Apologies if I get the terms note and card mixed up. When I say card I mean the thing presented to me to answer when I study a deck.
My question is: Is it possible to have Anki only show me a single card or group of cards if I get a specific card or n-number of other cards correct first? So like, I might have a flashcard which is a simple question on a certain topic, but if I fail this, there’s no point me studying the more detailed cards about the same topic.
Just to clarify your ideas: a note is what you edit, which has fields, templates, and that generates cards (ie. in the note editor you have a small cards button, that allows you to edit the templates). A card is a single Question/Answer object. The thing presented to you when you are studying is a card.
Now, the answer. No, it is not possible to link cards together (there is an old post where the dev explains why). However, when studying, you can bury (ie. remove it from cards to be studied for today) or suspend (ie. remove it from cards to be studied until un-suspended) if you think you there is no point in studying it.
However, every card should be learnable on its own, since it should contain only a single information. I fail to see in which situation it would be useful and correct to link cards like this – if you have a precise example, you’re welcome.
Thanks for reply and clarification.
The example use-case requires no further elaboration. It is simply about not studying notes which are detailed if a simpler question in another note on the same topic was not learned/successful.
Perhaps it is possible with an add-on. For example, the idea is to cluster some number of cards together, and only present the n-1 notes if the designated “cluster parent” card is approved/learned. You could bury/unbury all n-1 depending on that condition, alas, I trust the devs know what they’re talking about, and if it’s not possible, fair enough.
If the straightforward way to achieve this is as you say simply by burying notes, then I’ll make use of that.
Cheers
The example use-case requires no further elaboration. It is simply about not studying notes which are detailed if a simpler question in another note on the same topic was not learned/successful.
Yes, but I never met a situation in which two cards were related by a “is about the same thing but one is harder” relation. It was always possible to create several cards on independent topics, that when learnt together, would allow one to understand the harder part of the topic.
If you make the cards from a single note (e.g., you have {SimpleQuestion} and {ComplicatedQuestion} fields and appropriate card templates, rather than multiple notes, then you might be able to use the Trigger and actions add-on to accomplish your goal. However, that feels rather unwieldy to me.
On some notes, I use a simple ‘basic’ card type, but in another instance, I am finding I want a more verbose card, a list using the Cloze overlapper card type. These two are technically about the same thing, but I’d like to experiment with chaining the more detailed latter note to the first. What @snoyes has said, in function, appears to achieve what I’m looking for, i.e. a rule-based triggering of some subset of notes depending on learning another card somewhere else in the same deck. I’m not an advanced user of Anki, so it is possible that what you’re pointing out is a misuse in the way I am approaching my Anki. I might be better served with making use of different card types.
Thanks both.
EDIT: looks like that add-on needs some work first and doesn’t work for cloze deletions or mobile app which are quite important for my use-case. I’ll rethink how I’m using card types instead.
Hi, I think I have the same question that @hambro
I have to study some long paragraphs, or lists with lots of items, each one a paragraph by its own right, and the way I do it is by breaking it down in many small pieces that I turn into an Anki note.
To study a paragraph, I put as a question the first words of the paragraph and, as its answer, the following words. I made up an example with a childish song:
Note 1:
Question: I’m a little teapot
Answer: Short and stout
But normally the paragraphs keeps going, so I have another card that is the previous question, and its answer is the next following words.
Note 2:
Question: I’m a little teapot
Short and stout
Answer: Here is my handle
Note 3:
Question: I’m a little teapot
Short and stout
Here is my handle
Answer: Here is my spout.
So, I like how Anki shuffles the cards, but I´d love knowing how to make that when the card from Note 1 is shown, the next one would be the card from Note 2, and so on, in I way I wind up learning the whole paragraph as a whole.
Thanks
I suggest you look at dedicated add-ons to create these kinds of notes. For your purpose, I can think of two that might be helpful. LPCG and IR. The first one is for when you are trying to learn by heart poems or songs, or in general any sequence of reasonably short sequences of word, for which the order and the precision are important. The second one is when you are trying to remember the content of articles, books, or texts in general. The main difference is that, with the second one, the main focus is on remembering what the text says, not the precise words it uses, nor the order in which is says that.
