Best setting for flashcard spaced repetition?

I tried different setups for space repetition - however, none of them were satisfactory. Also, I love how customizable flashcard system is, but it is easy to get lost with all the settings.

I really love the system that Anki uses - it tests me in very good intervals, and, whenever I use Anki, I find it easy to memorize things.

Do you have any recommendations for good SRS system? Whenever I set up, I am limited to a specific amount of cards (and I can't expand), I get asked about badly scored cards way too often (slows me down) and about well scored cards way to rarely (makes me forget them)

We actually use a very similar algorithm to Anki's, so I'm surprised you're having such a different experience.

Where are you seeing a limit to a specific number of cards? We start off showing you however many cards you have due for the day, then once that runs out we put up a prompt to let you continue studying with not-yet-due cards - is that prompt not appearing? Or is our app requiring you to choose a specific number of cards to study?

As far as seeing difficult cards less often / easy cards more often, best way to adjust that would probably be to go into Scoring / Tweak Parameters and change the 'easiness change' numbers to something closer to zero (or even just zero them all out) - that way cards' easiness factors will be less affected by incorrect answers and you'll see difficult cards less often and easy cards more often. You can also change the 'incorrect score decrease' factors to something greater than 0 - that's the % by which a card's interval will be multiplied on an incorrect answer, so if you set it higher (probably not above 100 but maybe to 50 or 75) then the card won't come up quite so quickly once you get it wrong.

You can also easily exclude 'leeches' by going into Card Filters and set up a 'history filter' for 'not incorrect in row' of (say) 3 - that way a card will be excluded from study once you answer it incorrectly 3 times in a row.

Ok, I studied for a little bit and here's what I find problematic.

I was having a study session of four categories, which was more than 170 cards. Because it takes a long time, I did it in 3 sittings: in the morning, in the afternoon and in the evening. The repetitions that I get at the beginning were fine enough, but during afternoon and evening I wasn't asked about the cards from the morning - which means I could have already forgotten them.

What's more, after I reviewed those 176 cards, I clicked to begin a new test (to memorize all those cards a bit better, and review those I had the biggest trouble remembering) - and it started to test me from 16 new cards from these four categories! This is really confusing and problematic, because it makes me think that those 176 cards are all there are - and I miss the other ones.

Why can't I have ALL the cards from selected categories, so that I can see how much work there's ahead of me, and the card repetitions would appear with exponentially longer intervals?
Because I was surprised that after I scored positively one word several times it never appeared again, even if 10 hours have passed.
I hope it's understandable - English is not my first language, and even in my first language it would be hard to describe.


How do I deal with this? I am not organized enough to study flashcards everyday, I usually study with longer, more intense study sessions. Right now I'm preparing for exams and when I thought I was finished with all the 176 cards, it turns out there's 16 more. And I don't remember the words I learned in the morning.

Also I'd like to add, that so many customizable options make it easy to make things even worse - last time I tinkered a bit too much, I didn't help. So I prefer to ask about some good recommended settings.

Turn off the option to limit new cards per day in Card Selection - that will let you see all of your selected cards.

As for getting cards to come up after a few hours, best way to do that would probably be to set "day type" to "hours" instead of "calendar" (also in Card Selection), and either increase the points per day (go from 100 -> 200 = cards that were going to come up in 1 day come up instead in 12 hours) or decrease the minimum score in Scoring / Tweak Settings (so that incorrect cards will drop to say 10 points -> 2.4 hours if you've got it set to 100 points a day.

Another option would be to drop all of this SRS business altogether and go with a simpler system. Set "System" in Card Selection to "Fixed," "Sort By" to "Score" "ascending" (so the cards that are most critical come up first), and add a 'record filter' in Card Filters so that the test only includes 'not correct in row' '3' - this will give you all of your cards, with the least studied (or recently incorrect) first, and exclude any cards that you've answered correctly 3 times in a row (= you probably know them pretty well).

We're working on the options problem but it's difficult because people want so many different things; if we take away options then we'll have a lot of people simply unable to get what they want. The tentative plan for 4.0 is that instead of having our built-in 'profiles' simply choose a set of settings but expose the whole system to you, they'll come with their own severely reduced subset of settings and you won't even see the rest of it. (you'll be able to go into 'expert mode' if you want to customize outside of these profiles, but we hope most people won't need to)

Cubuk,

Have a read through this thread: https://www.plecoforums.com/threads/how-to-learn-in-batches-with-srs.4413/#post-40174

The TL;DR version is I have a two step process for memorizing my flash cards.

Step one: Learning phase
- I must get each card correct three times in a row before the card is considered "learned"

Step two: Long Term Memory phase
- I use the Pleco SRS to gradually increase the intervals that I review a particular card once I've gotten a card out of the Learning phase. No cards in the learning phase are practiced here (since I am not likely to remember them anyway)
- If I forget a card at this stage, it gets bumped back into the Learning phase.

This means I can review the cards more often in the beginning when I need it, until I think I've memorized them. Getting it three times in a row is usually a good indicator for me. If I like I can do it in one sitting by repeating the learning phase three times, or over any period I like (like once a day thus learning it over three days). Also, if I have a lot of cards, then I can limit a session to 10-30 cards in one sitting and when I start the next session, the Pleco settings will bring up some of the cards I've already reviewed rather than dumping a whole new batch on me (I think the default is 50% "old" and 50% "new" cards) which helps avoid getting swamped.

Once a card hits the long term memory phase, then as long as I keep remembering the card, I'll be tested on it less and less often.

I use this two step process for practicing, listening, reading, writing, speaking, and pinyin with a separate score file for each kind of test. (

I often don't do the speaking and pinyin testing as the first three are usually enough for me to go through in one day. My emphasis is on acquiring new words, rather than getting the last two correct.