Summer Break with Anki?

[MrsWeasley]

If you use Anki during the school year but don't want to review during the summer, what do you do in the fall? We'll have a huge number of cards to get through, and of course, I'll have new stuff I'll want to add.

[Tranquility7]

Hmmm. Ok, first I have to do my loyal Anki duty and tell you not to take a break from it, LOL! If you can just hang in there and get through Anki this summer - even just 3-4 times a week - it will be SO worth it! It will get your mature cards placed farther and farther out in the future, so that by the time next school year starts your daily Anki time will be very short. That will be great, since you will start adding new cards for the next year then. Even just doing Anki ONCE a week will still have payoff!

 

But, if you really can’t do it during the summer, I’ll tell you how we manage to recover from a “neglected deckâ€, which has happened on several occasions around here in spite of my advice to you above (do as I say and not as I do and all that jazz…!).   :blushing:

 

When I get back to Anki after a break that was too long, I simply open up my entire collection in the Anki card Browser and suspend ALL the cards that have short intervals. You define what qualifies as “shortâ€; for us that might mean suspending all cards that have intervals of less than one month. That means when we actually go to do Anki, the only cards we will be presented with are the ones we already know really well (and thus still have a chance at knowing well). We go through those cards, hopefully remembering all or at least most of them, and so they are then given new intervals and our deck the next day is virtually back to nothing (except the cards we had really forgotten from yesterday’s deck). So the next day I go back into the Browser and UNsuspend another segment of cards – say, the ones with intervals of 3 weeks to 1 month. Unsuspend that bunch of cards, run through Anki and see how it goes. Some you won’t remember and will have to click Again, but hopefully most will be remembered and get pushed out with bigger intervals again.

 

Do the same thing every time you do Anki, unsuspending another bunch of cards with shorter intervals each time until finally you are caught up. If your review deck gets too big as you go, then just keep working on that deck for a few days until it gets manageable again, and then unsuspend your next bunch of cards. You can unsuspend as quickly or as slowly as you want, depending on how much time you have for Anki each day and how quickly you want to get caught up.

 

I’d start the catch-up process in Anki at least a couple of weeks before you want to start adding new cards (depending on how big your neglected collection is), just because I don’t like the burden of new cards while also working on a slew of catch-ups. Plus it can get confusing to keep the right cards suspended when you have new cards thrown into the mix. But either way is doable.

[skueppers]

I limit the number of cards my kids see each day to a number they can handle without becoming overwhelmed and frustrated. That way, if there are times when reviews don't happen, any one day's review is never too arduous.

 

 

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[scoutingmom]

I create a filtered deck of the cards. There are even ways to sort them,and one is by urgency - I forget what they called it..... they are the ones that you need to study right away before you forget it. It puts those first. Make sure you put -is:learn because you don't want cards you are still learning in a filtered deck as it doesn't reschedule them. I'm not at my computer right now or I would give a sample of the filter.

 

The urgency idea is along the lines of being overdue with a card a few days with an interval of a year is less important than if the interval is, say, 5 days.

 

So I create the filtered deck. We do any new cards, and a number of the filtered deck. Every so often, at least once a week, I rebuild the filtered deck to resort with the urgency priority.... that puts any newer cards into that review filtered deck too, but prioritized.

 

I do try to focus on review and only add new cards if I have to. I agree that if you can do a bit of review over summer, it is best. But obviously I have been in this position as I have a solution. And I use AAR with Anki... and we haven't done it for a year as we did something else. I'm scared to see the number of reviews waiting for us...

 

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