A Complete Guide to Getting Started with Anki

If you’re a student, use flashcards to remember *everything*

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Intense 11-hour cram sessions, coffee-fueled all-nighters, complete exhaustion and mental breakdowns — it’s all just a part of school, right?

Well, no.

There’s a better way.

And it’s with Anki.

The ‘better’ way to learn

Right now, you probably wait until the last minute to read over your entire textbook and highlight all your notes. You stuff everything into your short-term memory in the small, fragile hope you remember it all tomorrow morning.

Now, there’s a lot of downsides to this, mainly:

• a) it really sucks and is not fun to do
• b) you probably won’t remember everything for the test anyways
• c) beyond that, you probably won’t remember any of the content a few weeks later…which is problematic if you have to take a cumulative test or build off of your knowledge for another topic

The solution to all those things is simple:

Put everything into your long-term memory by studying a little bit every day, so you remember it all for (essentially) forever.

This way, before a test, you don’t have to go from I-know-absolutely-nothing to I-kinda-know-some-stuff-but-like-not-really? over the span of a few frantic days.

Instead, you already know everything because you’ve been studying ever since you started learning.

On the day before the test, you don’t have to study for eight hours — maybe just 30 minutes.

And you’ll score better.

It’s all founded on one principle: spatial repetition.

This basically means that spreading out your studying(ex. 1 hour a week for 10 weeks) will be far more effective than one concentrated session(ex. 1 ten-hour session) because you can process the information better and review the information multiple times, reinforcing it in your mind.

For more information, check out this great video from Ali Abdaal:

Here’s a warning, though: this way of learning isn’t just a complete ‘easy way’ to get good grades and study less.

In fact, you’ll probably end up studying more in total time, but you’ll score higher on your tests, have less stress, actually remember the content, and it will feel like you study less.

There’s a reason that not a lot of people use this study method even though it’s by far more effective: it takes a lot more discipline.

Instead of studying the day or two before the test — when you really have no other choice — you have to choose to study every day, even when there’s no tests coming up.

That’s not easy, but if you’re able to do it, you’ll be heads and shoulders above everyone else.

What is Anki, and how does it help?

Now that you know about spacial repetition over cramming, how do you actually do it?

One word: flashcards.

But not flashcards in the ‘old’ way of learning, where you flip through a 300-deck Quizlet ten minutes before the test.

I mean flashcards that you do every day — that’s right, every day — for pretty much all your classes, reviewing the content as you learn it.

You use spatial repetition to spread out the studying and study the right thing every day.

But what is the ‘right thing’?

Well, it’s what you need to study based off how well, or not well, you know that piece of content.

Let’s say you have 10 flashcards. You review them, and you easily know the answer to 7 of them. So, you put those seven in a box that says ‘Study in two weeks’.

However, 2 of the flashcards are kind of tricky and take longer to remember the answer to. You put them in a box that says ‘Study tomorrow’.

Lastly, 1 of the cards is really hard — you’re stumped and have to look at the answer. You then put that in a box that says ‘Study in an hour’.

This is the basic premise of how spatial repetition flashcards work(except without physical boxes) — you might have thousands of cards across all your classes, but you only study a few every day based off when they’re scheduled for you to review.

There are a lot of apps that you can use for this, but the most popular(and my personal favorite) is Anki.

I’ve also tried a few alternatives, though, listed here:

• Mochi(great for browser)
• Remnote (combines notetaking with flashcards)

Now, specifically, what is Anki?

It’s a spatial repetition flashcard app that’s available for free on Android and desktop(Windows, Mac, and Linux), but costs $24.99 on iOS(yes, very pricy, but also very worth it if you use it every day).

Honestly, Anki’s interface is kind of ugly, but it’s functionality makes up for it a thousandfold.

There are so many features and abilities, but it’s also pretty easy to get started with(if you can avoid getting overwhelmed by all the buttons and terms).

Getting Started

In this section, I’ll walk you through step-by-step how to get started with Anki.

Along the way, I’ll dive deeper into how each tool can help you study smarter and faster, plugins you can use, and an example routine you can follow and use to get a better idea of how Anki works.

Setting Up

First, if you can, I would recommend starting on a computer(Windows, Mac, or Linux).

If you can’t, you can start on a mobile device(if it’s iOS it costs $25) or use AnkiWeb(which isn’t supposed to be used for creating cards, only reviewing them, so it’s very limited but still doable).

For computers, go to apps.ankiweb.net and click ‘Download’ or just scroll down to the Download section.

