Anki 2.0 User Manual

Active recall testing means being asked a question and trying to remember the answer. This is in contrast to passive study, where we read, watch or listen to something without pausing to consider if we know the answer. Research has shown that active recall testing is far more effective at building strong memories than passive study. There are two reasons for this:

You have probably encountered active recall testing in your school years without even realizing it. When good teachers give you a series of questions to answer after reading an article, or make you take weekly progress-check tests, they are not doing it simply to see if you understood the material or not. By testing you, they are increasing the chances you will be able to remember the material in the future.

A good way to integrate active recall testing into your own studies is to use flashcards. With traditional paper flashcards, you write a question on one side of a card, and the answer on the other side. By not turning the card over until you’ve thought about the answer, you can learn things more effectively than passive observation allows.

Our brains are efficient machines, and they rapidly discard information that doesn’t seem useful. Chances are that you don’t remember what you had for dinner on Monday two weeks ago, because this information is not usually useful. If you went to a fantastic restaurant that day and spent the last two weeks telling people about how great it was, however, you’re likely to still remember in vivid detail.

The brain’s "use it or lose it" policy applies to everything we learn. If you spend an afternoon memorizing some science terms, and then don’t think about that material for two weeks, you’ll probably have forgotten most of it. In fact, studies show we forget about 75% of material learnt within a 48 hour period. This can seem pretty depressing when you need to learn a lot of information.

The solution is simple, however: review. By reviewing newly-learnt information, we can greatly reduce forgetting.

The only problem is that traditionally review was not very practical. If you are using paper flashcards, it’s easy to flick through all of them if you only have 30 of them to review, but as the number grows to 300 or 3000, it quickly becomes unwieldy.

The spacing effect was reported by a German psychologist in 1885. He observed that we tend to remember things more effectively if we spread reviews out over time, instead of studying multiple times in one session. Since the 1930s there have been a number of proposals for utilizing the spacing effect to improve learning, in what has come to be called spaced repetition.

One example is in 1972, when a German scientist called Sebastian Leitner popularized a method of spaced repetition with paper flashcards. By separating the paper cards up into a series of boxes, and moving the cards to a different box on each successful or unsuccessful review, it was possible to see at a glance a rough estimate of how well a card was known and when it should be reviewed again. This was a great improvement over a single box of cards, and it has been widely adopted by computerized flashcard software. It is a rather rough approach however, as it can’t give you an exact date on which you should review something again, and it doesn’t cope very well with material of varying difficulty.

The biggest developments in the last 30 years have come from the authors of SuperMemo, a commercial flashcard program that implements spaced repetition. SuperMemo pioneered the concept of a system that keeps track of the ideal time to review material and optimizes itself based on the performance of the user.

In SuperMemo’s spaced repetition system, every time you answer a question, you tell the program how well you were able to remember it - whether you forgot completely, made a small mistake, remembered with trouble, remembered easily, etc. The program uses this feedback to decide the optimal time to show you the question again. Since a memory gets stronger each time you successfully recall it, the time between reviews gets bigger and bigger - so you may see a question for the first time, then 3 days later, 15 days later, 45 days later, and so on.

This was a revolution in learning, as it meant material could be learnt and retained with the absolute minimum amount of effort necessary. SuperMemo’s slogan sums it up: with spaced repetition, you can forget about forgetting.

While there is no denying the huge impact SuperMemo has had on the field, it is not without its problems. The program is often criticized for being buggy and difficult to navigate. It only runs on Windows computers. It’s proprietary software, meaning end-users can’t extend it or access the raw data. And while very old versions are made available for free, they are quite limited for modern use.

Anki addresses these issues. There are free clients for Anki available on many platforms, so struggling students and teachers with budgetary constraints are not left out. It’s open source, with an already flourishing library of add-ons contributed by end-users. It’s multi-platform, running on Windows, Mac OSX, Linux/FreeBSD, and some mobile devices. And it’s considerably easier to use than SuperMemo.

Internally, Anki’s spaced repetition system is based on an older version of the SuperMemo algorithm called SM2. Subsequent versions have managed to squeeze out a little more learning efficiency, but they come at the cost of greatly increased complexity, and they are more susceptible to scheduling errors in real-world use. For a more in-depth discussion of this and the differences in scheduling algorithms, see the bottom of the page.

A question and answer pair is called a card. This is based on a paper flashcard with a question on one side an the answer on the back. In Anki a card doesn’t actually look like a physical card, and when you show the answer the question remains visible by default. For example, if you’re studying basic chemistry, you might see a question like:

After thinking about it, and deciding the answer is O, you click the show answer button, and Anki shows you:

After checking you are correct, you can tell Anki how well you remembered, and Anki will choose a next time to show you again.

A deck is a group of cards. You can place cards in different decks to study parts of your card collection instead of studying everything at once. Each deck can have different settings, such as how many new cards to show each day, or how long to wait until cards are shown again.

Decks can contain other decks, which allows you to organize decks into a tree. Anki uses "::" to show different levels. A deck called "Chinese::Hanzi::Lesson 1" refers to a "Lesson 1" deck, which is part of the Hanzi deck, which is part of the Chinese deck. If you select "Lesson 1" then only cards from lesson 1 will be shown for study. If you select "Chinese," then each of the lessons will be shown in sequence. (If you normally want to study the groups in random order, you should use tags instead.)

To place decks into a tree, you can either name them with "::" between each level, or drag and drop them from the deck list.

Anki starts with a deck called "default"; any cards which have somehow become separated from other decks will go here. Anki will hide the default deck if it contains no cards and you have added other decks. Alternatively, you may rename this deck and use it for other cards.

For information on how decks affect the order cards are displayed in, please see this section.

Using paper flashcards or a traditional flashcard program, we might make the following cards:

and

and

There are a number of downsides to this traditional approach. A lot of typing is involved. It’s also easy to accidentally make mistakes, and if you later realize you spelt oxygen wrong, you have to edit each card in turn to correct it. You may also end up seeing one question right after the other, which isn’t so useful.

In Anki, instead of entering in cards directly, you add notes about things, and tell Anki how you want the notes to be turned into cards. In the above example, there were three related pieces of information:

To store this information, we might create a new type of note, and call it something like "Atomic Elements", giving it three fields: name, symbol and number. We can then tell Anki to create some cards based on those fields.

In order for Anki to create cards, we need to give it a blueprint that says which fields should be displayed on the front or back of each card. This blueprint is called a template.

For example, imagine we have the note mentioned above, and we want a card that shows:

To do this, we can set the template question and answer to:

By surrounding a field name in curly brackets, we tell Anki to replace that section with the actual information in the field. The information not surrounded by curly brackets remains the same on each card.

Now let’s create two more templates:

and

Once a template has been created, every time you add a new note, a card will be created based on that template. Templates make it easy to keep the formatting of your cards consistent, and can greatly reduce the amount of effort involved in adding information. They also mean Anki can ensure related cards don’t appear too close to each other, and mean you can fix a typing mistake once and have all the related cards updated at once.

To add and edit templates, click the "Cards…" button while adding or editing notes.

Your collection is all the material stored in Anki - your cards, notes, decks, templates, and so on.

The easiest way to get started with Anki is to download a deck of cards someone has shared.

Please note that it’s not currently possible to add shared decks directly to your AnkiWeb account. You need to import them with the desktop program, then synchronize to upload them to AnkiWeb.

Please see sharing decks for info on sharing your decks with others.

Recall from the basics that in Anki we add notes rather than cards, and Anki creates cards for us. Click Add in the main window, and the Add Notes window will appear.

The top left of the window shows us the current note type. If it does not say "Basic", then you may have added some note types when you downloaded a shared deck. The text below assumes that "Basic" is selected.

The top right of the window shows us the deck cards will be added to. If you’d like to add cards to a new deck, you can click on the deck name button and then click "Add".

Below the note type, you’ll see some buttons, and an area labeled "Front" and "Back". Front and Back are called fields, and you can add, remove and rename them by clicking the "Fields…" button above.

Below the fields is another area labelled "Tags". Tags are labels that you can attach to your notes, to make organizing and finding notes easier. You can leave the tags blank if you wish, or add one or more of them. Tags are separated by a space. If the tags area says

…then the note you add would have two tags.

When you’ve entered text into the front and back, you can click the "Add" button or press Ctrl+Enter (Command+Enter on a Mac) to add the note to your collection. When you do so, a card will be created as well, and placed into the deck you chose. If you’d like to edit a card you added, you can click the history button to search for a recently added card in the browser.

Anki checks the first field for uniqueness, so it will warn you if you enter two cards with a Front field of "apple" (for example). The uniqueness check is limited to the current note type, so if you’re studying multiple languages, two cards with the same Front would not be listed as duplicates as long as you had a different note type for each language.

Anki doesn’t check for duplicates in other fields automatically for efficiency reasons, but the browser has a "Find Duplicates" function which you can run periodically.

For more information on the buttons between the note type and the fields, please see the editor section.

While basic notes are sufficient for simple cards with only a word or phrase on each side, as soon as you find yourself wanting to include more than one piece of information on the front or back, it’s better to split that information up into more fields.

