The Official Anki Thread

[GangaMaster]

Post any questions and concerns about Anki. Here is a link to the free program and youtube videos on how to work it out.


He has more videos if you click his screen name under the video.


How to use image occlusion (great for Histology and Anatomy)

A guide for Anki by Drwillbe a phd/md that is also a poster on SDN:
http://drwillbe.blogspot.com/2011/08/anki-guide-for-medical-students.html

I've found these very useful to get you started.

Where to download:
http://ankisrs.net/

[I don't work for Anki but there are tons of threads on it and I figured I would put a one-stop spot for them, plus I'd love to read the other advice and answer questions]

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[cbrons]

Thank you for your community outreach mr anki


Sent from my iPhone using SDN Mobile

 

[chronicidal]

I'll copy an old post of mine.

The first key to making Anki work for you is following the SuperMemo 20 rules of formulating knowledge. The key ones are

• Learn before you memorize - only make cards for facts that you understand and connect to larger web of other facts
• Minimize the information tested on each card - no more than one question per card, avoid answers that require large sets and enumerations
• Use mnemonics - organize, visualize, elaborate
• Optimize wording - ask the most clear and specific question possible
• Prioritize - only make cards for knowledge that is high yield; make a clear rule for yourself what counts as high yield (e.g. only facts found in First Aid)

The second key to making Anki work for you is to use it consistently. Anki is for efficient retention. Retention requires long-term persistence.

• Review every single day, including weekends and vacations.
• Get the phone app, so you can do cards during random downtime in the day like waiting in line or sitting on the can.
• Continue to make better cards. It took me several months to get the hang of making good quality cards.
• Do not try to add too many cards at once. Binging will burn you out. Spread it out. Keep a reasonable new card limit, like 40/day.
• Continue to review even though your block exams have past and you do not get consistent gratification for the durability of your knowledge. It's easy to lose morale when you realize that you're spending time reviewing last block's materials while your classmates are spending less time studying and getting as good grades. Remember that it will pay off down the road, when you take the cumulative exam known as Step 1, when you get pimped, when your classmates have to re-learn stuff for clerkship shelf exams that everyone already learned once for Step 1 but forgot soon thereafter. Anki is for retention more than it is for cramming (though it can do that too).

 

[chronicidal]

Here are the time settings I use and may work well for others who make their own cards. (If you do not make your own cards, you might consider adding a learning step or reducing the length of the first learning interval.)

New cards:

• Steps in min: 10 2880
• Order: random order
• New cards/day: 100
• Graduating interval: 4 days
• Easy interval: 7 days
• Starting ease: 250%
• Bury related new cards: checked

Reviews:

• Maximum reviews/day: 200
• Easy bonus: 150%
• Interval modifier: 135%
• Bury related new cards: checked

Lapses:

• Steps in min: 20
• New interval: 20%
• Minimum interval: 2 days
• Leech threshold: 8 days
• Leech action: suspend card

With these settings, I'm getting 91.3% correct on mature cards. (This is the key number you want to target when playing with settings, but they won't change for several months after you change your settings. You want to balance long-term retention and efficiency.)

 

[Chelewn]

@chronicidal
Why did you change steps in min from 1 2880 to 10 2880 ?
What is your maximum interval?

...
What do the lapses settings do?

 

[cbrons]

Yeah I do intervals 1 day graduating, 1 day easy

 

[LostinLift]

Has anyone used Anki specifically for classes - then removed the minutiae and low yield cards after the exam and kept the HY stuff?

 

[@JackShephard]

I've used Anki a lot. I think the way I use it now is the best for medicine.

During M1 and M2 you have lots of time to study, so you can use things like Anki.

During boards and clinical study periods you have less time.

I now just study and memorize as much as possible. If you go over something a few times and it's still not sticking, that's when I use Anki. This ends up being < 20% of the material.

