Anki intro

Written 2022-11-06 - Sunday

Anki is a program you install on your computer, and possibly also phone. https://apps.ankiweb.net/

It's a program for helping you memorize things with flashcards. I used it to:

  • Learn German from basically nothing to B2 in ~9 or so months
  • Learn the names and faces of my colleagues at work
  • Learn all the useful command line flags and snippets (like Git etc.)
  • Learn shortcuts for programs, like for Chrome, Google Docs, macOS, Pop OS window management, etc.
  • Learn a whole bunch of geography like US states, country names and flags
  • Learn some random flags like “the size of a red blood cell is ~7 micrometers, a packet round-trip Netherlands ← → USA takes about 100 ms, …” - those are useful for mental math
  • Learn random facts about medicine, mostly about the brain
  • Learn names, complexities and steps involved in common algorithms
  • Learn common idioms in NumPy, PyTorch, Tensorflow, MPI, … - all the tools I wanna get really fluent in for my day-to-day work
  • Learn take-aways from machine learning papers

Especially medicine students use Anki a lot, because it's great for all the memorization they have to do.

A traditional flash card is a piece of paper with 2 sides - one side has a question, the other side has the answer you're supposed to recall. Like “Capital of USA" → “Washington DC”. You look at the question side, try to recall the answer, and then look at the answer side and see if you got it right. You have a deck of these pieces of paper for learning whatever you wanna learn.

Anki is one of a bunch of programs that let you do this with a computer - instead of a physical deck, it's a bunch of files on your computer, and you can sync it with your devices.

Anki uses spaced repetition. That means that you won't go through the cards always in the same order, but you'll tell the program how well you could recall the information. If you couldn't recall it, it'll ask you for that card more often, because your memory of it is not yet strong enough. If you can recall it easily, you will see it less and less often.

That's the basics. It's great because it's a well-known fact from psychology that it's way better to study in consistent small doses than to just cram for 5 hours before the exam - cause then you'll forget the thing in a week or two. It's called the spacing effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacing_effect, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3399982/#:~:text=The%20spacing%20effect%20refers%20to,study%20on%20the%20spacing%20effect).).

You could totally do this offline without a computer, if you just have a bunch of cards and consistently study them. Having it on a computer means you don't have to do the organization manually.

There's a lot of existing Anki decks for all sorts of subjects, see: https://ankiweb.net/shared/decks/

There's a sync service which lets you sync your Anki decks between different computers and other devices. There's a free Android app called AnkiDroid and a paid iOS official app. Be careful to get this app, not any other ones that try to hijack the name: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ichi2.anki

I go into more details of how I use Anki here: https://agentydragon.com/posts/2019-11-25-my-anki-patterns.html