The Absolute State of [[Spaced Repetition]] In Obsidian | Anki, Plugins, Workflows, & More 🧠️

welcome back everyone if you're new here my name is brian jenks and today we're talking about the absolute state of space repetition in obsidian what this means is we're going to talk about what even is space repetition why you should use it why and how i use it and all the ways that we can use it in and with the obsidian note-taking application quick note before we get started the best ways to support the channel on an ongoing basis would be github sponsors followed by patreon patreon takes fees github sponsors doesn't and if you are just interested in a one-time donation buy me a coffee or paypal work just fine if you're interested in supporting the channel not required but greatly appreciated those are the best ways to do it so if you're ready to hear about some space repetition stay tuned [Music] so just to start off what is spaced repetition it's likely something you've seen around in the productivity sphere learning and all these different areas of youtube and content is we talk a lot about space repetition nowadays but what even is it so i have a note on space repetition in my obsidian vault and i just think that this graphic this picture sums it up very very well a space repetition is a method of learning through the usage of flash cards and that's it that is it it is using flash cards the difference between how you might normally use flash cards like we all used to do in our younger years maybe in grade school or other things is that this actually uses a computer algorithm to determine based on your own scoring of those flash cards when you might need to see that flash card again to keep it in memory now where this is really useful and important is that normally we're going to forget almost everything we learn by the end of the day like 80 or i i don't know these metrics off top of my head but basically you're going to forget a lot of what you hear almost immediately and to actually hold on to that information and store it in long-term memory you're going to have to actually receive several reminders now for me i'm really bad with remembering people's names so this is really useful is that the first thing you're going to do is you're going to hear something and yeah immediately you can recall that thing but you know give it a few minutes an hour a day and you've likely forgotten that think of a phone number somebody tells you a phone number one time you're likely just go it's gone so what you do with space repetition is that you make flash cards and it says okay tomorrow i'm going to show you this flash card and you're going to be like i don't really remember this very well you see it again okay then you score it and you say i didn't really know this very well so then it shows you at a short interval later it's going to say okay and in a little bit i'm going to show it to you again okay i remembered this better this time so you score it higher now i'm going to space it out even farther and farther until eventually your cards are so far apart in their intervals i have some cards that i'm not going to see for another 11 months because i've done so many repetitions that i remember that information and as you can see here at this first memorization in the first reminder if i never encounter that information again i'm going to project projectedly forget this information almost completely through the passage of time but when you have this first reminder it actually resets that curve and now you're over here and as you continually reset the curve it keeps your memorization of that information at a very high level and so by taking advantage of these cards you can then store and program a lot of information to be spaced out and repeated at intervals so you can keep it in top of mind memory for a longer duration this is a great way of making sure you solidify information that you learn now memorization by itself is already a basically like building a house on a foundation of sand just by memorizing something doesn't really help you solidify memory now that's going beyond space repetition but when it comes to actually using memory and building up memory one of the greatest things you can do is have a foundation of understanding learn something first understand it then make flash cards and use space repetition to solidify that understanding and then add to it you also connect it to as many useful and connected contexts of information as possible if i know that you're only supposed to use a particular spoon for table etiquette in a dining scenario and i can place that piece of information in a space repetition card but also connect that to the context of that one time i went to that party with my friend jack over there he told me about this about this particular spoon scenario because i messed it up that one time that connects it viscerally to another piece of information in your mind a memory a person two other different things to connect that piece of information to and this this field goes on and on dealing with mind palaces and connecting information basically space repetition is another very very useful and powerful tool in the toolbox of learning and memorization so how did i find out about space repetition my first exposure to space repetition and my primary tool for utilizing that learning technique is ali abdul many of you probably have encountered ali on youtube he's very big now and i remember his videos on anki anki however you pronounce it uh the space repetition flash card software and the research papers he reviewed on the actual implementation of the space repetition learning methods i've done a lot of other reading on the field and the tool and the approach myself and through my own personal practice it is an incredibly helpful and useful tool if you've seen other videos on my channel where i talk about my own adhd some of the things i use space repetition and anki in this case for just beyond learning i use it to learn programming i remember i use it to remember things from my different school classes i use it to learn other languages but i also utilize anki and space repetition for things like reminding myself to socialize with people because of my object permanence issues with adhd so it's also a useful thing to space things out on a recurring basis you're still utilizing those space repetition algorithms for spacing out your intervals based on you know a particular scoring method and again all these types of settings are customizable with a lot of different applications in software but often just the the bare bones you know defaults work just fine so that's a little overview of what space repetition is and why it might be useful and why you might want to look into it so with that prefacing we're going to look at a lot of different applications tools and resources around using space repetition with and within obsidian to leverage your vault your notes and how you want to learn using these tools in obsidian so the variety of approaches i'm going to show here utilize either external software plug-ins in obsidian native functionality just a lot of different approaches you could take to practice flash cards and space repetition some people are more technical than others want to actually use more of these more robust processes and tools and some people just want something good enough or it works for them and they don't need basically how i like to say they don't need a bazooka for a fly situation so we're going to cover a variety of different tools approaches that vary in their complexity and in their usefulness so let's dive right in one of the first ideas i had for the just basic flash card usage in obsidian is an idea i actually again got from ali abdul but he uses notion for this now there are several different ways we could do this specific type of functionality i actually have a template for this if i just put in a fold you can use html in markdown so you could technically do this where folds are remembered now so we can say in summary here is my question and then inside details below summary is here is my answer and then in preview mode you can see there is a toggle here and now i can actually show my question and answer now the reason why i'm not really going to put too much emphasis on this one is that this doesn't work natively with you know bi-directional links or with images the way we use them in obsidian with again the bi-directional link and the exclamation point for transclusion because it is html which means a lot of the markdown and functionality native to obsidian don't work within html space if you're only working with simple text options maybe that might be something that works for you but i honestly never really use this and i think there isn't a better option i'm going to show next so the next option i'm going to show is again the same sort of collapsible hiding of content but it's this time we're actually going to use headings so i just have like a couple level six headings here and then below those headings is you know some content here's an answer here's another answer whatever now because i'm on obsidian release 11.0 by the time this comes out it may already be publicly available but with 11.0 we now have persistent folding which i showed in my announcement video card up somewhere now in the persistent fold i can actually fold this heading like this okay great and now if i leave this page and if i close it and then i open up my workbench again it's still folded it still remembers so what you can do is you can actually make your heading the question and then reveal the answer to yourself and see if you got it right or not okay great now i'm not gonna obviously i wouldn't put this on my workbench i would actually put this in a relevant note that actually matters so how might we leverage this like in a spaced repetition manner sure i can you know hunt all these down eventually but what if i get the answer wrong what do i do what you could do is then take advantage of the review plug-in the review plug-in by i believe it's ryan james murphy takes advantage of another plug-in natural language processing which i i honestly forget there's so many plugins i use i forget all the authors but review and natural language processing using these two plugins together i have a key binding for option r so if i showed you the command review option r actually says add a block to a daily note for review i don't want to add the entire note but a block so what i'm going to say is hey today is february 15th for me so my daily note is the 15th but i want to review this particular flash card in three days because i got the answer pretty right okay cool let's move it forward in a spaced repetition manner so if i did option r i'm going to get the review plugin saying hey when do you want it i want to see it in three days great so now it says ah okay set note workbench for review blah blah but not the note it's actually going to be the entire block so now that the block has been added for space repetition by using these plugins what does this look like so right now you can see this shows this block reference here but now that i'm done with this question i can now re-collapse it okay great but i also use the plug-in put backlinks into document just for now i've been playing with it and we can see right here that ah yes linked mentions the 18th three days from now now shows a transcluded block reference to this particular question if i go to that