I am fairly new to Anki, using it the past couple months, but still trying to understand the scheduling system.
I have made my decks with sub-decks which I put my cards in and organise into topics e.g around 80 cards per sub-deck. I have been using these individually and picking topics when needed, however on one sub-deck (that I have previously used no issues) it is only testing one card category at a time e.g all 35 cards in ‘Learn’ and once they are learned and ready to be reviewed in a couple days time only then will it test me on ‘Due’ cards repeating before moving to new. It still hasn’t tested me on 12 ‘New’ cards I have but keeps repeating cards per category.
Im not sure why this sub-deck isn’t testing a mixture like the others, I have had no problems up until now it only seems to be this topic deck. I have also tried watching videos on YouTube and adjusting my card settings for the whole deck.
New cars/day + Maximum reviews: 9999, also turned New cards ignore review limit on. But, there has been no difference.
I haven’t been using the deck regularly, but only use them when needed so not sure if that has had an impact on the scheduling of cards. Also wondered if it is better to study the whole deck or each individual sub-deck in terms of how the card repetition works. Have loved using Anki so far and has really helped my recall!
[Not quite what you asked about, but that’s probably smaller than you want your subdecks to be. See: Adding/Editing - Anki Manual .]
Because you’re using so many decks/subdecks, you’ve increased your deck-management overhead, and there’s a number of things this could be –
If you’re clicking each deck separately to study, are you sure they are all using the same Options preset, with the same Display Order settings?
Learn/Relearn cards that have reached the end of their step delay will always come first. If you’ve got a big backup of cards in Learn/Relearn, it might be a while before you see other Review cards.
[That’s also a good sign you’re introducing too many New cards too fast. If you aren’t able to graduate all of your Learn/Relearn cards to/back to Review every day, those quickly start to interfere with everything, including with each other. Speak up if you need a plan for how to tackle that backlog.]
Deck limits interact between parent and subdecks, so depending on how you have those set, whether you have any deck-specific limits hiding in among your subdecks, and what deck you’re clicking to study – you might only have room for Review cards, not New cards, for some decks. Even “New cards ignore review limits” might not behave how you expect, because it respects cumulative limits too/
That likely does. If you’ve got a backlog of overdue cards every time you sit down to study, and a too-low max daily reviews limits, there are a lot of cards you might not be studying at all.
General advice for beginners (5 and 6 seem particularly relevant to you) –
Read Getting Started, so you know what Anki can do – and Studying, so you know how to use it. Skim the rest of the manual if you have time, so you will know where to find things when you want them later on.
Set one short (5m-20m) learning step and relearning step.
Optimize your FSRS parameters (and then come back monthly to re-optimize).
Study all of your due cards every day – no backlogs, no long re/learning steps to carry cards over to the next day.
Don’t introduce New cards at a faster pace that you can keep up with the reviews on. [Expect that your daily workload will be 8-10x your daily New card limit.]
Except for limits, backlogs, too-small decks, etc. – all the things I’ve talked about above – that mostly doesn’t matter. It comes down to personal preference. “Interleaving” cards from different topics is often beneficial for learning, but you don’t have to go crazy with it (e.g., you should probably study unit 1 and unit 2 together, but you don’t need to study Chemistry and French together.)