Yeah, I've got 9000 reviews waiting for me in my old Chinese Anki deck, at some point you always fall off the wagon. I've changed my mind several times on SRS going back and forth, and my conclusion is that, for language, I think it's better to split your time with 90% on consuming meaningful input and 10% SRS, because learning in context with real content that you're interested in allows you to encode your memories much more efficiently. The problem with pairing available SRS systems with consuming real content is that they don't take into account "natural" repetitions, e.g. when you encountered a word in a movie outside the SRS, so they tend to underestimate how well you know a word. But also since "natural" repetitions are baked into the SRS model via parameters that fit the "average", it also tends to overestimate your knowledge of a lot of other items. Combined, you just have a very inefficient schedule that takes too much of your time for too little gain
I did the AJATT method way back in the day when it was relatively new. So heavily leaned on Anki, whilst also consuming loads of natural Japanese through music, shows, games, conversation etc.
In my experience doing both in tandem was the magic combination. Anki without native media is mildly pointless. Native media without Anki is super inefficient.
Used in equal measure you find your access and understanding of native media continually ratchets up day by day every 3000 cards I would notice a very significant jump in my abilities when consuming native media and partaking in conversation.
Nothing else has really come close for me out of all the other things I've tried.
That's essentially what I tried with Chinese, and I could sort of keep up with it before I had a kid but then I just can't find the time/energy to keep the backlog down AND watch new content, so for several years I stopped learning completely.
I also want to minimize time spent in Anki because it's just not fun, you know? I know common wisdom says it _should_ be painful, that means you're learning, but I'm not so sure. Me and everyone I know learned English without much pain or Spaced Repetition Systems after all. It's a much easier language to learn than Japanese/Chinese though, but it makes me feel it shouldn't have to be this difficult.
A prioritized queue of stuff to learn may be a better solution than staring at "over 9000" things to review. Such a queue would mean you simply bite off as much as you can chew every day and don't perpetually fall behind, assuming the priority queue has a small degree of randomness and is recomputed daily based on the decay rate of all modeled facts. Do you agree?
I think it can help to keep things less overwhelming.
But what I'm trying now is to ruthlessly suspend any card that I get wrong even once after the learning phase (i.e. the day after). I've noticed that some words stick much easier than others, there might be an 80/20 kind of distribution where 20% of the words are responsible for 80% of the time spent. In that case it might be better to add a bunch of words every day and then suspend the ones that don't stick very easily. The idea being that they'll stick more easily at a later point, at least this has been my experience with Chinese.
Actually I'm going to dig through my Anki database and see if my hunch is right.
Edit: it's more like 25% of the cards are responsible for close to 45% of reps. But 25% of the cards are responsible for 58% of review time, and then it's 36/70. That indicates to me that dropping the something like 30% hardest cards would save you a disproportionate amount of time. Of course there's some nuance here where I should probably do this per card type, otherwise you'd just drop the hardest card types.
The rate at which you can add new items is the inverse of the review period. What you're effectively doing is increasing the review interval, but you will still run into the fact that the number of items you can remove from the queue is finite. Eventually you will have only interesting items on the end of the queue equal to the number of items you can review. You're now back at square one: you don't have the time to add any new items.
The only way to deal with this is to review items a finite number of times and hope for the best.
When you're working on clearing away a backlog, your review periods should get bigger because Anki will give you "credit" for recalling these items longer. So it seems like reviews should be manageable as long as you're not forgetting too much. And Anki will always prioritize the items you're at highest risk of forgetting.
