How to set study schedule when adding a new card type to an existing deck?

Anki Scheduling
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I’m willing to bet someone has asked for something similar before, but after spending an hour searching both these forums, reddit, and google, I’m not sure if that’s the case after all. Please redirect me if this is a common topic, and accept my apology.

I have been studying the Japanese core 2k/6k shared deck for about a year. As a result, I’ve studied over 2,000 cards, but still have multiple thousands to go. I do not wish to lose my study data to this point, if possible. I am simplifying terminology to strictly “English” and “Japanese” so that my issue can be more easily understood by those who do not understand the nuance between kanji and kana.

tl;dr: I want to add a reversed card type to an existing deck and randomly be presented with either the JP → ENG card or ENG → JP card when a term is due for review.

The details:
The deck I have been using shows a word in Japanese on the front, requiring me to remember that word’s English translation on the back. The back also has the word’s pronunciation and part of speech, an audio reading of the word’s pronunciation, an example sentence using the word in Japanese, an audio reading of that sentence, and that sentence’s English translation. My goal is to sometimes randomly be prompted with the English word on the front, forcing me to remember the English → Japanese translation as well. I have created a second card type in this deck, and this created another 6,000 cards with English on the front as desired. No problem so far. What I need help with is setting up future reviews to take advantage of this formatting.

  1. I would like the new ENG → JP cards I created to be siblings of the same JP → ENG card of the same term, both for cards I have already learned and for future cards. I desire this because I believe it will simplify future reviews (see 4. below). I think this may happen automatically, since the card types are identical beyond one having {{Vocabulary-Japanese}} on the front with {{Vocabulary-English}} on the back, and the other card type having these values inverted. However, if they will not automatically be made siblings, I would like to understand how to mark them as such, ideally automatically, since doing so manually for 6,000 cards would be extremely tedious.

  2. Ideally, I would like new terms in the future to be introduced with the JP → ENG card type only. I recognize this may be asking too much, but I figured I’d throw it out there in case it’s possible.

  3. Once a new term is learned (with either card type, if 2. is not possible), the other is inserted into review automatically.

  4. I would like to make it so that all of the existing JP → ENG cards/terms I have studied in the past year will find their ENG → JP card-type sibling and pull them into review at the same time, with a 50% chance on any given day that a term comes up for review that it will pull from the Japanese-front card type for that term and a 50% chance that it will select the English-front card type for that term. Since they will be siblings, I believe future reviews will handle themselves automatically - i.e., when I review 大きい → “big”, it will automatically bury the corresponding “big” → 大きい card, and vice-versa. This prevents me from getting the same term in both directions in one day, and fuzziness settings will cause these cards’ orders to be randomly moved around in the future, which will decide if the next time the card comes due if I will get JP front or ENG front.

  5. I recognize the possibility that having both JP → ENG and ENG → JP cards for the same term up for review at the same time may artificially double the number of cards that are due daily. (I say artificially because if siblings bury each other like I think, my actual daily card load will be the same, but the cards that queue up on any given day will double since there will be a JP → ENG card and ENG → JP card for each term each day.) I am prepared to double my daily limits to compensate for this, but there may also be other functionality that I’m unaware of that won’t double my daily review count.

Currently, when I look ahead at my study schedule it is showing only English-front cards to be inserted up to the newest term I learned before creating these cards. After that, it goes back to inserting the remaining ~4,000 cards with Japanese-front text, then it will insert the ~4,000 cards with English-front text for the same terms. I recognize that what I am trying to do is incredibly bespoke and I have presented you all with a massive wall-of-text. Thank you in advance for your time and assistance. If I can provide any additional clarifying information, such as a video demonstration or screenshots of my settings, I am happy to do so.

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I don’t know the deck, of which you speak, but can you not add Reverse cards to it?

If you cannot, it might be easier if you were to migrate the cards to a Reverse Note Type, such as the “Basic (Optional reversed card)” Note Type. See here for some instructions.

You could export your deck to CSV, add the “y” in the Add Reverse column for all cards, or only those, for which you want the reverse option and then reimport the CSV. In this way you are only updating your cards and not losing your statistics. NB Back up your deck before you start, in case you make an error.

See here for steps to follow.

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I want to clarify for you – each of those cards will have its own scheduling. They won’t be taking turns on the same due date, and there’s no way to do the 50/50 that you want.

But really – separate scheduling is what you want. Recognition and production are 2 separate language skills, and your success or challenge with one for a word isn’t really relevant to your success or challenge with the other.

[Under your system, let’s say you get the JP>EN card wrong – even if you could devise a system where it would stay JP>EN through your relearning steps until it graduates back to Review (and I don’t think you can) – in a few days when it comes back for study, it might be the EN>JP card instead, which would do you little good, since it’s not the thing you needed to work on.]

Yep, you definitely do! And if they are created from the same note, they are siblings. So, if you did this by adding a card type to your note type that tells Anki to create this 2nd card from each of your existing notes of this note type, they are siblings.

