How to Study for Exams with Flashcards (Anki Masterclass)

hey friends welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is Ali I'm an entrepreneur and author but in a previous life a few years ago I spent 6 years in medical school at Cambridge University and 2 years working full-time as a doctor in the UK's National Health Service and there was one app that got me through that entire experience and that app is called Anki it's essentially a flash card app and if you're a student of any sort and you have to memorize stuff you need to be using Anki because it is

just absolutely incredible it's free it's open source and it just completely changed my life when I discovered it in medical school now Anki and Flash software in general is based on two key Concepts around effective studying and learning which are called active recall and space repetition these are things I've been making videos about since like 2017 so you might have seen some of those videos I'll link some of them down below and it's not just me who thinks that an is an absolute Game Changer there are literally hundreds of thousands of students all around the

world who swear by using Ani for pretty much every subject from medicine to law computer science and even Arts subjects like English and history and geography and stuff the issue with an app like Anki is that it's very powerful but it also has a little bit of a learning curve and that why a few years ago I decided to create an entire online course on how to use Anki and previously this course was available for paying subscribers on skillshare but recently me and my team decided you know what let's just put it for free on

YouTube because why not now I'll warn you now this class is absolutely massive there are going to be loads of time stamps down in the video description and if you're just getting started with an you only really need the first bit of the class but for the sake of completeness I've put in a bunch of bonus content where I interviewed some of my friends and people who are really good at using Anki and they shared their tips and yeah the classes a few few years old and so I look a little bit younger but Anki

the app hasn't really changed substantially in that time so I hope you enjoy this completely free master class in how to use Anki an absolutely gamechanging app that will transform the way you approach learning and studying anything hello welcome to the class in this video I'm going to explain the class structure so in the first segment we're going to be introducing kind of the basics of ani like why you should use Ani and the power of flash cards if you are you know familiar with the idea of space repetition and active recall and stuff feel

free to skip these videos and actually I think that's a general theme for this whole class you don't really have to watch all the videos in the order that they're given you can just kind of pick and choose the stuff that you want because I know people are going to be coming into this with different levels of experience with flashcards and with Anki and just with studying in general so the first chapter of the class is kind of aimed at complete beginners it's about things like how to install Anki and how to synchronize it with

anky web but then we've also got some stuff about basic flashcards Clos deletions and image inclusions and reverse flashcard types which even if you have been using an before in the past if you're not a complete professional at using Anki you still might find those basic videos helpful because I think it's really important to get a solid foundational understanding of how anky Works before we kind of dive into the the nitty-gritty of it so that was chapter one chapter two of the class is going to be walkthrough based so assuming you've got this foundational knowledge

of how Anki works with all these different card types I'll be taking you through how me and a few other people how we would create flashcards from lectures from classes in real life and from textbooks and how kind of the process works for making an effective flash card at that point you should have all the information you need to just kind of get started with Ani and then the rest of the class is fairly optional but in part three chapter 3 we're going to be answering some frequently asked questions so in preparation for this class

I posted on my Instagram asking people to send in their questions and we've tried our best to answer every single common question that people had the most common ones were around things like motivation and consistency and discipline like how to actually bring yourself to do your flash cards every day so hopefully we've got some advice for that but there were also a lot of questions about specifics about flash cards like how long should your anky flash card be how much information should you have on it and how to avoid things like flash card over Lo

and a load of people were for some reason interested in how Anki fits into a wider study strategy and so we've got videos comparing Anki and notion an and Quizlet an and Google Sheets uh and I'll be sharing my philosophy of how I use Anki to study for all sorts of things along the way then in chapter 4 we've got the optimizations the advanced stuff where we're going to be talking about tags a handful of add-ons that we recommend you install and the immense power of pre-made decks but also the potential pitfalls with pre-made decks

because pre-made decks genuinely have the potential to change the game complet when it comes to your flash cards but you got to kind of use them properly otherwise it becomes very overwhelming and we just want to throw our laptops in the bin because pre-made decks can can just be a nightmare to deal with hopefully you'll find a way to navigate pre-made decks in chapter 4 so that was it um thank you for watching this introductory video and I will see you in chapter one where I'll have a change of clothes for the very first segment

of the class all right so what is a flash card a flash card is very simply well it's a card that you have something on the front and you have something on the back so for for example with this uh capital of France that would be the front of my flash card and on the back of my flash card is the word Paris so capital of France and Paris this is a flash card and the idea is that I would have a deck of flash cards so that when I come to it I look at

the front I see capital of France and then I think okay cool um I think that's Paris and then I turn over and I'm like yes I got it right or if I saw capital of France I think oh I think it might be uh London and turn over oh yes it's Paris of course this is basically what a flash card is this looks really simple but flash cards are absolutely magical inventions that have the power to change your life like genuinely I'm not overstating this enough flash cards and in using flash cards properly is

100% a total Game Changer when it comes to effective studying so why are flash cards good so flash cards are good because it encourages us to use active recoil and if you've seen my previous class about how to study for exams and if you haven't then you should please I I talk a lot about active recall and how it's the single most powerful effective study technique basically the idea is that we test ourselves and the process of testing ourselves strengthens the connections in our brain between the kind of stuff that we have to learn therefore

if I were to just read in a book the capital of Francis Paris the capital of Francis Paris the capital of Francis Paris or just write it down or highlight it or whatever it wouldn't stick in my brain as much as if I actually tested myself if I actually thought oh what the hell is the capital of France and turned over oh yes it's Paris you know the act of testing ourselves is what strengthens those connections and flash cards are a very easy way to force ourselves to use active recall because we have to test

ourselves now why else are flash cards good well flash cards also lend themselves very well to the second most effective study technique and that's called spaced repetition now space repetition again I talk about this in depth in my YouTube videos and in my other class which you should definitely check out space repetition objective is to combat the forgetting curve now there's this thing in the scientific literature in fact I'm going to show you fantastic article from Nick case called how to remember every anything forever um it takes about 20 minutes to go through but there's

a graph that I want to show you here ah here we go in 1885 Herman ebbinghouse performed an act of scientific masochism uh he memorized thousands of nonsense words recorded how much he forgot over time and discovered the forgetting curve he found that you forget most of what you learn in the first 24 hours and then if you don't practice recall active recall flash cards your remaining memories Decay exponentially we've all had this thing where we study something one day and then the next day it feels like it's completely gone or a week later we

we don't even remember studying it in the first place this is not because we are stupid it's because this is how our brain works it's called the forgetting curve over time we exponentially forget things and this is sort of what it looks like so there's this interactive graph interactive graph over here and we can see that it's essentially an exponential decay over time so our memories will Decay the idea behind space repetition let's start with the repetition bit like once we recall the stuff so for example if I learned that the capital of France was

Paris then then I would be forgetting it according to this forgetting curve but let's say some point later I retested myself on the fact that the capital of France is Paris at that point my memory would go back to up to 100% And then it would restart the forgetting curve so you can see here let's say I start my recall at this point you know it it goes up to 100% strength of memory and then it again decays exponentially the slightly interesting thing about this is that every time that we revise the thing every time

we recall that the capital of France is Paris the Decay happens less steeply so for example if we move this interactive [Music] graph you'll notice that the lines are getting less and less steep right at the start if we look at the very first one that is a very kind of steep drop off this is exactly how memory works it's a steep exponential curve but if we recall it there and over there and over there and over there we see that actually it takes us longer to forget the same amount of information which is why

you never forget that the capital of France is Paris because you just come across that fact so often that it's now memorized forever and that's the idea behind space repetition um here's a nice little graph and if we hit the auto optimize button if we want to kind of optimize our memory to stay in this kind of yellow Sweet Spot you'll see that the the intervals that we are repeating it at gradually lengthen and the idea is that because as we we repeat the topics and as we repeat that factual recall we strengthen the connections

and then it takes us longer to forget it but it's the fact that we've forgotten it and then we're recalling it that is what allows the memory to take hold because the brain as I say in my previous class is sort of like a muscle in that when it's working hard it's growing but if it's working too easily it's not growing so I could read Capital Francis Paris over and over again in a single study session but my brain wouldn't be working because I haven't forgotten that fact whereas over time as I allow my bra

to forget some of the stuff and then I recall it that's like the magical way to remember every anything forever so this is all basically to introduce the concept of flash cards flash cards are amazing because of active recall and with physical flash cards you can create a space repetition system around them so back in the day what people used to do is they would have a box for stuff that I don't know they would have a box for stuff that I know kind of well they would have a box for stuff I know a

bit more better they would have another box for stuff I know a bit better than that and you know you would have your your flash cards in like different part and the idea would be that let's say you've got the capital of Francis Paris and you knew it very well you'd move it up to the next pile and you'd review the second pile maybe every 3 days then let's say you know it really well you would move it up to the next pile and you'd review this pile maybe every 7 days and so on and

so on until the final pile you were only looking at once every 3 months and that was the way that people used to use space repetition with flash cards back in the day but the whole reason behind this class is that there is an easier way and that easier way is Anki and Anki is the single best flash card app on the planet which reasons why we're going to go into in depth and in this whole class I'm basically going to be giving you a very beginners introduction to how to use Anki to memorize to

learn absolutely anything uh I started using an in my first year of med school and I discovered it a little bit too late I discovered it towards the end of the year and I was thinking damn I really wish I'd discovered this sooner I used Ani properly in my second and third year of med school and I got a first class degree in fact in my third year of med school I even ranked top of the year because I used Anki so much and then I kind of didn't really use it in my fourth year

I did average and then in my fifth year of med school I used an extensive and I did very well in the exams and then in final year I was making YouTube videos so I didn't really care but so like even anecdotally for me the years in which I've used Anki have been my easily my highest performing years exam-wise and I've also been a lot less stressed through exam revision just because I've had the system of ani so that's enough of a sales pitch for Ani let's now talk about what ani is and exactly why

you should use it Okay so we've talked about the theory of flash cards let's now talk about Anki which is basically what this entire class is going to be about now anky look powerful intelligent flashcards remembering things just became easier much easier in fact uh and this is apps. an web.net so you can just Google the word Anki and it will be the first result apps. an web.net remember anything remember anywhere remember efficiently this is this is an it's basically flash card software which incorporates active recall and space repetition and has a load of other

features some of which the beginner features we're going to break down in this class and then in the next class it's going to be kind of a kind of intermediate to Advanced look at Anki we'll be deep diving into all the weird and wonderful ways that you can customize Anki Anki is also free it is completely free you do have to pay a little B bit of money for the IOS app if you want I think it's 100% worth it but if for some reason you have an aversion to paying for software you can just

use Anki on the web you can use the Windows app you can use the Mac app you can use the Android app for free and I think there are some thirdparty iOS apps as well basically it's free every student in the world can benefit from using an or using flash cards of some sort and I'm going to argue that Anki is the single best one so Anki is a program which makes remembering things easily it's a lot more efficient than traditional study methods and you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying or greatly increase

the amount that you learn you can use it to learn a language study for medical and law exams memorize people's names and faces bit pointless brushing up on geography mastering long poems even practicing guitar chords and I've used Anki for various kind of aspects of that theyve it's got synchronization I.E anky web is a sort of free online service that keeps your decks synchronized across different devices so I can do my flash cards on my phone or on my iPad or on any computer that I go to cuz I can do it online so yeah

Anki is flash card software that incorporates spaced repetition now how does this work basically when you see a flash card in Anki you active recall you test yourself on what it is and then you see the answer and then you can rate whether you found it easy medium or hard basically and based on whether you click easy medium or or hard Anki has this special spaced repetition algorithm uh that's modeled after a service called supermemo from back in the day the details of that don't really matter but basically it automatically figures out what the space

repetition intervals should be for stuff that you marked easy medium or hard so if I found something easy it would then ask me again in 3 days time if I found it hard it would ask me in 15 minutes time and over time as I'm going through my flash cards repeatedly I'm rating myself in terms of how hard I found the stuff and then anky is resurfacing the relevant things appropriately based on when I'm most likely to just pass that threshold of forgetting and so if we can do Anki every day we can basically trust

the algorithm and really like the way that I thought of Anki in med school and the way that everyone I know who uses Anki properly thinks of it it's that Anki sort of functions as a second brain and you know that if you make a flash card in Anki provided you are consistently looking at flash cards every day you know that that fact or that concept is just going to get uploaded to your brain and in a way it takes all of the stress out of studying because we all really struggle to remember stuff and

like to figure out each day like what am I going to study what I'm going to do like I don't know what what my weakest topic is all of this stuff if we just chucked everything into anky and did our flash cards consistently over time it would just get uploaded to our brain that is the way to think about it a few caveats with that um that I'll talk about later in the optimization section we shouldn't be chucking everything into Anki an is very good for specific factoids specific examinable facts it's not great for like

understanding concepts we'll talk a little bit more about that that's a little bit more advanced but basically Anki is amazing you should definitely download Anki uh so that was kind of an introduction to what Anki actually is all right so in this video we're going to be talking about why Anki rather than some other Alternatives now if you're already sold an Anki please feel free to skip this video and just move on to the next ones in the series but basically Anki is well the best flash card soft on the planet a big reason why

that is is because Anki is free and Anki is open source which means other people can contribute to it and that means there are like hundreds of people around the world who have added their own add-ons and their own customizations to Anki and who have really drilled down into the space repetition algorithm and figured out what the best kind of intervals are that sort of thing the other stuff you could use you could use something like Quizlet I've experimented with Quizlet for a bit it's quite nice it's quite pretty but the one annoying thing about

anky it's not very pretty and it can sometimes feel like it's not intuitive um there is a bit of a learning curve with Quizlet there is no learning curve but Quizlet is also a lot less powerful than Anki overall you really can't customize it it takes a lot of effort to make cards you can't make cards offline in a sort of reasonable fashion the synchronization is a bit weird with different devices and while Quizlet is very pretty it's like anky with a layer of paint it also means you can't customize it and so if you're

serious about using flashcards and you know how to operate a computer proficiently then you will have no problem with ankey there is a slight learning curve but that is what this class is about it's to get you started with an if for example your grandma who doesn't know how to use a computer wants to memorize all the capitals of the world then fine use Quizlet Anki is not for your grandma but you are not your grandma you're watching a class wherever you're watching this and you know how to use a computer therefore you want to

do this properly you want to use Anki rather than quiz a few questions that people have asked over the years is what about Google Sheets or what about notion now I've made a video called about how I used Google Sheets as a sort of flash card alternative and why I didn't like Ani I would recommend overall use anky when you can because Anki is designed for space repetition and active recall my Google Sheets method that is designed for cramming it's designed for when the exam is only a few weeks away and I'm thinking ah crap

I I really need to focus on the stuff that I'm weakest on I don't really have the time to do the flashcard thing properly where I make flash cards and review them every day and blah blah blah I probably still could have done it with Anki if I twiddle the settings a bit but at the time I didn't really know much about how to twiddle the settings of ani properly and so I went with the Google Sheets method which is still pretty good if you're cramming for an exam but if you're studying for the long

term if your exam is more than a few weeks away will benefit from anky rather than Google Sheets and then uh it comes to Notions so let's see I'll show you some of my notes on Notions so what I do is I do use notion for things like scoping the subject where within gastrointestinal physiology I have created these kind of toggles for myself that have questions what is functional hyperemia in this context cool blood supply to the Villi this is sort of flash cards it's sort of active recall and that I am I am testing

myself but this is not designed for space repetition the main reason why I use notion is because I basically want to apply active equal to absolutely everything that I'm doing and for me right now I don't need to memorize a lot of this information because when it comes to human physiology I'm teaching the subject and when I'm teaching it I can have the notes open in front of me so it's not that I need information uploaded to my brain to prepare for an exam and the information that I need uploaded to my brain for my

life as a doctor is already in my brain like I don't need to understand the basics of first year Medical School gut physiology to understand how to be a doctor effectively which is why I kind of use notion for this sort of stuff it's very good at giving you a big picture understanding of the whole subject which is something that ank is not and actually what I usually recommend is you combine anky and notion but for those of you asking should I use notion as a flash card alternative no you shouldn't if you can you

should use Anki cuz Anki is incredible like absolutely gamechanging for memorizing facts notion with a toggle feature or Google Sheets or any other sort of thing is good for getting a big picture understanding and that is important but for for a subject like medicine there is only so much a big picture understanding you can do before you run into the wall of just having to memorize a load of stuff and an is the absolute single best thing you can use to memorize a load of stuff bar none so that is why you should use an

paper flash cards completely a complete waste of time why would you go through the effort of having to create stacks of paper flash cards unless you're one of those people that feels productive by writing with colorful pens and stuff I mean if it works for you then fine but the reason you're watching this class is because you want to learn how to memorize anything with anky it's a 21st century we don't need to be using paper flash cards if we're using these These are suboptimal we should be using Anki Anki is the one let's move

on to the next section where we talk about the mechanics of ani the very Basics how to install it how to get set up and a load of stuff about the basic fundamental types of flash cards that you can create all right so that was why Ani is the best software why do I use Anki personally well I use Anki to memorize specific factoids for medicine and I also used Anki extensively in my third year of med school when I was studying psychology as an extra degree to memorize chunks and chunks of paragraphs for my

essays and to memorize paper references and stuff like that so I have extensively used Ani in both a science subject fashion i. e memor memorizing individual fact but also in a kind of art subject like psychology where it's instead of memorizing an individual fact that you know this is what insulin does it's more about okay what is the theory of short-term memory versus long-term memory and what did badly in hitch's experiments in 1972 display about shter memory versus long-ter memory you know stuff stuff like that that involves memorizing large chunks of information so I've used