daily note we can see okay here we go review this now if i'm in preview mode it would actually show me you know that particular word wherever the block reference is next to but where i might actually care about this is i can click this link and now be brought to this particular question now if i open this up it'll actually show me this entire block now it's only going to show me this content here but if i did something where i moved this block to the heading here and the way you could do this is you can also instead of selecting top to bottom at the top if you do top to bottom it'll actually add the block right here if i did that and return back to the menu and preview it'll actually just show me the question so that way what i could do is i could think hmm let's think about this question what's my answer open the link okay here's the question here's the answer did i get it right or not and then repeat and continue to move these questions and answers forward in your daily notes and because it already has a block reference you can just continue to move that block reference forward and you can see the back links for that particular block slash question you could also take advantage of these different block and questions and make a single note for each question and just embed the entire note that might be an even easier solution than doing individual questions in a side of a single note but it just depends what is your approach how many notes questions ideas things do you want to create and how cluttered do you want your vault to be it really just depends on your own personal approach and if this particular option works for you the next thing we're going to look at is an application that is outside of obsidian so now we're going to move away from some of the native functionality and look at applications and plugins and i have a specific order for explaining this way so bear with me the first one we're going to look at is neuro cache you may have seen this around lately it is a great application for looking at and using space repetition with plain text files and markdown it can use it with a variety of different applications such as evernote rome onenote bear all different kinds of other tools and options just within a single application neurocache also has lots of documentation on how to actually utilize the application as well as getting your flashcards from markdown into the application so if you use any of these applications or tools you can look at this documentation on how to actually get your content into neurocache see some video uh walkthroughs on how to do this and we're actually going to do this today so you can see how you might actually take advantage of neurocache and one other cool feature is that they already have an amazing dark mode so plus one for me all right to begin showing more of neurocache's functionality because i literally have nothing in it right now so i'm going to show you start to finish how to actually get some content flash cards into neurocache and utilize some of its basic functionality so to begin what do we need to do we need to make some flash cards so we're going to jump right into my workbench note again and we're going to make some of our own flash cards so the first thing we're going to do is we're just going to ask a question that's it just ask a question so we could say what is the distance between the earth and soul called and what's the answer to this it's an au which equals an astronomical unit i believe i could be wrong who knows so by itself that's not going to do anything so how do we actually make this into a flash card so the first thing we're going to have to do is we're actually going to have to add a hash flash card now people who have been following my videos in my workflow already know this is probably not going to work for me because that i don't use these text type of tags for my settle cost and system you could utilize this hell you could probably even use emojis besides this text we'll test that out but this is why one of the reasons why i don't use neurocache but it could work for you so we're going to add that there we're going to say hey this line this is a flash card and now we're gonna add a line break and now the question and the answer are there and below that we're actually gonna add a horizontal rule which is a three uh dashes for a line and that is our flash card let's add one more we're going to say um what is a great learning method and we're going to say the answer is spaced repetition and we're actually going to add an image i'm going to say spaced repetition which actually is that png file if i hover over it yep there it is there's an image and this is also a flash card but we are also going to add something else now we can actually add additional tags beyond just flash card and the additional tags help you separate your content out by specific topics slash specific decks so what we're going to say here is we're going to call this one i don't know astronomy and we're going to call this one memory also learning and which is called srs now this isn't all we can do there's a lot of other things that we can actually utilize within neurocache so we're going to continue making some more cards because we're going to see some really cool usages of just what the application allows you to get away with so we're going to continue making some more i'm going to say what if i don't want an answer what if i just want a constant reminder to just happen spaced out in space repetition but it doesn't have an answer it's just oh yeah remember this thing so we can say hey uh remember to always think of others and then instead of flash card we're just going to put spaced that's it another horizontal rule and we're done that's it that is a new flash card it's going to actually be spaced out using space repetition but there's no answer to this it's just that's the content that's it now i've gone ahead and made a few other cards but what i want to highlight here is if you're going to put images in your neurocash cards you can't use these bi-directional links the way that we normally do in obsidian and if you're only going to drag over a particular file or files then you need to actually make sure that the images are brought with you otherwise it's not going to know what to pull in the easiest way to utilize neurocache in my opinion is just to have your vault either copied or completely hosted on something like dropbox or some sort of cloud hosting as long as it's not going to interfere with any sort of you know existing functionality with obsidian like caching or plugins or any sort of weird loss of data the best way to utilize this is just to have it look at the entire vault so you can easily just reference pictures images and other notes and other things so that's an option or you could just copy and paste a particular amount of files or a folder of files drag and drop that and that would work just fine but if you're going to use images what you have to do is actually use the markdown syntax so embed it with a transclusion you know exclamation point a single pair of brackets with the alias or whatever it is doesn't matter you even need an alias and then the actual image name so my image name was spaced repetition but this has a space in markdown links you need to replace the space character with a percent 20. there are other special character replacements but the easiest is just if you don't rename images and it just shows that like default pasted image a bunch of numbers for the time stamp then that's easy but if you actually name your uh your images you need to make sure that you actually change those spaces to percent 20 or just manage your images that way so your way you can always test that is if it actually renders an obsidian then it's likely going to work just fine as long as the image is brought over to whatever sort of folder or file you're importing so the next one i also made prior was the spaced one but are also looking at can we actually import code blocks like this and what about latex and what about html so if we actually render these you can see okay i have some syntax highlighting on this code block i have some color highlighting on this latex math equation and i do have some particular html formatting going on here by using the actual html tags now my css these colors are not going to be applied when i bring things over to neurocache because there's no css to use but inside of obsidian it looks this way so be aware of that things are not always going to look exactly the same i'm actually using html to do the font styling and with my law tech i actually have some color stuff going on you can check that out on my latex video for latex math jacks links somewhere and this might work in some way but it's my probably not going to work in the way you think so we have a variety of different types of content images text code latex html and we also have flashcards that are just spaced or are full flash cards with question and answer but nouricash actually has even more they also have even shorter cards such as we can actually do something like a question colon and then answer along with flash card and uh let's just call this test there we go that's it now you don't actually need the line break here because these are single line question answers so this is going to be a single flash card but i prefer just the separation but if you don't want to actually do that you don't have to we could also have question two followed by answer to followed by flash card and test great but is there another easier way what if i don't actually want to have to write out all of these tags what if i don't want to do that well there is actually a couple additional options for these single one line micro flash cards in neurocache we're gonna do brain brain answer and what you can do is easily just add a brain emoji so brain if i can type the word brain or we could also do zap zap not zep and then zap emoji so using the little lightning bolt emoji or the brain emoji this will also let you create new micro cards without having to do any of these hashtag stuff so that way it's able to just take a single emoji and know exactly what to parse and look for so now we have a bunch of flashcards made we got spaced flashcards we got normal flashcards we got flashcards in various quote unquote decks based on tag and we have some microflash cards on single lines some that use these little special emoji things to make little tiny card question answers lots of really cool usages of flashcard syntax with neurocache so now that we have these flashcards made in a file how can we get these into neurocache and use the application that's what we're going to look at next so like i said the easiest thing to do would be to just drag your entire vault and put it into some sort of cloud hosting and just have neuro cache look at the entire vault to scan everything pick a folder import a folder and just import the entire vault anything that actually is found using neura cache's syntax would then be brought in and updated great but if you don't want to do that what you can do is what i've done here as a simple example just to showcase the functionality here's the workbench note where all these flash cards are in and the image i actually list out here what you could do is you could always just drag whatever relevant files you have or a folder where you keep all of your flash card stuff in a single folder and just put that folder and copy it into