Notion vs ANKI: Which is the best app for studying?

hello everyone and welcome back to the channel my name is kitty and i'm an academic junior doctor working in the uk i'm currently studying for an exam called the mlcs part a which is an exam you need to take in order to enter surgical training in the uk so today we'll be looking at two of the most popular study apps anki and notion and comparing them and determining which one is the better revision tool for those who are unfamiliar with the apps anki is essentially an open source flash card program with inbuilt space repetition to help you memorize anything you like and it was also the main revision tool that i used in medical school to help me pass all of my exams in clinical years and also my medical school finals notion on the other hand is sold as an all-in-one workspace app that is not only for note-taking but also for organizing and planning every other aspect of your life i started using notion when i was a final year medical student initially just for doing to-do lists and keeping my life in order but since graduating i've been using notion for about six months now to study for the mrcs party exam so i have ample experience of both in this video i'll firstly give an upfront summary of what i think about the two apps then we'll compare anki and notion in-depth looking at how i use them for learning recall memorization and what is the ideal study setting and use cases for either app and finally we'll talk about what other extra functions these apps have and how you can use them together so firstly let's do an upfront summary for those of you who are short on time the choice of using anchor notion is of course based on your personal use case and how you study i think that the main benefits of using anki is that it is easy to use especially for short bursts of studying it has got inbuilt space repetition it's great for memorizing short answers and facts and the clause deletion function is really good for filling the blanks recall and is also great for using word spot images however i think anki is not so good when you need to understand a more broad concept or more complex topics once the cards are shuffled you can lose sight of the overall scope of the subject and it can get a bit monotonous after a while especially for longer study sessions or as you grow your deck of cards on the other hand notion is great for maintaining the structure and integrity of your notes you can use toggles to build follow-up questions and build a more complete database of knowledge and overall it has much wider range of functions than anki offers the downside with notion however is that it doesn't have space repetition it's more suitable for longer study sessions primarily because of the way it's accessed and the way the interface is built okay so now that we've gone through a summary of both anki and notion let's go into a more in-depth view of how you can use these two apps to learn recall and study okay so firstly we need to establish what is effective note-taking and effective learning and there's been numerous studies basically that shows passive note-taking i.e writing down exactly what someone says or exactly what a textbook says and copying it word for word is completely useless you're not really engaging your brain when you do this and therefore you're not actually retaining and learning the information as much as you could be doing so one way that you can tackle this is using what's called a cornell notice method and that basically just means you phrase everything like question and answer and the idea is basically when you come to read the information again from the question you prompt your brain to think and to record information before you actually read what's the correct answer and if we take a look at anki which is this window on the left here it essentially inbuilts the app so we're going to color actual surgery and add a card which is how you add content in anki using a basic card on the front it would be a question so for example what is the blood supply to the ascending colon and the answer is the right colic artery which arises from the superior mesenteric artery and then when you actually go to study this card again you can see it only comes up with the question first so you're prompted to think of the answer first in your brain so write colic artery in this case and then you review the answer and another card type that you can have in anki is something called a close deletion card so for example a closed card would look like this it would only have one face and you have a bunch of text here and you can see some random brackets and codes like that where if we go into preview you can see that when this card comes out this is what it would look like there would be sentences in black and then the bits that are in the brackets here are now in a blue bracket where it is hidden so then you have to think of what is the most common cause of seizures in children and then show the answer febrile convulsions which occurs at six months or three years which can be useful depending on what you're studying especially stuff that requires context and another thing that you can do with anki is having a picture that shows up and then identifying an answer from the picture so for me that's called kind of like spot test so for example if we go to a spot then um here you can see all the questions are basically like pictures and then the answer would be erythrism based on this picture for a dermatology question now let's have a look at how you can do this in notion so notion is different from anki in that it's not built to be a flashcard program right as i said earlier it's meant to be an all-in-one workspace where you can do note-taking and plan your live and do a daily planner and all sorts of things and unfortunately it doesn't really have an inbuilt flashcard system but you can do the cornell noticing method very easily using something called a toggle so for example here on the applied anatomy page i'm using to study for the mrcs you can see everything has got this arrow on the left and essentially it's really easy you just go toggle and then you make a list and under each toggle you can then hide various information so for example if we look at upper limb and the nerves in the upper limb if i click that it comes out with all the nerves i need to know about and let's