Anki for both those use cases and I found it really good I've also started recently to use Anki to help me help me learn music theory so I found some pre-made decks more on that later that bring up kind of different notes of the musical Stave or Clift or whatever it's called Uh and I'm trying to learn site reading through that because I know if I do them consistently that anything in Anki will be uploaded to my brain and I think that would be helpful so that's why I personally use Anki if you're convinced at

this point then please move on to the next video but if you're not here are some interviews that I've done with other people over the last few weeks who use Ani a lot and these are what they think about Ani and why it's amazing can you just tell me how you discovered Anki and sort of how it affected your life kind of broadly yeah so I discovered Anki through your YouTube video on evidence-based revision and I started using it for my bmat revision and then I carried on for my a levels and I think it

allows me to study spend a lot less time studying but I feel like I'm studying more effectively and I'm getting better results even though I'm spending less time studying so it's a lot less stressful because I'm not having to cram before exams I'm studying all the time like 20 minutes every day so it adds up to a lot of studying but it's less stressful and it's more spread out that's one of the things about Anki that if you can if you can bring yourself to do it consistently overall you actually probably spend less time working

and you overall you definitely have reduced stress levels yeah 100% And I totally agree with you you save a lot of time right like you're someone who's like the productivity King and I'm someone who also appreciates you know time allocation and I can say with Ani I was able to go through medical school I was exercising every day I was getting the amount of sleep I wanted to get I was calling my parents every day I felt so much less stressed and I still got you know just as good of outcomes and you know I'm

still able to you know feel competent in the hospital um and it's that's that's astounding to me because that didn't happen to me in undergrad I was sleeping four hours a night and just trying to make ends meet and now I have this tool and I feel amazing you know I have a life okay so that was why you should use Anki instead of other apps why I use Anki personally and why these other people use an and I've done like eight interviews with people who use an over the last couple of weeks and everyone

talks about how Anki literally changed their life so if that's not enough of a sale then I don't know what is but hopefully I've convinced you at this point thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video where we'll start a new section where we go over the mechanics of an and exactly how it works and how you operate it and how to make the flash cards and how to make them amazing all right welcome to this next section of the course which is all about the basic mechanics of Anki and in

this video we're talking about how to install Ani if you know how to use a computer you probably know how to install stuff but you know just for completeness we're including this video if you have no problems with installing software then please by all means skip this video and move on to the next one but yeah basically we want to go on apps. Ani web.net or we just type in anky on Google find the first result anky powerful intelligent flashcards and we hit the download button now you've got it for Windows Mac Linux if you're

using Linux you really don't need me to give you a tutorial on how to install stuff iPhone and Android and uh development stuff Let's ignore that so I'm on a Mac right now and I'm going to install anky for Mac OS 10 10 whatever Standard Version if you're on Windows you just install the 64-bit or 32-bit Windows version depending on which version of Windows you're on and it just basically gives you a guide here so I'm going to hit download anky and it's going to download cool now it's downloaded I'm going to click on that

downloaded file it's going to verify and then save the file to your desktop open it and drag an key to your applications folder or desktop there we go and now it's come up with this sort of thing which is how you install stuff on a Mac you click you drag it goes into applications and you're done oh here we go it is copying across 350 megabytes so it might take a little bit of time to download if your Internet is slow okay an is now officially installed so to open it up I'm going to open

up the Mac thingy migy bar I wouldn't doing this in real life and I would type in Anki and I click on it and it will open up and this is Anki this is not what you'll see you'll see a more blank screen but I've got a few decks in here which I'll go over in a while but let's pretend we see a completely blank screen we have now officially installed Ani and if you want to install it on iPhone Android you just Chuck it over here yeah basically that's how you install an okay so

in this video we are talking about the anatomy of ani and what all the different buttons and stuff actually do so when you open up an you will see this page and it'll probably be blank because it probably won't have any decks in it other than a default deck this is basically the home screen now this screen is your deck screen it shows you all of your different decks of flash cards so you can see over here I've got one that's music based that has some stuff inside it I've got one for MRCP which is

the membership of the Royal College of Physicians which is an exam I've got my third year psychology deck I've got a past medicine Snippets deck I've got a USMLE preparation deck which is a exam you take to get into residency in medicine in the United States studied zero cards today in 0 seconds 0 seconds per card this is the sort of default screen that you will get in in order to create a deck and I'd recommend you create create a first deck you hit the create deck button and it asks you for the name of

a deck so let's say Capital Cities and I'm going to hit okay and now we will see capital cities has formed as a deck but if I click on it it says congratulations you finished the deck for now because it doesn't have any flash cards inside it so this is the deck screen and I can create all the Decks that I want um music notation fine I can create a deck for Nobel Prize winners if that's what I wanted to me Mize I can create a deck for I don't know French vocabulary like you can

create decks for whatever you want in general you should probably have fewer decks rather than too many but obviously Capital Cities and French vocabulary are totally different subject whereas you know for all of medicine it sort of makes sense to have them within one deck we'll talk more about that later anyway this is the deck's screen now let's say you want to add a flash card that's the next thing along shortcut key a and it's really helpful to get familiar with the shortcuts but for now we're going to click on everything just so it's really

obvious what's going on hang on so I'm going to hit the add button and this sort of window will open up um and this is the ad field where you can add a flash card so you'll see the front and the back so for example front we can say capital of France and in the back we can say Paris and that is my flash card now there's a few other bits in this screen that can look a bit complicated the type it makes sense to start with basic like basic is the main type that we're

going to go over but there are a few other types that that I'll talk about a little bit later deck lets you select which deck you want this to go in you'll see like a long list of stuff because for example a lot of these decks are subdivided into other stuff but we're we're going to keep things simple we're going to Chuck it into our Capital City's deck which is what it was by default Capital France back Paris the fields button this is sort of complicated basically we don't need to worry about it it just

lets you generate new Fields if you want but you can ignore that the cards button again lets you change the styling and the text so if I wanted to make this bigger I could say 24 or I could say 36 and it would get bigger but let's just keep it as a default This is complicated stuff we don't need to worry about fields and cards now this is just sort of basic things so I could say capital of France I could bold it or I could use command B to bold italic underline Square probably not

yeah you can just sort of customize it there is an image button and there's a Clos deletion button that we're going to go over in a while but let's keep things basic for now capital of France Paris and then tags tags we can safely ignore for the time being we'll talk about tags in a a video further down the line but essentially let's say in fact I'll just let's do Europe so I can say that Europe is a tag the benefit of tags is that it then lets you search through your deck and find all

the all the capitals that are in Europe or alternatively if you were for for some reason studying for a European capitals quiz you could create a custom study session where you're just looking at that appropriate tag but again tags are complicated tags are an advanced feature as a beginner to Anki we don't need to worry about tags it just gets confusing but I'm going to in fact I'm not I'm not even going to tag with Europe just cuz there's no point and you'll see Capital France Paris that's basically all we need now we hit the

add button it looks like nothing happens but it says waiting for edting editing to finish resume now everything disappears which means that our card has been officially created now if I close this ad screen you'll see that in the capital cities there is one new card and this is another important thing about the anatomy of an to understand that we have cards that are new that we haven't yet studied and we have cards that are due cards that we've studied before that we are due to study again today so if I click on the capital

cities deck and we'll see there's one new learning is orange and to review is is green forget about the learning category doesn't really matter I hit study now it says capital of France now this is what it looks like when you're studying something and I think about it I know the capital of France is Paris so I can click the show answer button or I can just press the space bar and I would really recommend you press the space bar for it and it shows Paris now it's asking do I want to see it again

in 3 minutes do I want it to be marked as good which is 15 minutes or do I want to mark it as easy which is it comes back up in 4 days and this is where the spaced repetition intervals come in so let's say I knew that the capital of France was Paris I'm going to say good and it's going to come up again because it's the only card in my deck I'm going to say good and it's going to come up in a day's time and then it's going to say congratulations you have

finished this deck which is easy cuz we only had one card so that's like the very very basic so that was what the ad screen looks like let's look at the screen now now this can look complicated this is what my browse screen looks like but there's a lot more stuff here than than you're going to see in your browse screen basically on the browse screen you can look at your entire collection of flash cards or you can look at specific CL flash cards in specific decks so over here I've clicked on Capital Cities and

you'll see I've got capital of France over here if I look at my third year psychology you can see over here I've got zelner Ral 2006 and it it shows you what is on the front and on the back of these flash cards so I can say what cons atile and this is what my flash cards look like these are the ones that I was studying from in my third year of psychology this is just a selection of them I couldn't find the deck that had all of them in it because it will loads more

but the browse screen basically lets you browse your decks it can look intimidating but it's not really stats lets you see how many flash cards you studied so uh there's no data on here because I've reinstalled this but we can basically ignore ignore the stats feature it's just there and then the sync button we hit it and it synchronizes with anky web now the first time you press the sync button it's going to ask you for a username and password so so you're going to need to go on Ani web and create a username and

password because that's what your decks are going to be synchronized with but we'll go over that in a while and that is basically the anatomy of Anki that is what everything does there are these buttons here get shared and import file get shared opens up anky web and lets you download someone else's deck which we'll go over in a different video an import file lets you import a file like an anky deck package I think it's a k PKG file extension uh those are useful if you're Shar sh in decks with your friends or if

you're downloading decks off the internet but apart from that we now know everything about anky we've got these menus over here but really we don't need to worry about that for now we'll talk more about those a little bit later now hopefully this has giv you a very brief overview and bear in mind my an looks a lot more complicated than yours will for now and just you wait until until you see the exper edition of the course where we've got like people who've been using Ani every day for 700 days and how massive their

anes look let's start by keeping it simple for the time being because Anki does have a bit of a learning curve and the easy easier we can make the starting process of it the better we'll be doing in the long run so in the last video I showed you what the anatomy of ankey looks like and like what what the anky user interface does and what the different elements do do and we created actually our first basic flash card which was what is the capital of France it is Paris and in this video we're just

going to create a few more basic flashcards because this is the bread and butter of ani and if we can get quick at doing these things will improve and I'll be sharing some keyboard shortcuts as we go along because I'm going to assume you're intelligent here and you're not and you want to you want to optimize and clicking with the mouse is not very Optimum in general when using a computer we want to be using keyboard shortcut so as I go along I'll be explaining what keyboard shortcuts I'm using to create stuff and we'll be

able to kind of make this whole process of creating stuff more efficient so let's go to our Capital Cities deck currently there's nothing in it because we've only got one flash card that we've finished and let's add a flash card and I'm going to use the shortcut a to add and to figure out what the shortcuts are you just hover over the buts I'm hovering over the add button and I can see shortcut key a okay so from now on I'm going to press a to create flash cards so I'm going to create my flash

cards now so one way of doing that would be so Afghanistan and the capital is Kell because this is my Capital Cities deck I don't need to waste time by typing Capital Afghanistan question mark I can just literally go Afghanistan the back of it is caral and I'm not going to bother tagging because it's a bit complicated in fact should we tag no let's not tag it's a bit complicated on Cobble and then I could hit the add button but you'll see shortcut is command and enter or control and enter if you're on Windows and

so I'm going to hit command enter and you'll see that little thing came up it said added that flash card has now been added let's add a few more so Albania the capital is Tyran cool Algeria alers Andora Andora laa command enter Angola Luanda Antigua and baruda St John's so you can see that I'm just using tab to switch between the front and back or shift and tab to go back you could click but you're not a clicker you're a keyboard Warrior not a clicker clicking is bad you want to get out with the clicking

mindset anytime we clicking we know we're being inefficient and take again B St John's add and let's just do one more so Argentina buenos uh buenos IRS command enter we have added a bunch of flash cards we now see that there are seven new cards and if we hit study now we'll see Afghanistan I know the capital Afghanistan is kble so I'm going to hit space kble yeah that's pretty easy I knew that anyway capital of Albania I actually have no idea what the capital of Albania is tyrana oh damn okay so I'm going to

hit again I'm going to hit the the number one if we look here if we hover over again shortcut key one shortcut key two and shortcut key three so by hitting one I know that that is going to come up again in the next 3 minutes cool Algeria is algers and I knew that already so I'm going to hit easy Andora is h no idea oh Andora llla I should have known that this is active recoil in action but so I'm going to that's going to come up again and I usually hit again if I

have even a slight hesitation when going for the flash card and I usually hit good otherwise I I actually don't normally hit easy I think in general when you're actually learning stuff you should avoid avoid hitting the easy card unless you just know without a shadow of doubt that you're never going to forget that and I know I'm never going to forget that the capital of Afghanistan is kobble because I've known that for years but I'm not really going to hit easy while doing medical stuff plus it also feels a bit like huous be like

oh that was easy and then you forget it and then you think damn I'm an idiot so basically I only ever use one and two I only ever use again or good and I would suggest you do the same just to simplify things so that can come up again and I'm just going to show you by clicking but in real life I press one Angola no idea Luanda okay again Antiga and baruda St John's cool that was good Argentina buenos arez easy because I knew that anyway Albania was it Pana tyana yes I can say

that's good now Andora Andora lavela yep that's good Angola that's the cap of Angola tyan ah Luanda damn what was it Algeria ALG no Albania that was uh tyan so that this one definitely comes up again Antigo and baruda St John's nice and easy I'm going to put good for that and you'll see it's going to come up in one day's time so it's going to disappear from my current crop of reviewing and Angola the capital of Angola is oh I'm getting confused with Angola and AR was it Armenia Luanda yes got it but that

that was too much hesitation so that's going to come I I want that to come up again so I'm going to hit one Albania is Trana okay again too much hesitation I want that to come up again Angola lwanda good and Albania tyrana good Andor Lu oh no I'm getting confused with all these A's Andora laa obviously Angola is Luanda fine Andora is Andora laella fine Albania is tyana fine Andora is Andora laa fine and now going through these seven flash cards you'll see how often they were coming up right because the ones that I

didn't know I marked again and therefore they were coming up again and the ones I marked as good initially was coming back in 15 minutes but because we blitzed through the flash cards cuz there weren't many of them they came up earlier than that but then the next time I clicked good they were going to come up in one day's time and that's how the space repetition algorithm works when you mark something as good it slightly elongates the interval that you're going to see it next when you mark it it as easy it massively elongates

the interval and there's a whole there's tons of YouTube videos exploring the algorithm behind this in depth but again this is a beginner class in the exports class which is coming up after a while we'll dive into the intricacies of the algorithm and how it actually works but at the moment we don't really care we're marking stuff either as again or as good maybe as easy if you really feel like it but now we finished this and so that shows what a base flash card looks like and if we hit browse and look at Capital

Cities so these are the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 eight flash cards in basic format that we've created at the moment so that is how you create basic flash cards let's move on to the next video where where we'll talk about reversed flash cards and then we'll talk a little bit later about how we can actually make these flash cards better because right now all we're doing is memorizing memorizing words like you know Andora and Andora llla means nothing to me all I'm doing is memorizing what the word is so if it was

some kind of trivia thing and I was just trying to memorize all the capitals and fine but actually it it would be a lot more useful to actually know where on the map Andora is and have some kind of image associated with the country and just have an idea of what's going on in Andora we'll talk more about that a bit later on let's now talk about the second important flash card type to know about and that is reverse flash cards now some people won't use this at all depending on what you're studying and some

people will use it extensively and some people might just forget about them and just use closed deletions which we'll talk about later to be honest I am in the third Camp I just prefer closed deletions I tend not to use basic and flash cards but it's an important concept to keep in mind so let's go back to our Capital Cities let's press a to add a flash card and let's change the type to basic and reversed card now what does that mean let's insert a capital so we've got Australia and Canberra and I'm going to

command enter to create a new flash card there now let's look at what happened we saw that in creating that one flash card we've actually got two new cards in Our Deck to study I'm going to click study now and it's going to ask me what's the capital of Australia and I'm going to say canra cool let's say that was easy but now it's asking me canura because it's reversed the flash card and because I know this is my Capital Cities deck I now need to work out that canura is the capital of what and

the answer in this case is Australia so what's the point of this well the point of this is that when we create a basic flash card very often we are creating a one a one-way Connection in our brain if we just use Capital Cities as an example that everyone can understand I was going to do something for medicine but let's try and keep this keep this broad if we just had Luanda is the the capital of Angola and I could see Angola and think Luanda Angola Luanda Angola Luanda my brain would be very good at

coming up with shortcuts like maybe I'd think Angola Luanda so starts with an l and that sort of stuff and that connection would become strengthened because that's what I'm testing but if for some reason I got the word Luanda I might not necessarily be able to reverse engineer that connection or if I could it would take a lot more effort than I would want it to take ideally I would think loanda and immediately know that it's the capital of Angola rather than the other way around um and that's the point of a reversed card so

by just putting the information in once a reversed card allows us to create double the number of flash cards so that instead of just testing a one-way Association we're testing a two-way Association this might be important for you depending on what you're studying it's sort of important in medicine in some contexts not in other context there are some areas in which you'll want to be able to reverse those connections so for example the classical symptom of chera is rice water stools fine but if we had Cola rice water stools I'd be able to create that

connection but I should have a reverse card for that as well because if I saw a patient with rice water stools or saw that in a question I'd want to immediately be able to associate that with Cola so it's helpful to have the Reversed card in that sense so that's what they're for sometimes you might need them sometimes you might not but let's now move on and talk about closed deletions which is one of the most powerful features of Anki all right welcome back we've talked about the basic card and the Reversed card now I'm

going to talk about closed deletions and these will look complicated and they might sound complicated but it is the single most powerful feature of an so let's go back to our Capital City's example let's add a card and we're going to change the type to close close basic Let's ignore all the the stuff associated with it now you'll see text and extra that's interesting it's not quite front and back it's text and extra and the idea behind closed deltion is that closed deltion function as a fill in the Gap fill in the blank kind of

flash card and basically it allows us to replace bits of a sentence with a Clos deletion which encourages us to remember that kind of bit of the sentence I'll I'll show you what I mean let's use an example here so I'm going to write write the capital of Austria is Vienna now that is just a sentence and the point of Clos deletions is that it allows us to memorize sentences so I want to memorize the phrase the capital of Austria is Vienna so what I'm going to do is I'm going to double click on Australia

I'm going to select it and then I'm going to press the close deletion button which is this icon over here and you can see that it's got the hotkey command shift C but I'm just going to click it for now and you'll see that now we've got this weird code looking thing surrounding Austria you'll see these double curly brackets close double curly brackets and we've got C1 colon colon Austria C1 means Clos deletion one it is the first thing that we are closed deleting from here now let's just add this to the deck and let's

see what it looks like and I'm going to close this and now we'll see there's one new card study now the capital of something is Vienna so you saw what happened we have close deleted that and that is the phrase that has been deleted and now let's say I think the capital of London is Vienna I would press space bar oh the capital of Austria is Vienna so you can see that instead of acting as a front and back flash card it's acting as a kind of fill-in the Gap sort of flash card let's create

a new one and this time we'll add a double close so I'm going to press a to add a new flash card going to make sure the type is set to close by the way command n allows you to easily change the type and you can type it in so I'm going to type in close and again just like learning keyboard shortcuts to get quicker at using ankey cuz the more efficient we can use ankey the more efficiently you can upload stuff to our brains let's look at the next one so let's say um the

capital of azer is CP Let's ignore the extra field for now we'll come back to that later so now this time I'm going to create two different closed deletions so I'm going to select Azan and I'm going to go command shift C and that will turn aeran into a close one we can see it says C1 and I'm also going to select Baku and go command shift C and you'll see C2 has now appeared by Baku now what does this mean this means that just with a single flash card with a single creation on on

this screen I have now generated two closed deletions so let's let's add this I'm going to hit command enter to add close this and we'll see we've got three new flash cards added so one of them is the Australia one and two of them are the aaban one so let's have a look the capital of something is Vienna okay Austria Australia my bad and let's say easy so it doesn't come up for the next 4 days but now the capital of something is Baku and I know the answer is aeran and I'm going to hit

again yep I'm going to hit number one but now the capital of aeran is what well it's Baku because we know that and I'm going to hit good on that one the capital of aeran is Baku and the capital of aan is in fact Baku so that gives you an idea of what closed deletions do it's basically a way for us to create these fill in the Gap things very easily now let's use a different example I'm going to create a new deck and call it MK medicine for illustration purposes all right so I'm going

to go in the Mis medicine for illustration purposes deck I'm going to hit a to add a clar card and I'm going to make sure the type is close a Clos deletion type and for text let's find some notes that I was taking yesterday when stud gastrointestinal physiology for one of my supervisions here we go okay so this is the sentence that I want to put into an 12200 Ms per minute through the spanic bed and I'm referring to blood flow of blood per minute flows through the spanic bed and then of this around 75%

passes via the intestines to the liver in the hepatic portal vein the rest represents the oxygenated blood reading reaching the liver directly VI the hepatic artery now the two kind of facts that I want to upload to my brain here are this 1 1200 Ms of blood and this 75% because it's important for me to know that 1,200 Ms of blood per minute goes through the spanking bed which makes up about 20% of the cardiac output um so I'm going to select that I'm going to command shift C and that will turn that into a

single close and then off this around 75% so I want to close out the 75 bit so I still see that it's a percentage sign now there is one extra feature that you can do with Clos deletions I I'll come to that in a moment so let's hit add uh close and study now and it says something of blood per minute flows through this plank knic bed so I would think okay 1,200 so now we got 1,200 Ms of blood per minute flows through this planktic bed so that's fine let's say that was good and

now of this around 75% passes VI the intestine Del liver so you can see it's testing me on this one specific fact and now I know that that's 75% and the reason it's showing up is blue is because my styling thing is a little bit weird normally this would be a white a white screen so you'd see it clearly but if you want you can change change the styling of that in fact let's change it I'm going to edit the content click on cards and color let's make it red I'll make it red close we'll

talk more about that in the advanced section but I just editing the card just just to show you what it looks like so now of this around 75% passes via the intestin to the LI in the patter portal vein blah blah blah you can see that by turning this into closed card I've essentially been able to make the process of creating this flash card a little bit more efficient I was able to copy and paste information from my lecture notes notes that I've already taken and just shove it straight into Anki whereas if I was

doing it as a as a basic card I would say something like let's change the type to B basic I would say something like how much blood goes through the splank Nick circulation per minute and the answer would be 12200 Ms which I would say is 20% of cardiac output for example so that would be how I would make this a basic card and then I would say uh 1,200 Ms of blood goes so I would write that out and then I would write 75% so it it would be a lot more effort to upload

that fact to my brain with these numbers it would be a lot more effort to create a basic flash card for it than a Clos deletion which is why I prefer to use Clos deletions for most things personally but it's personal preference you can kind of do what you want okay the final thing I want to mention about Clos deletions which is sort of jumping ahead a little bit to how to edit flash cards but if we press the E button when we're looking at a card we come into the editing mode and we can

