Hi - I have noticed that cards I have reviewed are sometimes still marked as ‘new’. And when I look at ‘card info’ in the browse screen, it says reviews = 0 even though the dates/times of reviews are listed on the same screen. (I’ve attached a picture of an example).
This only seems to happen with a small portion of cards. It happens on day two or three after first learning the cards, and it seems to be related to cards I have struggled to memorize.
Is this a glitch in the system or am I misunderstanding how Anki categorises ‘new’ cards? Grateful for any advice; I’ve searched the forums but can’t find an answer to this. I am using Anki on a Windows laptop, synced to the App on an iphone. I have updated the software on both without fixing the issue.
Searching in the forums will not help. Read the manual instead.
In short, a new card becomes a learning card when you start learning it. All learning cards then go through a set of learning steps and at the end of it graduate to, what we call a review card. By default, the learning steps in Anki are 1m 10m which means when you press Good once, the card comes up again in a minute. The next time you press Good, it comes up again in 10 minutes. At last, pressing Good makes the card graduate with an interval we call graduating interval. This is set to 1d by default. Only after this, reviews are actually called reviews in Anki. This card you showed here has already become a review card. You should see the number of reviews increase on 14th June.
I hope this explanation satisfies you. And if it does, please read the manual. (You can see here if a link has been pressed and often it happens that the link to manual isn’t even clicked on by the OP. Sadly.)
( For whatever reason, this doesn’t apply if the person middle-clicks the link to open it in a new tab. It DOES apply if they CTRL-click the link, but it sometimes takes a refresh to see. – Looks like using the right-click context menu also bypasses the counter. )
(I saw Expertium’s enthusiastic explanation somewhere and then he provides a link to something (probably manual) and there are no clicks. It’s insulting if they actually didn’t click on it. It’s like I’m not reading anything, I’ll just come here and ask others)
( Yeah, I get that. I have to deliberately modify my behavior to get people to see I clicked anything because I use middle-click. That’s why I know about it not counting every click. )
Hi @sorata - thanks for your helpful answer. This certainly goes some way to clarifying things, particularly around what counts as a ‘review’.
One question remains though - I’d read the manual prior to posting and it says that ‘new’ cards are cards you’ve downloaded/entered but never studied (in the ‘types of cards’ section). Yet here I have cards I’ve seen and studied (up to graduation point) still being listed as new, which appears to contradict this.
This also makes me wonder: I have the new cards per day setting at 30, but if some of these each day are cards I’ve seen the day before, I may in fact be getting fewer new cards than this coming through. Thanks again for any thoughts.
You’re right about what counts as a new card. Where did you see those cards being “listed as new”? Can you clarify this?
No that should not happen. The only situation you will see fewer new cards is if you set the review limit low, and you don’t set “New cards ignore review limit” as positive.
I don’t think that other answer is correct. The “Reviews” in the upper part of the Card Info doesn’t mean just the Review stage – it counts how many times you’ve studied and graded the card in any stage.
Example [using FSRS, but it shouldn’t be different] –
You’re right that your Card Info is inconsistent. All of those reps should be counted above on the “Reviews” line. The card also shouldn’t list a “Position” in the New-queue anymore – it should have a “Due” date instead.
The first thing I would suspect looking at this is that you had a sync conflict on this card. Do you use multiple devices? Are you strict about syncing?
I see them listed as new on the browse screen, after selecting the relevant deck and the ‘new’ option on the left (example in the image below). The card for ‘diagnosis’, for example, is listed as a ‘new’ card here (9th on the list) but I in fact saw that card the day before.
I am fairly strict about syncing, as I’ll usually do it each day after finishing my reviews. But I’m not 100% so I guess possible this could be an issue. Although it was only a small number of cards that continued to be classed as ‘new’ after I’d first seen them, not the full set of 30 new cards from any one day. I’ve also noticed that the issue tends to be with cards I’ve struggled to get to the graduation stage - not sure why that would be, but felt like this correlation might be significant.
Thanks again.
Do you also do it before you start? You should be syncing when you open AND when you close/leave the app, on every device, every time. Most of the time, a little flexibility with that is okay. But if you have “changes” (edits, reviews, etc.) on multiple devices at the same time, you will always run the risk of a card ending up in the wrong state in the end.
That makes sense too, because it is specific changes to specific notes that are being synced. If only some of them have changes, only some of them would get conflicting data. And keep in mind, there are a lot of things that can mark a note as “edited” – even some things that add-ons do.
That’s the one that you posted the Card Info for above, right? It matches the “Position: 9” that you can see there. In the Browse window, you can show the Note Modified and Card Modified columns. Compare those date/time stamps with the date/times of the review history.
I don’t usually sync before starting. Perhaps that could be causing the issue. Just to confirm, is it necessary to sync between finishing one period of study and a later period of study, on the same device? I’d assumed syncing was to match up (in my case) the laptop where I enter new cards and the iPhone where I do all the reviews - so no need to sync in-between sessions on the iPhone if I wasn’t opening the desktop Anki in the meantime. But maybe that is incorrect?
Yes - this was the card I posted the info for above. The ‘card modified’ date/time match those of the latest review. The ‘note modified’ info matches the ‘added’ date, but I can’t confirm the ‘added’ time as it isn’t given on the card info screen.
Interestingly, the number of reviews of that card has increased since my earlier screenshot, and it now seems to be recording new reviews correctly. The number of reviews listed has gone up from 14 > 17, and the ‘review’ figure has gone up from 0 > 3. The first 14 that were previously missed still seem to be missing however, so the two figures don’t match. I’ll paste the card as it now looks:
Strictly speaking? No. But when you finish studying (or editing) can you always predict with certainty which device you’ll be using next? When you start studying (or editing), are you always sure which device you last used? I find it much easier to follow consistent rules than worry about that.
I’ll give you a different way to think about it – because the syncing happens indirectly, the version of your collection on AnkiWeb could actually be thought of as the “master” version. You probably always want to start from that master when you’re doing anything, and you probably want to update that master when you’re done.
I took a shot that might be fruitful, so I’m going to have to think more about why it wasn’t …
Thanks for the update about the Card Info. That the counters have now started increasing (correctly) certainly suggests that something went wrong before. Especially since this card graduated from Learn with that last review on 6-13 (you can tell because of the 1d interval and starting Ease being set) – but then on 6-14, it was clearly back in Learn (10m interval, no Ease)!
I join the recommendation of a Check Database, and I’d also like to see your version info – from Help > About > Copy debug info.
No red-flags there – which is good! A Check Database can help solve issues even if there’s nothing on-point in the responsive message. [The very-high-New-queue-numbers is just a suggestion, so that didn’t cause this.]
I’m hopeful that these few cards get re-introduced and go on to life long and happy lives! Hopefully with careful syncing, you won’t see this issue recur, but please let us know if you do.
Cool, thanks very much for your advice @Danika_Dakika, it’s much appreciated. I’ll make sure that syncing is regular and with a bit of luck that will sort this out.
