I wish i could relate cards just so they are not presented on the same day

My use cases with language learning:

  • same family words: Sometimes the verb and the adjetive are the same, sometimes is not, sometimes a verb has an adjetive sometimes not
  • synomyms: They mean the same thing, so i have to list the ones that are not to give me a fair chance
  • compound words: Maybe i failed the inner part and then im presented the compound word. Should i fail it too? answer is, it depends
  • expressions: lots of key words. When is very different, it needs a separate card

I keep my cards so the answer is as simple and clearcut as possible, but this problem is not helping

I could put all them on the same note and generate cards, problem is most of the time, a word is in different categories (it has synonyms, and its a compound word and its in some expression)

Can somebody come up with a sane way to fix this problem?

Your problem is not very clear. You want suggestions about how to create cards in a way that shows the relationships between words? I will tell you what I do.

To show related words, you can color code cards (for example, create a Note with a green background for masculine nouns and a red Note for feminine nouns), add some kind of textual mark to notes, or even add sound files to Notes (the sound of rain for feminine nouns, for example).

Instead of creating separate Notes, you can also use one Note type with Javascript that changes something about the card depending on the word you add.

If you have a Note for verbs, add a field for adjectives; if thereā€™s no related adjective for a certain verb, just leave the field blank. Put both the verb and the adjective on the card even if they are the same; seeing them both is how youā€™ll remember that they are the same.

I find that synonymes are not very important in the early stages of language learning and take too much effort to learn if they are just a list of words (rather than something you learn in context; the context makes them easier to remember). I do add them to some cards, but I style the cards so that the synonymes are in a small font and located at the edge of the card, so they donā€™t take focus away from the important information (the new word and its definition).

On study days when I have more time/energy/focus, I might look at the synonymes. When Iā€™ve reviewed the word many times and donā€™t need to focus so much on the meaning, I might look at the synonymes. Otherwise, I donā€™t usually do much with the synonymes. When I have multiple decks for a single language, I sometimes add the target word to one deck and the synonym to another deck for the same language, and study them as individual words.

Compound terms: letā€™s say you have ā€˜blatā€™ and ā€˜blat sprat.ā€™ If you donā€™t know what ā€˜blatā€™ means, maybe just donā€™t add ā€˜blat spratā€™ to the deck until later, or add ā€˜blatā€™, then add a bunch of other new cards before adding ā€˜blat spratā€™ so that you have time to learn ā€˜blatā€™ before Anki shows you ā€˜blat spratā€™ (this works only if you learn new cards in the order you added them). If both terms are already in your deck and you fail ā€˜blat,ā€™ just suspend ā€˜blat spratā€™ until you are ready for it. Or go ahead and review ā€˜blat spratā€™ anyway; you might find that it helps you remember what ā€˜blatā€™ means.

I think that learning expressions with Anki is a bad idea unless the expressions are part of your native language. The more words you have on a card, the more difficult the learning process.

However, one method is to split the expression up; create cards for every word in the expression. Use the expression as a sort of example sentence on every one of those cards. Then you can focus on learning the individual words, which you have to do before you can learn the expression; however, youā€™ll have a second layer of learning: seeing the expression many times because itā€™s on multiple cards. However, the individual words should be the main focus.

You might ask yourself if you really need to learn all these different aspects of the language. Maybe some of these things will come naturally as you improve basic comprehension of the language (with individual words). Maybe some of these things are better to learn at a more advanced stage. Maybe some are better learned with a tool other than Anki, and some are better learned with separate Anki decks rather than tons of info packed onto individual Notes.

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How do you know im in the early stages of language learning?

Languages dont maps 1 to 1, thats why i use them

Dont really want to discuss how i do it, but word A, translates to word Aā€™ Bā€™ but B translates to Cā€™

I ask for the translation of B that is not Cā€™

I use the word synonyms because thats what they are, but i dont really study them (given a word, i cant tell you the synonyms)

Thanks for your tips, but most of them are not really helpful in my case. I have been learning languages for a very long time. Im very aware of how to do it optimally

There are more cases if you are interested, but. I just used a few examples that came to mind where being able to relate cards would be useful instead of all this manual intervention you are suggesting me to do. (as in, dont add them yet! wait until you are ready)

I am already manually doing this kind of things so they dont ruin the learning, by the way. Thats why im asking for a sane way of doing it

For example, i add expresions at the end of the new queue and the ā€œpartsā€ at the front. Which is useful at first, but after both cards are done, they are mixed. If you do this a lot of times, and everyday i do many cards that are related to others. Every individual card has a small chance of having a related card on the same day, but overall, i always have a few

Its specially bad when of the cards has a very long interval, and by chance you just review some similar card a few cards ago. It happens a few times very day

My own suggestion would be to be able to add ids to another ids, and anki so would consider them related

I believe this is useful in many ways, not just language learning

i havenā€™t read the whole thread. But the heading made me think of add-ons like Bury Cousins (related cards that arenā€™t siblings) or Bury related notes. I havenā€™t used those but maybe they contain something useful for you. if not ignore this post ā€¦

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This addons seems they would fix my issue indeed, but problem is that both say they wont work in v3

On top of that, they only work on desktop :frowning:

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Like I said, what you are asking was not really clear, therefore you may not find the responses relevant. I actually gave you a bunch of suggestions on ways to relate cardsā€”color, sound, etc.

