Yeah, I know. That’s a weird title. Let me explain.
Anki keeps track of each card’s history, and especially of how many times you miss each card. If you miss the card a certain number of times, anki tags the card as a “leech” and then suspends it, which means that it won’t show up in your normal studying.
I guess the rationale is that you need to do some serious or different work with that card, but I would rather have the card tagged but continue to pop up in my normal studying rather than being buried. Even if I keep missing the card, it it keeps showing up every day, I’ll get it eventually.
I was studying today and saw a little note that a card had been marked as a leech and suspended, which is how I found out about it. Some rooting around behind the curtain in anki eventually showed me that about eight vocabulary cards had been suspended in this way! In other words, the cards that had given me the most trouble had been pulled from the deck, and I wasn’t seeing them!
After that, it took me quite a while to figure out how to undo this and how to prevent it from happening again. Here it is:
First, to find out if any of your cards have been suspended, click on “browse” at the to of the screen. This will open a large window pane with a list of words down the side. From that list, click on “suspended” and your suspended cards, if any, will show up. One of your options is to remove tags, so remove the tag “leech” on those cards.
To stop leeches from being suspended again, click on a deck just as if you were going to study it. However, instead of clicking on “study now” go to the bottom of the screen and click on “options”. In the new box that appears, click on the “leeches” tab. One of your choices should be “leech actions” and the default setting is “suspend card”. You can click on it and change it to “tag only”. Now the card will be tagged a leech but won’t disappear from your deck. (Alternatively, you can go to “leech threshold” and set it to a higher number, allowing the leech to still be suspended but only after you miss it a much higher number of times, if that’s what you want.)
Of course, I was doing all of this instead of studying, so I’m going back to my vocabulary.
頑張って
Japanese Language Journey 
Ahh, I had no idea you could do that! Thanks for the tip 🙂
LikeLike
I really love Anki, but it seems like there are tricks to everything, doesn’t it? I’m content to let the words come back day after day after day…eventually they’ll stick.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I didn’t know about this. I’ll be going straight home to check if I’m missing some of the words I have had most problems with! Thank you! Anki is a great tool though!
LikeLike
Oh, yeah, anki is absolutely my go-to learning tool, especially for the kanji and vocabulary. I think I started using anki from day 1 of Japanese study.
LikeLiked by 1 person
The same. Ove basically been trying to follow the 12 steps to language learning by Benny Lewis. It was a guest post on Tim Farriss’ blog. I’ve never learnt so fast before! You can see how I’ve done in 7 weeks on my blog.
LikeLike
Thank you! For one card I made to teach the dative cases in german I purposely clicked the “again” button just to minimize the time interval because there was especially a lot of friggen info on it that I wanted to make sure I continued to remember. Then I find it’s “leeched” and don’t see it for a month. Oh that helps my learning, thanks anki! Agh. This is a terrible feature and I wish they’d get rid of it. Well this is second best, thanks you again.
LikeLike
Yeah, you’re welcome. It was immensely frustrating to me because, if I miss a word too many times, I want to see it again and again. I don’t want it to get leeched! I was pleased when I discovered how to fix this, and I figured that there were likely to be other people who were just as annoyed by it as I was!
LikeLike
Thank you so much for this!
LikeLike
Glad to help.
LikeLike
Thanks for the guide.
I agree that suspending leeches should not be the default but I think it’s the proper thing to do for more “advanced” Anki users willing really work on them.
Leeches usually mean the card just doesn’t work and should be fixed.
You can’t always do it on a daily review and they waste time so setting it aside automatically is convenient.
You do need the discipline to get back to the leeches before it piles too much 🙂
LikeLike
It’s one of those things that seems to be personal. Some people want them out of the way because they interfere with learning the other cards, and they want to be able to study the problem words separately, while other people want them to left in the rotation, figuring that they will learn them eventually if they stay in. I would actually rather have those cards get flagged and then let the individual decided to pull them out if they want to. I can’t say that one way is right and one is wrong, though. Whatever works for the individual learner!
LikeLike
Thank you. Very helpful post.
LikeLike
Hope it helps
LikeLike