Anki is a software for creating cards similar to flashcards but the real power comes from the algorithm it uses to implement spaced repetition learning. This article will cover a few different methods for studying, setup, usage of Anki and best practices for effective learning.

Table of Contents

This is a long article but you can use it as a reference and jump around to any section.

— — Disclaimer

— Prerequisites

— Different Types of Studying

— — Cramming

— — Passive Learning

— — Active Recall

— Improving Study with Spaced Repetition

— — The Spacing Effect

— — Spaced Repetition

— Enter Anki and Spaced Repetition Software

— — Introduction to Anki

— — Why Use Anki?

— Getting Started

— — Installing Anki

— — Recommended Settings (optional)

— — Installing Add-ons

— Decks

— — Creating a Deck

— — Adding Sub-decks

— — Deck Settings

— Notes and Cards

— — Notes vs Cards

— — Basic Card / Creating your First Card

— — Basic and Reversed

— — Cloze Deletion

— — Overlapping Cloze

— — Basic Image Card

— — Image Occlusion

— — Making a Custom Note / Cards

— Anki Best Practices

— Additional Resources and Links

— Generate a Table of Contents like this one for your article

Disclaimer

This article is not a sponsored post for Anki. I’m writing about what works for me. It may not be the right tool for everyone.

Prerequisites

A computer with any OS or an Android/iPhone

A hunger for knowledge

Different Types of Studying

Let’s review a few different ways to study and learn new information.

Cramming is studying a large amount of information all at once. While this technique may have helped you pass tests, you would recall little of the information you “learned”.

If your goal is to learn information, then do not cram. (or at least don’t use cramming by itself)

This is reading, watching, listening, or attending a lecture but not taking notes or doing anything with the information. For example, binge-watching tutorials, it feels productive but it’s not effective.

This is being presented with a question and checking if you remember it. Think flashcards or taking a quiz after reading an article.

While this seems simple it’s very effective at forming strong long-term memories. We’ll be making use of this technique along with spaced repetition.

Improving Study with Spaced Repetition

Active recall is great but we can optimize our learning further using spaced repetition.

In 1885 a German psychologist observed that learning is better when studying is spread out. This is the spacing effect.

Spaced repetition is the technique for making use of the spacing effect.

Example System that uses Spaced Repetition

This is a system for manually studying flash cards using spaced repetition.

Setup five boxes label them 1–5 All flashcards start in box one Review your cards and if you successfully recall the information on a card then place it in the next box. If you fail to recall the card then either place the card in box one or send it back one box. i.e. from box 5 to box 4 Then set up a review schedule however you prefer.

For example, review

Box 1 daily

Box 2 every three days

Box 3 every week

Box 4 every two weeks

Box 5 once a month

Having your flashcards organized like this makes it easy to see which information you need to review but in the age of computers, we can do better.

Enter Anki and Spaced Repetition Software

Better than manually organizing flashcards is having software using complex algorithms do it for you.

Introduction to Anki

Anki is a program that makes it easy to create flashcards and automatically tracks when you should review them. This will save you time studying and it’s more efficient than the other methods.

Why Use Anki?

Anki is very accessible, it’s free open-source and available on all platforms

There are many add-ons made by the community

Getting Started

Installing Anki

You can find the download link and instructions on the Anki website here. It’s a simple installer.

Once you open Anki, you will see this screen:

Anki start

Recommended Settings (optional)

Before we begin, let’s change a few settings and I’ll show you the add-ons I’ll be using.

Go to Tools > Preferences to get the options Change the learn ahead limit to 0 mins

Anki preferences — learn ahead limit

The reason for this change is for reviews to show at the correct intervals.

For example, you review a card and then your next review is in 10 minutes.

If you have “learn ahead” set to 20 minutes then you can review that card immediately ignoring the 10-minute wait.

ignoring the 10-minute wait. With “learn ahead” at 0 minutes then you must wait for 10 minutes. This lets you have multiple reviews during the day as it should be.

Installing Add-ons

Anki handles add-ons in a way you are probably not used to.

Go to Tools > Add-ons to open the addons menu. Here you will see a list of any add-ons you have installed.

addons list

2. At the top right click “Get Add-ons” then in the new window, click “Browse Add-ons” — This will take you to the Anki add-on listing page.

3. Find an add-on you want then scroll to the bottom to get the code. Copy the code back into Anki and click “OK”. Anki will then install the add-on and restart.

download location on an add-on page

Suggested Add-ons

Here are a few critical add-ons to improve your Anki experience.

Image Occlusion Enhanced — This add-on is essential if you want to add cards based on an image (examples of this below)

— This add-on is essential if you want to add cards based on an image (examples of this below) Any Formatting Pack — A formatting pack will add more options like code blocks or markdown support.

Note: I didn’t include links to these add-ons because Anki has different listing pages depending on the version of Anki. At the time of writing this, I’m on Anki 2.1 but it could be different now.

Decks

Decks are the “boxes” that contain your cards. Let’s set up a deck and talk about deck management.

Creating a Deck

Creating a deck is easy, from the main Anki screen click “Create Deck” at the bottom then give your new deck a name.

create a deck

Adding Sub-decks

You want to have as few decks as possible but when you absolutely need another deck for organizational purposes, then a subdeck is an option.

Create a new deck like before and name it. Drag the new deck under the deck you want it to be a sub-deck of.

Deck Settings

To change settings for all decks, click on the gear icon next to any deck then choose “Options”.

To change individual deck settings, from the same deck options menu click Manage > Add. Give your new option group a name and select it from the drop-down.

