Phreadom’s Anki Tips
Tips for using Anki by Phreadom. More…
I was having trouble keeping motivated to do my vocabulary drills in Anki and some of the people in the chat pointed me to some helpful features that have really helped me get back to my studying with Anki… so I wanted to share!
The first was “Time Boxing”. This allows you to set a specific amount of time you want to review so that you can trim down your studying into more bite-sized chunks to help keep you from getting overwhelmed. I’ve set mine to 2 minutes (in the “Session limit (minutes)” box) which is a nice brief setting that I can pop over to periodically when I’m not doing something else.
Next was “Cram Mode”. I’m kind of winging this at the moment, but basically if your cards have tags on them, you can choose Cram Mode, type in which tags you want to cram on, and then it will just let you go hog wild and study as many as you want for as long as you want. For me I type in “Japanese” and it shows all my JLPT4 Vocabulary cards (which I added from Anki’s built in deck download feature; File → Download → Shared Deck…), and I leave it set at 2 minutes per session for “time boxing”… so as long as I leave that cram session open, every 2 minutes I can take a break and go do something else for a bit and when I come back I will be able to review the cards I chose “Again / Soon” for right away.
If you don’t have tags on your cards, you’ll have to add them yourself… you can do this under Edit → Browse Items… and add the tags yourself in the “Tags” field at the bottom there. Luckily my vocab cards were all associated with the “Japanese” tag already, so I didn’t have to mess with this.
Hopefully this helps other Anki users keep up with their studying as well!