Methodically haha
Initially it’s all about finding the sweet spot for how much you can handle at once and not burning out biting off more than you can chew. When you have to learn the images totally from scratch it WILL take a while before they’re comfortable.
For a full 2704 card-pair system I figured on about 4 months to get fairly familiar with all of the images, at around an hour of review time per day.
There are 169 possible two-card pairs per two-suit combination. There are 16 possible two-suit combinations. If you can learn a new one each week… 16 weeks, about 4 months.
Using Anki with a 2 day interval limit was the sweet spot for me. This meant that pairs that were “easy” were shown to me every other day. While the pairs that were tough were shown daily. This reinforced the hard ones but still maintained enough frequency with the easier ones to keep improving their speed.
The result was kind of a sawtooth like plot of time where each day I’d need less time to review… By the end of week 1, what took me an hour at first cut down to 20 or 30 minutes. But then a new set got added to the mix, so the first day of week 2 took maybe 75 mins, but by the end of week 2 I could review what I needed from BOTH sets in around 30 mins because those first week pairs were continuing to speed up. As I pushed on, I found I could take on a bit more and towards the end of the process I added an additional set per week.
So thats just the initial learning phase.
Nowadays, for maintaining fluency I try to review half the pairs one day (1352) and half the next (1352). I usually do that 4 days per week. Sometimes 6 days if I’m feeling ambitious. Sometimes its only one time each per week. I can run through 1352 randomized pairs in about 20-25 minutes or so averaging around one second of recognition time per pair.
A huge thing for making such a large scale system workable for me was keeping the structure consistent and limiting exceptions and variables. Every card value and suit combination is translated as one and only one sound (all with the foundation of the major system which I’ve been using since I first started memorizing.) Every pair is read in the exact same way: suitcombo-value1-value2. There are no leading vowels for words. This way there is no hesitation when sounding out any pair, no trying to keep track of which ones get exceptions, and it makes it MUCH easier to learn once you have your list built. I don’t think I would have been able to learn or retain the associations if I had to deal with variables or exceptions to the rule. The tradeoff there is that it is a bit more challenging to build out than a system with more phonetic options. It took a few months of work to come up with them all but I was able to fill in all 2704 entries with exact phonetic words or phrases that each associated with a single unique image.
Happy to answer any other questions you might have about the process or the system, but would rather not hijack John’s thread here. If you want more insight on my learning and development process for the system and want to continue discussing it, hit me up on this thread:
Or this one: