Why I made this course

hey friends welcome back to the channel if you're new here my name is Ali
I'm an entrepreneur and author but in a previous life a few years ago I
spent 6
years in medical school at Cambridge University and 2 years working full-
time as a doctor in the UK's National Health
Service and there was one app that got me through that entire experience
and that app is called Anki it's essentially
a flash card app and if you're a student of any sort and you have to
memorize stuff you need to be using Anki because
it is just absolutely incredible it's free it's open source and it just completely
changed my life when I discovered it in medical school now Anki
and Flash software in general is based on two key Concepts around
effective studying and learning which are called active recall and space
repetition these
are things I've been making videos about since like 2017 so you might have
seen some of those videos I'll link some of
them down below and it's not just me who thinks that an is an absolute
Game Changer there are literally hundreds of thousands of students all
around the
world who swear by using Ani for pretty much every subject from medicine
to law computer science and even Arts subjects
like English and history and geography and stuff the issue with an app like
Anki is that it's very powerful but it also has a little bit of a learning
curve and that why a few years ago I decided to create an entire online
course on how to use Anki and previously
this course was available for paying subscribers on skillshare but recently
me and my team decided you know what let's just put it for free on
YouTube
because why not now I'll warn you now this class is absolutely massive
there are going to be loads of time stamps
down in the video description and if you're just getting started with an you
only really need the first bit of the class but for the sake of completeness
I've put in a bunch of bonus content where I interviewed some of my friends
and people who are really good at using Anki and they shared their tips and
yeah
the classes a few few years old and so I look a little bit younger but Anki
the app hasn't really changed substantially in that time so I hope you enjoy
this
completely free master class in how to use Anki an absolutely
gamechanging app that will transform the way you approach
learning and studying anything hello welcome to the class in this video I'm
going to explain the class structure so
Course Introduction
in the first segment we're going to be introducing kind of the basics of ani
like why you should use Ani and the power of flash cards if you are you
know
familiar with the idea of space repetition and active recall and stuff feel free
to skip these videos and actually I think that's a general theme
for this whole class you don't really have to watch all the videos in the order
that they're given you can just kind of pick and choose the stuff that
you want because I know people are going to be coming into this with
different levels of experience with flashcards and with Anki and just with
studying in
general so the first chapter of the class is kind of aimed at complete
beginners it's about things like how to install Anki and how to synchronize it
with anky web but then we've also got some stuff about basic flashcards
Clos deletions and image inclusions and
reverse flashcard types which even if you have been using an before in the
past if you're not a complete
professional at using Anki you still might find those basic videos helpful
because I think it's really important to get a solid foundational
understanding
of how anky Works before we kind of dive into the the nitty-gritty of it so
that was chapter one chapter two of the class
is going to be walkthrough based so assuming you've got this foundational
knowledge of how Anki works with all these different card types I'll be
taking you through how me and a few other people how we would create
flashcards from lectures from classes in
real life and from textbooks and how kind of the process works for making
an effective flash card at that point you
should have all the information you need to just kind of get started with Ani
and then the rest of the class is fairly optional but in part three chapter 3
we're going to be answering some frequently asked questions so in
preparation for this class I posted on my Instagram asking people to send
in
their questions and we've tried our best to answer every single common
question that people had the most common ones were around things like
motivation and
consistency and discipline like how to actually bring yourself to do your
flash cards every day so hopefully we've got
some advice for that but there were also a lot of questions about specifics
about flash cards like how long should your
anky flash card be how much information should you have on it and how to
avoid things like flash card over Lo and a
load of people were for some reason interested in how Anki fits into a wider
study strategy and so we've got videos
comparing Anki and notion an and Quizlet an and Google Sheets uh and I'll
be sharing my philosophy of how I use Anki
to study for all sorts of things along the way then in chapter 4 we've got the
optimizations the advanced stuff where
we're going to be talking about tags a handful of add-ons that we
recommend you install and the immense power of
pre-made decks but also the potential pitfalls with pre-made decks because
pre-made decks genuinely have the
potential to change the game complet when it comes to your flash cards
but you got to kind of use them properly
otherwise it becomes very overwhelming and we just want to throw our
laptops in the bin because pre-made decks can can just be a nightmare to
deal with
hopefully you'll find a way to navigate pre-made decks in chapter 4 so that
was it um thank you for watching this
introductory video and I will see you in chapter one where I'll have a
change of clothes for the very first segment of
the class all right so what is a flash card a flash card is very simply well
What is a Flashcard?
it's a card that you have something on the front and you have something on
the back so for for example with this uh
capital of France that would be the front of my
flash card and on the back of my flash card is the word Paris so capital of
France and Paris this is a flash card
and the idea is that I would have a deck of flash cards so that when I come
to it I look at the front I see capital of
France and then I think okay cool um I think that's Paris and then I turn
over and I'm like yes I got it right or if I
saw capital of France I think oh I think it might be uh London and turn over
oh yes it's Paris of
course this is basically what a flash card is this looks really simple but flash
cards are absolutely magical
inventions that have the power to change your life like genuinely I'm not
overstating this enough flash cards and
in using flash cards properly is 100% a total Game Changer when it comes
to effective studying so why are flash
cards good so flash cards are good because it encourages us to use active
recoil and if you've seen my previous
class about how to study for exams and if you haven't then you should
please I I talk a lot about active recall and how
it's the single most powerful effective study technique basically the idea is
that we test ourselves and the process
of testing ourselves strengthens the connections in our brain between the
kind of stuff that we have to learn therefore if I were to just read in a
book the capital of Francis Paris the capital of Francis Paris the capital of
Francis Paris or just write it down or highlight it or whatever it wouldn't
stick in my brain as much as if I actually tested myself if I actually thought
oh what the hell is the capital of France and turned over oh yes it's
Paris you know the act of testing ourselves is what strengthens those
connections and flash cards are a very
easy way to force ourselves to use active recall because we have to test
ourselves now why else are flash cards
good well flash cards also lend themselves very well to the second most
effective study technique and that's
called spaced repetition now space repetition again I talk about this in
depth in my YouTube videos and in my other class which you should
definitely
check out space repetition objective is to combat the forgetting curve now
there's this thing in the scientific
literature in fact I'm going to show you fantastic article from Nick case
called how to remember every anything forever
um it takes about 20 minutes to go through but there's a graph that I want
to show you here ah here we go in 1885
Herman ebbinghouse performed an act of scientific masochism uh he
memorized thousands of nonsense words recorded how
much he forgot over time and discovered the forgetting curve he found that
you forget most of what you learn in the
first 24 hours and then if you don't practice recall active recall flash cards
your remaining memories Decay
exponentially we've all had this thing where we study something one day
and then the next day it feels like it's completely gone or a week later we
we
don't even remember studying it in the first place this is not because we are
stupid it's because this is how our brain works it's called the forgetting
curve over time we exponentially forget things and this is sort of what it
looks like so there's this interactive graph
interactive graph over here and we can see that it's essentially an
exponential decay over time so our memories will
Decay the idea behind space repetition let's start with the repetition bit like
once we recall the stuff so for example
if I learned that the capital of France was Paris then then I would be
forgetting it according to this forgetting curve but let's say some
point later I retested myself on the fact that the capital of France is Paris at
that point my memory would go back to
up to 100% And then it would restart the forgetting curve so you can see
here let's say I start my recall at this
point you know it it goes up to 100% strength of memory and then it again
decays exponentially the slightly
interesting thing about this is that every time that we revise the thing
every time we recall that the capital of France is Paris the Decay happens
less steeply so for example if we move this
interactive [Music]
graph you'll notice that the lines are getting less and less steep right at the
start if we look at the very first
one that is a very kind of steep drop off this is exactly how memory works
it's a steep exponential curve but if we
recall it there and over there
and over there and over there we see that actually it takes us longer to
forget the same amount of information
which is why you never forget that the capital of France is Paris because
you just come across that fact so often that it's now memorized forever and
that's
the idea behind space repetition um here's a nice little graph and if we hit
the auto optimize button if we want to
kind of optimize our memory to stay in this kind of yellow Sweet Spot you'll
see that the the intervals that we are
repeating it at gradually lengthen and the idea is that because as we we
repeat the topics and as we repeat that factual
recall we strengthen the connections and then it takes us longer to forget it
but it's the fact that we've forgotten it
and then we're recalling it that is what allows the memory to take hold
because the brain as I say in my previous class
is sort of like a muscle in that when it's working hard it's growing but if it's
working too easily it's not growing
so I could read Capital Francis Paris over and over again in a single study
session but my brain wouldn't be working
because I haven't forgotten that fact whereas over time as I allow my bra to
forget some of the stuff and then I
recall it that's like the magical way to remember every anything forever so
this is all basically to introduce the
concept of flash cards flash cards are amazing because of active recall and
with physical flash cards you can create
a space repetition system around them so back in the day what people
used to do is they would have a box for stuff that
I don't know they would have a box for stuff that I know kind of well they
would have a box for stuff I know a bit
more better they would have another box for stuff I know a bit better than
that and you know you would have your your flash cards in like different
part and
the idea would be that let's say you've got the capital of Francis Paris and
you knew it very well you'd move it up to
the next pile and you'd review the second pile maybe every 3 days then
let's say you know it really well you would move it up to the next pile and
you'd review this pile maybe every 7 days and so on and so on until the
final pile you were only looking at once every
3 months and that was the way that people used to use space repetition
with flash cards back in the day but the
whole reason behind this class is that there is an easier way and that
easier way is Anki and Anki is the single best
flash card app on the planet which reasons why we're going to go into in
depth and in this whole class I'm basically going to be giving you a very
beginners introduction to how to use Anki to memorize to learn absolutely
anything uh I started using an in my
first year of med school and I discovered it a little bit too late I discovered it
towards the end of the year and I was thinking damn I really
wish I'd discovered this sooner I used Ani properly in my second and third
year of med school and I got a first class degree in fact in my third year of
med
school I even ranked top of the year because I used Anki so much and then
I kind of didn't really use it in my fourth year I did average and then in my
fifth year of med school I used an extensive and I did very well in the
exams and then in final year I was making YouTube videos so I didn't really
care but so like even anecdotally for me the years in which I've used Anki
have been my easily my highest performing
years exam-wise and I've also been a lot less stressed through exam
revision just because I've had the system of ani so
that's enough of a sales pitch for Ani let's now talk about what ani is and
exactly why you should use it Okay so
What is Anki?
we've talked about the theory of flash cards let's now talk about Anki which
is basically what this entire class is going to be about now anky look
powerful
intelligent flashcards remembering things just became easier much easier
in fact uh and this is apps. an web.net so
you can just Google the word Anki and it will be the first result apps. an
web.net remember anything remember
anywhere remember efficiently this is this is an it's basically flash card
software which incorporates active
recall and space repetition and has a load of other features some of which
the
beginner features we're going to break down in this class and then in the
next class it's going to be kind of a kind of
intermediate to Advanced look at Anki we'll be deep diving into all the weird
and wonderful ways that you can customize Anki Anki is also free it is
completely free you do have to pay a little B bit of money for the IOS app if
you want I think it's 100% worth it but
if for some reason you have an aversion to paying for software you can just
use Anki on the web you can use the Windows
app you can use the Mac app you can use the Android app for free and I
think there are some thirdparty iOS apps as well basically it's free every
student
in the world can benefit from using an or using flash cards of some sort and
I'm going to argue that Anki is the single best one so Anki is a program
which makes remembering things easily it's a lot more efficient than
traditional study methods and you can either greatly decrease your time
spent
studying or greatly increase the amount that you learn you can use it to
learn a language study for medical and law exams
memorize people's names and faces bit pointless brushing up on
geography mastering long poems even practicing
guitar chords and I've used Anki for various kind of aspects of that theyve
it's got synchronization I.E anky web is
a sort of free online service that keeps your decks synchronized across
different devices so I can do my flash cards on my
phone or on my iPad or on any computer that I go to cuz I can do it online
so yeah Anki is flash card software that
incorporates spaced repetition now how does this work basically when you
see a flash card in Anki you active recall you
test yourself on what it is and then you see the answer and then you can
rate whether you found it easy medium or hard
basically and based on whether you click easy medium or or hard Anki has
this special spaced repetition algorithm uh
that's modeled after a service called supermemo from back in the day the
details of that don't really matter but basically it automatically figures out
what the space repetition intervals should be for stuff that you marked easy
medium or hard so if I found something
easy it would then ask me again in 3 days time if I found it hard it would ask
me in 15 minutes time and over time
as I'm going through my flash cards repeatedly I'm rating myself in terms of
how hard I found the stuff and then anky
is resurfacing the relevant things appropriately based on when I'm most
likely to just pass that threshold of
forgetting and so if we can do Anki every day we can basically trust the
algorithm and really like the way that I
thought of Anki in med school and the way that everyone I know who uses
Anki properly thinks of it it's that Anki sort of functions as a second brain
and
you know that if you make a flash card in Anki provided you are
consistently looking at flash cards every day you know that that fact or that
concept is
just going to get uploaded to your brain and in a way it takes all of the
stress out of studying because we all really struggle to remember stuff and
like to
figure out each day like what am I going to study what I'm going to do like I
don't know what what my weakest topic is all of this stuff if we just chucked
everything into anky and did our flash cards consistently over time it would
just get uploaded to our brain that is the way to think about it a few caveats
with that um that I'll talk about later in the optimization section we shouldn't
be chucking everything into Anki an is
very good for specific factoids specific examinable facts it's not great for
like understanding concepts we'll talk a
little bit more about that that's a little bit more advanced but basically Anki is
amazing you should definitely download Anki uh so that was kind of an
introduction to what Anki actually is all right so in this video we're going to
be talking about why Anki rather than
Why only Anki?
some other Alternatives now if you're already sold an Anki please feel free
to skip this video and just move on to the
next ones in the series but basically Anki is well the best flash card soft on
the planet a big reason why that is is
because Anki is free and Anki is open source which means other people
can contribute to it and that means there
are like hundreds of people around the world who have added their own
add-ons and their own customizations to Anki and who have really drilled
down into the
space repetition algorithm and figured out what the best kind of intervals
are that sort of thing the other stuff you
could use you could use something like Quizlet I've experimented with
Quizlet for a bit it's quite nice it's quite
pretty but the one annoying thing about anky it's not very pretty and it can
sometimes feel like it's not intuitive
um there is a bit of a learning curve with Quizlet there is no learning curve
but Quizlet is also a lot less powerful than Anki overall you really can't
customize it it takes a lot of effort to make cards you can't make cards
offline in a sort of reasonable fashion the
synchronization is a bit weird with different devices and while Quizlet is
very pretty it's like anky with a layer
of paint it also means you can't customize it and so if you're serious about
using flashcards and you know how
to operate a computer proficiently then you will have no problem with ankey
there is a slight learning curve but
that is what this class is about it's to get you started with an if for example
your grandma who doesn't know how to use
a computer wants to memorize all the capitals of the world then fine use
Quizlet Anki is not for your grandma but you are not your grandma you're
watching
a class wherever you're watching this and you know how to use a computer
therefore you want to do this properly you want to use Anki rather than quiz
a
few questions that people have asked over the years is what about Google
Sheets or what about notion now I've made a video called about how I
used
Google Sheets as a sort of flash card alternative and why I didn't like Ani I
would recommend overall use anky when
you can because Anki is designed for space repetition and active recall my
Google Sheets method that is designed for cramming it's designed for
when the
exam is only a few weeks away and I'm thinking ah crap I I really need to
focus on the stuff that I'm weakest on I
don't really have the time to do the flashcard thing properly where I make
flash cards and review them every day
and blah blah blah I probably still could have done it with Anki if I twiddle
the settings a bit but at the time I didn't really know much about how
to twiddle the settings of ani properly and so I went with the Google Sheets
method which is still pretty good if you're cramming for an exam but if
you're studying for the long term if your exam is more than a few weeks
away will benefit from anky rather than Google Sheets and then uh it
comes to
Notions so let's see I'll show you some of my notes on Notions so what I do
is I do use notion for things like scoping
the subject where within gastrointestinal physiology I have created these
kind of toggles for myself
that have questions what is functional hyperemia in this context cool blood
supply to the Villi this is sort of
flash cards it's sort of active recall and that I am I am testing myself but this
is not designed for space repetition the main reason why I use
notion is because I basically want to apply active equal to absolutely
everything that I'm doing and for me
right now I don't need to memorize a lot of this information because when it
comes to human physiology I'm teaching
the subject and when I'm teaching it I can have the notes open in front of
me so it's not that I need information
uploaded to my brain to prepare for an exam and the information that I
need uploaded to my brain for my life as a
doctor is already in my brain like I don't need to understand the basics of
first year Medical School gut physiology
to understand how to be a doctor effectively which is why I kind of use
notion for this sort of stuff it's very good at giving you a big picture
understanding of the whole subject which is something that ank is not and
actually what I usually recommend is you combine anky and notion but for
those of
you asking should I use notion as a flash card alternative no you shouldn't if
you can you should use Anki cuz Anki
is incredible like absolutely gamechanging for memorizing facts notion with
a toggle feature or Google Sheets
or any other sort of thing is good for getting a big picture understanding and
that is important but for for a subject
like medicine there is only so much a big picture understanding you can do
before you run into the wall of just having to memorize a load of stuff and
an is the absolute single best thing you can use to memorize a load of stuff
bar none so that is why you should use an
paper flash cards completely a complete waste of time why would you go
through the effort of having to create stacks of
paper flash cards unless you're one of those people that feels productive by
writing with colorful pens and stuff I
mean if it works for you then fine but the reason you're watching this class
is because you want to learn how to memorize anything with anky it's a
21st
century we don't need to be using paper flash cards if we're using these
These are suboptimal we should be using Anki Anki is the one let's move
on to the
next section where we talk about the mechanics of ani the very Basics how
to install it how to get set up and a load
of stuff about the basic fundamental types of flash cards that you can
create all right so that was why Ani is the
Why Anki is Amazing?