say go into radial nerve and we can see under here i've put anatomical course most function sensory functions in injury to the radial nerve so for example if we go into motor function and it asks which muscles are supplied by the radial nerve so i think the mnemonic is best which is brachioradialis the extensors supinators and the triceps brachii and once i've answered that question you click on the toggle and the answer shows up so it's essentially the same idea as the cornell method of having a question to prompt you to think before you see the answer and one thing that i really like about this simple function in notion is that it can build upon your previous questions and that is one of the biggest difference between using notion and anki to learn is because of this toggle function that can go on and on and on with different levels whereas anki is a self-contained card it affects the different type of knowledge that you're trying to retain and recall and learn and also the way that you organize your notes so let's break that down ank in general is much more suited to quick facts and short answers so as we saw earlier when the question is something like oh what's the blood supply to the ascending colon and the answer is just a one word answer it's really good for anki because you can flip through many many cards like that and as we said earlier it's really great when you have a close deletion ones where you need to fill in the blank and also for images and spot tests so for example if we went to cardiology and i type in uh tag spot so any kind of the spot tag under the deck you can see all my ecg show up and this is really good for learning you know things like this image-based questions with a very short answer so you know the question would just be what does this ecg show and i put in an image and then the answer is oh it's a secondary heart block which you can see from here and there's also all sorts of clever things you can do with third-party add-ons like blurring out the labels of an image and having to answer that as well however if the answer is more complicated or the topic is more complex for example um describing the fetal circulation of the heart or describing the development of the heart um it's really hard to do with anki because it's a self-contained card system and the only thing you can do is question and answer so with big things like oh describe the development of the heart it's huge complicated process and a huge topic right and looking at this you know with this card it might look very simple from the front but when you look at the back it's a huge card with so much information and although you know the prompt describe the development of the heart it's great to get you to start thinking and if you imagine um if you have a hundred cards of short answers and one word answers you can flip through that in a couple hours whereas with this if you have a 100 cards like that you would lose interest after the 10th card because there's too much information on the back of this notion on the other hand handles big concepts and broad topics a lot better owing to the toggle system that we were talking about earlier and the fact that you can follow questions on each other so everything is in kind of bite-sized chunks of information so for example let's look at this page i have on colorectal surgery and let's look at colorectal cancer so clinical presentations of colorectal cancer right-sided colon cancers present with anemia change in brow habit and right alia fossil mass then down here we have a follow-up question what might right colonic cancers mimic um so i think the answer is appendicitis and i'm correct so i cure cancers because the tumic and perfect near the appendix so it's in a similar area so it presents with similar signs and then again i have more follow-up questions who should you be suspicious that they present with signs uh like appendicitis and is anyone over 40 i think uh yep so you need to ct them to exclude another course why is it important to exclude cancer in someone presenting with appendicitis-like symptoms because if you went in a laparotomy and you perforated it then the cancer cells would get everywhere um and you would have metastasis so as you can see these toggles that build on questions are really useful in notion compared to anki where you might have to have four separate cars asking this and the cars might be shoveled out of order and they can be completely unrelated and you can imagine if you're trying to learn a broad topic sitting down and being able to go through everything like this chronologically it's a lot easier on your brain um to remember that rather than having separate cards popping up like one on colorectal cancer one on either a gallstones and then one on cardiac embryology and then back to colorectal cancer and that brings us to the other problem that i have with anki is the way that the notes are organized and back in medical school i use anki religiously i put all my notes onto anki so if you look here all the cards here from medical school essentially and if we look at the stats you can see that i have 4118 cards um covering basically all the topics that you learn in medical school and you can sort your cards in anki by dex so here i have nbchb and under that medicine surgery and under that i have all the kind of specialties like breast cardiology endocrine ent etc cetera and then you can further categorize the cards under this deck by using the tags so like i said earlier using tags like spot will show you all the images just by typing spot in the tags and then you can kind of categorize them a bit more so you know you can look up all the ecg questions and cardiology and just study that if you want and similar but that's really as far as the organization system and anki goes it doesn't really go any further than that what's more another complaint that i have with anki is when you first make a deck everything is in order so you know if you were looking at stemmies all the questions near here will be about stemmies um but once you've gone through this deck once all these cards will get shuffled based on how quickly you need to review them again from the space repetition theory which we're going to talk about in a bit and whilst mixed up cards are really great if you're trying to do like a quick fire quiz round with your friends or you know if you're