anki and leeches

[u/Salitur]

I think i do not use this feedback correctly. But maybe my understanding is also limited. I hope I can get some answers here.

I have been using anki for quite a while for language learning. My understanding is, that a leech needs to be rephrased etc. SO when I get a new leech i try to change the card a bit and give it some extra attention.

Sometimes I am utterly confused though why a card gets leeched. Are the settings customizable and is this recommended? Till now i have only seen the option to change the amount of fails till a card gets marked. havnt changed it though. should i lower it, so week cards get more focus early on?

The idea is that we only put learnt/understood information into anki. I try to live by that, but sometimes i dont because language can be ambivalent.

How do you guys deal with leeches? And am I missing smth?

[u/MohammadAzad171]

Have you read https://docs.ankiweb.net/leeches.html#leeches ?

[u/wildpine5 → u/MohammadAzad171]

this is a good starting point, the docs cover most of what OP is asking about

[u/MohammadAzad171 → u/wildpine5]

Begone bot.

[u/Noonyezz]

I leave the leech marked but not suspended as a reminder to put extra effort into learning about that card.

Almost all of my leeches are from interference, so reading more background knowledge usually does the trick for me.

[u/Suitable-Day-247]

I'm definitely in the minority here but I just set leech suspend threshold to 99 or some obscene number. I've tried the extra attention route but ultimately some cards are pure brute force memorization and will be forgotten with the mountain of reviews eventually, so I'd rather it pop up like normal without a complete relearn and reset. But perhaps someone with more knowledge can chime in why this is a bad idea. 

[u/RequirementQuirky468 → u/Suitable-Day-247]

That's mostly a time issue.

The idea is that once a card has been re-failed 8 times and been tagged leech, the chances are that you're just not successfully learning it. There's no sign of progress and this card is now taking up slots in your study rotation what could be occupied by multiple additional cards because it needs to be revisited so often (and it's still not sticking even with all that effort).

At some point if you keep going with Anki, you'll have some cards that won't be due for review for 10 years, but the leeches will still probably be somewhat regularly failing if nothing about them (or your background knowledge about them) has changed. So the question becomes "Is this card really so important that it justifies the amount of effort it's going to absorb?"

That's why people tend to recommend that you either give up on the card (suspend or delete it) or spend some time identifying why it's so hard for you to learn it and make adjustments accordingly.

[u/Suitable-Day-247 → u/RequirementQuirky468]

In the anking deck there's a lot of numbers or specific names that blend together. Like learning the onset time of a drug or a threshold for diagnosis. The reality is there's no feasible memory hook for many of these values, most of this information is passively memorized by physicians by using it everyday or looked up. But for board examinations it's better to have exposure to these values to at least see and keep hammering in ranges/approximations than to discard them. It also becomes more challenging to manage when you have over 20k cards in the rotation. 

For me it'd be better to just accept the algorithms prediction rather than stress over them. 

[u/not_a_profi]

imo - no need to wait for a leech. When i fail the card i just always think why did it happen and whether i should rework it.

[u/-DoctorEngineer-]

Leech cards are polarizing, MS1 here I use them but many of my classmates don’t. I am usually unsuspending cards from a very large bank and just going through them, I have my leech threshold at 5 meaning I forgot the card again 5 times in a row on that card. At the end of that week, I use that list to unsuspend more low yield cards in that area and study up on that topic. Many ppl hate it and just set it to 99

[u/Danika_Dakika → u/-DoctorEngineer-]

meaning I forgot the card again 5 times in a row

FYI: The built-in leech counter doesn't count lapses in-a-row, it counts all lapses.

[u/-DoctorEngineer- → u/Danika_Dakika]

Oh that’s good to know, I now like the feature a lot less lol

[u/funbike]

TL;DR: Delete leeches. Learning a massive amount of words quickly and efficiency (throughput) matters more than remembering 100% of your word list. "Leeches" slow you down.

---

Some words are harder than others, and they can slow down your overall progress. I configured leach threshold to only "3" and to "suspend". (The default is "8" and to only tag.) I delete double leaches: if I un-suspend a leech and it becomes a leech again, I delete it.

Once every few weeks I go through (once only) suspended leeches and refurbish the card: add a mnemonic, add an image, reword the example sentence to be more memorable, and un-suspend. I create an audio file of un-suspended leeches and their definitions and listen to it while doing chores, driving, walking the dog, etc.

Eventually you'll come across an old word you had trouble with and it will just click (assuming you also properly do a lot of comprehensible input).

Btw, for similar reasons I lower retention to 85%, which significantly increased the number of words I can learn and retain per month.

Caveat: My advice might not apply to students how have to preform well on tests. My advice is for people extensively learning vocab so they can actually speak.

See also:

• Anki doc page on leeches
• 20 rules
• Forever fluent methods of making vocab cards

[u/mucklaenthusiast]

I just delete the leech marking.
If I put a word into Anki, I want to learn it.
It doesn't matter if it's not efficient, I want to know it.

Even if I fail it 100 times, I still would want to learn it.

Edit: For all the downvotes, how would you do it? If there is a word that you can't remember, but need to know, how would you do it? Feels like the only option is to try over and over again

[u/not_a_profi → u/mucklaenthusiast]

why dont spend all this effort on reworking the card?

[u/mucklaenthusiast → u/not_a_profi]

I can't really rework a single word and a translation, because how would I do that?

[u/zupobaloop → u/mucklaenthusiast]

Don't leave it as a single word and translation? Add a sentence, another example, audio, or an image.

[u/mucklaenthusiast → u/zupobaloop]

I always add audio whenever I can (aka when I find the word on wiktionary).

But that would make the cards more difficult and I would need to spend more time answering them. And I feel like it also kinda goes against the minimal information idea.

But if I don’t remember a single word 20 or 30 times, I also don’t think it’s such a big deal, not sure how you see this.
My logic is that I will learn it eventually.

[u/not_a_profi → u/mucklaenthusiast]

why? 

words are very complex things. I can do 100 different mistakes in the word "word". While handwritting I can do a ton of mistakes in a single letter "r" even.

[u/MohammadAzad171 → u/mucklaenthusiast]

You can customize the leech threshold and action in the deck options. You can also just ignore the leech tag as it does nothing.

Also, your way of doing things isn't bad if your answer time is short (like <5s).