edit our card now this has a few different benefits that I'll talk specifically about in that video one thing to keep in mind about closed deletions is that you can add hints so for example if I add another double colon here and I say how many Ms of blood so you'll see it's got close one 1200 Ms col colon how many Ms of blood now if I close this and we look at this flash card this is the flash card it says how many meals of blood per minute flows through the SP bed so it's

asking me specifically the question because one important idea that we're going to keep coming back to is the fact that you want to create these flash cards for your future self and my future self in 6 month's time I might not actually remember especially just like this you know this phrase initially the phrase was 12200 Ms per minute through the spanic bed if I just Clos deletion that then the thing it would ask me would be something per minute through the spanic bed and in 6 months time I wouldn't remember that I'm actually referring to

a certain amount of blood flow I might think am I talking about you know hormone concentrations am I talking about drugs am I talking about something else I might not entirely remember that it's actually blood flow so the fact that I can create this hint for myself how many mills of blood per minute flow through this plantic bed means that my future self in 6 months time when I look at this flash card is not going to curse my old self I'm I'm I'm going to think thank you for taking the time to give me

that hint because now it's obvious to me what sort of answer I'm looking for rather than trying to think oh what was I thinking when I first made that flash card which is not the fact that I'm testing I'm testing my knowledge of how many meals per blood of meals per minute of blood go through this planket circulation I'm not testing whether I could read my mind from 6 months ago so this is a great way of adding hints to our Clos deletion ideally our sentence should be designed in a way that means we don't

need the hint so for example you'll notice that I actually changed it I said of blood per minute flows through the plank Nick plank niic bed I made it obvious because it's just a reflex at this point that we want to make it really clear for our future selves exactly what's going on but we have got this hint feature just in case so that was closed deletions closed deletions are the single most powerful feature of ani and I'd recommend you use them extensively but again in the uh later on Section we'll talk more about some

nuances about when you should and shouldn't use Clos deletions because it would be very tempting right to go through your entire lecture notes copy and paste everything into Anki and just close delete out the relevant bits but it's not quite that simple there are a few nuances but again this is a basic course which just giving you an introduction so that you can start using Anki and then over time you'll develop your own techniques and you'll find loads of tutorials on YouTube and you'll find my future class about how to optimize ankey for intermediates and

experts where we can dive into these details a little bit more so we are continuing our topic of closed deletions and this is a sort of bonus video this is about 5 minutes of a discussion and a demonstration that me and David who is a medical student in the US we were having about how he prepared for the MCAT and scored like incredibly well like 99.9th percentile in that and here he is demonstrating how to use clothes deletions and a bit of a discussion that we had about it so if you want feel free to

skip this but it's just a little bit of a bonus bit of spice in this class VI um yeah over to David can you talk a little bit about Clos deletion and what does it mean like essentially what they are yeah I mean a Clos deletion is essentially a fill in the blank so you're presented with a short piece of information um and then you're basically asked like what is the most important part of that sentence or you you would have to know what's going on in that sentence to answer it um yeah pretty much

all of the pre-made Decks that are used for like medical school training in the US at least um use close deletion at this point so here's like my step one deck so close deletion um you can see there's a little Ellipsis right here there's a blank and then there's a following sentence so for someone to properly answer this question they would have to know um you know what this is they would have to know what this is they would have to know which Step we're talking about in forming stit rate and you click the answer

okay it's a cedal COA and then here's a little picture um from another popular resource um first aid uh and here's like a little pneumonic that a lot of people can use to memorize this so it's basically just a fill in the blank so rather than asking it in a question format like what molecule molecule does this it just presents it to you in a sentence and it's kind of like if you imagine you were reading a textbook um each sentence in that textbook is probably important but if you just read you know page after

page of a textbook I think the retention is pretty low so this is a way to kind of like look at each sentence individually if it were in a textbook and say do I understand the point of this sentence do I understand the point of this sentence do I understand the point of this sentence fantastic and uh for for these cards can you just show us what it looks like on edit mode like if you if you were to create a closed Edition card what would it look like yeah so here's the edit form um

so essentially if you were to make a card or here do you want to we can like just make our own card oh if we can make our own card sure if we do for example the capital of France is Paris so we have a sentence right here and we're saying the capital Francis Paris so what we would do we would type this out into the card and basically up here I have my card type as a close so you can change this there's many different card types you can do a basic card type and

that's your classic flip it over where you would ask it a question where you say like what is the capital of France um which is another way to do it but this closed deletion has become very popular again because you can kind of get through the cards more rapidly so I choose close deletion I type out a sentence and then basically if I wanted to highlight um the Paris part I would um highlight it and then you hit shift command um C which is a hot key shortcut um and this will come up right here

so C1 colon colon Paris so now we can add this card to the deck and there's a lot of cool things you can do you can change the colors you can change the font um we can you know bold underline whatever um click add okay so now we have a card right here we go to study and here we go the capital of France is blank Paris and I guess one of the powers of Clos deletions is that you can also is that you can close deletion multiple things within the sentence so for example with

that one we could close delete close delete France as well and if we were to do that I wonder what that would look like yes so you can do that as well so same thing it's the shift command C if you're on a MacBook and so there's two ways to do this you can either make this two different cards where one time the card will show up in Paris will be blanked out and another time the card will show up in France will be blanked out or so that's how I have the C1 C2 let

me show you what that looks like real quick so here's one card Capital Francis blank capital of blank is blank or is Pairs and then the other option to do is where you could change this if you did both C1 so this is basically saying like close one close two how many different cards you want to broken up into okay if I did them both as C1 they would both be here we go on the same card ah okay which is kind of pointless with this particular card but yeah yeah exactly I now want to

introduce the idea of editing a flash card as you go along because editing flash cards is something thing that a lot of us don't think about doing the first time we start using Anki we just kind of make the flash card and then we take it at face value but actually one of the great powerful features of Anki is that we can easily edit our flash cards over time to make them more relevant more useful more comprehensive we just to give oursel some more hints so I'm going to create some capital cities um because why

not and we're going to use the close feature for these so I'm going to say the capital of the Bahamas is Mel and we'll close that and close that enter capital of of and I'm going to just copy that phrase so I don't have to continuously type it out of Bahrain is manamar close close C1 C2 so capital of Bangladesh isaka close one close two and just go for one more the capital of Barbados is uh bridg town uh okay close one close two right so we've created these flash cards now let's hit add let's

close and now we'll see we've got learning two which is two in progress and eight new ones that I've not seen before so let's hit study now the capital of something is Baku was that aeran it was aeran wonderful but now as I see that I'm going to think to myself okay well that's not particularly useful I would quite like to know where aeran is on a map so I'm going to search aeran on Google and I'm going to go images I I I just want a sort of nice map that tells me where aan

is okay this is quite helpful so what I'm going to do I'm going to copy this image I'm going to right click copy image and then on this flash card I'm going to press e e for edit or I could click the edit button if I'm if I'm a clicker but I'm not so I'm going to press e for edit and now you'll see there's this extra domain and the the other nice thing about I like about closed deletions is we've got this extra field which we can add to basic and reversed cards but it's

just a bit more complicated and I can just paste paste in this image so now when I see this flash card you'll see what happens so uh if I hit close the capital of something is Baku I'm going to think aaban but now I've got the answer but I've also got this stuff that I've put in the extra column so now this is infinitely more useful right it means I can see oh okay so Saudi Syria Iraq turkey Armenia oh I had I actually had no idea that aeran was like there and oh it looks

like aeran is split up into these two different areas and it's next to Armenia it's sort of bordered by Georgia oh it's right next to the Caspian Sea I genuinely had no idea where aeran was the thing that I'm testing myself on is still that the capital of aeran is Baku which is the point of this Capital City's deck but I've added more information to it to make it more relevant to make it more contextual because the difficulty with flash cards rather the Trap that we can fall into with flash cards is that it becomes

very easy to just memorize these individual factoids of information it's sort of like we're trying to see a painting but we're trying to sort of paint by pixels right we're just seeing individual pixels at a time whereas it's in the wider context when we when we zoom out that we actually see the big picture and this is a problem in everything that we study like anytime someone discovers Flash For the First Time The Single biggest mistake people make is that they just start shoving everything into flash cards and trying to memorize stuff without first understanding

it but the point is this extra feature when we edit flash cards as we go along we can just add more context to them so that we understand it so now even though I'm trying to memorize the capital of aeran is Baku the fact that I've seen this image now and I know where Azan is in my head and I've kind of seen this Baku aspect of of the image as well I now have like my brain now has more hooks to kind of hook onto to maintain this connection whereas before aeran was just like

a thing I knew it was a country somewhere in the Middle East and Baku never heard of it don't even know what it was before these were just words essentially but now it's more of a concept it's more of an understanding in my mind and that's why it's so important to edit these cards as we go along so let's do a few more so let's say that was good the capital of something is nasau I have no idea ah Bahamas is nasau okay so I actually uh I think vaguely the Bahamas are in North America

so let me find a decent image oh perfect this what I want to see so I'm going to right click copy image I'm going to hit e for edit paste it into the extra Zone and now when I close this I see oh the Bahamas are over there and nasau is one of these little Islands that's that's nearby and it's sort of between the US and Cuba cool and you know what let's add another editor Bahamas flag I wonder what the flag of the Bahamas looks like right click copy image edit this flash card I've

got image one over here and I could paste the flag in there as well escape to close spacebar and now I see the flag and I see where it is so again now I've got more and more elements like now it's no longer just memorizing the capital of the Bahamas is nasau it's actually putting some context into it let's go away from this and let's now look at mCP okay uh so this is like some Niche medical stuff herp herpes simplex and in EN keit's investigation PCR viral PCR or are we are we talking about

CSF oh here we go ah perfect so I'm going to edit this flash card and you'll see what it looks like this is like a complicated flash card uh it's it's got too much information on it it's not one of my own flash cards it's got way too much but we'll talk more about the minimum information principle later on but you'll see herp Simplex investigations close one so all of this is under a close deletion so all of this stuff and then in the extra Zone we've added this MRI scan and we've added this information

probably from radi opedia or some other source so that when I do this flash card I see all of this stuff which I would quite like to be in red rather than blue anyway CU it's more visible and I see this extra bit so again it instead of just memorizing the fact it gives me some more context so that is why editing flash cards as we go along is enormously helpful and these are the ones I made many as disease management oh this this has got way too much information on it but if I edit

this uh this was a basic card that's not what I mean actually yeah I'm going to edit this so you'll see it's asking me for the management of many A's disease and when I saw that card I was like oh God I don't know what you want from me because I made this card like two years ago and so I don't know what I was getting at so I can just edit the flash card to give myself a hint I can say brackets which specialty speciality do you refer to which organization do you inform what

do we do about acute attacks what about prevention so this is a bad flash card cuz it's got way too much information on it ideally it actually be exploding these out into individual flash cards but now if I look I've edited the flash card so that instead of it being a case of like just trying and guess the answer that was in my head six months ago instead it's a case of which specialty do you refer to okay I refer to ENT which organization do you inform the DBL what do we do about acute ATT

tax promazine what about prevention can't remember let's have a look beta where is it prevention beta hist investability rehabil yeah the reason why this is a bad flash card is because there is too much information on it and even though I knew most of that information there was one piece of information I didn't know but now I have to come back to the whole flash card again which means like as I get hundred like hundreds and thousands of flash cards it becomes a real pain in the bum to review them because I'm having to do

so much mental effort to re-review stuff that I already know I know and part of doing Anki well is doing anky efficiently so really I would explode this flash card into a load of smaller flash cards and then it would be it would only be this final bit that I actually didn't know and I knew the others so I'd be able to mark the others as easy or good and this is the one that I would be able to mark as hard so to come again but basically the point of this is to illustrate the

idea that as we're going through our flash cards we definitely want to be editing them as we go along the thing that I think about is that if there's ever anything that I actually don't understand in my flash card if there's a concept that doesn't quite make sense to me and I've decided it's important for it to make sense to me then I will add extra information because the extra information it doesn't take any effort to add it takes like 3 seconds but your future self will benefit so much from it when you can see

all of the context rather than having to Google or search through your textbook to find information so that was how we edit flash cards we really want to be editing them as we go along let's now talk about a slightly more advanced feature but I think we can cope with it and that is image occlusion now what is image occlusion well image occlusion is an add-on which I don't have yet so we're going to install the add-on first so I'm going to go tools and add-ons so to to install the add-on for image exclusion enhanced

I'm going to click get add-ons and you'll see to browse add-ons please click the browse button below when you found an add-on you like paste it's code below so I'm going to hit browse add-ons and it's going to take me to this add-ons for Anki 2.1 or whatever version of Anki you're using at the time of this recording and I'm going to contrl f or command F image occlusion ah here we go this is what I want I want image occlusion enhanced for Anki 2.1 Alpha and to install the add-on basically it'll give you a

code to download this add-on please copy and paste the following code into Anki 2.1 one so I'm going to copy that and then I'm going to paste it in here I'm going to hit okay and then here we go download complete please restart an to apply changes and you'll see we've got image occlusion enhanced for an 2.1 Alpha over here so let's restart an I'm going to close and we're going to open up an again perfect now if we go tools add-ons we'll see image occlusion enhanced has been installed so what does image including do

basically image occlusion lets you include aspects of an image in order to learn sort of like automatically generating flash cards from images so for example let's use our capital city so let's find um Australia major cities and let's find them in a map uh and oh here we go no it's a bit small trying to find something oh okay let's go here so I'm want to copy this image and in Capital Cities this is not really Capital Cities but I'm using it as an example to show what image occlusion is so in Capital Cities we're

going to add a new card and we don't need to do anything with this card what we need to do is we need to open up the image occlusion editor which you can see a button over here uh for it add image occlusion command shift o so let's hit command shift o now we can add image occlusions here so let's say I wanted to memorize what the different bits of Australia were you'll see on the side it's automatically automatically selected the rectangle tool by and I can select it by pressing the r or the ellipse

tool by pressing the e or you can just click on it but it's automatically on the rectangle tool and what I can do is I can just click and drag and you'll see Western Australia gets hidden click and drag Northern Territory and it disappears click and drag Queensland and it disappears let's make it a bit bigger South Australia and New South Wales uh Tasmania Victoria any other regions of Australia cool that's fine so now we've included all these aspects of the image and essentially what the image occlusion add-on is going to do is that it's

going to generate flash cards for us for all of these so I'm going to say we've got the option now we can say hide all guess one or hide one guess one now these have different use cases um in this example because we've got another example coming up I'm going to say hide one guess one so now you'll see at the bottom it says seven cards added so I'm going to click close And now if I go back to my deck you'll see there's 15 new cards the capital of aeran is Baku yes wonderful easy

the capital of the Bahamas is an asau yes easy in fact I should probably change that I should change it to the capital of the Bahamas is an asau because it gave me too much of a hint because it said the capital of the so now the capital of something the Bahamas is an N Out let's say it's easy fine fine fine fine fine okay here we go now we're on the image occlusion stuff now you'll see we've got the image and you'll see that one aspect of it has been occluded it's gone red and

you'll see that all the others are visible because I went for the hide one guess one so it's only hiding one of them I could have gone for hide all guest one which we'll see an example of a bit later on but now I think that's Western Australia Western Australia so we see that it's it's appeared and we can click toggle masks so now that I know it's Western Australia I can have good on that one but now we'll see that another one has been occluded and that is Northern Territories and another one and another

one and another one and another one and we're seeing them in that order because we don't have many flash cards in this deck and because I've set them to be in in order we can randomize the order if we want and over time as certain of these are going to be easier than others it will start to reset but you kind of get the idea this is a very good way to memorize a diagram or a map or a flowchart or things like that medical students use these a lot for anatomy and now we've got

two segments from Clara and David talking us through how to use the image occlusion enhance feature just to give you another example of how this sort of stuff works in real life but if you've got the objective then feel free to move on from the video so this is David and claraa explaining image occlusion I wonder if if it would be easier if you can show us how to make an image occlusion card just using a simple image or something in the practice deck that we've created okay so I've gotten this image from Google and

now we want to basically use it to study our anatomy so we'll have to change the card type so we had it on Clos deletion U but now we're going to be using an image occlusion so here we have the image pulled up we can basically blank them out by just dragging this box make several of them and then you can either have hide them all guess one we'll do that I think that's the best way to go um and so now we have an image we've kind of blanked out what's going on with the

words let's get past these ones so here is an example of uh image occlusion so you can see we've kind of blanked out everything that's going on of the form Anatomy so you know I can be sitting here and I like think in my head okay what is this this is like obviously a nice Net's picture it's colorcoded and stuff and it's always the joke that this is not what the cavers look like on the actual exam but I think this is a good way you know I think Anatomy is like a great subject um

but I think this is a good way to start learning an anatomy learn like how things should look where they should go um and then you can get in the cadabra lab and kind of find out so I'd like okay think about what it is in my head and I can test myself right then and there and I could go to the next one okay what is this think about it and then again at the bottom you can see if I didn't know what this was I could click again if I did know what it

was it'll show up in 10 minutes if I thought this was super easy there's no way I'm going to forget this I could click easy and I won't see it again for four days and I guess the reason that you're not showing the other three is because then just by process of elimination you'll just know that pron terror is the fourth one yeah I think that for me that would be um a true point but you can do it like I could choose to show the other three and just have one of them blanked out

but it kind of depends it's kind of a personal preference that's the thing about an it's like kind of confusing um to learn because there's so much that you can do and so many things you can change um but that's totally another option is that you could just blank out one at a time if you'd like yeah can you show us your your your process for making image occlusion things from like a new lecture for example I really love the um teach me Anatomy diagrams I think they're really clear so you've copied the image from

Google yeah I've searched up the image I've copied it and then gone into Ani and pressed add and then put it into lower Limon atomy deck I copied it and then like it comes up automatically if you oh so if you just paste it it automatically comes up with image image occlusion mode so you need to like copy the image on Google and then go on to the image occlusion thing but the the image yeah comes up automatically and then change it to Green I try and like um make the labels like the same size

because otherwise it like I know like what muscle you know that Flex or digitorum profundus is going to be a little bit of B the word then yeah so you're just clicking and dragging you're including the image yeah and then I click hide all guess one because am I right that hide one guess one like leaves the others like it does but often if there are only four muscles in the posterior compartment of the leg you process of elimination you'll know exactly what it is which is not help that's why I do that so then

