How to Change a Card So You See It Again Today in Anki

Every bit y'all may or may not know, I love Anki, the spaced repetition flash cards app. I've been using information technology in my Korean learning journeying for virtually ane and a half years now and I've written about it before. It'south a proficient app, but you tin have a much better experience by making some modifications to it.

I recommend using Anki for at least 2-three weeks before reading the rest of this article.

i. Irresolute default settings

Anki out of the box has two problematic defaults, and 1 default that I don't recommend personally.

ane.1. Resetting menu progress

Let'south say you have learned a bill of fare, just when yous review it you make a fault in recalling information technology, for whatever reason. Phone call it a encephalon fart, or pressing as well quickly, etc. Or y'all simply forgot!

By default, Anki resets your progress to that of a new card. So even if you had worked the card up to a ~4 month interval, at present you have to see it in 1 day, 2 days, 4 days, all again…

Even if you forget a menu, you lot still had learned it at one bespeak. Which means re-learning it is now significantly easier. Past completely resetting the card'southward intervals, Anki is wasting your fourth dimension. Information technology slowly weather yous to be unwilling to printing Again, which is not desireable at all.

Solution: In your deck'due south options group under Lapses, change New interval to 70%. This means if you forget a card, the new interval will be seventy% of the onetime one. As for why I chose 70%, it just felt like an appropriate amount–feel free to play with different percentages to see what works best for you.

1.2. Taking too long to mark Leeches

After you initially learn a card (the card reached a 1 day interval in default anki), if you lot forget it 8 times, Anki marks it as a Leech and suspends the carte, not showing it to you anymore.

A card being a leech by and large ways its too complicated, or y'all're getting it dislocated with a similar one. 8 times means it'southward going to have way too long to place cards that are problematic.

Solution: In your deck's options group under Lapses, change Leech threshold to four. You may also want to change Leech action to tag only. This mode you can easily sort for leech cards and modify or delete them.

As for treatment leech cards, y'all generally want to simplify the carte, or delete it outright. With the time and energy that you wasted on trying to recall a leech you lot could have learned a agglomeration of other cards. If it'southward a word that you don't want to delete, you can append the card, and practise using that discussion outside of anki. When you feel more than comfortable with it you lot can unsuspend it.

1.iii. Mixing new and review cards

By default, Anki mixes new and review cards. However, reviewing is vastly more important than learning new cards–it'southward okay if you don't memorize new cards every mean solar day, merely missing reviews really hurts your memorization progress.

Past putting reviews showtime, you can always do reviews daily and so choose to learn new words or not depending on how busy you are, how tired you are, etc. If the cards are mixed you lot tin't do this, making it likely y'all'll merely skip Anki for that day entirely, which can tin can chop-chop snowball into non using anki at all anymore. This happened to me.

Solution: In Anki's preferences, change Mix new cards and reviews to Prove new cards after reviews.

ane.four. Making improve card templates

The Basic card template in Anki has 2 fields: Forepart and Back. This is the minimum for flashcards obviously, but as you make cards it'due south likely y'all'll want to take split up information.

Over time my personal Zah Korean card template has grown to eight fields: english, korean, grammarType, samples, hanja, notes, image and audio. On the front I testify english, and grammarType as a hint. Some people put sample sentences but I find this leads to brusque-circuiting your recall; instead of recalling the word you recognize that sentence.

I also have a Zah Colorcard template which has a hexColor field. Because I initially tried to learn colors in Korean like regular vocabulary, which makes no sense. Anki lets you pull in values easily in the template's html and css sections.

Yous tin can alter a card's fields by going to Add or Edit, then clicking on Fields…​. You can add a new card type by going to Add or Edit, then click on the type, and so click Manage.

one.five. Better styling with html and css

Default anki'south styling is very patently. I recommend modifying information technology to show different fields in dissimilar colors. For example, my grammarType field is rendered in green while hanja is rendered in purple. I render my color carte du jour's hex value dynamically. Here's what my cards look like; the horizontal line denotes the front and back:

You can become to Scan, Add, or Edit and click on Cards…​ to get to the style dialogue. Some premade decks include overnice styling for you, or default to a night mode. For more in-depth info, you tin can visit styling in the anki transmission.