You may find yourself thinking "but I only want one card, so why can’t I just include the audio, a picture, a hint and the translation in the Front field?" If you’d prefer to do that, that’s fine. But the disadvantage of that approach is that all the information is stuck together. If you wanted to sort your cards by the hint, you wouldn’t be able to do that as it’s mixed in with the other content. You also wouldn’t be able to do things like move the audio from the front to the back, except by laboriously copying and pasting it for every note. By keeping content in separate fields, it makes it much easier to adjust the layout of your cards in the future.

To create a new type of note, in the Add window, click on the button next to "type", and then on the "Manage" button. Then click "Add" to add a new type of note. You’ll now see another screen that gives you a choice of note types to base the new type on. "Add" means to base the newly created type on one that comes with Anki. "Clone" means to base the newly created type on one that is in your collection. If you’d created a French vocab type already for example, you might use that when creating a German vocab type.

After choosing "OK", you’ll be asked to name the new type. The subject material you’re studying is a good choice here - things like "Japanese", "Trivia", and so on. Once you’ve chosen a name, close the Note Types window, and you’ll return to the adding window.

To customize fields, click the "Fields…" button when adding or editing a note.

Editing Font allows you to customize the font and size used when editing notes. This is useful if you want to make unimportant information smaller, or increase the size of foreign characters which are hard to read. The changes you make here do not affect how cards appear when reviewing: to do that, please see the templates section. If you have enabled the "type in the answer" function however, the text you type will use the font size defined here.

When Remember last input… is checked, Anki will not clear out the field content after a note is added. If you find yourself entering the same content into multiple notes, you may find this useful.

Reverse text direction is useful if you are studying languages that display text from right to left (RTL), such as Arabic or Hebrew. This setting currently only controls editing; to make sure the text displays correctly during review, you’ll need to adjust your template.

After you’ve added fields, you’ll probably want to add them to the front or back of your cards. For more information on that, please see the templates section.

While adding, you can click on the top left button to change note type, and the top right button to change deck. The window that opens up will not only allow you to select a deck or note type, but also to add new decks or manage your note types.

Searching is non-consecutive - please see this section for more information.

Study in Anki is limited to the currently selected deck, and any decks it contains. You can change the currently selected deck by clicking on "Decks" in the main window.

On the decks screen, your decks will be displayed in a list. There are two number columns, due and new. Due is the count of waiting reviews and cards currently in learning. New is the number of new cards that are waiting to be learnt that day.

When you click on a deck, it will become the current deck, and Anki will change to the study screen.

You can click the gears button to the right of a deck in order to rename or delete decks, or customize their options.

After clicking on a deck to study, you’ll see a screen that shows you how many cards are due today. There are three types:

To start a study session, click the Study Now button. Anki will proceed to show you cards until the cards to be shown for the day have run out.

When a card is shown, only the question is shown at first. After thinking about the answer, either click the Show Answer button, or press the spacebar. The answer will then be shown. It’s ok if it takes you a little while to recall the answer, but as a general rule if you can’t answer within about 10 seconds, it’s better to give up and show the answer than keep struggling to remember.

When the answer is shown, you should compare the answer you thought of with the answer which is shown, and tell Anki how well you remembered. If you don’t trust yourself to compare your answer accurately, you can ask Anki to prompt you to type in the answer rather than just showing it to you. If you’d like to do this, please see the templates section.

The number of buttons available for grading depends on whether the card is being learnt or reviewed.

When learning new cards, or when relearning cards that you have forgotten, Anki will show you the cards one or more times to help you memorize them. By default there are two steps: 1 minute and 10 minutes. You can change the number of steps and the delays between them by clicking the Options button while looking at the study overview.

There are three rating buttons when learning:

Again moves the card back to the first step.

Good moves the card to the next step. If the card was on the final step, the card is converted into a review card. By default, the card will be shown again the next day, and then at increasingly long delays.

Easy immediately converts the card into a review card, even if there were steps remaining. By default, the card will be shown again 4 days later, and then at increasingly long delays.

When cards are seen for the first time, they start at step one. This means answering Good on a card for the first time will show it one more time in 10 minutes, and the initial 1 minute step will be skipped.

You can use the 1, 2 and 3 keys on your keyboard to select a particular button, where 1 = Again. Pressing the spacebar will select Good.

If there are no other cards to show you that day, Anki will by default show learning cards again even if their delay has not elapsed completely. If you’d prefer to wait the full learning delay, you can change this behaviour in the preferences.

When a card has been previously learnt and is ready to be reviewed again, there are four buttons to rate your answer:

Again marks your answer as incorrect, and asks Anki to show the card more frequently in the future. Please see the lapses section for more information about how lapsed reviews are handled.

Hard shows the card at a slightly longer delay than last time, and tells Anki to be more conservative when scheduling the card in the future.

Good tells Anki that the last delay was about right, and the card easiness doesn’t need to be adjusted down or up. At the default starting easiness, the card will be shown again approximately 2 1/2 times longer than the previous time - so if you had waited 10 days to see the card previously, the next delay would be about 25 days.

Easy tells Anki you’re finding the delays too short. The card will be scheduled further into the future than Good, and Anki will be more aggressive in its scheduling of the card in the future. Because Easy rapidly increases the delay, it’s best left for only the easiest of cards. Usually you should find yourself answering Good instead.

Like learning cards, you can use 1-4 on the keyboard to select an answer. Pressing the spacebar will select Good.

When only the question is shown, Anki shows three numbers like 12 + 34 + 56. They represent new cards, cards in learning, and cards to review. If you’d prefer not to see the numbers, you can turn them off in Anki’s preferences.

When the answer is shown, Anki shows an estimate of the next time a card will be shown above each button. If you’d prefer not to see the estimates, you can also disable them in Anki’s preferences.

You can click the Edit button in the bottom left to edit the current note. When you finish editing, you’ll be returned to study. The editing screen is very similar to the add notes screen.

On the bottom right is a button labeled More. This button provides some other operations you can do on the current card or note:

Studying will show cards from the selected deck, and any decks it contains. Thus if you select "French", "French::Vocab" and "French::My Textbook::Lesson 1" and so on will all be shown as well.

For new cards and reviews, Anki fetches cards from the decks in alphabetical order. So in the above example, you would get cards first from "French", then "My Textbook", and finally "Vocab". You can use this fact to control the order cards appear in, placing high priority cards in decks that appear higher in the list. When computers sort text alphabetically, the "-" character comes before alphabetical characters, and "~" comes after them. So if you called the deck "-Vocab", your vocab cards would appear first, and you could call the other deck "~My Textbook" to force it to appear after everything else.

New cards and reviews are fetched separately, and Anki won’t wait until both queues are empty before moving on to the next deck, so it’s possible you’ll be exposed to new cards from a different deck to the reviews or vice versa. If you don’t want that, click directly on the deck you want to study instead of one of the parent decks.

Cards in learning are fetched from all decks at once, because they are somewhat time critical, and shown in the order they are due.

For more fine-grained ordering of new cards, you can change the order in the browser.

To control the order reviews from a given deck appear in, or change new cards from ordered to random order, please see the deck options.

Many of the common operations in Anki have keyboard shortcuts. Most of them are discoverable in the interface: menu items list their shortcuts next to them, and hovering the mouse cursor over a button will generally show its shortcut in a tooltip.

When studying, either space or enter will show the answer. When the answer is shown, you can use space or enter to select the Good button. You can use the 1-4 keys to select a specific ease button. Many people find it convenient to answer most cards with space and keep one finger on 1 for when they forget.

The "Study Deck" item in the Tools menu allows you to quickly switch to a deck with the keyboard. You can trigger it with the / key. When opened, it will display all of your decks, and show a filter area at the top. As you type characters, Anki will display only decks matching the characters you type. The search is non-consecutive, so if you want to select the "Japanese::Lesson 1" deck, you could just type "j1" (but not "1j").

If you fall behind in your reviews, Anki will prioritize cards that have been waiting the longest. It does this by taking the 200 cards that have been waiting the longest, and showing them to you in a random order up until your daily review limit. This ordering ensures that no cards will be left waiting indefinitely, but it means that if you introduce new cards, their reviews won’t appear until you’ve gotten through your backlog.

If you wish to change the order of the overdue reviews, you can do so by creating a filtered deck, as described in a later section of the manual.

When you answer cards that have been waiting for a while, Anki factors in that delay when determining the next time a card should be shown. Please see the frequently asked questions section at the bottom of the manual for more information.

The editor is shown when adding notes, editing a note during reviews, or browsing.

On the top left are two buttons, which open the fields and cards windows.

On the right are buttons that control formatting. Bold, italic and underline work like they do in a wordprocessing program. The next two buttons allow you to subscript or superscript text, which is useful for chemical compounds like H₂O and or simple math equations like x².

The icon with the red cross clears any formatting in the currently selected text. This includes colours, bold, etc.

The next button allows you to change text colour.

The paperclip allows you to attach audio, images and videos to your notes. For more information, please see the media section.

The red circle button allows you to record your voice and attach it to the note.

