New Card Limit increase doesn't work

Scheduling
1

I’m using Anki desktop Version 2.1.60.

Ankiweb FAQ says: “It is possible to increase the number of new cards that are presented each day by adjusting the deck options or using the custom study feature”.

But this does not work.

I create a new deck with 101 cards. They are easy, just for fast review, I want to review them all Now.

But Anki won’t let me do that. I have 83 New, 18 Learn, 0 Due. I increase Default options Daily Limits to 200 New cards / day, with Maximum reviews / day at 2000. That makes no difference at all. The only effect Daily Limits has is if I reduce it to less than 18 (Learn), then New is reduced, but Learn does not change. For example if I set it to 17, then I get 82 New with 18 Learn. This New card / day limit setting seems to only work to reduce the cards in the New count, but doesn’t do anything to move New cards to Learning cards.

It seems like it should be a simple straightforward setting, if I increase Daily Limits New Cards, then I should get more new cards in Learn - but I don’t. Is this a bug (“feature”), or is there some obscure setting that will make it work, or am I missing something obvious? I did a lot of internet research and don’t find anything about this case, except occasional articles saying it does work.

I eventually found a workaround. I created a Custom Study deck, with the filter set to Study by card state or tag - New Cards Only, with option Reschedule cards based on my answers in the deck. Then I walk through all the new cards fast (space, 1). Now delete the Custom Study deck, and viola, in my original deck all 101 cards are in Learn, no cards in new.

2

I’m not sure if I have understood correctly, but what you describe seems OK to me. You have 101 cards, and anki is showing you 83 + 18 = 101 cards

It doesn’t matter if you increase your daily limits, the program can’t show you more than 101 cards because there are only 101 cards.

You probably know that new cards are cards you haven’t seen, while learning cards are cards that you have already seen at least once:
https://docs.ankiweb.net/studying.html#study-overview

3 Likes
3

Thank you for response! Maybe I did not explain clearly. I created a deck with 101 cards and I want to study them ALL NOW, instead of only 20 cards today, 40 tomorrow, 60 the day after, etc. Initial study moved 18 New cards to Learn cards, but then would not show me any new cards. After setting deck options Daily New Card Limit to 200, all 101 cards show as sum of New + Learn, but Anki would still NOT show me any more of the New cards to study, only the Learn cards.

I created a new test deck to demonstrate, with 40 cards. The deck initially shows with 20 New cards, after changing deck Daily New Card Limit to 200, all 40 cards show.

This time however, Anki did allow me to review all 40 new cards, moving them to Learning. I do not understand why my first deck was limited, Anki did not show me all New cards, so they didn’t get moved to Learning. Until I did my workaround: Custom Study filtered to New cards only, review every card.

But since now I can not demonstrate the problem, operation seems to be as expected, the original deck now has all cards as Learning (after doing my workaround), we can consider this case closed.

Thank you for the link:

  • New refers to cards that you have downloaded or entered in, but have never been studied before.
  • Learning refers to cards that were seen for the first time recently, and are still being learnt.
  • To Review refers to cards that were previously learnt, and now need to be reviewed so you don’t forget them.
    To start a study session, click the Study Now button. Anki will proceed to show you cards until the cards to be shown for the day have run out.
4

In retrospect, I think there was another issue with the Scheduler. Now I understand New Card Daily Limit parameter only adjusts how many New cards that can be in New category, it has doesn’t affect whether or not the cards are presented for Learning (and then moved to Learning Category). My issue was even though my cards were in New category, they were not being presented for learning. Scheduler kept presenting cards that were in Learn category instead of New category. Maybe because I kept marking them “Again” (to keep them in Learn category), Scheduler kept pulling them up after Learning steps time (one minute by default) instead of pulling up New cards.

5

I’m not sure if this is what you’re looking for, but if you want to turn your learning (orange) cards into new (blue) cards again, you can use the forget command.

https://docs.ankiweb.net/browsing.html?highlight=forget#cards

1 Like
6

Yes, thank you, that option “forget” cards is sort of useful to move cards back to new. But it is also a limited option!

Goal is to, for any deck, move ALL the cards to New, so they can be all be reviewed, and in original order. Like if you create a new deck and want to check all the cards are correct. Or you want to “spin through” all the cards in original order.

That can be impossible in Anki. The reason is that Anki associates previous learning with every card, and those associations can not be deleted. Even after “forgetting” a card, right click on it, select “Info…” and you see that previous learning is still retained. I find no way to delete previous learning from an Anki card. And if Learning has value of e.g. 4 (Easy, 5 days), then the card will NOT be shown as New (even if card is “forgotten”, even with forget option “Reset repetition and lapse counts”, even if deck option set to high number of new cards), and will not be possible to review. Until the Rating time is up. Even if I delete all the cards in a deck and re-import them, so “Info…” doesn’t show any learning, the cards are still not able to show as New. Anki apparently keeps this data deep in its database.

Note: “forgetting” a card adds a Learning entry to its “Info…” with a Type of Manual and a Rating of 0. But it doesn’t override previous Type of Learning with Rating of (0,1,2,3,4) entries.

The only workaround I found for this is to delete the deck entirely and re-create it. I maintain all my decks in an import friendly text format, so this is easy for me to do.

It was a long frustrating process to figure this out. While Anki is a great tool using defaults, Anki should have a method to review all the cards in a deck in the original order without having to destroy and recreate that deck.

Maybe there is another way, all the cards can be moved to “Due” (using “Set Due Date” or “Reposition”). But then they don’t show in order. Is there a setting to force Due cards to be presented in original order despite Learning status?

7

I discovered that while I can’t force all the cards to be in original order (without destroying and recreating the deck), I can cause them all to be available for review. The method is to make them all Due, today. In Browse, select all the cards, Right Click, Cards, Set Due Date. I would still like a way to easily review them in original order. Now I use a PowerPoint deck, linear page-by-page.

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