 All right guys, welcome to the channel. In today's video, we're gonna do a full walkthrough of Anki, exactly how to use it. Also, I'll be sharing with you a unique method that I specifically use to improve my grades, my retention, while decreasing my time. Let's get into it. All right guys, welcome. In case you're new to the channel, my name is Lakshman, internal medicine physician and resident in training. I'm really excited to make this video because Anki was one of my favorite tools to use as a medical student, but also one of the things I still use now as a doctor. Now I know there's plenty of you guys watching this video that may be in medical school, on your medical journey or are just trying to use Anki for your particular academic or learning purposes. So depending on how familiar you are with the platform, feel free to just check out some of the links down below to the various chapters in the video, so that way you can find the parts that are most important to you. And if you do enjoy this video, I've made tons of videos on Anki and how I use it as a medical student, all throughout this channel and those will also be linked down below as well as a playlist. So first let's quickly just talk about exactly what Anki is. Now, there's plenty of flashcard systems out there, but the way I would define Anki is that it's an intelligent flashcard system that's designed around space repetition. You may be familiar with other popular flashcard systems like Quizlet, which are amazing and I definitely use them in my college days. So the beauty of Anki is that as you're doing your flashcard it starts to recognize which topics you're good at, which topics you're kind of average at and which topics you're amazing at. And in the future, whenever you're reviewing your flashcards it's going to have an increased frequency of those garbage topics, the things that you're really weak on that it's going to show you first and it's going to intermittently kind of sprinkle in the topics you're averaging and even less so of the topics you're good at. And so overall it becomes a fantastic and free resource that you can use to improve your active learning depending on if you're on your medical journey, you're trying to learn a class for college or if you're trying to, for example, learn a new language, it fits all of those modes perfectly. So next let's talk about how to set up Anki. Now, the beauty of Anki is that it's free and you can use it on both PC as well as a Mac. And for the demonstrations of this video we'll be doing it on a PC. So for all of you Mac lovers it's essentially the same thing. And you can also use it on your phone, Android or iOS. Now for the app version for Android it's absolutely free and for iOS unfortunately it does have a little bit of a cost but it's totally worth it because you can sync to your multiple devices and have your flashcards on your computer and then immediately to your phone. So for the purposes of this video I'm just gonna demonstrate on my laptop. So the first thing you're gonna do is to go to the Anki website and I'll link that down below as well. And again it's free so you can just go ahead and click download and then find the version that is best suitable for you. And I already have it kind of downloaded already but as soon as you do on your desktop you'll go ahead and see the Anki desktop icon. And you click it the first time it's basically going to ask you to kind of create a username and a profile. This is basically so your email can then be linked to all the flashcards you create. So in case then if you try to open up on your phone or your iPad or any other device you can easily sync it based off of that free account you created. Now in addition when you create Anki it's going to give you the option of creating a profile. Now most people just have one profile so that's kind of like your whole kind of portfolio of flashcards. You can also kind of get really advanced with this. So example if you're studying for a board exam like if you're studying for your MCAT when you're in medical school trying to get into med school and you can have just one profile for all the flashcards that are related to the MCAT and then you can have a profile for just your college classes or if you're studying in medical school you can have just one for your lectures and then some for your board exams that you're studying on the side. So as you guys can see I have various different profiles that I've created just for demos. So one of them is the Step 1 Academy. So in case you're studying for Step 1 that'll also be linked down below but we can just go ahead and log in. So now that we're done setting up Anki we can go ahead and start creating your own flashcards. Now the first time that you open up Anki there's obviously going to be nothing there but you guys can already start to see the potential of what this may look like when you kind of start to use Anki for quite some time. And later in this video we'll talk about creating your own flashcards as well as using flashcards that other people have already made. And before we get into the flashcards I want to talk about creating decks because this may give you an idea of how to structure your flashcards and then also give you an idea of the power that Anki has. So for example let's say that you're about to study for your cardiology block. Now you kind of have one so I'm just going to say cardiology class. So this can be a deck that you can essentially put all of your cardiology related topics so that's where you're learning in class right now. But let's say you instead want to get a little bit more macular and you want to go ahead and actually split it up based off of lectures which is what I recommend. And you can say lecture one say you're learning about EKGs that day, lecture two let's say you're learning about CHF or heart failure. Now the beauty is is that