best software why do I use Anki personally well I use Anki to memorize
specific factoids for medicine and I
also used Anki extensively in my third year of med school when I was
studying psychology as an extra degree to memorize chunks and chunks of
paragraphs
for my essays and to memorize paper references and stuff like that so I
have extensively used Ani in both a science
subject fashion i. e memor memorizing individual fact but also in a kind of
art subject like psychology where it's
instead of memorizing an individual fact that you know this is what insulin
does it's more about okay what is the theory
of short-term memory versus long-term memory and what did badly in
hitch's experiments in 1972 display about shter memory versus
long-ter memory you know stuff stuff like that that involves memorizing
large chunks of information so I've used Anki
for both those use cases and I found it really good I've also started recently
to use Anki to help me help me learn music theory so I found some pre-
made
decks more on that later that bring up kind of different notes of the musical
Stave or Clift or whatever it's called
Uh and I'm trying to learn site reading through that because I know if I do
them consistently that anything in Anki will
be uploaded to my brain and I think that would be helpful so that's why I
personally use Anki if you're convinced at this point then please move on to
the
next video but if you're not here are some interviews that I've done with
other people over the last few weeks who use Ani a lot and these are what
they
think about Ani and why it's amazing can you just tell me how you
discovered Anki and sort of how it affected your life kind of broadly yeah so
I discovered
Anki through your YouTube video on evidence-based revision and I started
using it for my bmat revision and then I
carried on for my a levels and I think it allows me to study spend a lot less
time studying but I feel like I'm
studying more effectively and I'm getting better results even though I'm
spending less time studying so it's a lot less stressful because I'm not
having to cram before exams I'm studying all the time like 20 minutes every
day so it adds up to a lot of studying but
it's less stressful and it's more spread out that's one of the things about
Anki that if you can if you can bring yourself to do it consistently overall
you actually probably spend less time working and you overall you
definitely have reduced stress levels yeah 100% And
I totally agree with you you save a lot of time right like you're someone
who's like the productivity King and I'm
someone who also appreciates you know time allocation and I can say with
Ani I was able to go through medical school I
was exercising every day I was getting the amount of sleep I wanted to get
I was calling my parents every day I felt so much less stressed and I still
got
you know just as good of outcomes and you know I'm still able to you know
feel competent in the hospital um and it's
that's that's astounding to me because that didn't happen to me in
undergrad I was sleeping four hours a night and just trying to make ends
meet and now I have
this tool and I feel amazing you know I have a life okay so that was why
you should use Anki instead of other apps
why I use Anki personally and why these other people use an and I've done
like eight interviews with people who use an
over the last couple of weeks and everyone talks about how Anki literally
changed their life so if that's not enough of a sale then I don't know what
is but hopefully I've convinced you at this point thank you for watching and
I'll see you in the next video where we'll start a new section where we go
over the mechanics of an and exactly how it works and how you operate it
and how to make the flash cards and how to make
them amazing all right welcome to this next section of the course which is
all about the basic mechanics of Anki and in
Section 1 : Basic Mechanics of Anki
this video we're talking about how to install Ani if you know how to use a
computer you probably know how to install stuff but you know just for
completeness we're including this video if you have no problems with
installing software then please by all means skip this video and move on to
the next one
but yeah basically we want to go on apps. Ani web.net or we just type in
anky on Google find the first result
anky powerful intelligent flashcards and we hit the download button now
you've got it for Windows Mac Linux if you're
using Linux you really don't need me to give you a tutorial on how to install
stuff iPhone and Android and uh
development stuff Let's ignore that so I'm on a Mac right now and I'm going
to install anky for Mac OS 10 10 whatever
Standard Version if you're on Windows you just install the 64-bit or 32-bit
Windows version depending on which
version of Windows you're on and it just basically gives you a guide here so
I'm going to hit download anky and it's going to download cool now it's
downloaded I'm going to click on that downloaded file it's going to verify
and then save the file to your desktop open
it and drag an key to your applications folder or desktop there we go and
now it's come up with this sort of thing which is how you install stuff on a
Mac
you click you drag it goes into applications and you're done oh here we go
it is copying across 350 megabytes so
it might take a little bit of time to download if your Internet is slow okay an is
now officially installed so to
open it up I'm going to open up the Mac thingy migy bar I wouldn't doing
this in real life and I would type in Anki and I
click on it and it will open up and this is Anki this is not what you'll see
you'll see a more blank screen but I've got a few decks in here which I'll go
over in a while but let's pretend we see a completely blank screen we have
now
officially installed Ani and if you want to install it on iPhone Android you just
Chuck it over here yeah basically that's
how you install an okay so in this video we are talking about the anatomy of
ani
Section 1 : The Anatomy of Anki
and what all the different buttons and stuff actually do so when you open up
an you will see this page and it'll
probably be blank because it probably won't have any decks in it other than
a default deck this is basically the home screen now this screen is your
deck
screen it shows you all of your different decks of flash cards so you can see
over here I've got one that's
music based that has some stuff inside it I've got one for MRCP which is
the membership of the Royal College of
Physicians which is an exam I've got my third year psychology deck I've got
a past medicine Snippets deck I've got a
USMLE preparation deck which is a exam you take to get into residency in
medicine in the United States studied
zero cards today in 0 seconds 0 seconds per card this is the sort of default
screen that you will get in in order to
create a deck and I'd recommend you create create a first deck you hit the
create deck button and it asks you for
the name of a deck so let's say Capital Cities and I'm going to hit okay and
now
we will see capital cities has formed as a deck but if I click on it it says
congratulations you finished the deck for now because it doesn't have any
flash cards inside it so this is the deck screen and I can create all the
Decks that I want um music notation fine
I can create a deck for Nobel Prize winners if that's what I
wanted to me Mize I can create a deck for I don't know French vocabulary
like you can create decks for
whatever you want in general you should probably have fewer decks rather
than too many but obviously Capital Cities and French vocabulary are
totally
different subject whereas you know for all of medicine it sort of makes
sense to have them within one deck we'll talk
more about that later anyway this is the deck's screen now let's say you
want to add a flash card that's the next thing
along shortcut key a and it's really helpful to get familiar with the shortcuts
but for now we're going to click on everything just so it's really
obvious what's going on hang on so I'm going to hit the add button and this
sort of window will open up um and this
is the ad field where you can add a flash card so you'll see the front and the
back so for example front we can say
capital of France and in the back we can say Paris and that is my flash card
now there's a
few other bits in this screen that can look a bit complicated the type it
makes sense to start with basic
like basic is the main type that we're going to go over but there are a few
other types that that I'll talk about a
little bit later deck lets you select which deck you want this to go in you'll
see like a long list of stuff because
for example a lot of these decks are subdivided into other stuff but we're
we're going to keep things simple we're going to Chuck it into our Capital
City's deck which is what it was by default Capital France back Paris the
fields button this is sort of
complicated basically we don't need to worry about it it just lets you
generate new Fields if you want but you can
ignore that the cards button again lets you change the styling and the text
so
if I wanted to make this bigger I could say 24 or I could say 36 and it would
get bigger but let's just keep it as a
default This is complicated stuff we don't need to worry about fields and
cards now this is just sort of basic
things so I could say capital of France I could bold it or I could use
command B to bold italic underline Square probably
not yeah you can just sort of customize it there is an image button and
there's a Clos deletion button that we're going
to go over in a while but let's keep things basic for now capital of France
Paris and then tags tags we can safely
ignore for the time being we'll talk about tags in a a video further down the
line but essentially let's say in fact
I'll just let's do Europe so I can say that Europe is a tag the benefit of tags
is that it then lets you search through
your deck and find all the all the capitals that are in Europe or alternatively
if you were for for some
reason studying for a European capitals quiz you could create a custom
study session where you're just looking at
that appropriate tag but again tags are complicated tags are an advanced
feature as a beginner to Anki we don't need to
worry about tags it just gets confusing but I'm going to in fact I'm not I'm not
even going to tag with Europe just cuz there's no point and you'll see
Capital
France Paris that's basically all we need now we hit the add button it looks
like nothing happens but it says waiting
for edting editing to finish resume now everything disappears which means
that our card has been officially created now
if I close this ad screen you'll see that in the capital cities there is one new
card and this is another important
thing about the anatomy of an to understand that we have cards that are
new that we haven't yet studied and we have cards
that are due cards that we've studied before that we are due to study again
today so if I click on the capital
cities deck and we'll see there's one new learning is orange and to review
is is green forget about the learning
category doesn't really matter I hit study now it says capital of France now
this is what it looks like when you're studying something and I think about it
I know the capital of France is Paris so I can click the show answer button
or I can just press the space bar and I would
really recommend you press the space bar for it and it shows Paris now it's
asking do I want to see it again in 3
minutes do I want it to be marked as good which is 15 minutes or do I want
to mark it as easy which is it comes back
up in 4 days and this is where the spaced repetition intervals come in so
let's say I knew that the capital of France was Paris I'm going to say good
and it's going to come up again because it's the only card in my deck I'm
going to say good and it's going to come up in a day's time and then it's
going to say
congratulations you have finished this deck which is easy cuz we only had
one card so that's like the very very basic so that was what the ad screen
looks
like let's look at the screen now now this can look complicated this is what
my browse screen looks like but there's
a lot more stuff here than than you're going to see in your browse screen
basically on the browse screen you can look at your entire collection of
flash
cards or you can look at specific CL flash cards in specific decks so over
here I've clicked on Capital Cities and
you'll see I've got capital of France over here if I look at my third year
psychology you can see over here I've got zelner Ral 2006 and it it shows
you
what is on the front and on the back of these flash cards so I can say what
cons atile and this is
what my flash cards look like these are the ones that I was studying from in
my third year of psychology this is just a
selection of them I couldn't find the deck that had all of them in it because it
will loads more but the browse screen basically lets you browse your decks
it
can look intimidating but it's not really stats lets you see how many flash
cards you studied
so uh there's no data on here because I've reinstalled this but we can
basically ignore ignore the stats feature it's just there and then the sync
button we hit it and it synchronizes with anky web now the first
time you press the sync button it's going to ask you for a username and
password so so you're going to need to go on Ani web and create a
username and
password because that's what your decks are going to be synchronized
with but we'll go over that in a while and that is basically the anatomy of
Anki that is
what everything does there are these buttons here get shared and import
file get shared opens up anky web and lets
you download someone else's deck which we'll go over in a different video
an import file lets you import a file like
an anky deck package I think it's a k PKG file extension uh those are useful
if you're Shar sh in decks with your
friends or if you're downloading decks off the internet but apart from that we
now know everything about anky we've got these menus over here but
really we
don't need to worry about that for now we'll talk more about those a little bit
later now hopefully this has giv you a very brief overview and bear in mind
my
an looks a lot more complicated than yours will for now and just you wait
until until you see the exper edition of
the course where we've got like people who've been using Ani every day
for 700 days and how massive their anes look
let's start by keeping it simple for the time being because Anki does have a
bit of a learning curve and the easy easier we can make the starting
process of it
the better we'll be doing in the long run so in the last video I showed you
what the anatomy of ankey looks like and
Section 1 : The Basic Flashcard
like what what the anky user interface does and what the different elements
do do and we created actually our first
basic flash card which was what is the capital of France it is Paris and in
this video we're just going to create a few more basic flashcards because
this
is the bread and butter of ani and if we can get quick at doing these things
will improve and I'll be sharing some
keyboard shortcuts as we go along because I'm going to assume you're
intelligent here and you're not and you want to you want to optimize and
clicking with the mouse is not very Optimum in general when using a
computer we want to be using keyboard shortcut so
as I go along I'll be explaining what keyboard shortcuts I'm using to create
stuff and we'll be able to kind of make
this whole process of creating stuff more efficient so let's go to our Capital
Cities deck currently there's nothing in it because we've only got one
flash card that we've finished and let's add a flash card and I'm going to use
the shortcut a to add and to figure out
what the shortcuts are you just hover over the buts I'm hovering over the
add button and I can see shortcut key a okay
so from now on I'm going to press a to create flash cards so I'm going to
create my flash cards now so one way of doing that would be so
Afghanistan and
the capital is Kell because this is my Capital Cities deck I don't need to
waste time by typing Capital Afghanistan
question mark I can just literally go Afghanistan the back of it is caral and
I'm not going to bother tagging
because it's a bit complicated in fact should we tag no let's not tag it's a bit
complicated on Cobble and then I
could hit the add button but you'll see shortcut is command and enter or
control and enter if you're on Windows and so
I'm going to hit command enter and you'll see that little thing came up it
said added that flash card has now been
added let's add a few more so Albania the capital is Tyran cool Algeria
alers Andora Andora laa command enter Angola Luanda
Antigua and baruda St John's so you can see that I'm just using tab to
switch
between the front and back or shift and tab to go back you could click but
you're not a clicker you're a keyboard Warrior not a clicker clicking is bad
you want to get out with the clicking mindset anytime we clicking we know
we're being inefficient and take again B St John's add and let's just do one
more
so Argentina buenos uh buenos IRS command enter we
have added a bunch of flash cards we now see that there are seven new
cards and if we hit study now we'll see Afghanistan I know the capital
Afghanistan is kble so I'm going to hit space kble yeah that's pretty easy I
knew that anyway capital of Albania I
actually have no idea what the capital of Albania is tyrana oh damn okay so
I'm going to hit again I'm going to hit the
the number one if we look here if we hover over again shortcut key one
shortcut key two and shortcut key three
so by hitting one I know that that is going to come up again in the next 3
minutes cool Algeria is algers and I knew that
already so I'm going to hit easy Andora is h no idea oh Andora llla I should
have known that this is active recoil in action but so I'm going to that's
going to come up again and I usually hit again
if I have even a slight hesitation when going for the flash card and I usually
hit good otherwise I I actually don't
normally hit easy I think in general when you're actually learning stuff you
should avoid avoid hitting the easy card
unless you just know without a shadow of doubt that you're never going to
forget that and I know I'm never going to forget that the capital of
Afghanistan
is kobble because I've known that for years but I'm not really going to hit
easy while doing medical stuff plus it also feels a bit like huous be like oh
that was easy and then you forget it and then you think damn I'm an idiot
so basically I only ever use one and two I only ever use again or good and I
would
suggest you do the same just to simplify things so that can come up again
and I'm just going to show you by clicking but
in real life I press one Angola no idea Luanda okay again Antiga and
baruda St John's cool that was good Argentina
buenos arez easy because I knew that anyway Albania was it Pana tyana
yes I
can say that's good now Andora Andora lavela yep that's good
Angola that's the cap of Angola tyan ah Luanda damn what was it Algeria
ALG no
Albania that was uh tyan so that this one definitely comes up again Antigo
and
baruda St John's nice and easy I'm going to put good for that and you'll see
it's going to come up in one day's time so
it's going to disappear from my current crop of reviewing and Angola the
capital of Angola is oh I'm getting confused
with Angola and AR was it Armenia Luanda yes got it but that that
was too much hesitation so that's going to come I I want that to come up
again so I'm going to hit one Albania is
Trana okay again too much hesitation I want that to come up again Angola
lwanda
good and Albania tyrana good Andor Lu
oh no I'm getting confused with all these A's Andora laa obviously Angola is
Luanda fine Andora is Andora laella fine
Albania is tyana fine Andora is Andora laa fine and now going through
these seven flash cards you'll see how often
they were coming up right because the ones that I didn't know I marked
again and therefore they were coming up again and the ones I marked as
good initially
was coming back in 15 minutes but because we blitzed through the flash
cards cuz there weren't many of them they came up earlier than that but
then
the next time I clicked good they were going to come up in one day's time
and that's how the space repetition algorithm works when you mark
something
as good it slightly elongates the interval that you're going to see it next
when you mark it it as easy it massively elongates the interval and
there's a whole there's tons of YouTube videos exploring the algorithm
behind this in depth but again this is a beginner class in the exports class
which is coming up after a while we'll dive into the intricacies of the
algorithm and how it actually works but at the moment we don't really care
we're
marking stuff either as again or as good maybe as easy if you really feel
like it but now we finished this and so that
shows what a base flash card looks like and if we hit browse and look at
Capital Cities so these are the 1 2 3 4 5 6 7
eight flash cards in basic format that we've created at the moment so that is
how you create basic flash cards let's
move on to the next video where where we'll talk about reversed flash
cards and then we'll talk a little bit later about how we can actually make
these
flash cards better because right now all we're doing is memorizing
memorizing words like you know Andora and Andora
llla means nothing to me all I'm doing is memorizing what the word is so if it
was some kind of trivia thing and I was
just trying to memorize all the capitals and fine but actually it it would be a
lot more useful to actually know where
on the map Andora is and have some kind of image associated with the
country and just have an idea of what's going on in Andora we'll talk more
about that a bit
later on let's now talk about the second important flash card type to know
about and that is reverse flash cards now some
Section 1 : The Reverse Flashcard
people won't use this at all depending on what you're studying and some
people will use it extensively and some people
might just forget about them and just use closed deletions which we'll talk
about later to be honest I am in the third Camp I just prefer closed
deletions I tend not to use basic and flash cards but it's an important
concept to keep in mind so let's go back
to our Capital Cities let's press a to add a flash card and let's change the
type to basic and reversed card now what does that mean let's insert a
capital so
we've got Australia and Canberra and I'm going to command enter to
create a new
flash card there now let's look at what happened we saw that in creating
that one flash card we've actually got two
new cards in Our Deck to study I'm going to click study now and it's going
to ask me what's the capital of Australia and
I'm going to say canra cool let's say that was easy but now it's asking me
canura because it's reversed the flash card and because I know this is my
Capital Cities deck I now need to work
out that canura is the capital of what and the answer in this case is
Australia so what's the point of this well the
point of this is that when we create a basic flash card very often we are
creating a one a one-way Connection in
our brain if we just use Capital Cities as an example that everyone can
understand I was going to do something for medicine but let's try and keep
this keep this broad if we just had Luanda is
the the capital of Angola and I could see Angola and think Luanda Angola
Luanda Angola Luanda my brain would be
very good at coming up with shortcuts like maybe I'd think Angola Luanda
so starts with an l and that sort of stuff
and that connection would become strengthened because that's what I'm
testing but if for some reason I got the
word Luanda I might not necessarily be able to reverse engineer that
connection or if I could it would take a lot more
effort than I would want it to take ideally I would think loanda and
immediately know that it's the capital of Angola rather than the other way
around um and that's the point of a reversed card so by just putting the
information in once a reversed card
allows us to create double the number of flash cards so that instead of just
testing a one-way Association we're testing a two-way Association this
might
be important for you depending on what you're studying it's sort of
important in medicine in some contexts not in other context there are some
areas in
which you'll want to be able to reverse those connections so for example
the classical symptom of chera is rice water
stools fine but if we had Cola rice water stools I'd be able to create that
connection but I should have a reverse card for that as well because if I
saw a
patient with rice water stools or saw that in a question I'd want to
immediately be able to associate that with Cola so it's helpful to have the
Reversed card in that sense so that's what they're for sometimes you might
need them sometimes you might not but let's now move on and talk about
closed
deletions which is one of the most powerful features of Anki all right
welcome back we've talked about the basic card and the Reversed card
now I'm
Section 1 : Cloze Deletions
going to talk about closed deletions and these will look complicated and
they might sound complicated but it is the
single most powerful feature of an so let's go back to our Capital City's
example let's add a card and we're going
to change the type to close close basic Let's ignore all the the stuff
associated with it now you'll see text
and extra that's interesting it's not quite front and back it's text and extra
and the idea behind closed deltion is
that closed deltion function as a fill in the Gap fill in the blank kind of flash
card and basically it allows us to
replace bits of a sentence with a Clos deletion which encourages us to
remember
that kind of bit of the sentence I'll I'll show you what I mean let's use an
example here so I'm going to write write the capital of Austria is Vienna now
that is just a sentence and the point of Clos deletions is that it allows us to
memorize sentences so I want to memorize
the phrase the capital of Austria is Vienna so what I'm going to do is I'm
going to double click on Australia I'm going to select it and then I'm going to
press the close deletion button which is
this icon over here and you can see that it's got the hotkey command shift
C but I'm just going to click it for now and you'll see that now we've got this
weird
code looking thing surrounding Austria you'll see these double curly
brackets close double curly brackets and we've
got C1 colon colon Austria C1 means Clos deletion one it is the first thing
that
we are closed deleting from here now let's just add this to the deck and let's
see what it looks like and I'm
going to close this and now we'll see there's one new card study now the
capital of something is Vienna so you
saw what happened we have close deleted that and that is the phrase that
has been deleted and now let's say I think
the capital of London is Vienna I would press space bar oh the capital of
Austria is Vienna so you can see that
instead of acting as a front and back flash card it's acting as a kind of fill-in
the Gap sort of flash card let's
create a new one and this time we'll add a double close so I'm going to
press a to add a new flash card going to make sure the type is set to close
by the way
command n allows you to easily change the type and you can type it in so
I'm going to type in close and again just
like learning keyboard shortcuts to get quicker at using ankey cuz the more
efficient we can use ankey the more efficiently you can upload stuff to our
brains let's look at the next one so let's say um the capital of azer is CP
Let's ignore the extra field
for now we'll come back to that later so now this time I'm going to create
two different closed deletions so I'm going
to select Azan and I'm going to go command shift C and that will turn aeran
into a close one we can see it says C1
and I'm also going to select Baku and go command shift C and you'll see
C2 has now appeared by Baku now what does this
mean this means that just with a single flash card with a single creation on
on this screen I have now generated two
closed deletions so let's let's add this I'm going to hit command enter to add
close this and we'll see we've got three new flash cards added so one of
them is the Australia one and two of them are
the aaban one so let's have a look the capital of something is Vienna okay
Austria Australia my bad and let's say
easy so it doesn't come up for the next 4 days but now the capital of
something is Baku and I know the answer is aeran
and I'm going to hit again yep I'm going to hit number one but now the
capital of aeran is what well it's Baku because we
know that and I'm going to hit good on that one the capital of aeran is Baku
and the capital of aan is in fact Baku
so that gives you an idea of what closed deletions do it's basically a way for
us to create these fill in the Gap things
very easily now let's use a different example I'm going to create a new deck
and call it MK medicine for illustration
purposes all right so I'm going to go in the Mis medicine for illustration
purposes deck I'm going to hit a to add a clar card and I'm going to make
sure
the type is close a Clos deletion type and for text let's find some notes that I
was taking yesterday when stud
gastrointestinal physiology for one of my supervisions here we go okay so
this is the sentence that I want to put into
an 12200 Ms per minute through the spanic bed and I'm referring to blood
flow of blood per
minute flows through the spanic bed and then of this around 75% passes
via the
intestines to the liver in the hepatic portal vein the rest represents the
oxygenated blood reading reaching the liver directly VI the hepatic artery
now
