active due notes each day

[zeppo]

I see that you created this app to assist with your own language study, which is what I intend to use it for.

How many "active" due notes do you personally study each day on average?

Just curious on how you put it to use.

[Ernie]

Hi,

I have 3 decks that I use:
Vocab words - about 3500 words total, ~3000 active, about 35 due each day
Characters - ~2500 characters, 1200 active, about 20 due each day
Audio sentences - from CD's no due cards, just slideshow

I'm not sure how much this helps. Mature decks will have fewer due cards. I recreated my decks a while back after switching text book series. I sometimes go a week without studying much (shame on me).

I'm currently working on creating really nice Vocab and Characters decks (currently with 8000+ and 2600+ cards respectively) that I'm going to switch over to and also include in a new Chinese app I'm going to release early next year (Taiwan Mandarin focused) . (I spend more time working that I do studying.)

[zeppo]

Thanks. I have been using another app, but I have pushed it to its limits and cannot add anymore notes because it takes so long to sync to the cloud now (an hour) on an iPhone 6. That's why I found your app for may cards from here forward. That developer doesn't use the app himself for long term study like you do, so the testing he performs isn't applied to decks with a long scheduling history. So that may be part of the problem. It may be a factor how I've structured my decks into a hierarchy of folders which that app which allows you to do. The developer is convinced that shouldn't be a problem as well, but he isn't actively testing for it. I have about 9000 cards on the app, but all text-- no photos or media. I may have around 400 decks now, going back to 2012.

My practice was to create a groups of 25 to 35 cards into decks and then make them active when I was ready for more to study. The decks wee also grouped somewhat thematically in terms of content.

I won't be transferring any of those decks to your app. But as I start adding cards on your app, do you think if I were to use a number of decks in this way it will mean a much slower sync time that if I used just a few?

I just want to plan ahead so I don't create a similar problem with your app.

[Ernie]

9000 cards should be no problem. I've tested the app with 20,000+ cards is it's fine. But 400 decks sounds difficult to navigate and maintain. You might consider combining them and using "Category 1" column to assign a category or tags which can allow you to filter them for studying. For example, my cards have a category for book+chapter, so I can turn individual chapters on/off.

You mentioned sync. The normal process to get cards in and out of the app is to transfer using my website, Dropbox or Google Drive. You can import/export and also run the "download/update" process on an existing deck to redownload cards from cloud (which will replace all cards, but the app will try to match up old and new cards so you don't lose your statistics).

I have a "sync" feature, but it only works with Dropbox and is not fully automatic. The backup to Dropbox is automatic, but the downloading from cloud is not as you need to help it along. This sync feature is designed to help keep two different devices in sync (if using 2+ devices) or as an automatic backup. It's not a particularly efficient process. If you have 200 decks, and you study one card from each, the app will need to export or import all cards from the 200 decks, or export/import the complete database file of all cards each time.

I'm currently working on an improved sync that will be much more efficient and be fully automatic.

[zeppo]

Instead of multiple decks I can use the Category column to essentially group the cards by a name in that field as I might have done in decks. It will be a long time before I have 9000 cards on this app. I took me 4 years on the other app that I use and I'm keeping those cards on that app. One reason I ended up with so many decks and folders on the other apps was to categorize them. He later added a tag feature which eliminates that need. It will be a project to go back and eliminate the folders on that app and add tags instead to see if it helps that app sync.

The other reason is I put a lot of thought into my cards, so it takes time to create them. They are seldom cards that you can simply reverse, because as you know a word will typically have multiple meanings so a reversal means creating cards to prompt for each of those meanings, etc. So I may take the time to create a few of hundred cards that will last me quite a while before I need to make more. But by grouping them when I make the inevitable edits and refinements that I realize need to be made when studying them, I am dealing with a small subset of the whole. It seems like for your app that would mean swapping the data on Google for a small deck verses a single large deck, but as long as it can handle that well I'll give it a shot.

Instead of having to edit one side of a card at a time to ensure it the process can match it up okay, can I use a column to assign each card a unique identifier which doesn't change when I edit side 1 and side 2? Could I use a category column for that? It wouldn't match the intended use of a category column, since no cards would share the same category name (being unique IDs), but I like the idea of having Side 3 for sentence examples. On the other hand, I can just add the sentence examples to Side 2 (which is what I do on the other app) and have Side 3 strictly for holding the unique IDs

[Ernie]

Create a column "ID" in your spreadsheet and assign a unique number for each card in the deck. You can then update both sides of the card. The process won't look at side 3, but with and ID, its a moot point anyway. So give it a try... create columns ID, Text 1, Text 2, Text 3. Add some data, create a new deck, study a bit, update your cloud source (both sides), run Download/Update, and make sure all is well.