What is Anki and why should I care?

Anki. Just the word itself conjures up feelings of despair and hope. Whether you love it or you hate it, Anki, and all spaced repetition flashcards for that matter, are likely here to stay for the long term. First learning about Anki can be intimidating, but that’s what this article is all about. 

What is Anki?

The Anki Logo

Anki is at the most basic level a flashcard app that uses spaced repetition. The core idea behind Anki is to help you retain information right before you forget it so that you can remember it for as long as possible. This theoretically minimizes the amount of time you spend reviewing, and maximizes the length of time you remember the information. 

Anki exists as a web app, desktop app, and separate iOS and Android apps which each work together allowing you some flexibility as to how you study. It is an open-source application, and the web app and desktop app are free to download at https://apps.ankiweb.net/. The iOS app is $25, while a third-party-developed Android app called AnkiDroid is available for free on the Google Play Store.

Anki has many users, but students in medical studies (medicine, PAs, pre-med, nursing, etc) and language learners are the biggest ones. The core ideas behind Anki, flashcards, and spaced repetition are important and deserve a little bit more time. 

Why flashcards, and why spaced repetition?

Flashcards

Studying can basically be divided into two broad categories: passive and active. Passive study activities are often low effort and low effectiveness. These include reading textbooks, watching lectures, and rewriting notes. Active study strategies are often high effort, highly effective, and contain “desirable difficulties.”^Bjork Examples of this include taking practice tests, explaining difficult concepts, making diagrams, and something called “active recall testing”^{Anki Manual} also known as self-quizzing with flashcards. While it is not wise to completely forgo passive studying, there is evidence to suggest that the higher proportion of studying that is active and the more sources of active studying performed by students, the higher test scores will be.^{Walck-Shannon} Long and short, if you want to better retain information, self-quizzing with flashcards is a great first step.

Spaced Repetition

Anki is first and foremost a spaced repetition flashcards app. The term “spaced repetition” is the key part here. There are plenty of flashcard apps out there (Quizlet, etc) but these generally function as follows:

1. Choose a deck of flashcards.

2. Study the entire deck.

3. Study the deck again later if you so choose.

These apps function well for short-term retention of material. If you are cramming for a test in an hour, it might be a good idea to hammer a flashcard deck multiple times to make sure you remember the material well. Anki, on the other hand, has a more long-term approach. Anki functions more like this:

1. Choose a deck of flashcards.

2. Study the entire deck.

3. Return to the deck the next day and study the hardest cards again.

4. Add any new decks you want to keep studying.

5. Return to the deck again on the third day to study the hardest cards from the first and second days.

6. Repeat for as long as is needed.

Anki specializes in showing you cards exactly when you need to see them in order to retain the information for the longest amount of time. A common schedule for studying flashcards might go something like this:

• Get a flashcard correct, and Anki will show it to you in 1 day

• Get it correct again, and Anki will show it to you again 3 days later

• Get it correct again, and Anki will show it to you again in 7 days

I think you get the picture. Generally, the intervals between reviewing cards keep increasing, unless you get a card incorrect.

• Get a card wrong, and Anki will show you the card again until you get it correct. Then the schedule will reset, and you will see it again in 1 day.

This is helpful for a number of reasons. First of all, it is efficient because you end up spending more of your limited time studying cards that are more difficult, instead of rereviewing material that you already understand. Secondly, and perhaps more important, is that spaced repetition of this kind has been proven via peer-reviewed research to increase your retention of the material. ^{Kang, Melton} This strategy is now well established in the literature and used widely by students across the globe and startup education companies like Duolingo.

There are lots of reasons to use Anki, and also a number of challenges to using it. Let’s start with the reasons you should think about using Anki.

Why would you want to use Anki?

There are a lot of things to like about using flashcards with spaced repetition, but it certainly isn;t for everyone. Let’s explore some of its strengths before we dive into the weaknesses.

Retaining large amounts of information over the long term

If this is your primary goal, Anki really does live up to the hype. With something like studying for medical board exams, with ungodly amounts of critical material to retain for years at a time, just knowing when to review past material is overwhelming. Anki does that work for you. It excels at keeping topics you may have found difficult, even a few years before, top of mind and ready for testing. If you find yourself in one of the groups studying for boards or learning a language, I highly recommend looking into Anki.