I've just done hi all guess one and then just get rid of it all right so those were a few different use cases for the image occlusion enhanced add-on like I said installing an addon on bit of an advanced feature but to be honest you saw how easy it was to actually install that add-on and image occlusion is a great way of putting image related things into our memory so medical students use it a lot for anatomy as you've seen equally if we're memorizing the crib cycle and there's all different aspects of it you can

use image occlusion for that if you want to learn the different aspects of Australia or the different states in America or something you can image include the relevant bits that you want for that all right welcome back in this video we are talking about how to install Anki on different platforms so I'm just going to search Anki on Google it is apps. anky web.net the annoying thing about different platforms is that there are lots of fake versions of Anki so this is the official website this is the one you want and this is the only

one that you want you can download the windows version the Mac version the Linux version iPhone and Android now if you're on an iOS device the one you want is ankey mobile let's open it up it is anky mobile flashcards this is what it's called and it costs about $25 or £23 now people are going to see that and think oh my God how the hell can I possibly pay £25 for software if genuinely you can't afford to pay £5 for software then that's absolutely fine I mean I I get that currency ex exchange rates

in different countries asid that £25 is a hell of a lot of money but if you're a student in the UK I can pretty much guarantee you spent more than £25 wasted on like a meal out with friends like literally if you really can't afford this like it's the single most worthwhile investment you can possibly make in fact if you can afford an iPhone period chances are almost certainly you can afford anky mobile flash cards and you should get anky mobile flash cards it is an absolute no-brainer I cannot imagine a single circumstance in which

someone realistically can afford an iPhone but can't afford to spend $25 on an incredible app this like buying this app this is the only part of an that costs money it is the thing that funds the development of the whole the whole ecosystem it is an absolute no-brainer if you're going to be using Anki for any length of time at all even if you're only going to be using it for a year even if you're only going to be using for a few weeks the amount of stress that Anki takes away if you can have

it on your phone in a nice app is astronomical it is totally worth the 25 quid please just buy the app if you have an iPhone if you have an Android then you don't need to buy the app because it's free you can get anky Droid which is this is what it looks like on the Google Play Store this is is the one Anki Droid and because there's so many copycats you'll always be sure to get the right one by going on it from the Anki website there is another one I think it's on on

iOS it's called Anki app and it's not the one that you want this is a fake app this is absolutely terrible you do not want Anki app flash cards you do not want Anki app you want specifically anky mobile flash cards the one that has the official Anki logo with the $25 price tag but let's say you can't afford it for whatever reason you can just go on your mobile device and I will show you go on Safari and you can go on an web.net anky web is a free companion to the compu computer version

of Anki anky web can be used online to review when you don't have access to your whole computer blah blah blah so I can log in I can type in my login details let me find the right account I have so many different Anki accounts and now you'll see I have all of my flash cards on anky web so if I wanted to I could review my Capital Cities and I could click study now the capital of aeran is Baku yes good the capital of the Bahamas is asau uh you'll see that it hasn't quite

synced from the previous video because Anki synchronizes once you close it but we'll talk more about that in the next next video so I can literally do all of my flashcards from my phone I don't need the app but because I have the app installed it just makes the whole process a lot a lot easier so if I hit synchronize uh oh I'm logged into a different account but I'll I'll explain the synchronization in in in the next video but basically there's no excuse for not having an on your phone please buy the app it

is totally worth it if you're an iOS device you can probably afford it but if not you can always use anky web.net and you can just log in directly on there so that was Anki on different platforms it's obviously helpful to have Anki across all the platforms I have Anki on my iPhone on my iPad on my Mac and I can access Ani web if I'm at work and I'm just using the crappy Windows computers at work and I've got like a spare half an hour I will often go onto anky web on the computer

rather than kind of slide on my phone go on an web on the computer and just bash through some flash cards that's a very easy way of using anky across different platforms but remember the official downloads are on the official anky website please don't get Hoodwinked by the Myriad fake anky apps the ones on the website are the ones that you want so it's the final video of the basic mechanic section and in this video we're talking about how to synchronize stuff to an web an is fantastic because they've got this free synchronization platform where

you can just automatically or semi-automatically keep your decks and flash cards and all your revisions and your space repetition schedule you can keep it synchronized across your different devices because as we discussed in the previous video you're going to install an on whatever device you have and preferably you're going to buy the IOS app but you can always use Ani web if you don't if you can't afford it for whatever reason anyway how do we sync well we can make our flash cards it's all well and good but then we can hit the sync button

shortcut key Y and initially it's going to say a free account is required to keep your collection synchronized please sign up for an account then enter your details below so I'm going to sign up for an account I've got loads of an accounts so your email is anest al.com anest al.com and let's use this Ser strong password cuz why not actually no that's not let's use something easy 1 2 3 4 5 six I just signed up sign up not now I'm going to accept some terms and conditions blahy blahy blah now I've got an

email confirmation let's open up that please verify your email address verify email now thank you your email address has been verified and your account is fully active one ful now I can type in anky test al.com 1 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 I'm going to hit enter okay now because I've got stuff here your decks here and Ani web differ in such a way they can't be merged together it's necessary to overwrite something so initially the very first time I want to hit upload to anky web because at the moment in my new

anky web account I just have a single default deck whereas I've got like an absolute ton of decks on my local computer so I want to upload all the decks on my local computer up to anky web so that I can synchronize stuff I'm going to hit upload to Ani web and now you're going to see your collection was successfully uploaded to Ani web perfect and we can see the synchronization button is like moving along so now in theory if I go on Dex oh look this is my fake account uh anest al.com and we

can see I've used up 46 megabytes of which 34 megabytes is Media because a lot of my decks have images in them so it takes some time to upload and like literally everything is now on Ani web this is absolutely incredible like look at this this is sick everything just been instantly uploaded this is how it works so now if we want to to synchronize basically whenever we want to synchronize we can hit the synchronization button or when we hit the close button oh it's still synchronizing stuff because there's a load a load of data

to to synchronize but essentially when we hit the close button Anki will automatically sync all the changes up to anky web now I'm going to go on my phone and I'm going to log into my Anki account on the app and then I'll be able to download the synchronized deck so let's go on Anki at the moment I've just got a default deck this is what it's going to look like when you first install it and I'm going to profiles add a new profile and test cool I'm going to hit synchronized and it says please

ener your enter your anky web details so I'm going to type in anky test at Ali ABD dal.com password we said was 1 2 3 4 5 6 now this is upload to anky web or download from anky web and the answer is we want to download from because you'll see on this device I only have one single Deck with nothing in it I don't want to overwrite all my decks on Ani web by uploading that instead I want to download from anky web because anky web is like the source of Truth For What like

it should be so I'm going to hit download from Ani web and now you will see everything is going it's all synchronizing it's downloading a ton of stuff because there's a load of images to download normally it wouldn't take this long it's taking this long because I've got loads of pre-made Decks that have tons and tons of images in them for medical exams but it will be practically instant if you this is the first time that you're using anky going to order some takeaway while the synchronizes because there's like hundreds of meaby to download ah

yes we are done look now you'll see that all of my decks have synchronized to Anki web and now they've been downloaded onto my phone so now everything is on my phone and everything is offline so if even if I don't have internet access I now have all 650 megabytes worth of data of which there are tens of thousands of like medical type flash cards which I can do on an airplane in the middle of the Himalayas wherever I want so yeah Capital Cities I've got my Western Australia so I just tap and I can

see okay it's good I've got that is that Queensland no it's that what is that Northern Territories fine Queensland whatever let go back to decks let's look at my USM deck in acute gastritis disruption of what type of barrier occurs disrupt of disruption of the mucosal barrier yes perfect that's say good what is the most common cause of chronic gastritis helicobactor pylori I think wonderful uh how can brain injury cause acute gastritis well you can get a Cushing ulcer Cushing ulcer caused by increased vagal stimulation which increases a in return asset production so I didn't

know all the details of that so let's go again and so on so I can go back and Dex and then when I want when I'm done I can hit synchronize and this is going to be much quicker because all it's done is it's uploaded the changes that I made so it's going to recognize that I did those four flash cards and it's going to update the algorithm accordingly and everything is synchronized on anky web completely for free this is absolutely incredible I can see why Anki is an absolutely life-changing app for a lot of

people so that was how we synchronized to and from anky web remember the first time you want to up upload to anky web and then the next time around you want to download from anky web and then it'll figure out what's going on and then you won't need to worry about upload download anymore you'll just hit the synchronized button and you'll be sorted the nice thing about anky web while we're here is that you can also share your decks you can make your decks public when I was in my second year of med school I

made loads of anky decks and I made them public and I shared them with people in the year below and friends in my year group and stuff and that was fun yeah there's just loads of different ways to use an and you can also download other people's decks from Anki probably won't talk about that in this class we'll talk about that in the next one because there's a lot of kind of advanced tips and tricks for how to use pre-made decks properly but this is just an introduction to Anki so that was how synchronization worked

thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next segment of the course all right welcome to the second section of the class and in this bit we're going to be going over some real world examples of how me and a few other people that I've interviewed over the past few weeks how we actually create anky cards in kind of real life based on our material and then how we review those anky cards and how we would do things like improve the cards over time and stuff like that and the idea is that as

we're watching these videos I'll kind of explain what the philosophy is behind what makes a good flash card there's loads of other videos on YouTube that discuss this PR Rock jaani has some very good ones he was one of the guys that I interviewed for ages there's some bonus segments of him in this class but now let's jump into it and so we're going to start by talking about how to make anky flashcards from a lecture so I've got my anky up and I'm going to use uh in fact I'm going to use my lecture

notes so I'm going to open a PDF expert and I'm going to let's say I don't know renal physiology let's go through renal physiology basically basically what I'm looking for is that well firstly I want to understand the content obviously uh hopefully you've seen my class on how to study for exams um that talks about the importance of understanding the content first and like for me I'm pretty sure now that I've been a doctor for two years and been studying physiology for a while I'm pretty sure I understand most of renal physiology but I still

need to memorize certain aspects of it so I'm going to create a new deck and I'm going to call it h because that is the subject H home for homeostasis first year physiology and I'm going to see which aspect of the lecture notes I can convert into Flash cards and the philosophy that I've got while I'm doing this is I'm thinking what is an examinable fact that I need to memorize that I can't just rely on understanding for those are my three things examinable fact that I need to memorize that I can't just rely on

understanding for something like where are the kidneys I don't need to memorize where the kidneys are because I know like where the kidneys are I know they're over there something like what is the blood supply to the kidneys I I just know it's the renal arteries like it's not the sort of thing that I need to memorize because I've long understood that fact it's as ingrained within me as that the fact that Paris is the capital of France but I'm as I'm going through these lectures I'm going to look for information that I could potentially

turn into a flash card and as we're going through I'll explain why I'm converting certain bits into different flash cards okay this is an interesting one so this graph basically shows um essentially in the body we have about 42 L of water the intracellular fluid I.E the water inside cells makes up 25 L the interstitial fluid I.E the water around the cells makes up 13 L and the plasma I.E blood makes up about 3 l of fluid these are important numbers to remember and so I'm going to create a flash card for each of them

it's going to be a basic flash card cuz it doesn't need to be special actually no you know what let's make a Clos deletion flash card out of this because then I can say body compartments intracellular fluid equals interstitial fluid equals and plasma equals body compartments how much fluid do we have in each so I can say interstitial fluid is about 25 L um 13 L and 3 l and what I'm going to do is I'm going to close all of these so command shift C command shift C command shift C but what I'm thinking

about is for example if I do them like this you'll see they're all c1s that means that when I add this card now it's going to ask me for the answer for all of them and it's just going to create one flash card because if I go in the edit mode you'll see C1 just means kind of the first close the first close the first close all of these are in one so the thing thinking of in my head is is it important for me to be able to generate this information without knowing the others

for example if I did it a C1 C2 and C3 just to give you an example and saved that now if I saw that I know the answer is 25 lers but I'm thinking in 6 months time if I didn't know that that was 25 L I'd probably be able to actually work it out based on these two numbers because I know I just know that the overall is about 41 42 l so that's why the philosophy here is that actually I'm going to convert them all into a single close because that is actually the

important information I need as a doctor and as a you know someone studying physiology I should be able to just reel these numbers off of the top of my head so it's it's it's really important for me to know this as one unit of information so when I see this flash card I can see okay 25 L intracellular 13 L interstitial and 3 l in the plasma boom absolutely right and while I'm here I'm just going to screenshot oh gosh this keyboard is not working let's switch keyboard on a Mac you would where's my diagram

you would use command control shift and four and then that turns into a selection and I can just I can just copy that whole segment and just paste it into extra so now if I close this and look at this flash card again now that I've got the answer once I've active record it once I've tested myself on the flash card I now see all this information and again like it's so useful putting the putting this extra information in flash cards because now I've got this visual of the kind of 25 L intracellular fluid the

13 L interstitial fluid and the 3 lers of plasma that would be one card that I would make from this using closed deletions ah here's another interesting one 55% of the blood is actually plasma and of that 9 91% is water 7% is proteins and 2% is electrolytes now I sort of knew that but I I didn't really have these numbers off the top of my head and I think it would I think it's helpful in terms of understanding physiology and understanding fluid bands around the body just to appreciate what these numbers are so what

I'm going to do I'm going to say um 55% of the blood is plasma how much of that is water so how much of the plasma is Water by percentage and because this is a closed deletion card within the text of the card I'm going to say 91% water and I'm going to close that with command shift C I'm going to add this close so this is this one let's say that was easy 55% of the blood is is plasma how much of the plasma is Water by percentage the answer is 91 this is basically

a basic card in Clos deletion format so alternatively what I could have done is I could have created a new card I could have switched the type to basic and I could have said uh what percentage of plasma is actually water and the answer would be 91 yeah that would be one way of doing it but because for me I tend to use Clos cards quite a lot if I've if I've got a card that's actually just a basic question and answer I would still just use the Clos deletion thing the other interesting thing about

the Clos thing is that it automatically comes with the extra field so now what I can do in the extra field is I can just copy and paste boom I'm going to screenshot that just paste it in there and now that's automatically in there right right so now this flash card is a lot more useful because now when I see this in 6 months time or however you know I'm going to see it tomorrow or later today 91% water but it also gives me the context I've explained that actually 91% water 7% proteins 2% electrolytes

and this is a diagram just to illustrate it a bit more and it was so easy for me to just screenshot that stuff and just shove it into anky I'm I might as well like this would be a lot less useful if I just memorized 91% water in isolation but now I've got it in context and I understand it's with proteins and electrolytes so for example if I were to add more cards here I would say um you know let's actually copy this stuff how much of the plasma is proteins by percentage and then I

would actually say which proteins which is technically another question sort of goes against the minimum information principle which is the idea that only one fact per flash card but because I know that actually memorizing the number seven is optically useful in the context of my subject it's more useful for me to be able to reel off albumin fibrinogen globulins Etc as being the other things in this list which is why I'm adding more than one piece of information to this particular flash card and this is why creating flash card gets so complicated because it really

depends on what you're trying to achieve and like what the objective is so actually let's just let's just fill this out so I'm going to say 7% proteins albumin fibrinogen globulins other Etc and I could just copy and paste that from the lecture notes close deletion that with command shift C and then copy and paste all of this stuff and maybe in the next series we'll talk about add-ons to make this process a bit more efficient but we're we're trying to keep things simple here so now how much of the plasma is water it's 91%

and I've got my illustration good how much of the plasma is proteins well it's about 7% and the proteins are alamin fibrinogen and globulins amongst other things mostly albumin great so that is how I would make kind of Fairly basic flash cards just based off of this you know let's make another one while while you're here what is V Hoff's equation and the answer is pi V equal nrt so I'm going to write uh Pi V equal nrt because I can't be a to define the symbol for pi and I'm just going to copy and

paste this whole thing in the extra Tab and I'm going to close out Pi V equal nrt now let's add it with command space bar close this how much is the plasma percentage of proteins blah blah blah let's say that was easy what is Van Hoff's equation well it's Pi V equals nrt but alone that fact is totally useless which is why in the extra column I have added I've screenshotted the information there and again just to reiterate it takes me zero effort to screenshot stuff but my future self will be so glad that I

did it so that was an example of three different flash cards that I've made just of of this one lecture and the question I'm thinking is do I need to me memorize it or can I just kind of understand van Hof's equation I kind of knew that already but it's a it's an anonomous thing like it's named after someone so you know in in a year's time in two years's time I might not specifically remember like I would know the equation Pi V equals nrt but I might not specifically remember that it was Van Hof's

equation which is why it's helpful to create the flash card for that whereas I probably wouldn't need a flash card for Speed equals distance over time just because it's so Bond or obvious and I just know it so the point that I want to make throughout this whole thing is that we don't want to just be making flash cards willy-nilly about everything we only want to make flash cards for the things that we think we might need a flash card to remember and that actually is partly why I don't like making flash cards the first

time I'm studying a new subject because the first time you're studying anything it is all completely new to you you know the first time I'm looking at capitals of the world the fact that Paris is the capital of France is is a completely new fact to me and so I'd make a flash card about it but really I I don't need to make a flash card about it it because it perhaps that's a bad example but like as you become more familiar with a topic you can start taking different aspects of that topic for granted

there's an example I'd like to give like a few months ago a student emailed me asking me to look at his flash cards he was starting first year of medical school no I think he was like A- level biology and one of his flash cards was where is the heart and the answer was in between the lungs that's a pretty ridiculous flash card to make because obviously everyone knows the heart is in between the lungs you don't need a flash card for that also it's a bad flash card because where is the heart like 2

years from now when you look at that flash card as a medical student or as a doctor I might well it's sort of in the middle media stum it's surrounded by the anterior and the posterior media stum it's got the pericardium around like I'm I'm not really sure what the question is asking right if the if the flash card was between which two organs is the heart then it's more obvious that okay the lungs but then it's a pointless flash card to create cuz you don't need a flash card to know that the heart is

in between the lungs you can just take it for granted so that's kind of the impression that I want to leave you with that Anki is fantastic an is amazing but you really want to avoid flash card overload and one way to avoid flash card overload is to only make a flash card if you think you might need a flash card to remember it and if something is super super easy then yeah you you just mark it as easy and it kind of ends up getting buried but yeah we don't want to be overloaded with

flash card so that was this segment of the video Let's in the next one we'll continue making some more flash cards and I'll just share some more thoughts along the way all right welcome back in this video we are talking about how to make flash cards from a video let me find a random lecture video on YouTube related to physiology probably I'll again try and go over what sort of flash cards I would make from that particular video so let's look at um I don't know pulmonary Sur Fant looks good double speed obviously welcome to

scho oh here we go so already we have an examinable fact here so I'm going to add to this deck and if we look at the bottom of this video which is hard to see because the player is in the way let's just enlarge this pulmonary surfactant is secreted into the alveoli from type two alola cells mention how an increas AM and so the examinable fact here is what cell type secretes suant what cell secretes Sur factant and I'm going to say uh type 2 alv cell and because this is a close card because that's

how I roll I'm going to close that out and then you know what might as well just screenshot this from the video and shove in the extra column just cuz why not so that's a useful fact for me to memorize so we mention how we the mechan in place prevent the coll of it's du to something oh interesting so I actually want to do an image occlusion here because I think it's useful for me to understand what a type 1 alola cell is and what a type 2 alola cell is so I'm going to screenshot

that copy it to my clipboard and I'm going to use command shift O command shift o to open up image inclusion it's going to automatically paste in this thing and I should be able to scroll around good so we've got the rectangle selected we're going to get rid of that we're going to get rid of that let's get rid of that as well Alva maccrage faum H capillary arthrite that's all fairly obvious stuff so I want to hide all of them because if I do hide one guess one it's going to show me all of

them and ask me to guess one of them but if it for example shows me alveola type 2 cell I know that the other one must be alveola type 1 cell so in this context it's better for me to hide all than guess one and I we'll see three cards have been added great let's continue so is as by okay here we go this is interesting what are the three things that makes up surfacant basically one two 3 it is fos oh God phospholine phosph tidal glycerol and hyro oh God s surfactant proteins I probably

could get a get a molecule diagram so surfactant it's going to show me the structure of these bits this is an image of phospho tidal choline so let's copy shove that into the extra column so now I can see phospho tidal choline and be like okay hydrophobic chains polar head groups blah blah blah but these are the three things that makes up makes up seaon and again do I want to do this as a single card or as three different cards I think I want to do it as a single card and again this is

this is somewhat controversial because there's more than one piece of information per card but again I kind of know that if I get asked a question in real life it'll be what are the three bits that make a ponary surfactant and I want to be able to rule them off off the top of my head so yes it would be more effort for me to recall this card when I see it but I know that in the context that this information is important it's important for me to know about all three components so actually I

could have just done a basic card foras but I'm just going to select everything close it with a single close rather than having to select each of them individually let's hit the add button and now we'll see 55% blood is plasma well that is 91% good what is Van Hof equations Pi V nrt what cell secretes a factant alveola type 2 cells good now this is an alveola type 1 cell good that is an alveola type two cell good and that is an alveola maccrage good what are the three things that make surfactant phosy choline

phosph glycerol and hydrophobic heads hydrophobic surfactant proteins no it's hydrophobic Tails whatever let's say good for that one and now I know what it's talking about easy done interpers between water molecules the okay so he said that pulmonary surfactant is removed by Alva macrophages now I didn't actually know that so I'm going to create a card for it so surfactant is secreted by type 2 alveolar cells but taken up by alol macro phages now this is actually the perfect opportunity to use a double close so I can close that I can close that so that

works so now if I add this I've added two cards so fact it's secreted by type to avoda cells yep but it's taken up by AV micro fages so now I've got these two facts that I've got from this lecture and put it into a flash card and this is a fairly simple flash card and again if I wanted to I could copy and paste this diagram so let's edit this extra paste the diagram in close so now it's going to appear in all of these all of these Clos deletion flash cards so hopefully you

you can get an idea of how I'm making the flash cards as I'm going along again just to reiterate I'm asking myself do I really need a flash card for this this is not the first time I'm going over the topic so already if there's something that I don't immediately think oh yeah I know that then I think okay maybe I need a flash card for it because clearly I haven't remembered it after all these eight years of being in medicine but that's sort of Step number one and step number two is I'm trying to

think about how I can turn it into the simplest flash card but also while I'm doing that I'm thinking about how is this information actually going to be tested is there any point in me knowing the structure of pulmonary surfactant based on those three things in isolation or would it be better if if I could just reel off the three things that make up ponary reactant just like in a row and in that context that would make sense so again just reiterating the point that design your flash cards based on the format and the method

that you're going to be tested in and remember you want to minimize the number of flash cards ideally so we don't want to be making flash cards on absolutely everything because then we get too many flash cards and it takes ages we want to try and keep that process as efficient as possible so thanks for watching and let's move on to the next video all right welcome back in this video I want to show you how I memorized bunches and bunches of paragraphs and paper references and kind of long bits of text for my psychology

essays that I had to write during my third year of med school I actually made a YouTube video sort of about this it's called how I ranked first at Cambridge University and it's done quite well cuz it's a good clickbait title but this is my third year psychology deck actually we'll click study now and we'll see how much of this I remember trannel and deasio 1985 I have absolutely no idea what I was talking about while the pro so prognostic Post in mind recognition they s SC to familiar what the hell does SC mean clearly

