I was wondering, out of the people that use anki here, do you consolidate your anki decks as you go, so that you get random stuff thrown at you during reviews? or do you tend to keep them separated.

I would find myself separating them personally for sake of organization, but it might be good to clump them.

At the same time drastically different decks ( Revtk vs sentences ) I would definitely keep separate, but what about Grammar dictionaries, vs iKnow vs Textbook vs Raw, just throw them all in together?

Being hyper organized about this stiff, each would be managed seperately, and i choose what to work on.

Anyways I am still newer to this so any input is appreciated, Thanks!

I only use one deck, the main reason being that I'm too lazy to switch back and forth between multiple ones. Another reason is that I like to have my total number of "expired" cards readily visible.

hiya, I use supermemo, not anki. And I have always just had one deck. Though when I have been struggling I have done a heisig testing session and then the grammar/vocab. The main problem being some of japanese for busy people has different keywords for kanji. I have tried to get round that by putting heisig in brackets in the question. But supermemo allows you to organise your knowledge like you would in file manager so its I have things setup in sections anyhow so having it organised has happened as I have added anyhow.

We had a thread like this a few days back. Anyway, I say keep them separate, that way you won't have to suspend etc when you don't feel like reviewing something. It also lets you focus on what you're doing, you shouldn't have korean questions jump up in the middle of reviewing Japanese.

There's also the problem with syncing. I have audio with every fact in my Chinese deck, I use no media what so ever in my Japanese deck (I use the Japanese deck every day on different computers and since it won't let you sync media, it's not a good idea to include it. Chinese on the other hand I keep to one computer and I don't review that deck every day.)

While I haven't started Anki, I would keep completely separate subjects apart. I would never mix languages, and I would probably keep specialized Japanese (single kanji, maybe keigo) apart from regular Japanese. Everything else would be lumped together.

Like hknamida says, all together. I've got RtK, sentences, topology, abstract algebra, MIPS architecture, chemistry, and assorted other miscellany mixed together.

I am considering starting a second deck, but that would only be to separate out items that I can't always do (so, for instance, items that require audio, or where the answer involves selecting a fret on a musical instrument); nevertheless, the issues of having to actively switch decks gives me serious pause as to whether that would work.

~J

I have everything in one big massive deck. My kanji, sentences, stuff I learn in class, all of it. I've collected nearly 5000 cards under a deck I affectionately call "Rotten potatoes".

I recently made the decision to combine my RTK and sentences decks, and I'm quite pleased with how well it's worked out. I tend to ignore my RTK deck for days at a time, so this kinda forces me to review everything at once. I was worried that consolidating would negatively impact my concentration by having two different models, but rather, I find that it's a refreshing change of pace to see a sentence or two after a dozen kanji or vice versa.

There is the issue of keeping things more organized in separate decks, but proper tagging can easily take care of this, so again, not a big deal.

I'm rather new to Anki and I'm wondering...how is it possible to have several different types of cards in one deck? Aren't the fields always different? Like, a chemistry card certainly has a different "set-up" than a kanji card...huh? I thought the underlying card scheme is always the same for one deck... *confused*

Nope. You can have varios "models" in the same deck.

Can you have different spacing in the same deck? I have a ridiculous memory for sentences but not so much for single vocabulary words, so I want to have a larger spacing (on the order of a week to start with) for my sentences. So far the only way I've found to do this is to start a second deck.

Delina Wrote:Can you have different spacing in the same deck? I have a ridiculous memory for sentences but not so much for single vocabulary words, so I want to have a larger spacing (on the order of a week to start with) for my sentences. So far the only way I've found to do this is to start a second deck.

I've not tried this yet myself, but in deck properties it looks like you can attribute priorities to specific tagged cards. So for example, assuming your vocab cards are labeled, let's say, "vocab", you could put that in the Very High Priority form to (theoretically) get them to appear at a higher frequency (or alternatively, the same deal with sentences in Low Priority). I'm sure someone else can verify and elaborate.

Edit: I was wrong! Thanks for the clarification, woodwojr.

Priority determines when cards are shown if they're all currently due; high priority ones are generally drawn first. It doesn't affect when cards come due.

It is possible to reschedule things manually, but the spacing you speak of is indeed only controllable per-deck.

