Quickly changing field sequence in only one note? (advanced)

Anki Help
1

I am using Anki to learn French in English. Instead of just having one French word per note, I am including related words I would like to learn into the same note. All my notes therefore have this field architecture:

  • Field 1: French Word 1
  • Field 2: English Word 1
  • Field 3: Audio Word 1
  • Field 4: French Word 2
  • Field 5: English Word 2
  • Field 6: Audio Word 2
  • Field 7: French Word 3
  • Field 8: English Word 3
  • Field 9: Audio Word 3
    … the list goes on so that I have a maximum of 10 French / 10 English / 10 Audios per note, i.e. 30 fields in total.

Some of my notes only have one, two or three French words, many others however have eight or nine. Each note creates one card per French word, so that one note can create up to 10 cards. The front of each card only shows one English word, while the back shows the entire information of the note, which provides me with context for each now word that I learn. I try to keep the most important words at the top and the less important ones at the bottom of that list, the sequence is therefore important to me.

Now I have two questions:

  1. Say I come across a new French word that I would like to add to an existing note that already has many fields filled up. Of course I could simply add the new word (French / English / Audio) at the bottom of the list and would be done. However, often times I would like to add the new word at or near the top of the note (i.e. squeeze it in for example between the first and second block of fields). That requires me to manually cut, copy and paste all of the existing words downwards, which is a huge pain if you are doing this as frequently as I am. Also, by manually copying and pasting everything downwards, I am mixing up the study progress information per card. A second way of doing this is simply by “changing the note type” to the same note type and then reassigning fields up and down, however that is also quite painful if you have 30 fields per note. Does anyone know a more elegant way of doing this without losing the study progress information per card? For instance, is there a way of simply dragging fields up/down in the editor/browser without altering cards or anything similar?

  2. Can you think of a more sophisticated way of structuring my notes?

2

Currently there is no such functionality. What use would dragging a field from the bottom to the top have, if it’s not to alter the card scheduling? There’s no semantic meaning to the index of a field.

It is possible to shift the card scheduling up and down with an add-on. This would be useful if your card creation is dependent on lists. Say you got a list where each item creates a card. When you insert a list item at a specific index, you’d want to shift the scheduling of cards created by the following items up. Or if you remove an item, you want the scheduling to shift down, so the scheduling always sticks to the original question.

I don’t think this could be done with fields though. The main issue is Anki’s generalization for countless use cases. Not every field creates a card, so how would Anki’s editor “know” which scheduling changes to apply when fields are dragged around?

I think a note should always cover one distinct concept. You said you add related words to your notes. Wouldn’t you run the risk of creating duplicates, then? In my eyes, related concepts should be grouped by tags instead, because categories oftentimes overlap.

If I were you, I’d only add synonyms for the concept of the note, but not related words. I’ve had good experiences with picking the question out of a list of synonymous words/images/sounds - it keeps the cards fresh and reduces the risk of memorizing the question instead of the actual concept you want to learn.

2 Likes
3

Thank you so much. I did indeed listen to your advise and created separate notes with relates words. Thanks for taking the time, really helpful kleinerpirat!