I I knew this back in the day let's hit brows and I'm looking for my third year psychology deck and let's sort it alphabetically okay so basically the way that I was using Ani for this is that I was creating essay plans like I was creating structures of essays that I was going to commit to memory using spider diagrams and mind maps for example in my mind map I would have the phrase abnormal basa gangli function in schizophrenia functional neuroimaging evidence which you know this was an essay about schizophrenia we were looking at what is

the evidence that in people with schizophrenia the basil ganglia which is a part of the brain is abnormal and the thing that I wanted to memorize was this study from honey from honey atel 2005 where they did functional MRI showing brain responses to simple Target detection tasks in groups of controls and schizophrenic were overactive in schizophrenia and the paman was underactive in schizophrenia so this is not the minimum information principle but actually it kind of is like the minimum information information principle is that we should have a single chunk of information for every flash card

this paper is a chunk of information like I need to know what the reference is I need to know who did the study and I need to know what the study showed and there's no point in me knowing the name and then creating a separate flash card for what the study showed because that's not how I'm going to recall that information I'm going to recall that information by seeing this on a plan and thinking okay I'm writing this essay about schizophrenia in the exam I need some evidence that shows that in schizophrenia there is some

kind of brain structural changes ah I remember from my flash card I know I've got that study from honey ATL 2005 where they showed that in schizophrenia the cordate is underactive and the pamment is overactive other way around the coda are under or overactive and the pment is underactive whatever but the point is that I'm using Flash cards to create these kind of links equally amydala overactivity and depression is it simply caused by medication or depressed state and then I've got this other chunk of paragraph that I've memorized again here anxiety is a good for

you in lab studies first consulted 100 years ago a small degree of anxiety has been found to improve performance and lab tasks too much anxiety interferes with performance you know this is like a whole chunk of information that I've memorized because anxiety is a good for you is the cue that I know I'm going to recall when it comes to writing my essay so again this is not the way that I'd recommend using an if you need to Anki then this is sort of a brain processing intensive way of using an to memorize chunks of

information but this worked really well for me and because of using an I was able to memorize kind of at least 10 references for every single essay that I was writing in the exam I'd memorized at least 50 essays of which like eight came up in the exam out of the 12 that we had to write so that was absolutely perfect but this took me absolutely ages like you know making these flash cards and reviewing them every single day without fail ultimately all of this information was uploaded to my brain but this is a difficult

way to use Anki a much easier way to use an is by using Anki keeping your flash cards as short as possible so that you can just like Blitz through the reviews whereas for one of these breel 2000 there's no way I can Blitz through this review like back in the day when I was studying for this exam I would I would just kind of scribble out what the paper reference was and what they showed and kind of recite the story to myself in my head and that would take 30 seconds to 1 minute sometimes

even longer per flash card and you know if I had thousands of flash cards it just wouldn't have worked so I had fewer flash cards but it's a lot easier to use Anki when you're just kind of blitzing through small Snippets of information individual factoids rather than this method of memorizing entire chunks of information but I just wanted to put this video in here to show you that you can use Anki to memorize chunks of information again it really just depends on in what format are you actually going to be tested are you going to

be asked to write write an essay in an exam with the book closed or you have to recite these references from memory some would argue it's kind of a pointless way to be tested I would agree but I don't make the rules this is just you know how you play the game or are you going to be tested in a sense that it's going to be multiple choice where it's based on recognition rather than generation of information all these things kind of dictate how how you should use your flash cards but in this I just

want to show you that there are a few different ways of doing it but if in doubt stick to the minimum information principle one fact per flash card one chunk of information per flashcard don't over complicate it like I've done here so I hope this just gave you a kind of brief look at how this stuff worked and feel free to slow this video down if you actually want to see what I'm going over all right in this section we're talking about how to optimize Anki how to use Anki properly and remember this class is

still aimed at people who are brand new to Anki there's a huge Rabbit Hole you can really go down into the weeds with Anki and how to optimize it and all the different settings and all that kind of stuff we'll save that for the future class where we kind of aim it more intermediates and experts but in this section of the class I just want to go over kind of some best practices ways in which we can optimize our Anki usage to get the best bang for a buck even as beginners so in this video

um this is going to be sort of a bonus segment it's an interview that I did with pre Jani who is a medical student YouTuber he's got a YouTube channel where he breaks down so much stuff about Anki and you should definitely watch all of his videos about Anki if you're really interested in exploring this topic deeper but in this short segment he and I are just kind of discussing and showing on screen how we would improve flash cards by kind of building on them and like kind of what makes a good flash card um

more on that in a video further down the line but yeah here is me and prag discussing how to improve your flash cards by adding extra information I wonder if you can just kind of take us through some other sort of random cards just so we can get an idea of what kind of extra information you put and I I and while we're there if we can talk about what makes a good flash card versus a bad flash card and I know you've got videos about this that we'll put in the description section wherever people

are watching this so here here's a good one so you know this is buide to feride conversion uh which is both of these are just diuretics but notice how um the first question was just like 2 milligrams IV is how much furosemide po this is a very just basic question and then the answer was 80 which is what I put in the back but in the extra column I included all the contextual basis behind that which is 40 milligrams of Lasix PO is 1 milligram of bumetanide Po and then underneath that I also said like

40 Mill lasx is 20 milligram lasx IV so that's the conversion from po to IV of lasx and then I also included the conversion of bumetanide Po to IV which is one milligram bumetanide PO is one milligram IV so even though this question is testing one facet of this which is bumetanide to Lasix you can see how I would need to know a lot of a lot more you know because you need to know bu Lasix poo to Lasix IV buide po to BU IV um and so on the extra column I almost always have

all of the prerequisite information I need to understand this question so when I let's say I just wrote 2 milligrams is equal to 80 poo if I had nothing else here this is a very useless card because then I'm just like cool two is 80 but one might be 40 and then like what about po IV like all those small things and now I have this card here that actually answers all of those so even though it's just one question that I'm being asked I have a lot more knowledge here that I can absorb so

so this one says which one is the left gastroepiploic artery comes from and this is just relating to the stomach so notice how I included a picture of the stomach in my extra column um and you'll see that the left one comes off of I think this oh the left one comes off the splenic artery and the right one comes off the gastro dool so notice how I included this picture and I said splenic so I'm like okay here's the splenic artery oh there's the left gastro I got it if I had asked right then

notice how I'd need to go to the Sea trunk probably go to the gastral and then it comes off the gastro DOL on the right side um so again not just the answer but all the prerequisite information I need to understand that question yeah because I suppose I suppose for that one like if if you didn't have the image the danger is your brain would just begin to associate that specific phrasing of the question with splenic artery just the words and you wouldn't have the idea like the actual Concept in your mind yeah which is

really important right because Anatomy is so visual so you may memorize these two things but I would argue that having the picture makes it even easier to memorize because you're like oh yeah splenic artery and oh it just comes off it's on the left side yeah so so this this has a lot more context and I'd argue even makes it easier because if it seems like you and I are very similar I can't just memorize random facts I need to have some sort of like there is logic behind this you know like whoever made these

amazing things didn't just do it out of craziness there's logic behind each and everything and so this kind of adds a bit more reason um so this one's asking like what is drug induced aseptic menitis again it's a very simple basic question um but you'll notice how I included an abstract here it's a picture of an abstract from Jama that talks about drug induced um uh yeah drug induced ASPC aseptic menitis and I have the actual paper here if I wanted to refer to it but again I kind of summarized it in my own way

it's when drugs certain drugs you take can cause your CSF fluid to actually have the same breakdown as if you had viral menitis and so notice how I kind of even highlighted the part of the abstract that's important which is nids can cause this antibiotics can cause this IVIG can cause this and antibi antibodies against the T3 receptor can cause this um but again basic question basic answer but all the information I need to understand that answer in the context of medicine so here's another one so this is just light's criteria for thoros and thesis

um so let's say um you wanted to decide if a thoros nesis if if a plural affusion you had was caused by heart failure as opposed to an infection this like criteria explains it but notice that I have I don't even ask any questions about it I ask another test that's really specific for exudative um plural Fusion is cholesterol cholesterol Valu is greater than what are indicative of exudative and this is 45 right and then also notice I included my transitive stuff here because it's not just about exudative so transudative are usually bilateral they're caused

by he failure curosis nephrotic syndrome and exive are usually infection and malignancy so again everything I need to understand the concept but then I my question is a very specific facet of that knowledge bank I suppose at that point if you still didn't understand it having read the information that's when you would just open up Google and just literally Google it find find a Wikipedia article exactly but notice how I don't just make one card so look this is the same thing what are three causes of exida of infusions so I usually have so many

questions about one topic I approach it from like 80 different attack angles that if I go through all of my cards and I sleep on it those angles come together it's kind of like the puzzle analogy we were using which you fill in pieces of the puzzle and before you know it you filled the whole puzzle in and your your concept bank is full you just didn't it all right welcome back in this video we're going to talk about the best settings that you should use for anky essentially there's a YouTube video by this guy

called Conor AKA Sai and he's got this guide to anky intervals and learning steps and I've experimented around with loads of different anky settings and these are the ones that I would recommend that you get started with the default Ani settings are all right but they can cause problems and this half an hour video has like a whole long explanation of it if you really want to get into it but because this is a beginner's class we're not going to bother explaining stuff we're just going to be like right these are the settings that you

want so how do you change your an settings well you you'll notice that next to every deck there's a little options icon I'm let's use my USM one and click options now you'll see that you've got we've got different options group option groups here and I'm going to manage and create a new one and I'm going to call that group let's say uh Ali recommended settings cool now basically these are the numbers that we want to put in so under the new cards essentially there's like three three categories of settings just to briefly explain we've

got new cards reviews and lapses so new cards are cards that are still in the learning phase and reviews are you know how many reviews we're doing each day um but basically Cards start off in the learning phase and then once you get them right enough times they graduate and then in theory they are cards that you should know and if you get them wrong once they graduated at that point they reset back to new cards kind of or rather at that point it counts as a lapse and then it effectively resets back to you

it's it's it's complicated you don't really need to know the details basically the new card def def fault steps I think are 3 and 15 which means that when a card is new you'll have noticed in the previous examples if you click again it comes up in 3 minutes and if you click good it comes up in 15 minutes and then after that time if you click good it graduates because the gradu graduating interval is set to one day so after just getting it right twice in a span of 15 minutes the card counts as

having graduated and then if you ever get it wrong again at that point the card difficulty becomes penalized which means that you start seeing that card over and over again and in this video konana calls it ease hell and I think that's a great a great description of it because everyone who doesn't change the default anky settings gets into this problem where they're like I I swear I've been seeing this card so often why does it keep on coming up it's cuz you haven't changed the settings these are the settings you want to change it

to so for new cards you want to write 15 so the first interval is 15 minutes 3 minutes is a bit pointless because 3 minutes you're not really learning anything you're just testing your short-term retention of it the next so 15 space 1440 1440 is 1440 minutes to one day that means the first interval is 15 minutes the next interval is 1 day and the third interval 8640 which I think is six 6 days I think that's 6 days so that's 15 minutes 1 day 6 days and the graduating interval is also really important to

change we want to change that to 15 days now what this means is that the first time we see a card if it's good it comes up in 15 minutes if it's good then it comes up in a day then it comes up in 6 days then it comes up in 15 days and after we've got it right after 15 days of it being a new card then that card graduates and at that point we're pretty confident we kind of know what's on the card and at that point if we get it wrong then we

start penalizing ourselves which we won't go into it's all explained in the video but with the default settings you don't really get to know a card very well you just have it in your short-term memory and for a lot of us we have pretty good short-term memories I've got pretty good short-term memories it becomes very easy to just graduate a card whereas you want to actually get more and more steps until a card becomes graduated because when anky marks a card is graduated Anki is saying that we expect you to have memorized this card by

this point whereas like you know there's cards that I've got tomorrow that are capital of Andor that I really can't remember or capital of Armenia that I can't remember I wouldn't want that to count as graduated cuz I know I can't remember it like I I want to have recalled it four times with at least 15 days of a gap between them to know that I fully know the card before it becomes a graduated card so these are one of the most important settings to do show new cards in the order added I actually prefer

show new cards in a random order because as you saw in the previous examples as we were creating capitals it becomes easy to actually memorize the order of the cards just subconsciously so adding new cards in a random order means that you don't see one after the other so you can figure out what the answer is based on the order that the answer came in so add new cards in a random order and finally for the easy interval I like to have 60 days as con recommends basically I tend not to hit easy I was

hitting it a few times in the example just just to kind of get us through the cards but I usually don't Mark a card as easy because if I'm marking it as easy then I'm really questioning why do I actually have this flash card in the first place something like the capital Francis Paris would be an easy card it would be the sort of car that I actually don't need to make so I tend not to Mark easy but easy interval I would just put a 60 days so these are the first settings to change

next when it comes to the reviews these are the settings I would recommend so maximum reviews per day I would set to 9999 because basically you always want to do the highest number of reviews that Anki says you should because if I said maximum reviews 20 a day like I only want to revise 20 cards a day and I've got 500 cards then I'm I'm never going to get through them all because I'm only doing a maximum of 20 each day whereas I set it to 9 and99 because the Anki algorithm is very good it's

it's very good at predicting when I'm going to forget stuff basically if you set your maximum reviews per day to too low a number you are hamstringing the algorithm you're not letting the algorithm work because you are not up for doing enough questions and sometimes when you're getting into the swing of things you can just Blitz through hundreds of flash cards in a in a given sitting so I like to have reviews at 9999 easy bonus is fine interval modifier is fine and maximum interval 90 days is fine that's sort of the maximum amount of

time that you'll see a card coming back in basically and then importantly for lapses this is important so essentially a lapse is what happens when you've got a graduated card and you get it wrong right so a card that has graduated in in Anki default settings a card that's graduated is a card that you've known for one day in my book that doesn't count as knowing something that just means you remember it from yesterday it doesn't count whereas in our new settings as we see over here a card that's graduated is a card that we've

been able to recall four times with a 15-day gap between those recalls so if at that point we get it wrong then okay fair play we should start seeing that card more often the default step is 15 minutes I think 20 minutes is better because really 15 minutes is not too too great new interval now I think that should be changed so what that means is that basically if you get a card wrong once it's graduated it will completely reset back to its default and you're going through your 15 minutes 1 day 6 days 15

days all over again which becomes a real annoyance especially if you made a typo or something or you actually knew it but if but you just sort of forgot it for a moment it's unfair on on ourselves to make us then redo that card in circulation again because a it's it's not it's not a very nice feeling and B it also comes at the expense of the other cards so I think it's useful to have that at 70% as konana recommends so 70% minimum interval 2 days and Lee threshold eight lapses Lee action tag only

it's really important that this should be tag only essentially what that means is that if we get a card wrong eight times in a row then anky will tag it and tell us that guy mate you've been getting this card wrong eight times in a row suspend is bad because suspend means Anki will start hiding that card and never show it again but if you've got something wrong eight times in a row you probably want to show it rather than hide it so tag only is the way for that and now I've saved this as

I recommended settings so I'm going to hit okay so now when I'm doing my USM deck I click options and I see that yeah it's on Ali's recommended settings but for example if I click my I don't know Capital Cities deck options that's currently on default whereas I could change it to's recommended settings or I could change it to konana or I could change it to assade or or whatever I want and now we'll see that that should be assade settings and I can change that to default again yeah and if we look back on

USM that should still be on ai's recommended settings so you can sort of change up the settings depending on what deck you're doing if for example I was learning Japanese or learning music theory I would want these cards to come up much more frequently whereas for me learning stuff for the USMLE uh you know I've got thousands of cards in this pre-made deck which I'll talk about later I don't want to review them every 3 minutes so those are the recommended settings but basically if you change ankey to those settings you won't really go wrong

so yeah that's all good thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next video okay welcome back in this section section three of the course I'm going to be answering frequently asked questions so in this video we're talking about when should you use ankey and this kind of gets split up into two parts right there is when should you create flash cards and second secondly when should you review flash cards and we'll tackle the second one first because it's easier you should be reviewing the flash cards every single day because if you can do

it every day then you letting the algorithm work in your favor you're allowing the system to work for you and it means you don't really have to think about it you just have to get your daily reviews done every day and so when I was using Anki extensively in medical school and all my friends have done this as well when we were using Anki properly we'd be doing it for example on the toilet or like on the bus or like you know in the car if you're in the car someone else is driving and you're

going to placement or something then it's quite easy to just kind of Blitz through flash card and it doesn't even have to be antisocial because you know for example what we would do in in clinical school is that someone would usually have anky open usually me with my friend Paul driving and then as I was doing my flash cards I would throw the question out to the rest of the group and everyone would kind of answer equally when I was in my second year we were memorizing drugs and pharmacology and stuff using anky and me

and my friends Callum and Paul we were all living together uh once or twice a week we'd get together we'd order a city Kebab takeaway and we would just kind of do drugs is what we called it just kind of bash through some anky flash cards so basically when it comes to reviewing a flash cards you want to be doing it at every opportunity when you have those spare moments of time and yeah you can sit down for an hour or two every day and be like right I'm just going to B you my anky

cards but think about the amount of time that we all waste scrolling through Instagram you know these days I'm on the toilet I'm not actively preparing for anything using an and so my default thing is I scroll through Instagram whereas you know now that I'm kind of going approaching the preparation for the USMLE and I'll be using Anki extensively for that it's nice now having that thing like a default activity that I can do when I'm on the toilet and in fact one thing I found helpful when I was in university is having having anky

as the very first icon on the very first page of my iPhone home screen I've now reduced the friction for me doing some anky cards rather than doing something completely pointless like scrolling through Instagram so that is when you should review your flash cards what about when you should create them now A friend of mine uh his name is Angus he ended up ranking like amazingly well in all the exams in in in medicine in Cambridge he started off making ankey flashcards in first year of med school but he started off making them after the

lecture like he would take notes in the lecture and then he would convert the notes into flash cards that is one way of doing it but very quickly he realized that actually he didn't need to take that intermediate step of taking the note first he could just convert the lecture into anky flashcards as he was going along and then for the next like five six years and he ended up like absolutely smashing every single exam and ended up like winning some like like loads of prizes at graduation and stuff was he was saying his method

was purely based on just using ankey using active recall and using spider diagrams here and there which we'll talk more about in a future video the point is he cut out the intermediate step of note taking from his like flash card generation and so when you start getting good at using ankey what you can do is you can start making flash cards in the lecture itself so for example if there's a diagram on the screen and maybe you've got the Powerpoint in on your laptop you can just screenshot from the PowerPoint put it into anky

alternatively if you don't have slides you could just take a photo with your phone and then Chuck it into anky you can make flash cards on the fly during lectures so that would be one way of doing it the other way of doing it is the more standard way that you in the lecture you actually pay attention and you kind of make notes I quite like making notes in lectures just because it helps keep me awake and then after the lecture then I would kind of go through and I would really ask myself okay do