what you can do is you can essentially go ahead and move that into your perspective. So now as you can see under cardiology class the deck that I created, I have all of my lectures and then as I continue to do more classes I can go ahead and add it in. And if I wanted to I can do flashcards from the whole cardiology block or specifically from that lecture depending on how I wanted to review. So the idea of having these kind of decks and then mini decks and then mini mini decks you have a lot of control of how you want to review your material. But now let's go ahead and talk about the fun stuff which is how to create the flashcards themselves. Now we're going to go ahead and break down some of the most common types of flashcards and give you an idea of what kind of things you can do with Anki. And then later in the video I'm also be sharing with you some of the advanced techniques that you should be using to ideally increase your retention while decreasing your time. So the first thing we're just going to go ahead and do is create an Anki tutorial for this YouTube video. And here is the deck I have. So right now I have no flashcards but what you can do is you can just go ahead and click add and then you can go ahead and click to the various types of flashcards. Now this may look overwhelming but the most basic flashcard that you can create is as a basic flashcard. That's what it's called. It's a simple front and back with the question that you would put as well as the answer. And I'm just going to put question one because it recognizes that I already have a flashcard like that. So if I click add and I click close now when I'm in my Anki deck I can click study and it's just going to ask me that question and I need to know that the answer is answered. And then you get to kind of play with the beauty of Anki itself which is telling yourself how well do you know this information. So if I don't know the answer really well I can click show to me again in a minute. If I do know it pretty well then I can say show it to me in 10 minutes. And if it's something I really, really can master then four days. And so it's a nice way to just press the button based off your immediate comfort level and then Anki will do everything in the background. So that is one type of flashcard that you can create but let's talk about a few other ones. Some of the ones that I like are the ability where you can create multiple flashcards with one effort. And so some things you can do is a basic and a reverse flashcard. And basically this is great for things like language translations or memorizing structures. So let's just say for example you're trying to learn the language you can have both the English version of the word as well as the translation and that respective language. And so you can go ahead and have the English and then translation whatever language you're trying to learn and click add. But now the beauty is that it's actually added not just one card but it's actually added two cards. As you can see now I have three flashcards. So the first one that's gonna show me is just the one that I did. But now I have English and then translation but I also have translation to the English. So it's a nice way to flip flop cards when it doesn't really matter which side you see first you can actually quiz yourself interchangeably. Now those are some of the most basic flashcards you can create but you can get really powerful with Anki and so this is where I started to geek out. But the next flashcard that I definitely recommend you guys kind of learning about and how to use is the close function. So close flashcards they basically imagine you have a phrase or a long thing that you have to memorize within it. So you know process A equals process B plus C. Let's just say you have to memorize an equation. So what you can actually do is just let's say I'm gonna go ahead and take something from this Anki script that I actually created for this video. So I'm just gonna copy it in there and let's just say I wanted to memorize this part of the flashcard for my respective class. You can just click these three dots right here or go control shift C if you're doing this on a PC. And then what it's gonna go ahead and do is if I click and actually review that flashcard it's gonna go and then block off that respective word and I have to memorize what went in there. So in this case it was an intelligent flashcard system. And since I got it right I can go ahead and click four days. Now again you can get even more advanced with this. So again if I go ahead and just paste that phrase in what I can do is I can now choose that respective word that I wanted but I can also add in other things from that phrase that I also wanted to quiz me on. So again the beauty of creating multiple flashcards from one phrase or one question. So in case you wanted to memorize different things in a phrase but you wanted to have one flashcard to quiz you on one part and another flashcard to quiz you on another that's also great. So here I'm just gonna go show you this example. If I click show the answers I'm just gonna click through. So as you guys can see this is the flashcard number one that I created. And then now I actually have another flashcard that's quizzing me on the latter part of the thing that I clicked. And then to finally close out this closed function that is definitely a tongue twister. One thing you can do as a little bit more of an advanced strategy is you can just go ahead and do the same thing. But let's say you wanted to get quizzed on both flashcards at the same time. Then what you can actually do is you can instead of clicking C2 and C1 you can just make both of these C1s. And so now when I see this flashcard it's actually going to force me to actually be asked both of the information at the same time instead of one at itself. So if you have a really long kind of