Enhancing Anki for Advanced Education: Seeking Guidance on Deck Layout and Personalisation

Anki Learning Effectively
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Hello Everyone :hugs:,

Since I’ve been using Anki for a few months, I’ve discovered how helpful it is for memorization—especially when it comes to learning a language and being ready for exams. But as I go farther into more complex topics, I’m seeing that in order to better meet my learning objectives, I need to optimise my deck structure and general Anki setup. I’m looking for community input on the following key topics in particular:

Deck Structure: When working with complicated issues, how do you arrange your decks? :thinking: For instance, do you think it’s more efficient to maintain everything in one big deck or to make several smaller decks for distinct subjects within a subject? Strategies that support both manageable review sessions and long-term retention are of special interest to me.

Personalising Card Layouts: It has come to my attention that certain users add code snippets, photos, and cloze deletions to their customised card layouts. Which customisations have you found to be the most successful in improving your learning process? :thinking: Do you have any recommendations for any particular templates or add-ons for making cards that are more visually appealing or interactive? :thinking:

Scheduling Reviews in Balance: It’s getting harder to strike a balance between daily reviews and fresh card learning as my deck sizes increase. How do you schedule your reviews such that you stay on top of things and don’t burn out while still learning new material? :thinking:

It would be extremely appreciated if you could provide any resources or advice. I’m interested in learning how more seasoned users have customised Anki to meet their needs, particularly with regard to managing challenging material and demanding workloads.

Thank you in advance for your help and support.

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  1. Using tags, or if I’m feeling it, then decks.
  2. I use the Basic one.
  3. Less new cards, and split study times depending on the workload. And always paying attention on my stats

I know it’s very basic, but I don’t wanna waste time tweaking the FSRS/SM-2 algorithm, fixing that is not broken, etc. I just study.

But as long the Anki Manual and the SuperMemo article is still up, then my study set is ready

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Deck Structure: See Adding/Editing - Anki Manual

Using Decks

Decks are designed to divide your content up into broad categories that you wish to study separately, such as English, Geography, and so on. You may be tempted to create lots of little decks to keep your content organized, such as “my geography book chapter 1”, or “food verbs”, but this is not recommended, for the following reasons:

  • Lots of little decks may mean you end up seeing cards in a recognizable order. On older scheduler versions, new cards can only be introduced in deck order. And if you were planning to click on each deck in turn (which is slow), you will end up seeing all the “chapter 1” or “food verb” reviews together. This makes it easier to answer the cards, as you can guess them from the context, which leads to weaker memories. When you need to recall the word or phrase outside Anki, you won’t always have the luxury of being shown related content first!
  • While less of a problem than it was in earlier Anki versions, adding hundreds of decks may cause slowdowns, and very large deck trees with thousands of items can actually break the display of the deck list in Anki versions before 2.1.50.

Using Tags

Instead of creating lots of little decks, it’s a better idea to use tags and/or fields to classify your content. Tags are a useful way to boost search results, find specific content, and keep your collection organized. There are many ways of using tags and flags effectively, and thinking in advance about how you want to use them will help you decide what will work best for you.
Some people prefer using decks and subdecks to keep their cards organized, but using tags have a big advantage over decks for that: you can add several tags to a single note, but a single card can only belong to one deck, which makes tags a more powerful and flexible categorization system than decks in most cases. You can also organize tags in trees in the same way as you can do for decks.

For example, instead of creating a “food verbs” deck, you could add those cards to your main language study deck, and tag the cards with “food” and “verb”. Since each card can have multiple tags, you can do things like search for all verbs, or all food-related vocabulary, or all verbs that are related to food.

You can add tags from the Edit window and from the Browser, and you can also add, delete, rename, or organize tags there. Please note that tags work at note level, which means that when you tag a card that has siblings, all the siblings will be tagged as well. If you need to tag a single card, but not its siblings, you should consider using flags instead.

Personalising Card Layouts

I like to use Enhanced Cloze (for Anki 2.1) to create “notebook” with questions within

AnKing Note Types (Easy Customization) should help with customization

If you are looking for Multiple choice templates, there is this post Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) Templates

Scheduling Reviews in Balance

I tend to make too many cards, but if the card is easy then I tend to exclude them to avoid having too many cards to review

Could try reviewing first before making new cards, there are options that can limit your card creation in Deck Options > Daily Limits

Extra

    1. Getting Started
    1. Getting Help
    1. Studying
    1. Adding/Editing
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I know this one, having your reviews divided over lots of decks feels easier to go through then if it was all sticked together. I have a lot of subdecks so sometimes I’ll just study from individual subdecks then clicking on parent to study.

You can also create filtered decks to divide reviews into manageable chunks.

I use different templates for different note types. It’s more about personal preference so I suggest you look through AnkiWeb ot GitHub to find something you like. There’s one called prettify in GitHub that I’ve seen recently, may check that out.

Given that I have a backlog 2000 cards, I’m not that qualified to talk about this one. I’ll just say these much about settings:

  1. Turn on FSRS.
  2. Create different presets for different subjects. Not much science here so strike a balance yourself.
  3. Optimise your presets.
  4. If you are thinking long-term, try the Compute minimum recommended retention (CMRR) setting and set Desired retention to that.
  5. Repeat for every preset. You’re done.

If you want to learn about FSRS, here’s a good resource: expertium.github.io

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In my opinion, any subject is only complicated when I have never seen it, studied it, or when I have not done research to understand how it works.

Once I understand it, Anki comes into action with review and spaced repetition, so I just need to trust it, reviewing every day so that in the long run I really know about a certain subject.

So for me, there is no complicated issue, what exists is not having studied enough to understand it. Anki comes in after you understand it, not before.

When the subject is big, then I divide it into smaller parts, including examples, so I can use the principle of minimum information in each card.

Using colors, emoticons, and images also help a lot. I created my own list of emojis with the first 2 syllables of all letters, except vowels, so it also serves as a tip in many cards.

With or without a layout, it doesn’t change my performance at all. I’ve tested several types and they didn’t have any effect, so the layout is kind of irrelevant to me. The most important thing is to leave the screen dark so as not to strain your vision and have a study cycle (review) of 20 minutes to 1 hour, rest your mind and come back after a few minutes or a few hours, repeating this cycle 3 times a day, it’s the famous pomodoro technique.

A complement that I like to use when reviewing is the one I made. It shows the card statistics during the review, in addition to automatically suspending the cards that you get the most correct with the sequence you define. In my case, if I get 20 correct answers to the same card in a row, then it is suspended. It’s in Portuguese, but it’s very easy to edit the init.py file in the addon folder. https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/752880974

I only use the basic note type, it’s enough for me, and FSRS is activated, with 0.92 retention and 120 days.
I keep my cards as simple as possible, based on the 20 rules of supermemo, there are good examples of how to make cards with short sentences or operations (math) with the least amount of information and I try to answer each one in less than 10 seconds. When I want to dedicate myself to a specific subject, I create tags and filtered decks, but I prefer to use subdecks.

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