Constant Numerical Card Order

Hello,
I have gone through the search history and while I have found slightly similar topics (and have tried applying various suggestions on those), I cannot get my deck to do what I need it to do.
Basically, I am trying to retrain my brain to approach my material for STEM (Aerospace) as:

Situation/Problem → Identification/Classification → Goal → Primary Approach/Reduction/Reordering → Branch Pathing → Failure/Exceptions → Re-summarization

The most basic thing I need is to have those cards appear linked together in that exact order each time. I have been trying to accomplish this by making each situation/problem a subdeck and just clicking on that to display the cards from the deck. Messy, but that works well enough for me. My problem however, is they refuse to stay in that order each time. I have tried the various sibling, interval, order gatherings and have not been able to make this happen.

If I can’t keep those in order, I am finding the review pretty useless, and I am surprised how hard any offering for a flashcard program seems to have with numerical processed based review. Yes I still use Anki for formulas and quick learning, but if someone could maybe give some suggestions, I would appreciate it. Maybe I am not selecting the correct options.

To reiterate, the most basic I need:
-Select a deck
-Have that deck show those cards in the order they are no matter what every time

It would be nice if I could also:
-Have a master deck for the entire topic
-That deck pull entire subdecks (or those cards in order) for review. Basically instead of random one off cards, it pulls the entire pack of cards from the subdeck.

Thank you in advance

With such a rigid sequence, it seems you can just put each section into its respective field on the same note, and use a single card type with scripts to reveal the information piece by piece.

If you specifically want it to be multiple cards, then can you explain why? And how do you expect SRS to deal with the cards’ intervals when some of the related cards are failed and some are passed during a review?

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I would like to keep the amount of information I have on one card via that workflow to a minimum. I have trouble with overstimulation and it defeats the purpose of the card if it is inundated.
Workarounds I have tried via single cards:

  1. using hidden/revealable text to force the different sections.
  2. Trying to split this onto front and back.
    In both cases, the amount of info is just a messy distraction. I would prefer to keep each of those processes on a different card to help focus, displayed in order because the order is important. Randomly pulling one of those cards out is not effective for me (I have tried).

So what exactly didn’t work for you with this approach? Did you try hiding the previous information section when revealing the next? It can be set up to look exactly like card flipping (save for the Anki own interface buttons).
Also, you didn’t answer the question regarding the srs part of the process.

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Are you sure this is what you need?
It feels like the end goal and approach is confused here.
Normally we might need to reproduce information in certain order, but if we force ourself to memorise it in the same order we are shooting ourself in the foot.

To be able to reproduce info in the same order one uses overlapping lists tactics: see alphabet example here (item 10).

Just additionally to this learn the template which you gave us here i.e. the general structure of the way you need to learn the info. You can learn it as an overlapping list + make one more card where you are tryng to recall everything, but dont punish yourself for minor mistakes - these you will fix eventually with the atomic cards.

I feel like you aren’t allowed to tell me what I do and don’t want. It is my way of learning, and I’m asking a question that should be a simple “yes you can do something like this” or “no it isn’t possible”.
I have a learning disability, and have trouble with sensory overload. You people critiquing this are not helping. I need small, digestible chunks of information on the card. I need to learn like I outlined because that is the way to approach engineering I have been having trouble with.
If you do not have anything useful to say, please refrain from posting. It is very rude. You do not get to decide how people learn and there is not a one full scope answer.
I am asking for technical Anki help, not critique on my learning methods.

I dont think my answer was rude, I put an effort into choosing words carefully. And I think it totally fits the sensory overload problem.
But I get it, it has been quite unpleasant to hear what I must and must not do.

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I’m not an Anki developer, but from my experience analyzing usage, I don’t see a method that would always maintain the same order. It depends on intervals and whether the cards are from the same entry, and it starts displaying them as far apart as possible, or even postpones studying a certain card until the next day. I was also trying to figure out how it would work with subdecks, and there’s no clear order there either.

But somehow, viewing needs to be done in the desired order, so I suggested simply creating a field where you enter the number you need for ordering and then sort by the desired column when viewing (using the add-on https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1334324384).

Of course, I’d be happy if you could customize the order in the filtered deck, since it currently has “In order added,” but people said they might add more later and that’s inconvenient for them. And I can’t change that logic from the add-on.

I agree with you that order is important in the initial stages of memorization. When testing Anki algorithms, they try to make the cards as simple as possible; they are essentially of equal complexity and shouldn’t be related to each other, so that this doesn’t affect the effectiveness of the test. But in reality, knowledge is interconnected, and this connection can be such that seeing “A” will make you remember “B,” but the opposite won’t work. Anki doesn’t take all these complexities into account.

Why is order important? I mentioned generating association after association, but chemical and electrical reactions also occur. To switch, you need to build up potential, and you need to build it now. That is, it’s precisely the timing and multiple repetitions that are important: “In the axon hillock, all these incoming signals are summed. If the total voltage exceeds the threshold, a powerful electrical impulse—an action potential—is generated.” In ancient times, they used a simple analogy: to make a beautiful drawing with a wood chisel, you need to go over the line many times, and each time you get a deeper and cleaner line.