I really need a flash card to understand SL memorize this thing and as we've talked about before individual factoids that might come up in the exam would be reasonable to make a flash card about let's say you know it was uh which chromosome is the is the gene for Cystic Fibrosis on and if you're like okay well there's no real understanding involved in doing that I know it would make sense to turn that into a flash card whereas let's say it's something like in a lecture randomly they mentioned that you know type 2 diabetes affects

20% of the UK population that's not a useful flash card because I know that I'm never going to be asked a question asking me what percentage of the UK population is affected by diabetes because that's just not the sort of question that we would have got in our exams our exams are much more scientific they didn't really care about these kind of stat though I wouldn't make a flash card about that so yeah those are kind of the two most popular places where you can make your flash cards number one during the lecture itself instead

of taking notes or maybe alongside or number two after the lecture when you're going over your material at that point it becomes a lot easier to just kind of screenshot stuff Chuck it into anky screenshot chuckin type of few things Chuck into an and you become very Adept at creating flash cards very quickly so that was just a few thoughts on when you should be using an thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video all right welcome back in this video we're talking about when you should start making flash cards this

is absolutely classic question that everyone asks like when should I start doing Ani basically you want to start making flash cards I want to say as soon as possible with the caveat that if you are a first year medical student or or a first year student of any kind and you're just getting started in your subject I probably would wait a few months before making flash cards the reason I say that is that when you are new to something like you know when I was a first year medical student student I had no idea what

the exams were going to be like I had no idea what like what the experience like or anything was going to be like and so if IID started creating flash cards from day one I would have overc created like an absolute torent of flash cards and a lot of them wouldn't have been useful because I didn't know what I didn't know and I didn't know what I knew and I I knew I yeah as I was just very very very ignorant at the start of my first year of med school by the time kind of

I got I got halfway through first year and definitely a second year rolled around at that point I knew the score I knew what the exams were about and knew what sort of questions they were asking and so it would be much more reasonable for me to then make flash cards from day one of my second year of med school all the way through to final year and that's what I did like from second year I was like okay I'm going to be doing an from day one and it worked absolutely amazingly equally in third

year where I ranked first in the O group it work just worked amazingly whereas in first year most of the friends that I had who started who discovered Anki and started using it they just ended up making way too many flash cards so the advice for when you should start making your flash cards is in general the earlier the better but keep in mind that when you are in work on something new you are going to be an absolute dumbass you're going to be ignorant about everything you won't know what you don't know and therefore

diving into flash cards might be counterproductive I would suggest waiting until we're waiting a few months and trying to really understand everything first before you worry about the things you have to memorize the other problem with making them making flash cards too early is that you end up wasting a lot of time making flash cards for things that might be trivial facts later like further down the line uh let's take an example for medical school um in Anatomy for example everyone basically knows that all of the muscles in the posterior compartment of the arm are

supplied by the radial nerve that fact you only really start to fully appreciate and it's so deeply ingrained a few weeks or months into med school it's not a fact that on day one you would think okay yeah I'm definitely going to remember this for the rest of my life I haven't visited Anatomy for 8 years and I still know that fact because it's just so deeply ingrained because it's just such a classic fact if I was a firste medical student and just and making flash cards for the first time I might waste a lot

of time making flash cards for all of the different muscles in the stero compartment of the arm and bothering to list the Nerf supply for them not realizing that actually this is a fact that they're all supplied by the radial Nerf that's a fact that I can now I can basically take for granted whereas if I'd waited a few weeks or months before starting to make the flash cards a I'm kind of doing a bit of revision because in making the flash cards I'm doing space repetition and active recall but b i now I I

now have more of an appreciation of what the important things are that I need to put on the flash card so that was a very rambly way of saying basically the sooner you can make the flash cards the better because you want to spread spr out the the workload of making Flash basically the sooner you can start revising the better I've had a few emails from students being like when should I start revising for my exams and the answer is mate you know the best time to start revising for your exams was two years ago

the second best time is right now uh you know the the earlier you can start doing this stuff the better because then we're fully taking advantage of active recall and space repetition we're fully taking advantage of the fact that you know our brain is wired to remember things over a long period of time provided we give it a long period of time to do it so the the earlier the better but with the caveat that if you're at the very start of a new chapter of your life maybe give it a few weeks or months

until you become less ignorant about what's going on and I say this in the nicest possible way because I was an absolute ignoramus when I was in my first year of med school I would not have benefited from using Anki for the first few weeks or months I would have benefited it from from using it a few months into it so another question that we've had quite a lot of on on Instagram is what should I put on a flash card and this is an impossible question to answer because it really depends massively on what

subject you're doing what stage of that subject you're at what year you and how old you are what your exam is doing and what specific things you want to be trying to memorize basically I think the way to think about it is that an is like your second brain it's like an extension of your brain and anything that goes into Ani will become uploaded to your brain provided you kind of do it effectively and consistently and all that stuff and provided you keep you stick to the minimum information principle in general and have not too

much information on each flash card preferably just one factoid one examinable fact so kind of with that mindset in mind that Ates what you should put on a flash card as I said in the previous video I wouldn't make a flash card asking me what percentage of people in the UK have diabetes because I know that it's an irrelevant fact maybe it's kind of useful to appreciate how big the number is but it's not the sort of thing I want to memorize as a piece of information and if I had too many of those going

through my flash cards would get really really dull and pointless because I'd be like oh this is a pointless question this is never going to come up in an exam and partly it also depends on what's our aim of using flash cards are we using flash cards purely to learn or are we using flash cards to prepare for an exam because everyone realizes this at some point in their lives and the sooner we can realize this the better our exams are not the arena where we test how much we've learned our exams are the arena

where we test how well we've prepared for the exam in an Ideal World in an absolutely perfect education system we would learn stuff and the exams would test the learning but and the exams would be relevant to the learning and maybe wouldn't even have exams at all but in the real world we have to play the game of exams so it really depends what do you want to put on a flash card depends on what information do you want uploaded to your brain a few tips on this if you're still struggling first ly the most

important thing to do is to scope the subject talked about this extensively in the previous skillshare class about how to study for exams you should check that out scope the subject first figure out kind of the general tree of your subject and the general branches before worrying about the kind of the details on the leaves because an is very good at the details on the leaves and the leaves it's not very good at the branches and the big tree so scope the subject understand the big tree understand where stuff fits in and then once you've

done that you can kind of break your subject down into the relevant bits and while you're doing that you're looking through past exam papers if you don't have past exam papers ask someone a year older than you what what they had in their exam you will get some kind of idea what's in the exam there is literally zero excuse if you're sitting there thinking oh but my school don't give out exam papers like there are so many sources of information out there there's the internet there's your professors your lecturers your teachers students in your year

students in the year above students two years above there are thousands of sources of information where you can find out what's going to be on the exam basically and therefore you can kind of build your flash card strategy around what you know is going to sort of come up on the exam if you're a medical student lots of medical students use anky I mean the way that I would do it for clinical school is that I would be doing question Banks online there's loads of question Banks available I use past medicine and past test personally

but there's loads of ones for the usml and if I got stuff wrong I'd be looking it up in for example a textbook or Wikipedia and I'd be turning that into a flash card because I know it's something that I got wrong and we learn best when we are learning based on the things we got wrong there's no real Point making flash cards on the things that we get right because then we just end up with way too many flash cards and it kind of becomes an exercise in futility so yeah I know that doesn't

really answer the question but so many people asked what should I put on my flash cards and the answer is dude I'm so sorry but it just massively depends on absolutely everything most importantly what are you going to be examined on what are you trying to upload to your memory that's kind of the main point so thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video all right so one of the most common questions that we get is how long should my flash card be and this is controversial right it's it's controversial because

there is a spectrum there are some people who are on the sort of minimum information principle Spectrum end of the spectrum where they would be very staunch Believers in that there should only be one single fact per flash card like each flash card should only have one objective and that should be to only put one fact into your brain and if you have to learn 10 facts you create 10 flash cards because that's how it works then on the other end of the spectrum you've got people like me for certain exams who would put entire

paragraphs or for examp like even I think some of my flash cards had like four paragraphs in them where I was just kind of committing those four paragraphs to memory but in that context I Was preparing for an essay exam where I wanted all those flash cards to be uploaded to my brain and the reason I had them as paragraphs rather than just as bullet points is because I wanted the writing style of those paragraphs to also be uploaded to my brain so it kind of depends on what what you're aiming for I would say

in general if we're asking the question how long should a flash card be the answer would be the shorter the better in general especially if you're a beginner at using Anki I would stick to the minimum information principle which is one fact per flash card because you can't really go wrong with that it's when you start adding way too many flags to your facts to your flash cards that it becomes such a ballach to get through that you will just stop doing it and like they say in like the Fitness World you know the best

workout routine is the one that you follow like there's no point trying to find the perfect workout routine because chances are you won't follow it the best one is the one that you'll follow if you start trying to sort of extend anky too much especially as a beginner in it you will end up just giving up and not using it it's like you know going to the gym and trying to bench 100 kg on your very first attempt like it's it's just not going to happen you're going to become demoralized and you won't be able

to do it consistently whereas if you stick to the minimum information principle of one factoid per flash card you can't really go wrong with that that's what I would recommend that's a general advice and over time as you get better at using ankey and more experienced you can then start modifying your flash cards to add a little bit more information to them if you have to because remember as we've discussed in the previous sections you can always modify your flash cards and it's very easy to do and it's something that you absolutely should be doing

so that's my take on the topic but we're now going to include some interview footage of a discussion that I had with prer and Carter both of them use Anki very extensively to absolutely smash their exams Carter came like 99.99 percentile in the MCAT from medical school prag like really really well in the USMLE again for med school it's all very medicine specific but the tips that they're giving are applicable to pretty much any subject so here is the the discussions between me PR and cter about this controversial issue of how much information should you

have on a flash card I guess it is sort of a spectrum there are some kind of one factoid per flash card purists who will generate 880,000 Clos deletions because they want to stick to that method and then you've got people who would memorize entire essays just using a single flash card so I wonder what your thoughts are on on on that about kind of one factoid or whether there's some there's some more new on here absolutely I'm going to just take that road in the middle which is a little bit of each right because

for the USMLE for sure one factoid works because the USMLE tests one very specific knowledge base point right but for real life medicine one factoid does not work I'll tell you a lot of the questions my attendance ask me would be more like this they would never ask me like what is one cause of an EXA of infusion they'd be like oh this patient has a lights criteria that's greater than 06 in terms of LDH what do you think is on your differential at that point I'm not I'm not going to have to be like

oh I don't know I never had a flash card that specifically talks about this scenario I'm going to be able to need to list all of the potential causes of an ex of diffusion in front of an attending right so and the reason why you're you're seeing this card in my in my suby deck is because it was for my suby which is suby is a lot more open-ended I'm going to be doing a lot more reasoning I'm going to be needing to think open-ended but if I was taking a test then yeah for sure

maybe could have been like malignancy causes what kind of EX what kind of um plural Fusion and the answer could have been exited um so I think when you're doing testing I think those small simple one close deletions definitely work but you're when you're in the hospital and you have to open up your blinders and you have to consider you know pretty large differentials that's when these cards do have to happen they got to make it into your bank somehow because you can't just know like oh these are the causes of exi but not be

able to tell people what the causes are if they ask you could tell me all the causes yeah absolutely no I I completely agree um when I so uh I made a video about how I used Anki to memorize entire chunk entire paragraphs for essays uh which I did in my third year of med school when I was studying psychology and a a few of the comments were talking about how oh actually technically this isn't the right way to use Anki because you're supposed to have one fact word for flash card and the way that

I sort of think about it is that yes fine technically like anky was originally designed to learn languages and you know when you're learning a language it it is a pretty much one toone mapping between kind of the front of the flash card and the back of the flash card but you can use Anki for lots of different things and you want to actually figure out what is your goal here like what are you trying to prepare for if you're preparing for a multiple choice pharmacology exam then okay fine one factor would the flash card

makes perfect sense if you're preparing for an exam where you're going to get a random question from any of these eight topics in Psychology and you want to memorize specific references that have descriptions of papers and stuff it doesn't make sense to kind of do it one line at a time because again you're just kind of comp compartmentalizing your knowledge in a way that that doesn't make sense you want to kind of put it together because that's the format you'll be tested in within the sort of uh Theory Theory crafting around an there's sort of

like a spectrum there are some people that fully purists of the minimum information principle which is the idea that each flash card should test one and only one factoid and then there are sort of people like me that would use it for things like memorizing entire essays uh and you know just just have like you know a whole paragraph of stuff within a flash card that I would then force myself to recall I wonder where on that Spectrum would you sort of slot most of your stuff my the rule that I try and stick to

is I really try and say no more than four things for flash card so one of the the cards that comes to mind that's in my developmental class is that I think I have a card asking like what are four functions of CI cells and so I can tell you that they fze cytoplasm they produce inhibit they produce Androgen biing protein and they produce like a medium to nourish the uh the sperm and so that's sort of where I think I draw I draw the limit at about four things um sometimes I mean sometimes you

just I think it depends there's sometimes where if you have like a clever pneumonic once you start getting more than four that's when I start trying to bust out some pneumonics and yeah abolutely that that that's where I find that that really helpful so yeah I think it's very it's it's very reasonable to have is to have a card that has an entire pneumonic on it because that's really just one chunk of information once you know the pneumonic you know the information like that's yeah and I mean I I think the biggest cards that I've

gotten towards have been about like seven um things so um like especially in that pathophysiology class where they're asking you uh to list say like seven causes of hyper calmia um I mean you can go all day all day with doing something like that so uh part of it is just sort of like knowing like these are probably going to be the seven that they're gonna these are probably the seven most important and then just making the pneumonic for those seven or another really good way that I found to think of it was for something

like cushions disease so sort of thinking about it from like top down was how I did it so I think I had like eight signs or symptoms of Cushings disase have you have you got a flash card for that that you can show us okay so yeah we've got six manifestations of Cushings um and so I how yeah so you can see right here I put it in italics and red work your way from the top to the bottom then from the core to the extremities and so for me I thought about it from um

you know I didn't have it organized like that on the car but like as I was reciting in my head i' think okay like the moon face the buffalo hump and then the purple strier that are on the abdomen and then start thinking about like trunkal obesity and then work my way outwards to the uh thin Limbs and then that sort of stuff that was another way either um either by sort categor I think I think you've mentioned in a video like categorize or die or something like that and so that's the if I I

find that if I can't come up with a pneumonic or something like that that's another really easy way to uh remember a whole chunk of information instead of just trying list seven ways that this thing happens just sort of think about like okay well this really breaks up into like three main things and then from there you know sort of talking about it that way yeah agreed and i' I'd probably say that I like if if we're giving kind of beginners general advice about Anki the minimum in sort of tending towards minimum information makes sense

because then you sort of get into the swing of it and then over time you start to realize that actually if I've got a bit more information actually doesn't matter on it I I can deal with that I think but then equally and I think this is why an is is so complicated that there's so much Nuance like if if for example you took this card and you applied the minimum information principle to it you would end up Clos deleting six of them and then like that that would just be overly excessive because each time

you go through it you'd be like H okay which one am I missing here which one am I missing here and eventually your brain would actually pattern match the position on of the thing on the list as opposed to the actual concept and that would just be be completely counterproductive yeah and that's that's one of the things I meant to mention back when I was talking about Bolding certain terms is that's something you got to be careful of because I definitely realized especially when I was like cramming for finals this last go around I think

my I think for my molecular genetic class we had like I think I had had like 1,200 cards or something like that and I realized that like as I'm just blurring through through all these cards that um a lot of times I was just like recognizing the like words in front of and the Clos delution and you know I didn't understand the concept at all I just knew like this word this word and what goes in the middle and so that's definitely something to try to avoid so that was lots of us giving lots of

advice on how much information you should have on a flash card in general just to reiterate the answer is as little information as possible and then you can start getting fancy later on once you become more experienced at using ankey so thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video all righty another really common question should I write notes or just make flash cards and again this is controversial in my opinion there is no point in making notes at all ever except for a few a few nuances I I talk about this

a lot more in my previous skillshare class about how to study for exams there's like a load of like a load of stuff about not taking but basically not taking can be useful if you're doing it in order to understand and you can't just do it in your head because yeah sometimes it is useful to write something down in order to understand it not taking is also useful if you are studying for the sorts of exams where you're being tested on information and you essentially you're having to combine lots of different information from lots of

different sources let's say you're studying English literature and you've got an essay question in your exam that asks you to reference three different sources and you've read 500 books that year you know you physically can't just return to the source material and memorize all the books you have to make notes on the stuff that you're that you're studying in order to synthesize and kind of condense them into format that makes sense which you can then put into anky to then upload to your brain but no taking becomes kind of the the first step for that

but for example let's say you're a medical student I don't think medical students should be taking notes at all because what's the point like it's not like medicine is particularly challenging it's only challenging because there's just a fire hose of information that you have to learn it's not like we're getting these like Arcane sources and we're putting information together in a novel way and trying to reach some kind of fundamental Insight no we're not doing that we are preparing for standardized exams every medical student in the world basically learns the exactly the same syllabus and

so there are thousands of revision sources out there that you know give the information to you making notes as a medical student in my opinion and the opinion of most of my friends is a total waste of time it should not be done unless it's required and unless you need to do it to understand your content and so as a medical student I would go for flash cards rather than notes because in a way your flash cards do become your notes like if you're using the Clos deletion or if you're using basic flash cards as

you're adding to your flash cards and hopefully you're making your flash cards bigger you're testing yourself on only one concept but you're adding lots of information to the extra information bit of the flash card so in a way your flash cards kind of become your own notes and a lots of my friends who used Anki quite well if they came across a new condition or something they wouldn't search through like Evernote or one note or anything they would just search through the anky database because they knew that that information would be in there somewhere and

then they would just add that piece of information to the flash card and in a way Anki then becomes sort of a notetaking system yeah not taking can be useful if you've got a subject that requires you to make all these inferences to use all these different sources medicine is not one of them if you're a medical student I think you're wasting your time by taking notes I think you can just go for flash cards and you can just go for mind maps and we're going to include a segment from Carter here the guy who

did really well on the MCAT about this whole idea of notes versus flashcards and I hope he kind of backs up what I'm saying um a couple of things that that that just came to mind how much do you take your own notes relative to just using eny are you talking about like when I'm in lecture or like that sort of thing yeah when you're in class and so I the the way I think of note taking is like note taking in class which for me personally is just to keep me awake and then there's

note taking after class which is to sort of flesh out and try and understand stuff a bit more yeah so uh I definitely I take notes in class just because it's one that that just keeps me keep me awake and keeps me engaged with material um for my emerging diseases class I don't take any notes whatsoever what he does is he just uploads the Powerpoints with blanks in them and so I'll just pay attention just enough to fill in those blanks and he doesn't ask I mean he's very old school so he doesn't ask anything

that's not directly on the PowerPoint so and his PowerPoints are very fleshed out so it's not like you have to like understand there's not like a whole lot of in-depth understanding you need to have behind it so I find that that's actually a Time that I can get other stuff done so I can sort of just be multitasking where I'm just filling in the blanks but then uh working on other stuff like sending emails and that sort of stuff but um during a class like developmental biology or my bioinformatics class it's definitely important for me

