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6Anki 2.0 User Manual
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10Switching Card Order
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12Styling Cards
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14Typing in the Answer
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16If YouTube is blocked in your country, you can download the videos instead.
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18Translations
19This page translated into other languages:
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21Bahasa Indonesia
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23Deutsch
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25Español
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27Français
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29Italiano
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31Polski
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33فارسى
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35日本語
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37简体中文
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39по-русски
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41These translations are contributed by volunteers. If you would like to help translate the manual into a different language, or you would like to look at the translations that are currently in progress, please see the translating the manual section.
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43Introduction
44Anki is a program which makes remembering things easy. Because it is a lot more efficient than traditional study methods, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying, or greatly increase the amount you learn.
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46Anyone who needs to remember things in their daily life can benefit from Anki. Since it is content-agnostic and supports images, audio, videos and scientific markup (via LaTeX), the possibilities are endless. For example:
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48learning a language
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50studying for medical and law exams
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52memorizing people’s names and faces
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54brushing up on geography
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56mastering long poems
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58even practicing guitar chords!
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60There are two simple concepts behind Anki: active recall testing and spaced repetition. They are not known to most learners, despite having been written about in the scientific literature for many years. Understanding how they work will make you a more effective learner.
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62Active Recall Testing
63Active recall testing means being asked a question and trying to remember the answer. This is in contrast to passive study, where we read, watch or listen to something without pausing to consider if we know the answer. Research has shown that active recall testing is far more effective at building strong memories than passive study. There are two reasons for this:
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65The act of recalling something strengthens the memory, increasing the chances we’ll be able to remember it again.
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67When we’re unable to answer a question, it tells us we need to return to the material to review or relearn it.
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69You have probably encountered active recall testing in your school years without even realizing it. When good teachers give you a series of questions to answer after reading an article, or make you take weekly progress-check tests, they are not doing it simply to see if you understood the material or not. By testing you, they are increasing the chances you will be able to remember the material in the future.
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71A good way to integrate active recall testing into your own studies is to use flashcards. With traditional paper flashcards, you write a question on one side of a card, and the answer on the other side. By not turning the card over until you’ve thought about the answer, you can learn things more effectively than passive observation allows.
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73Use It or Lose It
74Our brains are efficient machines, and they rapidly discard information that doesn’t seem useful. Chances are that you don’t remember what you had for dinner on Monday two weeks ago, because this information is not usually useful. If you went to a fantastic restaurant that day and spent the last two weeks telling people about how great it was, however, you’re likely to still remember in vivid detail.
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76The brain’s “use it or lose it” policy applies to everything we learn. If you spend an afternoon memorizing some science terms, and then don’t think about that material for two weeks, you’ll probably have forgotten most of it. In fact, studies show we forget about 75% of material learnt within a 48 hour period. This can seem pretty depressing when you need to learn a lot of information.
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78The solution is simple, however: review. By reviewing newly-learnt information, we can greatly reduce forgetting.
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80The only problem is that traditionally review was not very practical. If you are using paper flashcards, it’s easy to flick through all of them if you only have 30 of them to review, but as the number grows to 300 or 3000, it quickly becomes unwieldy.
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82Spaced Repetition
83The spacing effect was reported by a German psychologist in 1885. He observed that we tend to remember things more effectively if we spread reviews out over time, instead of studying multiple times in one session. Since the 1930s there have been a number of proposals for utilizing the spacing effect to improve learning, in what has come to be called spaced repetition.
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85One example is in 1972, when a German scientist called Sebastian Leitner popularized a method of spaced repetition with paper flashcards. By separating the paper cards up into a series of boxes, and moving the cards to a different box on each successful or unsuccessful review, it was possible to see at a glance a rough estimate of how well a card was known and when it should be reviewed again. This was a great improvement over a single box of cards, and it has been widely adopted by computerized flashcard software. It is a rather rough approach however, as it can’t give you an exact date on which you should review something again, and it doesn’t cope very well with material of varying difficulty.
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87The biggest developments in the last 30 years have come from the authors of SuperMemo, a commercial flashcard program that implements spaced repetition. SuperMemo pioneered the concept of a system that keeps track of the ideal time to review material and optimizes itself based on the performance of the user.
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89In SuperMemo’s spaced repetition system, every time you answer a question, you tell the program how well you were able to remember it – whether you forgot completely, made a small mistake, remembered with trouble, remembered easily, etc. The program uses this feedback to decide the optimal time to show you the question again. Since a memory gets stronger each time you successfully recall it, the time between reviews gets bigger and bigger – so you may see a question for the first time, then 3 days later, 15 days later, 45 days later, and so on.
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91This was a revolution in learning, as it meant material could be learnt and retained with the absolute minimum amount of effort necessary. SuperMemo’s slogan sums it up: with spaced repetition, you can forget about forgetting.
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93Why Anki?
94While there is no denying the huge impact SuperMemo has had on the field, it is not without its problems. The program is often criticized for being buggy and difficult to navigate. It only runs on Windows computers. It’s proprietary software, meaning end-users can’t extend it or access the raw data. And while very old versions are made available for free, they are quite limited for modern use.
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96Anki addresses these issues. There are free clients for Anki available on many platforms, so struggling students and teachers with budgetary constraints are not left out. It’s open source, with an already flourishing library of add-ons contributed by end-users. It’s multi-platform, running on Windows, Mac OSX, Linux/FreeBSD, and some mobile devices. And it’s considerably easier to use than SuperMemo.
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98Internally, Anki’s spaced repetition system is based on an older version of the SuperMemo algorithm called SM2. Subsequent versions have managed to squeeze out a little more learning efficiency, but they come at the cost of greatly increased complexity, and they are more susceptible to scheduling errors in real-world use. For a more in-depth discussion of this and the differences in scheduling algorithms, see the appropriate section in the FAQ.
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100The Basics
101Cards
102A question and answer pair is called a card. This is based on a paper flashcard with a question on one side and the answer on the back. In Anki a card doesn’t actually look like a physical card, and when you show the answer the question remains visible by default. For example, if you’re studying basic chemistry, you might see a question like:
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104Q: Chemical symbol for oxygen?
105After thinking about it, and deciding the answer is O, you click the show answer button, and Anki shows you:
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107Q: Chemical symbol for oxygen?
108A: O
109After confirming that you are correct, you can tell Anki how well you remembered, and Anki will choose a next time to show you again.
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111Decks
112A deck is a group of cards. You can place cards in different decks to study parts of your card collection instead of studying everything at once. Each deck can have different settings, such as how many new cards to show each day, or how long to wait until cards are shown again.
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114Decks can contain other decks, which allows you to organize decks into a tree. Anki uses “::” to show different levels. A deck called “Chinese::Hanzi” refers to a “Hanzi” deck, which is part of a “Chinese” deck. If you select “Hanzi” then only the Hanzi cards will be shown; if you select “Chinese” then all Chinese cards, including Hanzi cards, will be shown.
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116To place decks into a tree, you can either name them with “::” between each level, or drag and drop them from the deck list. Decks that have been nested under another deck (that is, that have at least one “::” in their names) are often called subdecks, and top-level decks are sometimes called superdecks or parent decks.
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118Anki starts with a deck called “default”; any cards which have somehow become separated from other decks will go here. Anki will hide the default deck if it contains no cards and you have added other decks. Alternatively, you may rename this deck and use it for other cards.
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120Decks are best used to hold broad categories of cards, rather than specific topics such as “food verbs” or “lesson 1”. For more info on this, please see the using decks appropriately section.
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122For information on how decks affect the order cards are displayed in, please see the display order section.
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124Notes & Fields
125When making flashcards, it’s often desirable to make more than one card that relates to some information. For example, if you’re learning French, and you learn that the word “bonjour” means “hello”, you may wish to create one card that shows you “bonjour” and asks you to remember “hello”, and another card that shows you “hello” and asks you to remember “bonjour”. One card is testing your ability to recognize the foreign word, and the other card is testing your ability to produce it.
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127When using paper flashcards, your only option in this case is to write out the information twice, once for each card. Some computer flashcard programs make life easier by providing a feature to flip the front and back sides. This is an improvement over the paper situation, but there are two major downsides:
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129Because such programs don’t track your performance of recognition and production separately, cards will tend not to be shown to you at the optimum time, meaning you forget more than you’d like, or you study more than is necessary.
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131Reversing the question and answer only works when you want exactly the same content on each side. This means it’s not possible to display extra info on the back of each card for example.
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133Anki solves these problems by allowing you to split the content of your cards up into separate pieces of information. You can then tell Anki which pieces of information you want on each card, and Anki will take care of creating the cards for you and updating them if you make any edits in the future.
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135Imagine we want to study French vocabulary, and we want to include the page number on the back of each card. We want our cards to look like this:
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137Q: Bonjour
138A: Hello
139   Page #12
140And:
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142Q: Hello
143A: Bonjour
144   Page #12
145In this example, we have three pieces of related information: a French word, an English meaning, and a page number. If we put them together, they’d look like this:
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147French: Bonjour
148English: Hello
149Page: 12
150In Anki, this related information is called a note, and each piece of information is called a field. So we can say that this type of note has three fields: French, English, and Page.
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152To add and edit fields, click the “Fields…” button while adding or editing notes. For more information on fields, please see the Customizing Fields section.
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154Card Types
155In order for Anki to create cards based on our notes, we need to give it a blueprint that says which fields should be displayed on the front or back of each card. This blueprint is called a card type. Each type of note can have one or more card types; when you add a note, Anki will create one card for each card type.
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157Each card type has two templates, one for the question and one for the answer. In the above French example, we wanted the recognition card to look like this:
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159Q: Bonjour
160A: Hello
161   Page #12
162To do this, we can set the question and answer templates to:
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164Q: {{French}}
165A: {{English}}<br>
166   Page #{{Page}}
167By surrounding a field name in double curly brackets, we tell Anki to replace that section with the actual information in the field. Anything not surrounded by curly brackets remains the same on each card. (For instance, we don’t have to type “Page #” into the Page field when adding material – it’s added automatically to every card.) <br> is a special code that tells Anki to move to the next line; more details are available in the templates section.
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169The production card templates work in a similar way:
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171Q: {{English}}
172A: {{French}}<br>
173   Page #{{Page}}
174Once a card type has been created, every time you add a new note, a card will be created based on that card type. Card types make it easy to keep the formatting of your cards consistent and can greatly reduce the amount of effort involved in adding information. They also mean Anki can ensure related cards don’t appear too close to each other, and they allow you to fix a typing mistake or factual error once and have all the related cards updated at once.
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176To add and edit card types, click the “Cards…” button while adding or editing notes. For more information on card types, please see the Cards and Templates section.
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178Note Types
179Anki allows you to create different types of notes for different material. Each type of note has its own set of fields and card types. It’s a good idea to create a separate note type for each broad topic you’re studying. In the above French example, we might create a note type called “French” for that. If we wanted to learn capital cities, we could create a separate note type for that as well, with fields such as “Country” and “Capital City”.
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181When Anki checks for duplicates, it only compares other notes of the same type. Thus if you add a capital city called “Orange” using the capital city note type, you won’t see a duplicate message when it comes time to learn how to say “orange” in French.
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183When you create a new collection, Anki automatically adds some standard note types to it. These note types are provided to make Anki easier for new users, but in the long run it’s recommended you define your own note types for the content you are learning. The standard note types are as follows:
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185Basic
186Has Front and Back fields, and will create one card. Text you enter in Front will appear on the front of the card, and text you enter in Back will appear on the back of the card.
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188Basic (and reversed card)
189Like Basic, but creates two cards for the text you enter: one from front→back and one from back→front.
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191Basic (optional reversed card)
192This is a front→back card, and optionally a back→front card. To do this, it has a third field called “Add Reverse.” If you enter any text into that field, a reverse card will be created. More information about this is available in the Cards and Templates section.
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194Cloze
195A note type which makes it easy to select text and turn it into a cloze deletion (e.g., “Man landed on the moon in […]” → “Man landed on the moon in 1969”). More information is available in the cloze deletion section.
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197To add your own note types and modify existing ones, you can use Tools → Manage Note Types from the main Anki window.
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199Note
200Notes and note types are common to your whole collection rather than limited to an individual deck. This means you can use many different types of notes in a particular deck, or have different cards generated from a particular note in different decks. When you add notes using the Add window, you can select what note type to use and what deck to use, and these choices are completely independent of each other. You can also change the note type of some notes after you’ve already created them.
201Collection
202Your collection is all the material stored in Anki – your cards, notes, decks, note types, deck options, and so on.
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204Adding Material
205Downloading Shared Decks
206You can watch a video about Shared Decks and Review Basics on YouTube.
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208The easiest way to get started with Anki is to download a deck of cards someone has shared:
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210Click the “Get Shared” button at the bottom of the deck list.
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212When you’ve found a deck you’re interested in, click the “Download” button to download a deck package.
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214Double-click on the downloaded package to load it into Anki, or File→Import it.
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216Please note that it’s not currently possible to add shared decks directly to your AnkiWeb account. You need to import them with the desktop program, then synchronize to upload them to AnkiWeb.
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218Please see sharing decks for info on sharing your own decks with others.
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220Self-made versus pre-made
221Creating your own deck is the most effective way to learn a complex subject. Subjects like languages and the sciences can’t be understood simply by memorizing facts — they require explanation and context to learn effectively. Furthermore, inputting the information yourself forces you to decide what the key points are, leading to a better understanding.
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223If you are a language learner, you may be tempted to download a long list of words and their translations, but this won’t teach you a language any more than memorizing scientific equations will teach you astrophysics. To learn properly, you need textbooks, teachers, or exposure to real-world sentences.
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225Do not learn if you do not understand.
226--SuperMemo
227Most shared decks are created by people who are learning material outside of Anki – from textbooks, classes, TV, etc. They select the interesting points from what they learn and put them into Anki. They make no effort to add background information or explanations to the cards, because they already understand the material. So when someone else downloads their deck and tries to use it, they’ll find it very difficult as the background information and explanations are missing.
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229That is not to say shared decks are useless – simply that for complex subjects, they should be used as a supplement to external material, not as a replacement for it. If you’re studying textbook ABC and someone has shared a deck of ideas from ABC, that’s a great way to save some time. And for simple subjects that are basically a list of facts, such as capital city names or pub quiz trivia, you probably don’t need external material. But if you attempt to study complex subjects without external material, you will probably meet with disappointing results.
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231Adding Cards and Notes
232Recall from the basics that in Anki we add notes rather than cards, and Anki creates cards for us. Click Add in the main window, and the Add Notes window will appear.
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234The top left of the window shows us the current note type. If it does not say “Basic,” then you may have added some note types when you downloaded a shared deck. The text below assumes that “Basic” is selected.
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236The top right of the window shows us the deck cards will be added to. If you’d like to add cards to a new deck, you can click on the deck name button and then click “Add”.
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238Below the note type, you’ll see some buttons, and an area labeled “Front” and “Back”. Front and Back are called fields, and you can add, remove and rename them by clicking the “Fields…” button above.
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240Below the fields is another area labelled “Tags”. Tags are labels that you can attach to your notes, to make organizing and finding notes easier. You can leave the tags blank if you wish, or add one or more of them. Tags are separated by a space. If the tags area says
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242vocab check_with_tutor
243…then the note you add would have two tags.
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245When you’ve entered text into the front and back, you can click the “Add” button or press Ctrl+Enter (Command+Enter on a Mac) to add the note to your collection. When you do so, a card will be created as well, and placed into the deck you chose. If you’d like to edit a card you added, you can click the history button to search for a recently added card in the browser.