~J

I don't just separate decks, I even separate SRS's. My Japanese stuff is Mnemosyne and my French stuff is Anki. Eventually I'll probably make another deck entirely of some other language or topic on KhatzuMemo, and whatever other SRS's are big. By improving my knowledge of more mediums, I improve my knowledge in each individual medium by extension. Also since I often write about SRS's, I feel like I should do whatever is in my power to increase my authority about them.

mentat_kgs Wrote:Nope. You can have varios "models" in the same deck.

I see. I think I'm beginning to understand Anki a bit better now. The wiki helps a lot. If I got that right, with the use of tags, there's no need to have multiple decks. Instead you can just have one master deck for everything with different models and use tags for the rest. I hope I got that right. I'm planning on starting with KO alongside RTK1 (the cd I ordered has arrived) and I'm wondering how to tackle that. Anki is really powerful, but also a bit confusing at times for a beginner...

One of the reasons to use multiple decks instead of only one is that the RTK1 cards mess up your kanjis stats. You'll get 100% everywhere but of course that does not reflect your real kanji ability at all...however, with the next version, this will be fixed:

Quote:Done. In the next version, the kanji stats will only check fields with
a model tag 'Japanese'

http://groups.google.com/group/ankisrs/b...030a?tvc=2

Depends on your definition of "mess up". Anyway, since I think the goal ought ultimately to be to nuke the Heisig cards, it lets you keep an eye on what holes you're reintroducing as you delete Heisig cards.

~J

Delina Wrote:Can you have different spacing in the same deck? I have a ridiculous memory for sentences but not so much for single vocabulary words, so I want to have a larger spacing (on the order of a week to start with) for my sentences. So far the only way I've found to do this is to start a second deck.

Just set your #4 button to have really high spacing, and keep everything else the same. That way, you can use 1-3 for vocab and 4 for anything super-easy (your sentences).

Set the "4: initial easy interval" to 8.0000 min -> 10.0000 max, and that should do the trick

Wait, what? That's "really high spacing"? I use 8.000..15.000, and thought that was only slightly aggressive.

~J

woodwojr Wrote:Depends on your definition of "mess up". Anyway, since I think the goal ought ultimately to be to nuke the Heisig cards, it lets you keep an eye on what holes you're reintroducing as you delete Heisig cards.

~J

I don't plan on nuking my Heisig reviews. Granted, I've always put off importing my progress from RevTK to Anki.

My main reasoning for not getting rid of Heisig? An SRS eventually spaces it out to nothingness anyway, right? Ok, RevTK doesn't do that (stops at 240 days), but that's just an initial design flaw.

does anki have a "deck of decks" concept (i.e. have a deck consists of multiple decks, which are independent from each other)?

Also, is there a way for anki to choose a random deck at startup?

Thanks.

You can store multiple categories in a deck, or use multiple decks.

If you want to switch between multiple decks, use

File->Recent decks

Note you should use a single deck for similar material, and a different deck for widely different material (eg, two different languages).

Nukemarine Wrote:I don't plan on nuking my Heisig reviews. Granted, I've always put off importing my progress from RevTK to Anki.

My main reasoning for not getting rid of Heisig? An SRS eventually spaces it out to nothingness anyway, right? Ok, RevTK doesn't do that (stops at 240 days), but that's just an initial design flaw.

It does, but my assertion is that Heisig is no longer useful information after a certain point (and thus reinforcing it only wastes time, even if the time wasted becomes miniscule). The ability to go from keyword to kanji is not intrinsically valuable; once you have a solid ability to produce the kanji and have production coverage elsewhere, deleting the associated Heisig card can only help you.

It's the old principle: once you've crossed the river, stop carrying the boat.

Edit: since you phrased this as an absolute:

Quote:Note you should use a single deck for similar material, and a different deck for widely different material (eg, two different languages).

I disagree completely. Using a single deck (especially since a recent update where certain operations were made non-hideous on large decks) removes the inefficiency associated with manually managing attention to decks, and only in corner cases is debatably better (more efficient workflow) than tag-based approaches—most of which will be sorted out if and when negations, intersections, and unions become available.

Is there an advantage you would claim for use of multiple decks (EDIT2: an advantage that a tag-filtering-based approach either cannot duplicate or duplicates in a clearly inferior way)?

~J

You can keep it all in the same deck if you wish. The only reasons not to are because you want separate statistics, you want to be able to share some portion, or because you like the separation.

Different decks have different card models with different goals. Mixing them would certainly ruin the statistics.