It is (Almost) Free

However you slice it, Anki is certainly a financial bargain. The web app, desktop app, most of the add-ons, and much of the pre-made content is entirely free. That means that you could feasibly create the backbone of your study regimen for a highly lucrative profession such as medicine for absolutely nothing, which is in stark contrast to many other study resources like question banks and textbooks. There is a pretty big catch to this, however. Many of the tools that make Anki especially useful, and could save you hours of time, will cost some money. The iOS version of the app, for instance, will cost you $25. Some of the remarkable add-ons, such as the Amboss add-on, will also cost you money. Many of these are absolutely worth it, in my opinion, but you could get by without paying anything at all.

It is highly customizable

You can make Anki your own to the degree of it almost being an issue (more on this later.) Many of the options to change Anki to fit your needs deserve articles in their own right, but here are a couple of the major categories of features that you can fully customize.

Review settings- do you feel like you are seeing your review cards too frequently? Not frequently enough? Would you prefer to only review cards once before seeing them again the next day or twice? The exact specifications as to how Anki runs through its spaced repetition algorithm are entirely customizable to your specifications. This might seem like minutiae, but these settings can have a huge impact on how much work you do with Anki each day, and they deserve much more time to explore their intricacies than we have here.

Add-Ons- Add-ons are miniature features that you can add to Anki, usually made by third-party companies or developers, similar to browser extensions. These range from small changes to help auto-sync your data to large changes that can alter the nature of how you use the app itself, such as the Amboss or NovaCards add-ons. There are thousands of add-ons, many of which are recommended en masse to users by influencers to extend the usefulness of Anki. This is another topic that deserves more time than we have here for specifics. 

Graphics- In Anki it is also possible to change the background and color scheme of the app. It makes sense to do this, especially if you will be spending hours of your time each day in this environment.

There are a ton of pre-made resources ready to go

From Japanese vocabulary to detailed cerebral anatomy, there are millions of pre-made flashcards available for free on the internet for you to study now. Many of these resources are very high quality and have a proven track record of producing high test scores in those who study with them. Anki allows you to skip hours of making detailed flashcards from your own notes, which would often be lower quality, and skip right ahead to instantly study the most important, highly tested material.

Rich media in your cards

While this is not necessarily unique to Anki, it is very useful that you can upload media like images and sounds to your flashcards. Image occlusion cards, in particular, are frequently used by medical students to study complex subjects like anatomy. Being able to listen to specific sounds, such as heart murmurs, or how to pronounce a word in another language, can also greatly enhance the learning experience.

An example of an image occlusion card in Anki.

There is a huge Anki Ecosystem

With Anki being the de facto tool for so many people across the internet, it is almost guaranteed that someone has solved whatever problem you have with it. Whether it is a YouTube video, blog post or Reddit comment, every aspect of the app has been picked apart by people time and time again. This makes it easy to find solutions that you need, advice from forums, or resources to use it more efficiently.  

 A sense of Finality

One reason I personally was interested in using Anki during my medical school journey was that it helped me to know when I was finished studying for the day. It would be pretty easy to allocate 24 hours of study time a day in medical school to all of the textbooks, videos, practice questions, and other resources that are available. One nice thing about Anki is that when you finish your reviews and new cards for the day, there is no more studying to be done. If you have a neurotic personality, like most medical students do, that nudge to finish studying can be very helpful to remind you to put the books down and begin to focus on the sort of wellness activities that will help you sustain your studies for the long term.

It is nice when Anki tells you it’s time to stop studying.

Offline Studying

Both the mobile app and the desktop offer a solid studying experience offline. I have had numerous experiences while driving in a rural area or on an airplane that I was very thankful for this feature, which is often more difficult to work or unavailable with for other study resources such as question banks. As long as you have internet to sync your studying before and after your session, you are good to go.

