Last night I spent several hours browsing a deck in the Anki desktop app on my Mac and suspending a large number of cards (so that they were marked beige/yellow). I then synced the deck to Ankidroid. However, when I tried to start learning, both on the Mac and on the Android device, the cards that I was presented with were all ones that I had marked as suspended.
From what I had been able to gather on the web, suspending cards is supposed to prevent them being presented. Have I misunderstood this?
I had only installed Anki on my Mac a couple of days before, having not used Anki for many years. I then synced from the Mac to the Anki server so that all the old decks I had there were deleted. The deck I edited last night was one of the versions of 5000 most commonly used French words, downloaded from Anki. What I want to do is just to fill in a few holes in my vocabulary, mainly to do with idiomatic expressions and usage of prepositions. What I absolutely want to avoid is having to wade through several thousand words and expressions that I can already recall effortlessly, one by one, in order to get to the small number of expressions that I can’t recall quite as easily, and I certainly don’t want to have all those ones I already know repeating themselves to me several times over. I thought that “suspend” was the way to achieve this.
Is suspend actually not working properly, or have I just misunderstood its purpose? If suspend isn’t the right way to go about eliminating all those words I already know quickly and so that I never see them again, then what is?