What I’m looking for in a flashcard program is making sets/decks called “lesson 1, 2, 3 etc.”, put the cards in those sets and then learn them as much as I want. That’s it.
With Anki you get “scheduled learning” using the blablabla method. That method is garbage and too slow. I don’t need Anki to tell me how to learn. Just show me the cards, that’s it.
“But you can make a filtered custom study blablabla”, in other programs I don’t need to do this at all. An option for turning off all Anki “features” would have been nice.
I’m so done with Anki. This is more disappointing than my unborn son.
It’s not telling you how to learn it’s just making it easier for you to review so you don’t waste time doing the same cards over and over everyday, it’s not efficient anyway
You’re not supposed to that for unefficient study
you just don’t want to bother with setting an app so that in the long term you get a million time(exagerated) better results than the way you want to use it.
You could have put this in a more friendly manner, but you got a point.
I reckon a significant chunk of Anki users are people who have to meet deadlines, for whom “Good enough” is the priority as opposed to perfection (procrastinators, the average student).
Medicine as an example
There are scenarios where cramming is the only option to pass a test, especially if you’re one of those students who can’t be bothered to memorize the whole curriculum before the next semester and set up a study plan in advance.
Med students typically engagage in an intense study period around a month before a big test. If you create cards while working through the material, you can’t expect to have completed your deck until about a week before the test.
SR is intended for much longer studying periods than that and I’m sure it’s a lot better than cramming. But there’s a big part of Anki’s userbase that cannot apply the “best practice” for abovementioned reasons and ends up hacking around Anki’s algorithm with add-ons or custom study sessions - both of which are equally unsatisfying to use.
I’m intrigued how you imagine this working. I suppose you only need two rating options (Pass and Fail) and iterate over a deck until you passed every card. How would you proceed?
Maybe you can elaborate a bit on how you’d use this in a real-world scenario?
Potential compromise
How about an easily accessible function to optimize deck options for a specific deadline? That would be the holy grail in my eyes.
I think all the options in Anki like the scheduled learning are excellent definitely wouldn’t want to get rid of this.
It seems to me you want a revision option that would work something like this?
A) Show cards in deck in order or randomly.
B) Give the option KNOW or DON’T KNOW
C) None of the card are scheduled when you go back into the deck (using this option) you just test yourself on them as if you were testing for the first time.
D) Maybe could even select cards that you want to do this to such as all red, blue flagged cards or all cards with “x” tag etc.
I admit, this might be a handy little feature to “learn” small decks/sets of cards before putting them into long term memory. It would also be nice for the night or week before cramming study where you just want to go over the same material constantly before the test but don’t expect to keep it in your long term memory.
The problem with what you want to do is that you are going to repeat cards that you already know and waste unnecessary time.
If you have many cards this effect can mean you will fail a test because you wasted hundreds of hours repeating what you already knew instead of focussing on the things you didnt know.
And you are right, the initial cost of creating cards is very high and most likely not worth it for many people.
So use a flash card application that doesn’t use a spaced repetition algorithm. Or scribble them on 3x5’s. Why would you baselessly complain about a more feature-rich application when you spent no time evaluating its functionality before attempting to use it?