studying something else like trying to do a new language and you kind of do want the vocabulary mixed up um that's a great thing but in medicine or any other topic where things sometimes do need to be chronological and need to be grouped together it makes it hard to follow if you're trying to read the broad topic comprehensively when everything is shuffled around and for the same reason you can very easily lose sight of the overall scope or the big picture of the topic so for example in gastroenterology that obviously includes things like hepatobiliary problems with the liver the gallstone the pancreatitis and then you have your small bowels and your large bowels and your esophagus and all this sort of thing and you can get really sort of caught up in the minute details of very specific things like oh what specific oncogenes cause this particular cancer and you lose sight of actually the topic of which cancers you're looking at and how that fits into the overall anatomy and how that fits into the overall pathology in a gastro patient and because of this i find that in medical school i often end up either resetting the cards or doing a custom study session where i go through them in the chronological order in which i wrote them so that i can read about all the pathologies with the gold brother at one time and then move on to the next thing rather than have everything mixed up and once you start resetting decks and doing custom study sessions you essentially just make the space repetition part of the whole program a bit of a moot point notion on the other hand is much better for organizing your notes so for example on the mrcs part a i have subpages on basic science principle surgery and general surgical topics and then further subcategorized pages on the specialty so for example if we go into vascular surgery and then all the different pathologies are listed here and then they're obviously all under toggles so for example if we look at traumatic aortic injuries there is aortic transactions and it comes up with all the questions and then again we can have the follow-on questions like we saw earlier with colorectal cancer and i personally find that using this note system on notion allows you to really hunker down and read all about one topic really easily compared to anki where you have to reset the deck or change the order of the cards to achieve the same effect it also means you retain the overall scope of the subject so for example if we looked at anatomy we would know that this is everything under anatomy that we need to study for this exam and if we look at for example the respiratory tract these are the subcategories i need to study and then under that these are the main things that i need to know and it's very easy to compile that information together in your head a lot easier than if you want anki where all of this is separate hundred cards another thing with notion that i really like is that if you need to add new information to your existing knowledge base it's a lot easier to do because you know exactly which heading to find in which toggle to find it in and then you just add it under that toggle and it fits into that big family tree of knowledge that you're trying to build whereas on anki again you would make like a completely separate self-contained card that would be out of order or in a different place or doesn't fit into the other cards or the other information that you wanted it to go with um so overall i think to build a complete knowledge base to work off on notion is a lot better next let's talk about recall and memorization and essentially one of the best ways to do this is called space repetition and the idea is you repeat the fact at kind of lengthening intervals to counter what we call a forgetting curve so basically if you read something once you might forget it the next day but if you read it again the next day then your memory will remember it for the next three days and then you repeat again it at three days and this time you remember for a week so in a week's time you read it again this time you remember it for a month and so on and so on and if you asked anyone what makes anki anki they would say it is because it's got the inbuilt space repetition program so let's take a look at that now so if we looked at the card we made earlier about blasphemy ascending colon after we show the answer you can see there's three buttons at the bottom here and so basically means if i knew the answer right away like that i would say oh it's easy and 4d above it means that this card will then go away and come back up in four days time if i knew the answer but i needed some prompting some thinking before i got there then i probably put good and this new card because it's just been made will come back up in 10 minutes time if i got it completely wrong come back up in one minute's time and essentially every subsequent time that you get the answer right on anki this interval here will lengthen so if i got it right on good this time then next time in 10 minutes time i got good again it would come up in one day's time and after that four days and then after that eight days and it adds up and up and up until you reach like months at a time at which point you know it will probably never come up again really or you know if i do get it wrong at any point and i had to click again it would restart the timer so it goes back to one minute 10 minute next day next four days etc you get the point and if we go into browse function you can see where it then ranks the cards based on your answer so for example these cards new ones always come up first and then um you know this one that i've done before was due to come up in september this one was due to come up in october and this one was due to come up in december i haven't done this in ages that's why it's all like from years ago but you can see that the app essentially automatically ranks them based on your answer so it's super easy to use it's all inbuilt all you have to do is click a button and it does all the work for you behind the scenes and additionally on anki you can also go into the settings and change the interval to whatever you like so if you want the intervals to be shorter not four days for two days or whatever then you can change that as well and another thing that anki does which we've kind of briefly looked at earlier is that it shows you the