It’s only going to put 20 new cards in your review queue daily if you have a huge backlog of unseen cards, which will only happen if you mass import a whole bunch of pre-made cards, which is not recommended. Actually creating 20 new cards a day would imply a pretty heavy study schedule.

> It’s only going to put 20 new cards in your review queue daily if you have a huge backlog of unseen cards

Correct. However, using a huge premade deck is not a bad idea in the sense that it's a huge time saver.

For me, creating an anki card takes between 1-2 minutes, depending on how slow the dictionaries (plural) are. So, 30-60 words per minute (45 avg) means it would take me almost 4.5 hours to input a measly 200 words.

I can write down 200 new words from one episode of a tv show. You can see where this is going. For Korean, about 5-6k words are recommended to begin having non-basic discussions. 5k words at 45 words/hour is ~110 hours.

Instead, I suggest using a parent deck that has a premade deck + your personal deck as children. This lets you have the best of both systems. You can use the Hoochie Mama! plugin [0] to properly randomize your review queue for child decks. Anki by default pulls cards in order from child decks.

Note: All of this assumes that your pre-made deck is of good quality. I can't speak about other languages, but Evita's Korean deck (5.8k cards) is sorted by frequency. It's fairly good, at least until you get to more of a intermediate level.

[0]: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1460733408

It also assumes that you are trying to learn thousands of new words in a foreign language, which requires less effort per card than almost any other exercise. Humans are natural language learners, after all. The OP was struggling to deal with 20 new cards a day on music theory and computer science.

Ah yeah, I'd typically create cards "just in time", so to speak, because I found that my retention would drop significantly without the context of what I was learning fresh in my mind.

Ideally this is how cards should be made. Most anki word decks neglect to have meaningful context, making them much less useful. Especially once you begin to study more advanced vocabulary.

What I ended up doing was modifying a pre-made deck to have more fields, and I edit a card as it pops up into my new queue. This takes more time, but it makes it easier for me to learn a word seeing example sentences and other information.