I'm using Anki for learning German.

Cards/Notes

I have these note types:

• verbs
• nouns
• adjectives
• prepositions
• other (adverbs and phrases)

All of them, besides the specialized fields, have examples, notes, and images.

verbs has these cards branching from it:

• translate-forward (English -> German)
• translate-backward
• past (präteritum form)
• perfect (perfekt form)

nouns cards:

• translate-forward
• translate-backward
• plural
• article (Though I think it would be better to remove this and include the article in translate-forward instead)

adjectives and other

• translate-forward
• translate-backward

adjectives also initially had adjective forms (comparative and superlative), but they follow the same pattern 99% of the time, so I removed them.

prepositions

• translate-forward
• translate-backward
• case (Nominativ/Akkusativ/Dativ/Genitiv)

Decks

All of these used to be in a single deck, but with so many card types I had to spend an extra second during a study to figure out what each card is asking. This was unnecessarily distracting. The deck override feature helped with that: it lets you sort the cards into different decks automatically as you add them. In combination with subdecks, I got this:

my-german/
├── translate-forward
├── translate-backward
├── verb-past
├── verb-perfect
└── other/
    ├── noun-article
    ├── noun-plural
    └── prepositions-case

Additionally, this lets me optimize the algorithm to each card type individually. Some of these card types are much easier than others, so a single deck was probably doing some sort of averaging, which probably resulted in easy cards being shown too often and hard cards too rarely.

Experience so far

• I don't think having multiple decks hurts the learning, contrary to what [the manual says](https://docs.ankiweb.net/editing#using-decks-appropriately). I think that's because I split them in a different way than what it argues against there.

• I wish I could pick which cards not to create when I'm adding a note. Sometimes, for example, I'm adding a separable verb (prefix + base word), where I'm already very familiar with the base word. In this case I don't want the präteritum/perfekt cards to be created. Currently I suspend those from the card browser, which takes a bit too many clicks.

• I went a bit too far when I made a separate card type for noun articles. I think my brain would form stronger connections if I had to remember the article together with the word. Changing it now would mess up the scheduling though, so I'm not sure what to do.

• This took quite a lot of time in the beginning, but I haven't touched it much since.