How To Use Anki Like A Pro [Full Step-By-Step Walkthrough]

guys welcome to the channel in today's video we're going to do a full walkthrough of anki exactly how to use it also i'll be sharing with you a unique method that i specifically use to improve my grades my retention while decreasing my time let's get into it alright guys welcome in case you're new to this channel my name is lax from internal medicine physician and resident in training i'm really excited to make this video because anki was one of my favorite tools to use as a medical student but also one of the things i still

use now as a doctor now i know there's plenty of you guys watching this video that may be in medical school on your medical journey or are just trying to use anki for your particular academic or learning purposes so depending on how familiar you are with the platform feel free to just check out some of the links down below to the various chapters in the video so that way you can find the parts that are most important to you and if you do enjoy this video i've made tons of videos on anki and how i

use it as a medical student all throughout this channel and those will also be linked down below as well as a playlist so first let's quickly just talk about exactly what anki is now there's plenty of flash card systems out there but the way i would define anki is that it's an intelligent flash card system that's designed around space repetition you may be familiar with other popular flashcard systems like quizlet which are amazing and i definitely use them in my college days so the beauty of anki is that as you're doing your flashcards it starts

to recognize which topics you're good at which topics you're kind of average at and which topics you're amazing at and in the future whenever you're reviewing your flashcards it's going to have an increased frequency of those garbage topics the things that you're really weak on that it's going to show you first and it's going to intermittently kind of sprinkle in the topics of your average on and even less so of the topics you're good at and so overall it becomes a fantastic and free resource that you can use to improve your active learning depending on

if you're on your medical journey you're trying to learn a class for college or if you're trying to for example learn a new language it fits all those molds perfectly so next let's talk about how to set up anki now the beauty of ankit is that it's free and you can use it on both pc as well as a mac and for the demonstrations of this video we'll be doing it on a pc so for all of you mac lovers it's essentially the same thing you can also use it on your phone android or ios

now for the app version for android it's absolutely free and for ios unfortunately it does have a little bit of a cost but it's totally worth it because you can sync to your multiple devices and have your flashcards on your computer and then immediately to your phone so for the purposes of this video i'm just going to demonstrate on my laptop so the first thing you're going to do is to go to the anki website and i'll link that down below as well and again it's free so you can just go ahead and click download

and then find the version that is best suitable for you and i already have it kind of downloaded already but as soon as you do on your desktop you'll go ahead and see the anki desktop icon and you click it the first time it's basically going to ask you to kind of create a username and a profile this is basically so your email can then be linked to all the flashcards you create so in case then if you try to open up on your phone your ipad or any other device you can easily sync it

based off of that free account you created now in addition when you create anki it's going to give you the option of creating a profile now most people just have one profile so that's kind of like your whole kind of portfolio of flashcards you can also kind of get really advanced with this so example if you're studying for a board exam like if you're studying for your mcat when you're in medical school trying to get to med school and you can have just one profile for all the flash cards that are related to the mcat

and then you can have a profile for just your college classes or if you're studying in medical school you can have just one for your lectures and then some for your board exams that you're setting on the side so as you guys can see i have various different profiles that i've created just for demos so one of them is the step one academy so in case you're studying for step one they'll also be linked down below but we can just go ahead and log in so now that we're done setting up anki we can go

ahead and start creating our own flash cards now the first time that you open up anki there's obviously going to be nothing there but you guys can already start to see the potential of what this may look like when you kind of start to use anki for quite some time and later in this video we'll talk about creating your own flashcards as well as using flashcards that other people have already made and before we get into the flashcards i want to talk about creating decks because this may give you an idea of how to structure

your flashcards and also give you an idea of the power that monkey has so for example let's say that you're about to study for your cardiology block and i already kind of have one so i'm just going to say cardiology class so this can be a deck that you can essentially put all of your cardiology related topics so that's where you're learning class right now but let's say you instead want to get a little bit more macular and you want to go ahead and actually split it up based off of lectures which is what i

