How Many Flashcards per Day Should You Study?

Decide how many new flashcards to add each day, because new cards set how many reviews you face later. The Anki manual gives one rough benchmark: learn 20 new cards a day, consistently, and expect roughly 200 reviews a day. Work backwards from the reviews you can sustain, and start lower than feels ambitious.

The sources here are the deck options page of the Anki manual, which describes how the flashcard app Anki schedules cards, and three studies of how people use flashcards. This guide builds a way to find your number from them: separate new cards from reviews, size the new ones to a review load you can keep, and go through each day’s pile the way one study favored. None of them names an ideal number of cards.

Are you counting new cards or reviews?

A new card is one you have never studied. A review is a card that comes back on a schedule after you have learned it. The question of how many flashcards to study a day blurs the two. You choose the new cards directly, and the reviews follow from the new cards you chose on earlier days.

The manual explains the link: “Studying new cards will temporarily increase the number of reviews you need to do a day, as newly-learned material needs to be repeated a number of times before the delay between repetitions can increase appreciably.” So a new card costs more than its first showing. It returns several times at short gaps before the gaps stretch, and each card you add today joins the reviews you owe on later days.

Paper decks follow the same logic. In the Leitner box system, new cards all go into the first box, which is the one you check most often, so a big batch of new cards lands where you study most.

How many reviews do 20 new cards a day create?

The manual gives one worked figure: “If you are consistently learning 20 new cards a day, you can expect your daily reviews to be roughly about 200 cards/day.” Read loosely, that is about ten daily reviews for each new card you add per day. Treat that ratio as a rough reading of one example. Your own ratio depends on your settings and on how often you forget cards.

One setting that moves it is desired retention, an option in Anki’s FSRS scheduler. It controls your odds of remembering a card at the moment it comes up for review. The manual spells out the trade: “In general, at lower desired retention you will have to do significantly fewer reviews per day, but you will also forget more cards.”

The load also arrives after the cards do, which is how the manual’s cautionary tale unfolds: “More than one Anki user has excitedly studied hundreds of new cards over their first few days of using the program, and then has become overwhelmed by the reviews required.” Judge a new-card number by where its reviews are heading, since the first few days show only part of the load.

How many flashcards per day should you study?

Start from the time you can give reviews every day, then set your new cards to fit it. The manual raises a version of this question in its section on choosing a desired retention, where it suggests asking yourself how many reviews, or how many minutes of reviews, you can realistically do per day. The same question sizes your new cards.

1. Pick a budget you can keep on bad days. Choose the minutes you can give flashcard reviews every day, busy days included, because scheduled reviews keep falling due whether or not you sit down.
2. Time yourself on 20 reviews. Pace varies with the cards and the subject, so measure your own. Divide your daily minutes by the time those 20 took, then multiply by 20. That is roughly how many reviews your budget holds.
3. Divide by about ten. Using the rough ratio from the manual’s example, that gives a first estimate of the new cards a day your budget supports. With the manual’s own figures, a budget of about 200 reviews lines up with roughly 20 new cards.
4. Start below that estimate. The reviews from today’s cards have not arrived yet, so a number that feels easy this week can feel heavy later.
5. Adjust from your own review count. If the reviews due each day outgrow your budget, the manual’s fix applies: “You can decrease the reviews required by introducing fewer new cards each day until your review burden decreases.”

Card design changes how many reviews fit in your minutes. Our guide to making good Anki cards argues that atomic cards, with one fact each, make for shorter daily reviews. How you split those minutes into sittings is a separate question, which our guide on how many hours to study a day answers with focused blocks of roughly 25 to 50 minutes and short breaks between them.

Should you study flashcards in one big stack or small stacks?

How you go through the day’s cards matters too. A 2009 study by Kornell, Optimising learning using flashcards: Spacing is more effective than cramming, starts from a habit: “Learners often divide flashcards into relatively small stacks, but compared to a large stack, small stacks decrease the spacing between study trials.”