It does some of the busy work for you

An alternative to Anki that I’ve heard of over the years to incorporate spaced repetition into your studies is to keep track of notes and actively go back and review them in a spaced schedule similar to Anki's. To me, this sounds like an organizational nightmare. Keeping track of which notebook had pharmacology notes and what folder I saved my anatomy worksheet in is difficult enough without having to also then take the time to go back and review them in a systematic way. Anki of course does this automatically, giving you access to a powerful study technique without the fuss of implementing it manually.

What is Anki not good for?

Anki is popular for a reason, but there is a lot of frustration with it as well. While very useful, here are a few of the challenges.

Anki is confusing as all get out

I, would say I am very comfortable with computers. I have worked in several tech companies, regularly write Python scripts to help with research or other work, and even program excel macros to better work with spreadsheets. Even with all of that, I was confused and intimidated the first time I opened Anki. The “Browse” tab alone is a lot to handle, let alone syncing, adjusting settings, and adding custom add-ons as is popular among many users. The sheer number of things to click on is pretty overwhelming, and even after years of experience I still get distracted by difficult-to-use aspects of the app during study sessions. 

One of the more confusing tabs in Anki, the browse tab.

While it is certainly possible to master the details of the app with some effort, I have met many people who simply don’t want to deal with it. This is not a technological constraint, but just an issue of bad design.

Ease hell

When you use Anki for hours a day, you end up accumulating a lot of reviews to pump through. Even though you may be retaining the information well, going through these easy cards can end up requiring hours a day. This is a tricky, sort of fundamental problem with Anki, and so common that it has a name: “ease hell.” You might want to retain this information, and Anki is very efficient at reducing the amount of time you spend reviewing cards, but at a certain point, the number of reviews you have can become so huge that it exceeds even this built-in efficiency.

There are a number of ways to deal with this. Adjusting the review settings to find what works for you can be a first step. Another is using the FSRS add-on to change the actual algorithm that runs spaced repetition on the Anki app.

No easy way to take a day off

Here is another pitfall with Anki’s algorithm. Let's say you have an average of 500 reviews a day. This takes quite a lot of time, and you decide to take a Saturday off when your family comes into town to visit. The result? 1000 reviews on Sunday. Proponents of this aspect of Anki point out that you never stop forgetting information, so you always need to be reviewing to retain it. That may be true, but students are not machines. Sometimes things come up, and sometimes we need a day off. There are various ways to try to get around this, including rescheduling your cards and various add-ons, but nothing intuitively built into the app.

Windows 95-era technology

I never feel like I’m living in the technological past more than when I use Anki. Even small things like manually having to sync the app before and after a study session provide a bad experience, and often a lot of frustration when bouncing between mobile and desktop like I often had to do. The app is also large, slow, and takes up a lot of processing power to operate. In addition to the above issues with the confusion, the UI also is just unpleasant to look at.

It takes forever to find relevant flashcards

This was probably my number one complaint about Anki. Searching through a premade deck of 30,000 flashcards for the exact cards that are relevant to your lecture eats up valuable study time and essentially does nothing for learning. This happens frequently because the scope of what is covered in individual lectures in medical school is vastly different from what might be covered by resources such as First Aid which flashcards are often based on. Fortunately, this was a major inspiration behind the development of NovaCards, and is now largely a non-issue. Now you can upload text, PowerPoints, PDFs, or other documents, and NovaCards will give you the exact flashcards that are most relevant to what you are studying.

Making flashcards takes time

While some learning can happen while synthesizing information to make flashcards, many students find this process less valuable, especially when using their notes to do so. Similar to finding relevant flashcards, this process can end up taking hours a day and begins to make using Anki a less efficient use of time. Luckily, this is also a problem that we at NovaCards have tackled with our Card Maker feature. Tens of thousands of cards have already been made, and you can get started making more for free today.

Crowding out other sources of learning

If you end up in ease hell, as many students do eventually, you might find yourself spending hours a day on Anki. I think this fact alone is why so many students have such a strong reaction when Anki is brought up. It conjures memories of sitting at your desk cranking through thousands of cards, day after day, often through some of the most stressful schooling of your life. 