dropbox or wherever whatever cloud hosting you have so what i did is i just put all this in here and i'm just going to import the entire downloads folder in my icloud instance and that's it i'm just going to import that and i'm going to be good to go so now let us actually open up mirror cache take a look at what we can see and figure out how to do this okay i'm going to have narrow cache open on my phone and i'm just going to be going along with this as i am showing you guys so i have the file in my icloud instance and i'm going to actually import it now when you first open neurocache you're likely going to see either this menu or any of these others now i don't have anything in here this is a brand new instance of neurocache nothing is going on so what i'm going to do is i'm going to go to notes and this is where we actually you know they actually are really great about documentation with this application so we can easily just go to how to use or nothing to say whatever but if i want to say hey i want to sync my notes and i click that it'll actually even show you hey this is where you're going to go so we click that little icon up there and it's going to give you this menu and there's a lot of different things and options in here what do we need to care about well as somebody who's using obsidian what i'm going to care about is importing a markdown file which is this markdown section right here up at the top and we can easily pick a folder or a file and even check this a folder to observe so i'm guessing i haven't tested this i'm guessing what this is doing is if you actually have your entire vault hosted on something like dropbox or icloud that you can have this watch for changes and if there are any additional changes such as new flash cards scan those into your flash card pool what i'm going to do is i'm going to pick import markdown folder because i have a whole folder with a worth of stuff let's say i have multiple files multiple images i'm just going to grab all that stuff import a folder it's going to be this downloads folder okay and done that's it it's that fast and if you have thousands and thousands of cards it might take a little bit but there we go now in this notes section you can see i have a bunch of different hashtags and in here and whoa what is all this so if i go into each of these i can actually see different cards that are actually tagged for that and basically these are your decks so the decks can be separated by these flashcards now the flashcard itself the actual hashtag flashcard is what you have to have to make it a flashcard at least a multi-line one there i showed you the other options earlier but we're going to look at all these and how they look so basically you can actually see this is your interface of all your different decks separated out by flashcards and if you look at the individual cards it'll actually show you a percentage of you know your score on how well you've been learning that item so let's look at some of the other tabs if i go to home okay so today's q i actually have 10 in the top right so 0 out of 10 so i actually have some things to review today i haven't done those but we could start studying but if i go to study tab it'll actually show me some statistics on how i've been doing with my cards as i go through my my flash cards in space repetition over time and we can see all the decks over here they're all listed in red not green because i actually need to go through them so let's do that let's go through our queue today which is all the 10 new flash cards we just put in and we can look at what these things look like on the front end so remember to always think of others there's no hashtags here and we're just going to drag this to green yep it's good okay why because that was spaced it's just a reminder no answer cool does code work this is when this should show us a code block no syntax highlighting but we do have a code block i guess you could put an image of a code block either way so okay now other html the does the html actually render and work it does it doesn't have my css but it does actually do bold and italic text there actually is support for some html and then okay here is one of our decks astronomy what is the distance between the earth and soul that is the au astronomical unit and great that was a normal flash card oh brain this is where we did the brain emoji with a colon separator between the question and answer for a micro card there's no deck no hashtag deck here but there's the answer okay so if you want to quickly make inline micro cards you can use the little lightning bolt or brain emoji to do that what about law tech rendering now you saw mine i had special color latex and other stuff that doesn't render but the formula does render so we do have math equations in law tech but we lose all that special color functionality and then question two we have answer two these are the inline ones and then here's the zap emoji yep same thing the same thing as the brain and what is a great learning method okay and so this is where our image was now the image at the top the double brackets doesn't work because that is the m the obsidian syntax the double bracket wiki syntax for transclusion of an image but the markdown link with the bracket and then the braces or the the parens actually works as long as that image is in along with that folder where the i'm importing my documents and my flashcards from so because i have the image in there it actually brought it in easiest way to not have to deal with management of that over time is just to have it all brought in and stored in the same place import your whole vault or have it watch and synchronize so great and then question answer great and so now we've reviewed our queue i can see oh some are good some are bad done and yay we've done our first review so now we can go back and there we go we've gotten 50 of our uh cards tweeted well on today we still have five more in the queue because we did not get them correct and then a 10 out of 10 we have reviewed them if we go to study we can see ah today we got some green we got some red we got some that are in between and yeah and one of the great things about this application neurocash compared to anki is that the interface and the usage is a lot simpler like you can put a lot of stuff into this but anki is kind of not very aesthetic of an interface and it's kind of harder to use than something as simple as import your cards mark down syntax multiple types of content and then a very graphical and friendly interface to actually deal and review your cards and if we wanted to actually change our space repetition algorithm that we wanted to use there are some options like we can actually also filter by highlights nodes flash cards different different options in there but we can actually change our space repetition algorithm by going to our notes tab and actually clicking the ellipsis here we could stop space repetition we can start it and we can even change the algorithm there we go so you have a variety of different options to pick i usually just leave them on the defaults until i really know what i'm doing with all those because sometimes the default is just good enough until you really know what you're doing and just like that we've already reviewed some flash cards so we can review some more there we go and say okay those are the ones i got wrong okay okay okay okay and there we go we've reviewed them and we're done and easily able to get through your cards and learn so one last thing i want to show you in neurocache right before i go with this and move on to the next application is i did re-import my documents and i did test it and if we actually go to the notes here you can see at the bottom emoji tags look the way i use tags in obsidian are supported and they do work so if you wanted to actually take advantage of this and still use the way i use obsidian you can totally do that but i also want to highlight here is i really enjoy applications like this and i really appreciate the developers of neurocash who are respecting your right to your data and your privacy so i think it's a really good thing to support developers and really push the narrative that we deserve to have the ease of migration the control of our data and just making it easy to migrate from applications if it's not right for us like why stranglehold your your customers so i really like neurocash because it's a very simple application not completely simple but it's simple enough to really make it easy to just dive into space repetition get a lot of functionality a lot of options available and make it easy to just get stuff from markdown into cards for you to review it's really really great and really powerful let's just say though i'm no longer interested in using this application i don't want them to have any of my data i can easily go into this menu to import more cards but at the bottom we're going to say clear neuro cache data yes i'm sure everything is gone all of your stuff every note everything everything is gone there is now nothing left in this application and i really enjoy and respect that from developers who respect your right to your data and your privacy let me migrate if i choose let me clear out my data make it easy for me to do so and that actually makes me more inclined to consider an application even if there's something more shiny and more feature-rich out there and available sometimes just the fact that you respect my right to have my data delete it and migrate at will is something that will actually be a good selling point for you so i applaud neurocache for making it that easy to use and migrate from the application so moving on to the next tool the next one i'm going to talk about is a very famous and popular space repetition flash card program that is widely used in a variety of fields especially the medical field and this one is anki anki or enki however you pronounce it is free and open source software that is actively developed constantly extended through add-ons and plug-ins and there's a variety of different applications that will let us use this specific piece of software with obsidian and our markdown files and i'm going to cover all of those in gross detail but let me first talk a little bit about anki what it can do what it can offer you and maybe you like what i'm doing that might actually be interesting to you so like i mentioned anki is free in open source software you can find it on github and they have a lot of additional pieces of anki and the functionality around anki on github it's written in python russ several other different application programming languages and you can download it from their website anki or apps.ankiweb.net and you can download it for pretty much any platform it's available for windows linux mac and iphone and android the only difference is that the iphone application actually requires you to pay for it's like 20 bucks it's a little pricey but i paid for it in case i'm ever on the go and i want to do my reviews but you can use this on pretty much any platform and you're good to go iphone ipad android linux mac windows whatever and there's so much you can do with this application but if you're also looking for a rabbit hole of information on how to use customize and really squeeze out every single little bit of value on anki and you want an anki specific channel the anking is someone i can definitely recommend with confidence on a lot of anki-based information there's some