How to come back to Anki after a long break (without clearing the pile)
You open Anki for the first time since summer. The deck is still there, the kanji are still there, and the due count says 1,340. Two reflexes show up at this point. One is to select everything and reset it. The other is to close the laptop and tell yourself you will start fresh next month.
Neither is necessary. Keep the deck, stop adding new cards, decide how many minutes you will give it today, and let the scheduler handle the intervals. That is the whole method. The rest of this post is why it works and how to set it up in Anki, with the official documentation linked at each step. If you want the longer story of how the pile got there, we wrote that up in Anki burnout: why it happens and the fix that actually lasts. This post is about the day you come back.
A due count is a scheduler's to-do list. It says "these cards were scheduled for a day that has already passed." It does not say "you have forgotten these cards." The two feel identical at seven in the morning, but they are different things, and the difference is what makes the comeback possible.
Some of those 1,340 cards you have forgotten. Many you have not. A word you had answered fifteen times before the break has a decent chance of surviving three months of silence, and Anki's own documentation says as much: after a long absence you may have forgotten many cards, but "chances are you haven't forgotten them all" (Anki manual, Due times after a break). Resetting throws away the ones you still know along with the ones you don't, and then charges you the time to relearn both.
So the pile is not debt. It is a list of cards waiting for a verdict, and each verdict is one button press.
The second worry is quieter: "my intervals are ruined." They are not, and this is worth understanding before you grade anything, because it changes how you press the buttons.
Anki counts the real time a card went unseen, not the time it was scheduled for. The official FAQ walks through a card that was due in 5 days and answered 20 days late. Under the legacy scheduler (SM-2), the extra delay is credited differently depending on your answer:
Your answer
How the 20-day delay is used
Next interval (official example)
Hard
Delay discarded
about 6 days
Good
Half the delay added
about 37.5 days
Easy
Full delay added
about 81 days
The figures are from Anki's "Due times after a break" page; the exact numbers depend on your deck settings and the card's history.
Read the table once more. A Hard answer on an overdue card gives you a conservative interval, not a punishment. Good gives you a reasonable step up. Nothing goes backwards. The card you half-remembered after three months comes back sooner; the card you answered without hesitation comes back later. That is the scheduler doing its job with better data than usual.
If you have FSRS turned on (Anki has shipped it since late 2023), the same idea holds with different math. As the delay grows, the card's retrievability, FSRS's estimate of the chance you still remember it, goes down. If you recall the card anyway, its stability goes up, and it approaches a ceiling instead of growing in a straight line the way SM-2's interval does. The maintainers answer the question directly in the fsrs4anki FAQ: does FSRS take delays into account? Yes.
Put plainly: FSRS does not break while you are away. It waits, and it recalculates from what actually happened.
Resetting is the right call in a few specific cases and almost nowhere else.
Your situation
Reset
Recover
The deck is one you built from your own reading and you still want those words
Yes
It is a shared deck and your goal changed (different exam, different level)
Yes, or delete it
You would relearn the material from scratch anyway (a course you did not finish)
Yes
You are not sure what you still remember
Yes. Reviewing is how you find out
If you land in the Recover column, which most people do, you can stop worrying about the other one. And if you ever do reset, Anki's Reset command in the card browser keeps the review history (Anki manual, Browsing), so even the drastic option is less final than it looks.
Five settings, all in the standard deck options or the card browser, all documented. No add-ons required.
1. New cards per day to 0. Deck options, Daily Limits. Anki's documentation recommends this directly: if you have a backlog of overdue reviews, stop introducing new cards until you have caught up (Anki manual, Deck Options). Every new card you add today becomes several reviews later this week.
2. Maximum reviews per day to a number you will finish. Same screen. The point is not to hide the backlog. The point is to make "done for today" a state that exists. Pick something you can clear in the time you have and raise it later if you want to.
