It seems like it can tick many of the boxes for effective long term learning if used properly (including not just surface learning but also deep conceptual understanding). However, my impression is that there is a learning curve and a cost associated to using it consistently, which leads to it not being used as much. Idk. What’s your experience?
What is that
Free Flashcard app. It’s been around for many years, and there’s lots of extensibility and free card decks.
oh ok. I never used flashcards or anything back when i was in school i never saw a need to study much. The most id do is read over the book if there was something i didnt learn in class.
It’s handy for things like learning languages or remembering medical terminology. And if you can couple it with mnemonics, it can be more effective than simply reading.
It helped me tremendously in college, and I still use it today, both for past knowledge retention, as well as learning some new things. It is an incredible tool.
As far as the learning curve goes, I would recommend this: just use it as is. You can dive down a rabbit hole of optimizing your learning approach and adding the right extensions, but that time is better spent just studying what you want to learn.
Use the Cloze format, keep cards limited to a couple sentences at most, and practice daily for a couple minutes, and you can’t go wrong.
Med student here. I probably would’ve failed a lot of in house exams/step 1 if I didn’t use anki. IMO it’s best for solidifying knowledge and quick recall of facts, but doing a shitload of practice questions is the best way to apply what you’ve memorized through anki (this last bit is most applicable to med school/mcat prep).
Really the main cost with it is your time. If you miss a day or two it can be daunting to get back in the groove and work on your review backlog. I usually have enough downtime during the day and time on the shitter to get through my reviews + whatever new cards I add. Anki itself is free but they do have a paid iOS app that I got just to use whenever I had a few mins of spare time.
As for the learning curve, this will vary if you’re making your own cards vs using a premade deck for a large standardized exam. Once you know the formatting it isn’t that difficult to make cloze cards for what you’re trying to learn.
If you miss a day or two it can be daunting to get back in the groove and work on your review backlog.
This is really why a lot of people I’ve talked about this are adamant about never missing a day of Anki reviews. Far more than keeping the streak going (which is a nice ego boost), avoiding this backlog of reviews is why you shouldn’t miss a day of reviews.
But even without missing a day, you might still face an ever increasing amount of reviews, which in my personal experience, has put people off Anki—people who I managed to convince to give it a try.
Tried it. Felt like a way-early development version of Quizlet… So I just use Quizlet when I want flashcards.
I use it, but not consistently. That’s mostly my fault, though. The app is really easy to use, generally, and you can really get into the weeds of settings if you want.
Mostly, though, I just use the defaults and that’s good enough for my needs.