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247Anki checks the first field for uniqueness, so it will warn you if you enter two cards with a Front field of “apple” (for example). The uniqueness check is limited to the current note type, so if you’re studying multiple languages, two cards with the same Front would not be listed as duplicates as long as you had a different note type for each language.
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249Anki doesn’t check for duplicates in other fields automatically for efficiency reasons, but the browser has a “Find Duplicates” function which you can run periodically.
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251For more information on the buttons between the note type and the fields, please see the editor section.
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253Best Practices
254Different people like to review in different ways, but there are some general concepts to keep in mind. An excellent introduction is this article on the SuperMemo site. In particular:
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256Keep it simple: The shorter your cards, the easier they are to review. You may be tempted to include lots of information “just in case,” but reviews will quickly become painful.
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258Don’t memorize without understanding: If you’re studying a language, try to avoid large lists of words. The best way to learn languages is in context, which means seeing those words used in a sentence. Likewise, imagine you’re studying a computer course. If you attempt to memorize the mountain of acronyms, you’ll find it very difficult to make progress. But if you take the time to understand the concepts behind the acronyms, learning the acronyms will become a lot easier.
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260Adding a Note Type
261While basic note types are sufficient for simple cards with only a word or phrase on each side, as soon as you find yourself wanting to include more than one piece of information on the front or back, it’s better to split that information up into more fields.
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263You may find yourself thinking "but I only want one card, so why can’t I just include the audio, a picture, a hint and the translation in the Front field?" If you’d prefer to do that, that’s fine. But the disadvantage of that approach is that all the information is stuck together. If you wanted to sort your cards by the hint, you wouldn’t be able to do that as it’s mixed in with the other content. You also wouldn’t be able to do things like move the audio from the front to the back, except by laboriously copying and pasting it for every note. By keeping content in separate fields, you make it much easier to adjust the layout of your cards in the future.
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265To create a new type of note, choose Tools → Manage Note Types from the main Anki window. Then click “Add” to add a new type of note. You’ll now see another screen that gives you a choice of note types to base the new type on. “Add” means to base the newly created type on one that comes with Anki. “Clone” means to base the newly created type on one that is already in your collection. For instance, if you’d created a French vocab type already, you might want to clone that when creating a German vocab type.
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267After choosing OK, you’ll be asked to name the new type. The subject material you’re studying is a good choice here – things like “Japanese”, ”Trivia”, and so on. Once you’ve chosen a name, close the Note Types window, and you’ll return to the adding window.
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269Customizing Fields
270To customize fields, click the “Fields…” button when adding or editing a note, or while the note type is selected in the Manage Note Types window.
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272You can add, remove, or rename fields by clicking the appropriate buttons. To change the order in which the fields appear in this dialog and the add notes dialog, you can use the reposition button, which asks for the numerical position you want the field to have. So if you want to change a field to be the new first field, enter “1”.
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274Note
275Do not use Tags, Type, Deck, Card, or FrontSide as field names, as they are special fields and will not work properly.
276The options at the bottom of the screen allow you to edit various properties of the fields to be used when adding and editing the cards. This is not where you customize what appears on your cards when reviewing; for that, please see templates.
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278Editing Font allows you to customize the font and size used when editing notes. This is useful if you want to make unimportant information smaller, or increase the size of foreign characters which are hard to read. The changes you make here do not affect how cards appear when reviewing: to do that, please see the templates section. If you have enabled the “type in the answer” function, however, the text you type will use the font size defined here. (For information about how to change the actual font face when typing the answer, please see the checking your answer section.)
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280Sort by this field… tells Anki to show this field in the Sort Field column of the browser. You can use this to sort cards by that field. Only one field can be the sort field at once.
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282When Remember last input… is checked, Anki will not clear out this field’s content after a note is added. If you find yourself entering the same content into multiple notes, you may find this useful.
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284Reverse text direction is useful if you are studying languages that display text from right to left (RTL), such as Arabic or Hebrew. This setting currently only controls editing; to make sure the text displays correctly during review, you’ll need to adjust your template.
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286After you’ve added fields, you’ll probably want to add them to the front or back of your cards. For more information on that, please see the templates section.
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288Changing Deck / Note Type
289While adding, you can click on the top left button to change note type, and the top right button to change deck. The window that opens up will not only allow you to select a deck or note type, but also to add new decks or manage your note types.
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291Using Decks Appropriately
292Decks are designed to divide your content up into broad categories that you wish to study separately, such as English, Geography, and so on. You may be tempted to create lots of little decks to keep your content organized, such as “my geography book chapter 1”, or “food verbs”, but this is not recommended, for the following reasons:
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294Lots of little decks mean you end up reviewing cards in a recognizable order. Whether it’s because you’re clicking on each deck in turn (which is slow) or you’ve added a number of decks under a single parent deck, you’ll end up seeing all the “chapter 1” or “food verb” cards together. This makes it easier to answer the cards, as you can guess them from the context, which leads to weaker memories. When you need to recall the word or phrase outside Anki, you won’t have the luxury of being shown related content first!
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296Anki was not designed to handle many decks (more than several dozen), and it will slow down as you add more – especially if you’re studying on a mobile client. A few extra decks is not going to make a noticeable difference, but if you have many decks the delays will start to add up.
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298Instead of creating lots of little decks, it’s a better idea to use tags and/or fields to classify your content. Instead of creating a “food verbs” decks for example, you could add those cards to your main language study deck, and tag the cards with “food” and “verb”. Each card can have multiple tags, which means you can do things like search for all verbs, or all food-related vocabulary, or all verbs that are related to food.
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300For those who like to stay very organized, you can add fields to your notes to classify your content, such as “book”, “page”, and so on. Anki supports searching in specific fields, which means you can do a search for “book:'my book' page:63” and immediately find what you’re looking for.
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302Anki’s custom study and filtered deck features make this especially powerful, as you can create temporary decks out of search terms. This allows you to review your content mixed together in a single deck most of the time (for optimum memory), but also create temporary decks when you need to focus on particular material, such as before a test. The general rule is that if you always want to be able to study some content separately, it should be in a normal deck, and if you only occasionally need to be able to study it separately (for a test, when under a backlog, etc), tags/fields and filtered decks are better.
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304Studying
305When you have found a deck you like or entered some notes in, it’s time to start studying.
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307Decks
308Study in Anki is limited to the currently selected deck as well as any subdecks it contains.
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310On the decks screen, your decks will be displayed in a list. There are two number columns, due and new. Due is the count of waiting reviews and cards currently in learning. New is the number of new cards that are ready to be learnt that day.
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312When you click on a deck, it will become the current deck, and Anki will change to the study screen. You can return to the deck list to change the currently selected deck at any time by clicking on “Decks” at the top of the main window. (You can also use the Study Deck feature to select a new deck from the keyboard, or you can press the ‘s’ key to study the currently selected deck.)
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314You can click the gears button to the right of a deck to rename or delete a deck, change its options, or export it.
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316When a deck has subdecks, the cards will appear from each deck in turn.
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318Study Overview
319After clicking on a deck to study, you’ll see a screen that shows you how many cards are due today. This is called the deck overview screen. The cards are split into three types:
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321New refers to cards that you have downloaded or entered in, but have never been studied before.
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323Learning refers to cards that were seen for the first time recently, and are still being learnt.
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325To Review refers to cards that were previously learnt, and now need to be reviewed so you don’t forget them.
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327To start a study session, click the Study Now button. Anki will proceed to show you cards until the cards to be shown for the day have run out.
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329While studying, you can return to the overview by pressing the “s” key on your keyboard.
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331Questions
332When a card is shown, only the question is shown at first. After thinking about the answer, either click the Show Answer button, or press the spacebar. The answer will then be shown. It’s okay if it takes you a little while to recall the answer, but as a general rule if you can’t answer within about 10 seconds, it’s probably better to give up and show the answer than keep struggling to remember.
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334When the answer is shown, you should compare the answer you thought of with the answer which is shown and tell Anki how well you remembered. If you don’t trust yourself to compare your answer accurately, you can ask Anki to prompt you to type in the answer rather than just showing it to you.
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336The number of buttons available for grading depends on whether the card is being learnt or reviewed.
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338Learning
339When learning new cards, or when relearning cards that you have forgotten, Anki will show you the cards one or more times to help you memorize them. Each time is called a learning step. By default there are two steps: 1 minute and 10 minutes. You can change the number of steps and the delays between them in the deck options.
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341There are three rating buttons when learning:
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343Again moves the card back to the first step.
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345Good moves the card to the next step. If the card was on the final step, the card is converted into a review card (it graduates). By default, once the card has reached the end of the learning steps, the card will be shown again the next day, then at increasingly long delays (see the next section).
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347Easy immediately converts the card into a review card, even if there were steps remaining. By default, the card will be shown again 4 days later, and then at increasingly long delays. The easy button will not be shown if you are in relearning mode and it would give the same interval as “good.”
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349When cards are seen for the first time, they start at step one. This means answering Good on a card for the first time will show it one more time in 10 minutes, and the initial 1 minute step will be skipped. If you push Again, though, the card will come back in 1 minute.
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351You can use the 1, 2 and 3 keys on your keyboard to select a particular button, where 1 is Again. Pressing the spacebar will select Good.
352
353If there are no other cards to show you, Anki will show learning cards again even if their delay has not elapsed completely. If you’d prefer to wait the full learning delay, you can change this behaviour in the preferences.
354
355Reviewing
356When a card has been previously learnt and is ready to be reviewed again, there are four buttons to rate your answer:
357
358Again marks your answer as incorrect and asks Anki to show the card more frequently in the future. The card is said to have lapsed. Please see the lapses section for more information about how lapsed reviews are handled.
359
360Hard shows the card at a slightly longer delay than last time, and tells Anki to show the card more frequently in the future.
361
362Good tells Anki that the last delay was about right, and the card easiness doesn’t need to be adjusted down or up. At the default starting easiness, the card will be shown again approximately 2 1/2 times longer than the previous time, so if you had waited 10 days to see the card previously, the next delay would be about 25 days.
363
364Easy tells Anki you found the delay too short. The card will be scheduled further into the future than Good, and Anki will schedule the card less frequently in the future. Because Easy rapidly increases the delay, it’s best used for only the easiest of cards. Usually you should find yourself answering Good instead.
365
366As with learning cards, you can use 1-4 on the keyboard to select an answer. Pressing the spacebar will select Good.
367
368Due Counts and Time Estimates
369When only the question is shown, Anki shows three numbers like 12 + 34 + 56 at the bottom of the screen. These represent the new cards, cards in learning, and cards to review. If you’d prefer not to see the numbers, you can turn them off in Anki’s preferences.
370
371Note
372The numbers count reviews needed to finish all the cards in that queue, not the number of cards. If you have multiple steps configured for lapsed cards, the number will increase by more than one when you fail a card, since that card needs to be shown several times.
373When the answer is shown, Anki shows an estimate of the next time a card will be shown above each button. If you’d prefer not to see the estimates, you can disable them in Anki’s preferences.
374
375Note
376Anki additionally adds a small amount of random variation to the next due times, in order to prevent cards that were introduced together and always rated the same from always staying next to each other. This variation is not shown on the time estimates but will be applied after selecting the button.
377Editing and More
378You can click the Edit button in the bottom left to edit the current note. When you finish editing, you’ll be returned to study. The editing screen works very similarly to the add notes screen.
379
380At the bottom right of the review screen is a button labeled More. This button provides some other operations you can do on the current card or note:
381
382Mark Note
383Adds a “marked” tag to the current note, so it can be easily found in the browser. This is useful when you want to take some action on the note at a later date, such as looking up a word when you get home. Marked cards also show a small star in the upper-right-hand corner during reviews.
384
385Bury Card / Note
386Hides a card or all of the note’s cards from review until the next day. (If you want to unbury cards before then, you can click the “unbury” button on the deck overview screen.) This is useful if you cannot answer the card at the moment or you want to come back to it another time. Burying can also happen automatically for cards of the same note. If cards were in learning when they are buried, they are moved back to the new card queue or review queue prior to being buried.
387
388Suspend Card / Note
389Hides a card or all of the note’s cards from review until they are manually unsuspended (by clicking the suspend button in the browser). This is useful if you want to avoid reviewing the note for some time, but don’t want to delete it. If cards were in learning when they are suspended, they are moved back to the new card queue or review queue prior to being suspended.
390
391Delete Note
392Deletes the note and all of its cards.
393
394Options
395Edit the options for the current deck.
396
397Replay Audio
398If the card has audio on the front or back, play it again.
399
400Record Own Voice
401Record from your microphone for the purposes of checking your pronunciation. This recording is temporary and will go away when you move to the next card. If you want to add audio to a card permanently, you can do that in the edit window.
402
403Replay Own Voice
404Replay the previous recording of your voice (presumably after showing the answer).
405
406Display Order
407Studying will show cards from the selected deck and any decks it contains. Thus, if you select your “French” deck, the subdecks “French::Vocab” and “French::My Textbook::Lesson 1” will be shown as well.
408
409For new cards and reviews, Anki fetches cards from the decks in alphabetical order. So in the above example, you would get cards first from “French”, then “My Textbook”, and finally “Vocab”. You can use this to control the order cards appear in, placing high priority cards in decks that appear higher in the list. When computers sort text alphabetically, the “-” character comes before alphabetical characters, and “~” comes after them. So you could call the deck “-Vocab” to make them appear first, and you could call the other deck “~My Textbook” to force it to appear after everything else.
410
411New cards and reviews are fetched separately, and Anki won’t wait until both queues are empty before moving on to the next deck, so it’s possible you’ll be exposed to new cards one deck while seeing reviews from another deck, or vice versa. If you don’t want this, click directly on the deck you want to study instead of one of the parent decks.
412
413Since cards in learning are somewhat time-critical, they are fetched from all decks at once and shown in the order they are due.
414
415To control the order reviews from a given deck appear in, or change new cards from ordered to random order, please see the deck options. For more fine-grained ordering of new cards, you can change the order in the browser.
416
417Siblings and Burying
418Recall from the basics that Anki can create more than one card for each thing you input, such as a front→back card and a back→front card, or two different cloze deletions from the same text. These related cards are called siblings. Anki tries to ensure siblings are not shown close together, as that’s usually not helpful.
419
420When you answer a card that has siblings, Anki prevents the card’s siblings from being shown in the same session by automatically burying them. Buried cards are hidden from review until the clock rolls over to a new day or you manually unbury them using the “Unbury” button that’s visible at the bottom of the deck overview screen. Anki will bury siblings even if the siblings are not in the same deck (for instance, if you use the deck override feature).
421
422Anki will only bury siblings that are new or review cards. It will not hide cards in learning, as time is of the essence for those cards. On the other hand, when you study a learning card, any new/review siblings will be buried.
423
424If you want to see more than one card of a note per day when learning or reviewing cards, you can stop Anki from burying cards in the deck options.
425
426Keyboard Shortcuts
427Most of the common operations in Anki have keyboard shortcuts. Most of them are discoverable in the interface: menu items list their shortcuts next to them, and hovering the mouse cursor over a button will generally show its shortcut in a tooltip.
428
429When studying, either space or enter will show the answer. When the answer is shown, you can use space or enter to select the Good button. You can use the 1-4 keys to select a specific ease button. Many people find it convenient to answer most cards with space and keep one finger on 1 for when they forget.
430
431The "Study Deck" item in the Tools menu allows you to quickly switch to a deck with the keyboard. You can trigger it with the / key. When opened, it will display all of your decks and show a filter area at the top. As you type characters, Anki will display only decks matching the characters you type. You can add a space to separate multiple search terms, and Anki will show only decks that match all the terms. So “ja 1” or “on1 ja” would both match a deck called “Japanese::Lesson1”.