really cool stuff in here like for instance a video i'm gonna make that he has also made about how to actually use a video game controller to improve your repetition um speed while also using the application but there's a lot of information in here and i honestly have a lot of research left to do on anki but this is a great channel for you guys to check out if you want to deep dive more on just the application itself so by itself anki is actually pretty plain it doesn't really do or look like much of anything but it is really powerful now right now you're seeing my anki decks you're seeing my plugins and all this other stuff going on but if we wanted to actually look at just what anki would look like if you just opened it we can actually switch to a new profile add it we're going to say youtube okay we have a youtube profile and i'm going to open it and here's what you would see this is brand new anki nothing into it a default deck and that is it now something really cool about anki is that there is a plethora of add-ons you can get to extend its functionality to use those you can always just go to tools add-ons and then what you're going to do is actually get add-ons and you can actually input a code and where you get these codes you would actually go to the anki website and in the forums there will be lists of different plugins and people talking about them rating them commenting about them if you browse those it'll actually show you all of these different add-ons and their ratings and you can sort them by ranking and honestly there are so many plugins and add-ons available that it's it's a little overwhelming but some of the ones i personally recommend are if you're gonna use this with obsidian at all and some of the other examples we're gonna use anki connect but one thing you can also do is if you wanted to show on discord as you're playing a game there's anki discord but some of the really critical ones for actually improving the quality of life with your space repetition i would say are the image occlusion enhanced edit field during review and uh let's see here life drain is good for gamification and then the review heat map i really enjoy those things i just think are really massive value added for e-reviews and i'll show you those in a little bit more detail in a minute but this is what anki looks like if you just open it and you have nothing so first things first let's make card so first thing we do is say okay what deck do we want to go to we have a default deck but we can create a new one let's do that i'm going to say hey make a new deck this one is going to be for obsidian enter okay oh default went away why because now we actually have a specific deck but we want a different one we want to say hey this one is going to be for spaced repetition cool we now have another deck now one thing really cool with this is that if i have some cards in this deck but not in this deck but this is a child deck of this one then you'll see some really cool rolling up going on but what does that look like let's see so if i click on space repetition that deck i need to actually make a new card okay so there are some hotkeys we can just click add but oh there i hover shortcut a if i hit a okay make a new a new card now this one is actually because i have the plug-in image occlusion but i'm just going to stick with basic now some of my card templates are changed because i actually have modified some stuff and but what we really need to do is a typical flash card front and back that is basic cool so i choose basic and it's going to say okay what do we want the front question and answer that's it okay we can also give it tags here at the bottom if i did a tag what this is going to let me do is say hey i can sort this and organize these with different tags so i could say hey it's part of my class c175 now i might know what that means that's my database and database management class cool but now if i hit enter command enter okay it made the card i hit at you could hit add or just command enter but it also retains the tag if you're going to make more but let's get out of there now oh okay the space repetition deck is showing me something if i go back to dex okay cool there's a new card and nothing is due because i haven't reviewed anything and it's not due again so the brand new cards look like it's a little blue over here but things that you've already reviewed that are popping back up appear here under do but now if i take this deck and actually drag it underneath obsidian it's now a child deck which now means that obsidian now shows one new card so this way i also do this for my own personal decks where i'll have multiple programming languages but i'll have the topic of coding so that way i can review in a specific context wow i'm prepared to oh hey i'm really answering code questions i'm not studying norwegian right now so i'm going to focus on code questions this might be a useful feature for you to do is making these child decks it does make it a little bit harder to manage when you use some of the applications we're going to look at later so what sort of inputs and things can we do with anki and space repetition well now you can see this child deck obsidian colon colon space repetition it's now a child deck we're going to add another card now what can we add here there's a bunch of stuff in here some of this is actually because of my add-ons but what we have is some rich text format we also have the ability to add things like latex math and yeah just close deletions if we're going to do um you know the actual closed deletion file uh flashcards so let's do this i'm gonna say hey uh this is gonna be bold italic and then we're gonna say super sub and yeah let's just see what we got here oh and under underline so bold we're going to make it bold italic just like that and then underline and now you can also hover and see the exact same thing command u and then subscript and then superscript just like that and i don't even know what this one doesn't ever use it or remove formatting so then if we're done with this we could say hey paste that paste that there but now i want to show it without formatting there we go just like that super easy we can also change the font color so we could say hey change this to blue and we could change this to honestly whatever you could change it by clicking the colors and then pick a color there we go white whatever select that and then you know if you change the color but what i really want to show you is that we can also do things like latex so if i actually get rid of all of that and we're going to clear this up let's do latex add some latex math inline so now it's actually going to give you this specific syntax now this looks different than what we're used to in say obsidian or math jacks because this is actually more the original law tech math how you would actually use it in law tech documents so what we could do here is we could do sum of pi raised to 7 with a subscript of sigma whatever that might be and the answer is hello world i can't spell at all and then we're just gonna enter okay cool that card is made now we can get out of the ad menu we have two new cards to review let's study okay first one question answer great now how easy was that so i have some different colors here on the buttons i guess it doesn't make a completely blank profile but i digress we could say okay i need to really review that in another minute i need to review it in 10 minutes or hey i'm ready for my first spaced interval show them it to me in four days we'll pick that one here's the equation perfect that's not exactly what i intended but you know it's it's good enough now one thing we can also do is i can actually control or command z to undo and now i'm back to the original question it removes my answer and now i can edit this again and pick a different score say i accidentally clicked the wrong thing but you can also hover see shortcut key you can actually hold your hand on the numpad characters so 1 2 3 4 the top of your keyboard and actually pick one two or three based on whatever buttons you see and actually you do that to actually score your cards now one of the big draws of anki is its way of using images because it's easy to just put content and flashcards into here let's just say you have an image of something you want to put in here and you don't have to write anything you just want images totally possible now i have a screenshot application thingy here so i'm just going to grab a screenshot just grab that okay cool i now have a screenshot now if i just paste this in here i now have an image in anki to review it could be an image of whatever i want it doesn't matter there you go done uh hello cool so now if i get out of here i can review this there's the image there's the answer done and a really great usage of that might be if you're learning languages you can easily just post a picture of say a dog and how do you say dog in another foreign language like okay how do i say dog in norwegian there we go huner for multiple dogs whatever so that's just pasting an image with the image occlusion plugin and this is one of probably the most important and useful add-on for uh anki is with that image i can say hey capture an image with a screenshot capture but now with the image occlusion plug-in i can just click on this button here and it takes my clipboard what i have on there and now i have this whole new menu of options available oops i screwed it up there but what that lets you do is actually edit your images and do something really really cool so i'm gonna make this full screen here now we have my image in here now i can easily just without even getting into all the custom functionality and all the different options in here because there are many i barely even begun to scratch the surface of this i can just click and drag some boxes there's one there's one there's one let's say you're hiding terms or images or pieces of a flash card there you go but now you have some options after hiding some stuff hide all guest one or hide one guess one what this will let you do is say hey hide every single block here and only show me or only let me or make me guess one of them or the other one is hey show everything except the one i'm guessing this is a really good one hide all guess one for easily trying to build that memory and so now four cards added four cards i only put in one image this is where image occlusion is great for producing lots of really great cards and that is because now i have five cards here and we'll actually show you well that's the other one but now if we actually let's do this oops i put it on the other menu there we go so now let's say oh wow here's all my blocked off pieces of content and here's the one i'm guessing what is that i don't know and it will show me only that one instead of showing me everything at any time so this is a really great way of showing and incrementally making a ton of flashcards off of a single image so again image occlusion plug-in really really useful for anki so so far i've just been talking about what anki can do the power of anki add-ons for anki everything are related to this because this actually will tie in with some of the other tools in obsidian that we're going to use in show but now i'm actually going to switch back to my own cus my own current profile and i'm going to show you some of what i have going on here so i'm going to open up my profile and i actually want to remove the other one