recommend and you can say lecture one say you're learning about ekgs that day lecture two let's say you're learning about chf or heart failure now the beauty is is that what you can do is you can essentially go ahead and move that into your perspective so now as you can see under cardiology class the deck that i created i have all of my lectures and then as i continue to do more classes i can go ahead and add it in and if i wanted to i can do flash cards from the whole cardiology block or

specifically from the electrode depending on how i wanted to review so the idea of having these kind of decks and then mini decks and then mini mini decks you have a lot of control of how you want to review your material but now let's go ahead and talk about the fun stuff which is how to create the flash cards themselves so we're going to go ahead and break down some of the most common types of flashcards and gives you an idea of what kind of things you can do with anki and then later in the

video i'm also sharing with you some of the advanced techniques that you should be using to ideally increase your retention while decreasing your time so the first thing we're just going to go ahead and do is create an anki tutorial for this youtube video and here is the deck i have so right now i have no flash cards but what you can do is you can just go ahead and click add and then you can go ahead and click to the various types of flash cards now this may look overwhelming but the most basic flash

card that you can create is a basic flash card that's what it's called and it's a simple front and back with the question that you would put as well as the answer and i'm just gonna put question one because it recognizes that i already have a flash card like that so if i click add and i click close now when i'm in my my own key deck i can click study and it's just going to ask me you know that question and i need to know that the answer is answered and then you get to

kind of play with the beauty of anki itself which is telling yourself you know how well do you know this information so if i don't know the answer really well i can click show it to me again in a minute if i do know it pretty well then i can say show it to me in 10 minutes and if it's something i really really can master than four days and so it's a nice way to just press the button based off your immediate comfort level and then anki will do everything in the background so that

is one type of flashcard you can create but let's talk about a few other ones some of the ones that i like are the ability where you can create multiple flashcards with one effort and so some things you can do is a basic and a reverse flashcard and basically this is great for things like language translations or memorizing structures so let's just say for example you're trying to learn the language you can have both the english version of the word as well as a translation in that respective language and so you can go ahead and

have the english and then translation uh whatever language you're trying to learn and click add but now the beauty is is that it's actually added um not just one card but it's actually added two cards as you can see now i have three flash cards so the first one it's going to show me is just the one that i did but now i have english and then translation but i also have translation to the english so it's a nice way to flip flop cards when it doesn't really matter which side you see first you can

actually quiz yourself interchangeably now those are some of the most basic flashcards you can create but you can get really powerful with anki and so this is where i started to geek out but the next flash card that i definitely recommend you guys kind of learning about and how to use is the close function so close flash bar is basically imagine you have a phrase or a long thing that you have to memorize within it so you know process a equals process b plus c let's just say you have to memorize an equation so what

you can actually do is just let's say i'm going to go ahead and take something from this anki script that i actually created for this video so i'm just going to copy it in there and let's just say i wanted to memorize this part of the flash card for my respective class you can just click these three dots right here or go ctrl shift c uh c if you're doing this on a pc and then what it's going to go ahead and do is if i click and actually review that flash card it's going to

go and then block off that respective word and i have to memorize what went in there so in this case it was an intelligent flashcard system and since i got it right i can go ahead and click four days now again you can get even more advanced with this so again if i go ahead and just paste that phrase in what i can do is i can now choose that respective word that i wanted but i can also add in other things from that phrase i also wanted to quiz me on so again the beauty

of creating multiple flashcards from one phrase or one question so in case you wanted to memorize different things in a phrase but you wanted to have one flashcard to quiz you on one part and another flashcard to quiz you on another that's also great so here i'm just gonna go show you this example if i click show the answers i'm just gonna click through so as you guys can see this is the flashcard number one that i created and then now i actually have another flash card that's quizzing me on the latter part of the

thing that i clicked and then to finally close out this closed function that is definitely a tongue twister one thing you can do as a little bit more of an advanced strategy is you can just go ahead and do the same thing but let's say you wanted to get quizzed on both flashcards at the same time then what you can actually do is you can instead of clicking c2 and c1 you can just make both of these c ones and so now when i see this flash card it's actually going to force me to actually

