How the jlab addon manages cards

From addon version 1.11, card management is deactivated by default. If you want to use it, please read this manual first. The card management is closely related to the approach I’d recommend for learning how to read Japanese: Do a few sentences by listening comprehension first, afterwards try to read them. This is why jlab decks are split up into a listening and a reading subdeck. Without card management, both listening and reading/cloze cards are all activated. With management, the cloze cards are deactivated/suspended. In a nutshell, card management then takes care of the following two tasks:

• Activate reading/cloze cards, if a listening card is remembered after a certain time. This is just a convenience feature to make sure you don’t do reading/cloze cards in advance.
• Removing or tagging old cards (from 1.11 on, you can specify the action to take). If a listening card exceeds a certain interval, it is tagged or removed while the associated reading card is activated. If the reading card also exceeds a certain interval, both cards are tagged / removed and you won’t see them again.

The second point (tagging / removing of cards) is never done for the beginner’s course. It is only relevant for advanced learners who want to do subs2srs decks with the jlab addon. These ones deliver massive amounts of sentences and keeping them in Anki too long with slow you down a lot. I found it very important to get rid of old cards to make room for new input. I’ll write more on the importance of this in the future.

Here are the settings explained:

• Manage jlab card life cycle: Turn management on/off.
• Ask before something is done: Shows a popup with details on the actions taken and allows to cancel the operation
• End action: Tag (tags the cards only), suspend (tags & suspends the cards), delete (will permanently remove cards)
• End interval listening cards: If a listening card is remembered after this amount of days, the end action is applied and the reading card is activated. If a reading card is available, the listening card will not be deleted yet. This happens only after the reading card reaches the lifecycle end. If you delete the reading card template, the listening cards will also be deleted.
• End interval cloze cards: Same as the end interval of reading cards

Tags created:

• jlabgc::retired-lc: is added to notes where the listening card reached the end of the life cycle.
• jlabgc::retired-cloze: is added to notes where the reading card reached the end of the life cycle (unless the note is deleted)