Avoid changing any of the default settings until you’ve been using Anki for a while and know you need to change something. If you need to change a setting, then be sure to read the documentation here.

Notes and Cards

To add notes select a deck and click “Add” at the top then change the note type.

Notes vs Cards

A note is what you create. It’s like a template or blueprint for a card. It can have fields for text, images, etc

Cards are what you review and are automatically generated by your notes

Basic Card / Creating your First Card

This is your typical flash card. It has a question on the front, answer on the back.

From the “Add” menu change the note type to “Basic”. Then fill out the fields.

adding a basic card

2. Once you add your card you can go back to the deck and click “Study Now”

3. You will be presented with the front of your card. Try to recall the answer and once you got the answer or gave up click “Show Answer”

4. After showing the answer you will have 3 buttons to choose from “Again”, “Good” or “Easy”.

If you didn’t know the answer at all choose “Again”

at all choose “Again” If you got the answer then choose “Good”

then choose “Good” If you had a hard time remembering the answer on a future review, there will be a hard button for you to choose

the answer on a future review, there will be a hard button for you to choose If you know the answer and you’re tired of seeing the question, then choose “Easy”

5. That’s how easy it is to use Anki.

From here Anki will automatically show you the cards again when it thinks you are about to forget that information.

Basic and Reversed

This is a standard flashcard, but it creates two cards.

One card uses the front as the question and the back as the answer

The other card uses the back as the question and the front as the answer

Reversed cards are good for things such as learning vocabulary. Use them over basic cards when you can to create two-way connections.

create a reversed card

Basic and Reversed Review

Use Reversed Cards For

Learning languages i.e. vocabulary

Any time you can over a basic card to form two-way connections

Cloze Deletion

Cloze deletion cards are like fill in the blank questions.

Example

Front:

Medium launched in the year […] Back:

Medium launched in the year 2012

You can also have multiple clozes creating multiple cards.

Make a Cloze Deletion Note

From the add menu change the note type to “Cloze” Add your question/sentence Highlight the part you want to create a clozed deletion card out of and click the cloze icon or press CTRL + SHIFT + C

creating a clozed deletion card

Notice the syntax {{c1::text}} {{c2::text}} c1 and c2 represent card one and card two and the text is hidden on that card. (see it in practice below)

cloze review

Use Cloze Deletion for:

Memorizing Lists, Sequences, Enumerations

Good for most things

Quickly copy/paste information and turn it into cards ( don’t go crazy with this )

Overlapping Cloze

This is currently not supported in Anki and the main add-on that was used for it is no longer free or up to date. I will work on making an add-on then come back to finish this section.

Basic Image Card

Our human brains are visual by nature so adding image based cards are very helpful.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Adding a Basic Image Card

Change card type to “Basic” Right-click your image > copy > paste into Anki

Or just drag and drop your image into Anki Review just like a basic card

basic image card (cat image by Paul Anderson)

Use Basic Image Cards for:

Anything you would use a basic card for

Diagrams (image occlusion is better)

Image Occlusion

If you’re adding a diagram, then use the image occlusion add-on. Image occlusion is like a cloze deletion but for images.

This note is part of the add-on “Image Occlusion Enhanced Alpha for Anki 2.1” Browse add-ons from Anki to get the correct version. There’s also an in-depth tutorial series on YouTube made by the creator of the add-on.

Image Occlusion Preview (image from Wikipedia)

Adding Image Occlusion Cards

Download the image you want to use In Anki go to the add screen and click the “Add Image Occlusion” button or press Ctrl + Shift + O Select your image Once your image loaded an editor will appear The quickest way to add cards is to select the rectangle tool draw a rectangle then copy/paste it on all the parts you want to hide.

creating an image occlusion

After you have all the parts you want to be a card covered choose either “Hide All, Guess One” or “Hide One, Guess One”. It will either hide all covered parts and tell you to guess a specific one or only cover the one you’re guessing.

Making a Custom Note / Cards

The default cards are good but what if you want your own custom type of card? Let’s walk through an example custom card.

Basic Card with a Title Field

a basic card with a custom title field

This is the card we’ll be making, it’s simple but useful. For example, if you had all of your programming cards mixed in one deck you would have no way of knowing what language this question was for without the title.

First, open the add note screen and click the note type button at the top left Click the manage button in the “Choose Note Type” window Click the add button in the manage window Select “Clone: Basic” and click OK Give your new note type a name

Adding a new note type

Next, we add our new title field.

Go back to the add screen Change the type to your new note type (mine is named “Basic Copy”) Click the fields button From the fields screen click add, give your new field a name and remember what you call it, this is important. Optionally check the “Remember last input when adding” box. This will keep the same text after clicking add meaning you can add cards without having to copy/paste the title every time.

add a title field

Almost done, now we just want to make sure our title shows on the card review.

From the add screen make sure your note type is selected Click the “Cards…” button to open a new window This opens your card templates. It uses HTML Remember what you named your field in the last step? In my case, it’s Title To add that to the card template on the front you need to put your field name in between curly braces and put it anywhere in the front template box. It looks a lot like a cloze. {{Fieldname}} I also added some HTML <br/> this is just like a new line or pressing the return key to put some space between the title and our front text.

{{Title}}<br/>

{{Front}}

Title Card Template

When you’re all done editing, just click close and your custom note type is complete!

Anki Best Practices

Unfortunately, this article is getting long so this will be in another standalone article with more custom card examples. (I’ll link it here when it’s released)

Additional Resources and Links

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Thanks for reading! Leave any questions or comments below.

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