Spaced repetition systems have gotten better

I've tried to get into anki a bunch of times but never stick with it. It's an on-and-off thing for me that I end up looking into again every few years, which I've gone through about 5 times now. Here's how it usually goes:

* Get interested in memorizing something / multiple things

* Find that the decks available to me are actually not so great

* Get reading online, people say that the real way to benefit from it is to make your own deck (which ups the time commitment significantly)

* Read online about how to get the most out of anki, find out that everyone universally agrees that the default settings are terrible but nobody quite agrees on how to set it for best results

* Try to hit a happy medium, but find that the overhead of 'rating' the difficulty of recall for cards (and how it interacts with the complex settings that I still don't have complete confidence in) adds an incredibly (to me) distracting amount of overhead and never get used to it

* Miss a few days, get overwhelmed with the amount of cards stacked up, don't feel good about my settings (which have implications for what cards show up like, a year + down the line)

* Ultimately fizzle out

I'm probably going to start the cycle over again soon. I really do want it to work out for me. Any tips to avoid this issue? I'm planning to actually pay for some decks this time to see if that gets me to the quality I want, and going to skip the whole 'trying to make my own deck' thing for now

Given what you've said:

* Make your own cards (unless there's an automated workflow [Japanese, sentence mining], really good shared decks, or you're studying for a standardized exam [USMLE])

* Deck Settings (scheduling): Enable FSRS. Press 'Optimize', then press optimize once per month.

* Deck Settings (workload): Wait 2 weeks before gradually increasing new cards per day (if you want to study for longer). Decrease it immediately if you feel you're getting overwhelmed.

* Deck Settings (backlog): Set max reviews/day to 9999

* App Settings: Disable 'Show next review time above answer buttons'

* Addons: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/876946123 (you seem to have a problem with answer button selection)

* Recommended: Press 'sync', and create an AnkiWeb account. In app settings, set Anki to auto-sync on open/close. This is a free backup.

* Optional: Use a mobile client (AnkiDroid is free on Android, AnkiWeb is free on iOS)

You'll feel like you completed the first day far too quickly, and will want to do more. Avoid overstudying until you build intuition for how it impacts your daily workload.

Use Anki every day

Thank you, the pass / fail addon will help a lot I think, in addition to the FSRS features included in the article. I'll come back to this comment for setting up my settings before starting up again with Anki.

If I'm planning to learn several topics at once (I'm never preparing for anything I will be tested on or hit a deadline for, this is not for a school, work, or travel program), is it better to treat the decks as one big combined review do you think?

Your call.

Ideally one deck, but add a tag when creating the note, so you can separate things out later if you want to pause learning something/split them out.

> Use Anki every day

I think this is great advice. I have some friends that used Anki that told me "oh yeah I just study once per week" and I just had PTSD of when I forgot to do one day. Sometimes I would miss a day due to traveling and timezone difference and I would instantly panic when I would see 400+ cards to review.

If you don't do it daily, Anki doesn't make any sense to me. My recommendation—to that friend and everyone else—is to study a little bit every day. It's much better for building a strong foundation, especially for languages.

Yeah, ignore the "defaults are terrible" people. Turn on FSRS, if it isn't on by default (I think it is), and forget about it.

I have seen this opinion offered hundreds of times and each and every time I reflect upon the irony that not one of these commenters having trouble navigating the UI, etc to their liking doesn't just ... Make Anki cards about Anki.

If that sounds silly, it shouldn't. I've made flashcards out of all kinds of other programs, from vim to shell shortcuts to Photoshop. Nobody ever expects an interface built for professionals to be something they can just waltz in on and understand perfectly on day 1.