If that’s Card 1 of your note type – yes, it will come first by default. Many (most?) language learners use sibling burying (as you mentioned) to keep the cards on separate days.

Card 2 won’t automatically jump to Review – it will be introduced as a New card and go through learning steps just like Card 1 did.

It sounds like you’ve already added the reverse cards you want. All you need to do is Reposition the new set of cards so they have the same positions in the New-queue as their already existing siblings. [If you want to see that in action, see the “Switching Card Order” video (or really just the 2nd half of it), which has the old interface, but all of the functionality is the same.]

The downside of adding your reverse cards so late in the process is that you’ve got a big stack of them to dig through before you’ll get back to introducing new words/notes you’ve never studied. If you want help with ways to work through that, just ask.

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Both helpful replies, thank you so much!

@matta I looked over that link you provided, and it looks like this could have saved me some time in creating the reversed cards. The basic reversed card type doesn’t support the fields I want, so it would have taken some tweaking anyway, but still good to know for the future, thank you!

@Danika_Dakika you raise an interesting point re: learning recognition and production with separate intervals. I understand that true 50/50 is not possible and likely would be undesirable anyway as you mentioned, thank you for that.

I would assume that being able to recognize “大きい → big” would be helpful in being able to produce “big → 大きい”. If I saw the former, then 5 minutes later in my review I am prompted to produce the latter, having just seen it in the other direction would make me far more likely to get this right since it’s fresh in my memory. This is not truly testing my brain’s ability to produce the word. This is the situation I want to avoid by having them be siblings of each other and automatically getting buried, so that my ability to recall and produce are truly independent and not simply relying on lucky timing of having seen a term in the opposite direction recently. Unfortunately, it looks like burying will always statically push a card to the next day, maximum, as opposed to the bury interval being something I can edit. Off the top of my head I would think burying a sibling a few days out would be more ideal. So it goes.

Regardless, it sounds like I created templates/card types correctly and each version of the card for a term is related to each other as a sibling.

The downside of adding your reverse cards so late in the process is that you’ve got a big stack of them to dig through before you’ll get back to introducing new words/notes you’ve never studied. If you want help with ways to work through that, just ask.

Yes, please! I’m open to ideas if you’ve got them. I would hate to have to slog through thousands of cards I already know just to get to new stuff, but I think it would be helpful to start learning ENG → JP at the same time as JP → ENG going forward.

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Yes. The sibling burying is key to what you want. Create a note that can be reversed, then allow Anki’s cleverness to manage your cards by burying your siblings. You quite rightly construe that seeing the reverse of a “大きい → big” card (“big → 大きい”) only tests ephemeral short-term memory.

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I agree completely. Each reinforces the other to a certain extent. That’s why I’m a firm believer is studying both.

In order for that to be a problem, the cards would already need to be scheduled on the same day – and after they are introduced, that’s a pretty rare occurrence. You might be surprised how little reverse cards interfere, and they don’t really have to go too far away to reduce that influence. In your real use of the language, I bet you never find yourself thinking, “Gah! When I need to produce a word one day and then I hear that word somewhere the next day, it’s less ideal!” :wink:

But there are add-ons that will let you customize burying or disperse siblings, if you find that 1 day doesn’t turn out to be enough for you.

An approach I’ve used that I think will work for you too is to use subdecks to balance those 2 stacks of New cards against each other in separate subdecks with different daily limits. For this example, I’m going to set your daily New limit to 10, and have 8 of those come from the from-ENG cards you’re catching up on, and 2 come from the completely new words. You can change those numbers to whatever you want as long as the subdeck numbers add up to the main deck number.

After you get everything repositioned appropriately (as explained above), create 2 new subdecks for your New cards – ENG New and All New. Use Change Deck to move the cards where only the from-ENG card is New to ENG New, and the cards where both siblings are New to All New. [If they aren’t easy to grab all at once, there are ways to search them up.]

Go into the Options for your parent deck, set your daily New card limit for “Preset” to 10, and click “Save to All Subdecks” in the top-right menu. Open the Options for the ENG New deck, and set the “This deck” daily New card limit to 8. Leave that tab selected when you Save. Then open the Options for the All New deck, and set the “This deck” daily New card limit to 2. Leave that tab selected when you Save.

Now when you study from the parent deck, you’ll get 10 New cards per day, 8 of which will be from-ENG, and 2 of which will be some combination of from-JP and from-ENG, for new words. In a few months, you’ll have introduced all of the from-ENG cards, so you can move all the subdeck cards back to to the parent deck, and delete the subdecks.

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I didn’t really understand how subdecks worked, but that makes it clear as day. It sounds like I’ll still have to get through all those ENG → JP cards, but at least I can set it up so that I’m still learning new stuff as I catch up. Thanks for all your help! I’ll get this set up tonight and see how my new cards look tomorrow.

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Every collection is different, and sometimes it’s hard to draft a plan entirely in theory – so if things don’t look right, please ask for clarification!

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