How to maintain anki decks?

Japanese Language
#1

I used to make separate Anki decks containing words and sentences for each chapter of the textbook(Genki and now Try, N3). And I found it a bit annoying when I ended up with so many decks and lost track with whats in what. I even had separate decks for NHK, Words from anime and podcasts and all.

How do you segregate and maintain your Anki decks?
How many cards should I add (max) in each deck?

#2

I started out with lots of different decks as well, but after a while I also found it annoying, plus I would more easily “cheat” on myself by saying “You know, I could as well skip that deck for today” :laughing:

Now I keep all my vocab cards in one deck and I use tags so I know where they came from (e.g. my tags are the JLPT levels, names of books, whether I saw the word in Japan or whether a language partner used it, etc.).

5 Likes
#3

I put all of my words and sentences in same deck. For me it doesn’t matter where they came from.They are just words I have to learn. Also I think having just one deck is less scary than having multiple decks to review.

1 Like
#4

OMG. this is sooo me. I have so many decks remaining with study items.

Nice idea,

1 Like
#5

I divide my anki decks by language only these days so I have huge ones with hundreds of words, but as long as you don’t add/ learn all of them at the same time, the daily workload is quite manageble (f.e. these days I have around 30-40 reviews in my japanese deck each day)

1 Like
#6

Thanks for the suggestions. I guess there is no harm in maintaining one massive deck. Just finished merging all of them.

2 Likes
#7

I keep all my book vocab decks as a subdeck under “Vocab” and have the individual decks hidden. I like to have them separately, but the only problem is that Anki goes through the decks in alphabetical order! So I kind of can infer which book the word is from depending if it’s at the start or end of a review session. This is my number one annoyance with Anki, and wonder why we don’t have an option for truly random order during reviews :frowning:.

Maybe I should adopt the tag system instead
 But I kind of like having separate stats for the decks, which is a bit more difficult to filter with tags.

2 Likes
#8

I tried Anki multiple times and finally gave up on it. Probably my own personality trait, but I spent way too much time building and fiddling with decks that could have been better spent studying. I think SRS is definitely the way to go, but for me it works way better just to let WK and other SRS programs deliver the content. It didn’t help that I always found Anki’s user interface annoying.

#9

Heh, I used to be like that, too, but then went down the rabbit hole of actually learning how Anki works on a deeper level and customising it. Now I could never go back to WK :smiley:. I agree, though, that the interface isn’t really intuitive, but it works well enogh once you get used to it.

That said, I don’t really make my own decks, and use quite simple cards of just vocab JP to English/JP. Or a deck for kanji writing from sentences, where the kanji is replaced by hiragana.

1 Like
#10

Can you recommend any resource on Anki with some down-to-earth language?
I still cannot setup properly the SRS intervals and cannot figure out where it went wrong :woman_facepalming:

1 Like
#11

Yes, that can be quite the rabbithole :wink: But I think the process of building a card is the first review already (or maybe it’s like WK’s lesson learning step), and so it’s not that bad for me.

I’m surprised to hear that actually
 for me the main reason to start with Anki was that the WK intervals tend to get too large around Guru 1 or 2 or so (I’m not as old as you are but old enough to feel that my brain does no longer work as well as I would like it to
) and so I was looking for something that gave me more configurability in terms of increasing the intervals.
Glad to hear that WK and other apps work for you though :slight_smile:

1 Like
#12

I think their manual is not too bad actually: Anki Manual
Also, they now have their own forum where lots of people are willing to help: https://forums.ankiweb.net/

Alternatively, if you describe your issue in more detail, maybe some of us can help?
(Like, are you talking about the initial intervals, like on WK, or about the increase over time? And how would you like them to be?)

1 Like
#13

I really like this video:

2 Likes
#14

This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.