be asked both of the informations at the same time instead of one at itself so if you have a really long kind of chain of commands or if you have bullet points and you want to memorize a few of them together or all of the bullet points as part of your flash card you can just click c1 or the same number and then that card will quiz you on all of them now the last type of flashcard that i want to show you is really where anki gets really cool especially if you're trying to memorize

diagrams and figures and like maps is the image occlusion tool so the image occlusion tool basically gives you the function of blocking off different things on a picture or an image and then making that into a flashcard now this is an add-on it's a free add-on and so let me just show you quickly how you add this on to your anki portfolio so one thing you're just gonna quickly do is you're gonna just go ahead and google image occlusion anki so we're just gonna click on one of these for the example so we're just gonna

go down here and it's going to kind of show you the ability of what that add-on can do and then to to actually install this add-on all you have to do is just go down and find the number that i'll give you so in this case it's right here so i'm just going to control um copy that and go back into my anki and you can just click on tools and click on add-ons and i already have this installed but just for all purposes go ahead and click get add-on and paste that code in it's

going to go ahead and download it and install it and then all you have to do is just restart your anki before you can actually use the tool so now let me show you exactly what the image occlusion tool can do and what type of cool things you can do with this especially if you're learning for things like anatomy so let's click add and we're going to click image occlusion and click choose now a lot of stuff can go here but all you have to do is just click on this last button that says add

image occlusion and then just find a picture so i have a picture of the heart here and now the beauty of it is essentially it's default it's where all you have to do is just kind of click over all the structures that you really need to know so and you don't have to click on everything so let's say say in this situation i didn't really care to memorize the septum but everything else was kind of fair game then you can just quickly in a matter of just a few seconds click over everything which is good

for this example and then you get to decide essentially how you want this flash card to be presented do you want it to look like this and then basically quiz you on one thing at a time but the rest of them are still kind of blocked off or do you want everything to be exposed except the one piece of information you need to know so i'm just gonna say you know hide one guess one meaning it can show the rest of them it doesn't really matter you can play with however you like but as you

can see i've added 11 flashcards now in a matter of just a few seconds so if i go ahead and click show answer then this is kind of the beauty of the image occlusion it's going to ask me to basically say what the structure is i'm hoping it's the right atrium there we go otherwise it basically fails but you can now go ahead and just keep clicking through and it's going to ask you a different structure now the first time you create your flash card that's going to ask you based off of the order that

you created them but over time what you'll find is as you say this topic is easy and this topic is hard it's going to interchange you know the order of them and kind of shuffle them for a natural learning process so that's basically how to create your own flashcards now before we get into some advanced strategies i just want to quickly talk about how to use the work other people have done to essentially get your learning so let's say you are trying to learn for a board exam or a language and you don't really want

to make your own flash cards you just want to take the hard work somebody else has already done and use it for your own learning so one of the great examples is when i'm in medical school one of the board exams we have to study for is step one and there's plenty of flash cards that people have made and some more popular ones that people use so zonkey for example is a great one that i kind of include for my step one academy students which is why it's here but to get those kinds of flashcards

all you have to really do is kind of google what you really want and seeing if there's an anki deck so if you're just trying to learn spanish i'm sure if you google spanish and like anki into google you'll find a flashcard deck for that if you're trying to learn for the mcat you can find respective flashcards there as well and so essentially what you can do is just try to find something on reddit which is a good option or sometimes the anki website actually has it so in this example it does and all you

have to do is just click download and then once it's finished downloading you can just go to file and import it'll actually just take a bit but it will import into that profile that you created so as you guys can see this is a pre-made deck that somebody else has made for a medical board exam and it has all of the decks as well as mini decks and i essentially can get as big or detail as i want into the topic so now let's get to the part of the video that's going to be probably

the most exciting and where i get to geek out the most and that's talking about advanced strategies that you can use to really increase your retention now one of the biggest downfalls of really any flashcard system is that sometimes it just takes you forever to make flashcards and then you really don't have enough time to actually review them so when i was in medical school i try to find as many techniques as possible to minimize that first part which is creating my flash cards and making them efficient now when you use the close and image

