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

Anki Learning Effectively
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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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