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Intro Video

The basics are covered in this screencast.

Formatting Questions

General Knowledge

Turning a given idea into a question and answer pair is simple. Imagine you’ve just heard the following sentence:

Canberra was founded in 1913.

The easiest way to test this is to make a cloze deletion.

Type or copy the above sentence into the Front.
Highlight 1913.
Click the […] button, or press F9.

You’ll end up with:

images/cloze2.png

You can then click the add button to add the newly created card to your deck.

Languages

There are two approaches to studying languages: you can aim for recall or recognition.

Recognition cards are cards which show you some written or audio extract of a foreign language, and check if you can understand it. For example, if you’re learning German, you might be shown a German word or sentence and asked to recall the meaning. Recognition cards are comparitively easy to do, allowing you to cover more material in a shorter time. Their downside is that while you may be able to recognize many words, they may not enter your active vocabulary.

Recall (or production) cards are cards which require you to produce an answer in the language you are studying. The question is either a word or expression in your native tongue, or a description. The answer will depend on what you’re trying to study - how to pronounce the foreign words, how to spell them, how to write them. Recall cards are more difficult than recognition cards and thus take longer to do. If you choose to use them, they are best left for essential vocabulary and expressions, where issues of synonyms arise less frequently.

Tips

Different people like to review in different ways, but there are some general concepts to keep in mind. An excellent introduction is this article on the SuperMemo site. In particular:

Keep it simple The shorter your cards, the easier they are to review. You may be tempted to include lots of information just in case, but reviews will quickly become painful.
Don’t memorize without understanding If you’re studying a language, try to avoid large lists of words. The best way to learn languages is in context, which means seeing those words used in a sentence. Likewise, imagine you’re studying a computer course. If you attempt to memorize the mountain of acronyms, you’ll find it very difficult to make progress. But if you take the time to understand the concepts behind the acronyms, learning the acronyms will become a lot easier.

Features

Required/Unique Fields

By default, Anki won’t let you add items if certain fields are blank, or if they contain the same information as in another card. Yellow fields indicate fields that are blank, and red fields indicate fields which duplicate information. You can change what Anki will complain about in the ModelProperties#Fields dialog.

Cards

Anki allows you to generate different "cards" for the data you put in - for example, you might want to quiz yourself from city to country and country to city when reviewing capital cities of the world. Click the cards button on the top right to change this.

Keyboard Shortcuts

(NB: On a Mac, Ctrl is the Command (⌘) key, and Alt is the Option key.)

Tab	change between fields.
Ctrl+Enter	add the current card.
Esc	close the dialog.
Ctrl+b	bold
Ctrl+i	italic
Ctrl+u	underline
F7 then F7	apply currently selected colour
F7 then F6	choose previous colour
F7 then F8	choose next colour
F7 then F5	select a colour
F2	card layout
F3	add image
F4	add sound
F9	apply ClozeDeletion
Ctrl+1,2,etc	enable/disable card model 1, 2, etc
Shift+Alt+m	change model
Shift+Alt+e	edit current model
Ctrl+l then l	LaTeX
Ctrl+l then e	LaTeX equation
Ctrl+l then m	LaTeX math environment
Ctrl+F9	edit HTML

Accents and foreign characters

Windows, Mac and Linux provide built-in support for other languages. There is no need to buy a different keyboard. Some flashcard programs try to save you the trouble of enabling support on your computer, and provide a clickable set of buttons for each foreign character, or provide their own conversion utilities. However, this makes input a lot slower. One person writes:

By the way, if you’re learning any foreign language with exotic characters, even just the Spanish ñ, I encourage you to look into how to efficiently type those characters. When I first started studying Japanese, I didn’t know how to type Japanese characters. I’d just copy-and-paste things to make flashcards and/or communicate with people. And if I wanted to type something original, that meant painstakingly finding, then copying-and-pasting each individual character. With my U.S.-bought computer, it was kind of a pain to get Japanese IME support (and it involved borrowing a Windows XP disk from a friend since you need one to install Microsoft’s Japanese IME). But it was worth it a million times over. In retrospect, I should have done that as one of my very first steps when I first set out to learn Japanese.

To learn more:

Advanced: LaTeX

LaTeX can be used to input mathematical notation, as well as other symbols (e.g. chemical formulas, musical notation, etc.). Note that to use LaTeX, you have to install it separately - it is not bundled with Anki. On Windows use MiKTeX; on OSX use MacTex, and on Linux use your distro’s package manager. Dvipng must also be installed.

Note	On Windows, go to Settings in MikTek’s maintenance window, and make sure "Install missing packages on the fly" is set to "No", not to "Ask me first". If you continue to have difficulties, one user reported that running Anki as an administrator until all the packages were fetched helped.

Note	On OSX, LaTeX has only been tested with MacTex and BasicTex. If you use BasicTex, you need to install dvipng separately, with the following command: tlmgr update --self && tlmgr install dvipng. If you want to install from MacPorts or similar, you will need to figure out any issues yourself.

The most general way to input LaTeX content is to surround it with [latex][/latex] tags. (This can be quickly done by selecting this content and clicking on the button, or using a keyboard shortcut).

For example, entering the following on the front of an Anki flashcard:

Does [latex]\begin{math}\sum_{k = 1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k}\end{math}[/latex] converge?

will produce this when the flashcard is viewed:

The formula in the example above is called a text formula, because it is displayed right within the non-mathematical text. In contrast, the following example shows a displayed formula:

Does the sum below converge?

[latex]\begin{displaymath}\sum_{k = 1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k}\end{displaymath}[/latex]

Text formulas and display formulas are the most common type of LaTeX expressions, so Anki provides abbreviated versions of them. Expressions of the form:

[latex]\begin{math}...\end{math}[/latex]

can be shortened to [$]…[/$], and expressions of the form

[latex]\begin{displaymath}...\end{displaymath}[/latex]

can be shortened to

[$$]...[/$$]

For example, the two LaTeX snippets shown before are equivalent to

Does [$]\sum_{k = 1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k}[/$] converge?

and

Does the sum below converge?

[$$]\sum_{k = 1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k}[/$$]

respectively.