Hello, so I have just jumped ship to the real Anki from AnkiApp and managed to export all of my decks to here. Now, I am not very tech competent, but I loved how user friendly the knock off AnkiApp is. I can just type in the fields I want and there’s an easy and convenient invert card button in the study settings. After searching around for a while and watching the video on YouTube, I tried the “edit, flip” when I open a deck and get this message
I have no idea what this means. What do I have to do so that I can just get my cards to be reversed when reviewing? Also, I tend to review on my phone but add new cards via the web app, while the flip/invert function carry over to the mobile app? Didn’t think this would be so complicated. Thanks for any help in advance
Welcome! I hope you’ll be happier once you get settled in and see all the great features you’ll have available.
First thing to make sure we’re on the same page about – (1) Do you want to flip these cards so that they only go in the other direction? Or (2) do you want to be able to study them in both directions? Some other apps do it differently, so I want to make sure I tell you the right way for Anki.
But, regardless of what you decide, step one is –
On your Back Template, you need to insert <hr id=answer> – probably just after {{FrontSide}} if the template has that. If the template doesn’t have that, I would add both of those lines at the very top of your Back Template. {{FrontSide}} <hr id=answer>
If you post the text of your Back Template, I can tell you exactly where. And I can explain step two once I know the answer to the question above.
Thank you for the welcome! As I said, it’s more an issue of me not being tech savvy and I was expecting the knockoff Anki to resemble the real one more, so when I wasn’t seeing an easy “invert deck” button like the knock off, I was greatly confused. Basically, I’d like to just be able to easily decide to flip the cards to test active recall, and then have them read normal when I choose to. It was just a box you could check on the review settings of the knockoff app and that was all there was to it.
The back template reads:
{{Front}} {{Back}}
Let’s do the easy part first. Change your Back Template to –
{{FrontSide}}
<hr id=answer>
{{Back}}
– just exactly that text (but ignore the weird code coloring the forum puts on it).
You’re not going to be able to do that – but there’s a good reason why (and it’s possible the other apps that let you do that didn’t understand what they were doing).
The 2 different “directions” of a card are testing different things. For instance, in language learning, when you’ve got your target language on the front, those are recognition cards, and when your target language is on the back, those are production cards (which I think is what you’re calling “active recall” cards?). Anki wants each of those card types to have its own review history and scheduling.
Let’s say for “comprobar,” you have no problem thinking of what it means when you see it, but when you see “to check,” you have trouble thinking of what the right word is. [I don’t speak Spanish, so bear with me if that’s not right! ] You should study the card with “to check” on the front more often, and the card with “comprobar” on the front less often. You might be thinking – “but that’s twice as many cards to study?!” – and that’s true! But learning one reinforces learning the other, so I don’t think it turns out to be twice as much work.
Anki makes it easy to do make the 2 cards with card templates. The same set of information you entered in fields (on your “note”) to make the first card, can be rearranged to make the 2nd card, and then Anki will make that 2nd card for every one of your notes.
After all of that – if it sounds awful to you and you don’t want it, and you’re regretting switching to Anki – I will tell you how to just keep flipping the cards back and forth. But I genuinely believe that muddles your review history and you won’t like the end result. It would be better to let Anki make you two cards and study both. What do you think?
I get what you’re saying, so what do I have to do differently to make the duplicate cards and how do I set it so that I’m seeing the “production cards” more often? Also, I’m still building all of the decks I imported, (I had heard some horror stories of people losing everything from the knock off apps and support never answering them, so already off to a better start here with that), will all the duplicates and preference to have the “production cards” show more be automatically applied to those cards I’m adding?
Your card templates seem very simple, so unless you’ve got a lot of customization hiding in your Styling tab, your quickest path is to change the note type for these notes to one of the defaults – “Basic (and reversed card)”. [It looks like you’re currently using at least 2 different note types – “Russian 10,000 words…” and “Spanish from Mikel sheet”? If there are more intricacies than I can see in your screenshots, feel free to post that.]
Before you do this, I’ll encourage you to read the Key Concepts guide, so you’ll be familiar with the terminology you’re going to see. Then select the notes you want to change – Notes > Change note type – select the note type you want, and make sure the fields and templates are set to map how you want them. That will immediately create a 2nd card – a “sibling” to the 1st card – for each of the selected notes.
As you introduce and study the cards, and grade your answers, Anki will naturally start setting the cards you’re doing well on for longer intervals and the cards that need more work for shorter intervals. Studying explains the process, but basically – if you the get the card wrong, click Again – if you get the card correct, click Good – and you can save Hard or Easy for the rare times when you get a card correct, but answering was exceptionally hard or easy.
These reverse/sibling cards will always be created when you add a note of this note type (or any other note type that is set up to make multiple cards). As far as seeing particular cards more often – every card will stand on its own and have its own schedule based on how your reviews with it are going.
Since you are just starting out, I’m going to put in a plug here for you enabling the newer scheduling algorithm, FSRS. The default algorithm is fine, but FSRS is superior for pretty much everyone in terms of minimizing the amount of work you need to do to learn. There’s an excellent tutorial if you want to know more about it – but all you’ll really need to do to turn it on is open your Deck Options, scroll down and toggle FSRS on. You can leave everything else alone for now.
That chills my bones! Your collection in Anki is pretty well protected. Anki makes local backup copies of your collection regularly throughout the day. And you can (and should!) set up syncing to AnkiWeb, for additional peace of mind.
] You should study the card with “to check” on the front more often, and the card with “comprobar” on the front less often. You might be thinking – “but that’s twice as many cards to study?!” – and that’s true! But learning one reinforces learning the other, so I don’t think it turns out to be twice as much work.
That chills my bones! Your collection in Anki is pretty well protected. Anki makes