How to Make Anki Cards FASTER | 4 Tips to SPEED UP YOUR STUDYING

time is probably the most valuable resource we have as humans as a first year dental student and a frequent user of anki i can tell you that i absolutely love anki for many reasons but i could also tell you that probably the biggest issue that i have with anki is just how much time it takes to make flash cards in this video i'm gonna give you four tips for speeding up your anki making it quicker to both make cards and study them and ultimately allowing you to go through more cards have better comprehension of your subjects and use anki a lot more effectively let's go ahead and get into it what up hello everyone my name is steven i am a first year dental student and i use anki every single day i've talked about anki a lot on this channel and i've actually made a few tutorials on just how i do certain things within anki to make my flash cards and help you out a little bit and looking back at those i kind of thought now would be a good time to give another quick tutorial on something that i think is actually really really important so this video isn't directly about one single add-on or one single thing that you should do but really what this video is about is about speeding up your time in anki and making it a little bit easier for you to get through more cards and to spend less time at the beginning making all of these cards as a dental student i make thousands of anki flash cards and i frequently get asked do i make my own cards or do i just download them from the internet i actually make them all myself and truly that is great but the most difficult and challenging part of this is just how much time it takes me to make all these cards the important thing is obviously studying those cards and making sure that you're familiarizing yourself with the information contained on those cards and so actually sitting there and typing them out can be at times a little bit more time consuming than what you want but i do think there are some things that you can do to cut down on this top in time that you are required to kind of spend in anki and that is what i'm going to share with you today so because this video is about not wasting time i don't want to waste any more of your time let's go ahead and get into my first tip which is actually an add-on the add-on that i want to talk about today is called frozen fields now if you've watched any videos about anki you've probably heard about frozen fields it's actually an interesting add-on that when i first heard about i was very confused as to why anybody would use it but now i don't make any flashcards without using it so let me show you why this add-on is important in my opinion so let me just go into a random deck here and then hit the a key to add a card now what we have here is our ad interface of course and you can see that this whole screen probably looks a little bit different than what you get when you download anki of course i'm using a card type that is special this is the close on king master card type i'm not exactly sure how i got this card type i really don't know i think it i think i downloaded a deck that had this as an option and that's how i got it but this is on king and it's a really really good card type when it comes to adding a ton of information but i want to show you how you get this little snowflake and what this thing does the snowflake here is the frozen fields add-on and when you click it anything that you put in the field that you've clicked is going to actually freeze and remain in place for as long as you want it to no matter how many cards you actually make so let's go ahead and actually add this frozen fields add-on what we're going to do here is go up to the tools page up in the top left and we're going to click add-ons this little add-ons page is going to pop up and you can see here that i already have frozen fields right here i want to show you how to actually get this what we're going to do is we're going to hit get add-ons right here and then we're going to enter this code 516-643804 so enter that and then hit ok once you've hit ok anki is going to add frozen fields to your particular program you can go ahead and exit out of all this and actually exit out of your anki so that anki can reload and make sure that frozen fields add-on is ready to go once you've reloaded anki we can go back to our ad interface and we'll see this interface once again and you should see these little snowflakes popped up on the side of all of your boxes here so how do we actually use these things so right here i have a presentation pulled up from my actual dental school this is a course in cariology and what i'm going to do is i'm going to hit shift command 4 to go ahead and make a selection for a screenshot and i'm just going to select this slide right here what that's going to do is it's going to pull my picture up down here off of the screen and i'm going to take it and drop it right in there on that extra portion of this card now i personally think that when you make flashcards in anki you should do this for every single card you make you should have some sort of visual reference point in your extra box for every single card you make if it's possible i just think that it helps for when you're studying your cards you get to actually see some information some information from where you drove the question in the text portion i just think it's really important and what we do is we add this picture into the extra box and if we were gonna go ahead and just make a card we just made something we typed some things in we made a closed delete and then we hit command return we would make that card and the picture that we just spent time putting in there would actually go away so what we're going to do is now with this awesome frozen fields add-on we're going to put that picture back in we're going to hit the snowflake and now when we make a card and then make a closed delete we can see that the extra box actually stays filled with our picture and we can do this for as many cards as we want so this is going to do a couple things one it's going to make your cards better