Great post! I used Anki religiously during the first few years of my undergrad but eventually fell out of the habit, mostly because making new cards became too time-consuming. (I wish I had come across advice like this back then!)
A few anecdotes from my own experience:
For math, I naively created cards that covered my first-year real analysis and linear algebra lecture notes in extreme detail. I used a custom card template that supported LaTeX, and many of the cards required me to prove theorems or solve problems. Despite how tedious they were to make, I actually enjoyed them. They forced me to whiteboard solutions and gave me reasonably quick feedback.
While I wouldn’t recommend this approach (it was incredibly time-intensive) reviewing those cards has consistently been a uniquely rewarding experience.
They trigger a kind of mental time travel, vividly bringing back both the content and mindset I was in when I created them. More than anything else, they help me reconnect with a sense of intellectual curiosity and creativity that I often struggle to access otherwise.
One experiment I tried was adding images to the back of my cards to aid recall. For language learning, I wrote a Python script to scrape Google Images for vocabulary terms. For math and CS, I’d usually hand-pick images.
I have mixed feelings about how well this worked. I can still recall some of the images, but not always the questions they were tied to. Still, they sometimes help me recall the general “neighborhood” of related cards. Curious if anyone else has tried this and what their experience was like.
Ironically, the deck I learned the least from was my computer science one, which makes sense in hindsight. The cards were often too large and passive. Unlike the math ones, I didn’t design them to actively engage with the material.
Looking back, I wonder how things might’ve changed if I had created cards that asked me to implement things, maybe even with runnable code snippets on the back.
I think the biggest hurdle for me in getting back into Anki has been not knowing what information is actually worth the effort to memorize. Reading this made me realize that creating really small, focused cards might make that question feel a lot less “all or nothing.” I might give it another shot :)
Great post! I used Anki religiously during the first few years of my undergrad but eventually fell out of the habit, mostly because making new cards became too time-consuming. (I wish I had come across advice like this back then!)
A few anecdotes from my own experience:
For math, I naively created cards that covered my first-year real analysis and linear algebra lecture notes in extreme detail. I used a custom card template that supported LaTeX, and many of the cards required me to prove theorems or solve problems. Despite how tedious they were to make, I actually enjoyed them. They forced me to whiteboard solutions and gave me reasonably quick feedback.
While I wouldn’t recommend this approach (it was incredibly time-intensive) reviewing those cards has consistently been a uniquely rewarding experience.
They trigger a kind of mental time travel, vividly bringing back both the content and mindset I was in when I created them. More than anything else, they help me reconnect with a sense of intellectual curiosity and creativity that I often struggle to access otherwise.
One experiment I tried was adding images to the back of my cards to aid recall. For language learning, I wrote a Python script to scrape Google Images for vocabulary terms. For math and CS, I’d usually hand-pick images.
I have mixed feelings about how well this worked. I can still recall some of the images, but not always the questions they were tied to. Still, they sometimes help me recall the general “neighborhood” of related cards. Curious if anyone else has tried this and what their experience was like.
Ironically, the deck I learned the least from was my computer science one, which makes sense in hindsight. The cards were often too large and passive. Unlike the math ones, I didn’t design them to actively engage with the material.
Looking back, I wonder how things might’ve changed if I had created cards that asked me to implement things, maybe even with runnable code snippets on the back.
I think the biggest hurdle for me in getting back into Anki has been not knowing what information is actually worth the effort to memorize. Reading this made me realize that creating really small, focused cards might make that question feel a lot less “all or nothing.” I might give it another shot :)