The last button allows you to add advanced mathematical markup called LaTeX to your notes, or edit the underlying formatting.

Most of the buttons have shortcut keys. You can hover the mouse cursor over a button to see its shortcut. For the LaTeX/HTML menu, use Ctrl+t then t, e or m to select the three LaTeX types, and Ctrl+shift+x to edit the HTML.

Cloze deletion is the process of hiding one or more words in a sentence. For example, if you have the sentence:

…and you create a cloze deletion on "1913", then the sentence would become:

For more information on why you might want to use cloze deletion, see rule number 5 here.

Anki provides a special cloze deletion type of note, to make creating clozes easy. To create a cloze deletion note, select the Cloze note type, and type some text into the "Text" field. Then drag the mouse over the text you want to hide to select it, and click the […] button. Anki will replace the text with:

The "c1" part means that you’ve created one cloze deletion on the sentence. You can create more than one deletion if you’d like. For example, if you select Canberra and click […] again, the text will now look like:

When you add the above note, Anki will create two cards. The first card will show:

…on the question, with the full sentence on the answer. The other card will have the following on the question:

You can also elide multiple sections at once. In the above example, if you change c2 to c1, only one card would be created, with both Canberra and 1913 hidden. If you hold down alt (option on a Mac) while creating a cloze, Anki will automatically use the same number instead of incrementing it.

Cloze deletions don’t need to fall on word boundaries, so if you select "anberra" rather than "Canberra" in the above example, the question would appear as "C[…] was founded in 1913", giving you a hint.

You can also give yourself hints that don’t match the text. If you replace the original sentence with:

…and then press […] after selecting "Canberra::city", Anki will treat the text after the two colons as a hint. When the card comes up for review, it will appear as:

For information on testing your ability to type in a cloze deletion correctly, please see the section on typing answers.

Please note that overlapping clozes are not supported. For example, the following field is invalid:

If you need to create clozes from overlapping text, add another Text field to your cloze, add it to the template, and then when creating notes, paste the text into two separate fields, like so:

The default cloze note type has a second field called Extra, that is shown on the answer side of each card. It can be used for adding some usage notes or extra information.

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:

If you’re learning a right to left language, there are lots of other things to consider. Please see this page for more information

To learn more, please search Google for something like "input Japanese on a mac" or "input german on windows", as there is plenty of good information available.

You can watch a video about reversing cards on YouTube.

If you want to reverse your existing cards, when editing a card, click the Cards button, and then Flip.

If you want to create cards that go in both directions (e.g., both "ookii"→"big" and "big"→"ookii"), you have several options. The simplest is to select the "Basic (and reversed card)" built-in note type. This will generate two cards, one in each direction.

If you want to generate reverse cards for only some of your material (perhaps you only want to take the time to study reverses for the most important material, or some of your cards don’t make sense reversed), you can select the "Basic (optional reversed card)" note type. This note type generates a forward-only card when you fill in only the first two fields; if you additionally enter something in the "Add Reverse" field (like a y), Anki will generate a reverse card as well. The contents of this field will never be displayed on a card.

If you later decide you don’t want a reverse card (or you didn’t create one at first and now want one), you can change it by editing the "Add Reverse" field. If you didn’t select the optional reverse note type to begin with, you can use Edit>Change Note Type in the browser to change it.

If you wish to generate reverse or certain cards only in certain situations with a more complex note type (for instance, one with three cards), please see the conditional replacement section.

The most basic template looks something like this:

When you place text within curly brackets, Anki looks for a field by that name, and replaces the text with the actual content of the field. You can include as many fields as you wish.

Your templates are not limited to a list of fields. You can also include arbitrary text on your templates. For example, if you’re studying capital cities, and you’ve created a note type with a "Country" field, you might create a question like this:

The default back template will look something like this:

This means "show me the text that’s on the question, then a divider line, and then the back field".

You can watch a video about this feature on YouTube.

If you’d like to type in the answer and have Anki compare your input to the real answer, you can do so by changing your template. Imagine your front and back templates look like:

To type in the foreign word and check if you are correct, you need to edit your question template so that it looks like this:

Note that we have added type: in front of the field we want to compare, and it is copied into the answer section as well. If you don’t have FrontSide on the back of your card, you will need to add the same type directive to the answer side as well.

When reviewing, Anki will display a text box where you can type in the answer, and upon hitting enter or showing the answer, Anki will show you which parts you got right and which parts you got wrong. The text box’s font size will be the size you configured for that field (via the "Fields" button when editing).

This feature does not change how the cards are answered, so it’s still up to you to decide how well you remembered or not.

It is also possible to type in the answer for cloze deletion cards. To do this, add the following to both the front and back template:

Unlike regular cards, this must be added to both sides on a cloze note type. If there are multiple sections elided, you can separate the answers in the text box with a comma.

The template language needs a special command to create a new line. For example, if you wrote the following in the template:

In the preview, you’d actually see:

To add a new line, you need to add a <br> code to the end of a line, like so:

The br code stands for "(line) br(eak)".

The same applies for fields. If you want to display two fields, one on each line, you would use

In between the front and back template is the card styling. Here you can change the background colour of the card, the default font, the text alignment, and so on.

The standard options available to you are:

Arbitrary CSS can be placed in the styling section - advanced users may wish to do things like add a background image or gradient for example.

The styling is shared between all cards, which means that when you make an adjustment it will affect all cards for that note type. It is also possible to specify card-specific styling. The following example will use a yellow background on all cards except the first one:

One other thing to note is that Anki shrinks images to fit the screen by default. You can change this by adding the following to the bottom of your styling section:

The default styling applies to the whole card. You can also make certain fields or part of the card use a different font, color, and so on. This is particularly important when studying foreign languages, as Anki will sometimes be unable to correctly display characters unless an appropriate font has been chosen.

Say you have an "Expression" field, and you want to give it the OSX Thai font "Ayuthaya". Imagine your template already reads:

What we need to do is wrap the text we want to style in some HTML. We will put the following in front of the text:

And the following behind it:

By wrapping the text like the above, we tell Anki to style the wrapped text with a custom style called "mystyle1", which we will create later.

Thus if we wanted the entire "What is …?" expression to use the Thai font, we would use:

And if we wanted only the expression field itself to use the Thai font, we’d use:

After we’ve edited the template, we now need to move to the Styling section between the templates. Before editing it, it should look something like:

Add your new style to the bottom, so it looks like:

You can include any styling you want in the style. If you wanted to increase the font size too, you’d change the mystyle1 section to look like:

It’s also possible to bundle custom fonts with your deck, so you don’t need to install them on your computer or mobile device. Please see the installing fonts section for more info.

It’s possible to add a field to the front or back of a card, but make it hidden until you explicitly show it. We call this a hint field. Before adding a hint, please bear in mind that the easier you make it to answer a question in Anki, the less likely you are to remember that question when you encounter it in real life.

First, you’ll need to add a field to store the hint in if you have not already. Please see the fields section if you’re not sure how to do this.

Assuming you’ve created a field called MyField, you can tell Anki to hide it by default by adding the following to your template:

If MyField is blank, nothing will be shown.

If you show the hint on the question and then reveal the answer, the hint will be hidden again. If you want to have the hint always revealed when the answer is shown, you will need to remove {{FrontSide}} from your back template and manually add the fields you wish to appear.

There are some special fields you can include in your templates:

FrontSide will not include any audio that was on the front side of the card. If you wish to have the same audio play on both the front and back of the card, you’ll need to manually include the audio fields on the back as well.

Anki will not create cards with empty front sides. Thus if "My Field" was empty, and one card’s front template included only that field, the card would not be created.

If no cards can be created, then the Add Notes window will warn you and not allow the note to be added until at least one card would be generated.

When you edit a previously added note, Anki will automatically create extra cards if they were previously blank, but no longer so.

If your edits have made some cards blank, Anki will not delete them immediately, as that could lead to accidental data loss. To remove empty cards, in the main window go the Tools menu and choose Maintenance→Empty Cards. You will be shown a list of empty cards and be given the option to delete them.

Anki does not consider special fields or non-field text for the purposes of card generation. Thus if your front template looked like the following, no card would be generated if Country was empty:

Please read the previous section before you read this.

Sometimes you may want to generate extra cards for only some of your material, such as testing your ability to recall the most important words of a set. You can accomplish this by adding an extra field to your note, and adding some text into it (such as "1") on the notes you want the extra card. Then in the card template, you can make the card’s creation depend on that field being non-empty. For more information on this, please see the conditional replacement section below.

Anki does not scan templates for media references, because it is slow to do so. This has implications for including media on the template.

It is possible to include certain text on your cards only if a field is empty or not empty. An example:

A real life example is only showing a label if the field is not empty:

You can also use conditional replacement to control which cards are generated. For example, consider a card with two fields on the front:

Normally a card would be generated if either the expression or notes field had text in it. If you only wanted a card generated if expression was not empty, then you could change the template to this:

And if you wanted to require both fields, you could use two conditional replacements:

Keep in mind that, as mentioned in the card generation section, this only works when you place the conditional replacement code on the 'front' of the card; if you do this on the back, you will simply end up with cards with a blank back side.

