How to use Anki and creating cards

[badlydrawnrob]

Using Anki is easy, but creating good quality cards isn't.
For a quick intro, any of these are helpful to get started:

• ☝️ One idea per card. Just one.
• 👩‍🎓 Found a difficult problem? Try 3 times, 3 ways!
• 😴 Learning more than the basics? Try lazy loading cards.

Wherever possible, make learning fun!

1. Thinking like a kid; focus, diffuse, and interleaved learning.¹
2. The Janki Method²
3. 20 Rules of Formulating Knowledge³
4. Anki essentials (100 page guide)
5. Drawing code can help too! (along with other methods.)⁴

Other helpful information

1. Good (and bad) examples of cards #114
2. Flashcards take too long to revise #122
3. Using the Anki app (the good and the bad) #72

Footnotes

1. This lady has some great books and courses that'll help shape your learning. ↩

2. Unfortunately his website seems to be dead and gone now (even Internet Archive can't revive it), but you can find his original article here. You can also find an accompanying article about self-study. The original article was a little more of a hardcore attitude to learning with Anki, where you committed to revising every single day. ↩

3. Understand before you revise, fit together related parts. Build on the basics, keep learning points simple and small! ↩

4. Other examples like Draw!, I'm a kid, I don't know that yet!, Elm and Racket have some useful ideas, but poorly written. They're work in progress and more conceptual than actionable right now. For instance, ideally drawn-out functions should be memorable and easy to reason about even after a year of creation. This is a bad example and this is (a complex, but) a good one. Some concepts are too difficult to put in a pithy card and could warrant a full article or chapter themselves. The key is knowing which bits can be useful for your Anki deck, and which bits to learn with another method. ↩