So, if you want to learn the childish song, I’d rather go for the first one, but if you are studying long paragraphs, and you don’t really mind forgetting the exact wording, I’d go for the second one.
However, be aware that both add-ons do not enforce any particular order for the card review (even if, as in your example, both can provide context). This means that you could be asked to learn something whose context is something you have not seen yet. It does not matter.
I think this is counterintuitive, but still, in the long run, the order in which the three notes you have given in example would be shown to the user does not affect their memorization. However, your notes are not optimal because the last ones contain too much information. Please refer to the LPCG add-on to see reasonable defaults.
First of all, @BlackBeans, thank you so much for your quick answer.
I´ve checked both options and, although I found them quite useful, they´re not entirely what I was looking for.
The problem is that I don’t have to learn, let´s say in the example, only one childish song, but some hundreds, and I think that the way in which LPCG works, that is actually the way I was already doing it, although manually, in the long run makes me lose the connection between the parts.
I mean, just to be clear, what I have to learn are a lot of articles of different laws.
Anyway, checking the options that you suggested has helped me to understand that Anki, simply, doesn´t work the way I was asking for. Although I think it could.
I mean, the principle behind the Spaced Repetition wouldn’t be too much compromise if Anki, instead of shuffling only cards, would shuffle groups of cards, so you learn that the data contained in those three or four cards go together.
Just to make myself clear, imagine that you have a long sentence, whose information that can be split in three different notes. You group those three notes, and then, you add the group to the deck, so it is shuffled along with the others.
When that group it´s delivered, you´re first asked the card of the first note, then the second, and finally the third one. The score of the group would be the worst of the three notes, so they go always together.
I think that would be a quite useful feature for Anki.
Thanks
That’s indeed an issue you might encounter, but the LPCG add-on has some features to prevent that. It worked for me, but I never used it to learn that much material.
For instance, LPCG provides some context for each sentence you have to learn, and also provides the line number. This is made for you to be able to have a “global” view of what you are learning, even though you learn it “locally”. What this means is that the context serves a local purpose: if I know I always succeed remembering a card with sentence A, then, if I can remember the sentences just before it, I know I will remember the sentence A. This is completely independent from other parts of the law article, and that’s why I called it “local”. Learning this way allows you to quickly enumerate all the sentences, even staring in the middle of the article, because you have trained yourself to only require few sentences of context to remember correctly, and because requiring that small amount of information is very lightweight for you brain, which can react quickly. On the other hand, having the line number allows you to understand approximately where you are in the law article and, while you only learn small bits by small bits, each time knowing only about “local” information, you will be able to “reconstruct” the whole article in your head. This means that, for instance, if I give you two sentences and ask which one happens first in the text, you won’t need to go through the whole article until you meet one of the two sentences, you will know right away which one comes first because you will know approximately where it lies. This also means that if you don’t really remember a sentence, and want to look for it, you will know right away where to look for.
So even though it might look like an automated way of doing what you already did, LPCG actually provides a mechanism to prevent you from losing the connection between each part of what you are learning, even though this mechanism is discrete. It might not be enough for you, but I would still give it a shot (also note that LPCG is configurable so you might need to tweak the settings to obtain a decent result).
On a second though, I also have an other idea. I had the same problem learning something completely different. The issue was that I had to learn how to do something, which required several steps, and so if I put to much information on a single card, it became too heavy to learn, and if, on the contrary, I spread it over several cards, it was manageable to learn but I would lose, in the end, some kind of general view on what I was doing. I knew how to go from one step to the next, but it was hard to tell exactly what I was doing at a given step.
I figured out later that the solution involves creating cards at each “level”. For instance, I had one cloze-deletion card which was a list of each part of the method, that did not go into detail. Then, for each part of the method, I had an other cloze-deletion card with the list of the steps required to complete that part, but still it did not go into details. Finally, for each step, I had a card that asked “How do I do [step]”? If you replaced this last kind of cards with the one generated by LPCG (or the one you already hand-made), you can obtain the desired result: you will learn each sentence by heart, but you will also learn by heart how they are related to each other through the overview cards.