432
433Falling Behind
434If you fall behind in your reviews, Anki will prioritize cards that have been waiting the longest. It does this by taking the 200 cards that have been waiting the longest and showing them to you in a random order up until your daily review limit. This ordering ensures that no cards will be left waiting indefinitely, but it means that if you introduce new cards, their reviews won’t appear until you’ve gotten through your backlog.
435
436If you wish to change the order of the overdue reviews, you can do so by creating a filtered deck.
437
438When you answer cards that have been waiting for a while, Anki factors in that delay when determining the next time a card should be shown. Please see the section on Anki’s spaced-repetition algorithm for more information.
439
440Editing
441Features
442The editor is shown when adding notes, editing a note during reviews, or browsing.
443
444On the top left are two buttons, which open the fields and cards windows.
445
446On the right are buttons that control formatting. Bold, italic and underline work like they do in a word processing program. The next two buttons allow you to subscript or superscript text, which is useful for chemical compounds like H2O or simple math equations like x2.
447
448The icon with the red X clears any formatting in the currently selected text. This includes colours, bold, etc.
449
450The next button allows you to change text colour.
451
452You can use the paperclip button to select audio, images and videos from your computer’s hard drive to attach to your notes. Alternatively, you can copy the media onto your computer’s clipboard (for instance, by right-clicking an image on the web and choosing Copy Image) and paste it into the field that you want to place it in. For more information about media, please see the media section.
453
454The red circle button allows you to record from your computer’s microphone and attach the recording to the note.
455
456The last button allows you to add advanced mathematical markup called LaTeX to your notes or edit the underlying formatting.
457
458Most of the buttons have shortcut keys. You can hover the mouse cursor over a button to see its shortcut. For the LaTeX/HTML menu, use Ctrl+t, then t, e or m to select the three LaTeX types, and Ctrl+Shift+x to edit the HTML.
459
460Cloze Deletion
461Cloze deletion is the process of hiding one or more words in a sentence. For example, if you have the sentence:
462
463Canberra was founded in 1913.
464…and you create a cloze deletion on “1913”, then the sentence would become:
465
466Canberra was founded in [...].
467Sometimes sections that have been removed in this fashion are said to be occluded.
468
469For more information on why you might want to use cloze deletion, see rule number 5 here.
470
471Anki provides a special cloze deletion type of note, to make creating clozes easy. To create a cloze deletion note, select the Cloze note type, and type some text into the "Text" field. Then drag the mouse over the text you want to hide to select it, and click the […] button. Anki will replace the text with:
472
473Canberra was founded in {{c1::1913}}.
474The “c1” part means that you’ve created one cloze deletion on the sentence. You can create more than one deletion if you’d like. For example, if you select Canberra and click […] again, the text will now look like:
475
476{{c2::Canberra}} was founded in {{c1::1913}}.
477When you add the above note, Anki will create two cards. The first card will show:
478
479Canberra was founded in [...].
480…on the question, with the full sentence on the answer. The other card will have the following on the question:
481
482[...] was founded in 1913.
483You can also elide multiple sections on the same card. In the above example, if you change c2 to c1, only one card would be created, with both Canberra and 1913 hidden. If you hold down alt (option on a Mac) while creating a cloze, Anki will automatically use the same number instead of incrementing it.
484
485Cloze deletions don’t need to fall on word boundaries, so if you select “anberra” rather than “Canberra” in the above example, the question would appear as “C[…] was founded in 1913”, giving you a hint.
486
487You can also give yourself hints that don’t match the text. If you replace the original sentence with:
488
489Canberra::city was founded in 1913
490…and then press […] after selecting "Canberra::city", Anki will treat the text after the two colons as a hint, changing the text into:
491
492{{c1::Canberra::city}} was founded in 1913
493When the card comes up for review, it will appear as:
494
495[city] was founded in 1913.
496For information on testing your ability to type in a cloze deletion correctly, please see the section on typing answers.
497
498Please note that overlapping clozes are not supported. For example, the following field is invalid:
499
500{{c1::Canberra was {{c2::founded}}}} in 1913
501If you need to create clozes from overlapping text, add another Text field to your cloze, add it to the template, and then when creating notes, paste the text into two separate fields, like so:
502
503Text1 field: {{c1::Canberra was founded}} in 1913
504
505Text2 field: {{c2::Canberra}} was founded in 1913
506The default cloze note type has a second field called Extra, that is shown on the answer side of each card. It can be used for adding some usage notes or extra information.
507
508The cloze note type is treated specially by Anki, and cannot be created based on a regular note type. If you wish to customize it, please make sure to clone the existing Cloze type instead of another type of note.
509
510Inputting Foreign Characters and Accents
511All modern computers have built in support for typing accents and foreign characters, and multiple ways to go about it. The method we recommend is using a keyboard layout for the language you want to learn.
512
513Languages with a separate script like Japanese, Chinese, Thai and so on have their own layouts specifically for that language.
514
515European languages that use accents may have their own layout, but can often by typed on a generic "international keyboard" layout. These work by typing the accent, then the character you want accented - eg an apostrophe (') then the letter a (a) gives á.
516
517To add the international keyboard on Windows machines, please see https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/kb/306560
518
519To add it on Macs, please see http://www.macworld.com/article/1147039/os-x/accentinput.html
520
521Keyboards for a specific language are added in a similar way, but we can not cover them all here. For more information, please try searching Google for "input Japanese on a mac", "type Chinese on Windows 10", and so on.
522
523If you’re learning a right to left language, there are lots of other things to consider. Please see this page for more information.
524
525Note
526The toolkit Anki is built on has trouble dealing with a few input methods, such as holding down keys to select accented characters on Mac OS X, and typing characters by holding down the alt key and typing a numeric code on Windows.
527Cards and Templates
528As mentioned in the basics section, Anki creates cards automatically, based on the notes you add. (Please read the basics section if you have not done so already, as the rest of this section assumes that you have read it.)
529
530You can configure the cards Anki should create and what should be shown on them when adding or editing material by clicking on the “Cards…” button. At the top of the window you’ll see a set of tabs, one for each card type. You can click the plus on the right if you’d like to add another card type to the current note type. Similarly, if you’d like to delete one, you can do so by clicking the X on the tab.
531
532On the top left is the front template, on the bottom left is the back template, and in between them is the card styling section.
533
534In Anki, templates are written in HTML, which is the language that web pages are written in. The styling section is CSS, which is the language used for styling web pages.
535
536On the right is a preview of the front and back of the currently selected card. If you opened the window while adding notes, the preview will be based on the text you had typed into the Add Notes window. If you opened the window while editing a note, the preview will be based on the content of that note. If you opened the window from Tools → Manage Note Types, Anki will display each field’s name in parentheses in place of content.
537
538At the bottom of the window is a More button that gives you options to rename or reorder the cards, as well as the following two options:
539
540The Deck Override option allows you to change the deck that cards generated from the current card type will be placed into. By default, cards are placed into the deck you provide in the Add Notes window. If you set a deck here, that card type will be placed into the deck you specified, instead of the deck listed in the Add Notes window. This can be useful if you want to separate cards into different decks (for instance, when studying a language, to put production cards in one deck and recognition cards in another). You can check which deck the cards are currently going to by choosing Deck Override again.
541
542The Browser Appearance option allows you to set different (perhaps simplified) templates for display in the Question and Answer columns of the browser; see browser appearance for more information.
543
544Reverse Cards
545You can watch a video about reversing cards on YouTube.
546
547If you want to create cards that go in both directions (e.g., both “ookii”→“big” and “big”→“ookii”), you have several options. The simplest is to select the “Basic (and reversed card)” built-in note type. This will generate two cards, one in each direction.
548
549If you want to generate reverse cards for only some of your material (perhaps you only want to take the time to study reverses for the most important material, or some of your cards don’t make sense reversed), you can select the “Basic (optional reversed card)” note type. This note type generates a forward-only card when you fill in only the first two fields; if you additionally enter something in the “Add Reverse” field (like a y), Anki will generate a reverse card as well. The contents of this field will never be displayed on a card.
550
551If you later decide you don’t want a reverse card that you added, you can delete it by removing the text from the “Add Reverse” field. Similarly, if you want to add a reverse card, you can add text to the “Add Reverse” field. If you didn’t select the optional reverse note type to begin with, you can use Edit → Change Note Type in the browser to change it.
552
553Note
554To avoid loss of scheduling information if you make an editing mistake, Anki does not automatically delete cards after you remove the text from the “add reverse” field. To complete the deletion, run Tools → Empty Cards from the main window.
555If you’re using a more complex note type (for instance, one with three cards) and you wish to generate specific cards only in certain situations, please see the conditional replacement section.
556
557Basic Templates
558The most basic template looks something like this:
559
560{{Front}}
561When you place text within curly brackets, Anki looks for a field by that name, and replaces the text with the actual content of the field. You can include as many fields as you wish.
562
563Note
564Field names are case sensitive. If you have a field named Front, writing {{front}} will not work properly.
565Your templates are not limited to a list of fields. You can also include arbitrary text on your templates. For example, if you’re studying capital cities, and you’ve created a note type with a “Country” field, you might create a front template like this:
566
567What's the capital city of {{Country}}?
568The default back template will look something like this:
569
570{{FrontSide}}
571
572<hr id=answer>
573
574{{Back}}
575This means “show me the text that’s on the front side, then a divider line, and then the Back field”.
576
577The id=answer part tells Anki where the divider is between the question and the answer. This allows Anki to automatically scroll to the spot where the answer starts when you press show answer on a long card (especially useful on mobile devices with small screens). If you don’t want a horizontal line at the beginning of the answer, you can use another HTML element such as a paragraph or div instead.
578
579Checking Your Answer
580You can watch a video about this feature on YouTube.
581
582If you’d like to type in the answer and have Anki compare your input to the real answer, you can do so by changing your template. Imagine your front and back templates look like:
583
584{{Native Word}}
585{{FrontSide}}
586
587<hr id=answer>
588
589{{Foreign Word}}
590To type in the foreign word and check if you are correct, you need to edit your front template so that it looks like this:
591
592{{Native Word}}
593{{type:Foreign Word}}
594Note that we have added type: in front of the field we want to compare. Since FrontSide is on the back of the card, the type answer box will appear on the back as well. (If you don’t have FrontSide on the back of your card, you will need to add the type directive to the answer side as well.)
595
596When reviewing, Anki will display a text box where you can type in the answer, and upon hitting enter or showing the answer, Anki will show you which parts you got right and which parts you got wrong. The text box’s font size will be the size you configured for that field (via the “Fields” button when editing).
597
598This feature does not change how the cards are answered, so it’s still up to you to decide how well you remembered or not.
599
600Note
601Only one typing comparison can be used on a card. If you add the above text multiple times, it will not work. It also only supports a single line, so it is not useful for comparing against a field that is comprised on multiple lines.
602Anki uses a monospaced font for the answer comparison so that the “provided” and “correct” sections line up. If you wish to override the font, you can put the following at the bottom of your styling section:
603
604code#typeans { font-family: "myfontname"; }
605Advanced users can override the default type-answer colours with the css classes typeGood, typeBad and typeMissed. At the time of writing, only the computer version of Anki supports these classes.
606
607It is also possible to type in the answer for cloze deletion cards. To do this, add {{type:cloze:Text}} to both the front and back template, so the back looks something like this:
608
609{{cloze:Text}}
610{{type:cloze:Text}}
611{{Extra}}
612Note that since the cloze type does not use FrontSide, this must be added to both sides on a cloze note type.
613
614If there are multiple sections elided, you can separate the answers in the text box with a comma.
615
616Note
617Type answer boxes will not appear in the "preview" dialog in the browser. When you review or look at the preview in the card types window, they will display.
618Newlines
619The template language needs a special command to create a new line. For example, if you wrote the following in the template:
620
621one
622two
623In the preview, you’d actually see:
624
625one two
626To add a new line, you need to add a <br> code to the end of a line, like so:
627
628one<br>
629two
630The br code stands for "(line) br(eak)".
631
632The same applies for fields. If you want to display two fields, one on each line, you would use
633
634{{Field 1}}<br>
635{{Field 2}}
636Card Styling
637You can watch a video about styling cards on YouTube.
638
639In between the front and back template is the card styling. Here you can change the background colour of the card, the default font, the text alignment, and so on.
640
641Note
642This is not where you change the font for type answer comparisons, type answer textboxes, or editing textboxes; to learn how to change these fonts, please see the checking your answer and customizing fields sections.
643The standard options available to you are:
644
645font-family
646The name of the font to use on the card. If your font has spaces in it like "MS Unicode", then you need to surround the font name in double quotes as in this sentence. It is also possible to use multiple fonts on one card; for information on that, please see below.
647
648font-size
649The size of the font in pixels. When changing it, make sure you leave px at the end.
650
651text-align
652Whether the text should be aligned in the center, left, or right.
653
654color
655The color of the text. Simple color names like blue, lightyellow, and so on will work, or you can use HTML color codes to select arbitrary colors. Please see this webpage for more information.
656
657background-color
658The color of the card background.
659
660Any CSS can be placed in the styling section – advanced users may wish to do things like add a background image or gradient, for example. If you’re wondering how to get some particular formatting, please search the web for information about how to do it in CSS, as there is a great deal of documentation available.
661
662The styling is shared between all cards, which means that when you make an adjustment it will affect all cards for that note type. It is also possible to specify card-specific styling, however. The following example will use a yellow background on all cards except the first one:
663
664.card { background-color: yellow; }
665.card1 { background-color: blue; }
666One other thing to note is that Anki shrinks images to fit the screen by default. You can change this by adding the following to the bottom of your styling section:
667
668img { max-width: none; max-height: none; }
669If you try to change the style for images and find that the star that appears on marked cards is affected (for instance, it becomes way too large), you can target it with the following:
670
671img#star { ... }
672Field Styling
673The default styling applies to the whole card. You can also make certain fields or part of the card use a different font, color, and so on. This is particularly important when studying foreign languages, as Anki will sometimes be unable to correctly display characters unless an appropriate font has been chosen.
674
675Say you have an “Expression” field, and you want to give it the OSX Thai font “Ayuthaya”. Imagine your template already reads:
676
677What is {{Expression}}?
678
679{{Notes}}
680What we need to do is wrap the text we want to style in some HTML. We will put the following in front of the text:
681
682<div class=mystyle1>
683And the following behind it:
684
685</div>
686By wrapping the text like the above, we tell Anki to style the wrapped text with a custom style called “mystyle1”, which we will create later.
687
688Thus if we wanted the entire “What is …?” expression to use the Thai font, we would use:
689
690<div class=mystyle1>What is {{Expression}}?</div>
691
692{{Notes}}
693And if we wanted only the expression field itself to use the Thai font, we’d use:
694
695What is <div class=mystyle1>{{Expression}}</div>?
696
697{{Notes}}
698After we’ve edited the template, we now need to move to the Styling section between the templates. Before editing it, it should look something like:
699
700.card {
701 font-family: arial;
702 font-size: 20px;
703 text-align: center;
704 color: black;
705 background-color: white;
706}
707Add your new style to the bottom, so it looks like:
708
709.card {
710 font-family: arial;
711 font-size: 20px;
712 text-align: center;
713 color: black;
714 background-color: white;
715}
716
717.mystyle1 {
718 font-family: ayuthaya;
719}
720You can include any styling you want in the style. If you wanted to increase the font size too, you’d change the mystyle1 section to look like:
721
722.mystyle1 {
723 font-family: ayuthaya;
724 font-size: 30px;
725}
726It’s also possible to bundle custom fonts with your deck, so you don’t need to install them on your computer or mobile device. Please see the installing fonts section for more info.