occlusion again you can make multiple flash cards and essentially one effort but some of the other things that i really enjoy doing is something i call my screenshot method so essentially what you can do is you can on one side have a powerpoint of your lectures or a pdf of your syllabus really any material then you can have anki and you can use either snipping tool on windows and pc or you can use the actual screenshot tools that the macs allow you to do then you can essentially go ahead and screenshot the whole powerpoint so

for example let's just say i was trying to create a flashcard so i can click add and i'm just going to create a basic one for the purposes of this video instead of having to type out various things from this flashcard to try to memorize you know my main thing is i want to be able to quiz myself as quickly as possible on this this powerpoint and so what i like to do is actually use make the heading of the the powerpoint the the question and then i actually will take a screenshot of just the

overall powerpoint and you can essentially just quiz yourself there so you can then have the powerpoint and then slowly as you see the flashcard just squeeze yourself on one thing at a time i talk about other things on how to actually do this method on various videos so i'll link those down below but this will really definitely speed up your process of creating flashcards you can get to that learning part which is the most important now the anki method or the screenshot method by itself just works fantastically i've had students that have just been able

to boost their grade and improve their free time by itself but if you want to get to a little bit more of an advanced stage what you can do is you can again make this into an image occlusion so to use this combination of the image occlusion as well as the anki method one of the cool things you can go ahead and do is actually create a folder of all the screenshots that you want and collect them or you can do this one at a time so anki has the beauty of collecting the screenshots that

you just do last so for example if i took a screenshot of this again and then i go into my image occlusion it's going to memorize that that's basically what's saved and so now you can essentially look at this flashcard and ask yourself like what parts do i want to memorize so let's just say the basic things that i want to do for the workup is x y and z so i want to quiz myself i want to quiz myself on what this ekg was and then also this one and then you know i'm just

going to select the features of the flash card that are most important and i'm going to just kind of blank out the rest and now i just wanted to basically say i want to hide a one and guess one so it's created six flashcards from this powerpoint really quickly so essentially without having to type anything up i've essentially been able to create that flashcard so for example let me just show you what that would look like so as you guys can see now the flashcard shows up and it's really just gonna quiz me on the

flashcard itself without me having to get crazy with the question and the first part it's gonna be what is the basic workup for some of the afib so i really need to know that i need to take their history their chest x-ray electrolytes if i don't get all of it then i can just say show it to me again and a minute donkey as you guys can see using this image occlusion tool plus the screenshot tool you can essentially get away without having to type anything um actually into anki itself and just using that powerpoint

or the syllabus lecture you want to memorize and then using image occlusion tool to make multiple flashcards and forcing yourself to just memorize the things of the powerpoint that you actually end up having to do for the exam now hopefully you guys enjoyed those first two techniques i have one more advanced strategies to really share with you the power that anki can do and really kind of hone in especially when you're studying for exams one of the most difficult things that i had especially when i started was this ability of saying okay like the test

is coming up i know there's hard topics and the easy topics anki is going to start to quiz me on everything and i really just want to focus on the hard things now because i know that's going to cost me my grade if i don't get these mastered so one thing you can do is you can actually have use the function of tags if you click and browse basically what a tag is is essentially you can label a card for multiple reasons so if you want to say one card is cardiology another card it's an

ekg another card is from this lecture you know you have a lot of control but one thing i like to do is actually like to add different tags in terms of the difficulty level of a flashcard so let's say you know we're going through the browse kind of menu i found the flashcards i created uh this by the way is a great option for you to kind of add notes so if i'm you know in this lecture and i'm learning something about afib then i add my notes here and it'll show in my flash cards

in the future but really where i want to focus on is the tag so let's just say for example as i'm going through this flash card over time i realize that it's a hard flash card and i go to the next one and i realize it's an easy flash card and then the next one i'm going to call this a hard flash card and we'll just do one more in this example we'll just say for some reason this flash card is difficult now if i click out one option you can use and anki is actually

creating a filtered deck and basically what a filter deck is is that you can basically tell anki i want this function to create a deck so what we can actually do is say anki show me tags that are labeled as hard and if you do this correctly what you'll find is it'll say filter deck 1 or whatever and if you click study now it's going to show you those flash cards that you labeled at one point or another with that tag and so as you guys can see these are all of the tags that we

