Learning a new sibling card based on the knowledge of a previous sibling card for a given note

Anki Help
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Learning a new sibling card only after I have mastered the previous sibling card for a given note.

I am studying German, and my note contains multiple card types:

  1. Direct translation of the verb’s infinitive
  2. Reverse translation of the verb’s infinitive
  3. Direct translation of the past tense verb form in Perfekt
  4. Reverse translation of the past tense verb form in Perfekt
  5. Direct translation of the past tense verb form in Präteritum
  6. Reverse translation of the past tense verb form in Präteritum
  7. Writing infinitive, etc.
    As you can see, the cards are grouped into meaningful blocks of two types: direct and reverse. However, this note cannot be split into several independent notes, as they all belong to a specific verb.

Regarding studying:
I want Anki to add new cards for study only after I have mastered the previous card. For example, unless I know Card 1 well (either with a retention rate of 90% or a maturity indicator >21 days), Anki won’t add new card 3, 4 after 2, 5 after 3, 6 after 4, etc. In other words, there is a new entity introduced: a dependency on the type of card, requiring the previous one to be mastered before showing the next.

The current Burying setting doesn’t align with this logic. It simply delays the display of a new card to the next day, regardless of whether I have mastered the previous one or not. This way, I might end up studying all cards of a note at the same time. I’d like a more structured, discrete approach.

Could you suggest how to set this up in Anki or recommend any add-ons that can help achieve this?

I have:
New card gather order = Deck
New card sort order = Order gathered

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There isn’t any way to automatically trigger that in Anki (I’ll let others respond about add-ons) – but I’m going to suggest to you that it’s not necessary either.

First, I don’t think the triggers you propose are productive, or necessarily good measure of mastery.

Retention = 90% isn’t a dependable measure for a card. If you study a card once and get it right once, your Retention of that card is 100%. If you study a card twice and get it wrong once, your Retention of that card is 50% and it will be a long time before you get back up to 90%. Lapses are a part of learning, and shouldn’t be used as a signal of lack of progress.

“Mature” – which means the current interval is over 21d – isn’t a rank that a card reaches, never to return. It’s just a name we use to separate longer intervals from shorter intervals.

For both of those, what should happen if the “trigger”-sibling reaches that line and then drops back? Obviously the un-suspended/already introduced card shouldn’t be re-suspended, because it’s already on its own learning path. And a lapse in the trigger-sibling isn’t necessarily the sign of a problem.

Interestingly, you’ve already got a natural spacer built into your note type – the odd/even card types. Card 1 will be introduced. Card 2 won’t be introduced until there’s a day without Card 1. Then Card 3 won’t be introduced until there’s a day without Card 1 or 2 – so it will never be the next day after Card 1.

If you want more space, you can get that pretty easily if you’re willing to do it in a more static way. You can use subdecks to sort these cards into “delay” groups – 1-2 go in Deck A, 3-4 in Deck B, 5-6 in Deck C, etc. [And use “Deck Override” for sorting the cards of any notes you add in the future.]

Start only introducing New cards from Deck A. Do that for 20 or 30 (or whatever you like). Then adjust your subdeck daily New card limits to start introducing from Deck B – but no faster than you’re introducing from A, to maintain the delay. That will give you a chance to establish a solid foundation with 1-2 before you see 3-4 – and so on with 5-6 in Deck C – but without requiring a strict dependency between the cards.

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Perhaps I didn’t express myself clearly or used the wrong metrics, but I think you understood the essence correctly: starting to study a new block of information for a given note only after sufficiently mastering the previous block.

I agree that uncertainty arises when a seemingly mature card is forgotten while the subsequent card has already started being studied and has followed its own learning path. But I believe the “secret” lies in which metric to use as the threshold for determining that a card is sufficiently well-studied. In the end, I can choose a deliberately higher metric threshold. For example, instead of 21 days, I could set it to 50 days.

At the moment, I’ve found a workaround by adding extra fields to the template and specifying that if a field is empty, the card will not be created.
However, this approach, firstly, requires additional management of these fields (which adds extra cognitive load and wastes “mental fuel” that could otherwise be used for studying the words themselves). This is probably the main reason to automate the process.
Secondly, it doesn’t give a complete picture of the number of cards, as not all cards are created.

Alright, following your advice, I will create subdecks, configure deck substitution, and specify the number of new cards for each subdeck.

  1. But in this case, I need to be sure that the order of (new) cards in these subdecks will be identical. And I can’t guarantee that. If the order gets disrupted, as you understand, different types of cards from different verbs will start showing up, and the “frontline” of studying words in the desired order will be disrupted. For example, I might start studying one verb with card type 1, another verb with card type 3, a third verb with card type 5, and so on. This might not be critical for language learning, but for now, I want to maintain some order.
  2. Secondly, if the number of new cards in these subdecks is fixed (e.g., 6), but at the initial stage there aren’t enough verbs to study this type of card, what then? Anki will need to display some additional cards to fill the number of new cards. Those cards do exist, so why not show them to me?
    For example:
    Number of new cards in all subdecks = 6
    image
    image144×149 1.24 KB

You’ll agree that I wouldn’t see just 4 new cards of type 2, 3 new cards of type 5, and one card of type 7. Instead, I’d see cards from other verbs where card 1 hasn’t been studied yet. I hope you understand what I tried to describe.

Managing this manually seems complicated.
Ideally, I’d like to set it up once and be done with it.

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There is no way to schedule cards on the basis of your retention rate or card maturity as far as I know. However, there is a partial solution:

Create one note but use Deck Override to put each card type in a different deck. So deck 1 will have nothing but card type 1 for each of the verbs you are studying, deck 2 will have only card type 2, etc.

Create the notes in the order that you want to learn the verbs, then set preferences so that new cards are displayed in the order of creation.

Study the decks in order, starting a new deck whenever you feel ready to move on to the next card type.

You would have to change the number of new cards a deck presents you each day based on how far you’ve gotten with your verbs so far.

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Delaying creating the sibling card – creating and suspending the sibling card (to be unsuspended later) – delaying introduction of the New sibling card using subdecks – you can see how those are all similar ideas. Yes, whichever appeals most to you and your workflow is the one you should go with.

I think you can. By default, all of the siblings should have the same New-queue number when they are created. If you’re studying them from the same parent deck, they will all use the same New card gather order. As long as that order is non-Random (so Deck, Ascending, or Descending), each subdeck will progress in the same order.

Sorry, I definitely don’t understand what you’re trying to describe! But I’m going to ask you to take a look at how parent and subdeck limits interact first – The Anki v3 scheduler - Anki FAQs .

I can tell you is that if you’re delaying decks B, C, and D – you wouldn’t face the situation where all of these cards would be in contention at the same time to be the next New card introduced. Card 1 for verbs 1-6 would have been introduced weeks ago in deck A, and you will just have started the tap on deck B, with decks C and D still having 0 limits. So in your example, you’d have some deck A card 1s, from verbs 50-55, and then deck B card 3s from verbs 1-6.

I didn’t factor into my suggestion that some of the cards wouldn’t exist – I don’t remember you mentioning that. (That would be a big consideration in any automated plan too – if the earlier card doesn’t exist, what would trigger the later card.) If that’s the situation, then things would need to be configured differently to make sure the later decks didn’t catch up with the earlier decks.

My suggestions aren’t the only ones, and they aren’t even necessarily the best ones for everyone, so have a look at the other approaches being discussed in this other thread – Bury siblings untill the older sibling is mature? - #8 by jambamboleo . I haven’t looked into those ideas, but it seemed so close to your question, I didn’t want you to miss it!

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