the two kind of facts that I want to upload to my brain here are this 1 1200
Ms of blood and this 75% because it's
important for me to know that 1,200 Ms of blood per minute goes through
the spanking bed which makes up about 20% of the cardiac output um so
I'm going to
select that I'm going to command shift C and that will turn that into a single
close and then off this around 75% so I
want to close out the 75 bit so I still see that it's a percentage sign now
there is one extra feature that you can do with Clos deletions I I'll come to
that in a moment so let's hit add uh close and study now and it says
something of blood per minute flows through this plank knic bed so I would
think okay 1,200 so now we got 1,200 Ms of blood per minute flows through
this
planktic bed so that's fine let's say that was good and now of this around
75% passes VI the intestine Del liver so you
can see it's testing me on this one specific fact and now I know that that's
75% and the reason it's showing up is
blue is because my styling thing is a little bit weird normally this would be a
white a white screen so you'd see it clearly but if you want you can change
change the styling of that in fact let's change it I'm going to edit the content
click on cards and color let's make it
red I'll make it red close we'll talk more about that in the advanced section
but I just editing the card just just to
show you what it looks like so now of this around 75% passes via the
intestin to the LI in the patter portal vein blah
blah blah you can see that by turning this into closed card I've essentially
been able to make the process of
creating this flash card a little bit more efficient I was able to copy and
paste information from my lecture notes notes that I've already taken and
just
shove it straight into Anki whereas if I was doing it as a as a basic card I
would say something like let's change
the type to B basic I would say something like how much blood goes
through the splank Nick circulation per
minute and the answer would be 12200 Ms which I would say is 20% of
cardiac
output for example so that would be how I would make this a basic card
and then
I would say uh 1,200 Ms of blood goes so I would write that out and then I
would
write 75% so it it would be a lot more effort to upload that fact to my brain
with these numbers it would be a lot
more effort to create a basic flash card for it than a Clos deletion which is
why I prefer to use Clos deletions for most
things personally but it's personal preference you can kind of do what you
want okay the final thing I want to mention about Clos deletions which is
sort of jumping ahead a little bit to how to edit flash cards but if we press
the E button when we're looking at a card we come into the editing mode
and
we can edit our card now this has a few different benefits that I'll talk
specifically about in that video one thing to keep in mind about closed
deletions is that you can add hints so for example if I add another double
colon here and I say how many Ms of
blood so you'll see it's got close one 1200 Ms col colon how many Ms of
blood now if I close this and we look at this
flash card this is the flash card it says how many meals of blood per minute
flows through the SP bed so it's
asking me specifically the question because one important idea that we're
going to keep coming back to is the fact
that you want to create these flash cards for your future self and my future
self in 6 month's time I might not
actually remember especially just like this you know this phrase initially the
phrase was 12200 Ms per minute through
the spanic bed if I just Clos deletion that then the thing it would ask me
would be something per minute through
the spanic bed and in 6 months time I wouldn't remember that I'm actually
referring to a certain amount of blood flow I might think am I talking about
you know hormone concentrations am I talking about drugs am I talking
about something else I might not entirely remember that it's actually blood
flow
so the fact that I can create this hint for myself how many mills of blood per
minute flow through this plantic bed
means that my future self in 6 months time when I look at this flash card is
not going to curse my old self I'm I'm
I'm going to think thank you for taking the time to give me that hint because
now it's obvious to me what sort of answer I'm looking for rather than
trying to think oh what was I thinking when I first made that flash card which
is not the fact that I'm testing I'm
testing my knowledge of how many meals per blood of meals per minute of
blood go through this planket circulation I'm not testing whether I could read
my mind
from 6 months ago so this is a great way of adding hints to our Clos
deletion ideally our sentence should be designed
in a way that means we don't need the hint so for example you'll notice that
I actually changed it I said of blood per
minute flows through the plank Nick plank niic bed I made it obvious
because it's just a reflex at this point that we want to make it really clear for
our
future selves exactly what's going on but we have got this hint feature just
in case so that was closed deletions closed deletions are the single most
powerful feature of ani and I'd recommend you use them extensively but
again in the uh later on Section we'll talk more about some nuances about
when
you should and shouldn't use Clos deletions because it would be very
tempting right to go through your entire lecture notes copy and paste
everything
into Anki and just close delete out the relevant bits but it's not quite that
simple there are a few nuances but again this is a basic course which just
giving
you an introduction so that you can start using Anki and then over time
you'll develop your own techniques and you'll find loads of tutorials on
YouTube and you'll find my future class about how to optimize ankey for
intermediates and experts where we can dive into these details a little bit
more so we are continuing our topic of closed deletions and this is a sort of
bonus video this is about 5 minutes of a
Section 1 : Cloze Deletions with David
discussion and a demonstration that me and David who is a medical
student in the US we were having about how he
prepared for the MCAT and scored like incredibly well like 99.9th percentile
in that and here he is demonstrating how
to use clothes deletions and a bit of a discussion that we had about it so if
you want feel free to skip this but it's just a little bit of a bonus bit of
spice in this class VI um yeah over to David can you talk a little bit about
Clos deletion and what does it mean like
essentially what they are yeah I mean a Clos deletion is essentially a fill in
the blank so you're presented with a
short piece of information um and then you're basically asked like what is
the most important part of that sentence or
you you would have to know what's going on in that sentence to answer it
um yeah pretty much all of the pre-made Decks
that are used for like medical school training in the US at least um use
close deletion at this point so here's like my
step one deck so close deletion um you can see there's a little Ellipsis right
here there's a blank and then there's a
following sentence so for someone to properly answer this question they
would have to know um you know what this is
they would have to know what this is they would have to know which Step
we're talking about in forming stit rate and you click the answer okay it's a
cedal
COA and then here's a little picture um from another popular resource um
first aid uh and here's like
a little pneumonic that a lot of people can use to memorize this so it's
basically just a fill in the blank so
rather than asking it in a question format like what molecule molecule does
this it just presents it to you in a
sentence and it's kind of like if you imagine you were reading a textbook um
each sentence in that textbook is
probably important but if you just read you know page after page of a
textbook I think the retention is pretty low so
this is a way to kind of like look at each sentence individually if it were in a
textbook and say do I understand the
point of this sentence do I understand the point of this sentence do I
understand the point of this sentence fantastic and uh for for these cards
can
you just show us what it looks like on edit mode like if you if you were to
create a closed Edition card what would it look like yeah so here's the edit
form um so essentially if you were to make a card or here do you want to
we can like just make our own card oh if we
can make our own card sure if we do for example the capital of France is
Paris so we have a sentence right here and
we're saying the capital Francis Paris so what we would do we would type
this out into the card and basically up here
I have my card type as a close so you can change this there's many
different card types you can do a basic card type
and that's your classic flip it over where you would ask it a question where
you say like what is the capital of France um which is another way to do it
but this closed deletion has become very popular again because you can
kind of get through the cards more rapidly so I choose close deletion I type
out a
sentence and then basically if I wanted to highlight um the Paris part I
would
um highlight it and then you hit shift command um C which is a hot key
shortcut
um and this will come up right here so C1 colon colon Paris so now we can
add
this card to the deck and there's a lot of cool things you can do you can
change the colors you can change the font um we
can you know bold underline whatever um click add okay so now we have
a card
right here we go to study and here we go the capital of France is
blank Paris and I guess one of the powers of Clos deletions is that you can
also is that you can close deletion multiple things within the sentence so for
example with that one we could close delete close delete France as well
and
if we were to do that I wonder what that would look like yes so you can do
that as well so same thing it's the shift
command C if you're on a MacBook and so there's two ways to do this you
can either make this two different cards
where one time the card will show up in Paris will be blanked out and
another time the card will show up in France will be blanked out or so that's
how I
have the C1 C2 let me show you what that looks like real quick so here's
one card Capital Francis blank capital of blank
is blank or is Pairs and then the other option to do is where you could
change
this if you did both C1 so this is basically saying like close one close two
how many different cards you want to broken up into okay if I did them both
as C1 they would both be here we go on the same card ah okay which is
kind of
pointless with this particular card but yeah yeah exactly I now want to
introduce the idea
Section 1 : Editing a Flashcard
of editing a flash card as you go along because editing flash cards is
something thing that a lot of us don't think about
doing the first time we start using Anki we just kind of make the flash card
and then we take it at face value but actually one of the great powerful
features of Anki is that we can easily edit our flash cards over time to make
them more relevant more useful more
comprehensive we just to give oursel some more hints so I'm going to
create some capital cities um because why not
and we're going to use the close feature for these so I'm going to say the
capital of the Bahamas is Mel and we'll
close that and close that enter capital of of and I'm going to just copy that
phrase so I don't have to continuously type it out of Bahrain is manamar
close
close C1 C2 so capital of Bangladesh
isaka close one close two and just go for one more the capital of Barbados
is
uh bridg town uh okay close one close two right so we've created these
flash
cards now let's hit add let's close and now we'll see we've got learning two
which is two in progress and eight new
ones that I've not seen before so let's hit study now the capital of
something is Baku was that aeran it was aeran
wonderful but now as I see that I'm going to think to myself okay well that's
not particularly useful I would
quite like to know where aeran is on a map so I'm going to search aeran on
Google and I'm going to go images I I I just want a sort of nice map that
tells me where aan is okay this is quite
helpful so what I'm going to do I'm going to copy this image I'm going to
right click copy image and then on this
flash card I'm going to press e e for edit or I could click the edit button if I'm
if I'm a clicker but I'm not so I'm
going to press e for edit and now you'll see there's this extra domain and
the the other nice thing about I like about
closed deletions is we've got this extra field which we can add to basic and
reversed cards but it's just a bit more complicated and I can just paste
paste
in this image so now when I see this flash card you'll see what happens so
uh if I hit close the capital of something
is Baku I'm going to think aaban but now I've got the answer but I've also
got this stuff that I've put in the extra
column so now this is infinitely more useful right it means I can see oh okay
so Saudi Syria Iraq turkey Armenia oh I
had I actually had no idea that aeran was like there and oh it looks like
aeran is split up into these two different areas and it's next to Armenia
it's sort of bordered by Georgia oh it's right next to the Caspian Sea I
genuinely had no idea where aeran was
the thing that I'm testing myself on is still that the capital of aeran is Baku
which is the point of this Capital City's deck but I've added more
information to it to make it more relevant to make it more contextual
because the difficulty with flash cards
rather the Trap that we can fall into with flash cards is that it becomes very
easy to just memorize these individual
factoids of information it's sort of like we're trying to see a painting but we're
trying to sort of paint by pixels
right we're just seeing individual pixels at a time whereas it's in the wider
context when we when we zoom out that we actually see the big picture
and
this is a problem in everything that we study like anytime someone
discovers Flash For the First Time The Single biggest mistake people make
is that they
just start shoving everything into flash cards and trying to memorize stuff
without first understanding it but the
point is this extra feature when we edit flash cards as we go along we can
just add more context to them so that we
understand it so now even though I'm trying to memorize the capital of
aeran is Baku the fact that I've seen this image now and I know where
Azan is in my
head and I've kind of seen this Baku aspect of of the image as well I now
have like my brain now has more hooks to
kind of hook onto to maintain this connection whereas before aeran was
just like a thing I knew it was a country
somewhere in the Middle East and Baku never heard of it don't even know
what it was before these were just words essentially but now it's more of a
concept it's more of an understanding in my mind and that's why it's so
important to edit these cards as we go along so
let's do a few more so let's say that was good the capital of something is
nasau I have no idea ah Bahamas is nasau
okay so I actually uh I think vaguely the Bahamas are in North America so
let me find a decent image oh
perfect this what I want to see so I'm going to right click copy image I'm
going to hit e for edit paste it into the extra Zone and now when I close this
I see oh the Bahamas are over there and nasau is one of these little
Islands that's that's nearby and it's sort of between the US and Cuba cool
and you
know what let's add another editor Bahamas flag I wonder what the flag of
the Bahamas looks like right click copy
image edit this flash card I've got image one over here and I could paste
the flag in there as well escape to
close spacebar and now I see the flag and I see where it is so again now
I've
got more and more elements like now it's no longer just memorizing the
capital of the Bahamas is nasau it's actually
putting some context into it let's go away from this and let's now look at
mCP
okay uh so this is like some Niche medical stuff herp herpes simplex and in
EN keit's
investigation PCR viral PCR or are we are we talking about CSF oh here
we go
ah perfect so I'm going to edit this flash card and you'll see what it looks
like this is like a complicated flash card uh it's it's got too much
information on it it's not one of my own flash cards it's got way too much but
we'll talk more about the minimum information principle later on but
you'll see herp Simplex investigations close one so all of this is under a
close deletion so all of this stuff and
then in the extra Zone we've added this MRI scan and we've added this
information probably from radi opedia or
some other source so that when I do this flash card I see all of this stuff
which I would quite like to be in red rather
than blue anyway CU it's more visible and I see this extra bit so again it
instead of just memorizing the fact it
gives me some more context so that is why editing flash cards as we go
along is enormously helpful and these are the
ones I made many as disease management oh this this has got way too
much information on it but if I edit this uh
this was a basic card that's not what I mean actually yeah I'm going to edit
this so you'll see it's asking me for the management of many A's disease
and
when I saw that card I was like oh God I don't know what you want from me
because I made this card like two years ago and
so I don't know what I was getting at so I can just edit the flash card to give
myself a hint I can say brackets which specialty speciality do you refer to
which organization do you inform what do we do about acute attacks what
about
prevention so this is a bad flash card cuz it's got way too much information
on it ideally it actually be exploding
these out into individual flash cards but now if I look I've edited the flash
card so that instead of it being a case of like just trying and guess the
answer
that was in my head six months ago instead it's a case of which specialty
do you refer to okay I refer to ENT which organization do you inform the
DBL
what do we do about acute ATT tax promazine what about prevention can't
remember let's have a look beta where is
it prevention beta hist investability rehabil yeah the reason why this is a bad
flash card is because there is too
much information on it and even though I knew most of that information
there was one piece of information I didn't know but now I have to come
back to the whole
flash card again which means like as I get hundred like hundreds and
thousands of flash cards it becomes a real pain in
the bum to review them because I'm having to do so much mental effort to
re-review stuff that I already know I
know and part of doing Anki well is doing anky efficiently so really I would
explode this flash card into a load of
smaller flash cards and then it would be it would only be this final bit that I
actually didn't know and I knew the others so I'd be able to mark the others
as easy or good and this is the one that I would be able to mark as hard so
to come again but basically the point of
this is to illustrate the idea that as we're going through our flash cards we
definitely want to be editing them as we go along the thing that I think about
is
that if there's ever anything that I actually don't understand in my flash card
if there's a concept that doesn't quite make sense to me and I've decided
it's important for it to make sense to me then I will add extra information
because the extra information it doesn't take any effort to add it takes like 3
seconds but your future self will benefit so much from it when you can see
all of the context rather than having to
Google or search through your textbook to find information so that was how
we edit flash cards we really want to be editing them as we go along let's
now
talk about a slightly more advanced feature but I think we can cope with it
and that is image occlusion now what is
image occlusion well image occlusion is an add-on which I don't have yet
so we're going to install the add-on first so I'm going to go tools and add-
ons so
to to install the add-on for image exclusion enhanced I'm going to click get
add-ons and you'll see to browse add-ons please click the browse button
below when you found an add-on you like paste it's code below so I'm
going to hit browse add-ons and it's going to take me to this add-ons for
Anki 2.1 or
whatever version of Anki you're using at the time of this recording and I'm
going to contrl f or command F image occlusion
ah here we go this is what I want I want image occlusion enhanced for Anki
2.1 Alpha and to install the add-on
basically it'll give you a code to download this add-on please copy and
paste the following code into Anki 2.1
one so I'm going to copy that and then I'm going to paste it in here I'm
going to hit okay and then here we go download
complete please restart an to apply changes and you'll see we've got
image occlusion enhanced for an 2.1 Alpha over
here so let's restart an I'm going to close and we're going to open up an
again perfect now if we go tools add-ons
we'll see image occlusion enhanced has been installed so what does image
including do basically image occlusion lets you include aspects of an image
in order to learn sort of like
automatically generating flash cards from images so for example let's use
our capital city so let's find um
Australia major cities and let's find them in a map uh and oh here we go no
it's a bit small trying to find
something oh okay let's go here so I'm want to copy this image and in
Capital Cities this is not
really Capital Cities but I'm using it as an example to show what image
occlusion is so in Capital Cities we're going to add a new card and we don't
need to do anything with this card what we need to do is we need to open
up the image occlusion editor which you can see a button over here uh for
it add image
occlusion command shift o so let's hit command shift o now we can add
image occlusions here so let's say I wanted to
memorize what the different bits of Australia were you'll see on the side it's
automatically automatically
selected the rectangle tool by and I can select it by pressing the r or the
ellipse tool by pressing the e or you
can just click on it but it's automatically on the rectangle tool and what I can
do is I can just click and drag and you'll see Western Australia
gets hidden click and drag Northern Territory and it disappears click and
drag Queensland and it disappears let's
make it a bit bigger South Australia and New South Wales uh Tasmania
Victoria any other regions of
Australia cool that's fine so now we've included all these aspects of the
image and essentially what the image occlusion
add-on is going to do is that it's going to generate flash cards for us for all
of these so I'm going to say we've got
the option now we can say hide all guess one or hide one guess one now
these have different use cases um in this example
because we've got another example coming up I'm going to say hide one
guess one so now you'll see at the bottom it says
seven cards added so I'm going to click close And now if I go back to my
deck you'll see there's 15 new cards the
capital of aeran is Baku yes wonderful easy the capital of the Bahamas is
an asau yes easy in fact I should probably
change that I should change it to the capital of the Bahamas is an asau
because it gave me too much of a hint
because it said the capital of the so now the capital of something the
Bahamas is an N Out let's say it's easy fine
fine fine fine fine okay here we go now we're on the image occlusion stuff
now you'll see we've got the image and
you'll see that one aspect of it has been occluded it's gone red and you'll
see that all the others are visible
because I went for the hide one guess one so it's only hiding one of them I
could have gone for hide all guest one
which we'll see an example of a bit later on but now I think that's Western
Australia Western Australia so we see that it's it's appeared and we can
click
toggle masks so now that I know it's Western Australia I can have good on
that one but now we'll see that another one has been occluded and that is
Northern Territories and another one and another one and another one and
another one and we're seeing them in that order
because we don't have many flash cards in this deck and because I've set
them to be in in order we can randomize the order if we want and over time
as
certain of these are going to be easier than others it will start to reset but
you kind of get the idea this is a very good way to memorize a diagram or a
map
or a flowchart or things like that medical students use these a lot for
anatomy and now we've got two segments
from Clara and David talking us through how to use the image occlusion
enhance feature just to give you another example
of how this sort of stuff works in real life but if you've got the objective then
feel free to move on from the video so this is David and claraa explaining
image occlusion I wonder if if it would be easier if you can show us how to
make an image occlusion card just using a simple image or something in
the
practice deck that we've created okay so I've gotten this image from
Google and now we want to basically use it to study
our anatomy so we'll have to change the card type so we had it on Clos
deletion U but now we're going to be using an
image occlusion so here we have the image pulled up we can basically
blank them out by just dragging this box make
several of them and then you can either have hide them all guess one we'll
do
that I think that's the best way to go um and so now we have an image
we've kind of blanked out what's going on with
the words let's get past these ones so here is an example of uh image
occlusion
so you can see we've kind of blanked out everything that's going on of the
form Anatomy so you know I can be sitting here and I like think in my head
okay
what is this this is like obviously a nice Net's picture it's colorcoded and
stuff and it's always the joke that this
is not what the cavers look like on the actual exam but I think this is a good
way you know I think Anatomy is like a
great subject um but I think this is a good way to start learning an anatomy
learn like how things should look where
they should go um and then you can get in the cadabra lab and kind of find
out so I'd like okay think about what it is
in my head and I can test myself right then and there and I could go to the
next one okay what is this think about
it and then again at the bottom you can see if I didn't know what this was I
could click again if I did know what it was it'll show up in 10 minutes if I
thought this was super easy there's no way I'm going to forget this I could
click easy and I won't see it again for four days and I guess the reason that
you're not showing the other three is because then just by process of
elimination you'll just know that pron terror is the fourth one yeah I think
that for me that would be um a true point but you can do it like I could
choose to show the other three and just
have one of them blanked out but it kind of depends it's kind of a personal
preference that's the thing about an it's like kind of confusing um to learn
because there's so much that you can do and so many things you can
change um but that's totally another option is that you could just blank out
one at a time
if you'd like yeah can you show us your your your process for making
image occlusion things from like a new lecture
for example I really love the um teach me Anatomy diagrams I think they're
really clear so you've copied the image
from Google yeah I've searched up the image I've copied it and then gone
into Ani and pressed add and then put it into
lower Limon atomy deck I copied it and then like it comes up automatically
if you oh so if you just paste it it automatically comes up with image image
occlusion mode so you need to like copy the image on Google and then go
on to
the image occlusion thing but the the image yeah comes up automatically
and
then change it to Green I try and like um make the labels
like the same size because otherwise it like I know like what muscle you
know that Flex or digitorum profundus is
going to be a little bit of B the word then yeah so you're just clicking and
dragging you're including the image yeah
and then I click hide all guess one because am I right that hide one guess
one like leaves the others like it does
but often if there are only four muscles in the posterior compartment of the
leg you process of elimination you'll know exactly what it is which is not
help
that's why I do that so then I've just done hi all guess one and then just get
rid of it all right so those were a few different use cases for the image
occlusion enhanced add-on like I said installing an addon on bit of an
advanced feature but to be honest you saw how easy it was to actually
install that add-on and image occlusion is a great way of putting image
related
things into our memory so medical students use it a lot for anatomy as
you've seen equally if we're memorizing the crib cycle and there's all
different
aspects of it you can use image occlusion for that if you want to learn the
different aspects of Australia or the different states in America or
something you can image include the relevant bits that you want for that all
right welcome back in this video we are
Section 1 : Anki on Different Platforms
talking about how to install Anki on different platforms so I'm just going to
search Anki on Google it is apps. anky
web.net the annoying thing about different platforms is that there are lots of
fake versions of Anki so this is
the official website this is the one you want and this is the only one that you
want you can download the windows version the Mac version the Linux
version iPhone and Android now if you're on an iOS device the one you