Across three experiments, participants learned GRE-type word pairs with a web-based study program. The result: “Studying one large stack of flashcards (i.e. spacing) was more effective than studying four smaller stacks of flashcards separately (i.e. massing).” Spacing also beat cramming, which the paper describes as massing study on the last day before the test.

The big stack wins on spacing. In a bigger stack, more cards pass between two showings of the same card, so every repetition comes after a longer gap. Participants’ own judgements pointed the other way: “Across experiments, spacing was more effective than massing for 90% of the participants, yet after the first study session, 72% of the participants believed that massing had been more effective than spacing.”

A survey of study habits fits that pattern. Wissman, Rawson and Pyc (2012) write: “We surveyed 374 undergraduates about the amount of practice and the timing of practice, two factors that strongly affect the efficacy of self-testing.” They report: “Results indicate that students understand the benefits of practising to higher criterion levels (amount of practice) but do not typically implement or understand the benefits of practising with longer lags (timing of practice).” The survey records what those students said they do and believe. It measured no learning outcomes, so the evidence on what spacing did comes from the Kornell experiments above.

For a paper deck, shuffle the cards due today and your new cards into one pile and work through it. In a Leitner box, note each card’s box before you shuffle, so you can still sort each card as you grade it: up one box when you get it right, back to box one when you miss it. If an app builds your daily queue, much of this is decided for you. The choice matters most when you split a deck into stacks yourself.

Should you take out flashcards you already know?

An easy way to shrink a daily pile is to pull out the cards that feel known, and Kornell and Bjork (2008) tested that habit. They “investigated self-regulation in the context of a common study method: flashcards.” The design: “In four experiments we examined the basis and effectiveness of a metacognitive strategy adopted almost universally by students: setting aside (dropping) items they think they know.”

The finding: “In fact, being allowed to drop flashcards had small but consistently negative effects on learning.” In the authors’ account, dropping depends on two unreliable things: how well students judge what they know, and how much value they place on further study. Keep the size in view, because the effects were small.

The practical step is modest. When a card feels known, answer it anyway when it comes due, and let the schedule push its next showing further out. In Anki or a Leitner box, a card you get right returns after a longer gap, so a known card is reviewed less often while it stays in the rotation. The habits that make each answer count, such as recalling the answer before you turn the card and grading yourself honestly, are the subject of how to use flashcards effectively.

What should you do when flashcard reviews pile up?

Pause new cards until you catch up. The manual is direct: “If you have a backlog of overdue review cards, it is recommended that you stop introducing new cards until you catch up with that backlog.” Each new card brings reviews of its own, so a pause gives you room to clear what is already due. When you are current again, restart at a lower number than before.

Anki also has a Maximum Reviews/Day setting, which “Allows you to set an upper limit on the number of review cards to show each day.” Set near your budget, it keeps a single day inside what you planned. By default, Anki also stops showing new cards once that limit is reached. If the limit holds reviews back day after day, they are waiting as a backlog: pause new cards as above, or raise the limit if you have the time, as Anki itself suggests.

Planning a spaced repetition schedule runs into the same limit. That guide warns that taking on new topics faster than you can review them makes the daily load swell until the whole system gets dropped, and it advises pacing new material to the reviews you can keep up with.

Where GeniusPal fits

GeniusPal is built differently from a scheduler like Anki. It writes questions from a pasted link or an uploaded file (PowerPoint, PDF, Word, CSV, Markdown or plain text, 10 MB at most), with 10 questions per set on the Free plan and as many as 30 on the paid plans. On Free, you answer them as a multiple-choice quiz. Recall mode, flashcard mode and written answers to quiz questions need a paid plan (Student or Genius). Photos and image-only scans are beyond it.

Every plan, Free included, gets a daily review: one round of at most 20 questions drawn from across your sets, starting with the ones you answered wrong or have yet to try. A short round capped at 20 suits a small daily budget. GeniusPal sets no due dates and schedules no reviews, so it cannot space each card on its own timetable the way Anki does. For reviews that schedule themselves, keep your flashcard deck in a scheduling app such as Anki, and use GeniusPal’s daily review as a short extra round on the sets you have generated.