To use Anki for 100% of the material would have me making tons of cards and never having time to review them. I've done this and it's a huge waste of time.

Also, the people who are the best at medical school (the people not using Anki and acing things) have developed amazing skills at memorizing the material (ask yourself, how can I remember this if I was never able to see this material again?). The people who can organize and structure the material while reading it in a book or after a Uworld question are the best. Try to develop those skills. Anki is great but it's a crutch. You will not meet a clinical student who is able to work 60-80 hrs a week on tougher rotations, then go home and read the material they need to know, and then to organize that material into Anki flashcards, and then to review the flashcards from previous times. You'll get to a time when you have only an hour or two to learn 50-100 pages of material. Best to develop those skills early when you have exorbitant amounts of time in M1/M2.

 

[GangaMaster]

Has anyone used Anki specifically for classes - then removed the minutiae and low yield cards after the exam and kept the HY stuff?

I use it for classes but I also have Firecracker so I use that for Step 1 studying and only for certain subjects. However, you could always do what you said in your post, its completely feasible if you make decks with include HY and LY stuff and as you are reviewing delete cards/suspend them or you can browse a deck (MAKE SURE YOU USE TAGS FOR EVERY THING YOU STUDY), by selecting a tag for the material you just took you could go through the specific set and remove ones you think are LY.
I don't make cards for everything I only make cards for tough concepts, breakdown of lists of stuff for path, so mine doesn't really include high yield stuff at times either.

 

[redblue]

I've used Anki a lot. I think the way I use it now is the best for medicine.

During M1 and M2 you have lots of time to study, so you can use things like Anki.

During boards and clinical study periods you have less time.

I now just study and memorize as much as possible. If you go over something a few times and it's still not sticking, that's when I use Anki. This ends up being < 20% of the material.

To use Anki for 100% of the material would have me making tons of cards and never having time to review them. I've done this and it's a huge waste of time.

Also, the people who are the best at medical school (the people not using Anki and acing things) have developed amazing skills at memorizing the material (ask yourself, how can I remember this if I was never able to see this material again?). The people who can organize and structure the material while reading it in a book or after a Uworld question are the best. Try to develop those skills. Anki is great but it's a crutch. You will not meet a clinical student who is able to work 60-80 hrs a week on tougher rotations, then go home and read the material they need to know, and then to organize that material into Anki flashcards, and then to review the flashcards from previous times. You'll get to a time when you have only an hour or two to learn 50-100 pages of material. Best to develop those skills early when you have exorbitant amounts of time in M1/M2.

I've been trying to rely less on Anki, but I've noticed that even after a few months of using Anki that it's already very hard to remember things without it. Any tips for training myself to stop relying on Anki for everything?

 

[@JackShephard]

I've been trying to rely less on Anki, but I've noticed that even after a few months of using Anki that it's already very hard to remember things without it. Any tips for training myself to stop relying on Anki for everything?

Yes. Ask yourself, "If I absolutely had to remember this and was never going to see this again - how would I do that?"

That's a skill. It's a way of organizing material in your brain. The people who have amazing memories are really just good at organizing things and making them logical in their head. If you continue to seek the answer for that question, you will find it. It's a skill developed with use.

 

[GangaMaster]

I've been trying to rely less on Anki, but I've noticed that even after a few months of using Anki that it's already very hard to remember things without it. Any tips for training myself to stop relying on Anki for everything?

That's the thing about Anki, its to help you remember stuff few months out. If you want to remember things long term, its either you take your slides and read them in a spaced repition manner, you rely on Anki or SM, or you use your amygdala to make connections to remember stuff.

 

[@JackShephard]

That's the thing about Anki, its to help you remember stuff few months out. If you want to remember things long term, its either you take your slides and read them in a spaced repition manner, you rely on Anki or SM, or you use your amygdala to make connections to remember stuff.

or you learn things to make them logical - like a story. If you work hard at that, it can stay with you for years. The drug side effects I know from pathophysiology stick very well. The one's I memorize are gone in weeks/months. To constantly keep these up isn't important for physicians to do. That's why everyone crams for board exams - the memorization stuff comes and goes. Trying to upkeep everything that is tested on a board exam is not only unecessary, it's also time consuming.

