Hi everyone, I’d really appreciate your advice on a problem I’ve encountered while using Anki.
I’m using Anki to memorize information that forms one continuous whole, and I’m wondering how best to structure the cards.
My cards are not independent facts. Each card contains one part of the same larger piece of information, and the cards correspond to consecutive parts of the original material.
For example, suppose the information is:
- A → B
- B → C
- C → D
- D → E
When I first review the cards, they naturally appear in the same sequence as the original material. This creates a potential problem: because each card is part of the same continuous information, the previous card provides a contextual cue for the next one.
So when I reach card 3, I may be able to recall it partly because I have just recalled card 2. In other words, I might be learning the sequence:
A → B → C → D → E
rather than learning each individual piece well enough to recall it independently.
This makes me wonder whether it would be better to somehow change or randomize the order of the cards before the first review, so that each card has to be recalled without relying on the preceding card as a cue.
Is there a way to do this in Anki, and would it actually be a useful approach?
More generally, how should one handle Anki cards when each card represents a part of one continuous body of information? Should the original sequence be preserved because the sequence itself is meaningful, or is it better to break the sequence during the initial learning process so that each card has to be recalled independently?
I’m particularly interested in the distinction between memorizing the content itself and memorizing the connections or sequence between the parts. How do experienced Anki users or memory practitioners handle this situation?