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How to Flip/Reverse Anki Cards and Decks

  • Sean 

Learn how to flip/reverse Anki cards and decks with this step-by-step tutorial. Improve your Anki experience by studying cards from multiple angles.

It can be helpful to do your cards both ways. This means sometimes you see the back of the card first, and other times you see the front first. If you want to flip your cards so you see the back first, keep reading.

For some reason, there is very little about how to do this online and it can be surprisingly confusing. That’s why I’m here to simplify this for you.

After you complete this tutorial, you will have reversed your choice of existing cards and be able to instantly create new Anki cards that are reversed.

This is trick is just one interesting Anki tip for a better learning experience. I have a whole other article where I show 12 other Anki tips and tricks from my years using this program.

With that out of the way, let’s get into how you can reverse your Anki cards.

1. Create a New Note Type

First, you are going to need to open the browse menu, select the deck you want to edit on the left side, then right-click the background and select “manage note types”.

Next click “add” and select “basic”. This allows you to just create a duplicated version of the basic note type. Next, I’ll show you how to make this duplicate into a reversed card type.

Here, you can see I just chose to name the new card type “basic_clone” but you can call this anything. In hindsight I would recommend “basic_reversed”.

2. Add A Reversed Card Type to The New Note

Next, you are going to need to go back into the menu with all of the note types again and this time we are going to edit the new note type we just created.

Select “manage note-type”, then select the new note type you created, and select “cards”.

To add a new card type to the note type you created, click “add card type” on the upper right side of the screen.

Once the new card type has been created, just hit the “flip” button to reverse the card type. Now in the card type section, it should have 2 cards. Card 1 should be card 1: Front → Back and card 2 should be card 2 back → Front.

3. Switch Your Cards to The New Note Type

Here’s the part where we actually reverse the Anki cards.

Now that you have created this new note type with a back-to-front option, you just need to switch the cards. You just need to select the cards in the browser and choose “change note type”.

Lastly, change the cards to the new reversed note type you created earlier.

You can see now that each card has been duplicated to include both the front → back and back → front card types. This adds a reversed version of each card.

You might think that these cards are not actually reversed because it doesn’t look like this in the browse menu. But, when you actually see the card as you’re reviewing them they will be reversed.

That’s how you reverse your Anki cards!

Should You Reverse your Anki Cards?

There is a small caveat with reversing your Anki cards.

You probably shouldn’t reverse all of them. Otherwise, you are going to be literally doubling your Anki cards. Anki can be quite time-consuming when you have a high number of cards so I would just recommend doing this with certain cards that you are really struggling with.

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