I feel like to because a lot of those professors will say like all right here's a PowerPoint and then we're going to I'm going to talk about some stuff that I will test on that's not already on this PowerPoint so in that in that case I'll I'll take notes or I'll flush out a diagram so that I understand diagram that we walk through better um but I mean after class that's where my note taking ends is after class I I find that like the rate limiting step in my learning is putting things into eny and

that once it's in eny I mean there's there's not a whole lot of purpose for me taking notes the only time that I'll bust back open the iPad and sort of like take notes again is if there's a concept that I'm just very confused about and I'm having a hard time um differentiating between two things so then I might make like a list to compare and contrast the two um but when I especially when I was studying for the MCAT what I've told a lot of people is like I did not take a single note

while studying for the mcad and a lot a lot of people don't don't believe me and you know there's I've I've tried to tell because I I I scored very very well on it and you know so people ask me like hey how did you get that score and you know what I keep telling people is like listen I didn't take a note all I did was anky and practice questions that is all I did and you know there's people who you know I see them like highlighting their book and like taking all these like

pages of notes I'm like listen like I told you what I did um and so with with that all I did was I you know they had these like review books for each subject and I just read the review book and instead of taking notes on that book all I did was just anything I want to like note and remember I just put into an and I knew that if I put it into an and just kept up with my reviews I was going to I was going to see it often enough that if they

tested me on it I would probably be able to answer it pretty well fantastic yeah that's my theory of of not taking as well I think especially especially for medicine and for subjects where it's it's not like you're going through sort of 18,000 English literature texts and having to create novel insights in those circumstances fair enough you need to take notes to summarize the material because it's physically impossible but when it comes to you know the MCAT or the you know the USMLE or medical school exams where it's basically finite discrete chunks of information that

you're being tested on and that everyone in the world is basically Lear in the same stuff taking notes yeah I I agree it's sometimes helpful for understanding if there's a particularly tricky concept but beyond that if it's an anky and actually the guy there was a guy in my year at Cambridge who ranked second in the entire year group just like absolutely smashing all the exams and he also had a social life um he just an he was he was Anki from day one his note taking was getting screenshots from the lectures there and then

and just chucking in into Anki and in the lectures he'd be making Anki flash cards as we were going along whereas all of the rest of us in first year we were just like making our NES and doing our highlighting and he ended up absolutely destroying every single exam just by using an yeah I have a I have a friend who's in PA school right now so like I'm do youall have those over there uh sort of position assistant sort of like a mid-level provider so he's he's in school right now and I mean that

is so he has mandatory class attendance um so what what I mean he'll go to class but I mean he is just sitting there in class and he's just taking the PowerPoint and just putting it he's doing what you just described putting it into an he just goes ahead and just starts starts making cards right there all right welcome back in this video we are tackling the question of how do you avoid flash card overload and this is something that we are all going to uh experience when we start using ankey sometimes you know even

with the best of intentions you just find that you've made a lot of cards and the cards just start to pile up like maybe there's one day where you miss your reviews and suddenly you've got 400 cards to do the next day and then you think oh 400 cards I can't be honest with this and then you skip your review and then you got 600 and now you're being overloaded by flash cards there's a few kind of tips that we can use to get around this firstly and most importantly if you can consistently do your

flash cards every single day then you will not be overloaded by flash card that's just the first thing to say secondly you want to avoid making flash cards on the stuff that you know you already know especially at the start especially if you're not following my advice and kind of making flash cards from day one of med school you're going to make loads of flash cards on things just because you like the idea of making a flash card and it feels like a safety blanket and you think oh I couldn't possibly know this without a

flash card but when it comes to flash cards we don't want to be creating that many because the more flash cards we create Let's see we create 100 flash cards every lecture and we've got 100 lectures that is way too many flash cards to handle instead we should probably create maybe 10 to 15 flash cards per lecture even if it's a lecture that's 1 hour long because the rest of the information probably doesn't need a flash card it doesn't require us to memorize it it probably requires us to understand it and as we've talked about

Anki is not great for understanding anky is wonderful for memorization so yeah number one do it consistently number two avoid making too many flash cards thirdly even with the best of intentions and the best strategy the flash cards can pile up especially towards the exams when you've gotten through all your syllabus and you've got a few hundred flash cards to review each day one way to avoid overload in that front is just kind of split up the studying session so what I would do is I would do a little bit in the morning then a

bit in the afternoon then a bit in the evening then a bit before bed while I'm lying in bed with a dark mode on on ankey using an add-on that kind of makes me swipe through flash cards and I just make sure I get all of them done by staggering them throughout the day so that would be one other way of doing it and now we've got a segment from CTO who did very well in the MCAT using Anki about the load balancer add-on that's kind of another tool in Your Arsenal for combating flash card

overload so I will hand over to David now any tips in General on how to kind of maintain the motivation because like often I would find and i' I've certainly I certainly know friends who would we' we'd log on to an and we'd be like oh my God 648 flash cards to do today and then it would just seem so overwhelming that we would just end up not doing it how do you kind of get over that yeah so there's two ways to go about that I can tell you the one that I do and

then there's one that's also very popular so basically what I would do um is I would any block of medical school that I was in I would make sure I did those reviews um they just needed to be done for you know my upcoming exams we had weekly exams um but then in order to you know prepare the best I could for my board exam it was important for me to review old material too so I had another deck of reviews in order to not get overwhelmed I would usually limit the reviews on that deck

to maybe like a 100 cards or so so that would take me you know I was using Pomodoro techniques for studying that would take me about 25 minutes to get through um that just kind of let me know that every day I would have about one Pomodoro Technique of review cards and that helped me from getting like overwhelmed if you know I had less to do that day I could add more to that review pile but I just kind of knew like approximately 25 minutes I would be spending reviewing so I didn't wake up and

have like you know 2,000 cards to review and I'm like wow I'm not going to do anything today except flashcards um because to me that was not motivational that was you know a lot of people you get overwhelmed with that so that's how I did I set my review limit um some people would argue that that makes Anki less effective that could be argued um but to me it was like flashcards are used for certain purpose and that's for like memory retention but I had to spend some time using other resources to like understand things

like you're probably not going to be able to understand physiology from an you need to learn that that from your other resources that are provided you use Ani to kind of retain things in your memory going forward oh I did that's very interesting uh so if so let's talk about the second thing and then we'll come back to this understand versus remember thing because I think that's really important so what was the the second thing that you were saying that you didn't do but some people do in order to not get overwhelmed by flash card

overload yeah so a new thing that came out um you know at some point when I was in medical school is another add-on basically there's people who like know how to code and they keep making these improvements for Ani um it's open source so it's very it's very useful but it's called a load balancer addon um so the load balancer add-on basically will look at how many reviews you have um in the upcoming days and it will kind of spread it out for you so instead of one day you waking up you open up your

um flashcard app and you're like oh my gosh I have 800 reviews this is going to take hours that load balance or add-on will look at the next few days and basically um make it so it's equal so instead of having 800 one day and 200 the next day it'll spread it out for you so you have 500 one day 500 the next day and it does that like over a week period so you can imagine it makes it so it's a little bit more consistent you can kind of expect um approximately how many reviews

you're G to have each day so it's not a complete guess um or a complete surprise when you open it up okay but it sounds like you went for the method of kind of limit hard limit only 100 reviews per day so that it becomes manageable and I suppose did mostly because I didn't find out until the load balancer until pretty late um and I just liked you know like I said I knew 100 cards took me one Pomodoro Technique to get through so I was like I felt comfortable with that in my preparation that

that was a good enough review for me that day um and if I had more time I could add on if I wanted to so those were some tips on how to manage flash card overload just to R trait number one most importantly just do them consistently it's really hard to do but if we can do it we're sorted forever number two avoid making too many flash cards number three you can split up your study session if you want and number four you might want to consider the load Bal add-on all right in this video

we're tackling the question of how do you stay consistent at doing your flash cards and we've talked so many times about how anky is the most powerful learning tool ever invented but it's only the most powerful learning tool ever invented if if you use it every single day and you can do it consistently but that's a challenge for a lot of us like consistency is a huge challenge like how do you pluck up the motivation to sit down and do the flash cards there's all sorts of ways of tackling this um I've got another SK

skillshare class about kind of tips for productivity and that talks about some uh some general principles some poers some laws like things we can like mental models we can have in our heads for trying to be more consistent at doing stuff really I I I I guess what it comes down to when it comes to being consistent with anky cards is that at the start you have to force yourself to do it it's like if you want to run a marathon like at the start and and you're training for a marathon like at the start

you won't want to get out of the house and go running but you kind of have to force yourself to do it because you know that actually this is in service of a wider goal and so when you're starting out with Anki you have to force yourself to do it but then then the nice thing is that once you forced yourself to do it for a few days and you start getting into this positive feedback loop of oh I I actually know this and you start realizing that your your mind is expanding and you're memorizing

more stuff it feels really good and the point we want to get to is the point where doing anky becomes quite fun it becomes like a game where you think all right cool it feels like a personal challenge like all right let's do this come on lad let's let's bash through some anky flash cards and that comes after a few kind a few weeks I'll be honest a few weeks of doing an like forcing yourself to do Anki every day if you can get to it sooner then fantastic you're really winning at life because you

are enjoying the things that we're doing rather than just forcing ourselves to do it but at the start we do have to force ourselves a few other ideas so for example one thing you can do is there's an idea called habit stacking where you know doing flash cards every day we want it to become a habit but to make it become a habit what we can sometimes do is we can tie it to something else that we're already doing so for example one place where I do a lot of flash cards is on the toilet

so if I'm sitting down to do a poo I will get my phone out and I will do anky like doing a poo is like the Habit I've just t in my head the idea that when I'm doing a poo on the luo I'm going to be doing flash cards as I go along another tip is that you can incorporate the idea of the five minute rule which is when you're struggling to pluck the motivation or discipline or willpower to sit down and do your flash cards you can tell yourself right I'm just going to

do this for 5 minutes and everyone can do 5 minutes we all have an extra 5 minutes in our day to do some flash cards and usually for me I've tricked my brain into getting started now that I'm started I actually quite enjoy doing the flash cards and so I end up doing it for a lot longer and end up finishing my reviews another way to be more consistent at using an is to do it with friends you know I've used lots of flash cards with friends as a medical student we're all learning the same

stuff and it's quite nice having like a group study session and everyone kind of working through flash cards together so that's another way to be consistent a fourth way is the heat map add-on which we'll talk more about in uh the later section of the course and finally I going to leave you with PRACK and I discussing the idea of how we build a consistent schedule around doing flash cards so you said that you do two hours of an every day how do you bring yourself to do that because I know a lot of people

as I'm sure you do who down an they get the zanki deck or you know some some random deck in see oh 8,000 cards to do today then you you know even if you start off with really good intentions as everyone does you end up kind of missing a day or two and then the reviews start to pile up like how do you how do you bring yourself to consistently do it as as you've been doing that's the that's one of the Silver Linings and also pitfalls of ani so the good part is you do

have to do those if you want to use Ani well and the bad part is there's no way to get around it so you really do have to make yourself do it or else those cards will start to pile up and at that point you're you you're it's useless that deck becomes useless because you have too many cards and you'll get too far behind so it almost had to become algorithmic for me like I have to do these cards or of course there will be people who want to take days off and I'm definitely one

of those people get better at knowing okay today I'll take my day off but tomorrow I'll have to put in twice as much work or you know I'll take three days off and on the weekend I'll spend eight hours just catching up those were all things I would do even based on medical school and just the timing we had but you still have to get into the mindset of like I still have to do these cards just because I have a lot of them should not deter me from finishing my deck so those were just

some tips on how we can be more consistent at using flash cards genuinely this is a real struggle everyone struggles with it if you're struggling with being consistent in your flash cards you're not alone I still struggle I still have to you know use do my flash cards every day and I struggle to do it every day but that's kind of where where we want to be getting to and actually the more consistently we can be doing our flash cards the easier Our Lives is just going to be so it's just such a no-brainer but

I think you do have to kind of force yourself to do it in the first instance all right a few app specific questions now and in this video we're talking about anky versus Quizlet basically Quizlet is pretty good Quizlet is pretty it looks nice it's got nice animations it's more of a pleasure to use than anky is and I think Quizlet is fine for doing things like learning the capitals or you know learning simple stuff but if you're for example embarking on a long ass Quest like of medical school for example or you're doing a

University degree I would suggest that Anki is probably better and the reason an is better is a it's more powerful like you can do a lot more things on Anki you've got add-ons for everything you can there's so many customizations and the active inputting stuff into Anki is a lot quicker like you can use keyboard shortcuts effectively it's not a web- based interface it's like a genuinely like desktop app that lives on your desktop so it's a bit quicker this sort of these minor efficiencies in using Anki rather than Quizlet really add up over a

long period of time and the fact that you can customize it with add-ons and you can kind of add images and stuff like easily like the more easily we can do stuff on any kind of app the more likely we are to use it especially when it's something like Anki or a flash card app that we're going to be using for hundreds of hours throughout our University experience I'm assuming you're a university student here but this applies to school as well especially if it's something like that the more seconds we can shave off every interaction

with the app the more time we save in the long run and so that in my book is the biggest reason for using anky over Quizlet because it's just quicker it's more efficient it's more customizable it's just generally more powerful and yeah if you like using Quizlet and you want to pay for Quizlet premium 20 quit a year for the space repetition then sure go for it like it doesn't really matter what you use like it's all basically the same stuff provided you're using active recoil and space repetition but having tried both of them my

personal recommendation would be to use anky rather than Quizlet so hopefully that answers the question thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video all right let's now talk about anky versus Google Sheets now if you don't know what I'm talking about then feel free to skip this video but basically a few years ago I made a video on YouTube where I was talking about how I use Google Sheets as a flash card alternative as like an alternative to anky and the idea for that method is that you have like the questions

in column A and answers in column B and then you hide the answer and as in you make it white make the text white so that you've hidden the answer and then you can just kind of go through now the the Google Sheets method is a good way of cramming for an exam and I would only really use the Google Sheets method when cramming because it's essentially a ghetto version of ani it's like a it's it's it's like a hacked version of ani that gives you the question and answer kind of like the Cornell note

taking method which I talked about more in previous skill shy class kind of like the Cornell note taking method but it doesn't have the space repetition algorithm it doesn't have a facility to Mark how difficult you found a question I suppose what you could do is you could you could select the cells and highlight them in red and yellow and green as I used to do but my philosophy about this is Google Sheets is good for cramming and key is good for the long term so if you have more than let's say two months until

your exam I wouldn't use Google Sheets because Google Sheets is a cramming is effective for cramming for like really thinking okay what are the main important questions I need to know here and just kind of going over them over and over again whereas Anki is it basically does the same thing as Google Sheets but just with a more robust space repetition algorithm so Google Sheets for the short term if you're going to cram for an exam but definitely anky if I've got more than two months to prepare for the exam that I'm preparing for all

right another quick one this is a very common question do I use Anki or do I use notion now again if you don't know what I'm talking about skip this video it's not relevant but the reason people are asking this is because for the last few months 2019 2020 I've been talking about how I use notion to take notes in med school I'm not in med school anymore but I I teach medical students and so I use notion to take notes for my stuff and this is an example of for example my gastrointestinal physiology kind

of sheet and essentially I use these toggle features so this is sort of the structure of the lecture structure of the G blood supply blah blah blah and then where are we uh so in instead of just writing notes I write I write notes or copy and paste stuff from the lecture but I hide them within these toggles and these these toggles are usually questions so how how much blood flow per minute 1200 m per minute through this plank bed what is functional hyperemia in this context blah blah blah blood FL supply to the V

so in a way this is sort of a flash card but it's sort of a flash card in the sense that you've got some information in that essentially you're asking yourself a question and then you're trying to answer it but again the short answer to this question is that it's not really a dichotomy it's not like notion or anky if I could only choose one I would use anky all the time um but notion is good for helping understand the bigger picture the problem with ke is that it's good at kind of helping you memorize

the individual pixels but sometimes if you if you are just using ankey and just memorizing the individual pixels you won't really get a deep understanding of the subject you'll just see loads of pixels and you won't really appreciate the bigger picture so one thing I've started thinking a lot recently is that with an if you if you want to use it properly you need some kind of system on the side that helps you to understand the bigger picture one way of doing that is by making Spider diagrams or mind maps this is where you have

your topic in the middle kind of like your tree and then you have your branches and then you can use Anki to learn the details on the leaves if that kind of metaphor makes sense the alternative to M myaps and flat and spider diagrams is to use notion so this is basically what I would create into a spider diagram so I would have General gut physiology in the middle and then I'd have structure of the gut blood supply epithelial blinding blah blah blah Paralis whatever this is basically a mind map that I've created for myself

but it's just that while going through the lecture I thought you know what I might as well just make some questions about it it's also kind of different for me me because I don't need to memorize this stuff I'm not preparing for an exam right now apart from the USM which is a slightly different way of preparing for it I'll be using an for that Philly I more have these notes because I'm teaching the subject to my medical students and therefore it's completely reasonable for me to have my laptop open with the notes in front

of me while I'm talking about GI physiology to them like I don't have to have this information off the top of my head and so if you're a student preparing for an exam I would suggest that you don't need to do this kind of stuff if you're taking notes then you might as well add a question to them just so becomes the Cornell note taking method and becomes legit because you're using active recall but if you're not taking notes just put stuff straight into Anki it's not a case of notion versus Anki but having said

that if I could only choose one I would use Anki and again yeah you can basically create a Google Sheets kind of flash flashcard method on notion but again that would be fine if you're cramming for an exam but it wouldn't be fine if you're doing it over the long term again Anki does the same thing but you might as well let the Anki space repetition algorithm work in your favor that's the thing that Google Sheets and notion don't have they don't have a space repetition algorithm built in cuz that's not the objective of the

software whereas Anki is specifically designed to upload information to our brains and so if you're in the business of uploading information to your brain as a student then you want to be using an notion is sort of the the note taking layer on top of that that helps you understand the subject that helps you understand the bigger picture so actually I would just probably use both if you can all right so the final video in this frequently asked questions kind of segment of of the class isn't really a question it's more reiterating the importance of

playing the long game when when it comes to Anki and in fact it's just generally important to play the long game I.E to try and be as consistent as possible when we're doing anything in life like you know there there's almost nothing that benefits from short you know intensive bursts rather than kind of playing the long game over time health is long game exercise is long game relationships are a long game you know basically anything worthwhile in life benefits from compound returns over time by playing the long game and studying for our exams is no

different if we play the long game if we can be consistent on a daily basis then we're letting Anki work in our favor we're letting the maths speak for itself and we're letting the algorithm upload stuff to our brain and it just works absolutely perfectly the other thing is that I think is really important like especially if you've gotten this far in the class you might be feeling a bit overwhelmed because there's like a load of information and we could have split this up into two or three classes but decided against it in the end

just cuz I think it's nice just being like this is everything you need to know about an but it is it is kind of a time investment to learn like it's not one of those things where you you'll start using it on day one and immediately pick it up and immediately start breezing around with that it's it's just not like that it's sort of like playing a piano like it's it feels like hard work initially but if you put that hard work in then you get the absolute Joy of being able to play the piano

so it's kind of the same with anky so if you're feeling overwhelmed at any point really think of it as an investment in your future an investment in getting better grades and reducing your stress and just having generally more fun with doing the things that we have to do to study and to pass our exams so just a quick message Public Service Announcement about the importance of playing the long game thank you for watching and I will see you in the next section of the class all right welcome back to the class bit of a

change of scenery now we are now on section four which is all about optimizing anky and we're going to be talking about add-ons and we're going to be talking about how to use pre-made decks effectively before we launch into this section I just want to give a word of warning this is some kind of advanced stuff if you're an anky beginner I would suggest actually that you don't watch the rest of this course for now because it can get very overwhelming very quickly because this is now like complicated stuff in fact even the last section

was a little bit on the complicated side if you're a beginner at Anki the single best thing that you can do right now is to turn off this class even though it means I'm getting less Revenue because it's kind paper watch time but the best thing you can do for yourself is to turn off this class right now and spend a few weeks trying to do Anki every day and as you're doing it you'll figure out that like some some like optimizations that you can make yourself you'll work out what the things that you find

difficult are so that when you come back to this class and we talk about add-ons and optimizations and hierarchical tags and pre-made decks and all these kind of fancy things you'll have more of a baseline of like a foundational Baseline for how to kind of understand that stuff having said that I know when I watch online classes I like watching all of them in one go and I tend not to do the exercises that the people recommend so if you're still with us then that's absolutely fine in this section we're going to be talking about

tags organizing tags using pre-made decks properly and a few different add-ons that me and others would recommend so let's dive into it all right welcome back let's talk about tags now when you make a flash card you might have noticed that you've got the option of adding a tag to it so for example let's make a new capital so add I don't know let's say front is Pakistan and back is Karachi fair enough um in fact let's change that to a close just so we do this properly so we say the capital of Pakistan is

