Spaced Repetition Card Order & large decks

[Penner]

Does anyone feel that large deck(s) don't work well with Spaced Repetitions?

I have 11 decks. Each deck has about 120 cards in it, with 5-6 categories in each deck.

It seems to take forever to get thru 11 decks this size. Is it not worth it to use Spaced Repetition in this case?

Thanks for your thoughts.

[Ernie]

Penner,

I was getting too many repetitions with large decks. I assume this is what is happening with you. What you probably need to do is tweek the settings a bit. Examples:

Change the minimum interval to something like 1 or 2 days (24/48 hours instead of 8 hours). One problem is that when the interval gets low, it takes a while to build the interval back up, so it repeats often. (Ah, I see that the max is 24 hours currently. This will change in next update.)

If you are going through new cards, increase the "First Interval After Correct" and "First interval After Strong" a bit. This will lower repetitions.

Lastly, use "strong correct" (swipe up) a little more often which you know the card.

All of these will increase the time between reviews for an individual card. My default settings tend to favor the side of more repetitions, but this doesn't work so well with large decks. So in summary, Spaced Repetition should be perfect for what you are doing, you just need to adjust the settings.

Maybe I can auto-adjust a little better, so I'll give this some thought.

Ernie

[norbert]

It is true that with SRS and big decks it is a bit a pain, but you cannot learn long term loads of thing at the same time. I suggest to the OP to:
- make a compound deck, and add one by one the subdecks
- learn each subdeck by itself until the repetion time has gone up to 2 days
- start with the next deck

I have several combination decks, each with more than 3000 cards build from 60 or so decks. With this amount you have to study every day several times to keep the card count low And for some of the decks (the kanji writing ones) I have reduced the minimum time even more to 6h.

All the best

Norbert

[Ernie]

Thank you Norbert for your insight!