I’ve been using Anki daily for several years and I think the app is very robust and solid. But there is one simple feature that I’ve always felt was missing and am surprised has never made it into the basic functionality of the app. It’s the ability to simply move a card to the bottom of a deck so that it can be reviewed last. Very often I just want to move a card (or cards) to the end to review last, but there is no simple way to do this.
My suggestion is to have an action called “Bottom of Deck” that moves a card to the bottom of the deck so that it comes up at the end. On the desktop version I would put “Bottom of Deck” here, just after Bury Card:
I know it has been suggested that you can use Bury Note to kind of simulate this. You would bury any notes you want to leave for last and then unbury them when you are done review all the other cards. But I do often use Bury Notes as intended to move cards to the next day. If I used this method, then I would have to bury cards, then remember to unbury them on days I need this, then remember which cards I actually wanted to bury so I could bury them again, and then review the cards that don’t get re-burried. This doesn’t seem like a good solution.
I also know there is an Anki add on that does move cards to the bottom of the deck somehow, but it is part of a larger add on that makes a lot of changes to Anki that I don’t want to make. It just feels like a “Bottom of Deck” action should be a natural part of the basic functionality of Anki.
I know there have been similar suggestions submitted, but since I had a more specific suggestion with a proposed name and with images, I thought it made sense to enter this as a new suggestion.
Whenever I see suggestions about this, I find myself thinking – why not just review the card now and grade your answer? [This is a genuine question – and since you posted about this, I’m asking you!]
It seems like either –
You remember the answer now – in which case, why wait until later to grade it? You should grade it now (Hard/Good/Easy) and move on.
You don’t remember the answer now – in which case, it’s lapsed, and you should grade it Again.
But these are both perfectly fine outcomes that Anki is designed to handle already. So what does this 3rd kick-the-can-down-the-road option accomplish? The only reason I saw you mention is “often I just want to.”
The forget/reset card action with ‘restore original position’ unset should do what you want. I’m afraid AnkiMobile doesn’t currently expose that option though.
I think you and I might have responded to different questions. I had understood the suggestion to be along the lines of “study this Review card later today” – as opposed to “introduce this New card after all other New cards in the deck.”
Yes, my question was as you interpreted it Danika. Let’s say I have 20 cards I am reviewing for the day. As I am working through them there are times when I want to move a card or two to the bottom of the deck so I can review them last. It would be useful to have an action to make this easy to do.
To answer your initial question about why I would want to do that, here are some scenarios where this comes up. Recently I have been doing my daily review while exercising on a stationary bike at a gym. Some of my cards I want to practice speaking out loud, like with foreign vocabulary. But I don’t feel comfortable blurting out “piloncillo” at the gym with people around me. I would like to move that card to the bottom of the deck so that I can finish the other cards first–the ones I can review silently–and then when I get home I can finish up the cards I moved to the bottom of the deck. I also have some cards with audio and I don’t want to play those in public. One more scenario is that on some cards I add extra information that I want to read to give me a fuller context. Sometimes flashcard questions can feel very isolated and decontextualized, so I occasionally add additional information to provide context. While answering the question may be quick, it does take more time to read the additional text. Sometimes I just want to leave those cards for last so that I can review them at a more convenient time.
But I see your point Danika. Anki was written with a certain design philosophy and a specific use in mind. And maybe the way I want to use it is kind of an off-label use. It’s like when Botox first came out. It was developed to fix certain nerve conditions in the eye, but then people wanted to use it to look younger. Maybe what I am asking for doesn’t really fit within the intended use of Anki. That makes sense. If I choose to use the app in a way that was not intended, I can’t expect it to do things for my scenario that it was not meant for. It’s like buying a toaster and then complaining that it can’t be used to fry an egg.
Nevertheless, I still hope this action can be added to the app.
I appreciate you sharing that with me so that I understand your workflow better!
I have a suggestion though – how about using both flag and bury? That will allow you to finish your on-the-go studying during the day, and when you get home at the end of the day, you’ll know exactly which cards to unbury.
