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Anki is possibly the best app ever

It allows me to forget about forgetting.

I started using Anki one month ago. It is incredibly powerful and I estimate it's saved me 5 hours per week for my high school courses. Let me convince you to use Anki:

what is anki?

Anki, at its core, is a simple flashcard app that uses active recall and spaced repetition. Here's what the app looks like:

This displays the front of a flashcard—in this case, the front is a Spanish word I'm supposed to recall in English. Before I reveal the answer[1], I would take my best guess and say that 'peluches' means 'animals':

Oops! I got it slightly wrong. Even though I was close, I would press 'Again'. If I identified it correctly, but it took me a while (10+ seconds), I would press 'Hard', and if I identified it correctly quickly, I would press either 'Good' or 'Easy' depending on my confidence.[2] The key: once you press a button, Anki automatically schedules the next time a card will come up.

That's the core of what makes Anki work. There are different flashcard types, and you can make different decks, and you can add tags, and you can do all sorts of other wonderful customization things.[3] But the main idea: as long as you honestly[4] complete all of your reviews every day, you'll eventually remember everything you input into Anki.

why use anki?

I started using Anki this year because I'm taking AP Psych and AP Bio: two courses with lots of terms to memorize. I quickly realized that flashcards would be the best way to remember all of the vocab for the AP exams in May. Except I'm lazy, and didn't want to make paper flashcards, so I Googled 'best flashcard app'... and here we are. I am so glad that I didn't try to do paper flashcards, because Anki is infinitely easier and faster.

Since my school doesn't have a psychology teacher, I'm taking Intro to Psychology on Outlier. So far, I've scored a 90 and 92 on my midterms—which I'd say is reasonably impressive, given that I've taken a grand total of four pages of class notes. I've just put all of the terms I need to remember into Anki, and as long as I do my cards every day, I don't have to worry about remembering them. Put differently: Anki allows me to "forget about forgetting".

Even if you aren't a student, you can still use Anki to memorize whatever you'd like. In addition to my school studies, I use Anki to memorize trivia about the moon landings and my friend's phone numbers.

conclusion

Anki is free and open-source and it's saved me so much time that it would be a crime for me to not recommend it. Download it here.

  1. Keybind: <space> to reveal card ↩︎

  2. Keybinds: <1>, <2>, <3>, <4> for Again, Hard, Good, and Easy. ↩︎

  3. Read the Anki manual! ↩︎

  4. By 'honestly', I mean rate your cards accurately. Don't press 'Easy' when the actual card should have been a 'Hard' or 'Again', for example. ↩︎