Anki - the best studying tool

Have you ever made a flashcard for studying? Maybe you have. Did you make it using paper? Did you find that it takes a loooot of time? My partner and I also started with paper flashcards. It takes a really long time to make them. During that time, we felt extremely productive. But are we really that productive while making paper cards? Do we really remember the material better by writing it out by hand? According to all the research, the answer is a big no.

Writing the material by hand doesn't add much to memory. But we feel like we are doing a lot. However, this is just a false feeling. What we want to achieve is knowledge, so that we can successfully complete a task, exam, or project. Do you agree that if we manage to achieve the same knowledge in a much shorter time, we would have much more time for other projects or simply more time to devote to further material that will successfully lead us to the end?

So, if you want to shorten your learning time and want to keep the flashcard method (which is the best learning method, but more on that in another post), then it is better to move the flashcard making into the digital age - i.e. to make flashcards in an app or on the internet. My partner and I have also discovered several apps that have greatly reduced the time we spent writing text by hand. But we quickly realised that with large subjects, the cards quickly become too much. After all, we want to repeat them every day as diligent students, don't we? On the first day, there are 20 cards. The next day, this number increases to 40, on the third day we already have 60 cards, and so on. After a week, we can barely prepare ourselves to start working on the cards, as there are already quite a lot of them. And what to do when these cards reach triple digits, which can already seem too much for a single day and we don't have much time for new material?

Have you ever noticed that when you repeat the cards every day, you become annoyed with some of them, because you have to repeat them again? But I already know this! Isn't there a better way?

There is. It's called spaced repetition. This feeling that we already know some cards by heart and they seem like "a waste of time" is correct. We remember new information for a short time, but if we repeat it shortly after learning, we remember it for a few days. If we repeat it again after a few days, we can remember it for two weeks or more. Therefore, all intermediate repetitions are really just a lot of unnecessary repetition and waste of time. If we repeat such a card after 14 days, we will remember it again for even longer, even if we don't repeat it in between. In studies, it has also been proven that we learn best when we can still remember the answer. So, just before we completely forget the answer. We can use this to our advantage, and only repeat the cards just before we would forget the information, instead of repeating them many times in between. This is called spaced repetition.

When we incorporate spaced repetition into our learning, we realize that currently there are only a few applications available that combine flashcards with spaced repetition. One of them is Anki. At first, it may seem a bit "old-fashioned", but we promise you that you cannot choose a better studying app. So, what are you waiting for? The app is free and you can use it on your computer, phone, or tablet. Anki is a tool that has helped us achieve the same results with much less time spent on studying compared to our peers. It's truly a tool you should consider getting today for any type of learning.