727
728Please see the card styling section for more information on the styling options you can use here.
729
730Hint Fields
731It’s possible to add a field to the front or back of a card, but make it hidden until you explicitly show it. We call this a hint field. Before adding a hint, please bear in mind that the easier you make it to answer a question in Anki, the less likely you are to remember that question when you encounter it in real life. Please have a read about the minimum information principle on http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm before proceeding.
732
733First, you’ll need to add a field to store the hint in if you have not already. Please see the fields section if you’re not sure how to do this.
734
735Assuming you’ve created a field called MyField, you can tell Anki to include it on the card but hide it by default by adding the following to your template:
736
737{{hint:MyField}}
738This will show a link labeled “show hint”; when you click it, the content of the field will be displayed on the card. (If MyField is empty, nothing will be shown.)
739
740If you show the hint on the question and then reveal the answer, the hint will be hidden again. If you want to have the hint always revealed when the answer is shown, you will need to remove {{FrontSide}} from your back template and manually add the fields you wish to appear.
741
742Note
743It is not currently possible to use a hint field for audio — the audio will play regardless of whether you’ve clicked on the hint link.
744If you want to customize the appearance or behaviour, you’ll need to implement the hint field yourself. We can not provide any support for doing so, but the following code should get you started:
745
746{{#Back}}
747<a class=hint href="#"
748onclick="this.style.display='none';document.getElementById('hint4753594160').style.display='inline-block';return false;">
749Show Back</a><div id="hint4753594160" class=hint style="display: none">{{Back}}</div>
750{{/Back}}
751Special Fields
752There are some special fields you can include in your templates:
753
754The note's tags: {{Tags}}
755
756The type of note: {{Type}}
757
758The card's deck: {{Deck}}
759
760The card's subdeck: {{Subdeck}}
761
762The type of card ("Forward", etc): {{Card}}
763
764The content of the front template (only valid in back template): {{FrontSide}}
765FrontSide will not include any audio that was on the front side of the card. If you wish to have the same audio play on both the front and back of the card, you’ll need to manually include the audio fields on the back as well.
766
767As with other fields, special field names are case sensitive.
768
769Card Generation & Deletion
770Anki will not create cards with empty front sides. Thus if “My Field” was empty, and one card’s front template included only that field, the card would not be created.
771
772If no cards can be created because all of the cards would have empty front sides, then the Add Notes window will warn you and not allow the note to be added until at least one card would be generated.
773
774When you edit a previously added note, Anki will automatically create extra cards if they were previously blank but no longer are. If your edits have made some cards blank when they previously were not, however, Anki will not delete them immediately, as that could lead to accidental data loss. To remove the empty cards, go to Tools → Empty Cards in the main window. You will be shown a list of empty cards and be given the option to delete them.
775
776Because of the way that card generation works, it is not possible to manually delete individual cards (they would just end up being recreated the next time the note was edited). Instead, you should make the relevant conditional replacement fields empty and then use the Empty Cards option. (If you don’t have fields set up to control card generation, please see the sections on reversed cards and selective card generation.) If you need to do this for many notes at once, you can use the find and replace feature in the browser.
777
778Anki does not consider special fields or non-field text for the purposes of card generation. Thus if your front template looked like the following, no card would be generated if Country was empty:
779
780Where is {{Country}} on the map?
781Selective Card Generation
782Please read the previous section on card generation and deletion before you read this.
783
784Sometimes you may want to generate extra cards for only some of your material, such as testing your ability to recall the most important words of a set. You can accomplish this by adding an extra field to your note, and adding some text into it (such as "1") on the notes you want the extra card. Then in the card template, you can make the card’s creation depend on that field being non-empty. For more information on this, please see the conditional replacement section below.
785
786Media & LaTeX References
787Anki does not scan templates for media references, because it is slow to do so. This has implications for including media on the template.
788
789Static Sounds/Images
790If you wish to include images or sounds on your cards that are the same for every card (eg, a company logo at the top of each card):
791
792Rename the file so it starts with an underscore, eg "_logo.jpg". The underscore tells Anki that the file is used by the template and it should be exported when sharing the deck.
793
794Add a reference to the media on your front or back template, like:
795
796<img src="_logo.jpg">
797Field References
798Media references to fields are not allowed. They may or may not display during review, and will not work when checking for unused media, importing/exporting, and so on. Examples that won’t work:
799
800<img src="{{Expression}}.jpg">
801
802[sound:{{Word}}]
803
804[latex]{{Field 1}}[/latex]
805Instead, you should include the media references in the field. Please see the importing section for more information.
806
807Conditional Replacement
808It is possible to include certain text, fields, or HTML on your cards only if a field is empty or not empty. An example:
809
810This text is always shown.
811
812{{#FieldName}}
813This text is only shown if FieldName has text in it
814{{/FieldName}}
815
816{{^FieldName}}
817This text is only shown if FieldName is empty
818{{/FieldName}}
819A real life example is only showing a label if the field is not empty:
820
821{{#Tags}}Tags: {{Tags}}{{/Tags}}
822Or say you want to display a specific field in blue on the front of your card if there are extra notes on the back (perhaps the fact that there are notes serves as a reminder that you should spend more time thinking about the answer). You can style the field as follows:
823
824{{#Notes}}<span style="color:blue;">{{/Notes}}
825{{FieldToFormat}}
826{{#Notes}}</span>{{/Notes}}
827You can also use conditional replacement to control which cards are generated. This works since Anki will not generate cards which would have a blank front side. For example, consider a card with two fields on the front:
828
829{{Expression}}
830{{Notes}}
831Normally a card would be generated if either the expression or notes field had text in it. If you only wanted a card generated if expression was not empty, then you could change the template to this:
832
833{{#Expression}}
834{{Expression}}
835{{Notes}}
836{{/Expression}}
837And if you wanted to require both fields, you could use two conditional replacements:
838
839{{#Expression}}
840{{#Notes}}
841{{Expression}}
842{{Notes}}
843{{/Notes}}
844{{/Expression}}
845Keep in mind that, as mentioned in the card generation section, this only works when you place the conditional replacement code on the front of the card; if you do this on the back, you will simply end up with cards with a blank back side. Similarly, since this works by checking if the front field would be empty, it is important to make sure you wrap the entire front side in the conditional replacement; for instance, the following would not work as expected:
846
847{{#Expression}}
848{{Expression}}
849{{/Expression}}
850{{Notes}}
851The default behaviour can be thought of as an "OR" condition - cards are created if the first field is non-empty, OR the second field is non-empty, and so on. The behaviour above can be thought of as an "AND" condition - cards are created if the first field is non-empty AND the second field is non-empty, and so on.
852
853A caveat: Anki is not currently able to mix AND and OR conditions. Thus the following template, which says "require expression and notes, or field 3", would not work:
854
855{{#Expression}}
856{{#Notes}}
857{{Expression}}
858{{Notes}}
859{{/Notes}}
860{{/Expression}}
861
862{{Field 3}}
863Another caveat is that negated expressions can not be used to control card generation. That is, wrapping a template in {{^Field}} will not do what you expect.
864
865Cloze Templates
866Please see the cloze deletion section for background info.
867
868The cloze note type functions differently from regular note types. Instead of a customizable number of card types, it has a single type which is shared by all cloze deletions on a note.
869
870As mentioned in the card generation section above, generation of regular cards depends on one or more fields on the question being non-empty. Cloze deletion note types are generated differently:
871
872Anki looks on the front template for one or more cloze replacements, like {{cloze:FieldName}}.
873
874It then looks in the FieldName field for all cloze references, like {{c1::text}}.
875
876For each separate number, a card will be generated.
877
878Because card generation functions differently for cloze deletion cards, {{cloze:…}} tags can not be used with a regular note type - they will only function properly when used with a cloze note type.
879
880Conditional generation provides a special field so you can check which card you are rendering. If you wanted to display the "hint1" field on the first cloze, and "hint2" field on the second cloze for example, you could use the following template:
881
882{{cloze:Text}}
883
884{{#c1}}
885{{Hint1}}
886{{/c1}}
887
888{{#c2}}
889{{Hint2}}
890{{/c2}}
891Other HTML
892Your templates can contain arbitrary HTML, which means that all the layout possibilities used on internet web pages can also be used on your cards. Things like tables, lists, images, links to external pages and so on are all supported. With tables for example, you could change the layout so that the front and back of a card appear on the left and right instead of the top and bottom.
893
894Covering all of HTML’s features is outside the scope of this manual, but there are plenty of good introductory guides to HTML available on the web if you’d like to learn more.
895
896Dictionary Links
897You can also use field replacement to create dictionary links. Imagine you’re studying a language and your favourite online dictionary allows you to search for text using a web URL like:
898
899http://example.com/search?q=myword
900You could add an automatic link by doing the following in your template:
901
902{{Expression}}
903
904<a href="http://example.com/search?q={{Expression}}">check in dictionary</a>
905The template above would allow you to search for each note’s expression by clicking on the link while reviewing. There is a caveat however, so please see the next section.
906
907HTML Stripping
908Like templates, fields are stored in HTML. In the dictionary link example above, if the expression contained the word "myword" without any formatting, then the HTML would be the same: "myword". But when you include formatting in your fields, extra HTML is included. If "myword" was bolded for example, the actual HTML would be "<b>myword</b>".
909
910This can present a problem for things like dictionary links. In the above example, the dictionary link would end up being:
911
912<a href="http://example.com/search?q=<b>myword</b>">check in dictionary</a>
913The extra characters in the link would likely confuse the dictionary site, and you’re likely not to get any matches.
914
915To solve this, Anki provides the ability to strip formatting from fields when they are replaced. If you prefix a field name with text:, Anki will not include any formatting. So a dictionary link that worked even with formatted text would be:
916
917<a href="http://example.com/search?q={{text:Expression}}">check in dictionary</a>
918Browser Appearance
919If your card templates are complex, it may be difficult to read the question and answer columns (called "Front" and "Back") in the card list. The "browser appearance" option allows you to define a custom template to be used only in the browser, so you can include only the important fields and change the order if you desire. The syntax is the same as in standard card templates.
920
921RTL (right to left) text
922If you’re learning a language that reads from right to left, you’ll need to adjust the template like so:
923
924<div dir=rtl>{{FieldThatHasRTLTextInIt}}</div>
925If you were linked directly here, please see the start of this section for more information.
926
927Platform-Specific CSS
928Anki defines some special CSS classes that allow you to define different styling for different platforms. The example below shows how to vary the font depending on where you’re reviewing:
929
930.win .jp { font-family: "MS Mincho"; }
931.mac .jp { font-family: "Hiragino Mincho Pro"; }
932.linux .jp { font-family: "Kochi Mincho"; }
933.mobile .jp { font-family: "Hiragino Mincho ProN"; }
934And in the template:
935
936<div class=jp>{{Field}}</div>
937For different iOS devices, you can use .iphone and .ipad.
938
939You can also use properties like .gecko, .opera, and .ie to select particular browsers when using AnkiWeb. Please see http://rafael.adm.br/css_browser_selector/ for a full list of options.
940
941Installing Fonts
942If you’re using Anki on a work or school computer where you don’t have permission to install new fonts, or you’re using Anki on a mobile device, it’s possible to add fonts directly to Anki.
943
944To add a font to Anki, it must be in the TrueType format. TrueType fonts have a filename ending in .ttf, such as "Arial.ttf". Once you’ve located a TrueType font, we’ll need to add it to the media folder:
945
946Rename the file, adding an underscore at the start, so it becomes like "_arial.ttf". Adding an underscore will tell Anki that this file will be used on a template, and should not be deleted when checking for unused media.
947
948In your computer’s file browser, go to your Anki Folder, and then a folder called "User 1" (or your profile name if you’ve renamed/added profiles).
949
950Inside the folder, you should see a folder called collection.media. Drag the renamed file to that folder.
951
952After that, we need to update the template:
953
954Click Add at the top of the main screen, and then select the note type you want to change with the top left button.
955
956Click Cards.
957
958In the styling section, add the following text to the bottom (after the last "}" character), replacing "_arial.ttf" with the name of the file you copied into your media folder:
959
960@font-face { font-family: myfont; src: url('_arial.ttf'); }
961Note
962Only change the "arial" part, not the "myfont" part.
963After that, you can either change the font for the entire card, or for individual fields. To change the font for the entire card, simply locate the font-family: line in the .card section and change the font to "myfont". To change the font for only certain fields, please see the Field Styling instructions above.
964
965Note
966Please make sure the filenames match exactly. If the file is called arial.TTF and you write arial.ttf in your card templates, it will not work.
967Fonts on a Mac
968Embedded fonts currently do not work on OS X. It is still possible to use custom fonts, but they need to be installed system wide.
969
970To install a font on your system, please see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT2435?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US
971
972You can set up Anki to use the system font on a Mac computer, and an embedded font elsewhere.
973
974On your front or back template, wrap the field you want to style in the following code, replacing "FieldName" with the name of your field.
975
976<span class="mystyle">{{FieldName}}</span>
977In the styling section, in addition to the font-face line described above, add the following:
978
979.mystyle { font-family: myfont; }
980.mac .mystyle { font-family: Helvetica; }
981Replace "Helvetica" with the name of the font you installed on your system. Keep "myfont" as is, as it references the font you embedded.
982
983Javascript
984As Anki cards are treated like webpages, it is possible to embed some Javascript on your cards via inline script tags in the template (loading external files using src= is not supported). As this is an advanced feature, we can not guarantee any particular Javascript will work, and can not provide any assistance when things are not working. If in doubt, it’s best to avoid it.
985
986Each Anki client may implement card display differently, so you will need to test the behaviour across platforms. A number of clients are implemented by keeping a long running webpage and dynamically updating parts of it as cards are reviewed, so your Javascript will need to update sections of the document using things like document.getElementById() rather than doing things like document.write().
987
988Functions like window.alert are also not available. Anki will write javascript errors to the terminal, so if you’re running on a Mac or Windows computer, you’ll need to manually catch the errors and write them to the document to see them. There is no debugger available, so to figure out problems you’ll need to break down your code until you discover which parts are causing problems.
989
990Profiles & Preferences
991Profiles
992If more than one person wants to use Anki on your computer, you can set up a separate profile for each user. Each user profile has their own collection, and own program settings. Profiles are configured by going to the File menu and choosing "Switch Profile".
993
994Note
995Profiles are intended to be used by different people, and each AnkiWeb account can only keep one profile in sync. For dividing up your own content, you should use separate decks rather than separate profiles, except when using extra profiles for experimenting with changes you don’t plan to sync to other devices.
996It’s possible to assign a password to your profile by going to Anki’s preferences window. Your collection is not encrypted, and people can still tamper with the file if they locate it on your hard disk. The password protection is mainly intended to make it harder for students to tamper with each other’s decks and settings in a classroom environment.
997
998Preferences
999The preferences are available from the Tools menu on Windows/Linux, or the Anki menu on a Mac. If you have multiple profiles, any changes you make will apply only to the current profile.
1000
1001Basic
1002
1003The Strip HTML option controls whether Anki should strip the formatting from text you paste into the editor. By default, Anki strips the formatting from pasted text so that you can control formatting in your card templates instead. If you’d prefer the formatting to be preserved (so you can paste bolded text, etc), you can uncheck this option.
1004
1005By default Anki pastes images on the clipboard as JPG files, to save disk space. You can use the Paste clipboard images as PNG option to paste as PNG images instead. PNG images support transparent backgrounds and are lossless, but they usually result in much larger file sizes.