because i don't like clutter so what i'm going to do is i'm going to delete that one yes and open mine great so i have a bunch of nested decks here i have different things going on cool but what i also have is um we're gonna create a brand new default deck default great uh oh it doesn't actually like that name i guess so let's just do test then so test deck has nothing in it but now if i add a card i have some options here and some of these i have changed deleted or made my own so with basic it's just a front and back but i also have these two custom fields this will work with the obsidian to anki plug-in i'm going to show you later and you'll see where these fields come in handy later on but other than those two added it's the same thing front and back all the different types of content images things that we can do just like that but if we also have this one f1 fdf uh i honestly i don't use this at all i don't know why it's here and i just leave it in case i need to have a template to play off of but there's also close deletion close deletion is really really useful because it's letting you see everything in context except what you're actually trying to hide so i could say my name is and then we could say command shift c and my name is brian and then my last name jinx okay cool there we go now this weird little syntax here is actually closed deletion now it has a number two what does that look like well now i can actually say i'm gonna hide off my last name too i'm gonna make that a closed deletion and it already increments to two okay this is saying i'm gonna get one card two cards out of this closed deletion let's say you have multiple fields you wanna hide together as part of one card and i said i'm gonna say because i said my name is and then closed deletion brian but i'm gonna change this three to a one that's cool whatever and the back completely unnecessary we don't need the back this is extra great and i'm going to add that now we have added that card now if i go to the test deck i have two cards because we had two closed deletions study now my name is what is it i said my name is blank okay this is closed deletion really useful for actually showing you context and making you guess and this is extra not required so you can make yourself guess something and then actually have information resources details about it listed here in the extra portion there you go and then the second closed deletion just like that now what we also can do is image occlusion which i never edit this this way i have never touched these i only use the actual add-in interface and that's it so i honestly could not tell you anything about that but here's something else i've done that i'm going to make a video on is actually my way of using programming cards in uh anki and that's a way of using the front back and additional info to show some certain portions of code but missing and actually making you type that code so we'll show you i'll show you more about that and i'm gonna tease you here with it but i'm gonna show you in another video completely on just that and how i did it later on so now looking at these cards okay cool what do we want to do with them well you can actually modify these templates so i could say hey here's a basic card and i'm going to look at the fields i can actually customize how many fields what type of fields what do i want to put in there how do i want them to be treated and this is a really useful part of anki is that you can granularly customize all kinds of stuff and really make this work for you the basics the basic functionality by itself already useful but when you really want to start squeezing out some extra value totally possible so i have all these fields in here but i also want to say cards and this will actually let you style your cards this is why my cards have grove box colors because if you know me by now grove box is life so i have my front template i have my back template i have my styling and this actually shows custom css to actually style my cards to actually look like this normally they do not look like this this is how i have my cards in anki and one of the great things about anki is that you can also sync this to the cloud so that that way all of your decks are available for your mobile applications other computers whatever you log in on and all this is synced so you can easily keep track of your review statistics and one of the great things about anki is that you also have this great statistics page this only shows that deck but if i show you my entire collection and show stats you can easily see my entire collection of my entire anki system and everything that i've been reviewing all my cards all this stuff and all of this is just syncable to the web you can review it on the web review it on the phone app on your desktop wherever and it's available on all major platforms amazing complex virtually accessible on everything tool that can really help you learn retain and memorize information now with that said we're actually going to look at how we can use anki and leverage it with obsidian using plug-ins and other functionality within obsidian quick note before we continue i do have a newsletter where i send out bulletins about new tools i find great new concepts i've learned different interesting things if you're interested in any of that type of content or just want to see like what i'm working on what i'm up to and get notification of new videos any of that type of stuff you can sign up to the to the newsletter in the link in the description or the pinned comment below with the time stamps and if you are not signed up and you want something like my templates mermaid charts or custom css and obsidian i offer those as a thank you for signing up to the newsletter link to that is below and let's get on with the video okay so diving into the obsidian to anki plugin in obsidian now i've been following this plugin since it was just a python script and brand new by the user sudonium i've been talking about putting out this video about it for so long and it's finally here i finally wanted to do something on just all space repetition options in working with obsidian and i'm finally getting to it and by now it's actually a full-fledged plug-in for obsidian not just an external script in python but actually a native plugin written with typescript and it's very powerful and very useful and leverages a lot of anki's settings but still using obsidian and markdown so it's actually still really powerful because it can take advantage of all that functionality but using obsidian how it's meant to be used so we're going to look at that today so if we actually go dive right in the plugin is actually going to be in community plugins and we're going to browse for it and it's going to be obsidian to anki obsidian if i can spell obsidian to anki right here by sudonium now this one is definitely a very complex plug-in because there's a lot of options and a lot of functionality and what all you have to do to get started is first one have anki installed two add this plugin now there's also going to be a setup right here so you can also follow these uh these settings have obsidian downloaded obviously at add this plugin have anki installed but we also need the anki plugin anki connect now this is really really important so now what we can do is we can go to anki and we can say hey go to tools add-ons i need an add-on what is it anki connect but we don't have that yet so we're going to search for it get add-ons browse for it now we can actually look for it oh right here anki connect it's right at the top how about that so you can also do that or you can just you know control f and search for it but anki connect and then you can find this code this code is the actual number for the add-on we're gonna grab that so now after we grab that code we can go here we can actually put that code in say okay and it will install the add-on but now here's the add-on as if we installed it i can click config and what you're going to put in this little pocket you're not going to see this you're going to see maybe something different but from the actual plug-in you're going to have this little text right here this json uh code right here this is going to be from the plug-in readme the obsidian tonki plug-in we're going to copy that and we're going to paste that into this little section here for the configuration we're going to say okay we're going to close this menu and then you're going to restart anki close it down completely now if you use this plugin you're going to have to have anki open for the plugin to function because it has to have something to connect to to update and sync your flash cards to anki from obsidian so if you're going to use it have anki open so diving into the settings what can this do and how can we leverage it there is a lot to unpack here now the uh readme by itself is not going to give you too much there is a whole wiki of documentation for this application this uh plugin on the repo but i'm actually going to show you some of what i have going on so if i go to obsidian anki settings now what this is going to show you is a bunch of information here what is what is all this what is all this doing so if i actually go to uh note type tables i can click on this note type table and it's going to say okay what what what is all this now anki is open and it is connected to obsidian so this is working right now it is connected to my anki instance so it's already picking out all of my different card templates oh basic f1 fdf close image occlusion okay okay now remember when i said i had those two extra fields i added to basic cards this is where they come in into context file link field and context field shows something very very interesting in anki now i'm actually going to show you a anki card of mine that actually shows this now let's go to i think it's actually databases if i show this let's go through some of this right here so when i actually made my cards in obsidian i actually have a file link this link will actually open up that document that has the card so you can actually see behind this here's actually the document with my anki cards in it and it linked to that but also in here it'll actually show me the context the name of the note it's under chapter 1 a subheading of 1.4 and the actual types of database this actually shows context so this way you have a link and context to the exact note say you need to revise a card and then sync it so it's updated you can do all of that with this plugin so first of all how do you actually set up those additional fields how you do that would be you have to go and first of all get out of here so we're actually going to go dex and i'm going to say add and now you're adding a card no you're going to go to the type of card you're looking at we were on basic here's these two fields how did i get those so i'm going to say fields you won't have these you need to make them so the first thing we can do is say add add a new field that's it that's it add a new field and you're good that's it that's all there is to it add those two fields and then when you actually open up anki and the settings for obsidian to anki you will then see from this drop down i can now select any of those four fields and so i just named them exactly the same for the most part and now they work and they're bonus fields so this way when i actually show the cards they're just stuff that shows with the answer the back because i don't care