Suggestion: Learning Queue Card Limit

Anki Suggestions
1

Hello @dae. This is an ancient suggestion which I hope you breathe some life back into.

There should be a limit to the number of learning cards in rotation at any given time.

Suppose you have ended up with 300 cards interday learning cards from yesterday. You fail Card 1 and can only see it again until you have went through the rest of all 299 interday review cards. By then you would have forgotten card 1 and the cycle continues. That is too painful and demotivating.

Therefore, it would not be a bad idea if there is a limit to how many learning cards a person could juggle with back and forth at any given moment.

  • Splitting those 300 into managable chunks of 5 cards at a time is much more feasible that trying to get through the 300 cards at once.

  • Anki could recognize the number of consecutive unique cards that have been failed and when that number reaches 5 (or whatever number a person assigns that to), Anki doesn’t move forward until the next rating of all those 5 cards becomes Good.

1 Like
2

Lately I’ve been doing reviews a bit similar to that purpose by filtered deck, like this:

+ Parent deck (limit 20)
 - Filtered deck (no reschedule, relearning 200+)

Review 20 cards and increase today’s card limit with Custom Study when the card count reaches 0.

  • Custom stuy → Increase today’s review card limit

As you say it seems almost impossible to remember when there are 100+ relearning cards. In my case I can memorize 10-20 cards.

2 Likes
3

Yes I do the same, but filtered decks are inconvenient since you have to keep making them which if you have hundreds of relearning cards it would be not viable. Also you would want the chunk of cards you finished to get back into rotation whereas with a filtered deck, when they run out they run out.

Make it built into Anki.

1 Like
4

So far one way I can think of to make creating such a filtered deck as easy as possible is to set the learning steps for the relearn cards to one day, not 10 minutes.

  • Deck option → Lapses → Relearning steps [ 1d ]

This auto hides all the relearning cards that I press Again until tomorrow. So my relearning cards will not grow too large and all cards with even one mistake will be hidden until tomorrow.

But I can’t memorize the cards I forgotten, so after I finished all of today’s reviews I use Custom Study to make a deck of the cards I made mistakes on today and relearn these cards.

  1. Reviewed all cards in the deck
  2. Deck Overview → Custom Study (bottom button) → Review forgotten cards

This allows me to move all the cards I press Again to the custom deck, so all the relearning cards are not a burden on the original deck until I re-review them.

Custom decks can limit the number of cards but when I re-create a custom deck there is a problem with cards that have already been reviewed going into the deck again, like this:

  1. Review 20 cards in Custom Study.
  2. Review is done, so recreate the Custom Study.
  3. Reviewed cards are duplicated.

So I put a custom deck in the parent deck and limit the number of cards by the deck preset.

  1. Put Custom Study in the parent deck to limit cards.
+ Parent deck (limit 20)
 - Custom Study (no reschedule, relearning 200+)
  1. Review 20 cards and increase today’s card limit with Custom Study when the card count reaches 0.
    • Custom stuy → Increase today’s review card limit
  2. Repeat until all cards are reviewed again.

As you say it is a bit of a bother to create such a parent deck all the time, so in my case when I create a custom deck I rename it and put it in the parent deck.

  1. Schedule all cards I pressed Again to tomorrow.
  2. Finish reviewing all cards.
  3. Create a custom study deck. (shortcut key: C)
  4. Open deck options. (key: O)
  5. Rename the deck.
    • “Custom Study Session” → “Custom::Study Session”
  6. Return to Anki’s Home and select the parent deck (key: D)

If I add “::” and rename the deck in this way ‘Custom’ becomes the parent deck and “Study Session” auto becomes a child deck so I can auto reuse the deck preset of “Custom”. If the child deck has a duplicate name a “+” will be auto added, like this:

+ Custom (Preset, max 20)
  - Custom::Study Session (no reschedule, relearning 50+)
  - Custom::Study Session+
  - Custom::Study Session++
  - Custom::Study Session+++
  ...

So far this way has worked well for me, I have never had reviews get stuck by too difficult re-learning cards so it is comfortable. The custom study deck is created after the completion of the review so it does not interfere.

I was thinking of developing an add-on to do this but didn’t because it was possible to do something similar only with native Anki, Custom studies work on mobile so they are more convenient than add-ons that work only on desktop.

The disadvantage of this way is that the FSRS algorithm basically does not support learning steps longer than one day, so I’m not sure how the algorithm works. Also if I relearn the deck by excluding from the deck the cards I pressed Again, the percentage of correct answers in the deck may be too high (in short this may cause problems similar to misusing Hard, if so the review interval will be too long, not sure exactly.)