stats of how you've been studying so if we look at all history last 12 months let's say um you can see you know like how much you've studied a day when which days that you've studied how many cards you studied how many you got right or wrong and how many overall cards you still have etc etc and other smart metrics like are you actually retaining information are you just cramming which is useful i guess like nice little metrics to have when you're trying to study for an exam so that's the space repetition function on anki that makes it so beloved by many and used by so many students but what about notion can it do a similar job so unfortunately on notion at the moment there is no inbuilt space repetition system you could use a template that allows you to create cards based on whatever you want so it would look something like this where you put the question on the front and then when you're clicking it you have the answer down the bottom but there's no way to make them disappear and come up at a certain interval certainly not automatically if you look online you can find people who have come up with different ways to combat this so one of the easier ways is to make your own revision timetable so on notion for example you can have a table like this with the different topics and then i like to do this retrospectively so let's say i studied the thorax anatomy on the 29th of january and i did it 5 out of 5 stars okay and i did it for all the rest of these topics as well and then i would you know the next time i go through them again i would pick the one that i was least confident in and record how well i did that's one way to track your progress and it's probably good for something like medicine where the topic is so broad you can't be expected to go through everything every day um so your focus is more on topic rather than individual questions and individual things and another thing you can do is for example if i studied the larynx today and i didn't really know the nerves that that runs in the larynx and things like that i could always highlight it red to remind myself that i didn't do so well in it so next time when i scroll down i can quickly see oh that's red that means i didn't know it very well another thing that you can do and there's plenty of tutorials for this on youtube is to create a sort of automatic uh space repetition system on notion in which essentially you create a table and then you use the coding function within notion so that it knows to make things disappear if you've read them today and for them to come back you know in a certain interval based on how well you've rated you knew it um and that's certainly doable and it's a closer mimic of the space repetition uh function that is programmed into anki but again it's a lot of work and from what tutorials i've seen they tend to be quite fiddly you have to have a good kind of knowledge of coding in the first place and it takes a lot of effort to set up and definitely not as easy as anki where the interface is so simple and everything happens behind the scene and all you do is open a card read it take an option and everything is done automatically so this category of recall memorization and ease of use goes to anki [Music] okay so far is one each to notion for learning and to anki for recall memorization so let's talk about the study setting and the individual use cases for each of these apps so firstly and most importantly what are you studying for so as we said earlier study content-wise i feel anki is probably better for short answers and quick fire facts whereas notion is better for broader and more complex subjects but of course this is all just a real thumb and depends on how you find using each of these apps i mean i use anki throughout all of medical school i never use notion to study during my finals and you know i did completely fine but i do find that now when i'm studying for the mrcs notion is a lot better in terms of organizing my notes and making sure everything fits i think particularly for things like medicine you know it just has so much that you can never be expected to know of medicine and surgery that's just that's just straight up when possible right and and it's so broad that you rely so much on scoping a subject you rely so much on having an overall mind map of where everything fits and how everything relates together that i think using notion is a lot better for that next let's talk about the study length and the environment in which you study in i think these are the easy to use nature of anki i think it's very suitable for shorter study sessions although you can do it for longer study sessions as well that's not a problem especially because the interface is so simple and you can use it as an app on your phone and your ipad for a small one-time fee i think that it's really easy to have it as like a quizzing app for very short bursts of time so for example if you were commuting to work on a bus um or if you have a longer day for like 30 minutes you can get up anki and just you know go through some questions and learn some knowledge i also find that again because of the simple interface it's very easy to focus on anki even on short bursts because all you have is a card and three buttons right you can use anki for longer study sessions as well as i've often done in medical school leading up to an exam i would sit for eight hours a day doing yankee cards but i do find that it can get a bit monotonous i think once you get past like 100 cards you start to sometimes just zone out and you start just clicking for the sake of clicking and not actually really engaging with the questions anymore and you certainly lose sight of the overall picture of the topic that you're trying to do another thing i like about anki is anki web which is essentially an online version of anki that you can access anywhere so all your cards are saved online and so if you were away from home without your computer ipad or phone or whatever if you went to a library you could still log in on any generic computer go on and q web and be able to access all your personal cards that you've made and study of that with notion i definitely think it's more of an app that you need to sit down and study for a longer time it is less accessible than enki i would argue because it doesn't have an online version you could make your notion available publicly as a website but