Hello everyone.
I am new to Anki and am about to start creating my own deck
This is my first post. I hope that it is not too redundant.
I am hoping to get advice on the best layout for learning Plant Identification.
I will need to memorize roughly 400 plants in the next 8 months.
Each plant has 7 pieces of information. I will attach an example image.
We are required to know:
Genus
Species
Common name
Family
Key ID features
Uses
Limitations
5,6,and 7 will each have multiple pieces of information
Bonus: I am hoping to attach an audio file for each with the proper pronunciation (Greek and Latin). Some of these plants sound like Harry Potter spells
There is one shared deck of horticultural plant names, unfortunately it does not totally match up with what I need, and it seems to me that it has WAY TOO MUCH info on each card. How would you break up this information into multiple cards? Would you have 7 different cards for each plant?
I agree with you that this is some terrible card design. But I suppose it gives you notes to work with, so you don’t have to start from scratch.
Mathematically, there are 7×6=42 possible card set-ups. Or even 8×7=56 because I imagine it would be useful to recognise a plant from a photo. The image would make an 8th piece of information.
Now, which of those possibilities are usefol to you?
Here’s one way to think about it:
How do you identify a plant? Probably with its scientific or common name. (Decide which one.) That’s your starting point.
What will you need to know, given a plant? Probably everything, except for the identifier, which is given. Makes 6 cards with Name->Info.
From what information will you need to be able to infer a plant? This, only you can answer, but it will probably only yield a few cards, like Features->Name or Image->Name.
So maybe you have about 10 cards now, but every use case is covered because from every relevant information you can infer the identifier and from the identifier you can infer any other information.
More cards would waste your time, but you might want to put more than one piece of information on the front, e.g., Name+Picture->Uses. Consider carefully whether this makes sense for every single card though! Not having the additional cue in a reallife situation might trip you up.
Sorry for the long post, I guess I’m procrastinating here…