want is ankey mobile let's open it up it is anky
mobile flashcards this is what it's called and it costs about $25 or £23 now
people are going to see that and think oh my God how the hell can I
possibly pay £25 for software if genuinely you can't afford to pay £5 for
software then
that's absolutely fine I mean I I get that currency ex exchange rates in
different countries asid that £25 is a
hell of a lot of money but if you're a student in the UK I can pretty much
guarantee you spent more than £25 wasted on like a meal out with friends
like
literally if you really can't afford this like it's the single most worthwhile
investment you can possibly make in fact if you can afford an iPhone
period chances are almost certainly you can afford anky mobile flash cards
and you should get anky mobile flash cards it is an absolute no-brainer I
cannot
imagine a single circumstance in which someone realistically can afford an
iPhone but can't afford to spend $25 on
an incredible app this like buying this app this is the only part of an that
costs money it is the thing that funds the development of the whole the
whole
ecosystem it is an absolute no-brainer if you're going to be using Anki for
any length of time at all even if you're only going to be using it for a year
even if you're only going to be using for a few weeks the amount of stress
that Anki takes away if you can have it on your phone in a nice app is
astronomical it is totally worth the 25 quid please just buy the app if you
have an iPhone if you have an Android then
you don't need to buy the app because it's free you can get anky Droid
which is this is what it looks like on the Google Play Store this is is the one
Anki Droid and because there's so many copycats you'll always be sure to
get the right one by going on it from the
Anki website there is another one I think it's on on iOS it's called Anki app
and it's not the one that you want
this is a fake app this is absolutely terrible you do not want Anki app flash
cards you do not want Anki app you want
specifically anky mobile flash cards the one that has the official Anki logo
with the $25 price tag but let's say you
can't afford it for whatever reason you can just go on your mobile device
and I will show you go on Safari and you can
go on an web.net anky web is a free companion to the compu computer
version of Anki anky web can be used online to
review when you don't have access to your whole computer blah blah blah
so I can log in I can type in my login details let me find the right account I
have so many different Anki accounts and now you'll see I have all of my
flash cards on anky web so if I wanted to I
could review my Capital Cities and I could click study now the capital of
aeran is Baku yes good the capital of
the Bahamas is asau uh you'll see that it hasn't quite synced from the
previous video because Anki synchronizes once you
close it but we'll talk more about that in the next next video so I can literally
do all of my flashcards from my phone I don't need the app but
because I have the app installed it just makes the whole process a lot a lot
easier so if I hit synchronize uh oh I'm logged into a different account but I'll
I'll explain the synchronization in in in the next video but basically there's no
excuse for not having an on your phone please buy the app it is totally
worth it if you're an iOS device you can probably afford it but if not you can
always use anky web.net and you can just
log in directly on there so that was Anki on different platforms it's obviously
helpful to have Anki across
all the platforms I have Anki on my iPhone on my iPad on my Mac and I
can access Ani web if I'm at work and I'm
just using the crappy Windows computers at work and I've got like a spare
half an hour I will often go onto anky web on the computer rather than kind
of slide
on my phone go on an web on the computer and just bash through some
flash cards that's a very easy way of using anky across different platforms
but remember
the official downloads are on the official anky website please don't get
Hoodwinked by the Myriad fake anky apps
the ones on the website are the ones that you want so it's the final video of
the basic mechanic section and in this video we're talking about how to
Section 1 : Syncing to Anki web
synchronize stuff to an web an is fantastic because they've got this free
synchronization platform where you can just automatically or semi-
automatically
keep your decks and flash cards and all your revisions and your space
repetition schedule you can keep it synchronized across your different
devices because as
we discussed in the previous video you're going to install an on whatever
device you have and preferably you're going to buy the IOS app but you
can always use Ani web if you don't if you
can't afford it for whatever reason anyway how do we sync well we can
make our flash cards it's all well and good but then we can hit the sync
button shortcut key Y and initially it's going
to say a free account is required to keep your collection synchronized
please sign up for an account then enter your details below so I'm going to
sign up
for an account I've got loads of an accounts so your email is anest al.com
anest al.com and let's use this
Ser strong password cuz why not actually no that's not let's use something
easy 1 2 3 4 5 six I just signed up sign up not
now I'm going to accept some terms and conditions blahy blahy blah now
I've got an email confirmation let's open up that
please verify your email address verify email now thank you your email
address has been verified and your account is fully active one ful now I can
type in
anky test al.com 1 2 1 2 3 4 5 6 I'm
going to hit enter okay now because I've got stuff here your decks here and
Ani web differ in such a way they can't be
merged together it's necessary to overwrite something so initially the very
first time I want to hit upload to
anky web because at the moment in my new anky web account I just have
a single default deck whereas I've got like an
absolute ton of decks on my local computer so I want to upload all the
decks on my local computer up to anky
web so that I can synchronize stuff I'm going to hit upload to Ani web and
now you're going to see your collection was successfully uploaded to Ani
web perfect
and we can see the synchronization button is like moving along so now in
theory if I go on Dex oh look this is my
fake account uh anest al.com and we can see I've used up 46 megabytes
of which
34 megabytes is Media because a lot of my decks have images in them so
it takes some time to upload and like literally
everything is now on Ani web this is absolutely incredible like look at this
this is sick everything just been instantly uploaded this is how it works
so now if we want to to synchronize basically whenever we want to
synchronize we can hit the synchronization button or when we hit
the close button oh it's still synchronizing stuff because there's a load a
load of data to to synchronize but essentially when we hit the close
button Anki will automatically sync all the changes up to anky web now I'm
going to go on my phone and I'm going to log
into my Anki account on the app and then I'll be able to download the
synchronized deck so let's go on Anki at the moment I've just got a default
deck
this is what it's going to look like when you first install it and I'm going to
profiles add a new profile and
test cool I'm going to hit synchronized and it says please ener your enter
your anky web details so I'm going to type in
anky test at Ali ABD dal.com password we said was 1 2 3 4 5 6 now this is
upload
to anky web or download from anky web and the answer is we want to
download from because you'll see on this device I
only have one single Deck with nothing in it I don't want to overwrite all my
decks on Ani web by uploading that instead I want to download from anky
web
because anky web is like the source of Truth For What like it should be so
I'm going to hit download from Ani web and now you will see everything is
going
it's all synchronizing it's downloading a ton of stuff because there's a load of
images to
download normally it wouldn't take this long it's taking this long because
I've got loads of pre-made Decks that have tons and tons of images in them
for
medical exams but it will be practically instant if you this is the first time that
you're using
anky going to order some takeaway while the synchronizes because there's
like hundreds of meaby to
download ah yes we are done look now you'll see that all of my decks have
synchronized to Anki web and now they've been downloaded onto my
phone so now everything is on my phone and everything
is offline so if even if I don't have internet access I now have all 650
megabytes worth of data of which there
are tens of thousands of like medical type flash cards which I can do on an
airplane in the middle of the Himalayas
wherever I want so yeah Capital Cities I've got my Western Australia so I
just tap and I can see okay it's good I've
got that is that Queensland no it's that what is that Northern Territories fine
Queensland whatever let go back to decks
let's look at my USM deck in acute gastritis disruption of what type of
barrier occurs disrupt of disruption of
the mucosal barrier yes perfect that's say good what is the most common
cause of chronic gastritis helicobactor pylori
I think wonderful uh how can brain injury cause acute gastritis well you can
get a Cushing
ulcer Cushing ulcer caused by increased vagal stimulation which increases
a in return asset production so I didn't know
all the details of that so let's go again and so on so I can go back and Dex
and then when I want when I'm done I can
hit synchronize and this is going to be much quicker because all it's done is
it's uploaded the changes that I made so
it's going to recognize that I did those four flash cards and it's going to
update the algorithm accordingly and
everything is synchronized on anky web completely for free this is
absolutely incredible I can see why Anki is an absolutely life-changing app
for a lot
of people so that was how we synchronized to and from anky web
remember the first time you want to up
upload to anky web and then the next time around you want to download
from anky web and then it'll figure out what's going on and then you won't
need
to worry about upload download anymore you'll just hit the synchronized
button and you'll be sorted the nice thing about anky web while we're here
is that
you can also share your decks you can make your decks public when I was
in my second year of med school I made loads of anky decks and I made
them public and
I shared them with people in the year below and friends in my year group
and stuff and that was fun yeah there's just loads of different ways to use
an and
you can also download other people's decks from Anki probably won't talk
about that in this class we'll talk about that in the next one because
there's a lot of kind of advanced tips and tricks for how to use pre-made
decks properly but this is just an introduction to Anki so that was how
synchronization worked thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next
segment of the course all right welcome to the second section of the class
and
Section 2 : Flashcards from a Lecture
in this bit we're going to be going over some real world examples of how
me and a
few other people that I've interviewed over the past few weeks how we
actually create anky cards in kind of real life
based on our material and then how we review those anky cards and how
we would do things like improve the cards over
time and stuff like that and the idea is that as we're watching these videos
I'll kind of explain what the philosophy is
behind what makes a good flash card there's loads of other videos on
YouTube that discuss this PR Rock jaani has some very good ones he was
one of the guys
that I interviewed for ages there's some bonus segments of him in this
class but now let's jump into it and so we're
going to start by talking about how to make anky flashcards from a lecture
so I've got my anky up and I'm going to use
uh in fact I'm going to use my lecture notes so I'm going to open a PDF
expert and I'm going to let's say I don't know
renal physiology let's go through renal physiology basically basically what
I'm looking for is that well firstly I want to understand the content obviously
uh
hopefully you've seen my class on how to study for exams um that talks
about the importance of understanding the content first and like for me I'm
pretty sure
now that I've been a doctor for two years and been studying physiology for
a while I'm pretty sure I understand most of renal physiology but I still need
to
memorize certain aspects of it so I'm going to create a new deck and I'm
going to call it h because that is the subject
H home for homeostasis first year physiology and I'm going to see which
aspect of the lecture notes I can
convert into Flash cards and the philosophy that I've got while I'm doing this
is I'm thinking what is an
examinable fact that I need to memorize that I can't just rely on
understanding for those are my three things examinable
fact that I need to memorize that I can't just rely on understanding for
something like where are the kidneys I don't need to memorize where the
kidneys
are because I know like where the kidneys are I know they're over there
something like what is the blood supply to the kidneys I I just know it's the
renal arteries like it's not the sort of
thing that I need to memorize because I've long understood that fact it's as
ingrained within me as that the fact
that Paris is the capital of France but I'm as I'm going through these
lectures I'm going to look for information that I could potentially turn into a
flash card
and as we're going through I'll explain why I'm converting certain bits into
different flash
cards okay this is an interesting one so this graph basically shows um
essentially in the body we have about 42 L of water the intracellular fluid I.E
the water inside cells makes up 25 L the
interstitial fluid I.E the water around the cells makes up 13 L and the
plasma I.E blood makes up about 3 l of fluid
these are important numbers to remember and so I'm going to create a
flash card for each of them it's going to be a basic flash card cuz it doesn't
need to
be special actually no you know what let's make a Clos deletion flash card
out of this because then I can say body
compartments intracellular fluid equals interstitial
fluid equals and plasma equals body compartments how much fluid
do we have in each so I can say interstitial fluid is
about 25 L um 13 L and 3 l and what I'm going to do is I'm going to close all
of these so
command shift C command shift C command shift C but what I'm thinking
about is for example if I do them like this
you'll see they're all c1s that means that when I add this
card now it's going to ask me for the answer for all of them and it's just
going to create one flash card because
if I go in the edit mode you'll see C1 just means kind of the first close the
first close the first close all of these
are in one so the thing thinking of in my head is is it important for me to be
able to generate this information
without knowing the others for example if I did it a C1 C2 and C3 just to
give you an example and saved
that now if I saw that I know the answer is 25 lers but I'm thinking in 6
months
time if I didn't know that that was 25 L I'd probably be able to actually work
it out based on these two numbers because I
know I just know that the overall is about 41 42 l so that's why the
philosophy here is that actually I'm
going to convert them all into a single close because that is actually the
important information I need as a doctor
and as a you know someone studying physiology I should be able to just
reel these numbers off of the top of my head so it's it's it's really important
for
me to know this as one unit of information so when I see this flash card I
can see okay 25 L intracellular
13 L interstitial and 3 l in the plasma boom absolutely right and while I'm
here
I'm just going to screenshot oh gosh this keyboard is not working let's
switch keyboard on a Mac you would
where's my diagram you would use command control shift and four and
then that turns into a selection and I can
just I can just copy that whole segment and just paste it into extra so now if
I close this and look at this flash card
again now that I've got the answer once I've active record it once I've tested
myself on the flash card I now see all this information and again like it's so
useful putting the putting this extra information in flash cards because now
I've got this visual of the kind of 25 L
intracellular fluid the 13 L interstitial fluid and the 3 lers of plasma that
would be one card that I would make from this using closed
deletions ah here's another interesting one 55% of the blood is actually
plasma and of that 9 91% is water 7% is
proteins and 2% is electrolytes now I sort of knew that but I I didn't really
have these numbers off the top of my
head and I think it would I think it's helpful in terms of understanding
physiology and understanding fluid bands around the body just to
appreciate what
these numbers are so what I'm going to do I'm going to say um 55% of the
blood is plasma how much of that is water so
how much of the plasma is Water by percentage and because this is a
closed
deletion card within the text of the card I'm going to say 91% water and I'm
going to close that with command shift C I'm going to add this close so this
is
this one let's say that was easy 55% of the blood is is plasma how much of
the plasma is Water by percentage the answer
is 91 this is basically a basic card in Clos deletion format so alternatively
what I could have done is I could have created a new card I could have
switched the type to basic and I could have said
uh what percentage of plasma is actually water and the answer would be
91 yeah that would be one way of doing it but
because for me I tend to use Clos cards quite a lot if I've if I've got a card
that's actually just a basic question
and answer I would still just use the Clos deletion thing the other interesting
thing about the Clos thing is that it automatically comes with the extra field
so now what I can do in the
extra field is I can just copy and paste boom I'm going to screenshot that
just paste it in there and now that's
automatically in there right right so now this flash card is a lot more useful
because now when I see this in 6 months
time or however you know I'm going to see it tomorrow or later today 91%
water but it also gives me the context I've
explained that actually 91% water 7% proteins 2% electrolytes and this is a
diagram just to illustrate it a bit more
and it was so easy for me to just screenshot that stuff and just shove it into
anky I'm I might as well like this
would be a lot less useful if I just memorized 91% water in isolation but now
I've got it in context and I understand
it's with proteins and electrolytes so for example if I were to add more cards
here I would say um you know let's
actually copy this stuff how much of the plasma is proteins by percentage
and
then I would actually say which proteins which is technically another
question sort of goes against the minimum information principle which is
the idea
that only one fact per flash card but because I know that actually
memorizing the number seven is optically useful in
the context of my subject it's more useful for me to be able to reel off
albumin fibrinogen globulins Etc as
being the other things in this list which is why I'm adding more than one
piece of information to this particular flash card and this is why creating
flash card gets so complicated because it really depends on what you're
trying to achieve and like what the objective is so actually let's just let's just
fill this out so I'm going to say 7% proteins albumin
fibrinogen globulins other Etc and I could just copy and paste that from the
lecture notes close deletion that with
command shift C and then copy and paste all of this stuff and maybe in the
next series we'll talk about add-ons to make
this process a bit more efficient but we're we're trying to keep things simple
here so now how much of the plasma is water it's 91% and I've got my
illustration good how much of the plasma is proteins well it's about 7% and
the proteins are alamin fibrinogen and
globulins amongst other things mostly albumin great so that is how I would
make kind of Fairly basic flash cards
just based off of this you know let's make another one while while you're
here what is V Hoff's
equation and the answer is pi V equal nrt so I'm going to write uh Pi V
equal
nrt because I can't be a to define the symbol for pi and I'm just going to
copy and paste this whole thing in the extra
Tab and I'm going to close out Pi V equal nrt now let's add it with command
space bar close this how much is the
plasma percentage of proteins blah blah blah let's say that was easy what
is Van Hoff's equation well it's Pi V equals nrt but alone that fact is totally
useless which is why in the extra column I have added I've screenshotted
the information there and again just to
reiterate it takes me zero effort to screenshot stuff but my future self will be
so glad that I did it so that was an
example of three different flash cards that I've made just of of this one
lecture and the question I'm thinking is do I need to me memorize it or can I
just kind of understand van Hof's equation I kind of knew that already but
it's a it's an anonomous thing like it's
named after someone so you know in in a year's time in two years's time I
might not specifically remember like I would
know the equation Pi V equals nrt but I might not specifically remember that
it was Van Hof's equation which is why it's helpful to create the flash card
for
that whereas I probably wouldn't need a flash card for Speed equals
distance over time just because it's so Bond or
obvious and I just know it so the point that I want to make throughout this
whole thing is that we don't want to just be making flash cards willy-nilly
about everything we only want to make flash cards for the things that we
think we might need a flash card to remember
and that actually is partly why I don't like making flash cards the first time
I'm studying a new subject because the
first time you're studying anything it is all completely new to you you know
the first time I'm looking at capitals of the world the fact that Paris is the
capital of France is is a completely new fact to me and so I'd make a flash
card about it but really I I don't need to make a flash card about it it
because it
perhaps that's a bad example but like as you become more familiar with a
topic you can start taking different aspects of that topic for granted there's
an
example I'd like to give like a few months ago a student emailed me asking
me to look at his flash cards he was starting first year of medical school no
I think he was like A- level biology and one of his flash cards was where is
the heart and the answer was in between the
lungs that's a pretty ridiculous flash card to make because obviously
everyone knows the heart is in between the lungs you don't need a flash
card for that
also it's a bad flash card because where is the heart like 2 years from now
when you look at that flash card as a medical student or as a doctor I might
well it's
sort of in the middle media stum it's surrounded by the anterior and the
posterior media stum it's got the pericardium around like I'm I'm not
really sure what the question is asking right if the if the flash card was
between which two organs is the heart
then it's more obvious that okay the lungs but then it's a pointless flash card
to create cuz you don't need a flash card to know that the heart is in
between the lungs you can just take it for granted so that's kind of the
impression that I want to leave you with that Anki is fantastic an is amazing
but
you really want to avoid flash card overload and one way to avoid flash
card overload is to only make a flash card if
you think you might need a flash card to remember it and if something is
super super easy then yeah you you just mark it as easy and it kind of ends
up
getting buried but yeah we don't want to be overloaded with flash card so
that was this segment of the video Let's in
the next one we'll continue making some more flash cards and I'll just share
some more thoughts along the way all right welcome back in this video we
are
Section 2 : Flashcard From a Video
talking about how to make flash cards from a video let me find a random
lecture video on YouTube related to
physiology probably I'll again try and go over what sort of flash cards I
would make from that particular video so let's
look at um I don't know pulmonary Sur Fant looks good double speed
obviously welcome to scho oh here we go so already we have an
examinable fact
here so I'm going to add to this deck and if we look at the bottom of this
video which is hard to see because the player is in the way let's just
enlarge
this pulmonary surfactant is secreted into the alveoli from type two alola
cells mention how an increas AM and so
the examinable fact here is what cell type secretes suant what cell secretes
Sur
factant and I'm going to say uh type 2 alv cell and because this is a close
card because that's how I roll I'm going to close that out and then you know
what might as well just screenshot this from
the video and shove in the extra column just cuz why not so that's a useful
fact for me to memorize so we mention how we
the mechan in place prevent the coll of it's du to something oh interesting
so I actually want to do an image occlusion
here because I think it's useful for me to understand what a type 1 alola cell
is and what a type 2 alola cell is so
I'm going to screenshot that copy it to my clipboard and I'm going to use
command shift O command shift o to open
up image inclusion it's going to automatically paste in this thing and I
should be able to scroll around good so
we've got the rectangle selected we're going to get rid of that we're going to
get rid of that let's get rid of that as
well Alva maccrage faum H capillary arthrite that's all fairly obvious stuff
so I want to hide all of them because if I do hide one guess one it's going to
show me all of them and ask me to guess one of them but if it for example
shows
me alveola type 2 cell I know that the other one must be alveola type 1 cell
so in this context it's better for me to hide all than guess one and I we'll see
three cards have been added great let's continue so is as by okay here we
go
this is interesting what are the three things that makes up
surfacant basically one two 3 it is fos oh God phospholine
phosph tidal glycerol and
hyro oh God s surfactant proteins I probably could get a get a molecule
diagram so surfactant it's going to show me the structure of these bits this
is an image of phospho tidal choline so
let's copy shove that into the extra column so now I can see phospho tidal
choline and be like okay hydrophobic
chains polar head groups blah blah blah but these are the three things that
makes up makes up seaon and again do I
want to do this as a single card or as three different cards I think I want to
do it as a single card and again this is
this is somewhat controversial because there's more than one piece of
information per card but again I kind of know that if I get asked a question
in
real life it'll be what are the three bits that make a ponary surfactant and I
want to be able to rule them off off the top of my head so yes it would be
more
effort for me to recall this card when I see it but I know that in the context
that this information is important it's important for me to know about all
three
components so actually I could have just done a basic card foras but I'm
just going to select everything close it with a single close rather than having
to
select each of them individually let's hit the add button and now we'll see
55% blood is plasma well that is 91% good
what is Van Hof equations Pi V nrt what cell secretes a factant alveola type
2 cells good now this is an alveola type 1
cell good that is an alveola type two cell good and that is an alveola
maccrage good what are the three things that make surfactant phosy
choline phosph glycerol and hydrophobic heads
hydrophobic surfactant proteins no it's hydrophobic Tails whatever let's say
good for that one and now I know what
it's talking about easy done interpers between water molecules the okay so
he said that pulmonary surfactant is
removed by Alva macrophages now I didn't actually know that so I'm going
to create a card for it so surfactant is
secreted by type 2 alveolar cells but taken up by alol
macro phages now this is actually the perfect opportunity to use a double
close so I can close that I can close that so that works so now if I add this
I've added two cards so fact it's secreted by type to avoda cells yep but
it's taken up by AV micro fages so now I've got these two facts that I've got
from this lecture and put it into a flash card and this is a fairly simple
flash card and again if I wanted to I could copy and paste this diagram so
let's edit this extra paste the diagram
in close so now it's going to appear in all of these all of these Clos deletion
flash cards so hopefully you you can get
an idea of how I'm making the flash cards as I'm going along again just to
reiterate I'm asking myself do I really need a flash card for this this is not
the first time I'm going over the topic so already if there's something that I
don't immediately think oh yeah I know that then I think okay maybe I need
a
flash card for it because clearly I haven't remembered it after all these eight
years of being in medicine but that's sort of Step number one and step
number two is I'm trying to think about
how I can turn it into the simplest flash card but also while I'm doing that I'm
thinking about how is this information actually going to be tested