i doubt many people would do that so what that means is essentially you can only really use notion on your own devices be that your laptop your tablet or your phone and with notion although it does have apps across different devices i think anything smaller than the tablet you're not really going to get very much out of it because yeah you can get notion on your phone but because of the small screen estate on this aside from checking like tick box lists or something like that it's the readability on this is not great when you're trying to read like long sentences and long explanations or trying to understand the concept and finally let's talk about any other extra functions that you can do on these apps so on anki it's obviously just built to be a flashcard program just so there isn't much else it can do so on anki if you go to tools add-ons you can see that i have a couple on here with large and colorful buttons format packs and stuff and if you click get add-ons it will take you to a page where you can download whatever you like and people have made some truly extraordinary things on there so definitely worth a look on the other hand notion again it's not built to just be a study app it's meant to be all sorts of other things so on here for example i have a daily planner i have project trackers and stuff like that and all that means is you can use that to complement your studying i'm not going to go in depth into all the other stuff because that's really outside the scope of this video but to complement your learning you should know that there's lots of other things that you can do um another useful thing as well is on notion you can embed a lot of other stuff so on anki it's mostly limited to adding a picture and things like that to your cards whereas on notion you can do that as well as for example here i've put down a pdf document with the syllabus of the exam which is really good so it's all in one place as we said earlier you can do like revision timetables you can also embed web pages and information from the internet into notion as well so you can really make it a one place for everything here for your notes and learning okay so we've gone through most of the pros and cons of what i think about using anki and notion and what sort of things they're suitable depending on how you study but if you're like me you would think oh i want some of the benefits of that but i also want some of the benefits of that how can i make these two abs work together so let's talk about that before we finish the video so currently the way that i use these two apps as i said earlier the majority of my stuff is on notion for the minute for this exam that i'm preparing for and again the reasons which we've already talked about for this is because medicine is so broad i want to keep an overall picture of everything i want to be able to scope all my subjects despite not actually you know maybe not going to death about everything and so notion in that way maintains the integrity of my knowledge base a lot better than anki would however i will still use anki very selectively so nowhere as comprehensive and thoroughly as i did in medical school where it was basically the only place where i kept any notes and essentially the way i use this is if there is something especially anatomy where i can't quite remember just by reading periodically on notion i would put it in anki so for example remembering you know what nerves go through which uh fossa so a hole in your skull that's really hard to remember so for that kind of thing i would put in an anki to force myself to do space repetition until i remember it well and that's worked really well for me and the other thing that i use anki for is when i'm doing question banks or past papers if their particular questions are really good so if there's a stem that's really good for example you know this is a 50 year old man who's coming with whatever um that's not the kind of thing that you would put in a notes bank like notion but i would put that in enki and it's really easy to just copy and paste from the question bank as well so that i can then test myself on a similar stem so that i can build up my pattern recognition essentially and prepare for the exams that way i did entertain for a while having everything i have on notion imported over to anki but i think that's just too much work and as i said the whole point of notion is that it builds upon concepts and it builds upon prior knowledge which is something that anki can't do even if you import all the cornell style questions and answers over but for those of you who might find this useful there are third party applications that you can use online to do this so if you just search notion to anki online you can find this website called twoankey.net and essentially if you structure your notion page in such a way that everything is just one toggle um question and answer but you can't have multiple toggles on the one thing but if you structure it like that this website essentially will be able to take that and turn it into an enki deck by itself so if that's something that you're interested in you can definitely make them work together in that way but there's no native way as such to turn anki to notion in notion to ancient vice versa and that wraps up the video i hope this has been helpful in helping you choose whether anki or notion is more suitable for your style of studying and how you can use these apps to use the canal note-taking method and to test your recall if you want to learn about how i use notion to organize other aspects of my life check out this other video on my channel which details exactly then don't forget to like and subscribe for more content and see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Kitty Wong

Views: 14,001

Keywords: Notion, Anki, Note taking, Notes, Studying, How to, Notion vs Anki, Which is better, Study, Productivity, Organisation, Recall, Memory, Student, Notion for students, ANKI for students, medical students, studying medicine, ANKI for medicine, Notion for medicine, Notion for medical students, ANKI for medical students, Medical exams, Medical finals, Medicine, Notion productivity, Active recall, Spaced repetition, Cornel method, Cornell method, flashcards, medical notes, medic flashcards

Id: 8o4xt_SBzOQ

Length: 28min 38sec (1718 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021