The default behaviour can be thought of as an "OR" condition - cards are created if the first field is non-empty, OR the second field is non-empty, and so on. The behaviour above can be thought of as an "AND" condition - cards are created if the first field is non-empty AND the second field is non-empty, and so on.

A caveat: Anki is not currently able to mix AND and OR conditions. Thus the following template, which says "require expression and notes, or field 3", would not work:

Another caveat is that negated expressions can not be used to control card generation. That is, wrapping a template in {{^Field}} will not do what you expect.

Please see the cloze deletion section for background info.

The cloze note type functions differently from regular note types. Instead of a customizable number of card templates, it has a single template which is shared by all cloze deletions on a note.

As mentioned in the card generation section above, generation of regular cards depends on one or more fields on the question being non-empty. Cloze deletion note types are generated differently:

Conditional generation provides a special field so you can check which card you are rendering. If you wanted to display the "hint1" field on the first cloze, and "hint2" field on the second cloze for example, you could use the following template:

Your templates can contain arbitrary HTML, which means that all the layout possibilities used on internet web pages can also be used on your cards. Things like tables, lists, images, links to external pages and so on are all supported. With tables for example, you could change the layout so that the front and back of a card appear on the left and right instead of the top and bottom.

Covering all of HTML’s features is outside the scope of this manual, but there are plenty of good introductory guides to HTML available on the web if you’d like to learn more.

You can also use field replacement to create dictionary links. Imagine you’re studying a language and your favourite online dictionary allows you to search for text using a web URL like:

You could add an automatic link by doing the following in your template:

The template above would allow you to search for each note’s expression by clicking on the link while reviewing. There is a caveat however, so please see the next section.

Like templates, fields are stored in HTML. In the dictionary link example above, if the expression contained the word "myword" without any formatting, then the HTML would be the same: "myword". But when you include formatting in your fields, extra HTML is included. If "myword" was bolded for example, the actual HTML would be "<b>myword</b>".

This can present a problem for things like dictionary links. In the above example, the dictionary link would end up being:

The extra characters in the link would likely confuse the dictionary site, and you’re likely not to get any matches.

To solve this, Anki provides the ability to strip formatting from fields when they are replaced. If you prefix a field name with text:, Anki will not include any formatting. So a dictionary link that worked even with formatted text would be:

It’s not uncommon for {{ and }} to pop up in LaTeX code when writing mathematical equations. To ensure that your LaTeX equations don’t conflict with Anki’s field replacements, it’s possible to change the separator to something else.

For example, if you have a template:

Changing it to the following will make it unlikely that the LaTeX will conflict:

While this most commonly occurs with LaTeX, the solution presented here will work in any situation where you need to include {{ }} on cards, regardless of whether LaTeX is used or not.

If your card templates are complex, it may be difficult to read the question and answer columns (called "Front" and "Back") in the card list. The "browser appearance" option allows you to define a custom template to be used only in the browser, so you can include only the important fields and change the order if you desire. The syntax is the same as in standard card templates.

If you’re learning a language that reads from right to left, you’ll need to adjust the template like so:

If you were linked directly here, please see the start of this section for more information.

Anki defines some special CSS classes that allow you to define different styling for different platforms. The example below shows how to vary the font depending on where you’re reviewing:

And in the template:

You can also use properties like .gecko, .opera, and .ie to select particular browsers when using AnkiWeb. Please see http://rafael.adm.br/css_browser_selector/ for a full list of options.

If you’re using Anki on a work or school computer where you don’t have permission to install new fonts, or you’re using Anki on a mobile device, it’s possible to add fonts directly to Anki.

To add a font to Anki, it must be in the TrueType format. TrueType fonts have a filename ending in .ttf, such as "Arial.ttf". Once you’ve located a TrueType font, we’ll need to add it to the media folder:

After that, we need to update the template:

After that, you can either change the font for the entire card, or for individual fields. To change the font for the entire card, simply locate the font-family: line in the .card section and change the font to "myfont". To change the font for only certain fields, please see the Field Styling instructions above.

If more than one person wants to use Anki on your computer, you can set up a separate profile for each user. Each user profile has their own collection, and own program settings. Profiles are configured by going to the File menu and choosing "Switch Profile".

It’s possible to assign a password to your profile by going to Anki’s preferences window. Your collection is not encrypted, and people can still tamper with the file if they locate it on your hard disk. The password protection is mainly intended to make it harder for students to tamper with each other’s decks and settings in a classroom environment.

While most people will want to stick to one profile per user, it’s possible to use extra profiles for testing purposes or for separating decks you want to keep on AnkiWeb from ones you do not.

The preferences are available from the Tools menu on Windows/Linux, or the Anki menu on a Mac. If you have multiple profiles, any changes you make will apply only to the current profile.

Basic

The Strip HTML option controls whether Anki should strip the formatting from text you paste into the editor. By default, Anki strips the formatting from pasted text so that you can control formatting in your card templates instead. If you’d prefer the formatting to be preserved (so you can paste bolded text, etc), you can uncheck this option.

By default Anki pastes images on the clipboard as JPG files, to save disk space. You can use the Paste clipboard images as PNG option to paste as PNG images instead. PNG images support transparent backgrounds and are lossless, but they usually result in much larger file sizes.

The first drop-down box controls how note types and decks interact. The default of "When adding, default to current deck" means that Anki saves the last-used note type for each deck and selects it again then next time you choose the deck (and, in addition, will start with the current deck selected when choosing Add from anywhere). The other option, "Change deck depending on note type," saves the last-used deck for each note type (and opens the add window to the last-used note type when you choose Add). This may be more convenient if you always use a single note type for each deck.

The second drop-down box controls when new cards are shown: either mixed with, before, or after all reviews.

The Next day starts at option controls when Anki should start showing the next day’s cards. The default setting of 4AM ensures that if you’re studying around midnight, you won’t have two days' worth of cards shown to you in one session. If you stay up very late or wake up very early, you may want to adjust this to a time you’re usually sleeping.

The Learn ahead limit tells Anki how to behave when there is nothing left to study in the current deck but cards in learning. The default setting of 20 minutes tells Anki that cards should be shown early if they have a delay of less than 20 minutes and there’s nothing else to do. If you set this to 0, Anki will always wait the full delay, showing the congratulations screen until the remaining cards are ready to be reviewed.

Timeboxing is a technique to help you focus by dividing a longer activity (such as a 30 minute study session) into smaller blocks. If you set the timebox time limit to a non-zero number of minutes, Anki will periodically show you how many cards you’ve managed to study during the prescribed time limit.

Steps controls the number of learning repetitions, and the delay between them. Please see the learning section for an overview of how the steps work.

Steps over a day (1440 minutes) are supported as well - if you want, you can define a schedule like 10 minutes, 1 day, 3 days and then finally 7 days before the card becomes a review card.

Order controls whether Anki should add new cards into the deck randomly, or in order. When you change this option, Anki will re-sort the decks using the current option group. One caveat with random order mode: if you review many of your new cards and then add more new cards, the newly added material is statistically more likely to appear than the previously remaining cards. To correct this, you can change the order to ordered mode and back again to force a re-sort.

New cards/day tells Anki how many new cards you’d like introduced on each day you open the program. Missed days will not cause the cards to pile up. The limit applies to the current deck and subdecks. This means if "French" has a limit of 20 cards and "French::Lesson 1" and "French::Lesson 2" both have limits of 15 cards, you’ll get 15 cards from lesson 1 but only 5 cards from lesson 2.

Graduating interval is the delay between answering Good on a card with no steps left, and seeing the card again.

Easy interval is the delay between answering easy on a card and seeing it again.

Starting ease controls the easiness that cards start out with. It is set when you see a card for the first time. It defaults to 250%, meaning that once you’ve finished learning a card, answering "Good" on subsequent reviews will increase the delay by approximately 2.5x (eg if the last delay was 10 days, the next delay would be 25 days). Based upon how you rate the card in subsequent reviews, the easiness may increase or decrease from what it starts out as.

When Try not to show… is checked, Anki will try not to introduce two new cards of the same note next to each other, as seeing one card may make it easier to answer another card.

Maximum reviews/day allows you to set an upper limit on the number of reviews to show each day. When this limit is reached, Anki will not show any more review cards for the day, even if there are some waiting. If you study consistently, this setting can help to smooth out occasional peaks in due card counts, and can save you from a heart attack when returning to Anki after a week off. When reviews have been hidden due to this option, a message will appear in the congratulations screen, suggesting you consider increasing the limit if you have time.

When you answer a review card, Anki tries to place it for review on a day that doesn’t have any other cards of the same note. The space siblings setting tells Anki how far it may adjust the ideal interval in order to keep siblings separated. The default 5% means that if a card has an interval of 100 days, Anki will consider increasing the interval by +/- 5 days.

The minimum sibling range allows you to force a minimum number of days to consider. With the default setting above, an interval of 10 days at 5% would be less than a day, so Anki would not be able to increase or decrease the interval at all. The minimum sibling range allows you to force a minimum range to consider with small intervals. At its default of 1 day, Anki will consider scheduling the card one day more or less than it normally would. If you have more than two cards in a note type, you may want to increase this.

