How To Make Anki Cards That Don’t Suck
I didn’t start using Anki until sometime in summer 2015. At the time, I remember feeling embarrassed that I had never known about that software, and thought a lot about how useful it was and how nice it would have been to know more about it earlier in my language learning journey.
I’ve learned a lot since then.
I’m slowly trying to compile everything I’ve learned about effectively learning Anki together in a series of videos and posts. This is the latest:
Now, there are a few general principles that you should understand if you’re planning on using Anki to learn any language - or, really, anything at all.
The first one, the one that trips everybody up, is that you need to make your own personal cards.
Almost everybody I’ve seen in the Anki community is obsessed with downloading the perfect deck. The problem, though, is that it just doesn’t work that way.
Anki is not really a learning system. What I mean by that is that the software is not really designed for you to come in with no foreknowledge and somehow magically learn something by looking at a couple of flash cards.
Rather, Anki is software that is meant to complement your learning. Ideally, you want to learn something first, master it to the extent that you understand it, and only then make Anki cards to solidify your learning.
If you try to learn something through flash cards alone, you’ll find yourself frustrated with the learning process. Either your studies will take too long, or you’ll wind up skipping through words and sentences, which, obviously, is even less helpful.
It’s much better to go slowly and thoroughly than to try to impress people by dumping a bunch of stuff in your deck at once.
That leads directly to the second principle, which is that your cards need to be simple.
Basically, you want every single card to ask you to accomplish a single task. In other words, sample sentence cards you create should only have a single word that you are testing yourself on, or a single grammatical principle that you are trying to solidify in your mind.
If you don’t understand the grammatical principle or the word at all, you really shouldn’t make an Anki card. You should spend time learning it and fully understanding it first before you even think about making an Anki card.
The idea behind Anki is that you take the knowledge that you’ve already gained and solidify it in your mind by reviewing it in a systematic fashion. Repetition through the algorithm allows you to take relatively shallow knowledge and slowly put it into your long term memory. And, of course, if you wind up forgetting the card, the algorithm will put it back in the mix, giving you the chance to learn it again.
Of course, that leads us to the third principle: Anki really has no ending.
I ran into this tweet the other day:
I understand the sentiment, I suppose - but the truth is that there’s no reason that Anki should ever “end.” Instead, your list of cards and interests should naturally expand as you broaden your reading to new topics and new genres.
Anyway, there are a few of my scattered thoughts on how Anki actually works. And, honestly, the program is a lot more fun if you cut out the preconstructed decks, if you make your cards simple, and if you stop dumping random stuff in for no apparent reason.
Back in college some of our exams allowed handwritten "cheat" sheets. And by condensing all the knowledge from the class we would usually be able to remember it without needing the sheet at all. the time spent making and using it was enough to usually memorize and understand all required knowledge. Our professors also advised us to make these sheets for exams that didn't allow it (and then leaving it at home). This usually worked. I reckon it's similar with anki cards in that regard.
this is nice! I am starting to use anki for school