chain of commands or if you have bullet points and you want to memorize a few of them together or all the bullet points as part of your flashcard then you can just click C1 or the same number and then that card will quiz you on all of them. Now the last type of flashcard that I want to show you is really where Anki gets really cool especially if you're trying to memorize diagrams and figures and like maps is the image occlusion tool. So the image occlusion tool basically gives you the function of blocking off different things on a picture or an image and then making that into a flashcard. Now this is an add-on, it's a free add-on and so let me just show you quickly how you add this on to your Anki portfolio. So one thing you're just gonna quickly do is you're gonna just go ahead and Google image occlusion Anki. So we're just gonna click on one of these for the example. So we're just gonna go down here and it's gonna kind of show you the ability of what that add-on can do. And then to actually install this add-on all you have to do is just go down and find the number that I'll give you. So in this case it's right here so I'm just gonna control copy that and go back into my Anki and then you can just click on tools and click on add-ons. And I already had this installed but just for your all purposes go ahead and click get add-on and paste that code in. It's gonna go ahead and download it and install it and then all you have to do is just restart your Anki before you can actually use that tool. So now let me show you exactly what the image occlusion tool can do and what type of cool things you can do with this especially if you're learning for things like anatomy. So let's click add and we're gonna click image occlusion and click choose. Now a lot of stuff can go here but all you have to do is just click on this last button that says add image occlusion and then just find a picture. So I have a picture of the heart here and now the beauty of it is essentially it's default it's where all you have to do is just kind of click over all the structures that you really need to know. So and you don't have to click on everything so let's say in this situation I didn't really care to memorize the septum but everything else was kind of fair game then you can just quickly in the matter just a few seconds click over everything which is good for this example. And then you get to decide essentially how you want this flash card to be presented. Do you want it to look like this and then basically quiz you on one thing at a time but the rest of them are still kind of blocked off or do you want everything to be exposed except the one piece of information you need to know. So I'm just gonna say, you know, hide one, guess one meaning it can show the rest of them. It doesn't really matter you can play with however you like but as you can see I've added 11 flash cards now in a matter of just a few seconds. So if I go ahead and click show answer then this is kind of the beauty of the image occlusion it's gonna ask me to basically say what the structure is I'm hoping it's the right atrium, there we go. Otherwise it basically fails as a doctor but you can now go ahead and just keep clicking through and it's gonna ask you a different structure. Now the first time you create your flash card it's gonna ask you based off of the order that you created them. But over time what you'll find is as you say this topic is easy and this topic is hard it's gonna interchange, you know, the order of them and kind of shuffle them for a natural learning process. So that's basically how to create your own flash cards. Now before we get into some of the advanced strategies I just wanna quickly talk about how to use the work other people have done to essentially get your learning. So let's say you are trying to learn for a board exam or a language and you don't really wanna make your own flash cards you just wanna take the hard work somebody else has already done and use it for your own learning. So one of the great examples is when I'm in medical school one of the board exams we have to study for is step one and there's plenty of flash cards that people have made and some more popular ones that people use. So Zonky for example is a great one that I kind of include for my Step One Academy students which is why it's here but to get those kinds of flash cards all you have to really do is kind of Google what you really want and see if there's an Onky deck. So if you're just trying to learn Spanish I'm sure if you Google Spanish and like Onky into Google you'll find a flash card deck for that. If you're trying to learn for the MCAT you can find respective flash cards there as well. And so essentially what you can do is just try to find something on Reddit which is a good option or sometimes the Onky website actually has it. So in this example it does and all you have to do is just click download and then once it's finished downloading you can just go to File and Import and it'll actually just take a bit but it will import into that profile that you created. So as you guys can see this is a pre-made deck that somebody else has made for a medical board exam and it has all of the decks as well as mini deck and it essentially can get as big or detail as I want into the topic. So now let's get to the part of the video that's gonna be probably the most exciting and where I get to geek out the most and that's talking about advanced strategies that you can use to really increase your retention. Now one of the biggest downfalls in really any flash card system is that sometimes it just takes you forever to make flash cards and then you really don't have enough time to actually review them. So when I was in medical school I tried to find as many techniques as possible to minimize that first part which is creating my flash cards and making them efficient. Now when you use a