How to use Anki like a PRO (by a Learning Expert)

did you know that there is a more advanced way of using flashcard apps like Anki I'm willing to bet you did it because it took me years of using flashcards and reading through research to figure this out in this video I'm going to tell you what flashcards are great for and what they are terrible for even though a lot of people still use them this way and at the end of this video I'm going to tell you my strategy for how you can make flash cards less overwhelming more memorable and you can triple their effectiveness

I've taught the strategy very successfully to hundreds of students over the years and whether you're using Anki or any other flashcard app there are things that you can do to make them dramatically more effective if you're new to this channel welcome I'm Dr Justin sung I'm a learning coach and researcher in the head of learning at I can study I'm also a former medical doctor for the last decade I've taught tens of thousands of students around the world to learn more efficiently now a couple years ago one of the videos that really blew up on

my channel was the problems with space repetition and active recall and if your system of learning does depend on Space repetition then there are some serious problems with it that I do talk about in all of my other videos but it doesn't mean that flash cards do not have its place in fact I've probably used flash cards more than most people after all I crossed my medical degree my honors degree my Master's Degree my learning teaching certification I've spent over eight years learning at Uni to eventually become top ranked flashcards including apps like Anki can

be a very effective and useful tool in your toolkit but like any tool we have to know how to use it properly for example you might have the best screwdriver in the world but you can't build an entire house with nothing else but a screwdriver at least not without seriously abusing your screwdriver taking 10 years longer than it needed to and probably injuring yourself in the process so let's take a quick look at what flash cards are good at and what they are bad at and then I'll tell you the strategy for how you can

increase the good and reduce the bad before we get into it I'd really appreciate if you give this video video a like it really helps with the algorithm so most flash cards work like this you have a prompt which could be a question or a fill in the blanks or an image occlusion which is basically just fill in the blanks with an image you then answer it from memory and Market as correct or incorrect some apps even let you rate how easy it was to get that answer right and that affects the spacing algorithm and

then depending on how long that algorithm calculated for you you're then prompted to answer that question again and this could be even just a few minutes later up to weeks flashcards are useful for three main reasons firstly it triggers active retrieval of knowledge which has well proven benefits on your memory and retention now the research is surprisingly complicated here much more complicated than a lot of people make it out to be so we're not going to go into exactly why and how it helps you but in summary actively retrieving your knowledge is a very important

part of any Learning System and you should definitely do it no Learning System is complete without having retrieval practice the problems can arise when you rely on the retrieval too much but we'll get to that later secondly it makes it very easy to space your repetitions out and it allows you to repeat stuff not at a topic or subject level but add a fact or at a concept level depending on your ability to recall that fact or concept repetition to some extent is always going to be necessary for learning so flashcard apps make this a

lot easier honestly the person that invented the digital lateness system is a genius trying to manage this with a manual calendar and a schedule and tracking every single thing that you got right or wrong would be a nightmare and extremely time consuming and time consuming isn't always a bad thing but in this case that time is not invested in learning it's just admin time and lastly it helps with something called micro learning micro learning is when you have these study sessions that are very concentrated and short bursts of time like only a few minutes long

and for some very complicated reasons that we haven't fully figured out yet micro learning tends to be quite effective having these concentrated shorter bursts of studying tends to have a disproportionately high benefit for your memory and your attention now that isn't to say that having longer study sessions is not useful what it means is that having the shorter ones that are only like three to seven minutes long are also useful so flashcards are great for this you can use flash cards when you're waiting for the bus when you're on the toilet when you're waiting to

order a coffee you could stack up to maybe 20 or 30 minutes a day of micro learning without actually scheduling any extra time you're just using these pockets of time that you might not have been able to utilize before and so when you look at these three main benefits you can see it's genuinely very useful add on top of the fact that it's also pretty straightforward and easy to use and it doesn't take a long time to learn to use them correctly flash cards are very very popular so what are flashcards not good at well

