I made a language learning deck consisting of pairs of cards - one with the English word, and one with the Chinese word. All of these pairs of cards are unfortunately paired together, so when new cards come up, it’s always the same word twice in a row (first in English, then in Chinese or vice versa). I am trying to unpair these cards to improve my learning.
Based on my research I thought that changing the “new card gather order” from “random note” to “random card” would have this result, but it didn’t change anything. I haven’t found any other solution. Please help or let me know if my question is unclear. Thanks!
Those cards created from the same note are called siblings. While it’s not possible to “unpair” them there are ways to keep them away from each other.
I’m going to start by suggesting something you didn’t mention. The usual way to handle this is to “bury” the other siblings so they are never shown on the same day – Studying - Anki Manual. That would entirely fix your “twice in a row” problem – but still allow the cards to be introduced relatively close in time to each other. If you try to randomize which cards are introduced, you might find you’re learning one card and not seeing its reversed sibling until months later.
If you want to change this with Display Order instead – make sure you’re setting that for the deck/parent-deck you click to study. Deck Options - Anki Manual
The other option is to shuffle the cards in the New-queue, but it takes a bit of extra effort to split siblings apart that way.