Hello,
I am a new user of Anki. Having researched it a bit I am trying to figuring out, whether Anki can randomly show cards or such a behavior is against its algorithms.
So basically I am using it to learn a language. I fill the decks with the lessons, and to me the most useful option is to be able to display cards in both ways (for instance Spanish-English and reverse way), and obviously to hide the answers until guessed (or not). The possibility to mark the words regarding their rate of knowing is not so important (or not at all).
For instance, there are 250 words in the current deck. I want Anki to randomly display them; instead what it does is constantly reshuffles maybe 25-50% of the deck (although I usually hit the ‘3’ key - good, sometimes ‘2’ but rarely), so I waste much time on that repeating part of the deck and only after a while I get the rest. That reshuffled part of the deck is random, but that is not what I want, as the other part of the deck is not displayed at all until multiple repeating of the first part is done.
There is an option to assign random order when inserting the cards in the deck which I’ve activated but still I don’t get the desired result.
Statistics about hit/missed words is of not importance to me in this regard; I’ve learned languages before the Anki and I don’t want to waste time with Anki but actually to do other stuff. If Anki can supplement that, that’s fine.
You could use a filtered deck with the following settings:
Search: deck:“name of your deck”
Limit: 250
Cards selected by: Random
Reschedule cards based on my answers in this deck: no
When studying the filtered deck, if you do not want to see a card again, you have to rate it as ‘easy’, otherwise it will appear again later in the same session.
Once you are done studying the deck, you can click on “Rebuild” to start again.
N.B. I suggested to set Reschedule cards to ‘no’ because you said that “The possibility to mark the words regarding their rate of knowing is not so important (or not at all)” and “Statistics about hit/missed words is of not importance to me in this regard”.
That is a reasonable take. I would only like to point out that how you rate your cards is not so much about seeing statistics about correct and incorrect answers, but mostly it is important for scheduling the repetitions using Anki’s spaced repetition algorithm, which should help you study more efficiently and reduce your workload over time.
Thanks, I’ve not tried the filtered decks yet. This should solve my issue.
Regarding statistics, I prefer to prepare my own repetitions and would use Anki just as a nice way to actually hide the answers and to provide an interface to insert the content.
I am an old school and prefer to learn using traditional means and by far writing is my preferred way to do so (it’s just cumbersome sometimes to repeat lists of foreign words). Now and then I could use Anki’s shuffling mechanisms as well - I like the synchronization options and other stuff Anki offers.
I understand your preference for traditional learning methods, and I am glad to hear that the filtered deck option could help with your issue.
Just to add, if you ever decide to use Anki’s spaced repetition algorithm while still using these settings, I recommend adjusting the search parameter to deck:“name of your deck” (is:due OR is:new) . This will ensure that only due and new cards are included, so you won’t review cards ahead of time.