EDIT: Having just watched the screencasts, I recommend anyone who is interested in using Anki to watch them before you do anything!!! They answered all my questions, which tons of reading through the wiki and stuff never did (indeed the wiki is lacking, not blaming anybody, maybe now that I understand Anki I can contribute). Just go to the anki homepage and click each of the 5 big icons. They link to a screencast. Indeed Anki is very powerful and capable, but it takes some patience to learn. WATCH THE SCREENCASTS FIRST, that is where all the goods are!!!!
:::::::ORIGINAL POST::::::::
Ok, after typing a whole bunch of stuff and then erasing it, I finally understood the concept of "facts," "cards," "questions," "answers," and how that relates to "Expression," "Meaning," "Production," "Recognition," and "Model." Sorry for griping, but I DID look at both the website, the wiki, and the forums many times. Just because someone is ignorant doesn't mean that he didn't try. Remember that next time, wrightak. Jumping to conclusions isn't very fair, is it? I understand that you are defensive because I was criticizing the program, but I feel like venting my frustrations as a user is useful to elucidating the flaws of the program. Isn't that what this thread is about, guy? (The author of Anki is free to take what I say as he will, whether he, as you did, simply dismisses me as someone who didn't try to look for the help, although I said repeatedly in the original post that I did, or whether he sees that there is frustration from someone who wants to use and learn the program but has a hard time, either due to the inadequacies of the program or the documentation. Here is a suggestion, dump the wiki, it is distracting away from the real resource, the screencasts. When I went to the wiki and kept seeing empty placeholder pages, I figured, as any normal person probably would, that the information was simply not documented. Another possibility, link to the screencasts in the Wiki.)
The "Add Card" window, then, is really the window where you enter the "Fact," which then generates one or two cards (or more if you have other "Card" entries created) based off both the "Fields" and the "Cards" descriptions. Then the "Edit Deck" window shows a list of "Cards," which means if you accidently left the "Production, Recognition" thing on, it would generate two "Cards" which would each show up in the "Edit Deck" list, upon which you use the "Action on Selected... Cards... Toggle Delete" on the one you didn't want.
Here is the confusing part. If I am selecting a single card in the "Edit Deck" window, there is an option that says "Action on Selected... Fact." How can the "Edit Deck" window be both a list of cards and facts? Or will selecting the card automatically refer back to the parent "Fact"? Do you see how there is a disconnect? Can I go back and edit the original "Fact"? (EDIT: the fact information appears at the bottom no matter which of the fact's cards you select, so editing that information will change the fact for all the cards)
Now I finally see that "Production" and "Recognition" are simply arbitrary terms defined in the model properties dialog box of the particular "Fact." So I could have simply gone in and redefined what the "Question" and "Answer" portions generated by editing the string insertion parameter to change my mistakenly selected "Production" cards to more like "Recognition" (redefine Production to be the same as Recognition), and from then on, no matter whether I accidently select Production or Recognition, I will always get the same result. (EDIT: I should have selected all the cards, then clicked "Action on Selected... Fact... Add Missing Active Cards" then gone back and deleted the "Production" cards. To me several things would have been more intuitive: allowing a user to go back the the window called "Add Cards" where they could edit the fact there, selecting or deselecting which cards should appear, also, because the "fact" which is parent information of "card" appears when you click on a "card," there was a lot of confusion for me as to what the difference was)
All in all, your suggestions ultimately led me to clear up a lot that the Wiki never managed to do (maybe it was all in the screencasts, which I didn't see: I will check those out later, thanks for the tip). However, I still feel the "Edit Deck" window has some major problems with intuitiveness. What I want to do is get back to the original "Fact Input" window (called "Add Cards"), and fix my mistake there, since I know what I did wrong in that window. Maybe crippled was too strong a term, but for someone who wants to use the home version of Anki more like the online version (very simply), there is a LOT of background knowledge that must be understood first, which is a little frustrating. (EDIT: I should have picked to create a "Basic" deck instead of "Japanese," it would have saved a lot of time... also mentioned in the screencasts. My suggestion is to make "Basic" the default when creating a new deck, it's a simple fix!)
The function of the add card window and the edit deck window are very different. One isn't meant to be a version of the other.
I think this statement is not true. The "Edit Deck" window takes over the functionality of the "Add Cards" window once the cards are added, which causes quite a disconnect to a non-power user.
Last edited by danieldesu (2008 March 27, 1:54 am)
