Hi all,
I have a downloaded deck of the 5000 most used words in a language. I want to study these in their order of frequency — studying in a random order makes little sense as the top 1000 words are far more useful than the bottom 1000, etc. The problem is that Anki gives options to study in a random order or in “order added,” neither of which are helpful for a downloaded deck with frequency information.
Is there a simple way to make them display according to the ranked order of the notes themselves, which is information in one of their fields?
I can sort by this field in the browse window, but I can’t get then set this as the display order. I did find this now closed thread with what seems to be a similar issue: Order of new cards by ranking field - #7 by Rolfi56
Like that person, the ‘due date’ in my window is either blank or is a date rather than an order (see pic), which seems to be important here. However, that thread seems to have some communication difficulties and the Original Poster doesn’t really explain what solved the problem. I’m hoping someone might have an explanation!
What I usually do is sorting in the browser in my desired order (the rank field you mention in this case). Then select all cards and and select Reposition (from the Cards menu, or Ctrl + Shift + S). Set Start position to 1, steps 1 and Shift position of existing cards (if you are repositioning just some of them).
This should change the Due column and make their order sequential according to your ranked field.
Many thanks! I’ve followed the steps but don’t quite understand the ‘shift position of existing cards’ feature. My guess is that leaving this box unchecked would mean that the cards I have studied will still appear in the current order, and after that the new ones. Is that right? I don’t want to pull the trigger and resort all of them (if avoidable) and loose what I’ve already half-learned!
Edit: I thought I’d just try it and try and undo if it was wrong and it worked well—I left that box unchecked and it seems that my revisions haven’t been affected.
Many thanks! I’d been going crazy learning the least useful words!
Umm, I think if you have already started learning the deck and want to preserve the due order or the cards you have already learned… that makes it a bit more complicated.
Here is the explanation of what Reposition does. That might clarify things.
If you don’t want to modify the order of cards you have already reviewed, what I would do is:
find all those cards (just look until what card you have learned so far in the browser in the current order),
make a note of the “Due” number of the last one (for example, if the last card you learned was “savoir” and it has a Due number of 2453, write that down
mark these cards you have already reviewed with some tag or flag (for example, select them and press Ctrl + 1 to apply the red flag)
find all the cards that you have not reviewed, that is: all the cards of the deck that don’t have the flag you just applied (by searching for deck:name_of_your_deck flag:0)
select all those cards and apply “Repositioning”, but for the starting number use a number after the one you found in step 2 (so, following the “savoir” example, write 2454 as the starting number)
apply the repositioning
eliminate the flag/tag from the cards from step 4, if you don’t need it anymore
I think this would achieve what you want. I might be a bit hacky, but I think it should do the trick. Maybe someone knows of an easier way.
Whatever you do, backup your deck first in case something doesn’t work as expected!
Sorry, I don’t think I understand your questions. Can you explain what problem are you facing?
If you can’t find the menus to do what I explained above because of Anki’s interface language, I suggest you to temporary change the language into English in Tools - Preferences (or pressing Ctrl + P).
I also don’t quite understand the question, could you rephrase?
To try and clarify the problem I had: I had a deck with words ranked according to frequency (in English you use words like ‘have’ and ‘she’ frequently, but not words like ‘pineapple’ and ‘tulip.’ The problem was that this ranking information was contained in a the note information, but Anki only offered the display order to either be random, or in order of when the cards were added.
The first solution would have you randomly learning lots of less-useful words like ‘pineapple’ before you could learn the more-useful words like ‘she.’ Which is slow and frustrating. Changing the number of new cards doesn’t solve this problem: it’s the order not the number. And setting the display order to date added doesn’t help either because the cards were downloaded and therefore all added at the same moment.
I have a selection of 300 cards (filtered deck) from the main deck, which contains 9000 cards. Unfortunately, I have to see all these 300 cards before the inner repetition starts. I would prefer to learn 10 cards and then, if one of these 10 cards is good, learn one of the remaining 290 cards.
I don’t think this is related to the original question of this thread. It’s better if you open a new thread and explain your problem and what you want to achieve (although I think you should investigate subdecks, maybe that’ll help you).
