I want to restart memorizing a deck I haven’t worked on for a few months. it’s a list of words with the front in English and the back in Mandarin (and reversed).
the deck has 1000 notes, it was basic only, it is now basic and reversed (so two cards instead of one for each note).
500 of these notes are new (I never started memorizing them) and I want to shelf them until I review the cards I already started to work on. the basic idea is to limit the workload, another one is that I already experienced that it’s better -for me at least- to learn things in smaller chunks than in bigger chunks (and not start a new chunk before the previous chunk is already very well memorized). in the end, it makes me memorize much faster.
500 are already learned and I want to review them. however, the reversed cards are new and I ALSO want to add them to my learning.
I also want to review these 500 first notes (both basic and reversed cards) approximately in the order in which I added them in the first place, maybe in chunks of 100 or 200 notes. approximately means that it doesn’t need to be exactly in that order and it would be better to have a bit of shuffling but I do want to review most of the oldest cards before the newest.
what settings do I need to apply do do exactly what I said ?
There are a few different things to tease apart here.
That makes it sound like the 2nd card type was added later. That isn’t necessarily a problem, but it can result in those sibling cards having different New-queue numbers. [more below]
You can suspend those (1000) cards – so they will sit there quietly until you are ready to start introducing them. But you should check these to make sure the siblings have the same New-queue numbers (in the “Due” column, instead of due dates). If they don’t, you can put them in the order you want and use “Reposition” to get them matched up. Browsing - Anki Manual
You don’t need to worry so much about the New-queue numbers “matching” in this set, because each note only has 1 New card. However, all of your Review cards are overdue (I assume, but you may want to deal with any not-yet-due ones another way), so you sort of need to “reintroduce” them too [but I’m not suggesting you reset them to New].
There are a few ways to approach this, so I’m just going to pick one. If it isn’t a good fit, there are others! –
Figure out the range of days when the Review cards were first introduced. It may take some trial-and-error running searches in Browse using “introduced” (Searching - Anki Manual). For instance, if you started studying these cards 12m ago and stopped 3m ago, you would use introduced:365 -introduced:90. Just make sure you’re capturing all of them in that search.
Suspend all of the New reverse siblings of your Review cards – is:new -is:suspended.
Decide how much of a chunk you want to start with, and narrow the Filtered deck by that much. Following the example above, if you wanted the first 50 days of cards you introduced, you’d change you search to introduced:315 -introduced:90. (Maybe you’ll want a smaller chunk than that, because all of them are going to be due…)
Seek out the New siblings of those Review cards and unsuspend them – get the Review cards in view in the main deck, is:deckname -is:suspended – switch the Browser to “Notes” mode – select All (which is actually selecting all sibling cards for those notes too) – Toggle Suspend (which should unsuspend the siblings). You can check that it worked by running the same search again.
Repeat steps 4 and 5 whenever you are ready to bring a new chunk of cards to life.
You can set your daily New card limit to what you like – you’ll just stop getting New cards when you run out of unsuspended ones. And remember that these overdue Review cards are going to get long intervals if you get them right, but that’s expected – Due times after a break - Frequently Asked Questions . Just grade your answers honestly.
oh my god, that’s a lot of information. thank you so much again for this very detailed answer. I’ll try to digest all this before I do anything (I don’t want to lose anything and mess up my list of words). merci merci !
Take your time! All of it is safe – but it will never hurt you to make a fresh backup before starting to make changes! And if you do something that didn’t turn out like you expected, Edit > Undo works for almost everything.