I recently enabled the “Burying” settings with an expectation to bring more diversity into each day’s studying. Instead, I found that my review process became much faster and easier, and less productive. It took some effort and research to understand why.
As I understand it, the system selects new cards and review cards regardless of any “siblings,” and then quietly buries siblings during study. I often have 6-8 cards per note, so a large percentage of new/review cards are getting buried. I’ve seen “225 due” suddenly change to “150 due” and it was most unexpected.
I suggest that the “Bury new siblings” and “Bury review siblings” should be taken into account when choosing the cards for each day. Or, to put it another way, the auto-burying should occur during the selection process for each day’s cards. That is:
When “Bury new siblings” is enabled, assuming daily limit of 50 new cards per day, I think the system should select up to 50 notes that have new cards to be learned, and then from each note select one card for today’s learning.
Likewise, when “Bury review siblings” is enabled, assuming daily limit of 500 review cards per day, I think the system should select up to 500 notes that include a “due” card, and again from each note select one card for today’s review.
I further suggest that the Browser should include an easy way to view (and possibly modify) “today’s new cards” and “today’s review cards,” which could help users to understand Anki’s choices and behavior. (Please let me know if this feature already exists! I haven’t found it.)
I think most people would interpret “New cards/day” and “Maximum reviews/day” to mean the actual number of cards to be studied, and I think the “New” and “Due” numbers should match the actual number of cards to be seen. But currently the “New” and “Due” numbers vastly overstate the number of cards to be seen – especially in my case where I generate many cards per note.
Using the v3 scheduler, today I have 199 new cards (which surely come from at least 40 different notes), but the system is only presenting 14 new cards for me to study. Perhaps some of the review choices are causing new cards to be buried, instead of the other way around?
Yesterday was even worse; out of 60 “new” cards chosen, I only got to see 4:
So, if I want 20 new cards per day, perhaps I should set my limit to 100 or higher, which seems out of line.
It’s true that I hadn’t noticed I was using the older scheduler, and v3 resolves the issue of “225 new” jumping to “150 new” but no, v3 doesn’t resolve the primary issues that I describe above.
I’ll mention that for a casual or new user, it may be difficult to understand the meaning of “New: 14 +46” and it’s not immediately obvious that “V3 scheduler” option is latest-and-greatest setting and not a legacy setting. Are new installations still running the older scheduler by default? I’m fairly new to Anki, and I’m sure that I never intentionally chose the older scheduler. Thanks!
If you adjusted your daily limits in the computer version of Anki, the deck options screen will have told you that with 20 new cards, your review limit should be at least 200. Your limit is too low, and will lead to a backlog of reviews over time. New cards are only introduced if the sum of them+reviews is under the daily limit:
I’m sorry, I misread your earlier post and thought you’d set the review limit to 100.
When determining which cards to bury, reviews are processed first. My guess is most of the pending new cards have a sibling that is due for review, preventing the new cards from being shown. Changing the new limit won’t help, as it’s the burying that is limiting the available cards. You either need to add more notes, turn off burying of new cards, or decrease the number of reviews you’re doing (not recommended)
That explains it, but it’s the opposite of the behavior that I expected. Perhaps there should be a user option to give higher priority to new cards.
For now, I will try disabling the “Bury new siblings” setting. Thanks!
If a review is delayed, you risk forgetting it. If a new card is delayed, there is no such risk, since you haven’t learnt it yet.
Disabling burying of new cards will allow the cards to be introduced more quickly, but may cause similar problems in the short term if multiple siblings are due for review on the same day.
I think new siblings are still being buried even after I disabled “Bury new siblings.”
The browser shows that I have at least 50 notes with new cards yet to be seen, and at this point (since I changed daily limit to 35 new cards) I would hope to study 35 of the new cards. In general, I want to learn my new notes shortly after I add them, and I don’t see any reason why reviews should be impeding the new material. Thanks!
Oops, you are correct, thanks! Apparently, I neglected to “Save” the new setting. (Possible minor bug: For some reason the “Save” button disappears when I scroll down to burial settings – after remaining visible while scrolling partway down.)
