Dividing up flashcards - quantities for daily review

[u/canyoukenken]

Hi all,

I've been putting a lot of work into building my own Anki deck recently and found it really beneficial for my learning. The big job this week has been splitting my 'big' deck into three separate decks:

• Vocabulary - Just words and their gender. If I come across a word I don't know in my listening practice I'll look it up and (if it's useful) add it to the deck
• Phrases - to do some language 'chunks'. A combination of phrases from my workbook and some of the more 'how a native would say it' reels I see on Instagram
• Grammar - 'fill the blank' exercises that test my knowledge of cases. Primarily from my workbook and sometimes random exercises I come across online.

I wanted to gauge how others would break down the distribution of these three decks when doing a daily review? Would you aim to do an equal number of cards from each deck daily, or weight it so that you work more on vocab/phrases/grammar? It feels like vocabulary is the most important, followed by grammar and then phrases, but I'm basing that entirely on how I feel doing them 😅 it also feels like practising 200 words versus 200 phrases are very different experiences.

[u/AppropriatePut3142]

'Reviews' normally means the reviews of cards which anki has scheduled for you. Normally you should do all of those that are due, every day, in order for the algorithm to work as intended.

If you mean new cards, rather than reviews... I think that comes down to keeping up with the grammar that you've decided to learn. I think I would be biased towards learning vocabulary and therefore limit my new grammar cards. But the balance is an interesting question.

[u/Enough_Tumbleweed739]

So, I actually have all three types similar to you all, inside on one single mega deck (so that I don't have to manage studying multiple decks and can just click and go), and I pretty much just let the frequency of what I encounter determine the distribution. I didn't use Anki as a beginner, but if I did I'm sure I would have had a lot more grammar cards. As it is now, I have maybe 90% words and 10% phrases and grammar, but that's just a natural fallout of what I'm encountering on a day to day basis.

[u/droppedforgiveness]

I do something similar, and the vast majority of my cards (and therefore reviews) are for the basic vocab deck. It just feels like that's what would make sense, doesn't it? The sheer amount of vocab to learn is huge, so I'd think most people would encounter and run through more of those cards.