How can I scale my vocab learning with Pleco?

[SteadyCamel]

I have about 2,600 flashcards and I'm facing a common problem in that just staying current with these using SRS is generally overwhelming. I've built the deck slowly so I know it pretty well but with an 85% hit rate, I still have ~110 cards / day to review. I stopped adding new cards six months ago and my daily card load has hardly gone down.

My intuition is I should be adding more cards faster (scaling on prior vocab) but I'm doing exactly the opposite.

How have other people dealt with this?

 

[Shun]

Hi SteadyCamel,

To avoid repetition, I suggest you have a look at the following threads, which all deal with optimizing settings for different studying habits:

• My SRS-free system for Pleco 3.2
• An interesting system from Edsko de Vries and others
• Many others if you search for "spaced repetition" or "SRS" in thread titles (using the Search button at the upper right)

If you need any support after reading these threads, please do ask.

Cheers, have fun,

Shun

 

[SteadyCamel]

Shun,
Thanks. I'm trying to digest these posts. The systems are a bit hard to follow, but all of this is very encouraging because I can see there are various ways out of my predicament.

I have a couple of additional questions:

• Do we know whether Pleco will retain the Frequency Adjusted test option with 4.0? The manual says no but saw in one of the posts that they will keep it.
• As I understand Frequency Adjusted, it's effectively a poor man's SRS where I can set the card limit? If so, it seems pretty handy and I wonder why I don't see people making use of it with these systems? One thought is that SRS is perhaps the most efficient way to learn and that if I under-review using Frequency Adjusted then my review sessions become a real slog with high failure rates?

One solution I'm considering is to stop testing on my current large deck and create a new "active" deck composed partly of new words and partly of words I need to re-learn. I could have "feeder" decks of words to move into my new "active" deck to manage the inflows, and I could migrate words "up" to the older deck when they reach a certain score. I would then either use Frequency Adjusted or SRS on my new "active" deck.

Thanks!

 

[mikelove]

We do plan to keep frequency adjusted testing in 4.0, but it’ll only be easily accessible through our “legacy” flashcard testing mode, which is essentially a 3.0 emulator and doesn’t really support any new functionality not in 3.0; we added it so that people aren’t forced to redo their flashcards when they upgrade. So if you set up a system you like that uses it, we’re not going to stop you from carrying on studying with it, but neither are we going to do much to improve it.

 

[Shun]

SteadyCamel,

You're very welcome. I would collect some ideas from the other threads, try them out, then report on what combination worked best for you. Your idea of an input category and an active category holds promise. What constitutes a good flashcard studying system is quite subjective, I find.