How to Use Anki: THE ULTIMATE BEGINNER'S GUIDE

so you've got this friend in medical school this pesky friend they're always talking about how many anki cards they studied last night they were up till three in the morning thousands of cards and you're sitting there like first off what the heck is anki and second off why am i friends with you you're so freaking annoying so you want to be a part of the crew you want to get better grades in school and you're like all right i'm going to download aki i want to see what this thing is about what is it and

is it going to make me a better student you download it and you start looking at it and you quickly realize that it is the most confusing non-intuitive weird looking thing you've ever tried to use so you google up how to use anki and thankfully the youtube algorithm has brought you here to me and that is where i come in today is going to be a day one guide to using anki the absolute basics i'm going to get you started using this study app and by the end of it hopefully you will be able to

make good cards yourself study them and get better grades which actually kind of makes me the pesky friend that won't shut up about anki hey friends welcome to the video my name is steven and i am a second year dental student today we're doing a day one guy donkey this is going to be the absolute basics getting you started with using this app i hope by the end of this video you'll have a good idea what anki is and how you can incorporate it into your life as a student i know this video is going

to be super long so i want to get right into the tutorial but if you enjoy it please let me know down below in the comments make sure you like the video and subscribe to the channel if you want to see more about anki and also about my life in dental school cool so let's get right into the tutorial i'm going to start with downloading and installing the app so that if you're absolutely from the very beginning here you can get going it's very very simple here we're going to go to apps.ankiweb.net and you can

just hit the download button that's going to bring you down over here you can choose whichever operating system you're running on uh just click whichever one you you're using and then follow through the prompts and you'll get it downloaded when you first open up your new anki app it's going to look kind of different from what i have here but that's totally okay i want to just start this whole process with explaining the interface what does this all mean what are you looking at and the first place to go is this top row of items

here we'll start out with dex this is the main landing page of anki and this is going to be all of our decks of flashcards so basically all of these are considered decks and i have created them named them and organized them based on my own organization system so all of your decks of flashcards are going to be found here now it's important to note in this deck section that decks can be stacked within each other so you can make one deck and then you can add decks into it and you get this sort of

tiered organization system there are plenty of other ways to organize within anki but on the most basic spectrum this is going to be how you do it making decks and then adding those decks into other decks did i say decks enough times the next button up here is your add button this is going to be the place where we add flash cards and i will talk about this process more in a bit if you want to skip ahead to that process you can find adding cards in the chapters below but this is the ad interface

and once again we'll talk about that the next thing is browse and browse is going to be a very important page this is going to be where you're basically able to search up your entire catalog of cards everything you've ever made typed in you'll be able to search it and get all those cards pulled up it's a super powerful aspect of anki and there's so many ways you can go with the browse feature we'll talk about some of those in the future but basically if you're ever looking for a specific card let's say you're looking

for the drug metformin and you want to figure out what that is and you want to see what kind of cards you have on it this would be the place that you would go to find it and the next button is stats this is going to show you everything that you are doing this is kind of a good way if you're an analytical person to see how much you're studying but if you want to see any of your stats and just a breakdown of how you're studying and what you're doing if you're that type of

person stats is the way to go and the last button up here in blue is the sync button this is going to sync your cards to anki web what this means is that if you make flashcards you will sync which happens automatically when you exit in and out of the app and that's going to add your upload your cards to anki web so that if you ever want to use the ios app there is a seamless syncing process between what you're doing here on your macbook or your pc and what you're doing on your iphone

your your ipad whatever other device you're using but once again every time we exit out of the app the sync function is going to happen automatically and we will seamlessly not ever lose any of our progress of the cards we're making so back to the decks function here because this is really where anki begins these are the decks that i have created all of these are my semesters of dental school and as you can see specifically here for this one i have plenty of decks within decks there's tons of different flash cards there's ton of

info tons of information in here a lot of these decks i got from other people or sort of added from just like other places and so you'll see here these are the new cards these are cards that haven't studied yet a lot of those numbers are blue because i kind of pick and choose what i do go in and study the red and green numbers are just cards that you have studied in the past and they're now due for you to study again one thing i did want to talk about with index though was the

gear symbol that you can see at the far right if we click on that we get a couple of options we can rename we get the options folder we can export and we can delete rename very intuitive if you want to name decks and sort of add them in with each other you can do that options we'll talk about export you can export decks and send them to your friends it's a very simple process but this is where we get into the next part of the video which is anki settings now anki settings it's a

completely different topic this is something that you could go on about for days and there are people that have done that i wanted to show you my basic anki settings and they're found here once again in this gear symbol next to each and every deck each deck can have a different type of settings so you can do this for any deck you can customize your decks however you would like so we'll go over here to options and it'll bring up this page for us so that we can mess with our settings now i'm going to