because every single card is now going to have some sort of visual reference whether it's a diagram or a picture of the slide like i have here but what it's going to do is it's going to save us time because we don't have to actually go through and put pictures on every single card we can make like 5 10 15 20 cards all on the same slide with the same picture just by using this frozen fields add-on so now i want to give you a little bit of an extra tip here on what to do with your screenshots so typically when you take a screenshot on your mac the screenshot is actually going to be saved straight to your desktop and what happens is your desktop is going to get filled up with all of these images of screenshots that you've taken for all of your notes so here's something that you can do to save a little bit of time in just managing the clutter that's about to appear on your desktop so in order to show you this i'm actually going to go ahead and employ the use of my iphone to actually film my computer screen here so let's go ahead hit play and i will show you what we're going to do so here's my computer i'm firstly going to go over to just anywhere on the home screen excuse the microphone and i'm going to double or excuse me right click and then i'm going to hit new folder that's going to pop up i can just type in screenshots or really anything that i want here the next thing that i'm going to do is i'm going to go down and i'm going to hit shift command 5. shift command 5 is going to bring up all of this down here i want to go to where it says options and i want to look up and you see where it says save here we're going to go other location that's going to bring up this page right here and what we can now do is just select that folder that we just made which is the screenshots folder and we'll hit choose once we've selected this new screenshots folder as our destination where we want all of our screenshots to save they're all going to go straight into that folder and so what that's going to do for us is it's going to allow us to dump all of those pictures into one place and when we're done making our anki cards at the end of the day we can simply go into there and delete all of those screenshots instead of having all that junk on your desktop so that's it for frozen fields let's go ahead and get on to the next tip so the next thing i want to talk about here is something that i think absolutely everybody should be doing when they're using anki and that is keyboard shortcuts keyboard shortcuts are going to save you so much time of just scrolling around on your track pad and clicking and doing all these unnecessary things so here's a couple of the things that i think are pretty necessary to use firstly the way that i make cards is pretty simple so once i'm in my anki home screen here i'm going to click the deck that i'm currently interested in adding cards to and instead of going up and clicking add i can simply hit the a key now i'm going to add my text and i want to have a question that starts with the word what instead of typing out the word what i can just do w period and that to me is going to signify what so i don't have to sit here and type that out a ton of times so i can say what is the bacteria that causes carries so that's my question there and now i want to add a closed deletion which i've talked about in other videos but instead of going up here and clicking this little thing right there which would add a closed deletion i can simply hit command shift c and this is going to give me an option for a closed deletion and i can hit s mutants now once i have my card completed and i have what i want in that in that field there i can now instead of going down here and hitting add i can simply hit command return you'll find that when you do this a ton you get really really quick with all these keyboard shortcuts and they actually become completely second nature to you you don't even have to think about the keys you can actually just go in and just lightning keys do all these keyboard shortcuts and i swear it's going to save you a ton of time now let's say we want to study our cards that we've made so once we're in the deck page here i'm going to hit my spacebar that's going to bring us to our first card and instead of hitting anything like using your mouse at all essentially what we're going to do is we're just going to use our keyboard so there are three keys that are really going to matter here and also i guess four keys the first thing is the space bar the space bar is going to give you the answer so we can hit that space bar and it's going to show us the answer to the cards also going to show us that nice handy screenshot that we added into the extra portion and now we have to actually go in and rank how we did on the card whether it needs to be shown to us again it's good or it was super easy which i really click by the way to do that we just have one two and three on our keyboard and what i like to do when i'm studying is to simply put my three fingers on one two and three and my other finger my index finger of my right hand on the space bar and so what i can do is very quickly decide whether or not that was good hit one two or three and then just go right to the next one spacebar hit two there spacebar again i don't know that one that's one or the three layers spacebar two basically you can study very very quickly when you use this method you should essentially get to the point where you're never actually using your mouse and clicking around in anki everything should be keyboard shortcuts and once you do it for a little bit of time it does become second nature and you get really really quick with it okay so the next thing that i want to talk about in this video is actually tags within anki now you might be looking at me thinking what the heck do tags have to do with saving time so let me go ahead and give you another scenario here let's say you're looking at an entire deck that you've made for a massive exam and it's got like 500 cards in it a thousand cards whatever it is but you only want to study a very small particular let's say lecture or a particular topic