Starting with Anki when you have already given up once

Anki is the best memorisation tool in existence, and it drives away half the people who install it. Its interface is dated, its vocabulary is technical, and its documentation assumes you want to configure everything.

Here is what you actually need to know. The rest can wait months.

The vocabulary, in three words

A note is your content: a term and its definition, a question and its answer.

A card is one question generated from a note. A note can produce several cards — front-to-back and back-to-front, for instance.

A deck is a folder of cards. One per subject is plenty; do not start building a tree.

That is all. Note types, templates, tags — you will need them one day, not today.

The daily loop

You open Anki, you click a deck, a question appears. You look for the answer in your head, you reveal it, and you grade yourself:

• Again — I did not know it. The card returns in a few minutes.
• Hard — I knew it, with difficulty.
• Good — I knew it. This is the default, the one you will use 80% of the time.
• Easy — obvious. Save it for cards that are genuinely secure, or you will not see them again soon enough.

The beginner's mistake is pressing Easy out of optimism. The interval explodes, the card disappears for three months, and you will have forgotten it by the time it returns.

The three settings that matter

Cap your new cards per day. By default Anki introduces twenty. If you import a deck of a thousand cards, you will think you have to learn them all at once — you do not, and that belief is the leading cause of abandonment. Ten to twenty a day is a sustainable rate.

Turn on FSRS. This is the modern scheduling algorithm, built into Anki since 2023. It replaces the old calculation and noticeably reduces the number of reviews needed for the same retention. It is in the deck options; switch it on and forget about it.

Install the mobile app. AnkiDroid is free on Android; AnkiMobile is paid on iPhone. It is the one purchase worth making: spaced repetition works because you review every day, and you only review every day if the tool is in your pocket. Syncing goes through AnkiWeb, which is free.

Importing a deck

An .apkg file opens with a double click on desktop, or from the import menu on mobile. The cards join your collection and follow your own schedule.

It is the format to prefer over CSV: no column mapping to configure, no encoding problems with accents, no note type to choose. It opens, and it is done.

What Anki will never do for you

It does not make your cards, and it does not check that they are any good. A badly divided deck will be faithfully scheduled for months, which is the worst possible outcome — you will diligently maintain a bad memory.

Hence the order to follow: understand the material, break it into atomic cards, reread what you produced, then hand the schedule to Anki.

The breaking down is what costs, and that is where a generator saves most of the time. But the rereading stays yours: no tool knows what your examiner expects.