Best way to use Anki

[GrayArea]

I have began creating Anki cards instead of writing down notes in a notebook.

However, there are a bunch of different ways you can set up Anki to test you every day (new cards per day, time intervals, etc.). I am brand new to Anki so I was wondering if anyone who had or is having success with Anki can enlighten me on how to optimally utilize it?

Thanks!

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[theonlytycrane]

I used anki in a really dumb way- I liked the flashcard aspect of the tool but I didn't it want it to tell me when to review stuff. Though I realize this kind of defeats the purpose of anki.

I made decks for g.chem, physics, o.chem, bio / biochem, lab techniques, and psych / soc. I added cards and would go through half of my decks each week so in 2 weeks I could go through all of my decks. I would go through psych / soc every week. I also found it useful for a quick way to look something up while I was studying or reviewing.

Come test day I knew everything in my anki decks, which was like my external brain full of equations and factoids.

 

[aldol16]

The best way? To not use it at all. I always thought filling one's brain with a bunch of useless facts and equations was a bad way to go about studying for the test. You only need to know the fundamentals (but you need to know them well) and that shouldn't require mass memorization. But to each their own, I suppose.

 

[darknecrosforte]

It's best for things that MUST be memorized, such as the names of psychologists and their major theories, fundamental organic chemistry mechanisms (some of my cards are "commands" to draw out a reaction and the back side shows what it looks like), and the specific anatomic structures and the clinical name used by current surgeons (ie. "Morrison's pouch" for the right hepatorenal recess). @aldol16 is correct in terms of warning against useless memorization.

Anki is optimally used as a way to use a tiny fraction of necessary info to trigger the complete recreation of a thought over increasing intervals of time. This means if you were trying to remember a picture or diagram, you would work to have cards that give you only 1/10 of the picture fragments, but allow you to find the other 9 because of how you constructed them. This is why downloading most Anki decks does not help the average student. In a 50 slide PPT of dense information, there is no reason to ever have more than 80 cards that have a single factoid on them. Lists, such as mnemonics for multiple items, should be kept at a minimum.

That's really it. It takes about a year to get "decent" at making cards (Learning how to use the program to its fullest, tagging, having a uniform format, working on speed, accurate data extraction from text, PPT, lecture, and internet sources).

 

[brew]

http://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/anki-central.1064361/

Try reading this!