is there any point in me knowing the structure of pulmonary surfactant
based on those three things in isolation or
would it be better if if I could just reel off the three things that make up
ponary reactant just like in a row and in that context that would make sense
so
again just reiterating the point that design your flash cards based on the
format and the method that you're going
to be tested in and remember you want to minimize the number of flash
cards ideally so we don't want to be making flash cards on absolutely
everything
because then we get too many flash cards and it takes ages we want to try
and keep that process as efficient as possible so thanks for watching and
let's move on to the next video all
Section 2 : How to Memorise a Paragraph
right welcome back in this video I want to show you how I memorized
bunches and bunches of paragraphs and paper
references and kind of long bits of text for my psychology essays that I had
to write during my third year of med school
I actually made a YouTube video sort of about this it's called how I ranked
first at Cambridge University and it's done quite well cuz it's a good clickbait
title but this is my third
year psychology deck actually we'll click study now and we'll see how much
of this I remember trannel and deasio 1985 I have absolutely no idea what I
was talking about while the pro so prognostic Post in mind recognition they
s SC to familiar what the hell does SC
mean clearly I I knew this back in the day let's hit brows and I'm looking for
my third year psychology deck and let's
sort it alphabetically okay so basically the way that I was using Ani for this
is that I was creating essay plans like I
was creating structures of essays that I was going to commit to memory
using spider diagrams and mind maps for example in my mind map I would
have the
phrase abnormal basa gangli function in schizophrenia functional
neuroimaging evidence which you know this was an essay about
schizophrenia we were
looking at what is the evidence that in people with schizophrenia the basil
ganglia which is a part of the brain is
abnormal and the thing that I wanted to memorize was this study from
honey from honey atel 2005 where they did
functional MRI showing brain responses to simple Target detection tasks in
groups of controls and schizophrenic were overactive in schizophrenia and
the
paman was underactive in schizophrenia so this is not the minimum
information principle but actually it kind of is
like the minimum information information principle is that we should have a
single chunk of information for every flash card this paper is a chunk of
information like I need to know what the reference is I need to know who
did the study and I need to know what the study showed and there's no
point in me
knowing the name and then creating a separate flash card for what the
study showed because that's not how I'm going
to recall that information I'm going to recall that information by seeing this
on a plan and thinking okay I'm writing
this essay about schizophrenia in the exam I need some evidence that
shows that in schizophrenia there is some kind
of brain structural changes ah I remember from my flash card I know I've
got that study from honey ATL 2005 where
they showed that in schizophrenia the cordate is underactive and the
pamment is overactive other way around the coda
are under or overactive and the pment is underactive whatever but the
point is that I'm using Flash cards to create these kind of links equally
amydala
overactivity and depression is it simply caused by medication or depressed
state and then I've got this other chunk of
paragraph that I've memorized again here anxiety is a good for you in lab
studies first consulted 100 years ago a small
degree of anxiety has been found to improve performance and lab tasks
too much anxiety interferes with performance you know this is like a whole
chunk of
information that I've memorized because anxiety is a good for you is the
cue that I know I'm going to recall when it
comes to writing my essay so again this is not the way that I'd recommend
using an if you need to Anki then this is sort of a brain processing intensive
way of
using an to memorize chunks of information but this worked really well for
me and because of using an I was able to memorize kind of at least 10
references for every single essay that I was writing in the exam I'd
memorized at least 50 essays of which like eight came up in the exam out
of the 12 that we had
to write so that was absolutely perfect but this took me absolutely ages like
you know making these flash cards and reviewing them every single day
without
fail ultimately all of this information was uploaded to my brain but this is a
difficult way to use Anki a much easier
way to use an is by using Anki keeping your flash cards as short as
possible so that you can just like Blitz through the reviews whereas for one
of these breel
2000 there's no way I can Blitz through this review like back in the day
when I was studying for this exam I would I would just kind of scribble out
what the
paper reference was and what they showed and kind of recite the story to
myself in my head and that would take 30
seconds to 1 minute sometimes even longer per flash card and you know if
I had thousands of flash cards it just wouldn't have worked so I had fewer
flash cards but it's a lot easier to use Anki when you're just kind of blitzing
through small Snippets of information individual factoids rather than this
method of memorizing entire chunks of information but I just wanted to put
this video in here to show you that you can use Anki to memorize chunks of
information again it really just depends on in what format are you actually
going to be tested are you going to be asked to write write an essay in an
exam with
the book closed or you have to recite these references from memory some
would argue it's kind of a pointless way to be tested I would agree but I
don't make
the rules this is just you know how you play the game or are you going to
be tested in a sense that it's going to be multiple choice where it's based on
recognition rather than generation of
information all these things kind of dictate how how you should use your
flash cards but in this I just want to
show you that there are a few different ways of doing it but if in doubt stick
to the minimum information principle one
fact per flash card one chunk of information per flashcard don't over
complicate it like I've done here so I
hope this just gave you a kind of brief look at how this stuff worked and feel
free to slow this video down if you
actually want to see what I'm going over all right in this section we're talking
about how to optimize Anki how
Section 2 : Improving your Flashcards
to use Anki properly and remember this class is still aimed at people who
are brand new to Anki there's a huge Rabbit Hole you can really go down
into the
weeds with Anki and how to optimize it and all the different settings and all
that kind of stuff we'll save that for the future class where we kind of aim it
more intermediates and experts but in this section of the class I just want to
go over kind of some best practices ways
in which we can optimize our Anki usage to get the best bang for a buck
even as beginners so in this video um this is
going to be sort of a bonus segment it's an interview that I did with pre Jani
who is a medical student YouTuber he's
got a YouTube channel where he breaks down so much stuff about Anki
and you should definitely watch all of his videos about Anki if you're really
interested in exploring this topic deeper but in this short segment he and I
are just kind of discussing and showing on screen how we would improve
flash cards by kind of building on them and like kind of what makes a good
flash card um more on that in a video further
down the line but yeah here is me and prag discussing how to improve your
flash cards by adding extra information
I wonder if you can just kind of take us through some other sort of random
cards just so we can get an idea of what kind of extra information you put
and I I and
while we're there if we can talk about what makes a good flash card versus
a bad flash card and I know you've got videos about this that we'll put in the
description section wherever people are watching this so here here's a
good one so you know this is buide to feride
conversion uh which is both of these are just diuretics but notice how um
the first question was just like 2
milligrams IV is how much furosemide po this is a very just basic question
and then the answer was 80 which is what I
put in the back but in the extra column I included all the contextual basis
behind that which is 40 milligrams of
Lasix PO is 1 milligram of bumetanide Po and then underneath that I also
said
like 40 Mill lasx is 20 milligram lasx IV so that's the conversion from po to IV
of lasx and then I also included the
conversion of bumetanide Po to IV which is one milligram bumetanide PO
is one milligram IV so even though this
question is testing one facet of this which is bumetanide to Lasix you can
see how I would need to know a lot of a lot
more you know because you need to know bu Lasix poo to Lasix IV buide
po to BU
IV um and so on the extra column I almost always have all of the
prerequisite information I need to
understand this question so when I let's say I just wrote 2 milligrams is
equal to 80 poo if I had nothing else here
this is a very useless card because then I'm just like cool two is 80 but one
might be 40 and then like what about po
IV like all those small things and now I have this card here that actually
answers all of those so even though it's
just one question that I'm being asked I have a lot more knowledge here
that I can absorb so so this one says which one
is the left gastroepiploic artery comes from and this is just relating to the
stomach so notice how I included a
picture of the stomach in my extra column um and you'll see that the left
one comes off of I think this oh the
left one comes off the splenic artery and the right one comes off the gastro
dool so notice how I included this picture and I said splenic so I'm like
okay here's the splenic artery oh there's the left gastro I got it if I had asked
right then notice how I'd need
to go to the Sea trunk probably go to the gastral and then it comes off the
gastro DOL on the right side um so again
not just the answer but all the prerequisite information I need to understand
that question yeah because I suppose I suppose for that one like if
if you didn't have the image the danger is your brain would just begin to
associate that specific phrasing of the
question with splenic artery just the words and you wouldn't have the idea
like the actual Concept in your mind
yeah which is really important right because Anatomy is so visual so you
may memorize these two things but I would
argue that having the picture makes it even easier to memorize because
you're like oh yeah splenic artery and oh it just comes off it's on the left
side yeah so so this this has a lot more context and I'd argue even makes it
easier because if it seems like you and
I are very similar I can't just memorize random facts I need to have some
sort of like there is logic behind this you know
like whoever made these amazing things didn't just do it out of craziness
there's logic behind each and everything
and so this kind of adds a bit more reason um so this one's asking like what
is drug induced aseptic menitis again
it's a very simple basic question um but you'll notice how I included an
abstract here it's a picture of an abstract from
Jama that talks about drug induced um uh yeah drug induced ASPC
aseptic menitis
and I have the actual paper here if I wanted to refer to it but again I kind of
summarized it in my own way it's when
drugs certain drugs you take can cause your CSF fluid to actually have the
same breakdown as if you had viral menitis
and so notice how I kind of even highlighted the part of the abstract that's
important which is nids can cause
this antibiotics can cause this IVIG can cause this and antibi antibodies
against the T3 receptor can cause this um but
again basic question basic answer but all the information I need to
understand that answer in the context of medicine
so here's another one so this is just light's criteria for thoros and thesis um
so let's say um you wanted to decide
if a thoros nesis if if a plural affusion you had was caused by heart failure
as opposed to an infection this
like criteria explains it but notice that I have I don't even ask any questions
about it I ask another test
that's really specific for exudative um plural Fusion is cholesterol
cholesterol
Valu is greater than what are indicative of exudative and this is 45 right and
then also notice I included my
transitive stuff here because it's not just about exudative so transudative
are usually bilateral they're caused by he
failure curosis nephrotic syndrome and exive are usually infection and
malignancy so again everything I need to
understand the concept but then I my question is a very specific facet of
that knowledge bank I suppose at that
point if you still didn't understand it having read the information that's when
you would just open up Google and just literally Google it find find a
Wikipedia article exactly but notice how I don't just make one card so look
this is the same thing what are three causes
of exida of infusions so I usually have so many questions about one topic I
approach it from like 80 different
attack angles that if I go through all of my cards and I sleep on it those
angles come together it's kind of like
the puzzle analogy we were using which you fill in pieces of the puzzle and
before you know it you filled the whole
puzzle in and your your concept bank is full you just didn't it all right
welcome back in this video we're going
Section 2 : The Best Settings for Anki
to talk about the best settings that you should use for anky essentially
there's a YouTube video by this guy called Conor
AKA Sai and he's got this guide to anky intervals and learning steps and
I've experimented around with loads of
different anky settings and these are the ones that I would recommend that
you get started with the default Ani settings are all right but they can
cause problems and this half an hour video has like a whole long
explanation of it if you really want to get into it but because this is a
beginner's class
we're not going to bother explaining stuff we're just going to be like right
these are the settings that you want so how do you change your an settings
well
you you'll notice that next to every deck there's a little options icon I'm let's
use my USM one and click options
now you'll see that you've got we've got different options group option
groups here and I'm going to manage and create
a new one and I'm going to call that group let's say uh Ali recommended
settings cool now basically these are the numbers that we want to put in so
under the new cards essentially there's
like three three categories of settings just to briefly explain we've got new
cards reviews and lapses so new cards
are cards that are still in the learning phase and reviews are you know how
many reviews we're doing each day um but
basically Cards start off in the learning phase and then once you get them
right enough times they graduate
and then in theory they are cards that you should know and if you get them
wrong once they graduated at that point
they reset back to new cards kind of or rather at that point it counts as a
lapse and then it effectively resets
back to you it's it's it's complicated you don't really need to know the details
basically the new card def def fault steps I think are 3 and 15 which
means that when a card is new you'll have noticed in the previous
examples if you click again it comes up in 3 minutes
and if you click good it comes up in 15 minutes and then after that time if
you click good it graduates because the
gradu graduating interval is set to one day so after just getting it right twice
in a span of 15 minutes the card counts
as having graduated and then if you ever get it wrong again at that point
the card difficulty becomes penalized which
means that you start seeing that card over and over again and in this video
konana calls it ease hell and I think
that's a great a great description of it because everyone who doesn't
change the default anky settings gets into this problem where they're like I I
swear
I've been seeing this card so often why does it keep on coming up it's cuz
you haven't changed the settings these are the settings you want to change
it to so for new cards you want to write 15 so
the first interval is 15 minutes 3 minutes is a bit pointless because 3
minutes you're not really learning anything you're just testing your short-
term retention of it the next so
15 space 1440 1440 is 1440 minutes to one day that means the first
interval is
15 minutes the next interval is 1 day and the third interval 8640 which I
think is six 6 days I think that's 6
days so that's 15 minutes 1 day 6 days and the graduating interval is also
really important to change we want to
change that to 15 days now what this means is that the first time we see a
card if it's good it comes up in 15
minutes if it's good then it comes up in a day then it comes up in 6 days
then it comes up in 15 days and after we've got
it right after 15 days of it being a new card then that card graduates and at
that point we're pretty confident we kind of know what's on the card and at
that point if we get it wrong then we start penalizing ourselves which we
won't go into it's all explained in the video but with the default settings you
don't really get to know a card very
well you just have it in your short-term memory and for a lot of us we have
pretty good short-term memories I've got pretty good short-term memories
it
becomes very easy to just graduate a card whereas you want to actually
get more and more steps until a card becomes graduated because when
anky marks a card
is graduated Anki is saying that we expect you to have memorized this card
by this point whereas like you know
there's cards that I've got tomorrow that are capital of Andor that I really
can't remember or capital of Armenia that I can't remember I wouldn't want
that to count as graduated cuz I know I can't remember it like I I want to
have recalled it four times with at least 15
days of a gap between them to know that I fully know the card before it
becomes a graduated card so these are one of the most important settings
to do show new
cards in the order added I actually prefer show new cards in a random
order because as you saw in the previous examples as we were creating
capitals it
becomes easy to actually memorize the order of the cards just
subconsciously so adding new cards in a random order means that you
don't see one after the
other so you can figure out what the answer is based on the order that the
answer came in so add new cards in a
random order and finally for the easy interval I like to have 60 days as con
recommends basically I tend not to hit
easy I was hitting it a few times in the example just just to kind of get us
through the cards but I usually don't Mark a card as easy because if I'm
marking it as easy then I'm really questioning why do I actually have this
flash card in the first place something like the capital Francis Paris would
be
an easy card it would be the sort of car that I actually don't need to make so
I tend not to Mark easy but easy interval I would just put a 60 days so these
are
the first settings to change next when it comes to the reviews these are the
settings I would recommend so maximum
reviews per day I would set to 9999 because basically you always want to
do the highest number of reviews that Anki
says you should because if I said maximum reviews 20 a day like I only
want to revise 20 cards a day and I've
got 500 cards then I'm I'm never going to get through them all because I'm
only doing a maximum of 20 each day whereas I
set it to 9 and99 because the Anki algorithm is very good it's it's very good
at predicting when I'm going to forget stuff basically if you set your
maximum reviews per day to too low a number you are hamstringing the
algorithm you're not letting the algorithm work because you are not up
for doing enough questions and sometimes when you're getting into the
swing of things you can just Blitz through hundreds of flash cards in a in a
given
sitting so I like to have reviews at 9999 easy bonus is fine interval modifier
is fine and maximum interval 90
days is fine that's sort of the maximum amount of time that you'll see a card
coming back in basically and then
importantly for lapses this is important so essentially a lapse is what
happens when you've got a graduated card and you
get it wrong right so a card that has graduated in in Anki default settings a
card that's graduated is a card that you've known for one day in my book
that
doesn't count as knowing something that just means you remember it from
yesterday it doesn't count whereas in our new settings as we see over here
a
card that's graduated is a card that we've been able to recall four times with
a 15-day gap between those recalls
so if at that point we get it wrong then okay fair play we should start seeing
that card more often the default step is
15 minutes I think 20 minutes is better because really 15 minutes is not too
too great new interval now I think that
should be changed so what that means is that basically if you get a card
wrong once it's graduated it will completely
reset back to its default and you're going through your 15 minutes 1 day 6
days 15 days all over again which becomes a real annoyance especially if
you made a typo or something or you actually knew it but if but you just sort
of forgot it for a moment it's
unfair on on ourselves to make us then redo that card in circulation again
because a it's it's not it's not a very
nice feeling and B it also comes at the expense of the other cards so I think
it's useful to have that at 70% as konana recommends so 70% minimum
interval 2 days and Lee threshold eight lapses Lee action tag only it's really
important that this should be tag only
essentially what that means is that if we get a card wrong eight times in a
row then anky will tag it and tell us that
guy mate you've been getting this card wrong eight times in a row suspend
is bad because suspend means Anki will start hiding that card and never
show it
again but if you've got something wrong eight times in a row you probably
want to show it rather than hide it so tag only is the way for that and now
I've
saved this as I recommended settings so I'm going to hit okay so now when
I'm doing my USM deck I click options and I
see that yeah it's on Ali's recommended settings but for example if I click
my I don't know Capital Cities deck options
that's currently on default whereas I could change it to's recommended
settings or I could change it to konana or I could change it to assade or or
whatever I want and now we'll see that that should be assade settings and I
can change that to default again yeah and if
we look back on USM that should still be on ai's recommended settings so
you can sort of change up the settings depending
on what deck you're doing if for example I was learning Japanese or
learning music theory I would want these cards to come up much more
frequently whereas for
me learning stuff for the USMLE uh you know I've got thousands of cards in
this pre-made deck which I'll talk about later I don't want to review them
every
3 minutes so those are the recommended settings but basically if you
change ankey to those settings you won't really
go wrong so yeah that's all good thanks for watching and I'll see you in the
next video okay welcome back in this
Section 3 : Why Should You Use Anki?
section section three of the course I'm going to be answering frequently
asked questions so in this video we're talking about when should you use
ankey and this
kind of gets split up into two parts right there is when should you create
flash cards and second secondly when should you review flash cards and
we'll
tackle the second one first because it's easier you should be reviewing the
flash cards every single day because if you can do it every day then you
letting the
algorithm work in your favor you're allowing the system to work for you and
it means you don't really have to think about it you just have to get your
daily
reviews done every day and so when I was using Anki extensively in
medical school and all my friends have done this as
well when we were using Anki properly we'd be doing it for example on the
toilet or like on the bus or like you
know in the car if you're in the car someone else is driving and you're going
to placement or something then it's quite easy to just kind of Blitz through
flash card and it doesn't even have to be antisocial because you know for
example what we would do in in clinical school is that someone would
usually
have anky open usually me with my friend Paul driving and then as I was
doing my flash cards I would throw the question
out to the rest of the group and everyone would kind of answer equally
when I was in my second year we were memorizing drugs and
pharmacology and
stuff using anky and me and my friends Callum and Paul we were all living
together uh once or twice a week we'd
get together we'd order a city Kebab takeaway and we would just kind of do
drugs is what we called it just kind of bash through some anky flash cards
so
basically when it comes to reviewing a flash cards you want to be doing it
at every opportunity when you have those spare moments of time and yeah
you can
sit down for an hour or two every day and be like right I'm just going to B
you my anky cards but think about the amount of time that we all waste
scrolling through Instagram you know these days I'm on the toilet I'm not
actively preparing for anything using an and so my default thing is I scroll
through Instagram whereas you know now that I'm kind of going
approaching the preparation for the USMLE and I'll be
using Anki extensively for that it's nice now having that thing like a default
activity that I can do when I'm on the toilet and in fact one thing I
found helpful when I was in university is having having anky as the very
first icon on the very first page of my iPhone
home screen I've now reduced the friction for me doing some anky cards
rather than doing something completely pointless like scrolling through
Instagram so that is when you should review your flash cards what about
when you should create them now A friend of mine uh his name is Angus
he ended up
ranking like amazingly well in all the exams in in in medicine in Cambridge
he started off making ankey flashcards in
first year of med school but he started off making them after the lecture like
he would take notes in the lecture and then he would convert the notes into
flash cards that is one way of doing it but very quickly he realized that
actually he didn't need to take that intermediate step of taking the note
first he could just convert the lecture into anky flashcards as he was going
along and then for the next like five
six years and he ended up like absolutely smashing every single exam and
ended up like winning some like like loads of prizes at graduation and stuff
was he was saying his method was purely based on just using ankey using
active recall and using spider diagrams here and there which we'll talk
more about in
a future video the point is he cut out the intermediate step of note taking
from his like flash card generation and
so when you start getting good at using ankey what you can do is you can
start making flash cards in the lecture itself
so for example if there's a diagram on the screen and maybe you've got the
Powerpoint in on your laptop you can just screenshot from the PowerPoint
put
it into anky alternatively if you don't have slides you could just take a photo
with your phone and then Chuck it into anky you can make flash cards on
the fly
during lectures so that would be one way of doing it the other way of doing
it is the more standard way that you in the lecture you actually pay attention
and
you kind of make notes I quite like making notes in lectures just because it
helps keep me awake and then after the lecture then I would kind of go
through
and I would really ask myself okay do I really need a flash card to
understand SL memorize this thing and as we've
talked about before individual factoids that might come up in the exam
would be
reasonable to make a flash card about let's say you know it was uh which
chromosome is the is the gene for Cystic
Fibrosis on and if you're like okay well there's no real understanding
involved in doing that I know it would make sense
to turn that into a flash card whereas let's say it's something like in a lecture
randomly they mentioned that you know type 2 diabetes affects 20% of the
UK population that's not a useful flash card because I know that I'm never
going to be asked a question asking me what
percentage of the UK population is affected by diabetes because that's just
not the sort of question that we would have got in our exams our exams are
much
more scientific they didn't really care about these kind of stat though I
wouldn't make a flash card about that so yeah those are kind of the two
most
popular places where you can make your flash cards number one during
the lecture itself instead of taking notes or maybe alongside or number two
after
the lecture when you're going over your material at that point it becomes a
lot easier to just kind of screenshot stuff Chuck it into anky screenshot
chuckin
type of few things Chuck into an and you become very Adept at creating
flash cards very quickly so that was just a
few thoughts on when you should be using an thank you for watching and
I'll see you in the next video all right welcome back in this video we're
talking about
Section 3 : When Should I Start Making Flashcards?
