- Videos
- Key Concepts
- Cards
- Types of Cards
- Decks
- Card Types
- Note Types
- Collection
- Cards
- Shared Decks
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- Linux
Videos
For a quick way to dive into Anki, please have a look at these introvideos. Some were made with a previous Anki version, but the conceptsare the same.
If YouTube is unavailable in your country, you can download the videosinstead.
Key Concepts
Cards
A question and answer pair is called a 'card'. This is based on a paperflashcard with a question on one side and the answer on the back. InAnki a card doesn’t actually look like a physical card, and when youshow the answer the question remains visible by default. For example, ifyou’re studying basic chemistry, you might see a question like:
Q: Chemical symbol for oxygen?After thinking about it, and deciding the answer is O, you click theshow answer button, and Anki shows you:
Q: Chemical symbol for oxygen?A: OAfter confirming that you are correct, you can tell Anki how well youremembered, and Anki will choose a next time to show you again.
Types of Cards
New: A new card is one that you have downloaded or entered in, but have never studied before.
Learning: Cards that were seen for the first time recently, and are still being learnt.
Review: Cards that were previously learnt, and now need to be reviewed so you don’t forget them.There are two types of review cards:
- Young: A young card is one that has an interval of less than 21 days, but isnot in learning.
- Mature: A mature card is one that has an interval of 21 days or greater.
Relearn: A relearning card is a card that you have failed in review mode, thusreturning it to learning mode to be relearned.
Decks
A 'deck' is a group of cards. You can place cards in different decks tostudy parts of your card collection instead of studying everything atonce. Each deck can have different settings, such as how many new cardsto show each day, or how long to wait until cards are shown again.
Decks can contain other decks, which allows you to organize decks into atree. Anki uses “::” to show different levels. A deck called“Chinese::Hanzi” refers to a “Hanzi” deck, which is part of a “Chinese”deck. If you select “Hanzi” then only the Hanzi cards will be shown; ifyou select “Chinese” then all Chinese cards, including Hanzi cards, willbe shown.
To place decks into a tree, you can either name them with “::” betweeneach level, or drag and drop them from the deck list. Decks that havebeen nested under another deck (that is, that have at least one “::” intheir names) are often called 'subdecks', and top-level decks aresometimes called 'superdecks' or 'parent decks'.
Anki starts with a deck called “default”; any cards which have somehowbecome separated from other decks will go here. Anki will hide thedefault deck if it contains no cards and you have added other decks.Alternatively, you may rename this deck and use it for other cards.
Decks are displayed in the deck list alphabetically. This can result ina surprising order if your decks contain numbers - for example, "My Deck 10"will come before "My Deck 9", as 1 comes before 9. If you wish to number yourdecks, you can add a "0" in front of single-digit numbers, e.g. "Deck 01","Deck 02" .. "Deck 10".
Decks are best used to hold broad categories of cards, rather thanspecific topics such as “food verbs” or “lesson 1”. For more info onthis, please see the using decks appropriately section.
For information on how decks affect the order cards are displayed in,please see the display order section.
When making flashcards, it’s often desirable to make more than one cardthat relates to some information. For example, if you’re learningFrench, and you learn that the word “bonjour” means “hello”, you maywish to create one card that shows you “bonjour” and asks you toremember “hello”, and another card that shows you “hello” and asks youto remember “bonjour”. One card is testing your ability to recognize theforeign word, and the other card is testing your ability to produce it.
When using paper flashcards, your only option in this case is to writeout the information twice, once for each card. Some computer flashcardprograms make life easier by providing a feature to flip the front andback sides. This is an improvement over the paper situation, but thereare two major downsides:
Because such programs don’t track your performance of recognitionand production separately, cards will tend not to be shown to you atthe optimum time, meaning you forget more than you’d like, or youstudy more than is necessary.
Reversing the question and answer only works when you want exactlythe same content on each side. This means it’s not possible todisplay extra info on the back of each card for example.
Anki solves these problems by allowing you to split the content of yourcards up into separate pieces of information. You can then tell Ankiwhich pieces of information you want on each card, and Anki will takecare of creating the cards for you and updating them if you make anyedits in the future.
Imagine we want to study French vocabulary, and we want to include thepage number on the back of each card. We want our cards to look likethis:
Q: BonjourA: Hello Page #12And:
Q: HelloA: Bonjour Page #12In this example, we have three pieces of related information: a Frenchword, an English meaning, and a page number. If we put them together,they’d look like this:
French: BonjourEnglish: HelloPage: 12In Anki, this related information is called a 'note', and each piece ofinformation is called a 'field'. So we can say that this type of notehas three fields: French, English, and Page.
To add and edit fields, click the “Fields…” button while adding orediting notes. For more information on fields, please see theCustomizing Fields section.
Card Types
In order for Anki to create cards based on our notes, we need to give ita blueprint that says which fields should be displayed on the front orback of each card. This blueprint is called a 'card type'. Each type ofnote can have one or more card types; when you add a note, Anki willcreate one card for each card type.