1006
1007The first drop-down box controls how note types and decks interact. The default of "When adding, default to current deck" means that Anki saves the last-used note type for each deck and selects it again then next time you choose the deck (and, in addition, will start with the current deck selected when choosing Add from anywhere). The other option, "Change deck depending on note type," saves the last-used deck for each note type (and opens the add window to the last-used note type when you choose Add). This may be more convenient if you always use a single note type for each deck.
1008
1009The second drop-down box controls when new cards are shown: either mixed with, before, or after all reviews.
1010
1011The Next day starts at option controls when Anki should start showing the next day’s cards. The default setting of 4AM ensures that if you’re studying around midnight, you won’t have two days' worth of cards shown to you in one session. If you stay up very late or wake up very early, you may want to adjust this to a time you’re usually sleeping.
1012
1013The Learn ahead limit tells Anki how to behave when there is nothing left to study in the current deck but cards in learning. The default setting of 20 minutes tells Anki that cards should be shown early if they have a delay of less than 20 minutes and there’s nothing else to do. If you set this to 0, Anki will always wait the full delay, showing the congratulations screen until the remaining cards are ready to be reviewed.
1014
1015Timeboxing is a technique to help you focus by dividing a longer activity (such as a 30 minute study session) into smaller blocks. If you set the timebox time limit to a non-zero number of minutes, Anki will periodically show you how many cards you’ve managed to study during the prescribed time limit.
1016
1017Deck Options
1018Deck options are accessed by selecting a deck on the Decks screen, and then clicking Options at the bottom of the screen.
1019
1020Anki allows you to share options between different decks, to make updating options in many decks at once easy. To do this, options are grouped into an options group. By default, all newly created decks use the same options group, and decks imported from previous versions of Anki have separate option groups. If you’d like to alter the settings on one deck but not other decks, click the gears icon in the top right and add a new options group.
1021
1022Please only change options that you fully understand, as inappropriate adjustments may render Anki less effective.
1023
1024Note
1025Options are not retroactive. For example, if you change an option that controls the delay after failing a card, cards that you failed prior to changing the option will have the old delay, not the new one.
1026New Cards
1027Steps controls the number of learning repetitions, and the delay between them. Please see the learning section for an overview of how the steps work.
1028
1029Steps over a day (1440 minutes) are supported as well - if you want, you can define a schedule like 10 minutes, 1 day, 3 days and then finally 7 days before the card becomes a review card.
1030
1031Note
1032If there’s nothing else to study, Anki will show cards up to 20 minutes early by default. The amount of time to look ahead is configurable in the preferences. One thing to be aware of is that the due counts will differ between the deck screen and study screens in this case. The deck screen will not count cards that are not ready, but the study screen will. This is done so that you can tell which decks need your attention.
1033Note
1034Anki treats small steps and steps that cross a day boundary differently. With small steps, the cards are shown as soon as the delay has passed, in preference to other waiting cards like reviews. This is done so that you can answer the card as closely to your requested delay as possible. In contrast, cards that cross a day boundary are scheduled on a per-day basis like reviews are. When you return to study the next day, the per-day learning cards will not be shown first, as that can make the first half of a review session frustratingly difficult. Instead, the cards will be shown after reviews are completed. They are included in the review count rather than the learning count, due to the way they are handled internally.
1035Order controls whether Anki should add new cards into the deck randomly, or in order. When you change this option, Anki will re-sort the decks using the current option group. One caveat with random order mode: if you review many of your new cards and then add more new cards, the newly added material is statistically more likely to appear than the previously remaining cards. To correct this, you can change the order to ordered mode and back again to force a re-sort.
1036
1037Note
1038When you select random order, Anki will randomize your notes, keeping the cards of a given note close together. The cards of a given note are shown in the order their card types appear in, so that siblings are introduced consistently - otherwise you could end up in a state where some notes had all their cards introduced and other notes had only one or two. Please see the "bury related" option below for more info.
1039New cards/day tells Anki how many new cards you’d like introduced on each day you open the program. Missed days will not cause the cards to pile up. The limit applies to the current deck and subdecks. This means if "French" has a limit of 20 cards and "French::Lesson 1" and "French::Lesson 2" both have limits of 15 cards, you’ll get 15 cards from lesson 1 but only 5 cards from lesson 2.
1040
1041Note
1042Studying new cards will temporarily increase the number of reviews you need to do a day, as freshly learnt material needs to be repeated a number of times before the delay between repetitions can increase appreciably. If you are consistently learning 20 new cards a day, you can expect your daily reviews to be roughly about 200 cards/day. You can decrease the reviews required by introducing fewer new cards each day, or by turning off new card display until your review burden decreases. More than one Anki user has excitedly studied hundreds of new cards over their first few days of using the program, and then become overwhelmed by the reviews required.
1043Graduating interval is the delay between answering Good on a card with no steps left, and seeing the card again.
1044
1045Easy interval is the delay between answering easy on a learning card and seeing it in review mode for the first time.
1046
1047Starting ease controls the easiness that cards start out with. It is set when a card graduates from learning for the first time. It defaults to 250%, meaning that once you’ve finished learning a card, answering "Good" on subsequent reviews will increase the delay by approximately 2.5x (eg if the last delay was 10 days, the next delay would be 25 days). Based upon how you rate the card in subsequent reviews, the easiness may increase or decrease from what it starts out as.
1048
1049Turning off bury related… will prevent Anki from burying siblings, and instead Anki will just try to avoid showing siblings directly after one another in the same session. For this to work, your new cards/day setting needs to be large enough for the cards of multiple notes to be included.
1050
1051Reviews
1052Maximum reviews/day allows you to set an upper limit on the number of reviews to show each day. When this limit is reached, Anki will not show any more review cards for the day, even if there are some waiting. If you study consistently, this setting can help to smooth out occasional peaks in due card counts, and can save you from a heart attack when returning to Anki after a week off. When reviews have been hidden due to this option, a message will appear in the congratulations screen, suggesting you consider increasing the limit if you have time.
1053
1054Easy bonus allows you to set the difference in intervals between answering Good and Easy on a card. For instance, with the default value of 130%, Easy will give an interval that is 1.3 times the Good interval.
1055
1056Interval modifier allows you to apply a multiplication factor to the intervals Anki generates. At its default of 100% it does nothing; if you set it to 80% for example, intervals will be generated at 80% of their normal size (so a 10 day interval would become 8 days). You can thus use the multiplier to make Anki present cards more or less frequently than it would otherwise, trading study time for retention or vice versa.
1057
1058For moderately difficult material, the average user should find they remember approximately 90% of mature cards that come up for review. You can find out your own performance by opening the graphs/statistics for a deck and looking at the Answer Buttons graph - mature retention is the correct% on the right side of the graph. If you haven’t been studying long you may not have any mature cards yet. As performance with new cards and younger cards can vary considerably, it’s a good idea to wait until you have a reasonable amount of mature reviews before you start drawing conclusions about your retention rate.
1059
1060On the SuperMemo website, they suggest that you can find an appropriate multiplier for a desired retention rate. Their formula boils down to:
1061
1062log(desired retention%) / log(current retention%)
1063Imagine we have a current retention rate of 85% and we want to increase it to 90%. We’d calculate the modifier as:
1064
1065log(90%) / log(85%) = 0.65
1066You can use Google to calculate it for you.
1067
1068If you plug the resulting 65% into the interval modifier, you should find over time that your retention moves closer to your desired retention.
1069
1070One important thing to note however is that the tradeoff between time spent studying and retention is not linear: we can see here that to increase our retention by 5 percentage points, we’d have to study 35% more frequently. If the material you are learning is very important then it may be worth the extra effort – that’s something you’ll need to decide for yourself. If you’re simply worried that you’re forgetting too much, you may find investing more time into the initial learning stage and/or making mnemonics gives you more gain for less effort.
1071
1072One final thing to note is that Anki forces a new interval to be at least 1 day longer than it was previously so that you don’t get stuck reviewing with the same interval forever. If your goal is to repeat a card once a day for multiple days, you can do that by setting more learning mode steps instead of by adjusting this modifier.
1073
1074Maximum interval allows you to place an upper limit on the time Anki will wait to reshow a card. The default is 100 years; you can decrease this to a smaller number if you’re willing to trade extra study time for higher retention.
1075
1076Turning off bury related… will prevent Anki from burying siblings, and instead Anki will just try to avoid showing siblings directly after one another in the same session.
1077
1078Note
1079Review cards are always shown in random order. If you wish to see them in a different order, you can use a filtered deck. More specifically, Anki randomizes reviews by grabbing batches of 50 cards in the order that they exist in the database, randomizing each batch, then putting them together. This means that there is a slight bias towards older cards being shown first, but it prevents individual cards from showing up in a predictable order.
1080Lapses
1081When you forget a review card, it is said to have lapsed. The default behaviour for lapsed reviews is to reset the interval to 1 (ie, make it due tomorrow), and put it in the learning queue for a refresher in 10 minutes. This behaviour can be customized with the options listed below.
1082
1083If you leave the steps blank, Anki will not place the card back in the learning queue, and it will be rescheduled as a review with its new interval determined by the settings below.
1084
1085Note
1086The new interval is determined when you answer "Again" to a review card, not when the card finishes its relearning steps. For this reason, the "Good" and "Easy" buttons during relearing do not alter the interval again - they only control which step you are on. If there is only a single step (the default), the "Easy" button will be hidden, since it would accomplish the same thing as the "Good" button. If you have 2 or more steps, "Easy" is not hidden, to allow you to graduate cards from the queue before all of their steps are finished.
1087New interval controls how much Anki should reduce the previous interval by. If the card had a 100 day interval, the default of 0% would reduce the interval to 0 (but see the next option). If you set this option to 20%, the card would have its interval reduced to 20 days instead.
1088
1089Minimum interval allows you to apply a minimum limit to the above option. The default setting says that lapses should be reviewed one day later. The interval must be 1 day or more.
1090
1091The leech options control the way Anki handles leeches. Please see the leech section for more information.
1092
1093General
1094Anki monitors how long it takes you to answer each question so that it can show you how long was spent studying each day. The time taken does not influence scheduling. If you take longer than 60 seconds, Anki assumes you have walked away from your computer or have been distracted, and limits the recorded time to 60 seconds, so that you don’t end up with inaccurate statistics. The ignore answer times… option allows you to adjust the cutoff threshold. The minimum cutoff is 30 seconds.
1095
1096If show answer timer is checked, Anki will display the current time taken for each card in the study area.
1097
1098By default, Anki automatically plays audio on the front and back of cards. If you uncheck automatically play audio, Anki will not play audio until you press the replay audio key, r or F5.
1099
1100The when answer shown, replay both question and answer audio option controls what happens when you choose to replay audio while the answer is shown. Please note that it does not control what happens when you show the answer; for that please see this section.
1101
1102Description
1103This section allows you to edit the deck description, which is shown in the study overview. The description is automatically set when downloading shared decks. You can delete all the text in the description if you no longer want to see it in the study overview area.
1104
1105You can also use HTML in the description—anything that works on a note should be valid.
1106
1107AnkiWeb and Synchronization
1108AnkiWeb is a service that allows you to keep your collection synchronized across multiple devices, and to study online. Please sign up for a free account before following the steps below.
1109
1110Setup
1111To start syncing your collection across devices, click the sync button (the top right one on the main screen), or press y on your keyboard. You’ll be prompted for your AnkiWeb ID and password, which you created in the signup process.
1112
1113When you synchronize your collection for the first time, Anki will ask you if you want to upload or download. If you have cards on your computer and your AnkiWeb account is empty, choose "upload" to send your data to AnkiWeb. If you have cards on AnkiWeb from another device, and no cards on your computer, choose "download" to replace the empty local collection with the cards that are on AnkiWeb. If you have different cards on both devices, more work is required to avoid losing data.
1114
1115Once the initial one way sync is completed, Anki will be able to merge changes from multiple locations with a few exceptions.
1116
1117Note
1118If you have multiple people using Anki on one machine and have created a profile for each user, each user will need to create their own AnkiWeb account to sync with. If you attempt to synchronize multiple profiles with a single AnkiWeb account, you will lose data.
1119Automatic Syncing
1120Once syncing is enabled, Anki will automatically sync each time your collection is closed or opened. If you would prefer to synchronize manually, you can disable automatic syncing in Anki’s preferences.
1121
1122Media
1123Anki will synchronize any sounds and images used by your notes. It will notice when media has been added or removed from your media folder, but will not notice if you have edited some existing files without adding or removing any. To get your edits noticed, you need to add or remove a file as well.
1124
1125Note
1126If you’re running Anki off a USB flash drive, you should use an NTFS file system, as Anki may not be able to detect media changes on a FAT32 filesystem.
1127Conflicts
1128Reviews and note edits can be merged, so if you review or edit on two different devices before syncing, Anki will preserve your changes from both locations. If the same card has been reviewed in two different locations, both reviews will be marked in the revision history, and the card will be kept in the state it was when it was most recently answered.
1129
1130There are certain changes that Anki is unable to merge. These mainly relate to the format of notes: things like adding a new field, or removing a card template. When you perform an operation that can’t be merged, Anki will warn you, and give you the option of aborting the operation. If you choose to continue, you’ll be asked to choose whether to keep the local copy or the copy on AnkiWeb when your collection is next synchronized.
1131
1132If you choose Upload to make the content on AnkiWeb a copy of the content on your local device, you then need to sync any other devices you use, and choose Download, so they too have the same content. Once all devices have the same content, future syncs will be able to merge again.
1133
1134If you wish to force a full upload or download (for example, because you accidentally deleted a deck on one side and want to restore the deck rather than having its deletion synchronized), you can check the "On next sync, force changes in one direction" box in Tools>Preferences>Network, then sync as usual. (You’ll be given the option to choose which side you want to use.)
1135
1136Merging Conflicts
1137Because the first sync can only sync changes in one direction, if you have added different content to different devices or profiles before setting syncing up, content on one device will be lost if you overwrite it with the content from the other device. With some work, it is possible to manually merge data into a single collection.
1138
1139Start by taking a backup on each device/profile, in case something goes wrong. With the computer version you can use File>Export to export "all decks" with scheduling information and media files included, and save the file somewhere safe. In AnkiMobile, the Add/Export button on the decks list screen will let you export all decks with media.
1140
1141Next, if one of your devices is a mobile device, synchronize it first. If there’s a conflict, choose "upload" to overwrite any existing data on AnkiWeb with the data from your mobile device. If both devices/profiles are on your computer, synchronize the device/profile with the most number of decks first.
1142
1143Now return to the other device/profile. If automatic syncing is enabled, a message may pop up asking if you want to upload or download. Click the cancel button - we don’t want to sync yet.
1144
1145Once you’re looking at the deck list, click the cog icon next to the first deck, and choose "export". Export the content with scheduling information and media included, and save the .apkg file somewhere. Now you’ll need to repeat this for each top-level deck.
1146
1147Once all top-level decks have been exported, click the sync button at the top right, and choose "download", which will overwrite the local content with the content you synced from your other device.
1148
1149You can now use File>Import to import the .apkg files you exported earlier, which will merge the exported content with the existing content, so everything will be in one place.
1150
1151Firewalls
1152Anki needs to be able to make outbound HTTPS connections to sync. At a minimum it must be able to connect to ankiweb.net, sync.ankiweb.net and msync.ankiweb.net. These domains may change over time, and the IP addresses they point to may also change, so we recommend you allow wildcard access to *.ankiweb.net to reduce the chance of the firewall rules needing to be updated in the future.
