This post concludes the series of posts on Anki and follows the post
introducing Anki and another one about the theory behind Anki.
I have been using Anki for five years and achieved high consistency in completing daily reviews. Here are my best practices:
- Be selective about cards you create in Anki: My goal is to learn the information on my Anki cards for a very long time, possibly for life.
- Do not import cards created by others: A big part of Anki is the mental connection to the cards you create because you invest time in their creation.
- Make cards atomic: When cards contain too much information it is likely you will have problems remembering the cards. Anki tracks the history of your answers and flags the cards that you repeatedly answer incorrectly as leeches. Anki removes these cards from reviewed cards and they become suspended.
- Do not give in to leeches: Decide whether you still wish to remember the information on a leech (see point 1 above). If you do, make it easier to remember, possibly by rewriting the card, so it is more atomic using cloze deletion.
- Spend time maintaining your Anki database: As you review cards, mark the ones that have issues, like cards containing misspelled words or confusing format. Review the marked cards at least weekly to correct them.
- Vary the environment where you study: Anki has applications for computers (Windows, MacOS, Linux) and mobile devices (iOS, Android), making it easy to review them anywhere. The more diverse environments you use to study, the easier it is to recall the information from them in real life where you need them. Anki synchronizes your notes between your devices, so do not worry about losing your progress.
- If you want to explore more suggestions, there is quite a famous list of 20 rules for effective learning. The list is written for SuperMemo, a product similar to Anki, but the rules are generic and apply to Anki as well.
It is easy to modify and extend the Anki’s functionality using add-ons written in Python. You can view a list of all available add-ons here. The following is a list of add-ons that I use:
- AutoDefine: Automatically retrieves the definition of an English word from the Merriam-Webster dictionary and populates the Anki card, optionally offering to include a corresponding image retrieved from Google. To learn how to use this add-on, please watch this tutorial. The author of this add-on is my son, who introduced me to Anki years ago.
- Syntax Highlighting for Code: Inserts syntax-highlighted code snippets into your notes. Syntax of many programming languages is supported.
- Hierarchical Tags: Using tags in Anki allows users to divide notes according to topics they belong to. Install this add-on to improve the usage of tags.
Anki is a wonderful tool that you can use to reap the benefits of the best memory augmenting techniques available. However, it is not the most user-friendly software. One of the areas that could be improved on is configuring Anki. There are many complicated manual settings that users can set to modify the default functionality of Anki. These manual settings could be replaced by a machine learning algorithm based on a previous history of how the user answered the questions.
In closing, I hope that this series was useful to you. If you have any comments or questions about Anki, please write them in the comment field below. You can also search the manual or visit the vibrant Reddit community. Happy learning!