How should I divide my study time?
You can divide your active study time roughly in three parts.
- Spend 1/3 of your time reading, 1/3 listening, and 1/3 reviewing Anki cards.
- Limit your Anki usage to no more than 1 or 2 hours a day. Dedicate the rest of your time to immersion.
- Watching movies and TV shows with subtitles counts as reading.
- Note that here we don't take into account passive immersion.
In other words, immerse as much as possible. Try to immerse all the time, but additionally dedicate 1 or 2 hours a day to the SRS to help retain what you learn.
I would recommend never spending more than two hours total on SRS, which includes an hour reviewing cards and an hour making cards. If you try to learn too many new cards a day, you'll quickly end up with a massive pile of reviews. Most people don't really enjoy Anki that much, even if they can tolerate it to some degree. Most people, once they hit around 300 reviews a day, they typically can't maintain that pace and fall into "Anki hell", burning out and ultimately quitting. And burning out is definitely the worst thing that can happen to your learning process.
For example,
on a bad day
when you only have 3 hours to study,
spend 1 hour on each activity.
On a good day
when you have, say, 12 hours,
allocate 1 hour to Anki,
5.5 hours for listening,
and 5.5 hours for reading.
We know that due to subvocalizing too much reading as a beginner causes harm in long term. Depending on your goals, when allocating your study time, you may want to increase the time spent listening (and watching raw content) at the expense of reading time.
Without immersion, Anki helps very little. Trading immersion time for more Anki is definitely not a good idea.
Related: How much time should I spend SRSing?
Tags: faq