So how would that work? Would I flag the cards that I want to review later today before I bury them, and any cards I actually want to bury I would not flag? And then when I unbury all cards I would just review the flagged ones and re-bury any cards without a flag (the ones I truly wanted to bury)? Or is a way to selectively unbury just the flagged cards so I don’t have to re-bury some of the cards?
In the Browse window, you can search up just those flagged cards (Searching - Anki Manual) – flag:x – or even just the buried ones with that flag – flag:x is:buried – Select all – Cards > Toggle Bury.
I’ll give it a try. In the absence of a Bottom of Deck acton, this rather involved method may be the only way to accomplish this behavior. Thanks for responding Danika.
know this thread is old now but I have an answer to this at least for my purposes:
I study Japanese with ANKI and to save time i often study a vocabulary deck while working out, in between sets. I would love to also study my Kanji deck but some cards require writing the Kanji and others are just recognition. It would be useful to study just the recognition cards by putting the writing ones to bottom until I come back later for my Japanese studies.
Since you know in advance which ones you want to save for later, you could also –
Before you start studying, search up those cards and flag+bury them. A search like prop:due<=0 card:writing would work – Searching - Anki Manual .
Move your writing cards into a separate subdeck. If you have both subdecks under the same parent deck, you can click the parent to study them both – but when you only want to study the recognition cards, you can click on that subdeck directly. You’ll use Change Deck for this – and if you’re still adding to your collection, Deck Override will add the right cards to the right subdecks going forward.
Thanks Carlos! Absent a true “Bottom of Deck” button–which I still hope gets added to Anki eventually–I think your add-on provides the closest current solution to my original suggestion. And if I understand correctly, so as long as I review the cards that get put in the “~Defer Cards~” filtered deck on the same day I defer them, then they are treated just the same as if I had reviewed them in the original deck, correct?
This tool just requires that if the user has deferred any cards, they just have to remember to go into a separate deck to finish reviewing them. And you can’t re-defer a card in the defer deck (put it at the bottom of the deck again). But other than that, this tool is a good approximation of a “Bottom of Deck” option. Thanks for taking the time to build such a tool. I appreciate it.
Exactly. If you review on the same day you add cards to the filtered deck (“defer”), they’ll behave just as if you had studied them in the original deck. If you don’t review them on the same day, they’ll be treated as if they were delayed.
I actually use the addon a bit differently. I usually add new cards, and since they’re new, they haven’t been “activated” by the algorithm yet. So I can leave them there for more than a day if I want. There are various ways to use this addon depending on your study needs!
I’ve been using the Defer Cards add-on as an alternative to a “Bottom of Deck” feature, and I have a couple of questions:
Is this add-on only available for the desktop version? I tried to use it on my iPhone but couldn’t find a “Defer” button.
On the Anki desktop version, I noticed that after reviewing deferred cards for a particular day, they automatically returned to the deferred deck when they became due again. Should I delete the “Defer Cards” deck after completing my reviews to prevent this from happening? And the deck will just be recreated?
Yes, add-ons are for the desktop version only. Any that add functionality are unlikely to be usable on AnkiMobile (outside of cards they have created) .
As far as the specific functionality of the add-on – are the cards you’re having the issue with ones that are in learning/relearning steps? IIRC, this add-on uses a Filtered deck. I expect those would follow the same functionality of other Filtered decks – they stay in the deck until they have graduated to Review, the deck is emptied, or the deck is deleted.
[I have limited experience with this particular add-on because it did some unexpected things when I experimented with it. Could have been user error on my part, but wasn’t worth trying to figure out at the time.]
Ok, thanks. So it looks like this add-on won’t fulfill the desire to have a “Bottom of Deck” button since it can’t be used on a mobile device. And if I use it on the desktop, I will just remember to delete the filtered deck it creates to prevent cards from showing up again on different days. And to answer your question, yes, these were newer cards I was seeing show up again so your explanation makes sense.
I had understood the suggestion to be along the lines of “study this Review card later today” – as opposed to “introduce this New card after all other New cards in the deck.”