Are redundant questions useful?

[EliasZ]

I am trying to learn about religion. I want to remember that Hinduism is older than Buddhism, so I made a cloze card that looks like this:

Hinduism is {{c1::older::older/newer}} than Buddhism.

But I’m a little worried that I may accidentally memorize the wording of the card without remembering the meaning, so I made a second cloze card like this:

Buddhism is {{c1::newer::older/newer}} than Hinduism.

Is this a good idea? I think it is because of my concern. Also, rule 17 (“Redundancy does not contradict minimum information principle”) of the 20 rules for formulating knowledge suggests it, and specifically mentions “multiple semantic representation”.

My gut feeling says it’s fine if one card reminds me of the other, the multiple representations are helpful, the time spent making the extra card is negligible, and the time spent studying 2 cards may be even less than 1 card if I remember it better and click “Easy” or “Good” instead of “Hard” or “Again”.

But I have some concerns. If one card reminds me of the other, can Anki still accurately decide how often to show them to me, based on my “Again”, “Hard”, etc. answer? And could I be wasting my time making and studying more cards than I need to?

Does anyone have any experience or thoughts regarding this? Has there been any sort of systematic research on whether or not what I’m doing is helpful?

I asked about this in the Anki subreddit, but I’m asking about it again here, hoping it will get more attention and useful answers.

[dae]

Different people will have different opinions, and there is no correct answer. But personally speaking:

• If you’d written the question yourself instead of using a cloze deletion (eg “Which was invented first, Buddhism or Hinduism?”), you may feel less of a need to make two separate questions.
• If knowing the timeframe is important, you might want to consider creating two cards that quiz you on the century each was created, instead of just asking about which was first.

[EliasZ]

Thanks for your advice dae.

I use cloze deletions for almost everything, because it seems like such a general and powerful but simple enough card type. But I don’t know if I’m using Anki as well as I could be using it.

Is “which was invented first?” a good question? Or would that have the same problem of memorizing the answer but not the meaning?

I do have questions about the centuries, or at least millennia, when each religion originated, but I thought it was hard to just remember the numbers, so I added the before/after questions, hoping those would help it stick in my head better. I just asked about an example of before/answer questions here because it is a simple example that illustrates what I’m asking about.