's weighted scoring system might work better, but that may be a question for the Pleco forum.

Anyways, suggestions welcome.

[jbradfor]

Or could I just kill myself for a week and then it would become a more manageable load over time?

Unfortunately, SRS does not work like that. The very nature of SRS spaces seeing the card over longer and longer periods of time. So one week intense work will not help long-term.

I would figure out how long each day you are willing to do SRS -- and make it conservative, most people get tired of SRS after some time. Then figure out how many cards you can do in that much time. And add cards SLOWLY, ensuring you don't exceed your daily time limit.

I'm a big fan of SRS, but I think it should be part of a balanced diet.

[renzhe]

In my experience, traditional flashcards break down before 1000 cards, SRS can go up to 10,000.

After that, you really need to use reading to keep common words fresh, and only use SRS for very tricky and rare words you're learning.

[Guest realmayo]

insighter: you're using SRS to learn vocab? Personally I've found SRS amazing for two things. For hammering individual characters. And for not forgetting vocabulary. But you are talking about using it to learn vocabulary? In which case you should really be asking yourself how many words would be too many if, say, SRS programmes didn't exist and you were just using a pen and paper to learn words. Because they're not magic. They'll stop you forgetting stuff but you've got to put in the effort to learn it in the first place. So I would urge you to make sure that first, you're actually putting effort in to learn a word, before you start SRS-ing it. And second, to make sure that you don't confuse SRS with learning Chinese. That is, don't treat it as a magic bullet. Spend time on the normal methods of language learning (reading, listening, speaking etc etc) and add the vocab into the SRS as you go along. Or, rather, try to imagine how you'd deal with learning new vocab if you weren't using SRS. What proportion of study time do you think students should devote to learning long lists of new vocab, pen and paper lists? Because I think that's how much time you should be spending on SRS. Sure there might be times when a vocab splurge is a good idea. But most of the time, as jbradfor says, you need balance.

I have a deck of 10,000 and am a big fan of SRS but have wasted time in the past by just dumping lots of new words into it -- a real waste of time. It might make sense when you're starting out, because you'll be seeing all those newly SRS-ed words time and time again in beginner-level textbooks. And I found it makes sense when brute-forcing individual characters. But for vocab: if you're adding more than four or five new words a day, I suggest you try to learn them first, and never allow yourself to spend more time on SRS than reading/listening etc.

Just re-reading your post: if could be that you have already learned most of this vocab? In which case I can only suggest trial and error: if you're overwhelmed by too many repetitions then just spend a week pressing (in Anki) CTRL+S (=suspend) instead of FAIL for all the cards you get wrong, then when you're on a more even keel reset those suspended cards to make them new cards again, and start them again, this time at a lower rate than before.

[imron]

This thread contains some related discussion.

[grahamH]

The maximum I go to is 100. When I've learned a card it gets deleted and makes way for a new card. All my flashcards are derived from native material, if there is a word, idiom or phrase I like, it gets added. SRS only works if you stick with the program if you have so many cards that you can't keep up then you need to reconsider your approach to vocabulary acquisition. Flashcard work should be a tiny part of your study program, five minutes here, five minutes there. Thousands of cards is too much of a commitment.

[WestTexas]

I'm just over 10000 in my Anki deck. This is what I do - I encounter a new word in some native material. I look it up on my frequency list to see how common it is, then decide, based on the frequency and how useful it seems, whether or not I want to remember it. Then I look it up in at least two different dictionaries, usually one Ch->English and one Chinese only dictionary (I like 现代汉语词典). Then if I don't feel like I understand it thoroughly I look up example sentences. Then I'll add a card to my deck. I don't use any pre-made decks at all. IMO the effort required in my method counts as 'learning', and anyways, I've yet to encounter any pre-made vocabulary material that didn't have at least a couple of errors, omissions, or inaccuracies.

An important thing to note is that the number of cards you do each day is not proportional to the total number in your deck. The primary factor is how many new cards you are doing each day, not the total number. It seems nonintuitive, but basically if you look at the intervals on the cards you do on a typical day, you will see that as the time intervals become longer, you are doing very few cards with long intervals compared to cards with short intervals. The vast majority of the cards you will see on a typical day, if you are consistently adding new cards, are ones that have either been introduced in the past month or so or been missed (and had their interval reset) within the past month or so.

[drungood]

I don't think you can have too many SRS cards. I've been using it for lots of stuff and have no intent on stopping, so a decade from now I may have 50000 cards.

The key is not to get too ambitious on how much you learn at a time, and to review with consistency. Going to bed at night without doing you SRS should feel as dirty as not brushing your teeth. Also, if you feel like the amount you are reviewing is getting overwhelming, then don't learn anything new for a few days. SRS is approximately an arithmetic series, so if you learn 30 new cards every day without exception, over a long period of time the amount of reviews will approach infinity. So you need to take days off sometimes - not for reviewing, but for adding.