Here, select your device and your device’s version, and start your download(if you have a Mac and are unsure if your Mac is Apple Silicon or Intel, click here).

I’ll be doing this on a Mac, but the process should be similar for Windows and Linux.

Once Anki is downloaded, open it up.

You’ll be given the option to create an account, which you can do now or later(or never, if you don’t plan on syncing across multiple devices).

Now, your Anki should look something like this(except it won’t have any decks — those are just my existing ones).

Creating decks and cards

Now that you have Anki up and running, it’s time to actually start using it.

There are a lot of different ways you can format and use Anki, but here are the fundamental parts:

• Cards — these are the flashcards themselves. They come in many different formats, from basic(question on one side, answer on the other side) to Cloze(fill in the blank).
• Decks — these are groups of cards, usually categorized by classes(ex. Math or Chemistry).
• Tags — these are identifiers or subcategories you can attach to your cards.

Now that you understand the three basic elements of Anki, let’s start by creating a new deck.

For this example, we’ll say you’re studying for history.

First, click ‘Create Deck’ on the bottom of the window.

Then, name your deck. Again, there are a lot of ways you can organize your Anki, but the simplest is to just make a deck for each of your classes.

In this case, since we’re studying for history, I’ll simply name it ‘History’.

And then you’ll have it in your decks!

Open up the History deck by hovering over it’s name and clicking. Right now, it’ll tell you that you’ve finished the deck, but that’s because you don’t have any cards in it.

To fix that, go to ‘Add’ at the top.

Now, this is the card creation window.

It looks really confusing at first, but don’t worry — here’s a rundown of the basics:

• In the top left hand corner, where it says ‘Type’ and then ‘Basic,’ is the card type. You can click on ‘Basic’ to change the card type(click here to learn more about them).

For now, I would recommend sticking with the Basic card until you get the hang of it.

• In the top right is the Deck. Since this card is in the History deck, it says ‘History’. Pretty simple.
• Moving onto the second row, the buttons ‘Fields…’, ‘Cards…’, and the gear icon are more advanced, so I would recommend just ignoring them for now. They essentially are for really specific customization of your card formats. I’ve been using Anki for years, though, and I still barely touch them, so they’re definitely not necessary.
• The rest of the buttons in that row are for formatting — making text bold, changing it’s color, subscript, bullet points, all that. You can also attach a file, a voice recording, or add math or code.
• The last two buttons in my screen(a brown and green rectangle and Chinese characters)aren’t going to be on yours — that’s because they’re plugins. More on that later.
• The top big white rectangle is for the front of your card. This usually contains the question.
• The bottom big white rectangle is the back of your card, and, you guessed it, usually has the answer.
• If you open up the little ‘Tags’ section on the bottom, you’ll see where you can input tags. To create a new tag, simply type it in and press enter. If you want to use an existing tag, just type it in to search for it, then select it.

Okay, you know the basics of the card creation window — let’s put it to use.

For this example, let’s say we’re learning about World War 1.

First, I’ll type in the question:

Then the answer:

And finally the tag(I use tags to sort by subtopic/unit inside a deck):

Then, click ‘Add’ at the bottom left of the screen or use the keyboard shortcut Cmd/Ctrl-Enter to add the card to the deck.

When you click back to the main Anki window, you’ll see we now have 1 new card to review!

You can continue this process, turning your notes into flashcards and organizing them by decks and tags.

Writing good flashcard questions is a skill in itself, and you can learn more with this video:

As you make flashcards and continually feed what you learn into the app, you’ll also start to review your material every day.

This way, in a few months, everything that you’ve learned in those past few months will be in your head, ready to help you ace the test.

Plugins

One of the best things about Anki is that users can create something wonderful: plugins.

If you don’t know what plugins are, they’re basically add-ons or power-ups that add extra features to software.

Anki has hundreds of free user-generated plugins with all sorts of features, and you should definitely take a look at them all here.

Two add-ons I recommend you start with are Image Occlusion Enhanced and Quizlet to Anki.

The image occlusion one allows you to create cards based off images, where they hide a certain part and then reveal it in the answer, like this:

From the Image Occlusion Enhanced add-on’s page

This is really great for diagrams and models, especially for science. You can also use it for memorizing maps.

Moving on, the Quizlet add-on is also super handy — you can turn any Quizlet deck into an Anki one.

(If you don’t know what Quizlet is, it’s a website with thousands of flashcard decks on all sorts of topics made by different users.)

This gives you the community-fueled variety of prebuilt Quizlets combined with the spatial repetition tools of Anki.

