Notes on Anki

This is not a guide on how to use Anki

I am not writing another general-purpose how-to guide. I'll explain what I think needs explaining, but this is about how I use Anki for the subjects I study. I'll briefly touch on some of what I see as major debates in the Anki community.

What I use Anki for

• Japanese
  • Genki textbook vocabuary pre-made deck
  • Genki textbook grammar
  • Kanji pre-made deck
• Technology
  • Knowledge of various security vulnerabilities and how to remediate them
  • Shortcuts for various programs
  • Commands and command flags
    • grep, tmux, diff, etc...
• Trivia
  • Notes from Index, A History of the

Deck Options

I configure my deck options per-top-level-deck and apply it to all sub-decks. Here's changes I apply to all decks that I find relevant: - New cards: 12 - I've found 12 new cards to be the maximum I can work with per day without getting overwhelmed. - I don't always get to the new cards, though, so my average per day is actually lower. - Maximum reviews/day: 999 - New/review order: Show after reviews - There's no reason to look at new cards if there are potentially due cards. - Bury review siblings: Enabled - Bury interday learning siblings: Enabled

The "Bury" Button

One thing I never see people mention is the use of the "Bury" button when doing cards. I often misread cards. This means that I give the right answer for what I thought the card was, but not what the card actually was. This is different from getting the wrong answer in that it often involves starting from incorrect information rather than ending at it. In these cases, I use the Bury button (= on the keyboard) to hide the card until the next day. That way it doesn't get marked as wrong in a way that affects the stats/scheduling of the card.

Community Debates

Here's my position on some of the debates/directions I commonly see on r/anki.

Pre-made vs Self-made

I believe that self-made cards are better for some subjects and purposes. The more abstract or advanced the knowledge, the more likely you'll want to make cards yourself. However, some things (such as geography or anatomy or textbook vocabulary) don't need to be customized to the person and can be learned through cards. In those cases, the time saved by using pre-made cards is worth it.

Avoiding Ease Hell

People often recommend the use of addons like Straight Reward to simplify Anki's answer options to Again and Good while avoiding the dreaded Ease Hell. I believe the Hard and Easy buttons still have a place. "Hard" is for things that take an above-average amount of time to answer. "Easy" is for things I can answer immediately upon seeing them without needing to think

Cloze vs Basic

Cloze cards are useful for remembering phrases verbatim or remembering individual items in an incomplete set. However, they should be avoided whenever possible.

One big deck vs many

Separate your top-level decks and study all of them at once using a custom deck. Use the search term is:due and enable rescheduling.