I use Anki but oh did I have to learn to discipline myself. Anki’s extreme flexibility coupled with an engineer’s mind had me spending whole stretches of days or even weeks just tweaking my card templates, hoping to achieve some sort of optimal card format that will maximize my acquisition of the language (Mandarin like in the post). At some point I had enough scripts in there that I had turned it into my own Duolingo-like app.
These days I reign that impulse in and force myself to stick to simple card formats. Creating cards should take as little time as possible. The Chinese Support add-on is super useful for that by the way.
Another thing about Anki is that it can feel oppressive sometimes, because if you don’t do your reps they just pile up and it becomes a drag to clear the “debt.” Staying on top of my reps before I had a baby and life was chill was easy; now with the baby I sometimes feel like Anki takes away from the already limited time I have to expose myself to the language by reading books, watching videos, etc.
I stick to it though, since for a language that distant from the two other languages I speak, memorization work is a must.
> Another thing about Anki is that it can feel oppressive sometimes, because if you don’t do your reps they just pile up and it becomes a drag to clear the “debt.” Staying on top of my reps before I had a baby and life was chill was easy; now with the baby I sometimes feel like Anki takes away from the already limited time I have to expose myself to the language by reading books, watching videos, etc.
For me the new habit has been to not guilt myself too badly for skipping my cards if I know I spent an hour or two on native materials. Key to this has been to make sure that while all of my subdecks under my combined deck offer me a set number of new cards every day, the combined deck is set to zero new cards per day. If I'm missing days, I need to stop adding cards for a while until my daily load is tolerable enough that I'm not tempted to skip out.
Also, I like to get new cards of the same type at the same time. After I've cleared them once, let them be mixed in with the other cards, but when they're introduced, I should be focused.
I hope that FSRS* eventually solves this: they've pretty much done away with manually-chosen "ease" as a concept (although not everyone has accepted that yet.) I hope they'll ditch the idea of people regulating the number of new cards they get per day and move to allowing users to select an amount of time they want to spend, or a date by which they want to have a particular proficiency (defined by card recall), and instead have the algo choose how many new cards you should have. e.g. I'm looking for 45 minutes a day of review, optimize for that; or, I want to be able on the 15th of October to be able to get 95% of this set of cards correct, drill me on them repetitiously for as long as it takes.
There's been a lot of thoughtful discussion about pushing the app forward in ways like this.** Simpler is better, and the scheduler should be scheduling, not the user; the scheduler's job is to adapt to the user.
The next frontier for SRS after polishing the schedulers is to gain an understanding of what makes a good card or a good deck, rather than leaving it as an exercise to the reader along with a bit of handwaving about how it's better to learn from one's own cards than ones that others have made. I'm about 3 years into daily SRS and this is not my experience. I'm eternally grateful to people who come up with innovative decks or just well written and focused cards.
FSRS-based simulator could help user regulate the number of new cards they need to learn per day. The simulator will be integrated into Anki natively in the next release. But it's still an experimental feature. If the simulator is accurate enough, I plan to make it more automatically to support the idea that let the algorithm choose many new cards the user should have.
These days I reign that impulse in and force myself to stick to simple card formats. Creating cards should take as little time as possible. The Chinese Support add-on is super useful for that by the way.
Another thing about Anki is that it can feel oppressive sometimes, because if you don’t do your reps they just pile up and it becomes a drag to clear the “debt.” Staying on top of my reps before I had a baby and life was chill was easy; now with the baby I sometimes feel like Anki takes away from the already limited time I have to expose myself to the language by reading books, watching videos, etc.
I stick to it though, since for a language that distant from the two other languages I speak, memorization work is a must.