I just want to use Anki to go through a deck, without any review or repetition of cards. For example, I have a 10,000 card deck, which I downloaded from the anki website. I want to quickly run through about 1,000 cards a day. I do not want to see any cards repeated. I do not want to see cards reversed. After finishing, I want the program to remember where i left off, so that I can start at that same point the next day. For example, suppose i stopped at card 1,218. I want the software to automatically start at card 1,219 when i restart the deck the next day. I think that Anki is so convoluted in design, and I cannot figure out how to use this software from the instructions and from youtube videos.
What settings should i use to achieve my simple objective? Thanks in advance, Edward.
Seems like a waste of a perfectly good Ferrari to me! But it sounds like you know what you want, so here’s how you do it. Let me know if you need a more detailed description of any of the steps.
- Build a Filtered deck with all of the cards. A search filter like
deck:decknamewill probably do it, but anything you can search for in Browse, you can use for a Filtered deck. - In the Filtered deck Options – uncheck “reschedule based on” and set all of the delays to 0. Set whatever “selected by”/Order you want, but make sure the Limit is high enough to capture all of the cards.
- Click the Filtered deck to study. It doesn’t matter what grading button you pick, the cards will be returned to their home deck after you see them once. As long as you don’t Rebuild the deck before you’ve gone through all 10K cards, the deck will remember where you are.
[I might make different suggestions depending on what you want to do with the 10K cards after this process – but if you want to know more about that, you’ll have to provide additional details.]
Does the note type for this deck already make reversed cards (which are actually separate cards)? If not, no problem – just don’t make them. If so, you need to eliminate them from your search filter in #1. You can do that by searching them up in Browse and suspending them, or by excluding them from your search filter.
Wow, many thanks for the prompt reply. I attach a screenshot of the filter menu. It seems to work, but I have a few questions:
(1) What time should I enter in “Repeat Failed Cards after ___ minutes”. I don’t know what this means. I changed that number from 10 minutes to 0 minutes. Is that ok?
(2) Is there any way to go through the cards using the mouse wheel, instead of clicking the mouse or pressing space bar?
(3) While studying the filtered deck, at the bottom it shows, “0 + 0 + 369”. I know that 369 means the number of cards left in deck. But what does “0+0” mean? Is it possible to display the card number, instead of the cards remaining in the deck?
(4) Is there any way to skip forward to a card number? For example, let’s say that I am currently on card number 1,256, and I want to jump ahead to card number 4,638. Can this be done?
Many thanks in advance, Edward
I didn’t realize you were using an older version. What version of Anki is this [see Help > About > Copy Debug Info]?
In current versions there are delays set for each answer button (as I mentioned in #2). But yes, setting that to 0 should be what you want.
[To clarify – the search filter and other settings in your screenshot will not accomplish what you asked for.]
Not without reprogramming your mouse to do something different. Mouse-wheel scrolling is used in the study screen for scrolling up/down the page. Enter is the other standard way to advance through cards.
Those counters generally mean the same thing they do in a regular study session (but there might be differences in older versions for a non-rescheduling Filtered deck). The blue counter is the number of New cards left, in the deck or in your daily limit; the red counter is the number of Learn/Relearn cards that are ready to be studied. You won’t have either in this deck.
Those card counters can be on/off [Preferences - Anki Manual], but you can’t substitute something else there.
If your cards have a number in a field and you want to display that on your cards, you can modify your templates to show it. Add it as a {{field replacement}} wherever you want the number to show – Field Replacements - Anki Manual . I could give you more specifics, but I would need more details.
Not in a Filtered deck, no. If you want to look at a particular card, you can search it up in the Browse window, but that won’t eliminate it from your deck.
Thanks for your patience in answering my questions Danika. The instructions are not clear on the Anki website. I’m using Windows 7, and Anki version 2.1.49, the latest version for Windows 7. I have a couple of other questions:
(1) Suppose i have a filtered deck containing 1,250 cards, not scheduled as you instructed. Is there any way of creating subdecks of 100 cards each, so that the result is 13 total subdecks, wherein 12 subdecks contain 100 cards each, and one subdeck contains 50 cards?
(2) Suppose that I am studying a 10,000 card deck, not scheduled. I’m on card 4,235. However, I wish to just start studying from the beginning of the deck with card 1. Is there any way to do this easily in Anki, or does Anki force me to go through all 10,000 cards in order to get back to card 1?
Thanks again for your generous help,
Edward
(1) You can’t create subdecks of a Filtered deck. But you can create 13 separate Filtered decks if you want to.
(2) All of the cards are unchanged from when you started studying them. So if you want to start the deck over, just Rebuild it, and it will be exactly the same as the first time (assuming you picked a non-random ordering). But there’s no “in order to get back to card 1” in this deck otherwise. These cards are only in the Filtered deck for you to see them once, and after that they return to their home deck.