Don't keep fwd/rev cards together during study

Anki Help
1

Best answer I can find in the forums is “use the Basic note type, not Basic (and reversed card).” But that won’t do what I want to do.

I have Scottish Gaelic (Gàidhlig) cards right now in “Basic (and reversed card)” which I’ll just call B-ARC. They are from the Duolingo deck on Ankiweb. They didn’t come with any sound, so I added an Audio field to my modified version of the deck (B-ARC+), and started adding pronunciations as I need them and can find them.

The cards are like this now, and individually, they work as intended:

Card 1: Front → Back + Audio

Card 2: Back → Front+ Audio

Pasting the sound file into the Audio field of one Card gets the other Card, too, which is perfect. So you can understand exactly what I’m trying to achieve, let’s look at one word: “room” (a room in a house):

Example Card 1:

Front, English: room

Back, Gaelic: seòmar, with the Gaelic pronunciation.

Card 2 for this Example:

Front, Gaelic: seòmar

Back, English: room, but again with the Gaelic pronunciation.

(Yes, I really need that much help with the pronunciation.)

The problem now is when I go to study, Anki won’t shuffle Card1/2 of room/seòmar with Card1/2 from other words. Card1 & Card 2 for each word are presented together, i.e. they come up one after the other, which isn’t helping me learn both directions.

Google search told me I have to use the Basic note type, not B-ARC, to have the front and back sides of the card shuffled amongst other cards. But I don’t see how to use the Basic note type and always have the Gaelic audio on the back side like I want. I want to try to remember the word and its pronunciation before I hear it.

This seems like it would be a good/common (?) way to study, so it seems like the answer would be obvious, but I’m not seeing it.

Is there a solution or workaround I can use and not lose all the work I’ve put into the deck so far, adding audio, tagging, etc?

Thank you!

Dave

2

That’s just an example of various AI/LLMs being very bad at giving advice about Anki. Don’t worry – you don’t need to do that.

Because I think it will help you going forward – make sure you understand the difference between notes (what you’re editing) and cards (what you’re studying) – Getting Started - Anki Manual .

One note that makes multiple cards is exactly the way you want to do this. There’s a few options for separating them – depending on how far apart you want them to be.

  • To make it so only one of the cards is studied on any given day – use “sibling” burying: Studying - Anki Manual . (I think this is the best way, and it’s what a lot of language learners do.)
  • To keep the cards from being introduced as New cards one-after-the-other – use New card sort order: Deck Options - Anki Manual . Something with “card type” or “random” first will probably be a good fit.
  • To keep the cards from being offered as Review cards one-after-the-other – well, that hardly ever happens, because they won’t necessarily be scheduled for the same day, and even if they are, they won’t be shown in a particular order. But Review sort order would be the fix for that: Deck Options - Anki Manual .
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OK! Thank you for the clarification that I won’t need to try to move this deck to another Note type. I will carefully read those sections of the manual for Deck options and studying options. Thank you for your kind reply! Regards, Dave

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