Why is it important to check knowledge out of order? That’s exactly what Anki does. It assumes you’ve memorized this atom of knowledge. Then it simply checks at regular intervals. It doesn’t take into account how you memorized it, but if you memorized the alphabet in order and are asked to say what letter comes after “T,” you’ll take a long time to answer, which would indicate you’re not very good at it and don’t know it. Checking out of order tests the extent to which you have other connections to this card (the atom of knowledge) in your head. If we have two objects, then there aren’t just two cards; there can be many: the objects themselves, whether they’re positioned on top of each other or not, whether they have the same color or shape or not. There can be many parameters, but the most important is the position or fusion, since this creates a new outline, and for us, it’s a common object encompassing these two. Does Anki take this into account? Of course not :slight_smile:

I’m expressing my point of view, and this answer, if not for you, then perhaps for someone else. Of course, this isn’t just my point of view; the general ideas are taken from a book I slightly edited by Kozarenko: “He was awarded the Cambridge Medal for ‘A Textbook of Mnemonics’ and was included by the Cambridge Biographical Centre among the outstanding scholars of the 20th century in the field of ‘Development of Intellectual Abilities.’” But the ability to quickly memorize is only part of the set of skills required for speed reading. So, I had to edit his book (with his consent) and include it in my free computer program, which you can use to try learning speed reading techniques (unfortunately, this is only in Russian; there are plenty of programs for English around the world, too, and people just need the desire to find them and try these methods).

All the best!

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Thank you, I’ve decided Anki is not the right tool for me.
The reason why I am not doing this random access memory type of order is because for three years, I have been doing this. It has not allowed me the ability to be a decent problem solver. Factoids and quizzing in this sense are not working. I am trying something new, with that being more geared towards a hybrid approach. No amount of simple memorizing makes me better at using a differential equation. It makes it easier to solve, I agree. What I am specifically struggling with is setup, analysis, end goals, etc. This is not as simple as flashing a notecard over and over. I am trying to retrain my process not my memorization.
It makes no sense to be flashing the nth step of an analytical problem to me randomly (at this stage) because there is fundamental approach of setup, classification, and understanding what the end goal is before that. That is helpful (to me) for pure math or other fact/method based knowledge. It is vastly unhelpful for doing something such as engineering analysis or design because the nth step may vary. The only way I personally am going to get through this, is training myself off of the parlor trick type curriculum I was given and into an actual approach which rewards order of processes that I stated above. Your results may be different.
Thank you though. Going forward, I am abandoning Anki in favor of Obsidian, as I can replicate more of what I need to be successful. I am still slightly irritated that a technical question turned into a lecture from others without accounting for the fact that some people simply have different brains and ways of learning. It was very disheartening and condescending, while providing very little input regarding the program itself (although I appreciate your comments and did not feel they were out of line. You were also very helpful in actually commenting on Anki’s limitations, so thank you.) In the future, I may have some use for Anki.

Thank you for raising this issue and for your opinion.

When a program is paid, the developer always praises it because the goal is to make money, but when it’s free, the goal is to help people. So, having created a program and course on speed typing, I suggest people go to Wikipedia and look through the entire list of typing trainers, try them all, and find the one that works best for them. Some people like the game format, while others need to be given everything they need. In Anki, with the help of add-ons, people can learn the way they want to learn—that’s the advantage of free software. But with other programs, you’ll be limited only by the author’s algorithm, and if it works for you, then all is well.

Regarding higher mathematics: I can’t tell you for sure if it’s suitable for your language, but for Russians, I’d suggest a website for correspondence courses where it’s explained in a very simple way. There’s an author with 10 volumes, which explains things more simply and clearly, but I don’t know about English, sorry. AI also doesn’t always explain things well. Even with basic physics, I tried to get a logically correct statement from it, and even then, it’s not perfect, since it gets the source information from other sources, which aren’t always accurate… even books don’t always present it concisely and precisely. We like to inflate definitions just to add more words and make more money from a thick book. It should be the other way around. We say, “brevity is the soul of wit.” Not all teachers have the ability to convey the essence, the basics, although I agree that the student must learn the basics, since they won’t be able to use the semantic units the teacher utters.

So, I wish you to find what will help you and be effective!

But without developing visual memory, without searching for logical connections, you’re unlikely to succeed, and this requires lengthy work on images, reflection, and anything that will help gradually build all the connections in your head. A single magic program won’t do, just as in learning a language, a program is just one of many tools in moving toward a goal.

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Not sure, what triggered that response, as my questions were strictly technical and directly related to the discussed functionality. Other people do not read your mind and not necessarily interpret the things you wrote in the exact same way that was originally assumed, so asking clarifying questions is a natural starting stage of any attempted solution. (I, for one, still do not understand whether the original question was regarding scheduling or presentation).

There is also always the aspect of the XY issue, which is rarely obvious from the get go and requires more elaboration on the inquirer part.

You are free to disregard this as another round of lecturing, of course, but at least someone else might take it into consideration when asking for any kind constructive help.


If your original task was to learn problem solving (meaning it is indeed the instance of the XY), than of course Anki is not a good fit. I would even go as far as to say it has quite a limited usefulness to anything math-related, because all formulae have intrinsic logic which, when understood, requires little memorization, and when not understood, does not benefit from memorization anyway. But for problem solving especially, nothing short of directly practicing solving itself would address the core skill.

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I stopped reading the later responses as I felt like people were getting frustrated.

It sounds to me like you are looking for a way to link cards together, one after another. I would look at the anki note linker addon. It may meet your needs.

You can link the next card at an appropriate place on your current card.