Each card type has two 'templates', one for the question and one for theanswer. In the above French example, we wanted the recognition card tolook like this:
Q: BonjourA: Hello Page #12To do this, we can set the question and answer templates to:
Q: {{French}}A: {{English}}<br> Page #{{Page}}By surrounding a field name in double curly brackets, we tell Anki toreplace that section with the actual information in the field. Anythingnot surrounded by curly brackets remains the same on each card. (Forinstance, we don’t have to type “Page #” into the Page field whenadding material – it’s added automatically to every card.) <br> isa special code that tells Anki to move to the next line; more detailsare available in the templates section.
The production card templates work in a similar way:
Q: {{English}}A: {{French}}<br> Page #{{Page}}Once a card type has been created, every time you add a new note, a cardwill be created based on that card type. Card types make it easy to keepthe formatting of your cards consistent and can greatly reduce theamount of effort involved in adding information. They also mean Anki canensure related cards don’t appear too close to each other, and theyallow you to fix a typing mistake or factual error once and have all therelated cards updated at once.
To add and edit card types, click the “Cards…” button while adding orediting notes. For more information on card types, please see the Cards and Templates section.
Note Types
Anki allows you to create different types of notes for differentmaterial. Each type of note has its own set of fields and card types.It’s a good idea to create a separate note type for each broad topicyou’re studying. In the above French example, we might create a notetype called “French” for that. If we wanted to learn capital cities, wecould create a separate note type for that as well, with fields such as“Country” and “Capital City”.
When Anki checks for duplicates, it only compares other notes of thesame type. Thus if you add a capital city called “Orange” using thecapital city note type, you won’t see a duplicate message when it comestime to learn how to say “orange” in French.
When you create a new collection, Anki automatically adds some standardnote types to it. These note types are provided to make Anki easier fornew users, but in the long run it’s recommended you define your own notetypes for the content you are learning. The standard note types are asfollows:
Basic
Has Front and Back fields, and will create one card. Text you enter inFront will appear on the front of the card, and text you enter in Backwill appear on the back of the card.Basic (and reversed card)
Like Basic, but creates two cards for the text you enter: one fromfront→back and one from back→front.Basic (optional reversed card)
This is a front→back card, and optionally a back→front card. To do this,it has a third field called “Add Reverse.” If you enter any text intothat field, a reverse card will be created. More information about thisis available in the Cards and Templates section.Basic (type in the answer)
This is essentially Basic, with an extra text box on the front where youcan type your answer in, after flipping to the back your input would bechecked and compared with the answer. More information is available in theChecking Your Answer section.Cloze
A note type which makes it easy to select text and turn it into a clozedeletion (e.g., “Man landed on the moon in […]” → “Man landed on themoon in 1969”). More information is available in the cloze deletion section.Image Occlusion
Like the cloze notetype, but it works with images instead of text,which is especially useful when studying material that heavily relies on images,such as anatomy, geography, and more. For details, please see the Image Occlusionsection of the manual.
To add your own note types and modify existing ones, you can use Tools →Manage Note Types from the main Anki window.
Notes and note types are common to your whole collection rather thanlimited to an individual deck. This means you can use many differenttypes of notes in a particular deck, or have different cards generatedfrom a particular note in different decks. When you add notes using theAdd window, you can select what note type to use and what deck to use,and these choices are completely independent of each other. You can alsochange the note type of some notes after you’ve already created them.
Collection
Your 'collection' is all the material stored in Anki – your cards,notes, decks, note types, deck options, and so on.
You can watch a video about Shared Decks and ReviewBasics on YouTube.
The easiest way to get started with Anki is to download a deck of cardssomeone has shared:
Click the “Get Shared” button at the bottom of the deck list.
When you’ve found a deck you’re interested in, click the “Download”button to download a deck package.
Double-click on the downloaded package to load it into Anki, orFile→Import it.
Please note that it’s not currently possible to add shared decksdirectly to your AnkiWeb account. You need to import them with thedesktop program, then synchronize to upload them to AnkiWeb.
Creating your own deck is the most effective way to learn a complexsubject. Subjects like languages and the sciences can’t be understoodsimply by memorizing facts — they require explanation and context tolearn effectively. Furthermore, inputting the information yourselfforces you to decide what the key points are, leading to a betterunderstanding.
If you are a language learner, you may be tempted to download a longlist of words and their translations, but this won’t teach you alanguage any more than memorizing scientific equations will teach youastrophysics. To learn properly, you need textbooks, teachers, orexposure to real-world sentences.
Do not learn if you do not understand.--SuperMemoMost shared decks are created by people who are learning materialoutside of Anki – from textbooks, classes, TV, etc. They select theinteresting points from what they learn and put them into Anki. Theymake no effort to add background information or explanations to thecards, because they already understand the material. So when someoneelse downloads their deck and tries to use it, they’ll find it verydifficult as the background information and explanations are missing.
That is not to say shared decks are useless – simply that for complexsubjects, they should be used as a 'supplement' to external material,not as a 'replacement' for it. If you’re studying textbook ABC andsomeone has shared a deck of ideas from ABC, that’s a great way to savesome time. And for simple subjects that are basically a list of facts,such as capital city names or pub quiz trivia, you probably don’t needexternal material. But if you attempt to study complex subjects withoutexternal material, you will probably meet with disappointing results.