But I know a lot of medical students are workaholics. So most will scoff at this advice. Anyway, I have nothing more to say on this matter. Good luck to all regardless of what method you pick.

 

[CherryRedDracul]

I use Anki mainly to remember easily forgotten details like stuff about micro or pharm. But I always hit the books and videos and such to get an overall understanding of the subject, a framework with I can start adding those little details, too. Once I get the concept, memorizing the little details doesn't become as much of a Herculean effort. I always aim to pair whatever knowledge I've gathered with something else I know.

Anki's like the glue I reapply to the details so I can stick them to the framework.

EDIT: Grammatical errors. Step 1 studying = fried brain.

 

[mulberry]

Thank you so much for this thread. Bookmarked for future reference.

 

[chronicidal]

@chronicidal
Why did you change steps in min from 1 2880 to 10 2880 ?
What is your maximum interval?

...
What do the lapses settings do?

Regarding steps: Because I make most of my own cards, I have some familiarity with them already and the cards are well structured, so I can afford a longer first interval (2 days or 2880 min). The length of the first learning interval has the most impact on the efficiency of your reviews. SuperMemo, the precursor to Anki, allowed you to set a 'forgetting index' (target % of cards you forget upon review), with the idea that something in between 6-14% was optimal in terms of efficiency versus retention. To achieve this, SuperMemo suggested a first learning interval of 2-7 days or something like that in most cases depending on the difficulty of the material. I get 92.9% correct on learning mode cards, which is about where I want it to be.

Because the 'again' interval of 1 min seems kind of short and reliant on working memory, I just bumped it up a little to 10 min. This one doesn't matter that much in my opinion. The idea is like doing the part of the mini mental status exam where you ask the patient to remember three items and then to recall them later. You have to wait a few minutes for it to mean much in terms of short-term memory capacity and resilience against distracting tasks.

The concepts behind why one should increase intervals at the loss of retention are two-fold: (1) You get diminishing marginal returns when you're trying to get 95% or more retention. You'll be doing repetitions so frequently that the workload becomes impractically inefficient. You have to balance efficiency in terms of acquisition of new knowledge (expect 200-300 facts per year for every minute you spend reviewing daily = all of First Aid in an hour a day for a year and a half) versus retention. Target 6-15% forgetting. See this SuperMemo page for modeling that explains this idea. (2) You remember facts better after you're forced to recall them at the point when you have almost forgotten it. Increasing your first learning interval makes your mind work a little harder to remember most facts. While you might spend more time on each card before you recall the answer (maybe even half a minute!), this sets you up for longer review intervals later on and more durable memories, so I'd like to think it balances out.

The maximum interval I have is 36500 but this setting doesn't really matter much in my opinion. My longest review interval currently out of all my cards is 6 years. Where this setting might matter is if you find research or believe that your long-term memory has a finite upper limit of retention duration that is shorter than your lifetime. But probably Anki will cease to exist as a program and something better might come along (e.g. chips that program memories into our brains) before that happens.

Lapse settings are for when you have a young or mature card and you forgot it, so you press 'again'. The next review interval after this lapse is then dictated by your lapse settings. For instance, if you have a card that you've lapsed on 8 times, chances are it's not a well-formulated card, so it's labeled a leech (on your time and energy) and suspended. Also, in most situations a lapse doesn't mean a fact is totally unfamiliar to you, you just couldn't free-recall it. That's why I don't set the lapse intervals to as if they were fresh new cards. If I had a card that had a 1 year review interval, I forgot it but it was at the tip of my tongue and very familiar and the card jogged my memory pretty well, I wouldn't want to see that card for at least a few weeks. This is set as a percentage of the previous interval (20% of a year = 10 weeks would be the next interval).