Easy bonus allows you to set the difference in intervals between answering Good and Easy on a card.

Interval modifier allows you to apply a multiplication factor to the intervals Anki generates. At its default of 100% it does nothing; if you set it to 80% for example, intervals will be generated at 80% of their normal size (so a 10 day interval would become 8 days). You can thus use the multiplier to make Anki present cards more or less frequently than it would otherwise, trading study time for retention or vice versa.

For moderately difficult material, the average user should find they remember approximately 90% of mature cards that come up for review. You can find out your own performance by opening the graphs/statistics for a deck and looking at the Answer Buttons graph - mature retention is the correct% on the right side of the graph. If you haven’t been studying long you may not have any mature cards yet. As performance with new cards and younger cards can vary considerably, it’s a good idea to wait until you have a reasonable amount of mature reviews before you start drawing conclusions about your retention rate.

On the SuperMemo website, they suggest that you can find an appropriate multiplier for a desired retention rate. Their formula boils down to:

Imagine we have a current retention rate of 85% and we want to increase it to 90%. We’d calculate the modifier as:

You can use Google to calculate it for you.

If you plug the resulting 65% into the interval modifier, you should find over time that your retention moves closer to your desired retention.

One important thing to note however is that the tradeoff between time spent studying and retention is not linear: we can see here that to increase our retention by 5 percentage points, we’d have to study 35% more frequently. If the material you are learning is very important then it may be worth the extra effort - that’s something you’ll need to decide for yourself. If you’re simply worried that you’re forgetting too much, you may find investing more time into the initial learning stage and/or making mnemonics gives you more gain for less effort.

One final thing to note is that Anki forces a new interval to be at least 1 day longer than it was previously so that you don’t get stuck reviewing with the same interval forever. If your goal is to repeat a card once a day for multiple days, you can do that by setting more learning mode steps instead of by adjusting this modifier.

Maximum interval allows you to place an upper limit on the time Anki will wait to reshow a card. The default is 100 years; you can decrease this to a smaller number if you’re willing to trade extra study time for higher retention.

When you forget a review card, it is said to have lapsed. The default behaviour for lapsed reviews is to reset the interval to 1 (ie, make it due tomorrow), and put it in the learning queue for a refresher in 10 minutes. This behaviour can be customized with the options listed below.

If you leave the steps blank, Anki will not place the card back in the learning queue, and it will be rescheduled as a review with its new interval determined by the settings below.

New interval controls how much Anki should reduce the previous interval by. If the card had a 100 day interval, the default of 0% would reduce the interval to 0 (but see the next option). If you set this option to 20%, the card would have its interval reduced to 20 days instead.

Minimum interval allows you to apply a minimum limit to the above option. The default setting says that lapses should be reviewed one day later. The interval must be 1 day or more.

The leech options control the way Anki handles leeches. Please see the leech section for more information.

Anki monitors how long it takes you to answer each question so that it can show you how long was spent studying each day. The time taken does not influence scheduling. If you take longer than 60 seconds, Anki assumes you have walked away from your computer or have been distracted, and limits the recorded time to 60 seconds, so that you don’t end up with inaccurate statistics. The ignore answer times… option allows you to adjust the cutoff threshold. The minimum cutoff is 30 seconds.

If show answer timer is checked, Anki will display the current time taken for each card in the study area.

By default, Anki automatically plays audio on the front and back of cards. If you uncheck automatically play audio, Anki will not play audio until you click the replay audio button.

The when answer shown, replay both question and answer audio option controls what happens when you choose to replay audio while the answer is shown. Please note that it does not control what happens when you show the answer; for that please see this section.

This section allows you to edit the deck description, which is shown in the study overview. The description is automatically set when downloading shared decks. You can delete all the text in the description if you no longer want to see it in the study overview area.

To start syncing your collection across devices, click the sync button (the top right one on the main screen), or press y on your keyboard. You’ll be prompted for your AnkiWeb ID and password, which you created in the signup process.

When you synchronize your collection for the first time, Anki will not be able to merge the content stored on AnkiWeb and the content stored on your computer, so you’ll need to choose which side you’d like to keep. Once the initial setup is completed however, Anki will be able to merge changes from multiple locations with a few exceptions.

Once syncing is enabled, Anki will automatically sync each time your collection is closed or opened. If you would prefer to synchronize manually, you can disable automatic syncing in Anki’s preferences.

Anki will synchronize any sounds and images used by your notes. It will notice when media has been added or removed from your media folder, but will not notice if you have edited some existing files without adding or removing any. To get your edits noticed, you need to add or remove a file as well.

Reviews and note edits can be merged, so if you review or edit on two different devices before syncing, Anki will preserve your changes from both locations. If the same card has been reviewed in two different locations, both reviews will be marked in the revision history, and the card will be kept in the state it was when it was most recently answered.

There are certain changes that Anki is unable to merge. These mainly relate to the format of notes: things like adding a new field, or removing a card template. When you perform an operation that can’t be merged, Anki will warn you, and give you the option of aborting the operation. If you choose to continue, you’ll be asked to choose whether to keep the local copy or the copy on AnkiWeb when your collection is next synchronized.

If you wish to force a full upload or download (because you accidentally deleted a deck on one side for example, and want to restore the deck rather than having its deletion synchronized), then you can use Tools>Maintenance>Full Sync.

Anki syncs over secure HTTP connections. If you need a proxy to access the internet, Anki should automatically pick up your system proxy settings if you’re on Windows or OS X, and will honour the HTTP_PROXY environment variable if you’re on another platform.

Please note that advanced proxy setup via .pac or .wpad files is not supported in Anki.

To override the system proxy settings on Windows or OS X, define a HTTP_PROXY environmental variable that points to the proxy server. It will look like:

If your username or password contains an @ (eg user@workdomain.com), you need to change it to %40, like so:

If for some reason Anki is unable to pick up your system settings on Windows, please use an environmental variable instead, as described above.

The sidebar on the left allows quick access to common search terms. Various search terms as described below are listed, along with all deck names and tag names. Clicking on an item will search for it. You can hold down ctrl (command on a Mac) and click in order to append the clicked item to the current search, instead of starting a new search. If you wanted to show learning cards in the German deck for instance, you could click on "Learning", then ctrl+click on "German". You can also hold down alt (option on a Mac) in order to reverse the search (prepend a -).

Above the card list is a search box. You can type in various things there to search for cards.

The card list displays cards that match the current search.

The columns are configurable: right click on one (or ctrl+click on a Mac) to choose which columns you’d like to see. You can drag columns to reorder them. Clicking on a column will sort by that column; click again to reverse the sort order. Not all columns can be sorted on.

When you click on a card, its note will be shown in the bottom section. If you drag the mouse or hold ctrl or command to select multiple cards, the editor will be temporarily hidden. Various operations (such as changing the deck) can operate on multiple cards at once.

The background colour will change depending on the card. Marked cards are a shade of purple. Suspended cards are a shade of yellow. For more information about marked and suspended cards, please see editing and more.

One of the available columns is called the sort field. Anki allows you to choose one field from each type of note to be used for sorting. You can change the sort field by clicking on "Fields…" in the current note section.

The question and answer columns display what you’d see on the question and answer while reviewing, except the answer column will strip the question part for clarity. You can also choose a custom format in the card template editor instead of showing what would be seen during review.

The bottom right area displays the currently selected card’s note. For more information about cards and notes, please see the basics. For more information on formatting buttons, please see editing.

Up the top of the browser window is the toolbar.

Info shows various information about the currently selected card, including its review history. For more information, see the statistics section.

Mark and Suspend are documented in editing and more.

Change Deck allows you to move cards to a different deck. Cards can be placed in different decks, so if you want to move all cards in a note, you should first use Edit > Select Notes.

Add Tags and Remove Tags allow you to add or remove tags in bulk.

Delete removes the selected card(s) and their notes. It is not possible to remove individual cards, as individual cards are controlled by the templates.

This option (Edit>Find and Replace) allows you to replace text in the cards you have selected. The regular expression option allows you to perform complex replacements. For example, given the following text on a card:

Searching for:

And replacing with the regexp:

Will change the card to:

A full discussion on regular expressions is outside the scope of this document. There are a number of tutorials available on the web. Please see http://docs.python.org/library/re.html for the particular format Anki uses.

You can use the Edit>Find Duplicates option to search for notes that have the same content. When you open the window, Anki will look at all of your note types and present a list of all possible fields. If you want to look for duplicates in the "Back" field, you’d select it from the list and then click "Search".

Unlike the check that happens when you add cards manually, the duplicate finding feature is not limited to a single note type. This means that by default, it will search in all note types that have the field you provided.

The search area allows you to narrow down where Anki will look for duplicates. If you only want to search for duplicates in the "French Vocab" and "French Verbs" note types, you would enter:

The search syntax is the same as used when searching in the browser. Please see the searching section for more information.