about it it's not part of the question so hey what's the front the front what's the back it's the front and showing the back everything else is just extra it shows with it it doesn't matter so that is actually how you set that up some of these other ones like this one i haven't bothered with image occlusion i don't even touch with this plugin because it just seems too complex for me i just do image occlusion in anki but then close deletion is really the same thing and then my programming card again same thing that's the note type table the type of cards you're going to create folder is if you actually wanted to have a specific folder of cards go to a specific deck and i honestly haven't played with this too much because i don't use folder hierarchies very much at all but you totally have the ability to do some manipulation based off of folders either the tags or the decks that you want to have set if you use a rigid hierarchy you can totally leverage that for your anki dex i do not next we have all these different syntax settings now i haven't messed with any of these i left them exactly how they are by default begin and start inline end in line target deck file tags delete frozen all those are exactly the same now what you can do here is also change your default tag now this is going to be a tag for obsidian or for anki for all the cards that obsidian to anki plugin adds to anki this is going to add this tag to all of those cards so you're able to easily separate them out and identify them now what you can also do is say hey if i don't say a specific deck to send this card to add it to a default deck and i don't like that so i always specify what deck i'm going to use now the scheduling interval is how often do you want this plug-in to run basically if you make any changes to any of your cards it will sync automatically but at what interval and i have this set to just like 30 minutes but you have to have anki open for that to work um add file link and add context those are the toggle options to utilize the note type table these fields that we added to the cards to actually add something to that you actually turn that on and it will do that for you now curly close changes the closed deletion syntax i honestly just think it's not a good idea to mess with this it's more portable to just use the anki closed deletion syntax and i'll show you in a minute how i leverage the template plug-in to deal with all this um again curly close highlights to closes this is using the highlight markdown to change it to close deletions for this curly clothes i just say don't use those in my opinion it's more portable to not use those id comments this is going to say the comments are this is the the unique ids that are assigned to each card and it's going to add a comment to those and i'll show you what that means and why how that's useful in a little bit and then add obsidian tags interpret the hashtag tags in obsidian in the fields of a note as anki tags i don't use this but i think it could be useful if you have a note that is tagged as something like a note that is tagged for like like me c plus plus programming but then i have some obsidian uh flashcards in there that gets sent to anki well now they're also tagged as c plus in the tags field could be useful regenerate note type table if you change any of your flash card templates you can regenerate that table and then set up that clear media cache this will as you can see right here clear the list of media file names and things that have been added to anki so for instance if you have templates of anki cards it's going to add those to the to a default deck because they're the templates and they still get picked up but once you you suspend those cards it already has an idea sign it's not going to add duplicate cards so you can basically just ignore this unless you have something that needs to be rebuilt and really just check out the troubleshooting section of the wiki for the plugin to really dive into more more of that and then clear file hash this is again for additional ids on the cards but um honestly if you just use this simply and don't get too crazy with it you're not gonna really encounter too many problems and if you do there's plenty of documentation and you can always ask questions in this in the forum and on the repo about this okay so now we've covered the settings how can we use this live we're gonna use this and we're gonna make something out of it okay so i'm going to add some new flash cards now i have a variety of flash card templates that again i offer all of my templates and things for free if you sign up to my newsletter link in the link below but i have a bunch of different templates here now it says anki and then a number what these do is this lets me show it shows me the order of things that i need to set up when i'm making new flash cards so first thing i'm going to do is i'm going to add anki and then zero okay first thing we want to do is i want to say okay link what's that okay this is if i'm actually going to make a new link to an actual document that it holds the flashcards for whatever subject because i don't want to have a bunch of flashcards on an actual note that might be on obsidian publish that would look really ugly and have a lot of inline and flashcard no so i just make a template of this note workbench anki cards so that's a template i could use i'm not going to do that here but okay so anki and then that would be link but now section this is saying okay i'm going to do an inline section well let's just say hey here's the note but i'm gonna have a section for multiple anki links so i can easily change this to one to two to whatever and actually have multiple sections okay that has nothing to do with the plug-in that's how i organize things but now for the plug-in we're going to say anki and then we're going to say one target deck where are we sending these cards to now i have some of my decks listed here i've already changed some of these so this is actually a little bit out of date but what we're going to do is i'm going to say we're going to send this to a new deck so if i go to my anki decks over here we have no deck we're going to say okay test so now what i also want to show you is something if you have a child deck so we're going to say test child underscore child okay so we're going to take this one and make it a child so now we have parent test and then child test child okay so now what i'm going to say is our target deck is going to be test we're going to remove all that cool what are the tags we're going to add um oops we're going to say the tag we're going to add is a test tag okay pool okay so we got deck we got tags what do we add next anki one okay nothing so two what type of card that's it so just where are we sending it to what we want to tag it as and what type of card we're just going to do a very simple basic card okay so here's some stuff now what i noticed that there were some issues by keeping the word front in here this shouldn't cause issues but it was so i typically just remove that now and just put my content here so i could easily just put in some text content and i'm just going to pick something from the readme that shows a variety of options okay i added a bunch of content in here to show a variety of options we have italics bold html underlining headings we can also do the mix of bold and italics you can do ordered lists unordered lists web links through the markdown links you can also do code blocks with code inline code or you can do actual syntax highlighted code blocks tables and logtech math equations wow so we can also add additional tags um this was a test and that's it if we have an answer for the back of this there's an answer and then the end this is the card this is an anki card and it's going to send it to the test deck great so let's do that so now we're actually going to go to the obsidian anki plugin i'm going to click this to scan the vault it's going to take a few minutes great and it's scanning so it's going to look through the entire vault of everything that matches start target deck all this stuff it's going to find all those things scan it and actually add those to anki or if something already exists and it's done now it's gonna if it already exists it's just going to update this is one of the really powerful things is because now you can see it ran it's done below tags and before end this id is actually the id for this specific card what this lets me do and i will show you in a minute is actually let you update this card over time so now if we go to anki okay here's a default one that's weird but here's test okay test there we go okay now again css was not supported that's why but now this note showcases a bunch of different types of formatting bold html underlining headings headings at various levels lists lists great now why was there a split there there shouldn't have been a split hmm what's going o back because it saw this and it was confused and it split this onto the back of the card we don't want that so if i actually remove that because that actually caused an error now because it has this id it's going to see this card and already take us back and affix that card so let's sync again so sync it's going to take a little bit all done that's fast okay go back to the card study here's everything so now we have all the stuff we got the web links we got code blocks this is actually in code syntax it's the inline code we also have the actual syntax highlighting on the code block itself that's useful tables and latex math equations awesome now if you're going to do images too images are also supported so now i could easily just take my uh space repetition image using the wiki link syntax send that to anki it's successful okay we're going to get out of here we're going to open it back up study and now the image is in here too just like that so that way you're able to use the actual native obsidian syntax to add your images and items into these cards wow already amazing and if i actually added those additional fields to have the basic card add the context to this which i did so if i show answer it will actually show me the actual answer here and if this was the type of card that actually showed those additional pieces of context it would appear at the end but wow already what we can add here all these different pieces and items of functionality this is just the basic card a front and back card so next i actually want to show you a closed deletion card how do we do that from within obsidian into obsidian to anki so now i'm actually going to get out of this deck and i don't want this card to exist anymore we don't need it anymore okay so what i'm going to do is i'm actually going to add above the id the word delete and what you can now do is delete everything under this card so there we're just going to say hey delete and now we can run this again and it will actually remove that id and say it's all gone it's all gone everything is deleted if i go back to anki okay there's something in default but i know what it is but there's nothing in test a card is now deleted inside of default is actually likely a template uh yes that is a template so what we can do is just say hey i'm going to suspend that with the shift at symbol and that suspends that permanently and because they have ids they're forever ignored but now whoa okay card is gone very easy to edit update sync and delete cards if they're hosted from within obsidian but now i actually