For some years now I’ve been able to study subdecks one at a time. E.g. with this subdeck structure:
Personal
→ History
→ Korean
→ Spanish
I could click on Personal and it would show me all History cards, then all Korean cards, etc.
This appears to be totally broken after the recent app update. I did also today rearrange my subdeck structure significantly which could have also had an effect, but that doesn’t seem like it would have scrambled everything so badly.
It appears that now clicking a top-level deck will show cards to study in totally random order. This is very bad because seeing individual cards from random subjects repeatedly has low fluency, it forces constant context switching (it’s very unlike, say, having a conversation in Korean). Or when studying for a math and chemistry finals, I wouldn’t pull random flashcards from a combined deck - I’d study for one then the other.
The only way I see right now of getting the old study method would be to click every subdeck individually. I have many subdecks though so that isn’t feasible - it would be a lot of distraction going back to the deck list dozens of times every day.
How can I get the old study order back? Thank you!
It was a deliberate change in the 2.1 scheduler, as there was a lot of demand for mixing reviews, and a single general subject with lots of subtopics is common. For now, you’ll need to downgrade to the old scheduler using an older Anki version if this is a dealbreaker for you.
There are no technical reasons why the v3 scheduler couldn’t support this case, so I will look into adding that as an option in the next alpha.
Thanks for the info. Yes, a simple (UI-wise and I hope dev-wise) checkbox or dropdown with “Study one subdeck at a time” vs “Shuffle all subtopics”, or similar, would do exactly what I need.
I appreciate the consideration and will watch for that in v3. In the meantime I downgraded just fine per your advice and 2.1.40 is still great for my needs.
Also I really appreciate that you took the time to create a downgrade path for a situation like this!
Wow, thanks. I can’t get it working though - maybe I haven’t found the right option. I turned on “2021 Scheduler” then selected “Review sort order => Deck, then due date”. The release notes refer explicitly to “subdeck” but I didn’t find anything explicitly saying that in the options.
Is that what you’re referring to or is there a different option? Would be happy to help out with Alpha testing here.
Yep, that should work. Did you confirm the change had been made by returning to the deck options again? The setting will be taken from whichever deck you click on.
Respectfully I completely disagree. Deck-by deck learning for my most heavily-studied topics (mostly languages) is much more efficient in my 10+ years of experience. I can see how interleaving could work for some narrow cases and perhaps some people would like it all the time. However there’s a reason when studying, we go to a Korean class, then a math class, etc. rather than try to mix it all into one big potpourri lesson.
When in an actual conversation I also don’t say three words in Korean, one word in Spanish, then five in Russian there are conversation modes in real life that deck-by-deck learning parallels well. Similarly, a surgeon performing a job in real life doesn’t suddenly stop to recall historical dates or wine varietals. Real life is focused on contexts.
I appreciate your thoughts, but your dismissive tone is unnecessary. Thanks!
there are conversation modes in real life that deck-by-deck learning parallels well. Similarly, a surgeon performing a job in real life doesn’t suddenly stop to recall historical dates or wine varietals. Real life is focused on contexts.