 

[Chelewn]

thank you thank you so much so for your answer It helped me understand a lot. I also like your Anki settings and I'll definitely be using them

Spaced repetition all the way

 

[eefen]

I'll just leave these here:
How to Study in Medical School (this link also has few more of the videos by that guy in the OP - pretty helpful stuff).
Anki Q&A (a little about how I use Anki, for better or worse)

 

[Brain Bucket]

I'm done with this.

 

[Mt Kilimanjaro]

I'm going to start getting more familiar with Anki over the summer. I'm curious how easy it is to use decks that someone else made? Are the files easy to transfer? Are people usually willing to share/trade for a good bottle of whisky?

I would think there's some value to making your own cards, but you could also save a lot of time by using someone else's deck.

 

[brainsurg88]

Can Anki decks be used efficiently for non micro/pharm subjects? Does pathophysiology work well with this method?

 

[gregoryhouse]

I've used Anki a lot. I think the way I use it now is the best for medicine.

During M1 and M2 you have lots of time to study, so you can use things like Anki.

During boards and clinical study periods you have less time.

I now just study and memorize as much as possible. If you go over something a few times and it's still not sticking, that's when I use Anki. This ends up being < 20% of the material.

To use Anki for 100% of the material would have me making tons of cards and never having time to review them. I've done this and it's a huge waste of time.

Also, the people who are the best at medical school (the people not using Anki and acing things) have developed amazing skills at memorizing the material (ask yourself, how can I remember this if I was never able to see this material again?). The people who can organize and structure the material while reading it in a book or after a Uworld question are the best. Try to develop those skills. Anki is great but it's a crutch. You will not meet a clinical student who is able to work 60-80 hrs a week on tougher rotations, then go home and read the material they need to know, and then to organize that material into Anki flashcards, and then to review the flashcards from previous times. You'll get to a time when you have only an hour or two to learn 50-100 pages of material. Best to develop those skills early when you have exorbitant amounts of time in M1/M2.

I find this very intriguing.

In college I never used flashed cards or even needed to review things more than once to do well on a test. Now sure college was easier than med school but what you say makes a lot of sense. I started using anki because I was following the advice from previous med students. Anki has been great for me and I am doing very well because of it. However, I noticed when going through cards that I am sometimes able to answer questions before even fully reading them because I have memorized a certain phrase with a certain answer. This is not to say that I am not able to recall this information when I see it in a different format but that clearly I am memorizing facts and not really forcing myself to think of it logically.

For physiology, I hardly if ever make anki cards because almost all of it makes sense to me logically and I can work my way through problems even if I don't remember exact details. I think if I can make things logically click for all subjects this would do me a much better service than Anki could. I'm kind of scared to change study habits mid unit but I think I'll try it out for a couple weeks and see how it pans out.

 

[gregoryhouse]

Can Anki decks be used efficiently for non micro/pharm subjects? Does pathophysiology work well with this method?

Anki can be used efficiently for anything.

Here is my format for path cards.

Front:
Disease: Section: Subsection (if needed)

Some examples would be

Front:
Endocarditis: Diagnosis

Back:
Blood cultures, etc...

Front:
Endocarditis: Clinical: Microembolization

Back:
Splinter hemorrhages, janeway nodules, etc..

 

[@JackShephard]

.

 

[@JackShephard]

.

 

[gregoryhouse]

Don't be afraid.

Experimenting during M1/M2 is what M1/M2 are all about. Your grades are minimally important. Step 1 and your clinical grades will be more important.

There will be somethings that are brute force memory, but the more often you learn things as you learned physio - the better off you'll be in medicine. The people who use brute force memory for everything struggle as the material piles up with limited free time during M3/M4 and residency.