want to put in a closed deletion card so i'm going to say one and or sorry anki one two closed card we're going to put in a closed deletion card so did you see this id he exists here this is actually the template it picked up by accident so because that happened i can actually get rid of that in my template so close and this will likely happen to you if you use my templates so inside of this um uh anki template for the anki closed card it's gonna actually give it an id but because that was actually brought over into anki to that default deck and i suspended it an identical card exists it's not going to add it back so that way i don't have to worry about this syncing ever again so what i can do is i can actually just get rid of this entirely i'm going to say get rid of that and done so now i want to actually want to close delete something say my name is and now i also have a template for the closed deletion syntax insert close there we go anki close done okay there it is text i'm going to say brian there's my name done what's the extra last name is jinx cool what are the tags i'm just going to say close done there we go now we can sync this oh wait but i want to send this to the child deck no longer test but test child how do i deal with multiple decks that are nested that is when you add double colons so now i can say test and child and now this will send it to the correct deck so now when i sync this it will sync it'll say yes give it an id it is now in anki when i go over here it appears in test because that's the parent but now it's in test child going here here's the actual close deletion my name is brian and my last name is jinx there we go and it shows the actual template here obsidian and the actual file context and link directly to ah there's the link takes you to that file really really useful for getting cards from obsidian into anki but let's say this is a lot of text and it's very verbose and it's just you don't want to have to deal with all of this block of text for every single card because it can be a lot believe me i got some cards from my database management foundations class and oh my lord there are a lot of cards to deal with this can be a lot this is why i made an external file to deal with all of these because that's 500 lines of text for just flash cards there are inline options available to you as well as custom regular expression options with the obsidian to anki plug-in we're going to take a look at those next okay so we're going to get rid of this card now because we're done so get rid of that and we're going to say delete and we're going to sync this one again so we're going to sync it's going to delete that card we are done there we go okay so now what if you want to add inline cards now there i don't use these at all because i just don't prefer the syntax but one thing you can do is you can do um i start and i end and you're going to say front and back in a specific syntax now i don't use these so i don't have a template for them but you can use them what it starts with is the i start ends with i end just like in the settings menu right here start i or start or end i whoops see i messed it up because it actually goes at the end and what this is going to let you do is say uh here's my card it's on a single line kind of like neurocache but you're going to say the base what type of card in the actual single line so it's going to be in square brackets what type of card this is the front of the card and then you say back with a double with a colon and that's going to be the back of the card okay so now let's sync this and see what it's going to do it's going to go to test child the parent deck or the child deck sync that it now adds a id at before the end i we go to the test child deck study now this is a test test successful done that's it so now that card exists and it's in line that is how you can do an inline card we could also do a close deletion actually does that already capitalized or not yes so it was so we can actually say hey make this a closed deletion and we're going to say test is going to get replaced with a close and the text is going to be test quick all right so then the back extra is just going to be this so actually because the cards are different we're actually going to see what that field is named so it's going to be back extra so back extra and we'll see if this works it might not honestly i don't use this so there we go added and then if we go back to the deck test child study that one is there we go so this is a test and see it didn't work so it should just be back or something but in any case you can see that there are actual inline cards that you can use and take advantage of with hey even close deletion now in the plug-in wiki documentation on github there's a litany of regex or regular expressions that you can actually add for specific type of card functionality basically regular expressions are looking up different pieces of syntax to pull out your flashcards from your markdown documents and by doing it this way you're able to take advantage of things like you want rem note style single line cards where you have just the double colons you can totally do that you just have to add a specific regular expression line to a particular field in the plugin for instance if i wanted this regular expression for rem note style flash cards to work for say my basic card template i need to copy this regular expression i'm going to go back to obsidian i'm going to say hey for my basic card here i'm going to insert a custom regular expression that's it i just pasted it right there we're good to go let's go out of here and now i'm going to go to my workbench and i'm going to say okay it's going to go to test child and i'm going to have it be um test uh child i'm just gonna call it simply like that and so by setting that custom regular expression it's going to find that particular piece of flash card and it's going to find the target deck find the tags add those and then see okay parent child or basically front back of the card and it's associated with the basic template so with this it lets me see easily separate into front and back an inline flash card using rem note style flash cards so if i run the sync on the plugin it's going to add the id below it okay great go to anki click study test child front and back of the card simple as that now if we edit this card you can see here's the context i can click that go to the file here's it just tells you where it was from obsidian to anki is a tag added automatically and test tag was what we set right here so with this you're able to easily create your own custom card templates link them up add custom data to those card templates from the plugins settings menu do inline cards do custom regular expressions for what type of inline cards you want all different kinds of functionality to really leverage the power of anki but this is really the more technical option for dealing with space repetition inside of obsidian there are some easier options but this one is the one that allows you the most power this is like your swiss army knife all these different tools and options all available right here at your fingertips and there's lots of documentation on the wiki for this uh plugin to take advantage of it and plus sidonium is a really active developer he's he or she they are always in the server answering questions promoting this app this this plug-in because it is so very powerful and useful i've been using this and following this plugins development since it was a brand new little python script way back and it's come a long way it's really really amazing and greatly fleshed out so i have a bunch of workflows here listed out for utilizing this plugin that i you know just i know of and could think of and what i actually use you could just have all of your notes and all of your flash cards for those notes in a particular folder and have those folders scanned to your anki decks based on the folders menu in the settings for the plugin i don't like lots of folders so that's not something that's going to work for me but that might be a workflow that works for you you could do linked notes which is what i'm currently doing where i have my main notes for a class or something and then i just have hey hey this class flash cards and on that note it's just all just all the spam of the flash cards just all that all that syntax all that all that writing and that way i'm able to keep my main notes clean but you also could do in-line cards if you so chose to actually have them in line in the text i don't like to do that so i don't even use them at all and then one other way of using this plug-in to your benefit without having to maintain a lot of stuff is you could easily just create these cards in obsidian sync them into anki and then delete all the stuff in obsidian it's basically a one-way sync you could do that but if you wanted to edit those cards easily or do like a regular expression i did a regular expression edit on like 50 cards at once to easily change something and you know it worked great but then you can sync those cards back to anki so if you don't want to have the ability to sync and update those cards then maybe you don't want to delete those and do a one-way sync but you could just make them in obsidian send them to anki and then get rid of the stuff in obsidian it's basically a great way of doing a bulk ad but that might not be for you the next plug-in i'm going to talk about is again another obsidian plug-in this one is the new kit on the block and i've been watching the development of this one relatively closely it mixes a lot of the best things about obsidian to anki and neurocache in that it allows you to do a lot of the simpler types of operations with neurocache of just getting content into a space repetition system it also allows for like you know card reverse card space double colon syntax very easily without any sort of additional like lots of technical setup and it also supports latex images obsidian uris references to notes code syntax highlighting tags constant context aware mode where it tells you the heading the note and all that all this stuff but with minimal syntax basically neuro cache syntax with a lot of the power of obsidian to anki but without a lot of complex finagling so it's really kind of like a more of a middle ground between neurocash and obsidian to anki but still letting you keep all the stuff in your own private systems because this will also take advantage of anki connect the same way that obsidian to anki does so this will also work in the same way it'll sync to anki but using minimal syntax like neurocache so we're gonna take a look at some of these options today so utilizing the new flash card plugin the new kit on the block we need to actually download it so we're gonna say flash cards there we go there it is download it you can update it activate the plugin and the way normally would and i haven't even looked at the options yet so we do have some options like we can actually test this and see if it actually works i know it does because i already have this stuff set up and we also have context aware mode this is the same thing where it says what file what heading where exactly it is this one will actually add old cards made without source nope don't need that code highlighting yeah we do want to add code highlighting default deck it's just name default that's normally the same and then do we want to actually identify the flash cards