within that entire set of cards how are you gonna do that well actually within anki the only real good way to do that is to tag all the cards that you make so back in our ad card interface here we'll see a bunch of blanks that we can that we can use and put information into but down here at the very bottom we see tags now tags are something that i thought i would never use but i use them now and i think they're really important for a lot of reasons so what you can do is just go ahead and type in any sort of tag that you want the the key here is you don't you can't include any spaces in your tags so if you want to include spaces just do the underscore there and that will allow you to kind of space out your words what you can do is you can simply add a tag and you can add that tag in there and then whatever cards you put with this tag those cards will be filtered in under that topic now let's go back to our scenario where we wanted to study one specific topic out of all of those crazy amount of cards what we can do is go over here to custom study and we'll click that and we'll go down to study by card state or tag you can then bump this up to as many cards as you want and then you can select whichever option i typically go all cards in random order and don't reschedule and then we can go in and choose the tags that we want to include now up here we can hit require one or more of these tags and we can actually go in and select the tags that we want and down here we can go in and also select select the tags that we don't want when we go in and create that new deck we will get a brand new deck full of all the cards that are tagged with just the tags we wanted and not of all the rest of them i think this is a time saver because instead of having to study 500 a thousand cards or whatever it is you can actually go in and pinpoint the specific topics that you want to study which ultimately is saving you time in the long run um so i kind of lied i said that there were four things at the beginning of this video and i've kind of only talked about three major things with some extra tips in there uh so since i shortchanged you on this one i'm gonna go ahead and just give you a couple of my general thoughts about saving time when you're using anki so there are a couple things that you can do the first is you can improve your typing speed there are plenty of websites available out there for free that allow you to actually learn how to type and to do it more effectively if you can type fast you're probably going to be able to make anki cards quickly which does help you in the long run the next thing you can do with respect to typing is something that i actually mentioned earlier which is to start abbreviating words if you're going to be using questions a lot in your cards that start with what for example instead of typing out the word what 50 100 a thousand times just type in w period and you may think that that's not going to save a whole lot of time but trust me those little tiny chunks of time that you save when you abbreviate words those are really going to add up and i promise in the long run you're going to spend less time typing and more time studying the other thing you can do to save time is make less cards now this may not seem like a viable option but sometimes we get really bogged down with making our own cards and we tend to make perhaps more than we really need so make sure that you're making high yield cards you're covering the topics that you don't know if there's something on a presentation that you know for a fact don't make a card about it because unless you're studying for something that's you know months away you're not really going to forget that information so go ahead and get to the next thing and then also make sure that you go online and see if there are decks available for your topics now for me this is difficult because my dental school gives us a lot of very niche information that is put together in a very unique way so there's not really an online deck or or series of decks that would help me out there kind of was for anatomy which was pretty pretty nice because gross anatomy is gross anatomy but for the rest of my courses i kind of have to just make all of my cards on my own but make sure you go on to websites like reddit and certain places like that to see what's available and to see if there's anything out there that you can use and just so you know i just wanted to clarify this i do not upload my own anki decks to the internet i can't actually do that because all of my decks include a bunch of screenshots from our presentations that were distributed by our school and our teachers have made it very very clear to us that these lectures are their intellectual property and they're not for us to distribute so unfortunately i can't help you out in that way but there are tons of people who upload all of their information in the form of ankidex onto the internet and i promise that with some good looking you'll probably be able to find something that will help you out so my friends that's all i have to say about saving time while using anki there's a lot of good techniques that you can use and if you have any of your own leave them in the comments for both me and all the viewers of this video we'll go ahead and learn together as i said in the beginning of this video my name is steven i'm a first year dental student and i hope that you stick around on my channel to see more content about anki and also more content about my life as a dental student and a young person just go ahead and click some of the videos that are available on my channel and give them a watch i hope you won't be disappointed but as i always say guys thank you so much for watching and i appreciate each and every one of you i will see you in the next video

Channel: Stephen P. Ray

Views: 52,536

Keywords: anki, anki tutorial, anki frozen fields, how to use anki, how to save time in anki, dental student, dentistry, dental school, med school, dental school tips, med school tips, anki keyboard shortcuts

Id: f7m23lGXh-A

Length: 16min 44sec (1004 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021