Some other items in the Edit menu:

Reschedule allows you to move cards to the end of the new card queue, or reschedule them as a review card on a given date. The second option is useful if you have imported already-learnt material, and you want to start it off with higher initial intervals. For example, choosing 60 and 90 will give all the imported cards an initial interval of 2 to 3 months.

The card’s revision history is not cleared when rescheduling: rescheduling changes the current state of a card, but not its history. If you want to hide the history, you will need to export your notes as a text file, delete the notes, and then import the text file again, creating new notes.

Reposition allows you to change the order new cards will appear in. You can find out the existing positions by enabling the due column, as described in the card list section above. If you run the reposition command when multiple cards are selected, it will apply increasing numbers to each card in turn. By default the number increases by one for each card, but this can be adjusted by changing the "step" setting.

Change Note Type allows you to convert the selected notes from one type to another type, and/or convert between card templates. For example, imagine you have a Russian note type and a Computer note type, and you accidentally added some computer-related text into a Russian note. You can use this option to fix that mistake. The progress of cards is not reset.

Select Notes takes the currently selected cards, finds their notes, and then selects all cards of those notes. If your notes have only one card, this does nothing.

The Go menu exists to provide keyboard shortcuts to jump to various parts of the browser, and to go up and down the card list.

The easiest way to create a filtered deck is with the Custom Study button, which appears at the bottom of the screen when you click on a deck. It offers some convenient presets for common tasks like reviewing the cards you’ve failed that day. It will create a filtered deck called "Custom Study Session" and automatically open it for you.

If an existing "Custom Study Session" deck exists, it will be emptied before a new one is created. If you wish to keep a custom study deck, you can rename it from the deck list.

Here is a summary of each of the options:

When a card is moved to a filtered deck, it retains a link to the deck it was in previously. That previous deck is said to be the card’s home deck.

Cards automatically return to their home deck after they are studied in the filtered deck. This can be after a single review, or after multiple reviews, depending on your settings.

It is also possible to move all cards back to their home decks at once:

Advanced users can create filtered decks with arbitrary search strings, instead of relying on set presets. To create a filtered deck manually, choose Create Filtered Deck from the Tools menu.

When you click the Build button, Anki finds cards that match the settings you specified, and temporarily moves them from their existing decks into your new filtered deck for study.

If you wish to fetch cards again using the same filter options (for instance, if you want to study all cards with a particular tag every day), you can use the Rebuild button at the bottom of the deck’s overview screen.

The search area controls what cards Anki will gather. All of the searches possible in the browser are also possible for filtered decks, such as limiting to tags, finding cards forgotten a certain number of times, and so on. Please see the searching section of the manual for more information on the different possibilities.

The limit option controls how many cards will be gathered into the deck. The order you select controls both the order cards are gathered in, and the order they will be reviewed in. If you select "most lapses" and a limit of 20 for example, then Anki will show you only the 20 most lapsed cards.

For efficiency reasons, if your cram deck contains more than 1000 cards, only 1000 cards will be shown as due on the deck list and study screens.

The "cards selected by" option controls the order that cards will appear in. If the maximum number of cards you select is lower than the number of cards that match the filter criteria, Anki will exclude the cards at the end of this sorted list first.

Please see the section on learning as a reminder of how steps work.

By default, Anki will use the steps of a card’s home deck. If a new card would normally be reviewed twice when being learnt, the same thing will happen when you study it in a filtered deck.

Cards return to their home deck when (re)learning is complete. Thus if you have 3 learning steps, a new card will return to its home deck upon three presses of "Good" or a single press of "Easy".

The custom steps option allows you to override the home deck’s steps and provide your own steps instead. The provided steps apply to both cards being learnt, lapsed reviews, and reviews ahead of time.

In a filtered deck, reviews that were already due are displayed as the review count as normal. Learning cards and non-due reviews are counted in the new card count, due to how the underlying implementation works.

If the filtered deck includes cards that were due for review, they will be shown like they would have been in their original deck - they appear in the review card count at the bottom of the screen, and there are four choices for how well you remembered. Upon a correct answer, the card will be moved back to its home deck, and its next delay adjusted using the home deck’s settings. If you forget the card, it will be shown according to the relearning steps defined in the home deck.

If your search included cards that are not due, Anki will show the reviews ahead of time. Anki uses a special algorithm for these reviews that takes into account how early you are reviewing.

Early reviews are included in the new card count rather than the review count, and will be shown according to the number of relearning steps defined in the home deck (unless you have provided custom steps). This means that if you have customized the number of relearning steps in the home deck, the non-due card may be shown more than once.

If you have multiple steps, Anki will only consider the first answer when deciding the next delay, and like relearning in normal decks, "Good" and "Easy" differ only in the step change and not the resulting delay.

By default, Anki will return cards to their home decks with altered scheduling based on your performance in the filtered deck. If you disable the reschedule cards based on my answers option, Anki will return the cards in the same state they were in when they were moved into the filtered deck. This is useful for quickly flipping through material.

If you have disabled rescheduling, the "Good" and "Easy" buttons will display no time above them when pressing them would cause the card to return to its home deck with its original scheduling.

Please note that new cards are returned to the end of the new card queue, rather than the start of it.

Filtered decks can be useful for catching up when you’ve fallen behind in your reviews. One Anki user describes the way they use the filtered decks to catch up as follows:

Some leeches are caused by interference. For example, an English learner may have recently learnt the words "disappoint" and "disappear". As they look similar, the learner may find themselves confusing the two when trying to answer. In these situations, it’s often productive to concentrate on just one idea. When that idea is firmly ingrained in your mind, you can then return to learning the other idea. So in these situations, you may want to leave one of the words suspended until you have learnt the other one well, and then unsuspend it in the browser.

Another way to manage leeches is to delete them. Consider if the material you’re struggling with is important enough to make it worth your while. By selectively deleting difficult and obscure items, you can dedicate more time to learning other material, and studying becomes a lot more fun.

Another approach is to change the way the information is presented. Perhaps the cards you have created have too much information on them, or perhaps you’re trying to memorize something without fully understanding it. Sometimes spending some time changing the way the card is phrased can help. It’s also a good time to think about making a mnemonic to help you remember.

Any plain text file that contains fields separated by commas, semicolons or tabs can be imported into Anki, provided some conditions are met.

Fields in your text file can be mapped to any field in your notes, including the tags field. You can choose which field in the text file corresponds to which field in the note when you import.

When you import a text file, you can choose what deck to put the cards in. Keep in mind that if you have the deck override option set for one or more of your templates, the cards will go to that deck rather than the one you’ve selected.

This is an example of a valid file:

There are two ways to include newlines in fields.

Escape the multi-lines:

Use HTML new lines:

Note that you need to turn on the "allow HTML in fields" checkbox in the import dialog for this to work.

This is an example of a valid file where the first line is ignored (#):

If you have non-Latin characters in your file (such as accents, Japanese and so on), Anki expects files to be saved in a UTF-8 encoding. The easiest way to do this is to use the free LibreOffice spreadsheet program instead of Excel to edit your file, as it supports UTF-8 easily, and also exports multi-line content properly, unlike Excel. If you wish to keep using Excel, please see this forum post for more information.

To save your spreadsheet to a file Anki can read with LibreOffice, go to File>Save As, and then select CSV for the type of file. After accepting the default options, LibreOffice will save the file and you can then import the saved file into Anki.

Anki can treat text imported from text files as HTML (the language used for web pages). This means that text with bold, italics and other formatting can be exported to a text file and imported again. If you want to include HTML formatting, you can check the "allow HTML in fields" checkbox when importing. You may wish to turn this off if you’re trying to import cards whose content contains angle brackets or other HTML syntax.

If you wish to use HTML for formatting your file but also wish to include angle brackets, you may write them differently: * < - &lt; * > - &gt;

If you want to include audio and pictures from a text file import, copy the files into the collection.media folder. Do not put subdirectories in the media folder, or some features will not work.

After you’ve copied the files, change one of the fields in your text file as follows.

or

Alternatively, you can use the find & replace feature to update all the fields at once. If each field contains text like "myaudio", and you wish to make it play a sound, you’d search for (.*) and replace it with "[sound:\1.mp3]", with the regular expressions option enabled.

You might be tempted to do this in a template, like:

Anki doesn’t support this for two reasons: searching for used media is expensive, as each card has to be rendered, and such functionality isn’t obvious to shared deck users. Please use the find & replace technique instead.

If you want to add tag1 and tag2 to every line you’re importing, add the following to the top of the text file:

Anki uses the first field to determine if a note is unique. If the file you are importing has a first field that matches one of the existing notes in your collection and that existing note is the same type as the type you’re importing, the existing note’s other fields will be updated based on content of the imported file.

If you choose "Notes in Plain Text", Anki will write the contents of the notes into a text file. Each field is separated by a tab. If you edit the resulting file and don’t modify the first field, you can later import that file back into Anki and Anki will update your notes based on your edits, provided you import back into the same note type.

If you find yourself needing to edit the first field as well, you’ll need to change the format of your note type so that the first field is an ID number rather than actual text. (You can install the "Add note id" plugin to make this easier.)