You'll see. The people using Anki during M3/M4 and residency are the people unnecessarily working 100 hrs a week. You don't want to be that person. M1 and M2 don't really matter that much, except for learning the basics really well (logically like you learned physio).

Yea, Im going to try it. Like I said its kind of the way I studied in college but got away from, so I'm hoping too much time hasn't passed that its a steep curve to get back to learning this way.

Thanks for the advice. Hoping for the best.

 

[eefen]

Well, this thread took an interesting turn.

As with most things in life, I think the answer falls somewhere in between the two extremes (e.g. ANKI MAKES YOU WEAK vs Anki FTW!!). The whole spaced-repetition movement was a response to the fact that our memories, no matter how we store them, do have a tendency to degrade over time. This is of particular concern to those of us in medical school, who will need to call upon many of these memories in the future and who don't want the time we spend creating them now to be wasted.

I do, however, agree that memories are better formulated when we create them in a logical way (e.g. telling a story). That's why I stopped making a bunch of basic, answer-this-isolated-factoid-question cards months ago. Instead, I've made cards that tell a story, as much as is possible, about whatever it is I'm trying to remember. The very act of organizing the sometimes disjointed or spread-out information presented to us into a logical card is, in fact, probably one of the most helpful aspects of Anki for me. But then, I'm also able to reap the benefits of spaced-repetition with that information.

Also, different people are different. Some will be able to take a few facts, spin them into a story, and remember them forever. Others will need a little more help - I know I do. Anki isn't a crutch, it's just one of many different tools we have to learn - and different tools will be used to different extends in different seasons.

 

[chiddler]

Enodcarditis is a perfect example of something you shouldn't need to flashcard. It's a very logical story you can tell yourself if you organize it correctly the first time.

Can you please explain further why that is so? What do you mean it's logical and that you can organize it correctly the first time?

 

[chronicidal]

Enodcarditis is a perfect example of something you shouldn't need to flashcard. It's a very logical story you can tell yourself if you organize it correctly the first time.

The terms "Janeway", "Osler", and "Roth" smack of logic to me. It's totally organizable that Coxiella burnetii is the most common cause of culture-negative endocarditis.

 

[@JackShephard]

.

 

[@JackShephard]

.

 

[LostinLift]

.

 

[@JackShephard]

The two are mutually exclusive?

No. Forget what I said. Nevermind.

Hope you guys do well.

 

[eefen]

@[USER=553803]JackShephard[/USER] - I didn't see your posts before you removed them, except for the quoted part, and didn't see who they were directed at. But I agree with you - it's important that people think through the material they are learning in a logical fashion rather than just memorize disjointed factoids.

Of course, medicine does have a a lot of disjointed factoids, which is one area where Anki becomes particularly useful, but...yeah. Big picture is better.

 

[starstarie]

Does anyone have tips on the best way to put pathways in anki (ex. metabolism steps or complement pathway)?

 

[CherryRedDracul]

Does anyone have tips on the best way to put pathways in anki (ex. metabolism steps or complement pathway)?

Check out Image Occlusion for Anki: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/282798835

It's Cloze deletion for pictures.

 

[GangaMaster]

Does anyone have tips on the best way to put pathways in anki (ex. metabolism steps or complement pathway)?

As cherry mentioned and the second video I posted explains how to use it in pathways.

 

[Buttermellow]

Does anyone have tips on the best way to put pathways in anki (ex. metabolism steps or complement pathway)?

I really like using cloze deletion for thing that have steps, as it's faster to input and gives you some context for the question. However, I've found that for me, drawing the pathways over and over on a whiteboard was really the best way.