3. Change the review sort order, temporarily. Deck options, Display Order. The default, "Due date, then random", is the right order when you are up to date. For a large backlog the manual suggests "Relative overdueness" on the legacy scheduler, or "Ascending retrievability" when FSRS is on, so the cards you are most likely to have forgotten come first. Switch it back once the pile is gone.
4. Suspend what no longer matters. Do not delete it. In the browser, select the cards tied to a goal you have dropped and suspend them. Suspended cards keep their history and come back with one click if you change your mind.
5. If the pile is huge, spread it with Set Due Date. Browser, Cards menu, Set Due Date. Enter a range such as 0-14 and the selected cards are redistributed across the next two weeks. For review cards this moves the due date without changing the interval, and the manual describes it as the tool for when "your study schedule is interrupted", which is exactly where you are.
Everything above is settings. This part is the habit.
Decide how many minutes, not how many cards. Fifteen is a common choice; the number matters less than the fact that it is a timer and not a count. When the time is up, close Anki, even if the counter still shows three digits. The pile will be smaller tomorrow than it was today, and that is the only measure that matters this week.
Grade honestly. An Again on a word you forgot is information, not failure. It is the scheduler finding out which cards the break actually cost you. Do not press Hard on everything out of guilt either; that shortens the intervals on cards you clearly know and makes next week heavier than it needs to be.
Keep new cards at zero until the due count fits inside your time box. A short session, kept every day, brings a pile down faster than most people expect. Treat that as a rough guide rather than a promise, and let the number on the screen tell you when you are through.
And pick up a text. The deck exists so that you can read. A week of reviews with nothing to read is how the last break started.
The five settings above exist because Anki leaves the pacing to you. That is the right design for people who like to tune their setup. It is more than some readers want to manage, and we built immit for them, so here is how the same comeback looks there.
immit's scheduler is FSRS-6, using fsrs-rs, the open-source implementation Anki uses, built in and with nothing to configure. When you open a review after time away, it does not show you a count first. It asks how much time you have, 5, 15 or 30 minutes, or everything that is due. Pick a time and immit lines up the cards FSRS says matter most today and stops when the timer does; the cards you did not reach keep their due dates. There is no new-cards-per-day limit to remember to turn down, because new cards enter the queue as you save them from your reading, and the load is shaped by the time you choose rather than by a daily target. A word you already own can be marked Known from inside the review, and a word you saved but are not ready for can sit in Save for later without adding to the pile. The reasoning behind these choices is in How we structure reviews, and what changes and what stays when you bring Anki habits over is in Switching from Anki to immit. If you want to see it, add the extension (free, no account needed).
None of that makes the Anki method wrong. It is the same idea, time instead of count and trust the scheduler, with the knobs left out. For the longer view of how spaced repetition fits into reading Japanese at all, start with Spaced repetition Japanese: the definitive guide.
Should I reset my Anki deck after a long break?
Rarely. Anki's own documentation calls resetting "an even worse solution" than the long intervals people worry about, because you throw away the cards you still know. Reset only when the deck no longer matches your goal, or when you would relearn the material from scratch anyway. Otherwise set new cards to zero, cap your daily reviews, and work through the pile with a timer.
Does FSRS handle overdue cards?
Yes. FSRS lowers a card's retrievability as the delay grows, and if you recall the card anyway it raises stability toward a ceiling rather than in a straight line. The fsrs4anki FAQ answers this directly. Your intervals are recalculated from what actually happened; nothing is lost while you are away.
How many reviews a day should I do while catching up?
Decide in minutes, not cards. Set Maximum reviews per day to a number you can finish in that time, stop when the timer ends, and raise the limit later if you want to. A daily session you keep beats a large session you abandon.
Should I keep adding new cards while I catch up?
No. Anki's manual recommends setting new cards per day to zero until the backlog is gone, because continuing to add cards while you are behind makes the backlog worse. Turn new cards back on once the due count fits inside your daily time box.