[WestTexas]

SRS is approximately an arithmetic series, so if you learn 30 new cards every day without exception

I was under the impression that the number of cards you do each day was a geometric series, which summed to a value proportional to the number you add each day and to the percentage yo miss, and so did not approach infinity regardless of how many cards are in the deck. I read the supermemo creator saying this.

[insighter]

<edit for relevance:) Thanks for the responses, I think I have a better ideas for using SRS.>

P.S It seems like the discussion has moved into other areas, but I stll have two questions. One user specific and one general.

I'm curious WestTexas, what frequency list do you consult and what is the cut-off after which you consider the word not worth adding?

Does anyone have experience with enrolling in a non-major Chinese university that doesn't have foreigners in mind? Could be a useful challenge or just mind-boggling lectures, but I'm not sure.

[Olle Linge]

I think we're talking about many things at the same time here, which should be separated:

Total number of cards: There is obviously no limit here, it all depends on how much time you are prepared to spend. I have 20 000 cards in my Anki deck at the moment and I spend around 30-40 minutes maintaining that. I've had it for years and it I'm quite satisfied with how it works. Since most cards show up less often than once every year, they don't clog up revision cues that much and are most often very easy to remember and can be answered quickly. I keep them because I like knowing what I've learnt and what I haven't, and I still do forget these words sometimes. SRS is excellent for not forgetting.

Number of daily reviews: This is almost the same question, but phrased in a diffferent way. It matters greatly how new the cards are. Reviewing something like 你好 takes about one second, reviewing a word you barely remember might take more than ten times as long. If you have to look something up because of bad input, you need minutes. That said, I normally review 200-300 cards per day, but most of those I remember without spending more than a few seconds.

Total number of new cards: This is something completely different. The most important thing most new users miss is that it's quite easy to add 100 words/day for a while, but it becomes really hard after a while. My most extreme experiment was adding 1200 成語 in about three days. That took a lot of time, not only during these days, but for weeks to come. After that, it starts becoming less of a hassle. I think that the first week after adding lots of words is the most taxing period (obviously), but it does really get better after that. If you're using Anki, you can check the graphs and see how many cards you have due in the near future. According to my current graph, it takes about two weeks before the young cards stop being a major factor.

So, what should you do? I would go along with jbradfor's advice:

I'm a big fan of SRS, but I think it should be part of a balanced diet.

Rather add 10 new characters a day for 100 days than add 100 new characters every 10 days. If you know you can manage 20 new characters a day, do that by all means, but not if it makes you stop or feel too tired to keep up the pace. You can add more cards when you know you're going to have more time for a few weeks, but don't add a ton of words just because you feel like it now. You have to feel like it tomorrow as well. And next week. Hurry slowly.

[imron]

I normally review 200-300 cards per day, but most of those I remember without spending more than a few seconds.

What would you say is the average time you spend on a card?

I ask because I find that if I take the time spent doing reviews and divide it by the number of cards, it usually averages out to about 30 seconds per card. This amount has been roughly consistent for me for a very long time, and at 200-300 cards a day, this would require a couple of hours per day just to do reviews, which is more time than I'm willing to spend on that (I aim for no more than 30 mins per day when I'm in vocab learning mode).

Obviously I'm not spending 30 seconds on *every* card. If I know a card instantly, I mark it as correct and move on to the next one straight away, but if I have even a short pause, then even though I'll still mark the card as correct, I'll also stop and spend a bit of time going over the card, drilling myself to be able to produce it instantly in my mind, going over the meaning and so on until I'm satisfied that next time the card comes up I won't need to pause (and it's this activity that drags out the average).

The main reason being that I'm aiming for instant recognition in real-world usage (like I have with English), because I've found that training anything less than instant recognition is sub-optimal for real-world usage.

[Olle Linge]

What would you say is the average time you spend on a card?

I spend around 30-40 minutes daily, which means slightly less than 10 seconds per card. Most of these are, as you describe, almost instant answers that take about one second to complete, perhaps even less. Cards I really have to think about, I select "hard" if I find the answer reasonably quickly (I'm not as strict as you are, though) and "again" if I can't or if I'm wrong.

Still, my 30-40 minutes is a bit misleading, because cards I want to look at more closely for some reason (I forgot them, they need clarification, they need examples, etc.) are marked and looked at later. Anki does not count this as review time, but it's still reviewing for me. I guess I do this an extra hour or two every week. My true Anki time should perhaps be 45-55 minutes or something, excluding learning new vocabulary of course.