when you should start making flash cards this is absolutely classic question
that everyone asks like when should I start doing Ani basically you want to
start
making flash cards I want to say as soon as possible with the caveat that if
you are a first year medical student or or a
first year student of any kind and you're just getting started in your subject I
probably would wait a few
months before making flash cards the reason I say that is that when you
are new to something like you know when I was a first year medical student
student
I had no idea what the exams were going to be like I had no idea what like
what the experience like or anything was
going to be like and so if IID started creating flash cards from day one I
would have overc created like an
absolute torent of flash cards and a lot of them wouldn't have been useful
because I didn't know what I didn't know
and I didn't know what I knew and I I knew I yeah as I was just very very
very ignorant at the start of my first year
of med school by the time kind of I got I got halfway through first year and
definitely a second year rolled around at that point I knew the score I knew
what the exams were about and knew what sort of questions they were
asking and so it would be much more reasonable for me to then make flash
cards from day one
of my second year of med school all the way through to final year and that's
what I did like from second year I was like okay I'm going to be doing an
from
day one and it worked absolutely amazingly equally in third year where I
ranked first in the O group it work just worked amazingly whereas in first
year
most of the friends that I had who started who discovered Anki and started
using it they just ended up making way too many flash cards so the advice
for
when you should start making your flash cards is in general the earlier the
better but keep in mind that when you are in work on something new you
are
going to be an absolute dumbass you're going to be ignorant about
everything you won't know what you don't know and
therefore diving into flash cards might be counterproductive I would
suggest waiting until we're waiting a few months
and trying to really understand everything first before you worry about the
things you have to memorize the
other problem with making them making flash cards too early is that you
end up wasting a lot of time making flash cards
for things that might be trivial facts later like further down the line uh let's
take an example for medical school
um in Anatomy for example everyone basically knows that all of the
muscles in the posterior compartment of the arm
are supplied by the radial nerve that fact you only really start to fully
appreciate and it's so deeply ingrained
a few weeks or months into med school it's not a fact that on day one you
would think okay yeah I'm definitely
going to remember this for the rest of my life I haven't visited Anatomy for 8
years and I still know that fact because it's just so deeply ingrained
because
it's just such a classic fact if I was a firste medical student and just and
making flash cards for the first time I
might waste a lot of time making flash cards for all of the different muscles
in the stero compartment of the arm and bothering to list the Nerf supply for
them not realizing that actually this is a fact that they're all supplied by the
radial Nerf that's a fact that I can now
I can basically take for granted whereas if I'd waited a few weeks or months
before starting to make the flash cards a I'm kind of doing a bit of revision
because in making the flash cards I'm doing space repetition and active
recall but b i now I I now have more of an appreciation of what the
important
things are that I need to put on the flash card so that was a very rambly
way of saying basically the sooner you can
make the flash cards the better because you want to spread spr out the the
workload of making Flash basically the
sooner you can start revising the better I've had a few emails from students
being like when should I start revising for my exams and the answer is
mate you
know the best time to start revising for your exams was two years ago the
second best time is right now uh you know the
the earlier you can start doing this stuff the better because then we're fully
taking advantage of active recall and space repetition we're fully taking
advantage of the fact that you know our brain is wired to remember things
over a long period of time provided we give it
a long period of time to do it so the the earlier the better but with the caveat
that if you're at the very start of a new chapter of your life maybe give
it a few weeks or months until you become less ignorant about what's going
on and I say this in the nicest possible way because I was an absolute
ignoramus
when I was in my first year of med school I would not have benefited from
using Anki for the first few weeks or months I would have benefited it from
from using it a few months into it so another question that we've had quite a
lot of on on Instagram is what should I
Section 3 : What Should I put on a Flashcard?
put on a flash card and this is an impossible question to answer because it
really depends massively on what subject you're doing what stage of that
subject
you're at what year you and how old you are what your exam is doing and
what specific things you want to be trying to memorize basically I think the
way to
think about it is that an is like your second brain it's like an extension of
your brain and anything that goes into Ani will become uploaded to your
brain
provided you kind of do it effectively and consistently and all that stuff and
provided you keep you stick to the
minimum information principle in general and have not too much
information on each flash card preferably just one
factoid one examinable fact so kind of with that mindset in mind that Ates
what you should put on a flash card as I said
in the previous video I wouldn't make a flash card asking me what
percentage of people in the UK have diabetes because I
know that it's an irrelevant fact maybe it's kind of useful to appreciate how
big the number is but it's not the sort of thing I want to memorize as a piece
of information and if I had too many of those going through my flash cards
would get really really dull and pointless because I'd be like oh this is a
pointless question this is never going to come up in an exam and partly it
also depends on what's our aim of using flash
cards are we using flash cards purely to learn or are we using flash cards
to prepare for an exam because everyone
realizes this at some point in their lives and the sooner we can realize this
the better our exams are not the arena
where we test how much we've learned our exams are the arena where we
test how well we've prepared for the exam in an
Ideal World in an absolutely perfect education system we would learn stuff
and the exams would test the learning
but and the exams would be relevant to the learning and maybe wouldn't
even have exams at all but in the real world we have to play the game of
exams so it
really depends what do you want to put on a flash card depends on what
information do you want uploaded to your brain a few tips on this if you're
still
struggling first ly the most important thing to do is to scope the subject
talked about this extensively in the
previous skillshare class about how to study for exams you should check
that out scope the subject first figure out
kind of the general tree of your subject and the general branches before
worrying
about the kind of the details on the leaves because an is very good at the
details on the leaves and the leaves it's not very good at the branches and
the big tree so scope the subject understand the big tree understand where
stuff fits in and then once you've done that you can kind of break your
subject
down into the relevant bits and while you're doing that you're looking
through past exam papers if you don't have past
exam papers ask someone a year older than you what what they had in
their exam you will get some kind of idea
what's in the exam there is literally zero excuse if you're sitting there
thinking oh but my school don't give out
exam papers like there are so many sources of information out there
there's the internet there's your professors your lecturers your teachers
students in
your year students in the year above students two years above there are
thousands of sources of information where you can find out what's going to
be on the exam basically and therefore
you can kind of build your flash card strategy around what you know is
going to sort of come up on the exam if you're
a medical student lots of medical students use anky I mean the way that I
would do it for clinical school is that I would be doing question Banks online
there's loads of question Banks available I use past medicine and past test
personally but there's loads of ones for the usml and if I got stuff
wrong I'd be looking it up in for example a textbook or Wikipedia and I'd be
turning that into a flash card
because I know it's something that I got wrong and we learn best when we
are learning based on the things we got wrong there's no real Point making
flash
cards on the things that we get right because then we just end up with way
too many flash cards and it kind of becomes an exercise in futility so yeah I
know
that doesn't really answer the question but so many people asked what
should I put on my flash cards and the answer is dude I'm so sorry but it
just massively
depends on absolutely everything most importantly what are you going to
be examined on what are you trying to upload to your memory that's kind of
the
main point so thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video all
right so one of the most common questions that we get is how long should
my flash card
Section 3 : How Long Should a Flashcard Be?
be and this is controversial right it's it's controversial because there is a
spectrum there are some people who are
on the sort of minimum information principle Spectrum end of the spectrum
where they would be very staunch
Believers in that there should only be one single fact per flash card like
each
flash card should only have one objective and that should be to only put
one fact into your brain and if you have to learn 10 facts you create 10 flash
cards because that's how it works then on the other end of the spectrum
you've got people like me for certain exams who
would put entire paragraphs or for examp like even I think some of my flash
cards had like four paragraphs in them where I
was just kind of committing those four paragraphs to memory but in that
context I Was preparing for an essay exam where I wanted all those flash
cards to be
uploaded to my brain and the reason I had them as paragraphs rather than
just as bullet points is because I wanted the writing style of those
paragraphs to
also be uploaded to my brain so it kind of depends on what what you're
aiming for I would say in general if we're
asking the question how long should a flash card be the answer would be
the shorter the better in general especially
if you're a beginner at using Anki I would stick to the minimum information
principle which is one fact per flash
card because you can't really go wrong with that it's when you start adding
way too many flags to your facts to your
flash cards that it becomes such a ballach to get through that you will just
stop doing it and like they say in
like the Fitness World you know the best workout routine is the one that
you follow like there's no point trying to find the perfect workout routine
because
chances are you won't follow it the best one is the one that you'll follow if
you start trying to sort of extend anky too
much especially as a beginner in it you will end up just giving up and not
using it it's like you know going to the gym and trying to bench 100 kg on
your very
first attempt like it's it's just not going to happen you're going to become
demoralized and you won't be able to do it consistently whereas if you stick
to the minimum information principle of one
factoid per flash card you can't really go wrong with that that's what I would
recommend that's a general advice and
over time as you get better at using ankey and more experienced you can
then start modifying your flash cards to add
a little bit more information to them if you have to because remember as
we've discussed in the previous sections you can always modify your flash
cards and
it's very easy to do and it's something that you absolutely should be doing
so that's my take on the topic but we're now going to include some
interview
footage of a discussion that I had with prer and Carter both of them use
Anki very extensively to absolutely smash
their exams Carter came like 99.99 percentile in the MCAT from medical
school prag like really really well in
the USMLE again for med school it's all very medicine specific but the tips
that they're giving are applicable to pretty
much any subject so here is the the discussions between me PR and cter
about this controversial issue of how much
information should you have on a flash card I guess it is sort of a spectrum
there are some kind of one factoid per
flash card purists who will generate 880,000 Clos deletions because they
want to stick to that
method and then you've got people who would memorize entire essays just
using a single flash card so I wonder what
your thoughts are on on on that about kind of one factoid or whether there's
some there's some more new on here
absolutely I'm going to just take that road in the middle which is a little bit of
each right because for the USMLE for
sure one factoid works because the USMLE tests one very specific
knowledge base
point right but for real life medicine one factoid does not work I'll tell you
a lot of the questions my attendance ask me would be more like this they
would never ask me like what is one cause of
an EXA of infusion they'd be like oh this patient has a lights criteria that's
greater than 06 in terms of LDH
what do you think is on your differential at that point I'm not I'm not going to
have to be like oh I don't know I never had a flash card that
specifically talks about this scenario I'm going to be able to need to list all of
the potential causes of an ex of
diffusion in front of an attending right so and the reason why you're you're
seeing this card in my in my suby deck
is because it was for my suby which is suby is a lot more open-ended I'm
going to be doing a lot more reasoning I'm going to be needing to think
open-ended
but if I was taking a test then yeah for sure maybe could have been like
malignancy causes what kind of EX what
kind of um plural Fusion and the answer could have been exited um so I
think when you're doing testing I think those
small simple one close deletions definitely work but you're when you're in
the hospital and you have to open up
your blinders and you have to consider you know pretty large differentials
that's when these cards do have to happen they got to make it into your
bank somehow because you can't just know like oh these are the causes of
exi but not be able to tell people what the
causes are if they ask you could tell me all the causes yeah absolutely no I
I completely agree um when I so uh I made
a video about how I used Anki to memorize entire chunk entire paragraphs
for essays uh which I did in my third
year of med school when I was studying psychology and a a few of the
comments were talking about how oh actually
technically this isn't the right way to use Anki because you're supposed to
have one fact word for flash card and the way
that I sort of think about it is that yes fine technically like anky was originally
designed to learn languages
and you know when you're learning a language it it is a pretty much one
toone mapping between kind of the front of the flash card and the back of
the
flash card but you can use Anki for lots of different things and you want to
actually figure out what is your goal
here like what are you trying to prepare for if you're preparing for a multiple
choice pharmacology exam then okay fine
one factor would the flash card makes perfect sense if you're preparing for
an exam where you're going to get a random question from any of these
eight topics
in Psychology and you want to memorize specific references that have
descriptions of papers and stuff it
doesn't make sense to kind of do it one line at a time because again you're
just kind of comp compartmentalizing your
knowledge in a way that that doesn't make sense you want to kind of put it
together because that's the format you'll be tested in within the sort of
uh Theory Theory crafting around an there's sort of like a spectrum there
are some people that fully purists of
the minimum information principle which is the idea that each flash card
should test one and only
one factoid and then there are sort of people like me that would use it for
things like memorizing entire essays uh
and you know just just have like you know a whole paragraph of stuff within
a flash card that I would then force
myself to recall I wonder where on that Spectrum would you sort of slot
most of your stuff my the rule that I try and
stick to is I really try and say no more than four things for flash card so one
of the the cards that comes to mind that's in my developmental class is that
I think I have a card asking like what are four functions of CI cells and so I
can tell you that they fze cytoplasm they produce inhibit they produce
Androgen biing protein and they produce like a medium to nourish the uh
the
sperm and so that's sort of where I think I draw I draw the limit at about
four things um sometimes I mean sometimes you just I think it depends
there's sometimes where if you have like
a clever pneumonic once you start getting more than four that's when I start
trying to bust out some pneumonics and yeah abolutely that that that's
where I find that that really helpful so yeah I think it's very it's it's very
reasonable to have is to have a card
that has an entire pneumonic on it because that's really just one chunk of
information once you know the pneumonic you know the information like
that's
yeah and I mean I I think the biggest cards that I've gotten towards have
been about like seven um things so um like
especially in that pathophysiology class where they're asking you uh to list
say like seven causes of hyper calmia um I
mean you can go all day all day with doing something like that so uh part of
it is just sort of like knowing like these are probably going to be the seven
that they're gonna these are probably the seven most important and then
just
making the pneumonic for those seven or another really good way that I
found to think of it was for something like
cushions disease so sort of thinking about it from like top down was how I
did it so I think I had like eight signs
or symptoms of Cushings disase have you have you got a flash card for
that that you can show us okay so yeah we've got six manifestations of
Cushings um and so I how yeah so you can see right here I put it in italics
and
red work your way from the top to the bottom then from the core to the
extremities and so for me I thought
about it from um you know I didn't have it organized like that on the car but
like as I was reciting in my head i'
think okay like the moon face the buffalo hump and then the purple strier
that are on the abdomen and then start thinking about like trunkal obesity
and then work my way outwards to the uh thin
Limbs and then that sort of stuff that was another way either um either by
sort
categor I think I think you've mentioned in a video like categorize or die or
something like that and so that's the if
I I find that if I can't come up with a pneumonic or something like that that's
another really easy way to uh remember a
whole chunk of information instead of just trying list seven ways that this
thing happens just sort of think about
like okay well this really breaks up into like three main things and then from
there you know sort of talking
about it that way yeah agreed and i' I'd probably say that I like if if we're
giving kind of beginners general advice
about Anki the minimum in sort of tending towards minimum information
makes sense because then you sort of get into the swing of it and then
over time you start to realize that actually if
I've got a bit more information actually doesn't matter on it I I can deal with
that I think but then equally and I
think this is why an is is so complicated that there's so much Nuance like if
if for example you took this
card and you applied the minimum information principle to it you would end
up Clos deleting six of them and
then like that that would just be overly excessive because each time you go
through it you'd be like H okay which
one am I missing here which one am I missing here and eventually your
brain would actually pattern match the position on of the thing on the list as
opposed to the actual concept and that would just be be completely
counterproductive yeah and that's that's one of the things I meant to
mention
back when I was talking about Bolding certain terms is that's something you
got to be careful of because I definitely realized especially when I
was like cramming for finals this last go around I think my I think for my
molecular genetic class we had like I think I had had like 1,200 cards or
something like that and I realized that
like as I'm just blurring through through all these cards that um a lot of
times I was just like recognizing the like words in front of and the Clos
delution and you know I didn't
understand the concept at all I just knew like this word this word and what
goes in the middle and so that's
definitely something to try to avoid so that was lots of us giving lots of
advice on how much information you should have on a flash card in general
just to reiterate the answer is as
little information as possible and then you can start getting fancy later on
once you become more experienced at using ankey so thank you for
watching
and I'll see you in the next video all righty another really common question
should I write notes or just make flash
Section 3 : Should I Write Notes?
cards and again this is controversial in my opinion there is no point in
making notes at all ever except for a few a few
nuances I I talk about this a lot more in my previous skillshare class about
how to study for exams there's like a load of like a load of stuff about not
taking but basically not taking can be useful if you're doing it in order to
understand and you can't just do it in
your head because yeah sometimes it is useful to write something down in
order to understand it not taking is also useful if you are studying for the
sorts
of exams where you're being tested on information and you essentially
you're having to combine lots of different
information from lots of different sources let's say you're studying English
literature and you've got an essay question in your exam that asks
you to reference three different sources and you've read 500 books that
year you know you physically can't just return to
the source material and memorize all the books you have to make notes on
the stuff that you're that you're studying in order to synthesize and kind of
condense them into format that makes sense which you can then put into
anky to then upload to your brain but no
taking becomes kind of the the first step for that but for example let's say
you're a medical student I don't think
medical students should be taking notes at all because what's the point like
it's not like medicine is particularly challenging it's only challenging
because there's just a fire hose of information that you have to learn it's not
like we're getting these like Arcane sources and we're putting information
together in a novel way and trying to reach some kind of fundamental
Insight no we're not doing that we are preparing for standardized exams
every medical
student in the world basically learns the exactly the same syllabus and so
there are thousands of revision sources out there that you know give the
information to you making notes as a medical student in my opinion and the
opinion of most of my friends is a total
waste of time it should not be done unless it's required and unless you
need to do it to understand your content and
so as a medical student I would go for flash cards rather than notes
because in a way your flash cards do become your
notes like if you're using the Clos deletion or if you're using basic flash
cards as you're adding to your flash cards and hopefully you're making your
flash cards bigger you're testing yourself on only one concept but you're
adding lots of information to the extra information bit of the flash card so in
a way your flash cards kind of become your own notes and a lots of my
friends who used Anki quite well if they came
across a new condition or something they wouldn't search through like
Evernote or one note or anything they would just
search through the anky database because they knew that that information
would be in there somewhere and then they would
just add that piece of information to the flash card and in a way Anki then
becomes sort of a notetaking system yeah
not taking can be useful if you've got a subject that requires you to make all
these inferences to use all these different sources medicine is not one of
them if you're a medical student I think you're wasting your time by taking
notes I think you can just go for flash cards and you can just go for mind
maps and
we're going to include a segment from Carter here the guy who did really
well on the MCAT about this whole idea of
notes versus flashcards and I hope he kind of backs up what I'm saying um
a couple of things that that that just came to mind how much do you take
your
own notes relative to just using eny are you talking about like when I'm in
lecture or like that sort of thing yeah
when you're in class and so I the the way I think of note taking is like note
taking in class which for me personally
is just to keep me awake and then there's note taking after class which is to
sort of flesh out and try and understand stuff a bit more yeah so uh I
definitely I take notes in class just because it's one that that just keeps me
keep me awake and keeps me engaged with
material um for my emerging diseases class I don't take any notes
whatsoever what he does is he just uploads the
Powerpoints with blanks in them and so I'll just pay attention just enough to
fill in those blanks and he doesn't ask
I mean he's very old school so he doesn't ask anything that's not directly on
the PowerPoint so and his PowerPoints
are very fleshed out so it's not like you have to like understand there's not
like a whole lot of in-depth
understanding you need to have behind it so I find that that's actually a
Time that I can get other stuff done so I can
sort of just be multitasking where I'm just filling in the blanks but then uh
working on other stuff like sending
emails and that sort of stuff but um during a class like developmental
biology or my bioinformatics class it's
definitely important for me I feel like to because a lot of those professors
will say like all right here's a PowerPoint and then we're going to I'm
going to talk about some stuff that I will test on that's not already on this
PowerPoint so in that in that case I'll
I'll take notes or I'll flush out a diagram so that I understand diagram that
we walk through better um but I
mean after class that's where my note taking ends is after class I I find that
like the rate limiting step in my
learning is putting things into eny and that once it's in eny I mean there's
there's not a whole lot of purpose for me taking notes the only time that I'll
bust back open the iPad and sort of like
take notes again is if there's a concept that I'm just very confused about
and I'm having a hard time um
differentiating between two things so then I might make like a list to
compare and contrast the two um but when I
especially when I was studying for the MCAT what I've told a lot of people
is like I did not take a single note while studying for the mcad and a lot a lot
of
people don't don't believe me and you know there's I've I've tried to tell
because I I I scored very very well on
it and you know so people ask me like hey how did you get that score and
you know what I keep telling people is like
listen I didn't take a note all I did was anky and practice questions that is all
I did and you know there's people
who you know I see them like highlighting their book and like taking all
these like pages of notes I'm like listen like I told you what I did um and
so with with that all I did was I you know they had these like review books
for each subject and I just read the
review book and instead of taking notes on that book all I did was just
anything I want to like note and remember I just
put into an and I knew that if I put it into an and just kept up with my
reviews I was going to I was going to see it
often enough that if they tested me on it I would probably be able to answer
it pretty well fantastic yeah that's my
theory of of not taking as well I think especially especially for medicine and
for subjects where it's it's not like
you're going through sort of 18,000 English literature texts and having to
create novel insights in those
circumstances fair enough you need to take notes to summarize the
material because it's physically impossible but when it comes to you know
the MCAT or
the you know the USMLE or medical school exams where it's basically
finite discrete chunks of information that
you're being tested on and that everyone in the world is basically Lear in
the same stuff taking notes yeah I I agree
it's sometimes helpful for understanding if there's a particularly tricky
concept but beyond that if it's an anky and
actually the guy there was a guy in my year at Cambridge who ranked
second in the entire year group just like
absolutely smashing all the exams and he also had a social life um he just
an he was he was Anki from day one his note
taking was getting screenshots from the lectures there and then and just
chucking in into Anki and in the
lectures he'd be making Anki flash cards as we were going along whereas
all of the rest of us in first year we were
just like making our NES and doing our highlighting and he ended up
absolutely destroying every single exam just by
using an yeah I have a I have a friend who's in PA school right now so like
I'm
do youall have those over there uh sort of position assistant sort of like a
mid-level provider so he's he's in
school right now and I mean that is so he has mandatory class attendance
um so what what I mean he'll go to class but I
mean he is just sitting there in class and he's just taking the PowerPoint
and just putting it he's doing what you just
described putting it into an he just goes ahead and just starts starts making
cards right there all right welcome back
Section 3 : How to Avoid Flashcard Overload?