While this alone is distasteful, it can become downright harmful to your learning if it takes away too much from other study activities. The article^{Walck-Shannon} I mentioned previously, showing that the higher percentage of time students spend studying with active study strategies also had another important finding: that the number of different active study strategies students used was also predictive of test performance. That means, according to that data, a student who does practice questions, studies flashcards, explains difficult concepts to a classmate, and draws diagrams is more likely to succeed than a student who only does flashcards and practice questions. If you spend 5 hours a day on flashcards and choose to forgo going to a study group in addition to those, you might be doing more harm than good. Remember that Anki is best used when trying to remember discreet facts. Getting the context for those facts will often have to come from other methods.

Repetitive

The final issue that many people have with Anki is that it can be repetitive and boring. It can be really challenging to wake up early every day, including weekends, and click through several hours of flashcards. You really have to develop a lot of willpower to be that disciplined, and a lot of people simply would rather not. It is reasonable to think that there are more engaging ways to study and to choose one of those strategies if you prefer. 

So, should I use Anki?

This is an oft-debated question in some circles. And of course, I can’t tell you what is right for you. If we have learned anything at NovaCards over the years, it’s that studying is a highly individualized practice. There is a huge amount of variety as to what works for each person.

I think the most important thing to do is try it for a while, maybe for a few weeks or one test, and see what you think. Try talking to others around you and see what their experience has been like. Consider looking for the decks that they use, if they are specific to your learning goals (IE made for your school’s curriculum), or if they are publicly available. Here are a few additional questions to consider:

• Do you have additional study strategies that will complement Anki?

• Do you have the discipline to keep up with all of your reviews?

• Are you ok spending a large percentage of your study time glued to a screen of some kind?

• Do you have people to talk to about Anki if it doesn't seem to be working out for you the way you would like?

• Are you OK cutting back on the number of cards you study if you need more time for other learning activities?

For me, the benefits of Anki outweigh the costs. It formed the backbone of my studies in medical school, and I am still benefitting from the knowledge I gained using it now. I recommend it to students, as long as they know how to manage some of its downsides. 

How do I get started?

The first mistake many people make is downloading the wrong app. There are many pseudo-Ankis out there on the internet and in the app stores. The correct website for Anki is https://apps.ankiweb.net/. On that website, you will find links to the desktop app, web app, and both mobile apps. Be sure to create an account and sync all of the versions of your apps.

Making flashcards to study is an art and science in and of itself, and something we will have to go into more depth with later. Finding pre-made decks is easy enough by searching through Google or Reddit for whatever you are interested in, e.g. “medical school pharmacology anki deck.” Download the deck, open it on your computer to get it into Anki, and sync it so that you will have access across all your devices. 

Conclusion

Anki really is one of the best tools we have for long-term retention of information. It is customizable, has a huge ecosystem of users, a lot of pre-made content, and is the standard study tool for many groups of people. That being said, it is not without its pitfalls and irritations. Whether you choose to use Anki or not is up to you, but in my experience, it can be the backbone of a successful academic career.

As mentioned, there are many frustrations that come with studying in Anki. We made NovaCards, a web app that makes learning with Anki more efficient, to address some of those issues. Feel free to jump over to our website to get started using our tools for free today.

Citations

Anki Manual. Background - Anki Manual. (n.d.). https://docs.ankiweb.net/background.html

Bjork, R. A. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. In Metcalfe, J., Shimamura, A. P. (Eds.), Metacognition: Knowing about knowing (pp. 185–205). Cambridge, MA: Worth Publishers.

Kang, S. H. (2016). Spaced repetition promotes efficient and effective learning. Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3(1), 12–19. https://doi.org/10.1177/2372732215624708

Melton, A. W. (1970). The situation with respect to the spacing of repetitions and memory. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior, 9(5), 596–606. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0022-5371(70)80107-4

Walck-Shannon EM, Rowell SF, Frey RF. To What Extent Do Study Habits Relate to Performance? CBE Life Sci Educ. 2021 Mar;20(1):ar6. doi: 10.1187/cbe.20-05-0091. PMID: 33444109; PMCID: PMC8108503.