How can I go about on improving the current note? What’s the best way of having this note including a separate question along the lines of ‘Who painted The Old Checkered Inn in Summer’? Bearing in mind that this deck is general knowledge so painter’s will only make up a handful of notes.
And just to give you one other example without visuals…
Front: What is ageusia?
Back: Loss of taste functions in the tongue.
Ideally I would like this note to also produce something along the lines of:
Front: What is the loss of taste functions in the tongue known as?
Back: Ageusia.
The simplest way is to just create a new card type (click the Options menu at the top-right of the screen) and add additional fields for the reverse question since it’s quite a general deck.
You have to fill the fields manually of course, there is no magic.
Or you can find some patterns common to each subset of the notes and make new note types for them. This is easy to do for definitions like in your second example.
You can make a note type with the fields “Term” and “Definition” and rephrase the question to make it suitable for reverse cards (e.g. “ageusia” goes in the Term field, and the definition in the Definition field without modifications).
Maybe I’m overthinking it now. I’ve created the below (assuming I’ll be able to generate a max five questions from a topic). So my thinking is that whenever I come across a trivia question I’d like to expand on, instead of messing with the original note, I’ll generate a separate note (which will populate up to five cards).
Is this a sensible enough way of going about this? What’s the argument against just creating individual notes as needed? As in, considering the wide range of topics, I’m not sure if there will be much of a pattern. So if I go this route I could create one basic card, maybe another, and a cloze deletion card, and a image occlusion card, etc…
This approach allows you to take advantage of Anki’s sibling burying to prevent cards made from the same note (siblings) from showing in the same session, while at the same time to have related cards in one place in the editor where you can make quick edits to all questions.
I personally prefer making separate notes (even without making specialized note types) because notes with too many fields are not nice to look at in the editor, and I feel this approach will force you to think about how much each given piece of information relates to another for it to be worth going in the same note. This is easier to think through when you only have like two cards for each note, but it may get harder for more cards, and you may feel the urge to add yet more fields to be able to sneak in more questions in the same note, which is bad if only because managing note types can be a pain.
Additionally, some changes to note types like adding new fields require full syncs to AnkiWeb (not a concern if you don’t use it, but just saying).
So I suggest you try if maybe something like the basic type in your first screenshot along with the cloze type will work just fine for you.
You can always organize your notes through other means like tags and decks and look up related questions with Anki’s search functionality.
Ah, that makes sense re burying related cards. Knew I was missing something!
I get that too many fields may not be nice to look at but I guess ideally I would only be looking at the editor the one time, i.e. when creating the note, and after that I’ll be just reviewing the cards it generates.
I tried downloading some shared decks to give me some ideas but struggled to find anything that really fits what I’m trying to do. Don’t know if you have any suggestions?
Also, this may not be for this thread, but as I said I’m using a shared deck. I’m studying this deck in order of cards added. The problem I see at the moment is that if I come across a note from the shared deck that I find interesting, I’ll then go and create a separate note to add additional information I’d like to learn. However, I won’t see this card for x number of weeks/months. Is there a way to manipulate Anki to get it to show these new cards sooner?
I regularly edit bad questions while reviewing to rephrase them or remove extraneous info and “refactor” them into multiple notes. If you can make good questions in the first ry, then good for you
If you actually find your approach suitable for you go for it. I think there is mostly no right and wrong way here, so choose what is convenient for you.
You can always restructure your notes (maybe with some effort) if you find a better approach. Anki is quite flexible when it comes to note types.
This is actually a point in favor of your approach of keeping related cards together in the same note as Anki gives siblings the same due number so you’ll see related cards soon if you adopt that approach.
But you have to convert the shared deck notes to a note type suitable for that like your “Basic - General Knowledge” note type in your screenshot.