in this video we are tackling the question of how do you avoid flash card
overload and this is something that we
are all going to uh experience when we start using ankey sometimes you
know even with the best of intentions you
just find that you've made a lot of cards and the cards just start to pile up
like maybe there's one day where you
miss your reviews and suddenly you've got 400 cards to do the next day
and then you think oh 400 cards I can't be honest with this and then you
skip
your review and then you got 600 and now you're being overloaded by
flash cards there's a few kind of tips that we can
use to get around this firstly and most importantly if you can consistently do
your flash cards every single day then
you will not be overloaded by flash card that's just the first thing to say
secondly you want to avoid making flash
cards on the stuff that you know you already know especially at the start
especially if you're not following my advice and kind of making flash cards
from day one of med school you're going to make loads of flash cards on
things just because you like the idea of making
a flash card and it feels like a safety blanket and you think oh I couldn't
possibly know this without a flash card but when it comes to flash cards we
don't want to be creating that many because the more flash cards we
create Let's see we create 100 flash cards every lecture and we've got 100
lectures
that is way too many flash cards to handle instead we should probably
create maybe 10 to 15 flash cards per lecture
even if it's a lecture that's 1 hour long because the rest of the information
probably doesn't need a flash card it doesn't require us to memorize it it
probably requires us to understand it and as we've talked about Anki is not
great for understanding anky is
wonderful for memorization so yeah number one do it consistently number
two avoid making too many flash cards
thirdly even with the best of intentions and the best strategy the flash cards
can pile up especially towards the exams
when you've gotten through all your syllabus and you've got a few hundred
flash cards to review each day one way to avoid overload in that front is
just
kind of split up the studying session so what I would do is I would do a little
bit in the morning then a bit in the afternoon then a bit in the evening then
a bit before bed while I'm lying in bed with a dark mode on on ankey using
an add-on that kind of makes me swipe through flash cards and I just make
sure
I get all of them done by staggering them throughout the day so that would
be one other way of doing it and now we've got a segment from CTO who
did very well
in the MCAT using Anki about the load balancer add-on that's kind of
another tool in Your Arsenal for combating flash
card overload so I will hand over to David now any tips in General on how
to
kind of maintain the motivation because like often I would find and i' I've
certainly I certainly know friends who would we' we'd log on to an and we'd
be
like oh my God 648 flash cards to do today and then it would just seem so
overwhelming that we would just end up
not doing it how do you kind of get over that yeah so there's two ways to go
about that I can tell you the one that I
do and then there's one that's also very popular so basically what I would
do um is I would any block of medical school
that I was in I would make sure I did those reviews um they just needed to
be done for you know my upcoming exams we
had weekly exams um but then in order to you know prepare the best I
could for my
board exam it was important for me to review old material too so I had
another deck of reviews in order to not get
overwhelmed I would usually limit the reviews on that deck to maybe like a
100 cards or so so that would take me you
know I was using Pomodoro techniques for studying that would take me
about 25 minutes to get through um that just kind
of let me know that every day I would have about one Pomodoro
Technique of review cards and that helped me from
getting like overwhelmed if you know I had less to do that day I could add
more to that review pile but I just kind of
knew like approximately 25 minutes I would be spending reviewing so I
didn't wake up and have like you know 2,000
cards to review and I'm like wow I'm not going to do anything today except
flashcards um because to me that was not
motivational that was you know a lot of people you get overwhelmed with
that so that's how I did I set my review limit
um some people would argue that that makes Anki less effective that could
be argued um but to me it was like
flashcards are used for certain purpose and that's for like memory retention
but I had to spend some time using other
resources to like understand things like you're probably not going to be able
to understand physiology from an you need
to learn that that from your other resources that are provided you use Ani to
kind of retain things in your memory
going forward oh I did that's very interesting uh so if so let's talk about
the second thing and then we'll come back to this understand versus
remember thing because I think that's really important so what was the the
second
thing that you were saying that you didn't do but some people do in order to
not get overwhelmed by flash card overload yeah so a new thing that came
out um you know at some point when I was in medical school is another
add-on basically there's people who like know
how to code and they keep making these improvements for Ani um it's
open source so it's very it's very useful but it's
called a load balancer addon um so the load balancer add-on basically will
look at how many reviews
you have um in the upcoming days and it will kind of spread it out for you
so instead of one day you waking up you
open up your um flashcard app and you're like oh my gosh I have 800
reviews this is going to take hours that load balance
or add-on will look at the next few days and basically um make it so it's
equal so instead of having 800 one day and 200
the next day it'll spread it out for you so you have 500 one day 500 the next
day and it does that like over a week period
so you can imagine it makes it so it's a little bit more consistent you can
kind of expect um approximately how many
reviews you're G to have each day so it's not a complete guess um or a
complete surprise when you open it up
okay but it sounds like you went for the method of kind of limit hard limit
only 100 reviews per day so that it becomes
manageable and I suppose did mostly because I didn't find out until the
load balancer until pretty late um and I just
liked you know like I said I knew 100 cards took me one Pomodoro
Technique to get through so I was like I felt
comfortable with that in my preparation that that was a good enough review
for me that day um and if I had more time I
could add on if I wanted to so those were some tips on how to manage
flash card overload just to R trait number one
most importantly just do them consistently it's really hard to do but if we can
do it we're sorted forever number two avoid making too many flash
cards number three you can split up your study session if you want and
number four you might want to consider the load Bal
add-on all right in this video we're tackling the question of how do you stay
consistent at doing your flash cards and
Section 3 : How to Stay Consistent?
we've talked so many times about how anky is the most powerful learning
tool ever invented but it's only the most
powerful learning tool ever invented if if you use it every single day and you
can do it consistently but that's a challenge for a lot of us like
consistency is a huge challenge like how do you pluck up the motivation to
sit down and do the flash cards there's all sorts of ways of tackling this um
I've
got another SK skillshare class about kind of tips for productivity and that
talks about some uh some general
principles some poers some laws like things we can like mental models we
can have in our heads for trying to be more
consistent at doing stuff really I I I I guess what it comes down to when it
comes to being consistent with anky
cards is that at the start you have to force yourself to do it it's like if you
want to run a marathon like at the start
and and you're training for a marathon like at the start you won't want to get
out of the house and go running but you kind of have to force yourself to do
it
because you know that actually this is in service of a wider goal and so
when you're starting out with Anki you have
to force yourself to do it but then then the nice thing is that once you forced
yourself to do it for a few days and you start getting into this positive
feedback loop of oh I I actually know this and you start realizing that your
your mind is expanding and you're memorizing more stuff it feels really
good and the point we want to get to is the point where doing anky
becomes quite fun it becomes like a game where you think all right cool it
feels like a
personal challenge like all right let's do this come on lad let's let's bash
through some anky flash cards and that
comes after a few kind a few weeks I'll be honest a few weeks of doing an
like forcing yourself to do Anki every day if
you can get to it sooner then fantastic you're really winning at life because
you are enjoying the things that we're doing rather than just forcing
ourselves
to do it but at the start we do have to force ourselves a few other ideas so
for example one thing you can do is there's an idea called habit stacking
where you
know doing flash cards every day we want it to become a habit but to make
it become a habit what we can sometimes do
is we can tie it to something else that we're already doing so for example
one place where I do a lot of flash cards is
on the toilet so if I'm sitting down to do a poo I will get my phone out and I
will do anky like doing a poo is like the Habit I've just t in my head the
idea that when I'm doing a poo on the luo I'm going to be doing flash cards
as I go along another tip is that you can incorporate the idea of the five
minute
rule which is when you're struggling to pluck the motivation or discipline or
willpower to sit down and do your flash cards you can tell yourself right I'm
just going to do this for 5 minutes and everyone can do 5 minutes we all
have an extra 5 minutes in our day to do some flash cards and usually for
me I've
tricked my brain into getting started now that I'm started I actually quite
enjoy doing the flash cards and so I end up doing it for a lot longer and end
up
finishing my reviews another way to be more consistent at using an is to do
it with friends you know I've used lots of flash cards with friends as a
medical
student we're all learning the same stuff and it's quite nice having like a
group study session and everyone kind of working through flash cards
together so
that's another way to be consistent a fourth way is the heat map add-on
which we'll talk more about in uh the later
section of the course and finally I going to leave you with PRACK and I
discussing the idea of how we build a consistent schedule around doing
flash
cards so you said that you do two hours of an every day how do you bring
yourself to do that because I know a lot
of people as I'm sure you do who down an they get the zanki deck or you
know some some random deck in see oh 8,000
cards to do today then you you know even if you start off with really good
intentions as everyone does you end up
kind of missing a day or two and then the reviews start to pile up like how
do you how do you bring yourself to
consistently do it as as you've been doing that's the that's one of the Silver
Linings and also pitfalls of ani
so the good part is you do have to do those if you want to use Ani well and
the bad part is there's no way to get
around it so you really do have to make yourself do it or else those cards
will start to pile up and at that point
you're you you're it's useless that deck becomes useless because you have
too many cards and you'll get too far behind so it almost had to become
algorithmic
for me like I have to do these cards or of course there will be people who
want to take days off and I'm definitely one
of those people get better at knowing okay today I'll take my day off but
tomorrow I'll have to put in twice as
much work or you know I'll take three days off and on the weekend I'll
spend eight hours just catching up those were
all things I would do even based on medical school and just the timing we
had but you still have to get into the
mindset of like I still have to do these cards just because I have a lot of
them should not deter me from finishing my
deck so those were just some tips on how we can be more consistent at
using flash cards genuinely this is a real struggle
everyone struggles with it if you're struggling with being consistent in your
flash cards you're not alone I still struggle I still have to you know use do
my flash cards every day and I struggle to do it every day but that's kind of
where where we want to be getting to and actually the more consistently
we can be
doing our flash cards the easier Our Lives is just going to be so it's just
such a no-brainer but I think you do
have to kind of force yourself to do it in the first instance all right a few app
specific questions now and in this
Section 3 : Anki vs Quizlet
video we're talking about anky versus Quizlet basically Quizlet is pretty
good
Quizlet is pretty it looks nice it's got nice animations it's more of a pleasure
to use than anky is and I think Quizlet
is fine for doing things like learning the capitals or you know learning simple
stuff but if you're for example
embarking on a long ass Quest like of medical school for example or you're
doing a University degree I would
suggest that Anki is probably better and the reason an is better is a it's
more powerful like you can do a lot more things on Anki you've got add-ons
for
everything you can there's so many customizations and the active inputting
stuff into Anki is a lot quicker like
you can use keyboard shortcuts effectively it's not a web- based interface
it's like a genuinely like desktop app that lives on your desktop
so it's a bit quicker this sort of these minor efficiencies in using Anki rather
than Quizlet really add up over a long period of time and the fact that you
can customize it with add-ons and you can kind of add images and stuff like
easily
like the more easily we can do stuff on any kind of app the more likely we
are to use it especially when it's something
like Anki or a flash card app that we're going to be using for hundreds of
hours throughout our University experience I'm
assuming you're a university student here but this applies to school as well
especially if it's something like that the more seconds we can shave off
every
interaction with the app the more time we save in the long run and so that
in my book is the biggest reason for using anky over Quizlet because it's
just
quicker it's more efficient it's more customizable it's just generally more
powerful and yeah if you like using Quizlet and you want to pay for Quizlet
premium 20 quit a year for the space repetition then sure go for it like it
doesn't really matter what you use like
it's all basically the same stuff provided you're using active recoil and space
repetition but having tried both
of them my personal recommendation would be to use anky rather than
Quizlet so hopefully that answers the question
thank you for watching and I'll see you in the next video all right let's now
talk about anky versus Google Sheets now
Section 3 : Anki vs Google Sheets
if you don't know what I'm talking about then feel free to skip this video but
basically a few years ago I made a video on YouTube where I was talking
about how
I use Google Sheets as a flash card alternative as like an alternative to
anky and the
idea for that method is that you have like the questions in column A and
answers in column B and then you hide
the answer and as in you make it white make the text white so that you've
hidden the answer and then you can just kind of go through now the the
Google
Sheets method is a good way of cramming for an exam and I would only
really use the Google Sheets method when cramming
because it's essentially a ghetto version of ani it's like a it's it's it's like a
hacked version of ani that
gives you the question and answer kind of like the Cornell note taking
method which I talked about more in previous skill shy class kind of like the
Cornell
note taking method but it doesn't have the space repetition algorithm it
doesn't have a facility to Mark how
difficult you found a question I suppose what you could do is you could you
could select the cells and highlight them in red and yellow and green as I
used to do
but my philosophy about this is Google Sheets is good for cramming and
key is good for the long term so if you have
more than let's say two months until your exam I wouldn't use Google
Sheets because Google Sheets is a cramming is
effective for cramming for like really thinking okay what are the main
important questions I need to know here and just kind of going over them
over and over again whereas Anki is it
basically does the same thing as Google Sheets but just with a more robust
space repetition algorithm so Google Sheets
for the short term if you're going to cram for an exam but definitely anky if
I've got more than two months to prepare for the exam that I'm preparing
for all
Section 3 : Anki vs Notion
right another quick one this is a very common question do I use Anki or do I
use notion now again if you don't know what I'm talking about skip this
video
it's not relevant but the reason people are asking this is because for the last
few months 2019 2020 I've been talking
about how I use notion to take notes in med school I'm not in med school
anymore but I I teach medical students and so I
use notion to take notes for my stuff and this is an example of for example
my gastrointestinal physiology kind of
sheet and essentially I use these toggle features so this is sort of the
structure of the lecture structure of the G blood supply blah blah blah and
then where are we uh so in instead of just writing notes I write I write notes
or copy and paste stuff from the lecture but I hide them within these toggles
and
these these toggles are usually questions so how how much blood flow per
minute 1200 m per minute through this plank bed what is functional
hyperemia
in this context blah blah blah blood FL supply to the V so in a way this is
sort
of a flash card but it's sort of a flash card in the sense that you've got some
information in that essentially you're asking yourself a question and then
you're trying to answer it but again the short answer to this question is that
it's not really a dichotomy it's not like notion or anky if I could only
choose one I would use anky all the time um but notion is good for helping
understand the bigger picture the problem with ke is that it's good at kind of
helping you memorize the individual pixels but sometimes if you
if you are just using ankey and just memorizing the individual pixels you
won't really get a deep understanding of
the subject you'll just see loads of pixels and you won't really appreciate the
bigger picture so one thing I've started thinking a lot recently is that
with an if you if you want to use it properly you need some kind of system
on the side that helps you to understand
the bigger picture one way of doing that is by making Spider diagrams or
mind maps this is where you have your topic in the middle kind of like your
tree and
then you have your branches and then you can use Anki to learn the details
on the leaves if that kind of metaphor makes
sense the alternative to M myaps and flat and spider diagrams is to use
notion so this is basically what I would
create into a spider diagram so I would have General gut physiology in the
middle and then I'd have structure of
the gut blood supply epithelial blinding blah blah blah Paralis whatever this
is basically a mind map that I've created
for myself but it's just that while going through the lecture I thought you
know what I might as well just make some
questions about it it's also kind of different for me me because I don't need
to memorize this stuff I'm not preparing for an exam right now apart from
the USM
which is a slightly different way of preparing for it I'll be using an for that
Philly I more have these notes because I'm teaching the subject to my
medical students and therefore it's completely reasonable for me to have
my laptop open with the notes in front of me while I'm talking about GI
physiology
to them like I don't have to have this information off the top of my head and
so if you're a student preparing for an
exam I would suggest that you don't need to do this kind of stuff if you're
taking notes then you might as well add
a question to them just so becomes the Cornell note taking method and
becomes legit because you're using active recall but if you're not taking
notes just put
stuff straight into Anki it's not a case of notion versus Anki but having said
that if I could only choose one I would
use Anki and again yeah you can basically create a Google Sheets kind of
flash flashcard method on notion but
again that would be fine if you're cramming for an exam but it wouldn't be
fine if you're doing it over the long term again Anki does the same thing but
you might as well let the Anki space repetition algorithm work in your favor
that's the thing that Google Sheets and
notion don't have they don't have a space repetition algorithm built in cuz
that's not the objective of the software whereas Anki is specifically
designed to
upload information to our brains and so if you're in the business of
uploading information to your brain as a student then you want to be using
an notion is
sort of the the note taking layer on top of that that helps you understand the
subject that helps you understand the
bigger picture so actually I would just probably use both if you can all right
so the final video in this frequently
Section 3 : Playing the Long Term Game
asked questions kind of segment of of the class isn't really a question it's
more reiterating the importance of
playing the long game when when it comes to Anki and in fact it's just
generally important to play the long game I.E to try and be as consistent as
possible
when we're doing anything in life like you know there there's almost nothing
that benefits from short you know
intensive bursts rather than kind of playing the long game over time health
is long game exercise is long game
relationships are a long game you know basically anything worthwhile in life
benefits from compound returns over time
by playing the long game and studying for our exams is no different if we
play the long game if we can be consistent on
a daily basis then we're letting Anki work in our favor we're letting the
maths speak for itself and we're letting the algorithm upload stuff to our
brain
and it just works absolutely perfectly the other thing is that I think is really
important like especially if you've gotten this far in the class you
might be feeling a bit overwhelmed because there's like a load of
information and we could have split this up into two or three classes but
decided
against it in the end just cuz I think it's nice just being like this is everything
you need to know about an but
it is it is kind of a time investment to learn like it's not one of those things
where you you'll start using it on day one and immediately pick it up and
immediately start breezing around with that it's it's just not like that it's sort
of like playing a piano like it's
it feels like hard work initially but if you put that hard work in then you get
the absolute Joy of being able to play the piano so it's kind of the same with
anky so if you're feeling overwhelmed at any point really think of it as an
investment in your future an investment
in getting better grades and reducing your stress and just having generally
more fun with doing the things that we have to do to study and to pass our
exams so just a quick message Public Service Announcement about the
importance of playing the long game
thank you for watching and I will see you in the next section of the class all
right welcome back to the class bit
Section 4 : Optimisation of Anki
of a change of scenery now we are now on section four which is all about
optimizing anky and we're going to be
talking about add-ons and we're going to be talking about how to use pre-
made decks effectively before we launch into
this section I just want to give a word of warning this is some kind of
advanced stuff if you're an anky beginner I would
suggest actually that you don't watch the rest of this course for now
because it can get very overwhelming very
quickly because this is now like complicated stuff in fact even the last
section was a little bit on the complicated side if you're a beginner at
Anki the single best thing that you can do right now is to turn off this class
even though it means I'm getting less Revenue because it's kind paper
watch
time but the best thing you can do for yourself is to turn off this class right
now and spend a few weeks trying to do
Anki every day and as you're doing it you'll figure out that like some some
like optimizations that you can make
yourself you'll work out what the things that you find difficult are so that
when you come back to this class and we talk
about add-ons and optimizations and hierarchical tags and pre-made decks
and all these kind of fancy things you'll
have more of a baseline of like a foundational Baseline for how to kind of
understand that stuff having said that I
know when I watch online classes I like watching all of them in one go and I
tend not to do the exercises that the
people recommend so if you're still with us then that's absolutely fine in this
section we're going to be talking about
tags organizing tags using pre-made decks properly and a few different
add-ons that me and others would
recommend so let's dive into it all right welcome back let's talk about tags
Section 4 : Tags
now when you make a flash card you might have noticed that you've got
the option of adding a tag to it so for example
let's make a new capital so add I don't know let's say front is Pakistan and
back is Karachi fair enough um in fact
let's change that to a close just so we do this properly so we say the
capital of Pakistan is Karachi and I can close that one and I
can close that two perfect pretty basic stuff that we covered in section one
of the class if you don't know what I did
there then you are waiting too far in this course you need to go back and
look at closed deletions that we talked about in in chapter one and let's
grab some
extra information from the internet so uh Karachi let's get a random image
from the Google uh I don't know to's pick
this copy image Chuck it in here for now that'll do now you'll see that when
I'm creating this flash card I've got the
option to add a tag now I'm going to add tag Asia okay and we've we've
added the
thing let's now pick another so let's go uh capital of India is New Delhi close
that close that can't be bothered to add extra information for now but you'll
see the tag stays as being Asia if I want I
can delete that and change it but I'm going to keep it as Asia and let's do
another one uh the capital
capital that's how you spell it don't know doesn't matter but it's now got the
Asia tag now if we look at the browse
thingy this might look a bit intimidating but uh don't let it basically at the top
