If you know a few hundred vocabulary, or even a thousand or two, you can use the reschedule function to limit the amount of time spent staying words you already know.

Let’s say you know a thousand words, but they’re mixed in your deck with a bunch of words you’ve never seen.  The cards are a little rusty and you still want to study them, but don’t need to see them every day – once a month is good to start.  But there are some words you don’t know and you need to study them every day.

Open your deck in the browser and hopefully, most of the words that you know will be at the beginning.  You don’t have to be perfect, but try to select the range of cards where most of your known cards are selected and unknown cards aren’t needlessly selected.  Then go to edit > reschedule and set it to a range – something like 20-45.  This will make their starting interval between 20-45 and they won’t all be due on the same day.

Now, when going through these cards, if you know the word, marking it good or easy, you won’t see it until next month or so.  If you don’t know the word, then failing the card will set it back to seeing it every day, while pressing hard you’ll see it in a few days.  You should probably suspend the cards you know really well.  Once you’ve gone through all the rescheduled cards, your deck should be pretty well sorted and you won’t be spending too much time studying things you know already.

Posted in: Anki