Hello. I’m just starting to use Anki, and its terrifyingly confusing. All cards have lots of parameters, newm, repeating, annoying and all sorts of things… I dont need anything of that. I want a very simple thing: I want ALL cards to show up RANDOMLY. Totally and completely. But however I try, still there are some New, some Repeating, some something. And worse, from 500 of my cards only like 10 or so ever show up ((. I don’t want to choose every time whether a card is hard or easy or whatever, its only more complications. Someone told me that a way to erase these differences is to always hit any card as Hard. Well ok I do it, but I dont see a way to see all the 500 in random order still… its always the same small set of like 10 or so cards.
Is there any EASY way to make everything just equal and equally random? I’d like to just relax sometimes and try my luck with several… sometimes. Without any ‘intervals’ or doing eveything on time (minutes, seconds, very frustrating).
Yes, there are ways to customize Anki, and tamp down all of the spaced-repetition features – but do you really want to be fighting with it every day? Anki is designed to show you your cards when you need to study them, and if you want to spend time studying more than that, t’s probably easier for you just to use a different app.
If you decide to stick around, this is all you need to start –
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.
Set one short (5m-20m) learning step and relearning step.
Optimize your FSRS parameters (and then come back monthly to re-optimize).
Study all of your due cards every day – no backlogs, no long re/learning steps to carry cards over to the next day.
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.]
Filtered decks can help, but there’s a catch. Since this is a deck, the cards will be moved from the main deck to this deck. Randomness is applied during reordering, meaning if you access a filtered deck multiple times, the first card will always be the same. It’s almost like a real stack of cards, but while in reality we can always draw from the middle, in Anki we always draw from the top of the deck. From an algorithmic perspective, it doesn’t matter where you draw from as long as the cards have already been reordered. If you return the cards to the parent deck in a timely manner, you’ll see all the cards.
If you don’t want to change the deck of cards and just want to look at the cards without changing their statistics, but select cards randomly, you can use the Anki extension: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1188253433
You mean if I build a filtered deck, study it and rebuild it (and do that multiple times, say 10 times in a row), the first card would always be the same? I rarely use filtered decks but that does sound like a bug to me if true.
By reassembling, you change the sorting. That’s not what I meant, but rather, if you look through the deck, the order is already set and only changes when you reassemble.