In order for formatting to be preserved when you import text back in, the text is exported with all the HTML formatting embedded in it.

A packaged deck consists of cards, notes, note types and any sounds or images bundled up into a file ending with .apkg. You can use packaged decks to transfer cards between people, or for backing up parts of your collection. A packaged deck is compressed, so it will be smaller than the sum of the files in your profile folder.

There are two different kinds of packaged decks.

It’s a good idea to occasionally check your collection file for problems. You can do this via the Tools>Maintenance>Check Database menu item. Checking the database ensures the file is not corrupted, rebuilds some internal structures, and optimizes the file.

When you check the database, your tag list is also rebuilt. When you delete individual decks or cards, Anki does not update the list of used tags, as it’s inefficient to do so. If you want to clear old tags out from the list that are no longer in use, checking your database is the way to do it.

Please note that Anki will automatically optimize your collection once every 2 weeks. This optimization ensures the collection performs well, but it does not check for errors or rebuild the tag list when automatically optimizing.

On Windows and OSX, Anki stores all of its files in an Anki folder, located in your Documents folder. On other operating systems, your files are stored in ~/Anki by default.

Within the Anki folder, the program-level and profile-level preferences are stored in a file called prefs.db.

There is also a separate folder for each profile. The folder contains:

You can specify a custom folder location by starting Anki with a command line like so:

If you always want to use a custom folder location, you can modify your shortcut to Anki. On Windows, right-click on the shortcut, choose Properties, select the Shortcut tab, and add "-b \path\to\data\folder" after the path to the program, which should leave you with something like "C:\Program Files\Anki\anki.exe -b C:\AnkiDataFolder". You can also use this technique with the -l option to easily use Anki in different languages.

Anki can be installed on a flash drive and run as a portable application:

If you would like to prevent the black command prompt window from remaining open, you can instead use:

Each time your collection is closed (when closing Anki, switching profiles, or synchronizing your deck), Anki exports your collection into the backups folder. By default Anki will store up to 30 backups; you can adjust this in the preferences.

Automatic backups do not protect against disk or computer failure, and do not extend to your media. To keep your collections safe, please consider making manual backups too.

The easiest way to take a manual backup is to back up your entire Anki folder. Please make sure you close Anki first, as backups may be corrupt if run while Anki is open.

To restore from a backup, simply close Anki, open Documents/Anki/<profile name>/backups, and double-click on the most recent backup in order to import it. If you use AnkiWeb, after restoring your deck, please use Tools>Maintenance>Full Sync and force an upload of the restored collection to AnkiWeb.

If Anki can’t write to files in the Anki folder, a message will be displayed on startup saying that Anki can’t write to the harddisk, and Anki will close. If you’re unsure how to fix the permissions, please contact someone near you who is knowledgable about computers and can help you out.

Anki uses a file format that is robust against program and computer crashes, but it’s still possible for your collection to become corrupt if the files are modified while Anki is open, stored on a network drive, or corrupted by a bug.

When you run Tools>Check Database, you will receive a message if Anki detects the file has been corrupted. The best way to recover from this is to restore from the most recent automatic backup, but if your backup is too old, then you can attempt to repair the corruption instead.

On Linux, make sure sqlite3 is installed. On a Mac, it should be installed already. On Windows, download http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-3_6_23.zip.

Next, create a backup of your collection.anki2 file, in case something goes wrong with the steps below.

Linux/OSX

Open a terminal, change to the folder your collection is located in, and type:

Make sure you use temp.file - do not put collection.anki2 on the right, or you will blank out the file. When you’re done, proceed to the final step.

Windows

Copy the sqlite3.exe program and your deck to your desktop. Then go to Start>Run and type in cmd.exe.

If you’re on a recent Windows, the command prompt may not start on your desktop. If you don’t see desktop displayed in the command prompt, type something like the following, replacing administrator with your login name.

Then type:

Make sure you use temp.file - do not put collection.anki2 on the right, or you will blank out the file. When you’re done, proceed to the final step.

Final Step

Check that you didn’t get an error message, and that temp.file is not empty. The procedure optimizes the collection in the process, so it’s normal for the new file to be somewhat smaller than the old one.

When you’ve confirmed the file is not empty, copy it over collection.anki2, making sure you still have a backup of the original version. Then start Anki and go to Tools>Check DB to make sure the collection has been successfully restored.

You can display information about a card by clicking the Info button in the toolbar while browsing. Most of the displayed information should be self-explanatory. A few notes:

The statistics window is accessed by clicking on the graphs icon in the top right of the main window, or by pressing Shift+S. The statistics window will show statistics from the currently selected deck and any subdecks. If you click on "collection" on the bottom left, statistics will be shown for your entire collection instead.

By default Anki will show you statistics for the previous month. You can change this to a year scope or deck life scope at the bottom.

Clicking on "Save Image" will save an image of the statistics to a file and open it in your default image editor, to make it easy to share your statistics with others.

The stats window uses some terms that you may not be familiar with:

Anki’s LaTeX support is not turn-key: it is assumed that you know how to use LaTeX already, and that you have it installed. If you have no experience with LaTeX, please consult one of the many guides available on the internet. If you are having trouble with markup, please ask on a LaTeX forum.

To install LaTeX, on Windows use MiKTeX; on OSX use MacTex, and on Linux use your distro’s package manager. Dvipng must also be installed.

When you review a card with LaTeX on it, Anki will generate an image for that LaTeX and place the image in your collection’s media folder for future use. The web & mobile clients will display these images if they already exist, but can not generate the images on their own.

To avoid having to review all your cards at least once before you can study on the other clients, Anki can generate the images in bulk for you. To generate all the images, please go to Tools>Maintenance>Unused Media. After that, syncing should upload the generated media to AnkiWeb and the other clients.

The most general way to input LaTeX content is to surround it with [latex][/latex] tags. There’s a shortcut button for this documented in the editor section.

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

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:

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

can be shortened to

and expressions of the form

can be shortened to

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

and

respectively.

Anki allows you to customize the LaTeX preamble so you can import custom packages for chemistry, music and so on. For example, imagine you find an example file for chemtex on the internet:

Firstly, follow the documentation of the package and MiKTeX/MacTex in order to install the package. To check the package is working, you’ll want to put code like the above into a .latex file and test you can compile it from the command line. Once you’ve confirmed that the package is available and working, we can integrate it with Anki.

To use the package with Anki, click "Add" in the main window, then click the note type selection button. Click the "Manage" button, then select the note type you plan to use and click "Options". The LaTeX header and footer are shown. The header will look something like:

To use chemtex, you’d add the usepackage line in the earlier example, so it looks like:

After that, you should be able to include lines like the following in your Anki cards:

On Windows/Linux you can hold down the alt key and press a highlighted letter to activate a particular menu.

OS X doesn’t support this feature, but it does allow you to assign shortcuts to specific menu items instead. Please see http://lifehacker.com/343328/create-a-keyboard-shortcut-for-any-menu-action-in-any-program for more information.

Sometimes you may be asked to use the debug console to change a setting or check something. Unless asked to enter text in the "debug console", you will probably not need this. Advanced users may like to read more about it in the add-ons page, linked below.

When asked to enter text into the "debug console", please start Anki, and in the main window, press Ctrl+: (that is the control key and colon key at the same time), or on a Mac, Command+: (command key and colon key at the same time). When you do so, a new window should pop up.

In the window that has popped up, please paste the text you were asked to paste in the top section. When you’ve done so, please press Ctrl+Return (Command+Return on a Mac), and some text should appear in the bottom section. If you’ve been asked to paste the resulting output, please copy it from the bottom area, and paste it back to the support person.

To share decks with other people, synchronize them with AnkiWeb, then click on "Share" from the menu next to the deck you wish to share.

If you shared a deck previously (including with previous versions of Anki), you can update it by clicking "Share" as above. Please ensure the name of the deck in your account exactly matches the name shown in the shared deck listing, or you’ll end up creating a new shared deck rather than updating the old one. Updating a shared deck will not reset the download counts or ratings. You can delete a shared deck that you have uploaded using the Delete button on the shared deck’s page.

To share a deck privately, use File>Export and export in the packaged Anki deck format (including media if necessary). You can then place the resulting deck.apkg file on a private website for people to download, or mail it to the relevant people.

Both desktop and mobile clients make it easy to import from an apkg file simply by clicking on it. AnkiWeb does not have the ability to import apkg files however, so the recipients of your deck will need to have the desktop client or Anki on their smartphone.

When a user imports a .apkg file, any new cards will be added, but deletions and edits will not sync across, so currently if you notice a mistake, you will need to contact the deck users about it.

Please see the add-on documentation above.

Translations can be done directly from the translation website.

Launchpad will guess which languages you can translate based on the country you’re connecting from. If the language you want to translate to doesn’t appear, sign up for a launchpad account, and in your profile, click the ! next to preferred languages to the language you want to translate.

