| I'm not the original poster, but I have 19,324 cards in my computer science deck and 3,632 in my Spanish deck... so our numbers are similar. I use my decks to keep topics in mind for years until I choose to forget them. But these cards are things I always have memorized -- they're not something that I restudy when I need them. 25k cards hardly exceed your brain's capacity! That's about the same amount of information as 12,000 words in a second language -- plenty of people are bilingual. Do I retain them all? Errrr... not really. My retention of cards I haven't seen for a while is about 85%. Further, 1,354 of the cards are "suspended" -- that is, I've gotten them wrong enough times that Anki won't show them to me again unless I un-suspend them. The most important questions to ask any one who's using a flashcard system are: - What do you get out of it?
- What are your costs? For me, I get years' worth of material I no longer need to look up and a good foundation in Spanish, even though I only travel every few years. But my costs are an hour a day, every day, trying to remember things that are just about to be forgotten. Good luck! |