It was not clear to you becase you chose to stop reading the titleā€¦

I wish i could relate cards

ā€¦here

just so they are not presented on the same day

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I think this would be very useful in general

You can also relate cards that you confuse with each other once you realize you confuse them

You know one because you already saw the other!

This happens to me a lot in language learning but also learning texts using LPCG. Its a common everyday problem

There are plenty of reasons to mark 2 cards as siblings!

So LPCG makes multiple notes from one poem? You could use Cloze Overlapper instead, which creates a single note with multiple cards. Resulting in siblings.

Learning poems, having cards not being siblings is not only okay, but encouraged!

What i meant is that sometimes I get similar texts or lines that i got confused. Some times within the same poem, sometimes in different poems!

Maybe the topic is similar or the line in itself or the context is similar

But if i get one one day, i dont want to get the other on the same day. Because if guessing one automatically gives up the other one. It would be nice to be able to mark them as siblings

My approach has been to create a Note Type that generates up to four cards in each language, and then enable the Deck Options such as ā€œBury review siblingsā€ to prevent seeing multiple variants in a single study session. For example, one note can generate separate cards for the words North, South, East, West ā€“ and the answer side can include all four, in two languages. As another example, if I want to learn several different phrases with similar meaning, I include them all on the same Note, generating one card in English (my cue to remember all of the translations) and separate cards in my target language (to ensure I recognize each one individually).

Sounds like the general problem of ā€œinterferenceā€. Supermemo (i.e. Piotr WoÅŗniak) writes about it.

https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Interference

https://www.supermemo.com/en/archives1990-2015/articles/20rules#Interference

It is not likely to be solved by burying siblings but rather by reformulating the cards.

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This would the recommended option right now

But this is not always possible when the structure is not well defined. I cant relate 2 lines of different poems

I could theoretically create a single note type for all of my uses and derive all the cards i need from there. But even then, it wouldnt work when the confusion comes from more than 2 items. And this happens as I already explained (i hope)

Im aware of this

The supermemo recomendations basically tells you that this happens, and that dont bang your head against it

I fix my cards when it happens. And it happens a lot to me

You still have to not have these cards presented on the same day, regardless of how well you fix your notes

Seeing one trigger the remembrance of the other ones in the same way seeing the front, triggers seeing the back

You need both :slight_smile:

In the supermemo example, you are not even learning new things. Its knowledge you already have that you lose because you confuse itā€¦ If i tell you one of them in one session, you already know the answer to the other one and the card has not even been presented to you yet

I am not sure that all the responders really appreciate the requirement.

I have raised this before as a valid use case to allow links between notes. Unfortunately the Anki architecture does not support it. I appreciate the argument that such a feature could be abused and is not always required, but for language learning it is a really needed feature to permit space based repetition to work correctly, as repetition would be best based on the word root rather than the specific word type.

Firstly, you really need to be able to learn words in both the base form and with prefixes/suffixes - that enables you to learn how prefixes/suffixes work in that language. You also need to lean verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc which are based on the same root - that helps you learn how word roots are formed into each grammatical form.

Some examples of a common word root in English:
to do, to undo, to redo
to join, to rejoin, join, joined, conjoined
to speed, speed, speeding, speedily

It is simply not practical to use a single note type as some have suggested. For instance I have a verb note type with approx 50 cards, a preposition note type with a similar number of cardsā€¦ Using a single note type would require something over 250 fields and several hundred cards. That is very unwieldy in Anki - it is far easier to add words and design cards with several more specific note types. If Anki permitted such large field and card numbers and provided a note editor that allowed for field grouping into collapsable views I might reconsider that view, but with current UI it would be painful.

And also for language learning I wish Anki had enumerated fields (eg. for gender: der/die/das), permitted any field to be designated as the note type key field (so that the gender field coukd be the first field), and provided a way to update cards that only differ by a parameter from a master template (consider learning verb conjugations or declensions by case).

As I put in my reply I think that the question IS clear, and a generic issue with using Anki for language learning.

You mention having separate fields for the verb, noun, adjective, etc forms. The trouble is that each word form may need multiple fields and cards. For instance English has irregular past forms that must be learnt (to take, took, has taken). And more grammatically challenging languages require MANY more fields which quickly makes using a single note type impractical.

As for using javascript I prefer using CSS with cass classes generated from the note data as I found that works better with AnkiDroid.

It goes even further language learning. It useful for any deck

How true is this?

Im just asking for another field in the card/database per card that holds ids of related cards

Fields have been added in the recent past (date a card was added to the deck rings the bell)

How?

For the use case that I posted where you have mutliple notes for different grammatical forms of the same word root you require something that is used by the scheduler to link notes when calculating when to show a card. Itā€™s not just a new field that is used in the card UI.

Relations between notes is a feature that has been requested a number of times before. If I remember correctly the reason these requests were not accepted was a thougjt that there was no valid use case for it , and that people were requesting it for scenarios where such a feature would work against the scheduler.

I remain convinced that language learning where there is a common word root is a valid and common use case which justifies this feature being added to Anki.