I think maybe such problems rarely occur for the average Anki user.

Since you seem to review a lot of cards every day, you probably have more than a few hundred relearning cards daily. But the average Anki user reviews only a few hundred cards at most, so I think the number of re-learning cards is a few dozen at most (according to the leaderboard data about 60-70% of Anki users have less than 300 cards daily). If so they can just review them and be done with it. (basically I also only use the above way when I’m stuck, not always.)

There are many other ways to reduce the workload, so I think power users can solve the problem themselves. (e.g. bury, suspend, divide deck, reduce desired retention, edit cards, exclude leech)

5

I still dont really understand how this method helps tackling the long learning card queue problem.

Ideally, you don’t want to give false ratings to a card by scheduling them to 1d.
If you have a total of 200 learning cards and you divide them into 10 cards, making you need a total of 20 filtered decks. That is too gratuitous.

Not only that, but when you finish a set of 20 cards in the time being and go to another set of 20 cards, you would forget when you should be coming back to the previous 20 cards if they are due again by some <1d interval (e.g. in 5 min while you are still reviewing the second set of 20 cards).

So doing this manually is really not efficient is what I am trying to say. So unless I misunderstood something you say (I still don’t understand clearly how you are doing this), I think it would be for the better if Anki has some built in mechanism to get though 50+ relearning interday cards easily.

1 Like
6

Are they actually interday learning cards? Or are they short-interval learning cards that are leftover from yesterday.

You mention posting about this before, but you didn’t give a link to that post.

Just like last time, the issue you’re having doesn’t sound like it’s a problem with actual interday learning cards – it’s with not graduating your Learn/Relearn cards to Review yesterday.

If these are actually interday learning cards, you can fix this in your Options: Deck Options - Anki Manual .

You should not expect there will be a change to how Anki handles short-interval learning cards to accommodate this. You have available to you all of the alternatives Shige has suggested.

1 Like
7

Are they actually interday learning cards? Or are they short-interval learning cards that are leftover from yesterday.

I stand corrected. They are leftover cards that carried onto the next day.

You should not expect there will be a change to how Anki handles short-interval learning cards to accommodate this. You have available to you all of the alternatives Shige has suggested.

I am not “expecting” anything. The whole point of this is to suggest making it built into Anki for the lack of a better alternative. I am already doing what Shige does more or less (unless I am misunderstanding or missing something he said). So unless there are genuine reasons why this suggestion should be ignored, I deem it valid.

Instead of shunning me, try other ways of being helpful and I would really appreciate if you’d stop comment on my posts if you really want to be of help for me, provided that I haven’t made an affront against the guidlines of this forum of course.

1 Like
8

I didn’t say there was anything invalid about you putting this up as a suggestion, or that your suggestion should be ignored. I’m responding to your suggestion to let you know it’s not likely to be implemented. Just like I responded to you last year to let you know what was happening. You can label it as “shunning” if you want to, but I’m responding to your posts (when they need responding to) – not ignoring them.

It’s unlikely the entire framework for studying Learn/Relearn cards will be rewritten to accommodate this niche studying method – so I’m encouraging you to be realistic and use the tools you have available.

1 Like
9

I too think it would be useful if Anki had such a built in feature, but it seems to me that it would be difficult to develop such a feature without using a filter deck.

If the queue is limited to 5-10 cards the user will soon have 0 cards to review, because the learning step for the default relearning cards is 10 min. Not reviewing anything for 10 min is inefficient.

Instead, if the queue reaches 0 it auto adds the waiting relearning cards, in this case the user can review 100+ cards within 10 min, so the cards will be 100+ anyway and the reviews will become stuck.

So I think such a queue limit works only when the relearning step is 0-1 min, if the relearning step is 1 min the user can review only about 10-20 cards. But this is not the default setting so I think it’s a niche way.

1 Like
10

When you create the parent deck and you put the filtered decks under it, which presets do the filtered decks follow.

  • The preset of the temporary parent deck
  • Or the preset of the original parent deck of these child filtered decks :red_question_mark:
1 Like
11

Perhaps an addon can do this. Look at this. This is exactly why I am suggesting this should be a built in feature in Anki because this is too arduous. Is there a way to at least duplicate filtered decks to make my life easier :red_question_mark:

image
image622×532 3.78 KB

1 Like