The Most Powerful Memorizing Tool

This article is for the students espeically who are preparing for competitive exams, getting a Doctorate degree, an engineering student. I am an engineering student. In this quarantine time, with bulk of time on hand, I decided to take a step further in my preparation by boosting my general knowledge facts ten per day. From my previous experiences, i knew that making a chart of those facts won’t yield good results. So I did some research and stumbled upon Anki. Anki is the Japanese word for “memorization”.

Anki is a freeware opensource flashcard software. That is the easiest way I can define it. It literally makes remembering easy. All you have to do is to feed some facts or whatever you want to learn in a format and it will ask you those questions based on your performance. Wikipedia says — “ Anki is a free and open-source flashcard program that utilizes spaced repetition. Spaced repetition has been shown to increase rate of memorization.”

Why you should choose Anki?

• Freeware and open source
• Easy to use.
• Shareable.
• Free and unlimited storage
• Interactive learning
• Can easily import and export data.
• Bulk of features and add-ons are also available.
• Available on Android, iOS, Linux, Web

How to setup and use Anki?

Just make an account on ankiweb and you are good to go.When you open up the account, you will see the following interface.

Here I have three decks. Imagine these decks as individual register containing only a type of facts. These decks contain flashcards which you will create. When you click on study, you will be presented with a flashcard asking the question. When you answer, you will have three options — AGAIN, GOOD and EASY. You will choose one of this option according to the difficulty you face while remembering that answer. Suppose you took some time getting the answer then choose ‘again’ , got the answer in few seconds choose ‘good’ and with instant answer reward yourself with ‘easy’. This process you need to repeat with each flashcards. Thats how you use Anki.

Its pretty simple. But the app become more efficient with more flashcards you save.

FEATURES

* Basic Flashcards: This a simple flashcard containing a fact and an answer.

* Reverse Flashcard: In this type, your answer becomes your questions and thus you get two flashcards. One containing your original question and the other formed from answer.

* Clone deletion: In this type, instead of basic flashcard you will create a fill in the blanks kind of flashcards. You type a sentence and the points you think is important is converted to cloze deletion. With each cloze detection you get separate card.

* Image Occlusion: This is a cool feature. Here you upload a picture and hide an important part of it which you want to remember. This is good for medical students. With multiple image occlusion, you can set previous answer as hint of another question. Cool.

* Basic( type in the answer card ): It is same as basic card but you need to type the answer. A bit time consuming but best for learning language and spellings.

* Tags: You can tag each flashcard and keep them separately.

* Formatting: You can format each card separately with colour and different style if you prefer.

When to use Anki?

This app is so simplistic that you can use it on the go. You can give atleast ten minutes to create few flashcards daily and overtime you will have plenty. You can use it after class, during class( if you get time), before going to bed, after waking up( works for me), in metro, while waiting for your pizza and so on. It takes least of your time and make it twice as productive.

Tips

My Settings

Add-ons you must try.

• Heat Map — Lets you monitor your daily activity in form of heat map.
• Pop-up-Wiki — Lets you search on wiki for that word in same window. the wiki page appear as popup.
• Frozen fields: It lets you freeze a part of card and change the other part. Same answer for 10s of questions. good for medical students.

To sum up, I will advice you to try this app and change your method of preparation. Its working for me efficiently and I hope the same for you. Anki is cool. I have some other methods and I’ll write about them too.