So, no, you don’t have to ‘choose between’ Quizlet and Anki — you can just use them both for the most powerful studying method.

But, again, there’s so many more add-ons than just these ones — everything from a plugin to study Chinese to changing the colors of the app.

No matter what Anki add-on you choose to download, here’s how to actually download it.

First, go to ‘Tool’s in the menu bar, and then click ‘Add-ons’.

This will bring you to the Add-ons window. Of course, unlike me, you won’t have any Add-ons yet.

To add one, click the orange ‘Get Add-ons…’

Here, you can put in the add-on’s code.

To find the code, go back to this website and find the Add-on you want.

Scroll down until you see ‘Download’.

Then, copy and paste the code into the Anki window.

Click ‘OK’, and it should tell you that your download is complete.

To finish off, close out of Anki and then reopen it, and your add-on should be completely installed.

Each add-on’s setup is a bit different, so for more detailed instructions on how to use it, simply find the ‘How to Use’ or ‘Directions’ section on the plugin’s page.

For ReColor

Using Anki With Your Phone

You can do a lot with Anki just on the free desktop app, but eventually, you’ll probably want to invest in the mobile app.

That way, you don’t have to pull out your computer to do your flashcards every day — instead, you can just open up your phone.

Now, if you have an Android device this is pretty much a no-brainer since the app is free, but if you’re on iOS, it’s a bit of a price tag.

However, if you’re using Anki every single day to keep up with your flashcards, I would say it’s completely worth it to buy the app regardless.

If you do decide to use Anki on your phone along with your computer, you can’t just use it straight away — you have to create an Anki account if you haven’t already.

This will allow you to log into all of your devices with your account, effectively syncing your flashcards.

However, Anki’s syncing features aren’t the automatically-updating-magic that a lot of other softwares have.

Instead, you have to close out of the app or manually hit ‘Sync’ after making any changes to update the flashcards on your other devices.

This includes reviewing flashcards, editing flashcards, and creating new ones.

It’s definitely a bit annoying, but you’ll get used to it after a while.

Example Routine

If you’re still not exactly sure how to use Anki in your everyday life to study, here’s an example routine of a high school student.

Normal Day

A ‘day-in-the-life’ of a student using Anki:

1. While they eat breakfast before school, they review all of the ‘New’ and ‘Due’ flashcards in Anki.
2. Throughout school, they take notes on what they learn.
3. When they come home from school or during any free periods at school, they turn their notes into flashcard questions. These flashcards will be reviewed in future days, or they can review them right after creation.
4. Repeat every day

Study Routine(1–5 days before test)

While using flashcards with Anki will ensure that most of the year’s content is in your long-term memory by the time a test comes around, it’s still a good idea to have dedicated studying time for big tests and quizzes.

The difference here is that you’re not spending hours and hours studying — maybe 30–60 minutes.

Here’s some study methods you can use along with flashcards:

1. Study all of your flashcards for that test. You can do this by going into the deck and clicking ‘Custom Study’. Then, click ‘Study by card state or tag’ and increase the amount of cards so that you can study all of them(or just do an absurdly high number to be safe). Then click ‘All cards in random order(don’t reschedule)’. Then, select which tags you want to include(ex. if you’re studying for your WW1 history test, choose ‘world war 1’. Press ‘Ok’, and then you can start reviewing all the flashcards. This is a great way to go through all the content and see what you already know — and what you don’t know. If you have a lot of cards, it can take a while, but it’s still faster and more effective than cramming.

2. Go through your notes and see if there’s any material that seems unfamiliar. Sometimes you can accidentally forget to put in parts of a unit into your flashcards, which means you haven’t reviewed it all — and you should definitely review it now.

3. Create a study guide that’s just a few pages long with the essential information from your unit.

4. Look through Quizlets for your course material, and input them into Anki if needed.

5. Draw models, maps, and timelines to get a better idea of how things are oriented in space(ex. parts of the eye or map of Europe) or time(ex. history of British imperialism across multiple countries).

All in all, you should start studying about 3–5 days before a small test and 1–3 weeks before a big one. This means continuing to do your flashcards and studying a bit extra every day for 20–30 minutes.

It helps to make a checklist of everything you want to do(ex. make a timeline, then study all flashcards, then make a study guide) and work through that checklist a little bit every day.

This article covers Anki in terms of school, but it can really be used for anything.

Whether you’re cramming for high school finals or are looking for a way to enhance your life with self-learning, give Anki a try and watch as it completely changes how you learn — and how you live.