There are some special markers in text that you need to be aware of, and careful when translating:

Sometimes it will not be clear what a string refers to, and you may want to see the context. Below every string to be translated, you’ll see a line like this:

If you strip off the first "../dtop" section, you’re left with something like "aqt/deckbrowser.py:299". You can then visit https://github.com/dae/anki/, locate the same filename, and click on it. The file will be displayed with line numbers on the left, and by matching up the line numbers (they may differ by a few lines sometimes), you may be able to get a better understanding of what the string refers to.

If you see forms in the string like the above example, the strings will generally be obvious. If you do need to understand the context however, things are a little more complicated, as those files are automatically generated from an interface description instead. Please go to https://github.com/dae/anki/tree/master/designer and locate the same filename and click on it. We can’t rely on line numbers in this case, so please use the browser’s find option to find the string in the file. The lines immediately surrounding the found text may give a clue as to its meaning.

If you find a string that you’re unsure how to translate, or would like to start a discussion with fellow native speakers on the best way to translate something, please feel free to start a thread in the Anki forums.

Any translations that were made at least a few hours before a new Anki release are automatically included in the next release. If you’d like to see your name in the About screen as a contributor, please drop Damien a line.

If you’d like to try out your translations without waiting for a new release, you can export a .mo file from the translation website. If you then move that .mo file into Anki’s installation folder, overwriting an existing .mo file with the same language code (in the locale folder), Anki will display the new translations when it is next started.

If you’re a fairly technical user, you may want to translate the source file of the manual, and compile it yourself with asciidoc. You can also use that github repo to keep track of changes to the manual in the future.

If that sounds complicated, an easier way is to visit this page and use File>Save As to save the manual to disk. You can then import it into Microsoft Word or similar software, and translate it that way.

When you’re happy with the translation, you can either put it up on your website and I can link to it, or I can host the translated file on Anki’s website (but if you’re planning to make frequent updates, the former is a better choice).

Anki’s source code is available at http://github.com/dae

If you have bugfixes or believe your changes would benefit many people, please have a look at the LICENSE file, and if you agree to the license, drop Damien an email or a Github pull request.

When you use Anki every day, each time a card is answered correctly, it gets a bigger interval. Let’s assume that good about doubles the interval. Thus you have a 5 day wait, then a 10 day wait, 20 days, 40 days, and so on.

When people return to their deck after weeks or months of no study, they’re often surprised by the length intervals have grown to. This is because Anki considers the actual time the card was unseen, not just the time it was scheduled for. Thus if the card was scheduled for 5 days but you didn’t study for a month, the next interval will be closer to 60 days than 10 days.

This is a good thing. If you have successfully remembered a card after a one month wait, chances are you’ll remember it again after a longer wait, too. The same principles which make SRS effective in normal use apply when you’re studying after a delay, too. It also makes little sense to schedule a card for 10 days in the future if you were able to easily answer it after a whole month’s wait - you’d be going backwards.

Resetting the deck is an even worse solution. When returning to a deck after a long absence, you may have forgotten many of your cards, but chances are you haven’t forgotten them all. Resetting the entire deck means you have to waste time studying material you already know.

Now you may find cards that you were able to recall, but not comfortably, since they were not reviewed when they should have been. To counter this, Anki treats the delay differently depending on your answer. If you find a card easy, the last interval plus the full delay are added together, and then used to calculate the next interval. When you answer good, only half the delay is used. And when you answer hard, only a quarter of the delay is used. So if a card was due in 5 days, and it’s answered 20 days late, the next times you’d end up with are approximately:

(the factors will actually vary depending on your performance in the deck)

If you find a card hard, the next interval is quite conservative and is less than the last wait (25 days). If you find it good, the next interval is only about 50% higher. And easy increases the interval aggressively as usual.

So it is recommended that you study as normal when you return to Anki after a period of absence. But if you absolutely must reset the deck, you can select the cards to reset in the browser, and use Edit>Reschedule.

Multiple choice questions are a poor review tool for a number of reasons. The reason they are commonly used in an academic setting is because they are easy to mark, and they allow the person studying to demonstrate their ability to recognize the correct answer even if they can’t produce it themselves.

Furthermore, good multiple choice questions have well chosen "distractors" - answers that are similar to the correct answer. A computer can look for similary spelt words, but it is not capable of chosing good distractors for more complicated topics.

If you are studying for a test and you have a sample test with a multiple choice question like the following:

Then that question should be rewritten in Anki as follows:

Or you can add your own choices:

Anki supports links between cards of a note, but not between unrelated cards. Imagine are you studying Japanese and aiming to be able to both recognize and reproduce the Japanese. You may enter the word "ookii", which means "big", and tell Anki to generate two cards - ookii→big and big→ookii.

In the above situation Anki can space reviews of those two sibling cards out so that they don’t appear one after the other (see "delayed cards" in the link at the top of this document).

Some people want to extend this link between arbitrary cards. They want to be able to tell Anki "after showing me this card, show me that card", or "don’t show me that card until I know this card well enough". This might sound like a nice idea in theory, but in practice it is not practical.

For one, unlike the sibling card case above, you would have to define all the relations yourself. Entering new notes into Anki would become a complicated process, as you’d have to search through the rest of the deck and assign relationships between the old and new material.

Secondly, remember that Anki is using an algorithm to determine when the optimum time to show you material again is. Adding constraints to card display that cause cards to display earlier or later than they were supposed to will make the spaced repetition system less effective, leading to more work than necessary, or forgotten cards.

The most effective way to use Anki is to make each note you see independent from other notes. Instead of trying to join similar words together, you’ll be better off if you can determine the differences between them. Synonyms are rarely completely interchangeable - they tend to have nuances attached, and it’s not unusual for a sentence to become strange if one synonym is replaced with another.

Continuing with the Japanese example earlier, imagine you want to learn the word "dekai", which also roughly translates to "big", but is a more colloquial expression. If you still want to review in both directions, you might make the English prompt of this word "big (more casual)". The further you progress in your language studies though, the more of a burden it becomes to define the differences between similar words, which is why cards asking you to produce a particular word are best left to the early stage of your studies. With a strong base vocabulary, moving towards recognition-based study makes more sense, as we all have a much larger passive vocabulary than our active vocabulary.

As for ensuring that difficult material is introduced after easier material, a number of existing tools are available. New cards are by default introduced in the order they are added to the deck, so as long as the learning materials or sources of information you are using are adequately graded for your level, material should appear in order of easiness.

Notes are designed to represent closely related information, and to make it easy to reorganize where that information appears on a card. In the context of language learning, notes are useful for representing things like a phrase-translation pair, a phrase-translation-reading triplet, and so on. All of these relationships are 1:1 - a given phrase has only one reading, and one translation. (1)

Because of their ability to tie related pieces of information together, some people try to use notes to tie less closely related information in their deck together. For example, if they come across two sentences with the word "completely":

Then they put those two sentences in the same note, under the rationale that since they share a word, they are related. But what if the user comes across another example sentence?

That sentence shares the word "confused" with a previous sentence. So should it be in the note for "confused"? Or the note for "completely"? Or both?

Unlike the phrase-translation pairs mentioned above, if you say sentences are related if they share a word, then sentences have a many:many relationship. That is, sentence A may be related to sentence B and C, sentence B may be related to A and D, and so on. Because the relationships are complex and overlapping, notes are not a good way to represent them.

There seem to be two main reasons people try to represent such relationships in notes:

(1) It is possible for different people to translate the same phrase in different ways, and different dialects may read the same word differently, but that is not relevant to the discussion.

Sorry, AnkiWeb is only available as a hosted service.

Working on Anki desktop, AnkiWeb and AnkiMobile is my full time job, and I need some way of paying the bills. Since I make the desktop & web versions available for free, I rely on sales of the iPhone app in order to finance development.

AnkiDroid is written by a separate group of volunteers. Since they based it on the free desktop version I make available (and rely on AnkiWeb in order to synchronize decks), they decided to make it freely available as well.

Anki was originally based on the SuperMemo SM5 algorithm. However, Anki’s default behaviour of revealing the next interval before answering a card revealed some fundamental problems with the SM5 algorithm. The key difference between SM2 and later revisions of the algorithm is this:

The latter approach promises to choose more accurate intervals by factoring in not just a single card’s performance, but the performance as a group. If you are very consistent in your studies and all cards are of a very similar difficulty, this approach can work quite well. However, once inconsistencies are introduced into the equation (cards of varying difficulty, not studying at the same time every day), SM3+ is more prone to incorrect guesses at the next interval - resulting in cards being scheduled too often or too far in the future.

Furthermore, as SM3+ dynamically adjusts the "optimum factors" table, a situation can often arise where answering "hard" on a card can result in a longer interval than answering "easy" would give. The next times are hidden from you in SuperMemo so the user is never aware of this.

After evaluating the alternatives, the Anki author decided that near-optimum intervals yielded by an SM2 derivative are better than trying to obtain optimum intervals at the risk of incorrect guesses. An SM2 approach is predictable and intuitive to end users, whereas an SM3+ approach hides the details from the user and requires users to trust the system (even when the system may make mistakes in the scheduling).

Anki’s algorithm is based on SM2, but differs from it in some respects.

For a description of the SM2 algorithm, please see http://www.supermemo.com/english/ol/sm2.htm