close and an image occlusion again you can make multiple flash cards and essentially one effort but some of the other things that I really enjoy doing is something I call my screenshot method. So essentially what you can do is you can on one side have a PowerPoint of your lectures or a PDF of your syllabus, really any material and then you can have anki and you can use either a snipping tool on Windows and PC or you can use the actual screenshot tools that the max allow you to do. Then you can essentially go ahead and screenshot the whole PowerPoint. So for example, I'll just say I was trying to create a flash card so I can click add and I'm just gonna create a basic one for the purposes of this video. Instead of having to type out various things from this flash card to try to memorize my main thing is I wanna be able to quiz myself as quickly as possible on this PowerPoint. And so what I like to do is actually make the heading of the PowerPoint, the question and then I actually will take a screenshot of just the overall PowerPoint and you can essentially just quiz yourself there. So you can then have the PowerPoint and then slowly as you see the flash card just quiz yourself on one thing at a time. I talk about other things on how to actually do this method on various videos so I'll link those down below but this will really definitely speed up your process of creating flash cards so you can get to that learning part which is the most important. Now the Anki method or the screenshot method by itself just works fantastically. I've had students that have just been able to boost their grade and improve their free time by itself. If you wanna get to a little bit more of an advanced stage what you can do is you can again make this into an image occlusion. So to use this combination of the image occlusion as well as the Anki method one of the cool things you can go ahead and do is actually create a folder of all the screenshots that you want and collect them or you can do this one at a time. So Anki has the beauty of collecting the screenshots that you just do last. So for example, if I took a screenshot of this again and then I go into my image occlusion it's gonna memorize that that's basically what saved. And so now you can essentially look at this flash card and ask yourself like what parts do I want to memorize? So I'll just say the basic things that I wanna do for the workup is X, Y, and Z. So I wanna quiz myself. I wanna quiz myself on what this EKG was and then also this one. And then I'm just gonna select the features of the flash card that are most important and I'm going to just kind of blank out the rest. And now I just wanted to basically say I wanna hide one and guess one. So it's created six flash cards from this PowerPoint really quickly. So essentially without having to type anything up I've essentially been able to create that flash card. So for example, let me just show you what that would look like. So as you guys can see now the flash card shows up and it's really just gonna quiz me on the flash card itself without me having to get crazy with the question. And the first part is gonna be what is the basic workup or some of the A5s? I really need to know that I need to take their history of chess, x-ray, or electrolytes. If I don't get all of it, then I can just show it to me again in a minute, Anki. As you guys can see using this image occlusion tool plus the screenshot tool can essentially get away without having to type anything actually into Anki itself and just using that PowerPoint or the syllabus lecture you wanna memorize and then using image occlusion tool to make multiple flash cards and forcing yourself to just memorize the things of the PowerPoint that you actually ended up having to do for the exam. Now hopefully you guys enjoyed those first two techniques and I have one more advanced strategies to really share with you the power that Anki can do and really kind of hone in, especially when you're studying for exams. One of the most difficult things that I had, especially when I started was his ability of saying, okay, like the test is coming up. I know there's hard topics and the easy topics. Anki's gonna start to quiz me on everything and I really just wanna focus on the hard things now because I know that's gonna cost me my grade if I don't get these mastered. So one that you can do is you can actually have use the function of tags. So if you click on browse, basically what a tag is, is essentially you can label a card for multiple reasons. So if you wanna say one card is cardiology, another card is an EKG, and another card is from this lecture. You have a lot of control. But one thing I like to do is actually like to add different tags in terms of the difficulty level of a flashcard. So let's say we're going through the browse menu. I found the flashcards I created. This, by the way, is a great option for you to kind of add notes. So if I'm in this lecture and I'm learning something about AFib, then I add my notes here and it'll show my flashcards in the future. But really where I wanna focus on is the tags. So let's just say, for example, as I'm going through this flashcard over time, I realize that it's a hard flashcard. I go to the next one and I realize this is an easy flashcard. And then the next one, I'm gonna call this a hard flashcard. And we'll just do one more in this example. We'll just say, hey, for some reason, this flashcard is difficult. Now, if I click out one option you can use and Anki is actually creating a filtered deck. Now, basically what a filtered deck is is that you can basically tell Anki I want this function to create a deck. So what we can actually do is say, Anki, show me tags that are labeled as hard. And if you do this correctly, what you'll find is it'll say filter deck one or whatever. Like, study now, it's gonna show you those flashcards that you