even though flashcards trigger active retrieval of knowledge the way you retrieve the knowledge makes a big difference flashcard apps are generally designed to test you on a one-to-one ratio what that means is that you get one prompt the question that tests you on one concept or fact and this is good for Direct Factory call and memorization but it's not as helpful for the higher order learning needs where you actually need to draw on multiple Concepts and facts and how they influence and relate to each other and I talk about this concept A Lot in my

other videos like all the time now you could make flashcards like a challenging exam question that tests you on these interrelated Concepts but it tends to get a little bit messy it's a lot longer to create those questions it takes longer to answer them and It's tricky to understand whether you should Mark a question right or wrong for example if your flashcard is testing you now on six or seven different concepts and facts and you get five of those correct and you miss one of them do you answer that card as correct or incorrect if

you've ever tried this yourself you know that it gets pretty messy once you start testing on more than two or three facts and Concepts per card so problem number one is that it only really helps for the lower order Style Direct Factory call and memorization type of learning which is usually not enough to get you the best marks or especially if you're a union Beyond even a pass which is also part of problem number two flash cards get overwhelming very quickly if you try to use flashcards to learn absolutely everything then you get to a

point where you have to do hundreds of flashcards every single day and this is very time consuming and also not very effective as I often talk about in my videos human memory excels when knowledge is connected into a network when information is less connected in a network your brain holds on to that information much less strongly which means you forget it more easily it's really common for students to rely so heavily on apps like Anki that they don't actually use any other learning methods which might be much better at building higher order knowledge networks since

all knowledge must exist in a network for it to be retained and used and because flash cards are pretty bad at building knowledge networks we end up with a mountain of information we have to learn through pure root memorization and repetition even if we didn't need to in the first place it actually creates unnecessary work for us and it's a very Brute Force way of trying to study a topic and I can tell you experts in their field that know more about that field than anyone else they're not sitting at home doing flash cards on

the hundreds of new Journal articles that are released every week they probably aren't using flashcards at all in fact and again it goes back to that analogy of the screwdriver yes a screwdriver can be really good at what it does and you can love using your screwdriver for tightening a screw if you've never used a screwdriver before you're going to feel that it's amazing compared to trying to tighten the screw with your fingernail but it doesn't mean that it magically solves every possible need that you have when you're building a house flashcards are great at

what it's good at but when you try to use it in ways that it's not good at it's not efficient and it's actually going to do more harm than good and then once you do get overwhelmed by the volume of flashcards it's actually very hard to escape because now you're investing so much of your time into doing your flashcards you can't use other methods without falling behind and in some cases being able to get a flash card correct might actually even be harmful so this is problem number three which is that flashcards are very repetitive

which is the whole point of it but there's another part to this because we repeat the same flashcard again and again we may end up memorizing the flash card rather than the actual knowledge and you've probably already experienced this before for example if you've got a flash card that asks the question what is the function of the mitochondria and the answer is mitochondria is a Powerhouse of the cell then if you do this flashcard enough times you might actually just read what is the function of and then you already know that the rest of this

flashcard says might chondria then if you do this enough times you might recognize the flash card just by reading what is the Fung and at that point you already know that the rest of it's going to say function of a mitochondria and you're able to record the answer straight away without even having to read the whole question which might seem like a really good thing because your recoil is faster but it's not the problem here is that we're no longer testing our ability to recall the knowledge anymore all we're testing is our ability to associate

that particular flashcard with that particular answer so when we get into an exam or any other type of assessment and we're asked on that knowledge but in a way that's different to how our flash card put it we may actually struggle to recall that knowledge because it's not testing our recall of the knowledge in itself anymore when we get these types of questions wrong we could often look at it and say well I just made a silly mistake because I already knew that but actually there's a very big and important difference between knowing something and

