Setting up Anki for a history/language learner

Anki Help
1

Hullo!

I’ve just heard about Anki and FSRS and my mind is truly overwhelmed!

The problem is that I don’t even know where to start. I think I’d use Anki for memorizing historical dates and learn new words to expand my vocabulary.

My question is: How would you create the decks? One deck for one historical topic? eg. WW2, American Civil War etc.? How would you organize and categorize foreign vocabulary decks?

Thanks for helping, and sorry if this thing had been previously discussed before!

Berc

2
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I suspect a single deck for history would be all that you need, and then use tags for things like topic or era – Adding/Editing - Anki Manual . Think of decks for organizing a study session – as the place you click to study a group of cards together. Unless you’re going to regularly study WW2 separately from other eras, it wouldn’t need a separate deck.

One deck for the language, and then tags for anything else you want to be able to find them by – part of speech, topic/category, chapter in your curriculum, etc.

General advice for beginners –

  1. 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.
  2. Enable FSRS.
  3. Set one short (5m-20m) learning step and relearning step.
  4. Optimize your FSRS parameters (and then come back monthly to re-optimize).
  5. Study all of your due cards every day – no backlogs, no long re/learning steps to carry cards over to the next day.
  6. 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.]

[Duplicate post: Reddit ]

4

Thanks for the detailed reply! I’ve read the manual and I’ve got some questions!

  1. What parameters should I give to maximalize FSRS? The manual just explains how things work, but it does not recommend any setting.
  2. What to do if I want to learn a specific topic within the History deck? For example, let’s say there’re 20 cards about the American Civial War and I only want to review those 20 cards and not the whole History deck which contains 500 cards.
5

You don’t give parameters to FSRS. You click Optimize and it determines the parameters for you based on your review history. [See #4 above.]

If you don’t have very much history, start studying using the default parameters, and you can try optimizing in a few weeks.

If you tag them, as I suggested, you can use a Filtered deck to study cards outside of their usual grouping. You can build your search filter in the Browse window, so you know what cards to expect, then Edit > Create Filtered Deck.

6

Thanks for the reply!

Studying the filtered decks counts in the stats and in the algorythm, or FSRS ignore them?