labeled at one point or another with that tag. And so as you guys can see, these are all of the tags that we added below and it'll just kind of continue. Now, the beauty of this method is that if you were studying for these flashcards in general, you can just go to edit and add tags. So this flashcard already had a tag for hard and then now it's suddenly easy. You can just type in easy or if it never had a tag at all, you can go ahead and label it based off your difficulty. So as you're getting closer to exam time, you can start labeling topics based off of how important and difficult they are for you because again, when test time is getting close, you really just want to say, Anki, I know you wanted to use space repetition, but right now I need to focus on difficult topics. Please show me those. So this is a great way to kind of get around that. And hopefully those last few methods really gave you some ideas of how to use Anki and the power of Anki. And again, all of this is free, which is just absolutely remarkable, but I want to give you some kind of remaining tips that I use to really kind of speed up my review process and make them really effective. So let's just say, for example, we're gonna go ahead and study it for step one. So one thing you can do is as you're going through the flashcard, you want to keep in mind things that slow you down. Now, often when we see a brand new flashcard, the first kind of method that I like to use to make sure that I'm always giving all of the topics importance and priority is I have kind of a mental timer. And sometimes I'll make it as low as 10 seconds, which means you have 10 seconds to answer the question and 10 seconds to review the actual answer that comes up. So this prevents me from getting too into a flashcard. It's not gonna just simply accept, you know, I don't know it, show it to me again in a minute. So let's say this is a flashcard and to avoid me kind of getting too much into the weeds of this figure, I can just say you have 10 seconds and then you have to click one minute or 10 minutes. And so having this timer method, especially if flashcards are hard for you to review, works really well. Now, again, the amount of time that you focus per flashcard doesn't really matter, but just having a timer just keeps you going and that way one topic is no more important than the topics of the very end of your flashcard deck. And that's my timer method, but number two is to really break down a large flashcard into tiny bits of information you want to memorize. So again, the beauty of Anki is that I can show it to you in a schedule. So there's no pressure of trying to memorize everything at once. And I feel like medical students and just students in general will do this a lot. So let's just say, for example, I'm trying to memorize the various structures of the skin in this flashcard. You know, somebody's first approach is gonna say, let me try to memorize everything at the same time. But again, you're not giving equal priority to other flashcards because by the time you get to the end of your flashcard review, you're likely gonna have low energy less focused. So what I like to do is instead say, okay, you have about 20 seconds. And let's just memorize the first two layers of this and then I'm gonna see this flashcard again. No big deal. So I can answer the question, so get that correct. But if there's something in the figure or the PowerPoint, if I was using the screenshot method that I wanted to do, I'm just gonna say, let's memorize these two. So the corneum and the granulosa. And then if I get those right, perfect. I can move on to the next three to four structures that it's labeling. And I can click show it to me again in a minute. Now I see that flashcard next time. The first thing I have to ask myself is did I memorize those two things? If so, cool. Let's add one more thing and show it to me again in a minute. This way you're constantly moving. Topics are all having equal priority and the learning process just has so much more of a flow and it's just not a stress. But that guys is my broad overview on how to exactly use Anki. Hopefully you guys really enjoyed this video. Put a lot of effort to kind of show the different things that I personally use, the things that I found medical students and other students using. So let me know in the comments down below what you guys think, what other questions you may have for Anki. Now remember, I've created tons of Anki related videos here on the YouTube channel. So make sure you check out that playlist down below. And while you're down there, probably just go ahead and smash that like button because if you made it to the end of the video, that means the video hopefully gave you enough value and some ideas on how to use it for school. So if you did enjoy this video, I'd really appreciate it at least for YouTube to kind of show this video to as many students as possible. Go ahead and smash that like button. And if you do enjoy the kind of advanced strategies that I've shared in this video, there's tons more across the YouTube channel and plenty more coming your way. So go ahead and hit that subscribe button and notification bell. If you enjoyed this video, I know you're gonna enjoy this video of how you can boost your grades and retention by just using one tip. And in this video, basically how I show you a full walkthrough of how you use that Anki screenshot method. If you are on your medical journey, then check out some of the programs that have for you down below. Basically showing you more step-by-step videos just like this on how to improve your retention, get better grades, and become a less stressful man student. But with that being said, guys, thank you so much for watching. Thanks for being a part of my journey. Hopefully I have this little help to you on yours and I'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.