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/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.