Cards not going through my designated steps

Anki Help
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This is definitely a bug, whether it’s intended or not, whether it’s a setting problem or not!! If I set specific steps, I expect Anki to follow them - not decide to follow some other inbuilt rule!! I’m really sick of Anki at this point. I’ve used Anki for years! Anki was great a app few years ago - it always did what I wanted it to. It always followed my designated steps, and the learning gaps always made sense incrementally. Now they just don’t! I get stupid gaps in my card appearances so that instead of concentrating on learning, I’m spending a lot of my time breaking my listening concentration correcting stupid jumps in card times! Please just fix all this rubbish and go back to making Anki place appropriate gaps between viewings!! This is NOT better!! I want to CHOOSE the gaps between card viewings with the rules, not have Anki follow some inbuilt arbitrary rule where it decides that I know a card well enough to just suddenly jump it from 2 days to 16 days!! I don’t want to have to continually check the card times for every card because many of my cards are going straight from 1 day to 8 and 17 day intervals! Seriously.

And my cards are skipping introductory steps. I want my cards to definitely go through these steps, in the interests of Krashen, to ensure I hear them every day for at least 5 days before they start skipping days. I read that they do this when the settings are changed, but even though I haven’t changed the settings, cards still insist on skipping steps. And even resetting the card multiple times and starting again doesn’t fix this problem! The cards insist on making my intervals 4h, 8h 1d, instead of the 30m 4h 8h 16h 1d that I specifically have in my settings. This is so annoying. It’s making Anki not worth the effort, quite frankly, because I can’t concentrate on the meanings of words if I have to break my listening concentration between every word to check that the next card interval is not ridiculous. It completely breaks my immersion into the language!

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I get it – you’re mad. I assume you’re talking about v2-to-v3 scheduler changes? The v3 scheduler has been available for a few years, but it seems like the end-of-support for v2 has been harder on some folks than others. There aren’t that many differences – Anki has always had built-in rules that it follows, and you actually probably have more control now than you used to.

[But – if you’re talking about switching from the SM-2 algorithm to FSRS – no one is forcing you to do that! FSRS is an objectively superior algorithm, but maybe not as much for someone who wants strict control over intervals and such, and you don’t want to pay the piper. By all means, stop torturing yourself and go back! :sweat_smile: ]

I can respond quickly to this easy one, because it actually has not changed – but it is only noticeable under certain circumstances. [Issue #3]

You have long learning steps. When one will cross a day-boundary, it is converted to days, so your cards will be available for study with the rest of the day’s cards when your next-day starts, not at some arbitrary point later in the day. Assuming your day-boundary is set at the default of 4am, and you’re studying at 10pm – since there’s only 6h until the next day, your 8h and 16h learning steps will both be converted to 1d.

If you just posted to release your ire – good, I’m glad you did! Carrying anger like that around is a poison, and not worth it, especially about a piece of software. Hopefully you’re feeling calmer now. :crossed_fingers:t4:

But if you’d like help dealing with and understanding what you’re seeing, I’m happy to walk through some things with you. To do that, I’m definitely going to need more information from you. Issues I think you mentioned –

  1. Review intervals jumping to too long too quickly.
  2. Learning steps being skipped or duplicated.

For each of those issues, post the Card Info for a card this has happened to recently, along with your Deck Options for: the deck the card is in, any parent deck you click to study, and any subdecks in between (if they are different).

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Firstly I’m learning Korean, so I’m using the Korean support mod. This means that I can’t use older versions because the mod relies on obtaining information (sound files) from outside webpage sources, pages that often change their setup, so the mod requires updates regularly, but the updates generally only work in the updated Anki. I’ve had to update Anki several times to continue using this mod as intended.

Secondly, I have no idea about SM-2 or FSRS, but I have FSRS turned off.

As for the steps, something has DEFINITELY changed in Anki. I’ve used Anki for over 5 years always with these same steps, and these steps were never violated until I updated to the newer Anki (for the reasons mentioned above). And the steps are not violated for every card, only some cards, and then it seems to be the same cards over and over again, because I keep “forgetting” them in order to reset them and get them to go through the proper process, hoping it was a card level issue. This definitely wasn’t happening until fairly recently - until I updated Anki. So something definitely has changed where the algorithm how just takes everything to the nearest day then? Which is fine for older cards, but it isn’t fine for learning cards where the intervals are closer together and hours are more important. Perhaps the changes just now includes learning as well as matured cards in taking cards to the nearest day - pretty stupid since basically completely cancels out the usage of the hourly steps of the learning stage past 12 hours, right?

Okay, well, what I want to achieve is to view these cards at least 4 or 5 days every day in learning stage before they start skipping days. That’s why I set the hours - the hours themselves aren’t important - just the daily viewing for 4 - 5 days while my brain initially tentatively acquires them (otherwise I’m just learning them and not acquiring them). I only view them once a day. So if I reset these intervals to be all less than 12 hours, that would presumably fix the problem then? Something like: 30m 4h 6h 8h 10h, then they would graduate to 1d on the next step. I’ll try that.

Then I’m left with cards suddenly deciding to jump from 1 day to 16 days. How do I tell Anki to turn these jumps off and just adhere to the jumps defined in the settings?? Like it used to do! No language learner would benefit from these huge jumps unless they just wanted to academically learn a language, which means they’d never really learn to speak and listen to it. Why isn’t there a toggle switch to turn that off?? It’s forced on the user, and judging by all the other complaints I’ve read across the net complaining about these ridiculous jumps this ‘feature’ definitely isn’t particularly popular among many users. These jumps might work well for Medical students massively learning medicine names, but they are NOT AT ALL useful for language learners who need to hear words regularly in order to acquire them - language learning isn’t memorising facts and stuff, it’s sound recognition over time.

It appears to me that Anki is completely leaving the second language research in favour of applying standard learning research. The two are VERY, VERY different. Languages are acquired VERY differently to general learning. I get that people also use Anki for learning various stuff, but Anki was FIRST AND FOREMOST a language learning app, wasn’t it? Is it not a language learning any longer? It’s certainly now far less useful for learning languages. Because the second language research does NOT support these changes!! The reason I know that is because I read that research a LOT in my second language University degree. I teach English as a second language. I find this very sad that Anki appears to be moving towards teaching people to learn a language instead of acquiring it.

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If you want help, do this.

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@ferophila is correct – in order to help you with issues #1 and #2 that I originally spotted, you have to give us the things I asked for.

This is exactly what I wrote about in my first response [it’s possible this is really #2, but let’s call it #3 for now, just in case]. If you are studying within 8 hours of “tomorrow” – there’s no functional difference between an 8h interval and a 12h interval and a 16h interval and a 1d interval. This has not changed.

That’s #1 again. There’s no need to repeat the complaint. No one will be able to help you until we can figure out what is causing that on those particular cards of yours – so you have to provide the details I asked for.

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