Hi, all. I’m hoping to use Anki with an autistic boy to check his vocabulary, and to that end I am writing an add on. I need to be able to display the front of N cards (2, 3, 4, 6 …) and the back of one card, and if I could adapt an existing add on that would save a lot of time as I have not done GUI development in this millennium. Is there such an add on available? Many thanks!
Hi,
perhaps you can accomplish what you want with a different approach. You can get the content of N cards in the note and showing it at the front side of the card. I do not know the specifics, if you want to have a multiple choice question, multiple extra fields in the note and customizing the card styling will do.
N = 2,3,4,6, but not 5? This sounds strange. 
Nevertheless, some clarification is probably needed. Do you want to do a kind of multiple choice approach? I would highly recommend against it, because of multiple reasons:
- it’s in-between active/passive recall: distinguishing the right answer from the wrong answers - especially based on random vocab cards out of the whole collection - is usually easier than coming up with the right answer on your own.
- It can cause unnecessary memory interferences: giving wrong inputs similar to the wanted input is basically a recipe for creating a memory interference disaster…
- Also, it’s not what is needed when you want somebody to use a language, rather than learning for stupid test designs. If you want to speak a language, there is not going to be a bunch of phrases in front of you where you have to select the word you want to say… That’s silly.
Back when I didn’t knew about Anki, and didn’t think much of flashcards, I coded a latin vocabulary trainer for my calculator in C. I wasn’t enough of a genius to realise that I could have just graded the cards by myself, and rather decided to make it a multiple choice test based on random other words from the vocab list. It was a stupid approach - while it was clearly better than my previous strategy of not learning at all, it was definitely not as effective as the regular flashcard approach by Anki. Differentiating between verbs, substantives, etc. would have made the system a bit better, but it would have still come with the exact same problems I outlined.
I am not sure what the boy being an autist has to do with the case, so a clarification would be needed.
If we understood your question wrong and this is not about a multiple choice-style system, clarification would be needed as well.
I am not aware of any add-ons that do exactly what you propose, but it wouldn’t be that hard to come up with something. Otherwise, there is @guillempalausalva approach, but just know that multiple-choice tests are outright bad.
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The child is effectively non-verbal, and this is to see how much of his first language he knows. He has not yet clicked that a set of words used by one adult can also be used with another adult. SO I would not be using Anki as a language memory aid. There are other services and apps out there, but they all have their annoyances, including the lack of randomization, which causes the child to be bored.
So if I combine cards into what you call a note, they’ll be presented on screen? Perfect.
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Fair enough. But I am still not entirely sure what you are trying to achieve. It could very well be that you are better off with a hacked together (local) webpage.
You can add fields to a note, and then let them show up with a custom card template, which is essentially a webpage. This won’t take in all other cards for randomisation though, so is not exactly what you want. You can not combine “cards” to a note…
https://docs.ankiweb.net/#/templates/intro
https://docs.ankiweb.net/#/editing?id=customizing-fields
I wish you best of luck in working with the boy though!
EDIT:
Do I understand it right that you would just need some pairing? What kind of information will be on what you call cards? Images? Sounds? Plain text? I think you currently misunderstand some of the concepts, and I do not want to confuse you further. But if I understand your concept correctly, it definitely would be easier to come up with some JS/HTML (which you would have to do in Anki as well!) from scratch than trying to workaround a system which isn’t designed to achieve what you desire.
I think you want to show some amount of “answer sides” (with text/image/sound? this is important for a possible solution!) alongside one question, and let the boy decide for the question? Depending on the scale of operation, you can make a Javascript list of the question/answer contents, select a random amount of answer contents to show in CSS div boxes, alongside with the question.
As you currently seem to lack some understanding in Anki’s functionality, it might take more time to learn about it. For someone experienced with Anki add-on development, the thing I think you are trying to achieve isn’t that hard, but it will cause a headache for you probably.