give you a very basic overview so that you can just not worry too much about this because i realize this is very intimidating to look at it looks very confusing and it can be basically there is a default options or settings list for each deck and that's what i currently have selected here and the default we'll go through it really basically daily limits that's how many cards you can see in every day i always set that to 9999 i would never remotely get even close to that many cards in a day but perhaps you could

change that if you'd like really the most important thing in this entire page is found here where we see new cards we have first here the learning steps and there is of course information if you want to read more about this this is basically when you're studying flash cards how quickly are you seeing them so what this means right here this first number that's when you're going to see a card if you get it wrong so if you get a card wrong you're studying and you and you didn't get the answer it'll show it to

you again in a minute once you get it right it'll show it to you again in 10 minutes and after that it's gonna show up the next day this can really be changed to however you'd like it and i'll talk about that more in a second but that's basically what that is the graduating interval is the number of days it's gonna take for you to see a card that you've gotten right again so this is one day if i get a new card correct on day one it's gonna show it to me again on day

two and on day two if i get it right it's gonna show me that same cardigan four days later and this seems like a lot but this is just how the anki interval system works and insertion order should in my opinion always be random um you could do it sequentially that's adding the oldest cards or the cards that you've added first showing those to you first but random is gonna just jumble everything up and i think that's the best way to do it so that is a basic overview of the default settings within anki if

you don't want to mess with any of this keep it on default for every deck that's probably going to be best in my opinion the default settings are good i don't love them though so i tend to use something that i call ally's settings and if you know this is if you know you know so these are ali settings and he put it online at one point and this is i think just kind of what i tend to prefer i may have changed it a little bit but basically these are my learning steps five minutes

one day and two days that means if i get a card wrong i'm gonna see it again in five minutes if i get it correct i'm gonna see it again in one day and then again in two days and once again you can play with this to make it however you want it to be it's really up to you i don't think all this is super super important but the big thing on this is i like to see a card if i get a card right in a day i have so many cards that i

want it to go ahead and pop into tomorrow i don't want to have to do it twice so the default settings will have you doing the same card twice every day i tend to not like that and that is a basic overview of settings and just sort of how i use it what i do i know that once again this is a very very big topic and if you want to get way more into it you certainly can now let's actually use anki let's add some cards this process is super super simple uh it's very

very intuitive in my opinion um and so let's get right into it basically the first thing that we want to do is select a deck so let's say we just want to add cards to my d2 spring cumulative deck here i can just go in and hit the add button or i can hit a on my keyboard and that's going to bring up the add interface when you do this you will see the basic card type i'll talk more about this here in a second but this is what the ad interface looks like we have

the front which is the front of the card and then the back which is the back of the card so a very basic flash card if you have them physically is a front side and a back side you look at one side and then you flip it over to see the answer that is what this is and all of this up here is not super super important but you can basically change the way the text looks if you want to bold italicize superscript whatever it is there's tons of stuff here and you can kind of

mess with that but basically speaking i mean adding flashcards is very simple here after you type something out you basically just hit add and that's going to add the card to your deck you could also hit command return and that will once again add the card to your deck now in terms of card types this is something that i do think is important and in my opinion the card type that you should basically always be using is the closed card type and essentially what this allows you to do is something called a close delete close

deletes are basically fill in the blanks it's kind of the best way to put it so if i made a card here that said what is a close deletion i would then basically go in and add the answer on one side so instead of having two sides of the flash card all that is here on one and basically to add my closed deletion i'm hitting command shift c command shift c is going to pop up this weird symbol and i can go in and say fill in the blank i can then go over here to

the back or extra and add in a screenshot add in more information this is basically just what's going to pop up when you're studying you have a little extra field to kind of add in extra information or notes whatever you want to do there once again to add this card we're going to go and hit command return that's going to add that card there and we'll be able to study it at a later date one thing to note here about this more information back extra section i really think that this is an important thing to

do if you're making flashcards you should always have something here in this back extra fill-in box there should always be something here what i've talked about in the past is adding in a screenshot of the powerpoint slide that you're taking information from so that anytime you have a card here and you have information you can always reference back to the teacher's material what they gave you extra reading extra information extra notes just mnemonics ways to remember things all that should be dumped in here it's a super super powerful aspect of anki and i think every

single card you should you make should have something in that box now another important aspect of adding cards is pinning fields pinning fields let me explain it really basically here so let's say we have our card here what am i doing on this app and our answer this is our closed deletion right there that's our answer now we also have this screenshot of the random colors let's assume that this is a powerpoint slide and it's giving us the answer to the question let's say we want to add multiple cards from this one powerpoint slide say

