"Mixed Multi-Card” / Context-Linked Cards

Anki Suggestions
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PROBLEM: Currently, Anki treats each card as fully independent. However, some topics especially in fields like medicine, anatomy, or physics rely on context continuity. For example, one concept naturally leads into another, and breaking that chain disrupts learning flow.

Let’s say I have a set of related cards about a nerve:

Basic Card: “What is the name of the nerve that innervates X?”
→ You answer correctly → The linked cards follow

Image Occlusion: “Which of these nerves is X on the diagram?”
→ Only shown after you’ve answered the previous card (unless marked ‘Again’).

Basic Card: “Why is X located next to Y, and what problems are linked to it?”

Cloze Card: “The problem linked to X being next to Y is due to {{c1::the step Z}} during {{c2::XZY}}.”
Right now, I can make all of these cards manually, but I can’t make them behave as a contextual sequence where answering one unlocks or immediately follows into the next related card.

SUGGESTION:
A new option that lets users link cards together so they appear in sequence, like a short chain, rather than being randomly spaced.

You can group cards as a chain.

  • When reviewing, if Card A is shown and marked “Good” or better, Card B (its linked successor) can appear next — possibly right after it, or with a small adjustable delay.

  • If Card A is marked “Again,” Card B won’t show until Card A is relearned.

  • The linked cards can be of different types (Basic, Cloze, Image Occlusion, etc.), allowing rich context transitions.

This will help with keeping context when learning multi steps processes or anatomical relationships, it also reduces the need to cram too much into one card (for example I make basic or clozes cards that go “What is X, what step? Why? What happens when it ends?” and those are in my opinion terrible cards but its the only way the learn something that needs context, I understand cloze could work but not that much either because it’s either you put them all in Cloze 1 and if you get one wrong you redo the whole thing, or you put them in different clozes but then you can already see the steps that come before and after, which doesnt help. Having a system that lets you link cards that will follow each other in a sequence can definitely help since you’d have 1 question (instead of a huge card with a bunch of questions) and is in the sequence order you’d want it to be. Would be context aware spaced repetition without breaking the SRS model.

You could have the option “Show immediately after”, which means when you review a card that belongs to a chain (Card A for example) and you mark it as Good or Easy, the linked card (Card B) appears right after card A in the same session —> Goal is to preserve context contuinity

Or you could have the option “Prioritize next review”, which means instead of showing the next card immediately, Anki tags or prioritizes the linked card (Card B) so that it appears earlier than usual in the next review session or soon after —> Goal is to have a bit of spacing between the related cards, but allow for some other cards to pop up. Anki ensures that they appear close together in time rather than being scattered days apart

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But is a sequence really necessary for those? I never studied medicine, only psychology, but during my studies using simple basic questions & image occlussion was more than enough. Sure, there have been a lot of cards that ask about various aspects of the topic (like symptoms, treatment, affected parts in the brain, ect.), but I never found that to be an issue.

Besides: Will you, in a real-life scenario, actually find the info in such a sequence? Or might you be “randomly quizzed” for those tiny knowledge blocks anyways? At least in psychology we don’t get such a sequence in real-life situations, so we basically always have to know the info, even without prior focus on a certain topic.

Just trying to understand where that would be useful (e.g. we had to learn stuff like brain anatomy and I never felt the need for a sequentiell design like you propose).

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I’m in medicine so there’s a lot of context dependent reasoning chains, situations where knowing A only makes sense if you remember B first, for example, for example if you’re shown with first a basic card that asks “Which nerve innervates the muscles of facial expression —> Facial nerve (CN VII)” Then, an image occlusion of “Identify CN VII on this brainstem diagram” followed by a basic card that goes “A patient has a lesion of CN VII proximal to the geniculate ganglion, what symptoms do you expect –> paralysis of facial muscles, loss of taste in anterior 2/3 of tongue, …” and then you follow it with a cloze card “The combination of these symptoms helps localize the lesion to {{c1::the segment before the geniculate ganglion}}

In this example if they were to appear randomly spaced you could lose the clinical logic of it, if you’re suddenly asked about a lesion localization, if you don’t have the anatomical context fresh in yuor mind it won’t work, or at least it’ll be a guessing game. The goal behind this isnt to spoon feed sequences but to teach “integrated reasoning” or whatever you may call it. Think of it as some kind of “mental flowchart” where you start with the larger idea (what is the nerve), and progressively get more into details.

Another example would be in biochemistry, you have a card that’s first more general:
Cloze card: The first reaction of the urea cycle occurs in the {{c1::mitochondria}} and involves {c2::carbamoyl phosphate synthetase I}} followed by a basic card that goes deeper “What activates carbamoyl phosphate synthetase I —> N-acetylglutamate” followed by an image occlusion “Identify where carbamoyl phosphate enters the urea cycle on this diagram” and you could go on and on, that’s to make sure that you truly understand the cycle to its fullest extent. You could even make a card having you detail the exact path that say a glucose would take for example if it entered the glycolysis and then the citric acid cycle but instead of being used for energy its rerouted in the gluconeogenesis path. I’d rather have a bunch of sequential cards saying questions about a particular step than a big card that has me explaining from beginning to end and have to redo it because I accidentally said it used vessel A instead of vessel B to enter the mitochondria, at least i’d be stopped dead in my tracks where I failed with a card sequence (also obviously the multi card type would help depending on the context, might need an image to show or some more context where you want to follow with a cloze, etc..)

I hope i don’t sound like im angry or anything its just im doing a few things at the same time right now I didnt really check the tone this reply gives, if so my bad

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You do not sound angry, no worries.

I think I understand your reasoning. I personally think sequentiell cards aren’t needed for your examples (and I personally didn’t “lose the clinical logic of it”) but that might be due to interindividual differences.

You explained your usecase quite thoroughly, thank you for that! Maybe someone will implement this in an addon or directly in anki thanks to your request here.

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There are sequential cloze templates out there that might do what you want. See for example this topic Cloze one by one uncovering.

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Yeah but the whole thing isnt about cloze only, it would be a bunch of different card types showing in sequences

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You can probably modify the templates to show the type of questions you want, instead of cloze.

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You’re right they might not always be needed for these scenarios because with time it just becomes natural to know this and that, but many of us are still students and so we need to learn certain facts to get the points needed on the exams, but in my opinion it can also helps memorize certain mechanisms or pathways, either until your exam or until it become natural. My idea and the way I function is to learn for example in biochemistry what happens with X or Y when taking the entire path from A to B, learning everything it goes through individually and then being able to make links between the path it takes and the general cycle it goes through. Its like following a single car on a highway interchange, then another one that goes in the same interchange but on a different road and so on until you can paint the whole picture of that highway interchange because you know each individual parts, as opposed to learning straight on its complex pathway

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