Karachi and I can close that one and I can close that two perfect pretty basic stuff that we covered in section one of the class if you don't know what I did there then you are waiting too far in this course you need to go back and look at closed deletions that we talked about in in chapter one and let's grab some extra information from the internet so uh Karachi let's get a random image from the Google uh I don't know to's pick this copy image Chuck it in here for now that'll do now you'll

see that when I'm creating this flash card I've got the option to add a tag now I'm going to add tag Asia okay and we've we've added the thing let's now pick another so let's go uh capital of India is New Delhi close that close that can't be bothered to add extra information for now but you'll see the tag stays as being Asia if I want I can delete that and change it but I'm going to keep it as Asia and let's do another one uh the capital capital that's how you spell it don't know

doesn't matter but it's now got the Asia tag now if we look at the browse thingy this might look a bit intimidating but uh don't let it basically at the top of our browse we've got got our whole whole collection and then we've got the list of decks and list of sub decks if you have sub decks within your decks more about that later on in this in this section and actually underneath the decks we have a list of all these card types so these are all like basic card types um this is the Clos

deletion card type so if we wanted to we could have a look and see all of our different Clos deletions all of our different basic cards your list is probably less big than mine because I've got a few pre-made decks again more on that in a little bit but then underneath that we have all of these tags and you'll see this little tag icon that shows that it's a tag now again my list is absolutely huge because I've got lots of pre-made decks and pre-made decks tend to use a lot of tags in them but

let's find our Asia tag and we'll see when we click on our Asia tag it filters all of the cards that have the tag Asia okay so fair enough they've got the tag of Asia why is this helpful well it's helpful because if we have an appropriate tagging system firstly it helps in terms of organizing our deck and secondly it helps in terms of creating custom sessions so in terms of organizing the deck let's say I was it kind of makes a bit more sense in medicine let's say um I wanted to do infectious deseases

right and I didn't have a specific deck for infectious diseases I had a single deck that had all my stuff all my medicine stuff in it I could click on the infectious diseases tag or in the Infectious tag and it would find me the relevant cards that are tagged with infectious diseases so one way of actually splitting up a deck is by having everything in one big deck and then using tags to organize it within that there's another example here this the mCP and there's the mcp2 so mCP is the membership of the Royal College

of Physicians and mcp2 is the part two of that exam and in pre-made decks people have tagged these different things so if I want to I can kind of search search through that so you kind of get the idea of tags it works similarly to in every note taking program you've ever used you can just search for things by TX but the reason why this is actually reasonably helpful is because you can create a custom study session so if we go on decks and then let's go capital cities for example just to keep things very

very basic now I can click the custom study button at the bottom or shortcut C now when I've got this up I can say study by card state or tag I could select 100 cards from the deck and I could say in a random all review cards in a random order and then I can click choose tags and now it tells me which tags are within this deck so we know Asia require one of more of these tags Asia so I'm telling Anki that I only want to study the stuff that's tagged with Asia hit

okay now this has created a custom study session which means I can cram the capitals of these Asian countries if I want so the capital of India is New Delhi the capital of Saudi Arabia is Riyad capital of Pakistan is Karachi blah blah blah you know you kind of get the idea this is helpful because if you've got for example a midterm exam coming up on nephology the study of the kidneys and you have as you've been going through you've been tagging all your kidney related flash cards with nephology or renal or kidneys or whatever

it means you can then cram them all in one go using a custom study session that tends to be the main use case for those so tags are in this section because they're absolutely not required they're not a big deal and actually it's very easy to become too too cute about tagging everything be like oh i' only make a flash card if I can add eight tags to it but all that does is in it increases the friction to creating flash cards and as I said right at the start of the class we want to

be reducing the friction as much as possible because friction is the worst force on the planet and so really I probably wouldn't use tags if I were you if you're just getting started out but if you've got a reasonably solid use case for them at that point it might be worth doing so that was the basics of tags in the next video we're going to be talking about the hierarchical tags add-on that makes tags a little bit more useful all right welcome back in this video we're talking about the hierarchical tags add-on and instead of

me explaining it which gets a bit boring and a bit dull we have got David who did very well in the MCAT who uses the hierarchical tags add-on pretty extensively uh and he is explaining and walking us through how we use it and why it's useful so I'm going to hand you hand you over to David the hierarchical tags um is some of the decks are basically um they're altered in different ways so I can show you so like this deck right here with a plus sign has a bunch of what are called sub decks

um so that's one way whoever made this deck that's how they decide to do it they put a bunch of sub decks in this one deck but this person you can see they have all 9,000 of their cards under one name so the only way to basically sort out those cards is to look at the tags so right here so like the AK step two this has this is where all of theirs is sorted out and so basically that add-on just makes makes this look a little bit prettier on this side it's a little bit

more of an advanced add-on um but definitely something that you see how it's just like in a different area where the tagging system is yeah because I guess otherwise by default you just see this long ass list of tags which is not overly helpful exactly otherwise if I didn't have this for like so this is basically Decks that don't have it it would just be like this it would just be like this super long um it's kind of unorganized it's kind of a kind of a headache it's not as clean um so these are some

of like the older Decks that I have that don't have this tagging system but you can see that's not near as clean as something like this where it's broken up into the different rotations Family Medicine Internal Medicine neuro OB and so I can kind of go through um on which rotation I'm on and essentially pull out cards for that rotation it's just much cleaner so that was a look at how we can use the hierarchical tags add-on to make our tagging a little bit more effective but again tags are probably not very useful I personally

don't use tags very much because when it comes to Medicine stuff the so much content that you could just have separate decks and I don't see a real need to tag them myself but there are people that use tags an absolute ton but basically you don't really need to worry about it too much cuz tags are not overly helpful anyway at least for me all right welcome back in this video we're talking about the power of pre-made decks now the first thing to say is a word of caution pre-made decks are a very powerful device

but when used in appropriately they can cause a massive degree of overwhelm and downloading pre-made decks is often a big reason as to why people start using anky and then abandon it because they just get completely completely frazzled and overwhelmed by the amount of cards you can sometimes get in pre-made decks basically a pre-made deck is a deck an anky deck that someone else has already made for you that you can just download and then you can do the flash cards so clearly the benefit is that it saves you from having to make your own

flash cards there are some pre-made decks like this USM RX1 let's have a quick browse I think this has is there a way of seeing how many cards in it okay well I'm going to scroll and you can see that this is just like an absolutely Mass massive amount of cards in this deck in fact yeah we've got basically basically all aspects of medicine is covered in this USMLE RX deck I think there are over 10,000 cards in it and you can see why if you download 10,000 cards the first time you use Ani and

start trying to go through them it becomes very very overwhelming very very quickly so we'll start by just quickly talking about how to actually download a pre-made deck and basically you can search on Google an keep pre-made decks you will find the shared decks on anky web so you can download some from there so let's search for anatomy for example and it's going to G me a long list of decks that are tagged with Anatomy so this is one way of finding a pre-made deck you can look through the anky directory itself it's probably not

what I'd recommend instead what I'd recommend is that you find some kind of online Forum like Reddit for example for your specific subject for example if you're a medical student taking the USMLE there is a USMLE step one subreddit that has loads of links to really in-depth comprehensive anky decks and they're filtered so that you know there there are some Decks that everyone uses and some Decks that no one uses and so you want to pick the ones that everyone uses because they're going to be higher quality the flash cards are going to be more

legit they're going to be more fact checked by a large group of people so what I would suggest is whatever subject you're doing try and find an online kind of community Reddit is a good place to start where you can download these pre-made decks from and this is like super super popular in medicine like loads of people in the US preparing for the US MLA for medical school use pre-made decks and there's also sort to debates raging on the internet as to is hoopla better than zanki which is better than an King's deck which is

better than person's deck and you know there's all these different people who make these different decks but there's only like a handful of them to choose from and I've gone for USM RX I don't even know who made it but I went on Reddit and found a pre-made deck so you download a pre-made deck and then when you download a deck basically uh let's download a random one uh we click the download button and it's going to download a file with the extension AK PKG or something like that oh this is a really big file

let's download a smaller one uh guitar note names only 47 notes that should be more doable so if I look in my downloads folder we've got this file guitar note names. apkg now if I double click that here we go it's going to automatically add it to my ankey and now if we go on Deck we will see guitar note names with audio fretboard Anatomy so I can click on that I can click study first string e lower oh it's got a sound as well don't know if you can hear that so I guess this

is good for like ear training and stuff for musicians anyway that is how you download a shared deck it's super super easy you just download the apkg file and then you double click it and then it automatically adds to your anky then if I hit the synchronize synchronize button this deck is going to be synced across all my devices magically for free with anky web isn't Anki an absolute Miracle of engineering so that is how you install a pre-made deck in the next video we're going to be hearing from PR and his advice about using

pre-made decks and kind of the general philosophy of using pre-made decks and we'll have a little bit of a discussion and then we'll end by talking about kind of pros and cons all right welcome back in this video we're talking about the philos ophy of using pre-made decks and I'm going to start by including the discussion that PR and I had about the philosophy of pre-made decks and then I will do a bit more chat at the end so this is me and PRACK coming up now what's your philosophy on pre-made decks versus building your

own cards oh this is a good one um I think so there there's a caveat here I think pre-made decks are phenomenal and they're going to save people a lot of time if they use them properly but pre-made decks are really bad if you're the type of person who thinks this will solve all my problems and just like randomly Imports cards and like is like today I'm going to learn kidney and just looks at those cards as a way to learn kidney that's like the worst approach because one you have no context behind where how

and why those cards were made and two you didn't do anything to give yourself a background right like so let's say you're learning nephrotic syndromes and you just pull in all the cards about nephrotic syndromes and try to memorize them at that point that's like horrible because now you're just memorizing a bunch of factoids but let's say you watch I don't know pathoma video that explains nephrotic syndromes okay you get protura you have a lot of protein loss which leads to edema and all these things and you actually get the framework for nephrotic syndrome now

you pull in all the cards about nephrotic syndrome and now suddenly you can actually shape that card based on the lens of the video you just watched and now it'll make a lot more sense like okay yeah this is why this nephrotic syndrome presents in this way and now I'm not just memorizing a random sentence I'm memorizing the actual you know concept of nephrotic syndromes and so that's when pre-made decks can work if you prequel them with some level of understanding or knowledge or you read a chapter and then you pulled in cards that were

relevant but if you just pull in cards without reading anything doing anything and expect to get all your knowledge about nephrotic syndrome from a pre-made deck you're not going to get anywhere because then you'll just memorize a bunch of sentences and making your own cards I a big proponent of like I made a lot of my cards um I have a deck about 30,000 that I use right now and I'd say at least 20,000 of those are either my own cards or pre-made cards that I've modified with my own twist um and the reason for

that is what I just mentioned to you the memory anchor you'll remember things a lot more when they're personable so I usually have like inappropriate pneumonics in a lot of my cards or like an inappropriate way to remember them because that often is a good way to remember things or sometimes I'll include a picture that I found when I was learning the concept and the reason these work a lot better is when you make a card you do one pass of the material right so let's say you made a card and you like you know

a metabolic acidosis implies a pH less than 7.4 with no changes in PS like with no with with the normal pco2 you make that card you yourself have already gone through that first pass of saying oh this is what metabolic alkalosis is and it has no change in pco2 now when you do that card you're doing a second pass automatically when you use a pre-made card you may have to do one three five passes even for you to even understand what the hell is this card saying because you didn't really go through the process of

creating that card from scratch so you kind of had to put that context in and that can take sometimes a lot more time than just having made your own card so overall let's talk about pros and cons so as PR said the benefit of using pre-made decks is clearly that you then don't have to make your own flash cards but there are a few huge drawbacks firstly there is the massive risk of flash card overload if you make the mistake of not suspending basically all of the cards in a pre-made deck and then unsuspending the

ones as you study as you study the topic you can see that list of 20,000 cards and think I'm never going to do this and then you just throw your laptop in the bin because you've given up on anky that's what we want to do if we're using pre-made decks we want to be using them effectively and appropriately Point number two is that yes it does save you time using a pre-made deck but the research shows that it is probably a bit more effective to create your own cards overall in my opinion and in most

people's opinion the time you save from using a pre-made deck is more than made up for the fact that using a pre-made deck is slightly less efficient is or rather is is is slightly less effective than creating your own cards I would much rather have 80% Effectiveness and Save myself time that I don't have to make these 10,000 cards then have 100% Effectiveness but have to spend 8 years of my life actually creating these flash cards so overall I think the the benefit of pre-made decks vastly outweighs the negative side of them but it is

important to understand the negative side and third it's really important to remember that if you are using a pre-made deck you definitely want to be customizing it as you go along if you're purely using a pre-made deck and not adding anything or editing anything you're probably doing something wrong and you're probably relying on memorization rather than understanding the way that I use these pre-made decks is if I if there is even a single thing on a flash card that I don't understand that I think I'm not I'm not happy with this I won't say to

myself I'll just memorize the fact unless it's something obviously that I can just purely memorize like you know what chromosome is this gene on and it's like I don't care like that's pure memorization but for most things where if I don't understand something on a card I will look it up on Wikipedia look it up on Google even maybe look it up in a textbook and then I will edit the flash card in the extra region or just like edit the flash card completely to add that information to it so that the next time I

see the flash card I see the extra information I've added to it so Premier decks are amazing they're one of the most kind of superp power features of ani but you do have to use them appropriately and hopefully in this video you've gotten some advice about how to use them appropriately all right welcome back so for the next few videos we're going to be talking about different add-ons that you can add to Ani and why they're useful so in this video we're talking about the heat map add-on which is incredibly effective and that most people

who are Anki Pros they have this add-on because it's really useful for like motivating yourself to like do anky consistently and I'm going to hand you over to David who's going to be explaining exactly how the heat map add-on works so you've been literally going through flash cards every day for 372 days yes that's one thing I wanted to highlight um absolutely absurd how on Earth do you do that yeah so I think that like for for motivation and stuff um this is an add-on that you can get for eny it's called The Heat Map

add-on I don't know if you've heard of that one but basically it'll kind of give you a little colored block for every day so I can go back even look at this one this is all of last year so the last time I missed a day on ay was basically spring break uh last year unfortunately I missed those two days otherwise I could have a longer streak Yeah so basically what the streak means is that I've logged into Ani and done you know some sort of flashcard review for over a year now at this point

at es in flow so it has my daily average of 319 as I Was preparing for step one you know that number went up obviously and then after I took the exam you know I went on a little bit of a vacation and stuff that number went down but nonetheless every day I logged in and did some amount of flash cards so someday I would do 700 someday I would do 70 um but I think the the key with Anki and with space repetition is that you have to be consistent like I just think Medical

School you it's a lot of information and it's in my opinion it's not necessarily about who puts in the most hours who cuts in out of their sleep it's about who's like consistent day after day after day um and so that's kind of why the streak is something that I think is like very motivational for me and helpful for a lot of people so that was the heat map add-on hope you found that segment of the video useful highly recommend you install it because it does really help with motivation and consistency the next add-on we're

going to talk about is the anky Frozen Fields add-on which makes it actually a lot more efficient to add cards especially if you're in for example a lecture or if you're going through your lecture notes or a textbook the frozen field add-on is absolutely amazing and here is PR explaining why it's useful and how to use it appropriately the other add-on I really like and this is really clutch too it's called the Frozen Fields add-on it's these snowflex snowflakes next to the thing and what that really helps you do is let me just change this

deck to something useless um it's like let's say I'm making a topic like blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah and then the answer is like something here and then I press add it will actually preserve everything I wrote especially when I'm trying to create multiple questions from one concept preserving what I wrote here helps because then I can change one or two things and then change the answer and I don't have to rewrite the whole question especially really useful also for this extra column because we talked about the

fact that in the extra column I put all the prerequisite info I need to answer multiple questions so let's say in the extra column I include everything about respiratory acidosis then I keep that Frozen I want to have that there and then I just unfreeze this part and create as many questions as I want about respiratory acidosis and now I have the frozen field out on holding that source of knowledge constant and then I can just keep switching out the the cars that I make from that that that is ridiculously useful that's so useful especially

when you're someone like me who makes a lot of flash cards you want to minimize the time you spend on flash cards while making them the most useful possible so the fact that I can put whatever I want here and save it and then you know keep changing the top is really helpful especially when you're going from a big big big thing to making multiple little little little flash card questions the next add-on is actually something that I didn't know existed until sanish who was one of the people that we interviewed for this class explained

it to me and this makes it easier to look stuff up which again it just kind of shaves seconds off every interaction that we have with anky and is therefore incredibly useful so I'm going to hand you over to sanish explaining the Wikipedia what's it called the popup Wikipedia beta at least that's what it's called at the time of recording maybe they're out of beta now but yeah pop up Wikipedia here is sanes here we go I got this Wikipedia search addon so if I'm looking at a card so I think so if you I

can highlight a word on an and I can press command shift W I think n yeah I can press command shift W and on Mark and it will come up with a Wikipedia preview of the thing oh incredible What's this called this is so useful yeah so this is popup Wikipedia beta nice okay that's handy I didn't know that existed but that's really helpful um Medical School anky Reddit yeah um so this is quite useful so if I forget something completely I don't know what it is I've just got like an immediate Wikipedia is really

good for learning anyway I use that if I lecture and I just got that popup immediately instead of Googling it so that was the popup Wikipedia beta add-on hope you found it useful I definitely learned something from that did not know it existed and I kind of wish I knew it existed before because it would have saved me having to Google stuff on Alfred on my Mac or on my iPhone on Safari like every time I didn't understand something all right so next we have the speed Focus mode add-on and this is something that I

knew existed that I don't personally use myself because I don't have personally the huge volume of flash flash cards that people like PRACK do when preparing for the USMLE so I'm going to hand you over to PR explaining what is speed Focus mode and why it's helpful so here we go oh this one comes in clutch um which one is it speed Focus mode have you used this one no I haven't what is that so speed Focus mode is how I got through when I was doing eny for step one I was doing 20 2,000

flash cards in three hours um so it's like an incredibly crazy fast pace and the reason I was able to do that is this this add-on flash card which basically you tell how automatically after like 5 Seconds it plays an alert and then after 7 Seconds it will automatically show me the answer um and so the good part about this is it really one I'll show you why I like it it like when it plays that alert it really makes you realize like dude you've been staring at this for 5 seconds do you know that

and then by 7 Seconds it will automatically show you the answer so here let's just practice and I'll show you what I mean so four signs and symptoms so I think after 5 Seconds it plays this alarm and then it just shows me the answer right away um and the reason this is good is one it limits the time and two if you're already dealing with a lot of cars that you know this like increases your pace much more so than you would ever think um and so again three lifestyle three facets of Lifestyle modification

like weight gain weight loss exercise diet um and so by 5 Seconds it plays it and then by 7 Seconds it shows the answer but the good part is it forces you to be like dude I'm doing ankey right now I'm going to Zone in and just focus as opposed to I don't know about you but when I'm doing Ani without this add-on I'm like half on Instagram I get a couple questions right I'm feeling good yeah um and the other part is when that beeper goes off at 5 Seconds it is a physical reminder

to you that you have been staring at this blank sheet of paper for 5 seconds so if you don't know it now you probably just don't know it well enough so learn it and then move on um I usually use five and eight so not five SEC so it'll play the alarm at 5 Seconds seconds and then it will show the answer and there is also the um option that you can automatically mark it to say again but I don't usually do that I just make them show me my answer and then I'll say do

I really know this do I not and then I'll press what I need to press um so this this saved me a lot of time primarily when I was scrunch for time um I was able to do a lot more cards I was able to get through them relatively fast to keep my speed up but I don't use that add-on now because right now time is not a con training issue I find that this add-on really just helps when it's like crunch time go time um so those are like my top three add-ons I'd say

so that was an overview of the speed Focus mode add-on like I said I don't personally use this myself because I've got enough discipline to just kind of go through it and at least for our UK Medical School exams we didn't have such a huge volume of information like the US guys do for the USMLE so if you're taking the USMLE or another exam that has such a massive amount of content then maybe this is an add-on worth considering all right if you got to the end of this class without skipping all of it then

incredibly well played firstly and secondly thank you for uh juicing my watchtime stats and hopefully we'll make some money from the YouTube AdSense on this class but probably not very much because you're probably a student and YouTube doesn't monetize students very effectively anyway if you want to learn more about studying you might want to check out this three-hour long master class over here which is also one of my free online courses where I break down the science of effective studying and how you can use it to your advantage thanks for watching see you next time