 

[Chelewn]

Reviews:

• Maximum reviews/day: 200
• Easy bonus: 150%
• Interval modifier: 135%
• Bury related new cards: checked

Hey chronicidal , what if the amount of reviews that you're supposed to do one day exceeds 200? If you put a maximum number then what happens to the cards you didn't do that day? Doesn't it mess up the algorithm? ... or? Thanks

 

[chronicidal]

Hey chronicidal , what if the amount of reviews that you're supposed to do one day exceeds 200? If you put a maximum number then what happens to the cards you didn't do that day? Doesn't it mess up the algorithm? ... or? Thanks

They get pushed to the next day and so forth. Yes it's messes with the algorithm insofar as your spacings become longer than what was initially intended. It's roughly okay. We're talking about the difference of like 1% forgetting if you increase your intervals by like 10% (kinda made those numbers up). The ideal situation is that you only add new cards at a rate in which you're able to keep up with all reviews.

 

[swolebrah]

Do you guys prefer using close deletion over basic cards for everything? I feel like it makes for faster and more quantity in regards to the cards.

 

[chronicidal]

Do you guys prefer using close deletion over basic cards for everything? I feel like it makes for faster and more quantity in regards to the cards.

I prefer basic because it forces me to be more specific and concise with my question. It's easy to get lazy and make crappy cards with cloze. My deck is 10% cloze and 75% basic.

 

[GangaMaster]

Do you guys prefer using close deletion over basic cards for everything? I feel like it makes for faster and more quantity in regards to the cards.

I prefer cloze, because under extras I put the entire lecture slide that is in reference to the question I am asking so if I think of something to recite after I give the answer, or if I want to change the question, I don't have to search through my notes for the slide.

 

[CodeRedDew]

I prefer cloze, because under extras I put the entire lecture slide that is in reference to the question I am asking so if I think of something to recite after I give the answer, or if I want to change the question, I don't have to search through my notes for the slide.

You can do that with a basic card as well...it's practically the same thing

 

[GangaMaster]

You can do that with a basic card as well...it's practically the same thing

NO MY WAY IS BETTER. /facetiousness

 

[swolebrah]

I prefer cloze, because under extras I put the entire lecture slide that is in reference to the question I am asking so if I think of something to recite after I give the answer, or if I want to change the question, I don't have to search through my notes for the slide.

I prefer basic because it forces me to be more specific and concise with my question. It's easy to get lazy and make crappy cards with cloze. My deck is 10% cloze and 75% basic.

thanks for the responses

 

[Chelewn]

Hey @chronicidal
How do you manage your decks? How many decks do you have? And have you made any new changes to your Anki settings since #4? If you have then please tell me which and why THANK YOU

 

[chronicidal]

Hey @chronicidal
How do you manage your decks? How many decks do you have? And have you made any new changes to your Anki settings since #4? If you have then please tell me which and why THANK YOU

I have one deck that I keep up with reviewing, a deck for new cards I'm making that I'm going to share with friends, and a bunch of old decks of cards from myself and others that I keep around in case I'm going to revisit those subjects and want to improve those cards. The deck I keep up with reviewing is tagged by subject. Damien Elmes suggests that you do not use a complex subdeck structure because it slows down Anki, and because your reviews will occur in sequence by deck. Having your reviews in sequence by subject, rather randomized, produces weaker memories.

 

[Chelewn]

I have one deck that I keep up with reviewing, a deck for new cards I'm making that I'm going to share with friends, and a bunch of old decks of cards from myself and others that I keep around in case I'm going to revisit those subjects and want to improve those cards. The deck I keep up with reviewing is tagged by subject. Damien Elmes suggests that you do not use a complex subdeck structure because it slows down Anki, and because your reviews will occur in sequence by deck. Having your reviews in sequence by subject, rather randomized, produces weaker memories.

Thank you very much. So I guess you haven't made any changes to your 'deck' settings. I am just curious - when was the last time you didn't review any cards for 24-48 hrs?

 

[chronicidal]

Thank you very much. So I guess you haven't made any changes to your 'deck' settings. I am just curious - when was the last time you didn't review any cards for 24-48 hrs?

yea

i don't know; probably last august when i wasn't really adding much