10 new cards a day is only 3650 a year. I have 6000 cards in anki (mix of sentence and grammar cards) and I feel like I need double or triple that to make the shows I like comprehensible enough to immerse with. Right now I am just immersing, sentence mining and trusting the process but can you really absorb that many new words from mostly incomprehensible input?
#why do people recommend such a low number of cards a day?
fierce ermine
leaden flare
Its important to remember that cards in anki != words you know
both from the point of view of "how can i understand this if i only have x anki cards" and "if i only do x new cards per day its going to take me forever to reach y"
These kind of miss the bigger point.
anki gives you a pretty nice and efficient way to memorize words, and while this can be really helpful for the process of acquiring vocab remember that
- acquiring words happens outside of anki
- you acquire a lot of words that you never turn into flashcards
i think a better way of looking at anki, rather than as a place to farm your knowledge of the language, is as a place to
-get additional exposure to words that cause you trouble, i.e. the reading/meaning is hard for you to remember
-"pin" words that you find interesting or that 'stick out' to you into your memory to make it more likely you will acquire them later on.
fierce ermine
I just feel like until you reach a critical mass of words doing 25 new cards a day is still worth your time
leaden flare
if the workload that 25 new cards/day creates is something that you can consistently handle alright and you find that it helps you (these can be problems for some but not for everyone) then there's no issue have at it
solemn shoal
Anpandu gave you a good answer, but I wanted to give another angle.
The cold hard fact is that 99% of people don't understand how Anki works. The recommendation of 10 new cards per day is mainly a safeguard for people who don't understand that reviews will multiply 7x after 2 weeks so they don't get overwhelmed. Also, 10 is a good number for most people that's sustainable. Most people are going to be busy. They have jobs, school, a family, and various other responsibilities. Anything higher than 10 new cards is pretty unreasonable for busy people with responsibilities.
ornate geyser
By taking on more new cards/day then you can handle, you also create a negative feedback loop where you’re spending too much time on reviews which cuts in to immersion time, slowing down how fast you memorise and acquire these words which decreases retention in Anki, which increases the time you spend on reviews and the cycle repeats. This makes Anki miserable to review and an easy path to burnout.
10 cards/day is a good, sustainable baseline for a lot of people, especially beginners starting out who do 1-2 hours of immersion/day. In the future if they can upscale their immersion time, they can increase their cards/day if they want but remember that Anki is just a supplement - you want to spend the majority of your time immersing if you want to meaningfully boost your comprehension.