1153
1154If you have a firewall on your machine, you should add an exception for Anki. If you are on a work or school network, please contact your network administrator for assistance - it is not something we can help you with.
1155
1156Proxies
1157If you need a proxy to access the internet, Anki should automatically pick up your system proxy settings if you’re on Windows or OS X, and will honour the HTTP_PROXY environment variable if you’re on another platform.
1158
1159Please note that advanced proxy setup via .pac or .wpad files is not supported in Anki.
1160
1161To override the system proxy settings on Windows or OS X, define a HTTP_PROXY environmental variable that points to the proxy server. It will look like:
1162
1163http://user:[email protected]:8080
1164If your username or password contains an @ (eg [email protected]), you need to change it to %40, like so:
1165
1166http://user%40workdomain.com:[email protected]:8080
1167To set environmental variables on Windows, please see https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/all/proddocs/en-us/sysdm_advancd_environmnt_addchange_variable.mspx?mfr=true
1168
1169If you’re on a Mac, please see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/135688/setting-environment-variables-in-os-x
1170
1171Note
1172The toolkit Anki is built on is unfortunately not currently able to pick up your proxy username and password from your system settings. This means that if you use a proxy that requires authentication, syncing will fail. In this case, you will need to use an environmental variable that defines your proxy details as described above, or use a personal proxy server that you route traffic through, which in turn connects to the upstream proxy that requires authentication.
1173Note
1174Heavily locked down networks that intercept secure connections and present their own certificate instead may cause Anki to throw up SSL errors. We do not support using Anki in such environments.
1175Browser
1176The browser (which has nothing to do with web browsers such as Mozilla Firefox) allows you to search through your cards and notes and edit them. It is opened by clicking on Browse in the main window, or by pressing b on your keyboard. It is comprised of three sections: the sidebar on the left, the card list on the top right, and the current note on the bottom right. By positioning the mouse between two sections, it is possible to click and drag to expand one section and shrink another.
1177
1178Sidebar
1179The sidebar on the left allows quick access to common search terms. Various search terms as described below are listed, along with all deck names and tag names. Clicking on an item will search for it.
1180
1181You can hold down Ctrl (command on a Mac) and click in order to append the clicked item to the current search with an AND condition, instead of starting a new search. If you wanted to show learning cards that were also in the German deck for instance, you could click on "Learning", then ctrl+click on "German".
1182
1183You can hold down Shift to create an OR search instead of an AND. For example, you could click one deck, then shift-click another to show cards from either of the decks in the same view.
1184
1185You can hold down Alt (option on a Mac) in order to reverse the search (prepend a -) – for instance, to show all cards in a current deck that do not have a certain tag. Alt/option can be combined with either Ctrl or Shift (e.g., Ctrl-Alt-clicking will result in adding a new search term that is negated).
1186
1187To remove tags that are not used by any notes, use Tools>Check Database from the main window.
1188
1189Searching
1190Above the card list is a search box. You can type in various things there to search for cards. (If you’d rather select what you’re looking for in a list, please take a look at the sidebar section above.)
1191
1192Simple searches
1193When you type some text into the search box, Anki finds matching notes and displays their cards. Anki searches in all fields of the notes, but does not search for tags (see later in this section for how to search for tags). Some examples:
1194
1195dog
1196search for "dog" - will match words like "doggy" and "underdog" too
1197
1198dog cat
1199finds notes with both "dog" and "cat", such as "a dog and cat"
1200
1201dog or cat
1202finds notes with either "dog" or "cat"
1203
1204dog (cat or mouse)
1205finds notes with dog and cat, or dog and mouse
1206
1207-cat
1208finds notes without the word "cat".
1209
1210-cat -mouse
1211finds notes with neither "cat" nor "mouse".
1212
1213-(cat or mouse)
1214same as the above.
1215
1216"a dog"
1217finds notes with the exact phrase "a dog" on them
1218
1219-"a dog"
1220finds notes without the exact phrase "a dog"
1221
1222d_g
1223finds notes with d, <a letter>, g, like dog, dig, dug, and so on.
1224
1225d*g
1226finds notes with d, <zero or more letters>, g, like dg, dog, dung, etc.
1227
1228Things to note from the above:
1229
1230Search terms are separated by spaces.
1231
1232When multiple search terms are provided, Anki looks for notes that match all of the terms.
1233
1234You can use "or" if you only need one of the terms to match.
1235
1236You can prepend a minus sign to a term to find notes that don’t match.
1237
1238If you want to search for something including a space or parenthesis, enclose it in quotes.
1239
1240You can group search terms by placing them in parentheses, as in the dog (cat or mouse) example. This becomes important when combining OR and AND searches — in the example, with the parentheses, it matches either dog cat or dog mouse, whereas without them it would match either dog and cat or mouse.
1241
1242Anki is only able to search within formatting in the sort field you’ve configured. For example, if you add "example" to one of your fields, this will not be matched when searching for "example" unless that field is the sort field. If a word is not formatted, or the formatting does not change in the middle of the word, then Anki will be able to find it in any field.
1243
1244Limiting to a field
1245You can also ask Anki to match only if a particular field contains some text. Unlike the searches above, searching on fields requires an exact match by default.
1246
1247front:dog
1248find notes with a Front field of exactly "dog". A field that says "a dog" will not match.
1249
1250front:*dog*
1251find notes with Front field containing dog somewhere
1252
1253front:
1254find notes that have an empty Front field
1255
1256front:_*
1257find notes that have a non-empty Front field
1258
1259front:*
1260find notes that have a Front field, empty or not
1261
1262Tags, decks, cards and notes
1263tag:animal
1264find notes with the tag "animal"
1265
1266tag:none
1267find notes with no tags
1268
1269tag:ani*
1270find notes with tags starting with ani
1271
1272deck:french
1273find cards in a French deck, or subdecks like French::Vocab
1274
1275deck:french -deck:french::*
1276find cards in French, but not subdecks
1277
1278deck:"french vocab"
1279searching when a deck has a space
1280
1281"deck:french vocab"
1282also ok
1283
1284deck:filtered
1285filtered decks only
1286
1287-deck:filtered
1288normal decks only
1289
1290card:forward
1291search for Forward cards
1292
1293card:1
1294search for cards by template number - eg, to find the second cloze deletion for a note, you’d use card:2
1295
1296note:basic
1297search for cards with a Basic note type
1298
1299Card state
1300is:due
1301review cards and learning cards waiting to be studied
1302
1303is:new
1304new cards
1305
1306is:learn
1307cards in learning
1308
1309is:review
1310reviews (both due and not due) and lapsed cards
1311
1312is:suspended
1313cards that have been manually suspended
1314
1315is:buried
1316cards that have been buried, either automatically or manually
1317
1318Cards that have lapsed fall into several of these categories, so it may be useful to combine them to get more precise results:
1319
1320is:learn is:review
1321cards that have lapsed and are awaiting relearning
1322
1323-is:learn is:review
1324review cards, not including lapsed cards
1325
1326is:learn -is:review
1327cards that are in learning for the first time
1328
1329Card properties
1330prop:ivl>=10
1331cards with interval of 10 days or more
1332
1333prop:due=1
1334cards due tomorrow
1335
1336prop:due=-1
1337cards due yesterday that haven’t been answered yet
1338
1339prop:due>-1 prop:due<1
1340cards due between yesterday and tomorrow
1341
1342prop:reps<10
1343cards that have been answered less than 10 times
1344
1345prop:lapses>3
1346cards that have moved into relearning more than 3 times
1347
1348prop:ease!=2.5
1349cards easier or harder than default
1350
1351Note that due only matches review cards and learning cards with an interval of a day or more: cards in learning with small intervals like 10 minutes are not included.
1352
1353Recently added
1354added:1
1355cards added today
1356
1357added:7
1358cards added in last week
1359
1360The check is made against card creation time rather than note creation time, so cards that were generated within the time frame will be included even if their notes were added a long time ago.
1361
1362Recently answered
1363rated:1
1364cards answered today
1365
1366rated:1:2
1367cards answered Hard (2) today
1368
1369rated:7:1
1370cards answered Again (1) over the last 7 days
1371
1372rated:31:4
1373cards answered Easy (4) in the last month
1374
1375For speed, rating searches are limited to 31 days.
1376
1377Object IDs
1378nid:123
1379all cards of the note with note id 123
1380
1381cid:123
1382the card with card id 123
1383
1384mid:123
1385find note types with note type id 123
1386
1387Note and card IDs can be found in the card info dialog in the browser. Note type IDs can be found by clicking on a note type in the Browse screen. These searches may also be helpful when doing add-on development or otherwise working closely with the database.
1388
1389Note
1390Object IDs will not work in the mobile clients, and are not intended to be used in filtered decks at the moment.
1391Card List
1392The card list displays cards that match the current search.
1393
1394The columns are configurable: right click on one (or ctrl+click on a Mac) to choose which columns you’d like to see. You can drag columns to reorder them. Clicking on a column will sort by that column; click again to reverse the sort order. Not all columns can be sorted on.
1395
1396Note
1397The due column behaves differently for different types of cards. New cards show a number rather than a due date, which indicates the order the new cards will be presented in. Cards in (re)learning and reviews will both show a due date, but when sorting they are first grouped by type and then sorted by date.
1398Note
1399The "edited" and "changed" columns sound the same but track different things. "Edited" tracks the last time changes were made to the note (e.g., when the content of a field was edited), while "changed" tracks the last time changes were made to the card (e.g., when you reviewed the card and the review history and interval were updated).
1400When you click on a card, its note will be shown in the bottom section. If you drag the mouse or hold ctrl or command to select multiple cards, the editor will be temporarily hidden. Various operations (such as changing the deck) can operate on multiple cards at once.
1401
1402The background colour will change depending on the card. Marked cards are a shade of purple. Suspended cards are a shade of yellow. For more information about marked and suspended cards, please see editing and more.
1403
1404One of the available columns is called the sort field. Anki allows you to choose one field from each type of note to be used for sorting. You can change the sort field by clicking on "Fields…" in the current note section.
1405
1406The question and answer columns display what you’d see on the question and answer while reviewing, except the answer column will strip the question part for clarity. You can also choose a custom format in the card type editor instead of showing what would be seen during review.
1407
1408Current Note
1409The bottom right area displays the currently selected card’s note. For more information about cards and notes, please see the basics. For more information on formatting buttons, please see editing.
1410
1411You can see a preview of what the currently selected card would look like when reviewing by clicking the "preview" button next to the search box. Note that this will not display any type answer fields on your cards, which makes it easier to preview cards quickly.
1412
1413Toolbar
1414Up the top of the browser window is the toolbar.
1415
1416Info shows various information about the currently selected card, including its review history. For more information, see the statistics section.
1417
1418Mark and Suspend are documented in editing and more.
1419
1420Change Deck allows you to move cards to a different deck. Cards can be placed in different decks, so if you want to move all cards in a note, you should first use Edit > Select Notes.
1421
1422Add Tags and Remove Tags allow you to add or remove tags from notes in bulk. To remove unused tags from the list on the left, use Tools>Check Database from the main window.
1423
1424Delete removes the selected card(s) and their notes. It is not possible to remove individual cards, as individual cards are controlled by the templates.
1425
1426Find and Replace
1427This option (Edit→Find and Replace…) allows you to replace text in the notes you have selected. The regular expression option allows you to perform complex replacements. For example, given the following text in a field:
1428
1429<img src="pic.jpg" />
1430Searching for:
1431
1432<img src="(.+?)" />
1433And replacing with the regexp:
1434
1435\1
1436Will change the card to:
1437
1438pic.jpg
1439A full discussion on regular expressions is outside the scope of this document. There are a number of tutorials available on the web. Please see http://docs.python.org/library/re.html for the particular format Anki uses.
1440
1441Finding Duplicates
1442You can use the Edit>Find Duplicates option to search for notes that have the same content. When you open the window, Anki will look at all of your note types and present a list of all possible fields. If you want to look for duplicates in the "Back" field, you’d select it from the list and then click "Search".
1443
1444Unlike the check that happens when you add cards manually, the duplicate finding feature is not limited to a single note type. This means that by default, it will search in all note types that have the field you provided.
1445
1446The optional limit text box allows you to narrow down where Anki will look for duplicates. If you only want to search for duplicates in the "French Vocab" and "French Verbs" note types, you would enter:
1447
1448note:'french vocab' or note:'french verbs'
1449Or you might want to look only for duplicates in a particular deck, so you could use:
1450
1451deck:'myDeck'
1452The search syntax is the same as used when searching in the browser. Please see the searching section for more information.
1453
1454You can click one of the links in the search results list to display the duplicate notes in that set. If the search brings up a large number of duplicates, you may wish to instead click the Tag Duplicates button, which will tag all matching notes with "duplicate." You can then search for this tag in the browser and handle them all from the same screen.
1455
1456Other Menu Items
1457Some other items in the Edit menu:
1458
1459Reschedule allows you to move cards to the end of the new card queue, or reschedule them as a review card on a given date. The second option is useful if you have imported already-learnt material, and you want to start it off with higher initial intervals. For example, choosing 60 and 90 will give all the imported cards an initial interval of 2 to 3 months.
1460
1461The card’s revision history is not cleared when rescheduling: rescheduling changes the current state of a card, but not its history. If you want to hide the history, you will need to export your notes as a text file, delete the notes, and then import the text file again, creating new notes.
1462
1463Reposition allows you to change the order new cards will appear in. You can find out the existing positions by enabling the due column, as described in the card list section above. If you run the reposition command when multiple cards are selected, it will apply increasing numbers to each card in turn. By default the number increases by one for each card, but this can be adjusted by changing the "step" setting. The Shift position of existing cards option allows you to insert cards between currently existing ones, pushing the currently existing ones apart. For instance, if you have five cards and you want to move 3, 4, and 5 between 1 and 2, selecting this setting would cause the cards to end up in the order 1, 3, 4, 5, 2. By contrast, if you turn this option off, 2 and 3 will get the same position number (and it will thus be random which one comes up first).
1464
1465Change Note Type allows you to convert the selected notes from one type to another. For example, imagine you have a Russian note type and a Computer note type, and you accidentally added some computer-related text into a Russian note. You can use this option to fix that mistake. The scheduling of cards is not affected.
1466
1467Select Notes takes the currently selected cards, finds their notes, and then selects all cards of those notes. If your notes have only one card, this does nothing.
1468
1469The Go menu exists to provide keyboard shortcuts to jump to various parts of the browser, and to go up and down the card list.
1470
1471Filtered Decks & Cramming
1472When you study a regular deck in Anki, only a limited number of cards are shown: the cards Anki thinks you’re about to forget, and a daily limit of new cards. This is generally useful, as it ensures you don’t spend more time studying than necessary. But sometimes it can be useful to step outside of these normal limits, such as when you need to revise for a test, focus on particular material, and so on. To make this possible, Anki provides a different type of deck called a filtered deck.
1473
1474Filtered decks offer a lot of possibilities. They can be used for previewing cards, cramming cards before a test, studying particular tags, catching up on a backlog with a particular sort order, reviewing ahead of schedule, going over the day’s failed cards, and more.
1475
1476Custom Study
1477The easiest way to create a filtered deck is with the Custom Study button, which appears at the bottom of the screen when you click on a deck. It offers some convenient presets for common tasks like reviewing the cards you’ve failed that day. It will create a filtered deck called "Custom Study Session" and automatically open it for you.
1478
1479If an existing "Custom Study Session" deck exists, it will be emptied before a new one is created. If you wish to keep a custom study deck, you can rename it from the deck list.
