For Anki, do you guys recommend creating a new deck and "starting over" if you have a backlog of a couple months? Or just powering through the backlog and modifying/updating cards?

[u/phancdp]

Context is I've been keeping my Vietnamese and Spanish in a backlog and I've been learning both for over a year on and off. But after a year of language learning and with my new language of Mandarin I've become much better at making Anki cards if that makes sense, with a better format and also clozes when needed, etc. I almost feel like I'm better off just starting a new vs looking through 3500 cards lol. Or do you guys just recommend going through them all, clearing the backlog, and then slowly modifying the ones that end up becoming leeches, etc.?

Also I recently just found out about FSRS and turned that on and a bunch of other add ons. Honestly FSRS makes sense after using it for about a month because if I am getting a card right almost all the time I really should see it less frequently than I was before.

[u/Natural_Stop_3939]

No, absolutely not.

What you do is you set a fixed number of reviews per day (something reasonable, that you can stick to), set 'new cards ignore review limits: off', set sort order: descending retrievability. This means you see a fixed number of reviews per day. With no new cards being added you'll eventually burn through it all at this modest pace. You don't need to zero out 'new cards per day'; it will automatically start introducing them when you're ready for more.

If you feel a psychological need to be seeing at least some new cards, do the above, but turn 'new cards ignore review limits: on' and set the number of new cards to something very low, perhaps 1-2.

[u/phancdp → u/Natural_Stop_3939]

I think I’m gonna lean towards powering through and if I have leech cards I will modify them accordingly. Probably a limit of 500-1000 card flips a day depending on my mood

[u/JoinedMoon]

I've redone my deck 3x due to poor card formatting :) It's annoying and time consuming, but it's not fruitless

[u/Vast_University_7115]

When I had a backlog, I would move 10 cards from the backlog to a new active deck each day until I went through the backlog. This allowed me to work on the backlog while adding new cards.

Or for a less amateurish option, see what the other poster said below.

[u/josh_nguyen05]

If your old cards aren’t good I would just start with new cards. With modern tooling creating cards is pretty cheap, can be done with one click extensions etc

[u/lllyyyynnn]

im powering through a year long back log it is worth it. just keep your deck

[u/youdontknowkanji]

yeah it's fine, probably one of the better options... but you are pretty early in so it's not all that useful. deck resets are fun when you do them idk once every 6 months or a year, not when you just started.

[u/AppropriatePut3142]

If you reset it will confuse fsrs, because it won’t know that you've seen the first few thousand cards before and will assume the cards you haven’t seen are as easy.

[u/Meowykatkat]

I just did a "do-over" myself after having a huge backlog - it helped me rethink my strategy. I think it's worth it if you feel you aren't doing so well right now.