2. Why beliefs-changing plugins are needed

Essentially, the way Anki treats cards is not intuitive, and actually hampers your memorization progress. Allow'southward say you're reviewing a card–you lot accept four options. Over again, if you lot forget, and Hard, Good, or Easy.

You would presume this means "I (the user) had a hard/good/piece of cake time recalling this card today", right? Well, Anki actually sees information technology equally "this card is intrinsically more than difficult; please modify it permanently".

Huh?

You see, every carte in Anki has an individual ease percentage, starting at 250% by default. The algorithm that calculates a new interval goes like:

NewInterval = OldInterval × CardEase × DeckIntervalModifier  Where:   OldInterval: i day is the offset default value   CardEase: 250% by default   DeckIntervalModifier: ane.0 by default, assail a per-deck basis

When you hit Again, Hard or Easy, Anki modifies the ease by -20%, -15%, or +xv%, respectively…​ Yous can encounter now why people recommend non hitting Like shooting fish in a barrel at all; it speedily snowballs. Note that a card'southward ease can't go lower than 130%.

So you might be saying, why is seeing cards besides oftentimes, aka "overlearning", an issue? Either way, I'm seeing more difficult cards more than oftentimes.. Well, research suggests that after an initial period, the actress time spent doesn't actually lead to improve recall.

In one study (Rohrer, Taylor, Pashler, Wixted, & Cepeda, 2005), college students learned novel vocabulary (e.g., cicatrix–scar), cycling through a list of word–definition pairs either 5 or 10 times. The extra 5 cycles yielded a substantial benefit after 1 week, but the gain was no longer apparent after four weeks … From a long-term perspective, overlearning appears to be inefficient almost to the betoken of wasting time. [one]

Now take a wait at what happens in Anki if y'all lower the ease too much:

So even if you know a card plenty to hit Good, if you had striking Hard iii-iv times prior, the interval growth rate is permanently stunted due to how Anki works. You would have to hit Easy to residual it which is counterintuitive.

Enquiry likewise suggests that larger spacing is better in the long term.

In a 9-year longitudinal investigation, 4 subjects learned and relearned 300 English-foreign language word pairs. Either 13 or 26 relearning sessions were administered at intervals of 14, 28, or 56 days. Retention was tested for ane, 2, three, or 5 years after grooming terminated. The longer intersession intervals slowed down conquering slightly, but this disadvantage during preparation was first hy essentially higher retention. Thirteen retraining sessions spaced at 56 days yielded retentiveness comparable to 26 sessions spaced at 14 days. [2]

Our results can exist summarized equally follows. Nosotros observe that over substantial fourth dimension periods, spacing has powerful (and typically nonmonotonic) effects on retention, with optimal retention occurring when spacing is some modest fraction of the concluding retention interval (perhaps almost 10%–20%). [1]

With that out of the manner, here are the plugins I use.

iii. Anki Subdecks

If you review from multiple decks daily, you lot can use a parent deck with subdecks to mix reviews. This is my own personal opinion, simply I recollect information technology's meliorate for recall if you alter contexts. This is more like recall in existent life.

Making subdecks in anki is really easy–just brand a parent deck, and drag decks onto it. Or yous can manually rename the deck in this format: Parent Deck Proper noun::Subdeck Name. If done right, it should appear like this:

The merely issue is Anki volition still do reviews ane deck at a time. I tried using the experimental V2 scheduler, but it didn't piece of work for me. So now we have to plow to a plugin: HoochieMama: Randomize Rev Queue. Afterwards yous install this, open Anki'due south preferences, and in the Muffins tab enable Hoochie Mama! RandRevQ west/ subdeck limit.

That's it! Now you can review from multiple subdecks, and new cards are nevertheless deck past deck. If you desire to mix new cards as well, there'due south Hoochie Papa. I personally don't think that is as useful.