1480
1481Here is a summary of each of the options:
1482
1483Increase today’s new card limit
1484Add more new cards to the deck you are currently studying. Note that unlike other options, this does not create a new filtered deck, it modifies the existing deck.
1485
1486Increase today’s review card limit
1487If not all reviews due today were shown due to the daily review limit, this option allows you to show more of them. Like with the new cards option, this modifies the existing deck.
1488
1489Review forgotten cards
1490Show all cards that you’ve answered Again (1) to within a number of days you specify.
1491
1492Review ahead
1493Show cards that will be due in the near future (a number of days you specify). This is useful for working through some of your older cards before a vacation, but it will not help with cards you have learnt recently. Please see the reviewing ahead section below for more info.
1494
1495Preview new cards
1496Show cards that you have recently added, without converting them to review cards as they are answered.
1497
1498Study by card state or tag
1499Select a certain number of cards from the current deck to study. You can choose to select new cards only, due cards only, or all cards; after you click "Choose Tags", you can also limit the selected cards by tags. If you wish to see all the cards in the deck (for instance, to study before a big test), you can set the number of cards to more than the number of cards in the deck.
1500
1501Home Decks
1502When a card is moved to a filtered deck, it retains a link to the deck it was in previously. That previous deck is said to be the card’s home deck.
1503
1504Cards automatically return to their home deck after they are studied in the filtered deck. This can be after a single review, or after multiple reviews, depending on your settings.
1505
1506It is also possible to move all cards back to their home decks at once:
1507
1508The "Empty" button in the study overview moves all cards in the filtered deck back to their home deck, but does not delete the empty filtered deck. This can be useful if you want to fill it again later (using the Rebuild button).
1509
1510Deleting a filtered deck does the same thing as "Empty" does, but also removes the emptied deck from the deck list. No cards are deleted when you delete a filtered deck.
1511
1512Note
1513In the current implementation, if you create, rebuild, empty or delete a filtered deck while cards are still in learning, they will be turned back into new cards. In the case of failed reviews in relearning, any remaining relearning steps will be skipped.
1514Creating Manually
1515Advanced users can create filtered decks with arbitrary search strings, instead of relying on set presets. To create a filtered deck manually, choose Create Filtered Deck from the Tools menu.
1516
1517When you click the Build button, Anki finds cards that match the settings you specified, and temporarily moves them from their existing decks into your new filtered deck for study.
1518
1519If you wish to fetch cards again using the same filter options (for instance, if you want to study all cards with a particular tag every day), you can use the Rebuild button at the bottom of the deck’s overview screen.
1520
1521The search area controls what cards Anki will gather. All of the searches possible in the browser are also possible for filtered decks, such as limiting to tags, finding cards forgotten a certain number of times, and so on. Please see the searching section of the manual for more information on the different possibilities.
1522
1523Note
1524Filtered decks can not include cards that are suspended, buried, or already in a different filtered deck. For this reason, a search in the browser may reveal cards that don’t end up in the filtered deck.
1525The limit option controls how many cards will be gathered into the deck. The order you select controls both the order cards are gathered in, and the order they will be reviewed in. If you select "most lapses" and a limit of 20 for example, then Anki will show you only the 20 most lapsed cards.
1526
1527For efficiency reasons, if your cram deck contains more than 1000 cards, only 1000 cards will be shown as due on the deck list and study screens.
1528
1529Order
1530The "cards selected by" option controls the order that cards will appear in. If the maximum number of cards you select is lower than the number of cards that match the filter criteria, Anki will exclude the cards at the end of this sorted list first.
1531
1532Oldest seen first
1533Display cards that you haven’t seen in reviews for the longest time first.
1534
1535Random
1536Randomize the order of all cards that match the filter criteria (use no set order).
1537
1538Increasing intervals
1539Display cards that have the smallest interval first.
1540
1541Decreasing intervals
1542Display cards that have the largest interval first.
1543
1544Most lapses
1545Display cards that you have failed the most times first.
1546
1547Order added
1548Display cards that you added first (have the earliest creation date) first.
1549
1550Order due
1551Display cards with the earliest due date first.
1552
1553Latest added first
1554Display cards that you’ve most recently added to the deck first. (This is the opposite of Order added.)
1555
1556Relative overdueness
1557Display cards that are most overdue in relation to their current interval first (for instance, a card with a current interval of 5 days overdue by 2 days displays before a card with a current interval of 5 years overdue by a week). This is useful if you have a large backlog that may take some time to get through and want to review the cards you’re most in danger of forgetting first.
1558
1559Steps & Returning
1560Please see the section on learning as a reminder of how steps work.
1561
1562By default, Anki will use the steps of a card’s home deck. If a new card would normally be reviewed twice when being learnt, the same thing will happen when you study it in a filtered deck.
1563
1564Cards return to their home deck when (re)learning is complete. Thus if you have 3 learning steps, a new card will return to its home deck upon three presses of "Good" or a single press of "Easy".
1565
1566The custom steps option allows you to override the home deck’s steps and provide your own steps instead. The provided steps apply to both cards being learnt, lapsed reviews, and reviews ahead of time.
1567
1568Counts
1569In a filtered deck, reviews that were already due are displayed in the review count as normal. Learning cards and non-due reviews are counted in the new card count, due to how the underlying implementation works. Reviews that were not due are not scheduled like new cards however - Anki uses a special algorithm that takes into account how close they were to their normal due time when reviewed.
1570
1571Due Reviews
1572If the filtered deck includes cards that were due for review, they will be shown like they would have been in their original deck - they appear in the review card count at the bottom of the screen, and there are four choices for how well you remembered. Upon a correct answer, the card will be moved back to its home deck, and its next delay adjusted using the home deck’s settings. If you forget the card, it will be shown according to the relearning steps defined in the home deck.
1573
1574Reviewing Ahead
1575If your search included cards that are not due, Anki will show the reviews ahead of time.
1576
1577Anki uses a special algorithm for these reviews that takes into account how early you are reviewing. If the cards were almost due to be shown, they will be given a new delay similar to what they would have received if you had reviewed them on time. If the cards are reviewed soon after they were scheduled however, their new delay will be similar to their previous delay. This calculation works on a sliding scale.
1578
1579Note
1580Because reviewing a card shortly after it is scheduled has little impact on scheduling (eg, a card due tomorrow with a one day interval will remain due tomorrow if reviewed early), the "review ahead" custom study setting is not appropriate for repeated use. If used to go through a week’s worth of cards before a trip, the mature cards will be rescheduled into the future and the new cards will remain at small intervals, because you don’t know them well enough for them to be rescheduled further. If you review ahead again the next day, all you’ll end up doing is going through those same new cards again, to little benefit.
1581Early reviews are included in the new card count rather than the review count, and will be shown according to the number of relearning steps defined in the home deck (unless you have provided custom steps). This means that if you have customized the number of relearning steps in the home deck, the non-due card may be shown more than once.
1582
1583If you have multiple steps, Anki will only consider the first answer when deciding the next delay, and like relearning in normal decks, "Good" and "Easy" differ only in the step change and not the resulting delay.
1584
1585Rescheduling
1586By default, Anki will return cards to their home decks with altered scheduling based on your performance in the filtered deck. If you disable the reschedule cards based on my answers option, Anki will return the cards in the same state they were in when they were moved into the filtered deck. This is useful for quickly flipping through material.
1587
1588If you have disabled rescheduling, the "Good" and "Easy" buttons will display no time above them when pressing them would cause the card to return to its home deck with its original scheduling.
1589
1590Please note that new cards are returned to the end of the new card queue, rather than the start of it.
1591
1592Catching Up
1593Filtered decks can be useful for catching up when you’ve fallen behind in your reviews. One Anki user describes the way they use the filtered decks to catch up as follows:
1594
1595I did this for a backlog of 800 cards with filtered subdecks. Worked very well for me.
1596
1597Just Due filter with: "is:due prop:due>-7"
1598Over Due filter with: "is:due prop:due<=-7"
1599The Just Due deck will then contain cards that became due in the past week. That's the deck you should study every day as it gets the cards that become due regularly. With this you can study as if there wasn't any backlog.
1600
1601The Over Due deck will contain your backlog, cards which you didn't study in time. You can study them the same way you would study new cards. They go back into the regular cards, so the number of overdue will never grow as long as you keep your Just Due deck in check.
1602
1603How long it takes depends on how many overdue cards you study each day in addition to the ones that become due regularly. You can still motor through them when you feel like it - or you can do a specific number per day like you would for new cards. Up to you.
1604
1605Leeches
1606Leeches are cards that you keep on forgetting. Because they require so many reviews, they take up a lot more of your time than other cards.
1607
1608Anki can help you identify leeches. Each time a review card lapses (is failed while it is review mode), a counter is increased. When that counter reaches 8, the note is tagged as a leech, and the card is suspended. The threshold, and whether to suspend or not, can be adjusted in the deck options.
1609
1610Anki will continue to issue leech warnings periodically for a difficult card. The warning interval is half the initial leech threshold. That is, if you have Anki configured to warn at 8 lapses, future warnings will happen every 4 lapses. (12, 16, etc)
1611
1612Once a leech is found, there are a number of ways you can handle it.
1613
1614Waiting
1615Some leeches are caused by interference. For example, an English learner may have recently learnt the words "disappoint" and "disappear". As they look similar, the learner may find themselves confusing the two when trying to answer. In these situations, it’s often productive to concentrate on just one idea. When that idea is firmly ingrained in your mind, you can then return to learning the other idea. So in these situations, you may want to leave one of the words suspended until you have learnt the other one well, and then unsuspend it in the browser.
1616
1617Deleting
1618Another way to manage leeches is to delete them. Consider if the material you’re struggling with is important enough to make it worth your while. By selectively deleting difficult and obscure items, you can dedicate more time to learning other material, and studying becomes a lot more fun.
1619
1620Editing
1621Another approach is to change the way the information is presented. Perhaps the cards you have created have too much information on them, or perhaps you’re trying to memorize something without fully understanding it. Sometimes spending some time changing the way the card is phrased can help. It’s also a good time to think about making a mnemonic to help you remember.
1622
1623Importing
1624Anki can import text files, packaged Anki decks created by the export feature, Mnemosyne 2.0 .db files, and SuperMemo .xml files. To import a file, click the File menu and then "Import".
1625
1626Importing text files
1627Any plain text file that contains fields separated by commas, semicolons or tabs can be imported into Anki, provided some conditions are met.
1628
1629The files must be plain text (myfile.txt). Other formats like myfile.xls, myfile.rtf, myfile.doc must be saved as a plain text file first.
1630
1631The files must be in UTF-8 format (see below).
1632
1633Anki determines the number of fields in the file by looking at the first (non-commented) line. Any lines in the file which have a different number of fields will be ignored.
1634
1635The first line also defines the separating character – if Anki finds a ; on the first line it will use that, if it finds a comma it’ll use that, etc.
1636
1637Fields in your text file can be mapped to any field in your notes, including the tags field. You can choose which field in the text file corresponds to which field in the note when you import.
1638
1639When you import a text file, you can choose what deck to put the cards in. Keep in mind that if you have the deck override option set for one or more of your templates, the cards will go to that deck rather than the one you’ve selected.
1640
1641This is an example of a valid file:
1642
1643foo bar; bar baz; baz quux
1644apple; banana; grape
1645There are two ways to include newlines in fields.
1646
1647Escape the multi-lines by placing the contents of the field in quotation marks:
1648
1649hello; "this is
1650a two line answer"
1651two; this is a one line one
1652Because quotes are used to mark where a field begins and ends, if you wish to include them inside your field, you need to replace a single doublequote with two doublequotes to "escape" them from the regular handling, like so:
1653
1654field one;"field two with ""escaped quotes"" inside it"
1655When you use a spreadsheet program like Libreoffice to create the CSV file for you, it will automatically take care of escaping double quotes.
1656
1657Use HTML new lines:
1658
1659hello; this is<br>a two line answer
1660two; this is a one line one
1661You need to turn on the "allow HTML in fields" checkbox in the import dialog for HTML newlines to work.
1662
1663Note
1664Escaped multi-lines will not work correctly if you are using cloze deletions that span multiple lines. In this case, please use HTML newlines instead.
1665You can also include tags in another field and select it as a tags field in the import dialog:
1666
1667first field; second field; tags
1668This is an example of a valid file where the first line is ignored (#):
1669
1670# this is a comment and is ignored
1671foo bar; bar baz; baz quux
1672field1; field2; field3
1673Spreadsheets and UTF-8
1674If you have non-Latin characters in your file (such as accents, Japanese and so on), Anki expects files to be saved in a UTF-8 encoding. The easiest way to do this is to use the free LibreOffice spreadsheet program instead of Excel to edit your file, as it supports UTF-8 easily, and also exports multi-line content properly, unlike Excel. If you wish to keep using Excel, please see this forum post for more information.
1675
1676To save your spreadsheet to a file Anki can read with LibreOffice, go to File>Save As, and then select CSV for the type of file. After accepting the default options, LibreOffice will save the file and you can then import the saved file into Anki.
1677
1678HTML
1679Anki can treat text imported from text files as HTML (the language used for web pages). This means that text with bold, italics and other formatting can be exported to a text file and imported again. If you want to include HTML formatting, you can check the "allow HTML in fields" checkbox when importing. You may wish to turn this off if you’re trying to import cards whose content contains angle brackets or other HTML syntax.
1680
1681If you wish to use HTML for formatting your file but also wish to include angle brackets, you may write them differently:
1682
1683For "<", use "&lt;"
1684
1685For ">", use "&gt;"
1686
1687Importing Media
1688If you want to include audio and pictures from a text file import, copy the files into the collection.media folder. Do not put subdirectories in the media folder, or some features will not work.
1689
1690After you’ve copied the files, change one of the fields in your text file as follows.
1691
1692<img src="myimage.jpg">
1693or
1694
1695[sound:myaudio.mp3]
1696Alternatively, you can use the find & replace feature to update all the fields at once. If each field contains text like "myaudio", and you wish to make it play a sound, you’d search for (.*) and replace it with "[sound:\1.mp3]", with the regular expressions option enabled.
1697
1698Note
1699When importing a text file with these references, you must make sure to enable the "Allow HTML" option.
1700You might be tempted to do this in a template, like:
1701
1702<img src="{{field name}}">
1703Anki doesn’t support this for two reasons: searching for used media is expensive, as each card has to be rendered, and such functionality isn’t obvious to shared deck users. Please use the find & replace technique instead.
1704
1705Bulk media imports
1706Another option for importing large amounts of media at once is to use the media import add-on. This add-on will automatically create notes for all files in a folder you select, with the filenames on the front (minus the file extension, so if you have a file named apple.jpg, the front would say apple) and the images or audio on the back. If you would like a different arrangement of media and filenames, you can change the note type of the created cards afterwards.
1707
1708Adding Tags
1709If you want to add tag1 and tag2 to every line you’re importing, add the following to the top of the text file:
1710
1711tags:tag1 tag2
1712Duplicates and Updating
1713When importing text files, Anki uses the first field to determine if a note is unique. By default, if the file you are importing has a first field that matches one of the existing notes in your collection and that existing note is the same type as the type you’re importing, the existing note’s other fields will be updated based on content of the imported file. A drop-down box in the import screen allows you to change this behaviour, to either ignore duplicates completely, or import them as new notes instead of updating existing ones.
1714
1715Note
1716The duplicate check is done for your entire collection, not just in the current deck. If Anki is indicating that notes have not changed when you expected them to be imported, please check that the notes are not already in your collection somewhere.
1717If you have updating turned on and older versions of the notes you’re importing are already in your collection, they will be updated in place (in their current decks) rather than being moved to the deck you have set in the import dialog. If notes are updated in place, the existing scheduling information on all their cards will be preserved.
