I’m using sub decks as of anki 2.0 and season 3. I doubt there is much difference as far as TF is concerned.

• This reply was modified 11 years, 5 months ago by  Xalphenos.

I never saw the point of subdecks. There seems to be no difference between them other than that you can study a set of subdecks at the same time. This would be useful if doing so gave you the cards in random order (mixing from multiple subdecks), but it doesn’t. At best it saves you a few mouse clicks.

With that said, I think its best not to divide your stuff up into “a lot of decks”. Three or four should be plenty. Having a deck with only about 20-30 cards in it is not useful since you can use the fact that you know what deck you are in to help clue you into to an answer (aka cheat). For example, if a card comes up like 結構 and I can’t remember if it’s けっこう or けっこん but I know that I’m in my chapter 4 vocab deck and けっこう was a chapter 5 word, then I can get the answer right without actually knowing it. You could say that finding the answer that way is cheating so, even if you do figure it out, you should fail the card. But a lot of this goes on subconsciously so you don’t realize your doing it and, even if you are aware of it, figuring out the answer that way does not mean that you wouldn’t have been able to get it “honestly” if given another second or two to think about it.

Long story short, make a few decks based on card type (kanji, vocab j-e, vocab j-j, sentences, etc) and avoid having decks separated into what chapter they came from, what part of speech they are or some other category (body parts, colors, etc).

I trying out something new. I moved back to subdecks from one big, Everything Deck, to Sub-decks so I can have different settings, then use a Filtered Deck to study them all at once in a mixed, random order

I have a main deck that I keep most stuff in, called simply “Japanese”, and sub decks for Kanji and Leeches.

For the subdecks, I’ll have different settings, like additional Review steps or a different “Interval Modifier” based on my retention. For example, I have a harder time with context-less Kanji than I do with in-place sentences, so I adjusted the interval modifier to try to keep my retention rate at around ~90%. Leeches I’m obviously having problems with, so I’m toying with additional steps (say, 1, 1, 5, and 15 minutes before graduating vs the standard lone, 10 minute step.)

For studying, I have a filtered deck for (“Deck:Japanese” is:due) with a random order. That’ll pull all of today’s reviews from all of my Japanese decks and keep their various settings intact (I think. Still playing with it!).