There are a LOT of Anki threads popping up in various places. I am by no means an expert, but I have been using it as my primary/only study method for the past year and feel comfortable explaining most of the features. I thought I'd just make a centralized Anki post rather than bouncing between all of the threads and messages I've seen recently concerning it.
First of all,
Why Anki?
To answer this, we start with
Why SRS?
Spaced repetition software (SRS) is awesome. For those of you who don't know what SRS does, here's a brief intro:
SRS programs such as SuperMemo or Anki schedule your flashcard reviews so that the better you know something, the less frequently it gets asked. Essentially, if you can remember something after 4 days, it waits 8 days before asking the same question. If you get it wrong, you start seeing the card more frequently. This allows you to carry a large number of cards with only a small number of reviews per day. For example, I currently have ~4000 cards in my Anki decks, and I review between 50-100 every day, depending on how many new cards I have added recently. I am sitting at about 97% retention, which is crazy when you consider that some of these cards are from classes I took last year.
This is the main benefit of studying with an SRS program. It used to drive me crazy that I would learn so much and spend all of this money on courses only to waste it by retaining maybe 50% of it down the line. After reading about how people would study for med school tests, then relearn it all for the Step, then re-learn what they actually needed on the wards, etc., I got very frustrated at the inefficiency and decided to try SRS.
Wikipedia's vague overview of SRS
Anki's overview
Of course, Anki is not the only program to use these SRS algorithms. It's not even the first. Here is a cross post from another thread where I outline why I personally think that Anki specifically is a wonderful study option:
1) Cross-platform usability
You can use Anki online or download Anki on PC, Mac, Android, newer Blackberry, or iOS (though iOS Anki is insanely expensive for an app, it's not so much if you consider that it funds the others). Make your cards on the computer, where you have ease of use and computing power, and review them on the go whenever you have the time. Far better than having to access a website on a mobile device. Everything you do in one place is synced perfectly across your others (though if you don't sync at the beginning and end of sessions you will sometimes duplicate your work). Honestly, this is key because if you don't review daily, it's easy to get behind, get overwhelmed, or simply start forgetting more.
2) Fairly low entry barriers
This isn't a main one, but it's like Photoshop...if it's too confusing to get started, no one will. Anki has some basic settings so that, when you first decide to use it, it's pretty straightforward. So do the other flashcard programs, so this isn't necessarily an advantage over them, but if it didn't have this it would be at a disadvantage, so I'm including it.
3) Powerful card creation tools
OK, so you've been using Anki for a while and want to get fancy. This will take a bit of Googling and a bit of work...but it's worth it. Here you begin to see
why it's so important to have a powerful desktop program in addition to the web and the mobile apps. Sure, you can just make a Front/Back card on your phone or online. That's simple enough. But the real power of Anki comes with customization. You can:
- Make your own custom Note templates: Use a list of one-word answers to generate a slew of fully formatted, properly worded cards. For classes such as Anatomy or anything else which requires learning large amounts of similar information from a table, this makes it easy. Simply design a template which allows you to enter the info straight from the table in your textbook, and let Anki make the actual cards from that information.
- Make multiple choice cards: OK, so this is a subset of the Note templates, but it's a neat trick. Personally, I tend to avoid MC because active recall is far more useful for long-term learning (and reading MC cards just slows me down - remembering is faster). However, sometimes it is useful to create your own test questions, as it prepares you for the style of questions you will see, and trying to make your own trick questions really gives you an idea of what the prof will be trying to test you on.
- Image Occlusion: This is a downloadable extension which lets you turn an image - say, a labelled Anatomy diagram or a biochem pathway map - into multiple usable cards. Copy the image, highlight the labels you want to test yourself on, and boom...that one Anatomy plate is now 20+ identification cards.
- Type your answers: Anki lets you type in your responses and then compares them to the answer field. This helps you keep yourself honest.
- Format your cards: Make a 'hints' field which is in white text, allowing you to highlight it for a clue. Add an 'explanations' field to your answers without it muddling them up. My personal favorite is to
bold any information which is required (aka if I don't recall that piece of info, I get the card wrong). Unformatted text is a judgement call, and
italics are fun facts which I find useful or interesting, but which I do not think are necessary. I can always 'pass' a card without recalling the italicized info, though I will not label it as 'easy' without.
-Try Incremental Reading: A terribly named way of essentially 'banking' large amounts of text to be converted into flashcards'). I have not tried this yet, but am itching to do so.
- Cloze Deletion: Write one dense, information-packed sentence, then tell Anki to show it to you without key words. Your job is to recall those key facts. This format is also designed to include hints.
The key is this: Do whatever works for you...and after a little work to set up your template, do it quickly. This is where Anki shines. Include images, text, or audio, and again, have that sync across all platforms.
4) Custom Study and Cram decks
A lot of people are used to using flashcards to cram, and when they first start Anki they make 1 of 2 errors. 1, they will make their review count too high because their Due count is low until they generate a lot of cards. 2, they will look to cram for a test, get frustrated that the deck is 'done' after 1 pass-through, and give up. Here's the thing: you can cram without messing up Anki's SRS settings (and without even changing your long-term review dates, if you want). Custom Study decks allow you to review all of your cards 80x in a row if you want (and either have it reschedule the cards or not affect your long-term scheduling). You can study a certain subset of them. You can increase your 'New' card limit for a day if you just added a ton of cards and have the time to crank through them, or just started a deck and have nothing else to do and waiting seems pointless to you. You can increase your 'Review' limit if you've gotten behind, or if you have a lot of time today and want to lighten your load for the next few days. Going out of town this weekend, or have a bunch of exams in the next 3d and don't want to get behind? 'Study Ahead' for 2-3d so that your Anki is out of the way and you can return to it post-vacation/post-exam without any catching up to do. Plus, Anki keeps track of 'Cram' studying separately, so you can see how much you are studying for SRS and how much you are studying for that test - separately. If you make a Cram deck, guess what...it shows up on all of your devices with syncing. This also means that you can set up your favorite Cram settings and just keep them as a separate deck which you 'rebuild' (a button at the bottom) whenever you want to study that way, on any device.
5) Stats
What's that, you say? Anki keeps track of things for you? Yup. At any given time you can look at how you are doing on each of your study decks - how many cards do you have? How many more are unseen? How many are young (review due in <20d), mature (due >20d), learning, or unseen? How often do you answer cards in each of those categories correctly? How many reviews do you do each day? Do you do better at certain times of day? How many cards are due tomorrow? How many cards are due every day for the next week? Has your retention increased or decreased in the past month compared to your average for the year? How long do you spend on each card? How long do you spend reviewing each day? How many days do you actually remember to review. As an added incentive, how much less time would you have to spend each day if you
actually studied every day like you should? Anki answers all of these questions and more, with graphs, for each individual deck and card category (young, mature, learning).
6) Customizable SRS options
This is perhaps the most difficult part of Anki to 'get', but it is really important. You don't have to do it right away - it has taken me a full year to realize what truly works for me - but
not having these options would be terrible. For example, I use card creation to learn the information. This means that I do not need or want an extended initial learning period - that just drives me crazy and rockets my Due count through the roof. I also like to keep the information for my current courses very fresh instead of going for long intervals. Anki lets you customize the various aspects of the algorithm to get the system that works for you. It is, however, pretty obtuse as to what each individual change does, so this is likely the very very last thing you will pick up