in the note sure why not so basically i don't like to change anything now one really interesting thing that the way this plugin works compared to obsidian to anki is that it actually leverages the yaml header so in here we define our card deck in the yaml header so cards dash deck and then you actually list out the deck if you have a parent child like i do test child here you do the same sort of syntax just like this now with tags this is another reason why this one isn't going to work for me is that it also hijacks the tags in the yaml header here so this means that whatever i put in this tag field will also spam my tag pane in here so i don't like that and i'm not going to use this plugin for that reason but you can actually put additional tags in here so like we could also put in because this is an array we're going to say tests there we go so now we have two tags for these cards so now we're actually going to generate the flash cards okay i clicked the button successfully inserted four cards now oh interesting this one actually does not do the html comments it does basically like a block reference hash but below each of the uh below this card so this way is actually more than a normal block reference hash that's interesting and one thing to know is that hey why do this only add one card none of these other ones have it now all these syntaxes do work according to the documentation so no matter where you put the double colons with spaces it should just work but it only added the first one why so this way it's detecting a question and answer but it's hijacking the heading the heading here is the question then it's showing hey here's my question under this heading with this answer so what we're going to do is actually add a heading over each individual card here but there's multiple ways of doing syntax this is actually just an inline syntax so we're going to go over a couple of them but that's interesting so then when i actually go over to anki here's the card you know test child okay got to got it to the right deck study it actually shows me interesting hashtag obsidian tests okay and then this is actually one of those um tags that i added it didn't have the emoji but okay so you do that there's my question my answer this is actually the context aware mode this is the question the actual heading but then the actual question heading actual question so that's interesting now if we edit this obsidian and tests okay it didn't add the emoji like neurocache does so that's interesting but okay so it actually can work so reviewing the documentation a little bit more one thing we can also do is say each of these different headings is a hashtag card this actually will let you say this is a card and then give me what is below it but because we also have context aware mode on it'll also show some interesting results for these subheadings let's see what this does with all these different cards wow okay so each of these is given its own little hash because they're each a card okay so now if we go back to the vault and okay five new cards let's start going through some of these what does what do these look like okay that's the inline one we added okay computer science languages stuff languages stuff okay so then we're gonna see oh okay additional deeper levels okay languages oop so this is a really cool way of seeing like those could be the questions but these are also just answers okay now i wonder what would happen if we said okay instead of java we have my question double colon then we sync it again okay updated two cards okay so let's actually go back in study oop okay oops c plus plus okay but then we have java my question so in this case this is giving me the heading and now a question but then the answer is still the answer so this way this is actually just showing us the entire context of each heading but then if you also do the double colon it'll show you that as part of the context aware question if you don't like the messiness of that context aware list of stuff going on you can turn it off by turning off context aware mode so let's do that let's turn that off and sync it okay successfully update it and there we go my question my answer done just like that okay that's pretty neat okay let's try and break this plug in see what we can do i have the top level heading now i also have this subheading with a hashtag card so this and everything below it should be a card now these ones these subheadings do not have hashtag cards so will they just be picked up as formatting i don't know yet we'll see now i also have an image i have tables code links inline code okay one thing i want to see let's also see if we can get html in here so let's just do underline and we're going to do html underline now one thing i haven't tested recently is actually putting in the audio files i'm not sure who how many people do this but there actually is the functionality to put in audio files into obsidian by having it just you know record your own voice now i haven't turned it on in a while because i haven't really had too much of a use for it but it is actually possible if i can just find the core plugin for it uh let's see where is it where is it uh audio recorder so now with audio recorder we're actually gonna record some audio here this is audio added to anki okay so then where did that go um okay here it is i added it right here where my cursor was so now we're going to put that right there it embeds that audio it's an audio player okay so yeah that worked now with all this content underneath this card let's see what breaks it and what doesn't okay let's sync it okay it's been added underneath this levels thing instead of the actual card okay well let's see what this actually looks like let's study some cool stuff okay okay so some cool stuff where is that that's the card and then it broke i think at varying levels it included levels okay so it can handle all those formatting it can handle headings but as soon as it encountered content below levels it kind of broke hmm okay let's see another card okay so it did not like some stuff below levels hmm interesting i'm not sure why but let's actually delete these headings and see how it plays nice without additional headings because it does look like it could handle it but it's a little bit more finicky than something like the obsidian to anki plug-in okay so let's try it again now let's sync okay uh oh did not insert a card so probably i need to update this um comes cool stuff too okay generate flash card it does not insert it that is tricky okay i tried doing an insertion again and i think maybe maybe what it's mad about is this double line break or line breaks in general let me test one more time but it did add at least this block of content right here because now we have this but that's it hmm i'm not too happy with that so let's just do get rid of all these line breaks and maybe that might make it happy maybe not let's see okay sync one more time okay oh oh there it is at the bottom okay okay okay get rid of that one some more for you and wow okay so the audio hmm interesting way of treating the audio what does that do looks like it'll just take us to here but it doesn't actually play the audio inside of anki i wonder if the other plugins do that but we do have order lists unordered um okay code blocks code highlighting tables work images work okay so there's a lot of stuff that does actually work with this but it does look like it's a little bit more sensitive to line breaks and to headings than the obsidian to anki plug-in so again a lot of things capable in this plugin but maybe not as much as some of the other pieces but you know pick which one of these tools will work best for you which is what's not too complex what has enough tools available for you to use and what is just a pleasure to use what works with your workflow for instance for me these tags in tags and taking over the yaml header this might work for me but this and the tags in in taking advantage of obsidian tags like that that does not work for my workflow so for me a lot of these applications and plugins do not work for me but maybe they might work for you so hopefully you've seen the power of space repetition and the tools that will make it more available and readily accessible for you neurocache some of the plugins just basic toggling inside of obsidian with remembered persistent folds lots of things to take advantage of memorization and learning tools and hopefully this review and the just the absolute status based repetition in obsidian was helpful do let us know in the comments below how you're using any of these tools what you like about them what you like dislike about the others and let us know any cool things that you've discovered found and use these tools for space repetition is an amazing tool in your toolbox for effective learning and knowledge building a quick note before we go if you'd like to talk more about this and just connect more with the people who are interested in my content what i put out what i write about what i do then we do have a discord server link to that is in the description below it's a very fun welcoming place we talk about a lot of different things we'd also talk about you know mental health adhd knowledge management software linux code and a variety of other topics it's a very fun and welcoming place and that's exactly how i want to keep it and lastly a big thank you to the patreon and github supporters and sponsors who support this channel on an ongoing basis thank you rito leonardo justin ed elliott klaus pippa rex alberto clark joel john john paul jimmy and rob thank you all for all of your support and your patronage all this is not required i greatly appreciate that you do appreciate the channel and like supporting it and the best way to do that is github sponsors followed by patreon for an ongoing basis and if you want to do it uh as a single transaction or paypal are amazing as well so thank you all for watching and i will catch you all in the next one [Music] you

Channel: Bryan Jenks

Views: 21,565

Keywords: bryan jenks, new macbook pro, macbook pro, catalina, anki, obsidian, obsidian.md, obsidian app, bryan jenks obsidian, obsidian md, anki app, spaced repetition, SRS, memory, learning, memorization, spaced repetition in obsidian, how do i use anki with obsidian, how do i use obsidian with anki, how do i use the obsidian to anki plugin, how to use spaced repetition in obsidian, what is spaced repetition, how do i use spaced repetition, how do i use obsidian for spaced repetition

Id: OqVs1Sw-Ahg

Length: 91min 4sec (5464 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 22 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/ProductivePM]

Great way to use Obsidian and Anki. Bryan does a great job of taking you step by step along with exactly how he uses it.

[u/Kurren123]

Great article. I'd love a comparison of nueracache vs anki, as I currently use Anki but am willing to move over to neuracache if all that changes is the ability to write my cards in markdown

[u/NorsemanCrafts]

[[Spaced Repetition]] is an incredible tool / approach / Resource for solidifying information into long-term memory. This is very helpful for those with ADHD who have poor working memory, students who are trying to learn lots of information, and anyone who really just wants to remember more of what they learn.

Forming Knowledge is the name of the game and these tools / approaches in and around [[Obsidian]] will help you do that.