chirel Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5124 days ago 125 posts - 159 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: French
| Message 1 of 20 03 July 2010 at 8:45am | IP Logged |
I have reached a point where some of my Anki cards only show after a month. These are actually words that I knew
well years ago already (that's when I last tried to learn Swedish), so I've been deleting them. I'm pretty sure I
remember those words. But soon some of the new words will only show after a month and now I'm wondering when
would be a good time to delete those. Is one month too short a time interval? Should I wait untill they are shown
after six months or something? When do you delete new words because you are confident that you won't forget
them any more?
Edit: Fixed the title.
Edited by chirel on 03 July 2010 at 12:09pm
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feanarosurion Senior Member Canada Joined 5095 days ago 217 posts - 316 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Norwegian
| Message 2 of 20 03 July 2010 at 9:11am | IP Logged |
The intervals go up to 5 years. I honestly wouldn't delete anything. Anki keeps track of your progress very accurately, and the intervals keep going up so that you review when your brain probably needs a refresher to keep it locked in long term. I'm definitely confident that I'm not going to forget quite a few words in my deck, but I still wouldn't delete anything. Even if you've known the word for years and you have it locked in your active vocabulary, you should still keep it around. It's not hurting your learning. If anything I'd say having easier words mixed in with the hard ones helps the process. At the very least it's a confidence boost when you see a word you've known for ages, and your brain immediately knows the meaning and you can click "very easy" or "easy." I know I always smile when I see "Hyvä," "Yö," or "Päivä." I mean, if you'd rather clear out your deck that's another thing, but if anything a large vocabulary deck is a good thing. Then as you pass big numbers you can use those as extra milestones. Regardless, in my opinion, there's no downside to keeping cards around, so you might as well keep them in your deck and see the intervals grow and see more and more cards mature as you go.
Edited by feanarosurion on 03 July 2010 at 9:12am
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chirel Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5124 days ago 125 posts - 159 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: French
| Message 3 of 20 03 July 2010 at 12:08pm | IP Logged |
Thanks for the opinion. I guess you' are right. For some reason though I feel more frustrated when I see a familiar
word than when I'm struggling to learn a word. I'd rather not see the familiar cards. I was just wondering what is
familiar enough to be deleted. On the other hand, I've added all words in the deck myself and I do like to see those
familiar words sometimes when I've had ten difficult ones in a row.
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Liface Triglot Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/Lif Joined 5672 days ago 150 posts - 237 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Dutch, French
| Message 4 of 20 03 July 2010 at 6:23pm | IP Logged |
Don't delete anything! That's the whole point.
I hope I'm using Anki my entire life. Who knows, maybe if I bring it back up in 5 years, I'll forget that familiar word. It's very important to keep the entire deck intact.
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furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6286 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian
| Message 5 of 20 03 July 2010 at 10:26pm | IP Logged |
I would generally only delete the very basic everyday words. Stuff that you use so often (like "house = casa") that you get annoyed that your flash card system gives you such an easy question. If there's any doubt at all, I'd never delete the card -- "pretty sure" isn't sure enough. Ideally, I'd like it so that, if I wanted, I could stop using the language completely for years, with Anki being my only continuing use of it, then revisit the language and still use it with little difficulty.
I only use the sentence method for new cards. In that case I'll delete a sentence if the sentence is basic and everything in it already appears on other cards. For instance, a sentence whose only point is to teach me the word "abogado" isn't important once I've got several other cards that also use "abogado".
Edited by furrykef on 03 July 2010 at 10:27pm
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Javi Senior Member Spain Joined 5795 days ago 419 posts - 548 votes Speaks: Spanish*
| Message 6 of 20 07 July 2010 at 8:09pm | IP Logged |
I don't know about anki, but in my experience with the SM algorithm, thinking about
removing a super-easy card might take longer than a lifetime of reps for that card. So I
only consider deletion with those cards that I fail to recall.
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feanarosurion Senior Member Canada Joined 5095 days ago 217 posts - 316 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Norwegian
| Message 7 of 20 07 July 2010 at 10:11pm | IP Logged |
Doesn't that defeat the purpose? If you fail to recall it, then you need more review. Therefore, those are the cards you should definitely keep around.
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Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5349 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese
| Message 8 of 20 07 July 2010 at 11:31pm | IP Logged |
The only time I delete cards is when they are completely superseded by two or more other cards. For example, I will occasionally throw a single word in there as I want to remember that word for some specific reason, but then later I may end up with a few cards that have phrases or sentences containing that word (and usually the dictionary form in the misc field if it is a verb) making that card unnecessary.
There are several cards in my deck that I would deem "way too easy" but I don't really see the harm in leaving them since they rarely appear (and become more rare each time you get them right) and leaving them in there ensures at least *some* repeated exposure to that word/phrase/sentence even if I do nothing but SRS.
Besides...it can be a rather pleasant reminder to see a phrase come up that once was complete gibberish to you but now seems just as normal as something in your own native language.
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