being able to retrieve and use it in a realistic setting so as a rule of thumb if I see a student using flashcards for almost all of their learning and they end up with hundreds or even thousands of them I know that they're probably doing more harm than good like much more harm than good so therefore to make flash Cuts more effective we need to make them better at doing the higher order learning stuff and make them less overwhelming and also stop ourselves from getting into that pattern where we're just memorizing the flash card rather

than the knowledge and surprisingly potentially one of the most useful things that you can actually do is to like this video and the second most important thing is to follow the strategy that I'm about to teach you now this strategy is very rare I almost never really see anyone using flashcards like this even though it is extremely extremely effective about six years ago I coached a young athlete there were world-class Olympic level athlete and they had a 30 hour per week training schedule and I was coaching them not on the Athletics I was coaching them

to handle studying for uni and handle all their learning stuff while they were also doing this crazy crazy training this person had really no time to sit down and study for long periods of time the only time they had was a six hour block on a Saturday where they could get through as much studying as possible and as a result of that experience I learned a lot about micro learning and how to really make micro learning including flashcards work for you and since then I've taught these principles and techniques that I'm about to teach you

to thousands of students so here's how we want to set your learning up you want to split your dedicated long study sessions into three parts now when I say a long study session I think anything more than three or four hours I'd say is a long study session but it's kind of relative like if you're studying three to four hours every single day and then your long session is like a seven hour block on a weekend then you could call that your long study session the first part is targeted review the second part is consolidation

and preparation and the third part is preview in the second part which is consolidation and preparation we're going to be covering all the material that we've learned since our previous long study session so that could have been maybe a few days ago or even a whole week ago during this time you're gonna review your material you're gonna write your notes this is kind of like the main what we'd normally think of as yours normal study time and if possible I'd recommend that you use an efficient method for encoding that is non-linear and multi-order and if

you don't know how to do that then I'd really recommend checking out my video on how I studied for my masters where I literally show you exactly how I did it now of course as I always talk about the quality of your encoding makes a big difference to how much you forget and the quality of your knowledge it's not something that you can just pick up and learn in 30 seconds I'm gonna teach you the principles I teach you the techniques and my other videos all the time you have to actually practice it so if

you're sitting there watching this thinking that you can get good at this or know how to do it just by watching videos that's not gonna happen Okay like it's a skill it's not just a theory you have to actually put in the practice anyway while you're going through the material and you're encoding it you're actually filtering out the information so the stuff that you feel like you can encode you're going to encode it with whatever method that you're using and the stuff that you feel like you're going to forget even by using that method or

it just doesn't fit that's the stuff that goes into your flashcards it's already different because a lot of people will just dump absolutely everything onto their flashcards and again that's kind of as soon as you do that you're fighting a losing battle at first the flashcards you make are going to be simple just direct recall or facts and Concepts just kind of the normal way that you use flashcards and if you again have an effective method of encoding then you should have already less flash cards than before because you'll have less things to just straight

up memorize but here is where things get interesting throughout the week in these little pockets of time you're going to continue to do your flash cards and you should reasonably be able to get through around about 100 to 150 flash cards per week just through these random little pockets of time and if you've got more than that then that probably indicates that your method of encoding is actually holding you back instead so that's the trigger for you to go check out my videos on coding as you you go throughout the week and you're completing the

flash cards you need to Mark the ones that you got correct three times in a row we want to come back to these later most apps have some kind of like star or flag or some kind of way to kind of just note that flash card we're gonna want to be able to find all of the ones that we got correct three times in a row likewise if you get a flashcard incorrect three times in a row we also want to flag that one too flag it something different so you can tell the two apart

now in your next long study session which is a few days or a week later we're gonna have a list of flash cards that we got correct three times in a row and a list of flash cards that we got incorrect three times in a row and at the beginning of this long study session we're gonna do our targeted review start with the flashcards you got wrong three times in a row the chances are these flash cards are going to continue to be a problem for you and so it's not worth it to just leave