the slide has multiple bullet points and we want to go through and add multiple cards instead of adding in that screenshot every single time you want to make a new card all you have to do is come over to here and hit this little pin button now what that'll do is when you add this card it'll pin this field this field what is inside this field won't go away so that you can go back in add another card with another closed deletion and you will see add that card and the the field is still there

the screenshot is still there so this is really powerful once again it's called pinning fields and it'll allow you to keep information within boxes so that you can go in and make 20 cards per powerpoint slide and never lose that powerpoint slide information when you're studying this is going to be super super helpful so now we have added a bunch of flash cards and it is time to go in and actually study the most important aspect of using anki is actually studying with it uh it's very simple i've gone ahead and selected a deck here

and all we are going to do now is hit the spacebar and boom we get a question or a flashcard and very simply we can look at this flashcard we can see what we're trying to get here this is the closed deletion this is what it's hoping for us to answer and basically all we have to do is hit the space bar spacebar will reveal the answer it will also reveal anything else that was added to the card in sort of the extra box area and that is it basically if we knew the answer to

this question we can grade how we did we can say good hard again whatever if we didn't know once again just grade it however you did in my opinion you should always be using the good option easy is only if you like absolutely are never going to forget the information i rarely hit easy it's usually just these three typically good or again now important to note here is the question of how often should you be studying the answer is technically every day anki is a system that's built to be studied every day and used every

day i certainly have not been diligent enough to do that i'll just be completely honest with you but that's the way it was intended to be used and so if you study your cards every day the way that anki stacks the information and sort of organizes the cards that is going to optimally allow you to have that spaced repetition concept that everybody talks about so there's your answer okay finally friends let's talk add-ons now anki add-ons this is another aspect of anki that you could go way way way further into detail about but i will

give you some of the add-ons that i think are necessary basically let me first quickly explain what an add-on is these are features that you add to your anki to make it better make it more usable more user-friendly more powerful more intuitive whatever it is that you want to do the internet is filled with anki add-ons and those are just features that you can add if you want a little bit more capability out of your app really the only add-on that i think everyone should have and is entirely necessary is image occlusion and i made

a video about image occlusion which you can check out right here that's going to send you to my video on it check that out image occlusion is super powerful and i think everyone should use it so what about some other add-ons that are nice to have that i would recommend to see these we'll go over to tools and then add-ons check out everything that i've done over here basically i think there are a couple that make life a little bit easier that make life nicer the first of these is hierarchical tags and this is going

to make your browse function that i talked about earlier up here it's going to make that a lot better basically you can tag cards and then use this hierarchical tags add-on to organize those tags and then make and create decks based off of the tags not the decks themselves advanced browser is nice and it's exactly what it sounds like it makes the browser function of all this better and if you want to research and check all this out you can check out anki web which will have information on all these add-ons the review heat map

is a good one in my opinion this is going to add in this picture right here and this is called the heat map it's showing you your progress how much you're working on you're studying every day and once again i don't study as much with anki anymore as i used to so that's why this isn't filled up but what you'd like to see is all these boxes are blue you're going to also see a daily average days to learn longest streak and current streak and so these are nice things just once again a creature comfort

something that makes your anki look and feel a little bit better and then the final one that i wanted to talk about was the king of button add-ons that's this one right here and this is going to make your buttons and your cards look a lot better so if we go to any random cards uh any random deck here we'll see that when i hit spacebar we get these giant cool looking buttons and this can be completely customized with this king of buttons add-on i like this i think it makes the studying experience just a

little bit better so it's an add-on that i appreciate and enjoy and if you want to add on any add-ons the way to do it is to go to tools add-ons and then get add-ons this will give you a box in which you can paste a code those codes are going to be found in the browse add-ons here on the website so you can scroll through here check all these out they've got user reviews and ratings they've also got tons of information from the people that created these anything that you want to do within anki

is probably going to be available as an add-on here you basically go to anything click on that it'll pull up its page you can then just copy this code come back over to here and paste that code in and that'll add in your add-on hey friends that's it for this video there is a ton of information here anki is a very very powerful app you could do a whole lot with it and this video could be hours and days long even with just all the information but hopefully this was a good starting setup starting guide

for using anki i think i covered everything that you need in order to download create cards and begin studying them once again there's so much more that you could know and that you could learn about this software and if you have any questions about it please let me know i am by no means an anki expert i usually can answer the basic questions but the cool thing about these videos that i have found is that people in my comments will always help out other commenters so there will always be if you ask a question in

the comments somebody will be there to answer it for you this video is insanely long so i'm going to end it here but hopefully once again you learned a lot hopefully this was a good guide for you if you enjoyed it please like the video please comment below and let me know that it was helpful for you and subscribe to the channel for more i've enjoyed anki it's been very good to me so hopefully this will be the beginning of a good journey with anki for you my friends best of luck studying thank you for

watching today and as i always say at the end of my videos i will see you in the next one