of our browse we've
got got our whole whole collection and then we've got the list of decks and
list of sub decks if you have sub decks
within your decks more about that later on in this in this section and actually
underneath the decks we have a list of
all these card types so these are all like basic card types um this is the Clos
deletion card type so if we wanted
to we could have a look and see all of our different Clos deletions all of our
different basic cards your list is
probably less big than mine because I've got a few pre-made decks again
more on that in a little bit but then underneath
that we have all of these tags and you'll see this little tag icon that shows
that it's a tag now again my list
is absolutely huge because I've got lots of pre-made decks and pre-made
decks tend to use a lot of tags in them but let's find our Asia tag and we'll
see
when we click on our Asia tag it filters all of the cards that have the tag Asia
okay so fair enough they've got the tag of Asia why is this helpful well it's
helpful because if we have an
appropriate tagging system firstly it helps in terms of organizing our deck
and secondly it helps in terms of
creating custom sessions so in terms of organizing the deck let's say I was
it kind of makes a bit more sense in
medicine let's say um I wanted to do infectious deseases right and I didn't
have a specific deck for infectious diseases I had a single deck that had all
my stuff all my medicine stuff in it I could click on the infectious diseases
tag or in the Infectious tag and it would find me the relevant cards that are
tagged with infectious diseases so
one way of actually splitting up a deck is by having everything in one big
deck and then using tags to organize it
within that there's another example here this the mCP and there's the mcp2
so mCP
is the membership of the Royal College of Physicians and mcp2 is the part
two of that exam and in pre-made decks
people have tagged these different things so if I want to I can kind of
search search through that so you kind of get the idea of tags it works
similarly to in every note taking program you've ever used you can just
search for things by TX but the reason why this is actually reasonably
helpful
is because you can create a custom study session so if we go on decks
and then
let's go capital cities for example just to keep things very very basic now I
can click the custom study button at the
bottom or shortcut C now when I've got this up I can say study by card
state or tag I could select 100 cards from the
deck and I could say in a random all review cards in a random order and
then I can click choose tags and now it tells
me which tags are within this deck so we know Asia require one of more of
these tags Asia so I'm telling Anki that I
only want to study the stuff that's tagged with Asia hit okay now this has
created a custom study session which means I can cram the capitals of
these
Asian countries if I want so the capital of India is New Delhi the capital of
Saudi Arabia is Riyad capital of
Pakistan is Karachi blah blah blah you know you kind of get the idea this is
helpful because if you've got for
example a midterm exam coming up on nephology the study of the kidneys
and you have as you've been going through
you've been tagging all your kidney related flash cards with nephology or
renal or kidneys or whatever it means you can then cram them all in one go
using a custom study session that tends to be the main use case for those
so tags are in this section because they're
absolutely not required they're not a big deal and actually it's very easy to
become too too cute about tagging
everything be like oh i' only make a flash card if I can add eight tags to it
but all that does is in it increases the
friction to creating flash cards and as I said right at the start of the class we
want to be reducing the friction as much as possible because friction is the
worst force on the planet and so really I probably wouldn't use tags if I were
you if you're just getting started out
but if you've got a reasonably solid use case for them at that point it might
be worth doing so that was the basics of
tags in the next video we're going to be talking about the hierarchical tags
add-on that makes tags a little bit more
useful all right welcome back in this video we're talking about the
hierarchical tags add-on and instead of me explaining it which gets a bit
boring
Section 4 : Advanced Tagging
and a bit dull we have got David who did very well in the MCAT who uses
the hierarchical tags add-on pretty extensively uh and he is explaining and
walking us through how we use it and why it's useful so I'm going to hand
you hand you over to David the hierarchical
tags um is some of the decks are basically um they're altered in different
ways so I can show you so like
this deck right here with a plus sign has a bunch of what are called sub
decks um so that's one way whoever made this
deck that's how they decide to do it they put a bunch of sub decks in this
one deck but this person you can see they have all 9,000 of their cards
under
one name so the only way to basically sort out those cards is to look at the
tags so right here so like the AK step two this has this is where all of theirs
is sorted out and so basically that add-on just makes makes this look a little
bit prettier on this side it's a little bit more of an advanced add-on um
but definitely something that you see how it's just like in a different area
where the tagging system is yeah because
I guess otherwise by default you just see this long ass list of tags which is
not overly helpful exactly otherwise if I didn't have this for like so this is
basically Decks that don't have it it would just be like this it would just be
like this super long um it's kind of unorganized it's kind of a kind of a
headache it's not as clean um so these are some of like the older Decks
that I have that don't have this tagging system
but you can see that's not near as clean as something like this where it's
broken up into the different rotations Family
Medicine Internal Medicine neuro OB and so I can kind of go through um
on which
rotation I'm on and essentially pull out cards for that rotation it's just much
cleaner so that was a look at how we can
use the hierarchical tags add-on to make our tagging a little bit more
effective but again tags are probably not very
useful I personally don't use tags very much because when it comes to
Medicine stuff the so much content that you could
just have separate decks and I don't see a real need to tag them myself but
there are people that use tags an absolute ton
but basically you don't really need to worry about it too much cuz tags are
not overly helpful anyway at least for me
Section 4 : Premade Decks
all right welcome back in this video we're talking about the power of pre-
made decks now the first thing to say is a word of caution pre-made decks
are a very powerful device but when used in appropriately they can cause a
massive degree of overwhelm and
downloading pre-made decks is often a big reason as to why people start
using anky and then abandon it because they
just get completely completely frazzled and overwhelmed by the amount of
cards you can sometimes get in pre-made decks
basically a pre-made deck is a deck an anky deck that someone else has
already made for you that you can just download and then you can do the
flash cards so
clearly the benefit is that it saves you from having to make your own flash
cards there are some pre-made decks like this
USM RX1 let's have a quick browse I think this has is there a way of seeing
how many cards in it okay well I'm going
to scroll and you can see that this is just like an absolutely Mass massive
amount of cards in this deck in fact
yeah we've got basically basically all aspects of medicine is covered in this
USMLE RX deck I think there are over
10,000 cards in it and you can see why if you download 10,000 cards the
first time you use Ani and start trying to go through them it becomes very
very
overwhelming very very quickly so we'll start by just quickly talking about
how to actually download a pre-made deck and
basically you can search on Google an keep pre-made decks you will find
the shared decks on anky web so you can
download some from there so let's search for anatomy for example and it's
going to G me a long list of decks that are
tagged with Anatomy so this is one way of finding a pre-made deck you can
look through the anky directory itself it's
probably not what I'd recommend instead what I'd recommend is that you
find some kind of online Forum like Reddit for
example for your specific subject for example if you're a medical student
taking the USMLE there is a USMLE step
one subreddit that has loads of links to really in-depth comprehensive anky
decks and they're filtered so that you know
there there are some Decks that everyone uses and some Decks that no
one uses and so you want to pick the ones that everyone uses because
they're going to
be higher quality the flash cards are going to be more legit they're going to
be more fact checked by a large group of people so what I would suggest is
whatever subject you're doing try and find an online kind of community
Reddit is a good place to start where you can
download these pre-made decks from and this is like super super popular
in medicine like loads of people in the US
preparing for the US MLA for medical school use pre-made decks and
there's also sort to debates raging on the
internet as to is hoopla better than zanki which is better than an King's deck
which is better than person's deck
and you know there's all these different people who make these different
decks but there's only like a handful of them to choose from and I've gone
for USM RX
I don't even know who made it but I went on Reddit and found a pre-made
deck so you download a pre-made deck and then
when you download a deck basically uh let's download a random one uh
we click the download button and
it's going to download a file with the extension AK PKG or something like
that
oh this is a really big file let's download a smaller one uh guitar note names
only 47 notes that should be more
doable so if I look in my downloads folder we've got this file guitar note
names. apkg now if I double click that
here we go it's going to automatically add it to my ankey and now if we go
on Deck we will see guitar note names with
audio fretboard Anatomy so I can click on that I can click study first string e
lower oh it's got a
sound as well don't know if you can hear that so I guess this is good for like
ear training and stuff for musicians anyway that is how you download a
shared deck it's super super easy you just download the apkg file and then
you
double click it and then it automatically adds to your anky then if I hit the
synchronize synchronize button this deck is going to be synced across
all my devices magically for free with anky web isn't Anki an absolute
Miracle of engineering so that is how you
install a pre-made deck in the next video we're going to be hearing from PR
and his advice about using pre-made
decks and kind of the general philosophy of using pre-made decks and
we'll have a little bit of a discussion and then we'll end by talking about kind
of pros
and cons all right welcome back in this video we're talking about the philos
ophy of using pre-made decks and I'm
Section 4 : Premade Decks: Philosophy
going to start by including the discussion that PR and I had about the
philosophy of pre-made decks and then I will do a bit more chat at the end
so
this is me and PRACK coming up now what's your philosophy on pre-made
decks versus building your own cards oh this is a good one um I think so
there
there's a caveat here I think pre-made decks are phenomenal and they're
going to save people a lot of time if they use
them properly but pre-made decks are really bad if you're the type of
person
who thinks this will solve all my problems and just like randomly Imports
cards and like is like today I'm going
to learn kidney and just looks at those cards as a way to learn kidney that's
like the worst approach because one you
have no context behind where how and why those cards were made and
two you didn't do anything to give yourself a
background right like so let's say you're learning nephrotic syndromes and
you just pull in all the cards about nephrotic syndromes and try to
memorize
them at that point that's like horrible because now you're just memorizing a
bunch of factoids but let's say you
watch I don't know pathoma video that explains nephrotic syndromes okay
you get protura you have a lot of protein
loss which leads to edema and all these things and you actually get the
framework for nephrotic syndrome now you pull in all the cards about
nephrotic
syndrome and now suddenly you can actually shape that card based on the
lens of the video you just watched and
now it'll make a lot more sense like okay yeah this is why this nephrotic
syndrome presents in this way and now
I'm not just memorizing a random sentence I'm memorizing the actual you
know concept of nephrotic syndromes and
so that's when pre-made decks can work if you prequel them with some
level of
understanding or knowledge or you read a chapter and then you pulled in
cards that were relevant but if you just pull in cards without reading
anything doing
anything and expect to get all your knowledge about nephrotic syndrome
from a pre-made deck you're not going to get anywhere because then you'll
just
memorize a bunch of sentences and making your own cards I a big
proponent of like I made a lot of my cards um I have a
deck about 30,000 that I use right now and I'd say at least 20,000 of those
are either my own cards or pre-made cards
that I've modified with my own twist um and the reason for that is what I just
mentioned to you the memory anchor
you'll remember things a lot more when they're personable so I usually
have like inappropriate pneumonics in a lot of my cards or like an
inappropriate way
to remember them because that often is a good way to remember things or
sometimes I'll include a picture that I found when
I was learning the concept and the reason these work a lot better is when
you make a card you do one pass of the
material right so let's say you made a card and you like you know a
metabolic acidosis implies a pH less than 7.4 with
no changes in PS like with no with with the normal pco2 you make that card
you
yourself have already gone through that first pass of saying oh this is what
metabolic alkalosis is and it has no
change in pco2 now when you do that card you're doing a second pass
automatically when you use a pre-made card you may
have to do one three five passes even for you to even understand what the
hell is this card saying because you didn't
really go through the process of creating that card from scratch so you kind
of had to put that context in and
that can take sometimes a lot more time than just having made your own
card so overall let's talk about pros and cons so as PR said the benefit of
using
pre-made decks is clearly that you then don't have to make your own flash
cards but there are a few huge drawbacks firstly there is the massive risk of
flash card overload if you make the mistake of not suspending basically all
of the cards in a pre-made deck and then
unsuspending the ones as you study as you study the topic you can see
that list of 20,000 cards and think I'm never
going to do this and then you just throw your laptop in the bin because
you've given up on anky that's what we want to do if we're using pre-made
decks we want
to be using them effectively and appropriately Point number two is that yes
it does save you time using a
pre-made deck but the research shows that it is probably a bit more
effective to create your own cards overall in my
opinion and in most people's opinion the time you save from using a pre-
made deck is more than made up for the fact that
using a pre-made deck is slightly less efficient is or rather is is is slightly
less effective than creating your own cards I would much rather have 80%
Effectiveness and Save myself time that I don't have to make these 10,000
cards
then have 100% Effectiveness but have to spend 8 years of my life actually
creating these flash cards so overall I think the the benefit of pre-made
decks
vastly outweighs the negative side of them but it is important to understand
the negative side and third it's really
important to remember that if you are using a pre-made deck you definitely
want to be customizing it as you go along if you're purely using a pre-made
deck and not adding anything or editing anything you're probably doing
something wrong and you're probably relying on memorization rather than
understanding the way that I use these pre-made decks is if I if there is
even a single thing on a flash card that I don't understand that I think I'm
not
I'm not happy with this I won't say to myself I'll just memorize the fact
unless it's something obviously that I can just purely memorize like you
know
what chromosome is this gene on and it's like I don't care like that's pure
memorization but for most things where if I don't understand something on
a
card I will look it up on Wikipedia look it up on Google even maybe look it
up in a textbook and then I will edit the
flash card in the extra region or just like edit the flash card completely to
add that information to it so that the
next time I see the flash card I see the extra information I've added to it so
Premier decks are amazing they're one of
the most kind of superp power features of ani but you do have to use them
appropriately and hopefully in this video you've gotten some advice about
how to use them appropriately all right welcome back so for the next few
videos we're going to be talking about different add-ons that
Section 4 : Add-ons: Heatmap
you can add to Ani and why they're useful so in this video we're talking
about the heat map add-on which is
incredibly effective and that most people who are Anki Pros they have this
add-on because it's really useful for
like motivating yourself to like do anky consistently and I'm going to hand
you over to David who's going to be explaining exactly how the heat map
add-on works so you've been literally going through flash cards every day
for 372 days yes that's one thing I wanted
to highlight um absolutely absurd how on Earth do you do that yeah so I
think
that like for for motivation and stuff um this is an add-on that you can get for
eny it's called The Heat Map add-on
I don't know if you've heard of that one but basically it'll kind of give you a
little colored block for every day so I can go back even look at this one this
is all of last year so the last time I missed a day on ay was basically spring
break uh last year unfortunately I missed those two days otherwise I could
have a longer streak Yeah so basically
what the streak means is that I've logged into Ani and done you know some
sort of flashcard review for over a year
now at this point at es in flow so it has my daily average of 319 as I Was
preparing for step one you know that
number went up obviously and then after I took the exam you know I went
on a little bit of a vacation and stuff that
number went down but nonetheless every day I logged in and did some
amount of flash cards so someday I would do 700
someday I would do 70 um but I think the the key with Anki and with space
repetition is that you have to be
consistent like I just think Medical School you it's a lot of information and it's
in my opinion it's not necessarily
about who puts in the most hours who cuts in out of their sleep it's about
who's like consistent day after day
after day um and so that's kind of why the streak is something that I think is
like very motivational for me and
helpful for a lot of people so that was the heat map add-on hope you found
that segment of the video useful highly recommend you install it because it
does
really help with motivation and consistency the next add-on we're going to
talk about is the anky Frozen Fields
Section 4 : Add-ons: Frozen Fields
add-on which makes it actually a lot more efficient to add cards especially if
you're in for example a lecture or if
you're going through your lecture notes or a textbook the frozen field add-
on is absolutely amazing and here is PR explaining why it's useful and how
to
use it appropriately the other add-on I really like and this is really clutch too
it's called the Frozen Fields add-on
it's these snowflex snowflakes next to the thing and what that really helps
you do is let me just change this deck to
something useless um it's like let's say I'm making a topic like blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah and then the answer is like something here and then I press add
it
will actually preserve everything I wrote especially when I'm trying to create
multiple questions from one
concept preserving what I wrote here helps because then I can change one
or two things and then change the answer
and I don't have to rewrite the whole question especially really useful also
for this extra column because we talked about the
fact that in the extra column I put all the prerequisite info I need to answer
multiple questions so let's say in the
extra column I include everything about respiratory acidosis then I keep
that Frozen I want to have that there and
then I just unfreeze this part and create as many questions as I want about
respiratory acidosis and now I have the
frozen field out on holding that source of knowledge constant and then I
can just keep switching out the the cars
that I make from that that that is ridiculously useful that's so useful
especially when you're someone like me
who makes a lot of flash cards you want to minimize the time you spend on
flash cards while making them the most useful
possible so the fact that I can put whatever I want here and save it and
then you know keep changing the top is really helpful especially when
you're going from a big big big thing to making
multiple little little little flash card questions the next add-on is actually
something that I didn't know existed
Section 4 : Add-ons: Pop-up Wiki
until sanish who was one of the people that we interviewed for this class
explained it to me and this makes it easier to look stuff up which again it
just kind of shaves seconds off every interaction that we have with anky
and is therefore incredibly useful so I'm
going to hand you over to sanish explaining the Wikipedia what's it called
the popup Wikipedia beta at least
that's what it's called at the time of recording maybe they're out of beta now
but yeah pop up Wikipedia here is sanes
here we go I got this Wikipedia search addon so if I'm looking at a card so I
think so if you I can highlight a word on an and I can press command shift
WI
think n yeah I can press command shift W and on Mark and it will come up
with a Wikipedia preview of the thing oh
incredible What's this called this is so useful yeah so this is popup
Wikipedia beta nice okay that's handy I didn't
know that existed but that's really helpful um Medical School anky Reddit
yeah um so this is quite useful so if I
forget something completely I don't know what it is I've just got like an
immediate Wikipedia is really good for
learning anyway I use that if I lecture and I just got that popup immediately
instead of Googling it so that was the
popup Wikipedia beta add-on hope you found it useful I definitely learned
something from that did not know it existed and I kind of wish I knew it
existed before because it would have saved me having to Google stuff on
Alfred on my Mac or on my iPhone on Safari like every time I didn't
understand something all right so next we have the speed Focus mode
add-on and this is something that I knew existed
Section 4 : Add-ons: Speed Focus
that I don't personally use myself because I don't have personally the huge
volume of flash flash cards that people
like PRACK do when preparing for the USMLE so I'm going to hand you
over to PR explaining what is speed Focus mode
and why it's helpful so here we go oh this one comes in clutch um which
one is it speed Focus mode have you used this
one no I haven't what is that so speed Focus mode is how I got through
when I was doing eny for step one I was doing
20 2,000 flash cards in three hours um so it's like an incredibly crazy fast
pace and the reason I was able to do that is this this add-on flash card
which basically you tell how automatically after like 5 Seconds it plays an
alert and then after 7 Seconds
it will automatically show me the answer um and so the good part about
this is it really one I'll show you why I like it
it like when it plays that alert it really makes you realize like dude you've
been staring at this for 5 seconds do you know that and then by 7
Seconds it will automatically show you the answer so here let's just practice
and I'll show you what I mean so four
signs and symptoms so I think after 5 Seconds it plays this alarm and then
it just shows me the
answer right away um and the reason this is good is one it limits the time
and
two if you're already dealing with a lot of cars that you know this like
increases your pace much more so than
you would ever think um and so again three lifestyle three facets of
Lifestyle modification like weight gain
weight loss exercise diet um and so by 5 Seconds it plays it and then by 7
Seconds it shows the answer but the good part is it forces you to be like
dude I'm doing ankey right now I'm going to Zone in and just focus as
opposed to I
don't know about you but when I'm doing Ani without this add-on I'm like
half on Instagram I get a couple questions right
I'm feeling good yeah um and the other part is when that beeper goes off at
5
Seconds it is a physical reminder to you that you have been staring at this
blank sheet of paper for 5 seconds so if you
don't know it now you probably just don't know it well enough so learn it
and then move on um I usually use five
and eight so not five SEC so it'll play the alarm at 5 Seconds seconds and
then it will show the answer and there is
also the um option that you can automatically mark it to say again but I
don't usually do that I just make them
show me my answer and then I'll say do I really know this do I not and then
I'll press what I need to press um so this
this saved me a lot of time primarily when I was scrunch for time um I was
able to do a lot more cards I was able
to get through them relatively fast to keep my speed up but I don't use that
add-on now because right now time is not
a con training issue I find that this add-on really just helps when it's like
crunch time go time um so those are like
my top three add-ons I'd say so that was an overview of the speed Focus
mode add-on like I said I don't personally
use this myself because I've got enough discipline to just kind of go through
it and at least for our UK Medical School
exams we didn't have such a huge volume of information like the US guys
do for the USMLE so if you're taking the USMLE
or another exam that has such a massive amount of content then maybe
this is an add-on worth
considering all right if you got to the end of this class without skipping all of
it then incredibly well played
Conclusion
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learn more about studying you might want to check out this three-hour long
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break down the science of effective studying and how you can use it to
your advantage thanks for watching see you next time