it inside your flashcard deck and continue to just repeat them again and again sometimes you're getting right so sometimes getting it wrong it's just going to clog up your system it's worthwhile to just spend a little bit more time to really consolidate the knowledge in those cards so that you reduce the chances of you forgetting them for each of these cards spend five to ten minutes per card to go a little bit deeper and to try to connect that factor concept with your prior existing knowledge or other parts of the topic or create analogies we're

going to try to build more of a network around this it doesn't matter if you can't get through all of your incorrect list if you dedicate a part of your study sessions every time to doing this you're just going to help reduce that flash card burden over time now if you do this and then you still get those flashcards wrong then you just do the same process again but this time you go even deeper and you build even more connections and and create even more of a network around it this often does mean that you'll

have to go a little bit out of scope of the topic but honestly it's fine the time it takes to go out of scope but hold on to that piece of information is just going to be worth it you might also find when you do this that you look at this card and you think you know what I don't even really need to know this which would be great because then you can just remove it from your system and you don't have to worry about it again the more things you can get rid of the

better it is for the cards you got correct three times in a row we're gonna go through those and merge and upgrade them we already remember the basic facts so let's challenge ourselves with a higher level take a look at all the facts and Concepts that you got in that correct list of cards and start thinking how some of these cards might be related to each other or influence each other when you see that some of these things might be connected we're going to combine them to create a higher order question instead for example if

you've got two flashcards correct and one of them said how does protein synthesis work and the other one said how are hormones received by cell receptors then you could fuse the two of them together to create a question that's like how do hormones influence protein synthesis so this new card is actually testing on the same basic facts as the original but now we're also testing on the relationships and info influences that they have on each other so there are multiple benefits of doing this number one it just reduces the number of flash cards you've got

to deal with number two it forces you to think about relationships and builds networks and number three it builds on your existing knowledge and what I mean by that is that when you have this kind of mega flash card that's a combination of multiple other ones you already know that you've got Mastery over the foundational information so when you test yourself on that it's unlikely that you're going to get like 80 of it right every single time and then just 20 of it consistently wrong and because the flash cards are constantly merging and changing as

your Mastery grows you're not going to get to that point where you're just so repetitive on it that you're just memorizing oh neither flash card and then as you go your flash cards should continue to just converge and get upgraded now it does take a little bit of time to set all of this up and use this process but first of all it pays itself off in efficiency gains across really just like one or two weeks but also it's probably faster to answer each of these questions because it's constantly building on what you already know

and creating these challenging questions is much easier when you've got that filtered list to work with and you know you can just see exactly how they could come together it's easier than just trying to do it from scratch so these two steps which is the reviewing your incorrect ones and going deeper and then reviewing your correct ones to fuse and take them higher this is part one targeted review and then in part two we're going to go through our new material which is where we're you know encoding even more and then obviously we're creating even

more flashcards to work with for the week to come and then part three is the preview preview is when you're priming yourself in the material that you haven't really covered yet is one of the most important parts of studying if you had to choose between only doing review versus only doing the preview I would always say go for preview because it's the thing that's going to stop you from Forgetting so much in the first place it makes everything easier from that point onwards you can always catch up on review if you start falling behind but

if you don't do the preview then you you're just constantly going to be falling behind because you're just going to forget so much preview is ultimately what stops you from getting overwhelmed so by following the strategy you will find that your flashcards become more challenging but in a good way they're a lot more engaging and enjoyable it helps you to prepare for your exams a lot more comprehensively it makes flash cards less overwhelming and overall improves your attention so there are some parts that I haven't had time to go through in this video like for

example in part two when you're doing the encoding if you want to learn how to do that a little bit better then I'd recommend checking out my video on how I study for my masters where you can see a demonstration of it or part three which is a preview which I've said is so important I'd recommend that you'd start with watching this video and how I ranked first at Monash University where I talk about the system or preview that I use that's a good place to start or if you're wanting a single place to start

with all of my videos where you can learn all the fundamentals step by step then have a look at this playlist that we've created for you as well as usual thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time [Music] thank you