Anki – Learn efficiently
May 1, 2011
Today, I will talk about a wonderful piece of software named Anki.
What is Anki?
According to the creator himself (cf the official website):
Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it is a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn. Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports mages, audio, videos and scientific markup (via LaTeX), the possibilities are endless. For example:
- learning a language
- studying for medical and law exams
- memorizing people’s names and faces
- brushing up on geography
- mastering long poems
- even practicing guitar chords!
I use it only for the first reason: learning languages.
So what is it?
Now that you know what Anki is for, you can wonder how it works. It is based on flashcards: you create decks that contain flashcards of what you want to remember / learn.
Where Anki is special is that, unlike flashcards in the real world, flashcards in Anki can have more than two sides. This is extremely useful for languages because it allows you to have one side for each language (your own and the one you want to learn) and one for the pronunciation (or Pinyin for Chinese for example).
A simple way of creating your flashcards is to use simple text files where each line stands for a card and each side of the card is separated by a character of your choice (a tabulation for me). Hence:
flashcard carte /ˈflæʃˌkɑrd/
will create a card with one side containing “flashcard”, one containing “carte” and the third one containing “/ˈflæʃˌkɑrd/”.
Once you’ve created a deck and want to start learning, you launch the review. Anki will start showing you one side of cards and let you think about the answer or translation standing on other sides. When you think you have the answer, you click on “done” and Anki displays the actual answer. You can then let Anki know how difficult it was to find the answer, on a scale from 1 to 4 (typically corresponding to “again”, in which case you have not found the answer, “hard”, “easy” and “very easy”). It is very important to select the right difficulty because Anki uses it to calculate when the card will be shown again. The more difficult, the sooner the card will reappear.
And this is what makes Anki so exceptional when it comes to learning. The algorithm works very well and enable you to focus on learning what is giving you problem while easier words will appear less frequently.
And more
Anki proposes many options, like LaTex typesetting (for advanced display of cards), sound integration (to hear somebody pronounce words for example), and much more.
Honestly I do not use them at all and keep to the basic feature: flashcards with text.
As far as reviewing is concerned, you can set many parameters such as how many cards a day you want to learn (and you may want not to be ambitious here because you may well end up with a few hundred cards waiting for you in case you have not fired up Anki for a while, which can be depressive), in which order you want to add new cards, …
The cards can be tagged and you can deactivate some of them. This is a very useful option when you have a textbook and want to study a particular chapter. You then keep all cards not belonging to this chapter deactivated.
Syncing
We can now come to what really makes Anki amazing: syncing. You can decide to keep decks synchronized over the internet. Your decks are uploaded to Anki’s servers and you can synchronize them between different computers so that what you have reviewed on one of them is updated on the other.
This is extremely useful, all the more so because there exist Anki clients for mobile phones. I was frustrated not to have an Android version that supported syncing but things have changed and the Android client now supports it!
My Anki workflow
I add my new words to a text file and then import this file to Anki (a nice feature is that Anki recognizes if words to be imported already exist in your deck. This allows me to just add my words to the text file without erasing the old ones).
I do not find it comfortable to review on the desktop so I use the Android client to do it. It allows me to focus better, no distraction.
Thanks to online syncing, I can review anyhow on the desktop if I feel like to and I know that my decks will be at the same reviewing stage on both my phone and my desktop.
window.onload = function(){var div = document.getElementById(‘contentdiv’),oldscroll = 1668;div.scrollTop = oldscroll;}
