Deck Options - New Cards
Overview:
This is the real heart of the SRS: the timing of your card learning and reviewing.
To be honest, I can't add much here that isn't well spelled out in
the online User Manual.
The gist of it is that there are 2 main types of cards: New cards and Review cards. When you open Deck Options, you will get to change a bunch of features which alter how frequently you see those two types of cards. I'll focus on New Cards, as that's really the part with the most immediately visible differences. First, New Cards are cards which you have never seen in Anki yet. Therefore, they are shown to you frequently until they 'graduate' to Review cards.
Steps: When you are first learning something, you tend to repeat the information frequently until it is drilled into your brain. Steps is Anki's adjustable version of doing just that. Ever practiced a speech or a musical passage and told yourself "OK, I am going to do this 5 times, but if I mess up even once, I have to start my count over." That's Steps. This setting allows you to pick how many times you have to get a card right before you 'know it'...and how long you have to wait in between each recall. By default, those are 1min and 10min. The first time you see a card, if you get it right, you will see it again in 10min. If you get it wrong, you start over again in 1min. (Note: if you select 'Easy' while reviewing it does something different. More on that later.) If you get it right after your 10min interval, it 'graduates' to become a Review card.
Graduating Interval: When your New card graduates, it has to have an interval assigned to it. By default, this is set at the next day.
Easy Interval: If at any time in this process you mark a learning card as 'Easy', it becomes a Review card with the interval specified here.
Starting Ease: This is an annoyingly named feature. It defaults to 250%, which essentially means that your interval will increase by 2.5x every time you mark a card 'correct'. Of course, if you mark it as hard, forget it a few times, or mark it as easy, this number can change...cards which you consistently mark as 'Easy' may increase the interval by 3x every time (ease of 300%). It is important (though a bit confusing) to differentiate this from the "Interval Modifier" you will see under the Review tab...this one affects how Anki calculates your intervals throughout the life of the card and relative to other cards.
Those 4 are closely related, so I grouped them together even though Anki has some bizarre organization going on there.
Order and
New Cards/day are fairly self explanatory.
Bury Related New Cards until next day: This one is odd. Basically, if you use Notes with multiple cards, say, a Forward/Reverse (or a Cloze or custom template), the program will try to only show you ONE of those cards each day, so you don't spoil yourself. Sometimes this is useful. Sometimes, say, if you make a Note with a lot of information but no spoilers, it's simply annoying. Sometimes you have an exam the next day and spoilers be damned!
My recommendation:
I try to make all of my own cards, which makes frequent reviewing unnecessary, as I mostly learn by making, not by reviewing. Also, I tend to binge-make cards, so if I have to review each one after 10min, my learning session becomes hell. So for all of my decks, I use
Steps: 1 120
which in practice means that I can look at my new cards in the morning, then again either later that day or the next day. If I get them right, I'm golden.
Other universal setting: I always select
Show new cards in random order
because I see no reason to see anything in a fixed order. I like to minimize any cues for my cards other than the information itself. Personal preference.
Now, the rest of my settings vary by deck. I have 3 Deck Options groups: Current, Review, and SideProject.
For Current, I want to learn a lot of cards every day and I want to see them frequently, so I use
New cards/day: 50
Graduating: 2d
Easy: 5d
Starting ease: 250%
(See, while decreasing this interval would increase how often I saw the card, the decreased ease is a
permanent change to that card; even after I move it to a Review deck I would see it more frequently than the other cards. Better to adjust Interval Modifier for the Review cards in this deck...more later)
I do NOT bury related new cards, because a) I make my own Note templates where siblings are not spoilers, and b) I am often cramming.
For Review I choose
New cards/day: 10
Graduating: 3d
Easy: 7d
Starting ease: 250%
and I bury related new cards.
I keep the New cards/day low here...you may ask why I have any New cards at all in my Review deck. Turns out, as I said, I do a lot of binge-card making, so sometimes the cards I make for my final exam are still new after the class ends. Also, when class ends I like to sort through my cards and fix/remake any which are unclear or which are only useful for this class, without being generalizable. So I do have new cards in the Review deck, but I would prefer to focus on learning my CURRENT course's new cards.