added below and it'll just kind of continue now the beauty of this method is that if you were studying for these flashcards in general you can just go to edit and add tags so this flashcard already had a tag for hard and now it's suddenly easy you can just type in easy or if it never had a tag at all you can go ahead and label based off your difficulty so as you're getting closer to exam time you can start labeling topics based off of how important and difficult they are for you because again when

test time is getting close you really just want to say hunky i know you want to use space repetition but right now i need to focus on difficult topics please show me those this is a great way to kind of get around that now hopefully those last few methods really give you some ideas how to use anki and the power of anki and again all this is free which is just absolutely remarkable but i want to give you some kind of remaining tips that i use to really kind of speed up my review process and

make them really effective so let's just say for example we're gonna go ahead and study it for step one so one thing you can do is as you're going through the flash card you want to keep in mind things that slow you down now often when we see a brand new flash card the first kind of method that i like to use to make sure that i'm always giving all of the topics importance and priority is i have kind of a mental timer and sometimes i'll make it as low as 10 seconds which means you

have 10 seconds to answer the question and 10 seconds to review the the actual answer that comes up so this prevents me from getting too into a flashcard it's not gonna just simply accept you know i don't know it show it to me again in a minute let's say this is a flashcard and to avoid me kind of getting too much into the weeds of this figure i can just say you have 10 seconds and then you have to collect one minute or 10 minutes and so having this timer method especially if flashcards are hard

for you to review works really well now again the amount of time you focus per flashcard doesn't really matter but just having a timer just keeps you going and that way one topic is no more important than the topics at the very end of your flashcard deck and that's my timer method but number two is to really break down a large flashcard into tiny bits of information you want to memorize so again the beauty of anki is that i can show it to you in a schedule so there's no pressure of trying to memorize everything

at once and i feel like medical students and just students in general will do this a lot so let's just say for example i'm trying to memorize the various structures of the skin and this flash card you know somebody's first approach is going to say let me try to memorize everything at the same time but again you're not giving equal priority to other flashcards because by the time you get to the end of your flashcard review you're likely going to have low energy less focus so what i like to do is instead say okay you

have about 20 seconds and let's just memorize the first two layers of this and then i'm going to see this flash card again no big deal so i can answer the question so get that correct but if there's something in the figure or the powerpoint if i was using the screenshot method that i wanted to do i'm just going to say let's memorize these two so the corneum and the granulosum and then if i get those right perfect i can move on to the next three to four structures that it's labeling and i can click

show it to me again in a minute now i see that flashcard next time the first thing i have to ask myself is did i memorize those two things if so cool let's add one more thing and show it to me again in a minute this way you're constantly moving topics are all have an equal priority and the learning process just has so much more of a flow and it's just not as stressful but that guys is my broad overview on how to exactly use anki hopefully you guys really enjoyed this video put a lot

of effort to kind of show the different things i personally use the things that i found medical students and other students using so let me know in the comments down below what you guys think what other questions you may have for anki now remember i've created tons of anki related videos here on the youtube channel so make sure you check out that playlist down below and while you're down there probably just go ahead and smash that like button because if you made to the end of the video that means the video hopefully gave you enough

value and some ideas on how to use it for school so if you did enjoy this video i'd really appreciate at least for youtube to kind of show this video to as many students as possible go ahead and smash that like button and if you do enjoy the kind of advanced strategies that i've shared in this video there's tons more across the youtube channel and plenty more coming your way so go ahead and hit that subscribe button and notification about if you enjoyed this video i know you're going to enjoy this video how you can

boost your grades and retention by just using one tip and then this video is basically how i show you a full walkthrough of how to use that honky screenshot method if you are on your medical journey then check out some of the programs i have for you down below basically showing you more step-by-step videos just like this on how to improve your retention get better grades and become a less stressful med student but with that being said guys thank you so much for watching thanks for being a part of my journey hopefully that was a

little help to you on yours and i'll see you guys in the next one peace