Short on time: How much can I reduce the desired retention in Anki before FSRS becomes weird for Japanese vocabulary study?

How much can I reduce the FSRS desired retention in Anki without having diminishing returns? I have only 1h to study Japanese a day and as half of that time goes into Anki I would like to reduce the time spent on reviews and have more time for immersion.

I'm at 4k vocab cards in the SRS loop and I finished all the 常用漢字, given my 1h time constraint I feel like spending half of the time on Anki doesn't yield great ROI at this stage, I want to allocate more of the available time to immersion.

My Anki metrics are:

  • FSRS desired retention: 80%
  • FSRS minimum recommended retention: 0.70
    • I read on r/Anki this calculation is broken in the latest versions and gives 0.70 to most people so it's most likely not a useful metric, putting it here just in case
  • True retention (past month): 78.0%
    • What is a good range for this (min, max)? I could push my desired retention lower and make sure the true retention number stays above a threshold (i.e. >=75.0%) but idk what the lowest acceptable number is here, which is why I wanted to ask here first
  • Supermature rate (past month): 88.7%
    • What's a good range for this? Is this too high possibly?

Daily routine has been 12 new cards a day + reviews done every day consistently.

Thanks in advance

by Civil-Raisin-2741

Leave a Reply