Circumspection

Brand sure to back up your anki decks before adding behavior modification plugins like this.

4. Filtering Cards

At that place are times when you want to study something more than specific than just cards in a deck. For example, lets say you have a general linguistic communication deck with some cards tagged as colors, and you lot want to only report those.

4.1. Custom Study Sessions

If you click on a deck, you should see a "Custom Study" button. This gives you several options, which you can read near here.

• Increase today's new menu limit

• Increase today's review card limit

• Review forgotten cards

• Review ahead

• Preview new cards

• Report by card state or tag

Cull the last one, then "All cards in random order (don't reschedule)", unless you only desire to written report cards that you lot've already seen. Then click Choose Tags, and the tags that you want to focus on.

One time y'all review the card, it will go back to the main deck. Yous can also delete the Custom Study Session deck.

The downside here is that the queries are per deck. What if you want to search multiple decks, or have a more than complicated query?

iv.2. Manually Filtering

The other pick Anki has is to create a Filtered Deck, using Tools > Create Filtered Deck from the principal menu.

This volition give you lot a search prompt. Anki searches can get pretty advanced, and so read virtually them here. Some useful ones:

• deck:deckname filters past deck.

• -deck:deckname adding a - negates the filter.

• tag:tagname filters past tag.

• -deck:filtered filters past normal (unfiltered) decks just.

Yous tin group terms with parentheses: (tag:tag1 or tag:tag2 and tag:tag3)

v. Visual Plugins

These aren't really necessary merely I similar seeing stats. Give me allll the stats.

This is basically a fancy stats plugin. You can encounter a detailed breakdown by solar day, week, and month, and see your true retention charge per unit. You desire roughly fourscore-ninety% retention. [TODO]

This addon shows actress information of the due cards and returns the expected time to finalize (Due+New).

This adds more stats to the main window via columns. As y'all can run into in that link, the default config adds quite a lot, so I modified my config to skin it down, which looks like this:

Note that the stats at the bottom are from the More decks stats and fourth dimension left plugin.

Adds 2 new graphs to the stats window.

Only colorizes Again to be carmine, Good to be dark-green, etc. It's a small but nice thing to accept when reviewing. At that place's likewise Large and Colorful Buttons if you wanted even more colorful buttons.

This is an awesome plugin that visually shows your kanji learning progress. Simply select a deck that has a kanji field, and run Tools > Generate Kanji Grid. It looks like this:

This was generated from my deck with the default settings.

6. Behavior Plugins

This is where things get fun. These plugins change the cadre functionality of Anki, so please, read nearly them and brand sure you understand what they practice before adding them.

Caution

Make sure to back up your Anki decks earlier installing these.

This adds a pane to the Add Card window, letting you chop-chop search through your Anki decks for keywords. It's very useful for finding duplicates, or searching among sample sentences.

The only con is the search doesn't piece of work for non-ascii text. When I accept fourth dimension I plan on fixing this.

This adds a command in your Tools menu chosen Reset Ease + Force Sync After. It resets all Anki cards to have the default ease value, 250%. You have to install it manually.

This changes Again, Hard, and Easy to not alter the carte's ease value. Past default, Anki modifies information technology by -20%, -xv%, or +15%, respectively. This is a bad idea, and I get into more detail [in my other anki post][TODO]. This goes hand in hand with ResetEZ. It besides needs to be manually installed.

Come across the Making use of subdecks department above. This randomizes review cards in subdecks.

seven. Other Plugins

There may be plugins for the language(due south) that you're learning. Japanese has several, for example. It'due south worth searching "anki <language>"" to see what's available.

8. Conclusion

Considering that we end upwards using Anki for years, it's worth taking some time to ameliorate it and read the documentation closely. Is there a plugin or change that you lot experience like I missed? Allow me know.

nine. Further Reading

References

other memorization posts other anki posts

biggenuants.blogspot.com

Source: https://andrewzah.com/posts/2019/better-anki-usage-guide/

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