I think 5 seconds / card is fine, and that’s what I do in anki. 20-30 secs / card is crazy long, since nobody thinks for that long trying to come up with a word while interacting with the language naturally. 5 secs/card also has the advantage of greatly increasing the number of cards you can do, which will help prevent burnout and increase your progress. I really don’t see much of an advantage for long cards since if you don’t remember it in 5 secs, maybe only 15% of the time you would remember it if you had 20 secs. Pausing to hear the audio for a sentence I also think is unnecessary, since in real life you’re going to need to be able to see and recognize a word even without much context in order to achieve true fluency.
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I honestly have no idea how people can memorize and remember cards after interacting with them for 5 seconds once a week/month, assuming you’re not constantly encountering them elsewhere. 5 seconds would never work for me.
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Anki’s FSRS system is quite powerful, so if you’re forgetting them constantly, you’re going to be seeing them a lot more than once a week. Generally, you’re going to see it everyday for a couple days until you start to remember it, and then it slowly increases the increment, but if you ever forget, it drops the increment back down to just a day or two so that you can remember it again.
Each card only takes 5 secs, but since my true retention rate is 80%, that means for 20% of the cards, I’m going to see them a 2nd/3rd/4th/etc. time, meaning my total time with the card is more like 15-30 secs, and then I’m going to see them again tomorrow. So it’s far from 5 secs/ week, more like 5-30 secs each day.
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the beauty of anki is that it forces you to pretty much memorize cards no matter what. When you first learn a card, you will probably see it on anki 7+ times just in your first week. if its a card that youre really bad at (so you get it wrong and the interval resets), you could see it 20+ times in a single week. if you know what it means, it could be years between when you see the vocab word on anki
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