1718
1719For info on how duplicates are handled in .apkg files, please see the Deck Packages section below.
1720
1721Exporting
1722Exporting allows you to save part of your collection as a text file or packaged Anki deck. To export, click the File menu and choose Export.
1723
1724Exporting Text
1725If you choose "Notes in Plain Text", Anki will write the contents of the notes into a text file. Each field is separated by a tab. If you edit the resulting file and don’t modify the first field, you can later import that file back into Anki and Anki will update your notes based on your edits, provided you import back into the same note type.
1726
1727If you find yourself needing to edit the first field as well, you’ll need to change the format of your note type so that the first field is an ID number rather than actual text. (You can install the "Add note id" plugin to make this easier.)
1728
1729In order for formatting to be preserved when you import text back in, the text is exported with all the HTML formatting embedded in it.
1730
1731Exporting Packaged Decks
1732A packaged deck consists of cards, notes, note types and any sounds or images bundled up into a file ending with .apkg. You can use packaged decks to transfer cards between people, or for backing up parts of your collection. A packaged deck is compressed, so it will be smaller than the sum of the files in your profile folder.
1733
1734There are two different kinds of packaged decks.
1735
1736Collection Package
1737When you export all decks with scheduling included, this is called a collection package. Anki will copy your entire collection into a file called "collection.apkg", and place it on your desktop. A collection package is used to back up your collection, or copy it to another device.
1738
1739When this file is later imported, Anki will delete all the current cards in the collection, and replace the collection with the items in the collection.apkg file. This is useful for copying your collection back and forth between devices.
1740
1741Note
1742Existing media in your collection is not deleted when you import a collection.apkg. To delete unused media, use Tools>Check Media.
1743Note
1744Anki’s automatic backups are also collection packages. Simply double click on one to restore your collection to that backup.
1745Deck Package
1746Deck packages contain a single deck (and any child decks it may have). They have a filename ending with .apkg, but a filename other than collection.apkg. When you import a deck package, Anki will add the contents into your collection, rather than overwriting your collection.
1747
1748If some notes in the deck package have previously been imported, Anki will keep the version with the most recent modification time. So if you download an updated deck, the edits that have been made in the updated version will be made in your collection as well, but if you re-import an unchanged deck after making edits in your collection, the changes in your collection will be kept.
1749
1750If you choose not to include scheduling information, Anki will assume that you are sharing the deck with other people, and will remove marked and leech tags so that they will have a clean copy of it.
1751
1752Managing Files and Your Collection
1753Checking Your Collection
1754It’s a good idea to occasionally check your collection file for problems. You can do this via the Tools>Check Database menu item. Checking the database ensures the file is not corrupted, rebuilds some internal structures, and optimizes the file.
1755
1756When you check the database, your tag list is also rebuilt. When you delete individual decks or cards, Anki does not update the list of used tags, as it’s inefficient to do so. If you want to clear old tags out from the list that are no longer in use, checking your database is the way to do it.
1757
1758Please note that Anki will automatically optimize your collection once every 2 weeks. This optimization ensures the collection performs well, but it does not check for errors or rebuild the tag list when automatically optimizing.
1759
1760File Locations
1761On Windows, the latest Anki versions store your Anki files in your appdata folder. You can access it by opening the file manager, and typing %APPDATA%\Anki2 in the location field. Older versions of Anki stored your Anki files in a folder called Anki in your Documents folder.
1762
1763On Mac computers, recent Anki versions store all their files in the ~/Library/Application Support/Anki2 folder. The Library folder is hidden by default, but can be revealed in Finder by holding down the option key while clicking on the Go menu. If you’re on an older Anki version, your Anki files will be in your Documents/Anki folder.
1764
1765On Linux, recent Anki versions store your data in ~/.local/share/Anki2, or $XDG_DATA_HOME/Anki2 if you have set a custom data path. Older versions of Anki stored your files in ~/Documents/Anki or ~/Anki.
1766
1767Within the Anki folder, the program-level and profile-level preferences are stored in a file called prefs.db.
1768
1769There is also a separate folder for each profile. The folder contains:
1770
1771Your notes, decks, cards and so on in a file called collection.anki2
1772
1773Your audio and images in a collection.media folder
1774
1775A backups folder
1776
1777Some system files
1778
1779Warning
1780You should never copy or move your collection while Anki is open. Doing so could cause your collection to become corrupted. Please don’t move or modify the other files in the folder either.
1781Startup Options
1782If you have made a destructive change on one computer and have an undamaged copy on another computer, you may wish to start Anki without syncing in order to use the full sync option without first downloading the changes. Similarly, if you are experiencing problems with Anki, you might want to (or might be instructed to) disable add-ons temporarily to see if one might be causing the problem. You can do both of these things by holding down the Shift key while starting Anki.
1783
1784It is possible to specify a custom folder location during startup. This is an advanced feature that is primarily intended to be used with portable installations, and we recommend you use the default location in most circumstances.
1785
1786The syntax to specify an alternate folder is as follows:
1787
1788anki -b /path/to/anki/folder
1789If you have multiple profiles, you can pass -p <name> to load a specific profile.
1790
1791To change the interface language, use -l <iso 639-1 language code>, such as "-l ja" for Japanese.
1792
1793If you always want to use a custom folder location, you can modify your shortcut to Anki. On Windows, right-click on the shortcut, choose Properties, select the Shortcut tab, and add "-b \path\to\data\folder" after the path to the program, which should leave you with something like
1794
1795"C:\Program Files\Anki\anki.exe" -b "C:\AnkiDataFolder"
1796You can also use this technique with the -l option to easily use Anki in different languages.
1797
1798Note
1799On Windows, you should use a backslash (\) not a forward slash (/).
1800On a Mac there is no easy way to alter the behaviour when clicking on the Anki icon, but it is possibile to start Anki with a custom base folder from a terminal:
1801
1802open /Applications/Anki.app --args -b ~/myankifolder
1803DropBox and File Syncing
1804We do not recommend you sync your Anki folder directly with a third-party synchronization service, as it can lead to database corruption when files are synced while in use.
1805
1806If you just want to synchronize your media, you can link external folders into services like DropBox. Please see http://www.dropboxwiki.com/tips-and-tricks/sync-other-folders for more info.
1807
1808If you wish to keep your collection in sync as well, it is strongly recommended that you create a script that copies your files from your synced folder to a local folder, launches Anki, and then copies the files back when Anki is closed. This will ensure that the files are never synchronized while they are open.
1809
1810Network Filesystems
1811We strongly recommend you have Anki store your files on a local hard disk, as network filesystems can lead to database corruption. If a network filesystem is your only option, regular use of Tools>Check Database to detect corruption is recommended.
1812
1813Running from a Flash Drive
1814On Windows, Anki can be installed on a USB / flash drive and run as a portable application. The following example assumes your USB drive is drive G.
1815
1816Copy the \Program Files\Anki folder to the flash drive, so you have a folder like G:\Anki.
1817
1818Create a text file called G:\anki.bat with the following text:
1819
1820g:\anki\anki.exe -b g:\ankidata
1821If you would like to prevent the black command prompt window from remaining open, you can instead use:
1822
1823start /b g:\anki\anki.exe -b g:\ankidata
1824Double-clicking on anki.bat should start Anki with the user data stored in G:\ankidata.
1825
1826Note
1827The full path including drive letter is required - if you try using \anki\anki.exe instead you will find syncing stops working.
1828Note
1829Media syncing with AnkiWeb may not work if your flash drive is formatted as FAT32. Please format the drive as NTFS to ensure media syncs correctly.
1830Backups
1831Each time your collection is closed (when closing Anki, switching profiles, or synchronizing your deck), Anki exports your collection into the backups folder. By default Anki will store up to 30 backups; you can adjust this in the preferences.
1832
1833Automatic backups do not protect against disk or computer failure, and do not extend to your media. To keep your collections safe, please consider making manual backups too.
1834
1835The easiest way to make a manual backup is to use the File>Export menu item to export all decks with scheduling and media information included, which will save your data to an .apkg/.colpkg file.
1836
1837If you want to back up multiple profiles and your add-ons as well, you can make a complete copy of your Anki folder. Please make sure you close Anki first, as backups may be corrupt if run while Anki is open.
1838
1839To restore from an automatic backup:
1840
1841First create a copy of your backups folder, as each time you close Anki it deletes the oldest backup, and if you’re trying different backup files you could accidentally end up deleting the backup you need. To do this, locate your Anki folder, and copy the entire folder somewhere safe, like your desktop.
1842
1843Open Anki and the profile you want to restore. If your profile is corrupt and won’t open, you can rename the User 1/collection.anki2 file to something else to tell Anki to recreate an empty collection when you next open the profile.
1844
1845With the profile open, use File>Import and import a backup from the copy of the backups folder you created on your desktop. In the file selection dialog, you can set it to detail mode using one of the icons so that the modification date is shown on each file - that will give you an idea of which backup you need.
1846
1847If the backup you imported was not old enough, try an older one until you locate an appropriate one.
1848
1849Anki also logs deleted notes to a text file called deleted.txt in your profile folder. These notes are in a text format that can be read by File>Import, though please note the import feature only supports a single note type at one time, so if you have deleted notes from different note types, you’ll need to split the file into separate files for each note type first.
1850
1851Inaccessible Harddisk
1852If Anki can’t write to files in the Anki folder, a message will be displayed on startup saying that Anki can’t write to the harddisk, and Anki will close. If you’re unsure how to fix the permissions, please contact someone near you who is knowledgable about computers and can help you out.
1853
1854Permissions of Temp Folder
1855Anki uses the system’s temporary folder to store temporary data. If the permissions of this folder have been changed from the default settings by a rogue app or buggy antivirus app, Anki will not function properly.
1856
1857If you’re on a Windows 7 machine, the general steps to fix the problem are listed below. As this is somewhat complicated, please ask someone knowledgeable about Windows if you are not sure.
1858
1859Click on the start bar, and type in %temp% (including the percents), then hit enter.
1860
1861Go up one folder, and locate the temp folder. Right click on it, and choose Properties.
1862
1863In the security tab, click on Advanced.
1864
1865Click on the Owner tab. If you’re not listed as the owner, click the button to take ownership.
1866
1867On the permissions tab, ensure that you have full control. On a default W7 install the control will actually be inherited from c:\users\your-username.
1868
1869Corrupt Collections
1870Anki uses a file format that is robust against program and computer crashes, but it’s still possible for your collection to become corrupt if the files are modified while Anki is open, stored on a network drive, or corrupted by a bug.
1871
1872When you run Tools>Check Database, you will receive a message if Anki detects the file has been corrupted. The best way to recover from this is to restore from the most recent automatic backup, but if your backup is too old, then you can attempt to repair the corruption instead.
1873
1874On Linux, make sure sqlite3 is installed. On a Mac, it should be installed already. On Windows, download http://www.sqlite.org/sqlite-3_6_23.zip.
1875
1876Next, create a backup of your collection.anki2 file, in case something goes wrong with the steps below.
1877
1878Linux/OSX
1879
1880Open a terminal, change to the folder your collection is located in, and type:
1881
1882sqlite3 collection.anki2 .dump > dump.txt
1883Open the resulting dump.txt file in a text editor, and look at the final line. If it reads "rollback;", change it to "commit;"
1884
1885Then run the following in a terminal:
1886
1887cat dump.txt | sqlite3 temp.file
1888Make sure you use temp.file - do not put collection.anki2 on the right, or you will blank out the file. When you’re done, proceed to the final step.
1889
1890Windows
1891
1892Copy the sqlite3.exe program and your deck to your desktop. Then go to Start>Run and type in cmd.exe.
1893
1894If you’re on a recent Windows, the command prompt may not start on your desktop. If you don’t see desktop displayed in the command prompt, type something like the following, replacing administrator with your login name.
1895
1896cd C:\Users\Administrator\Desktop
1897Then type:
1898
1899sqlite3 collection.anki2 .dump > dump.txt
1900Open the resulting dump.txt file in a text editor, and look at the final line. If it reads "rollback;", change it to "commit;"
1901
1902Then run the following in a terminal:
1903
1904type dump.txt | sqlite3 temp.file
1905Make sure you use temp.file - do not put collection.anki2 on the right, or you will blank out the file. When you’re done, proceed to the final step.
1906
1907Final Step
1908
1909Check that you didn’t get an error message, and that temp.file is not empty. The procedure optimizes the collection in the process, so it’s normal for the new file to be somewhat smaller than the old one.
1910
1911When you’ve confirmed the file is not empty:
1912
1913rename the original collection.anki2 file to something else
1914
1915rename temp.file to collection.anki2
1916
1917move collection.anki2 back into your collection folder, overwriting the old version
1918
1919start Anki and go to Tools>Check Database to make sure the collection has been successfully restored.
1920
1921Graphs and Statistics
1922Card Info
1923You can display information about a card by clicking the Info button in the toolbar while browsing. Most of the displayed information should be self-explanatory. A few notes:
1924
1925Position
1926Only shown when the card is new, it shows the order the card will appear in relative to other new cards. The position can be changed in the browser.
1927
1928Interval
1929The delay from one review to the next. Times are abbreviated; "0s, 1m, 3h, 4d, 5mo, 6y" refers to seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years respectively.
1930
1931Ease
1932The approximate amount the interval will grow when you answer a review card with the "Good" button.
1933
1934Statistics
1935The statistics window is accessed by clicking on the graphs icon in the top right of the main window, or by pressing Shift+S. The statistics window will show statistics from the currently selected deck and any subdecks. If you click on "collection" on the bottom left, statistics will be shown for your entire collection instead.
1936
1937By default Anki will show you statistics for the previous month. You can change this to a year scope or deck life scope at the bottom. (The "today" section at the top is of course unaffected by this selection.)
1938
1939Clicking on "Save Image" will save an image of the statistics to a file on your desktop to make it easy to share your statistics with others.
1940
1941Note
1942When you delete notes, their review history is maintained in Anki. It will not be included when looking at statistics for a specific deck (as Anki has no way of knowing which deck the deleted cards belonged to), but will be included when you look at statistics for the whole collection.
1943Types of Cards
1944The stats window uses some terms that you may not be familiar with:
1945
1946Mature
1947A mature card is one that has an interval of 21 days or greater.
1948
1949Young
1950A young card is one that has an interval of less than 21 days, but is not in learning.
1951
1952Learn
1953A learning card is one that is still in learning mode (using whatever steps may be defined in the deck’s options).
1954
1955Relearn
1956A relearning card is a card that you have failed in review mode, thus returning it to learning mode to be relearned.
1957
1958Unseen
1959An unseen card is one that has been added to your collection but has not yet entered learning mode. Unseen cards are sometimes referred to as "new" cards, especially when they are in the "new" queue to be shown for the first time.
1960
1961Today
1962At the top of the statistics window is a brief list of textual statistics about the reviews that you have completed today. A “review” in this context is one answering of a card, so a card might count as multiple reviews if it needed to be seen multiple times, and a learning card answered also counts as a “review.” A couple of the stats whose meaning may not be immediately obvious:
1963
1964Again count
1965This is the number of reviews that you have failed (i.e., pressed Again on). The correct percentage listed afterwards is the number of cards you did not fail divided by the total number of cards you studied.
1966
1967Learn, Review, Relearn, Filtered
1968The number of reviews that were learning cards, review cards, relearning cards, or studied in a filtered deck when not due.
1969
1970The stats for the current day are not a good overall indicator of your learning progress; everyone has bad days and good days, and seeing that you got a lower percentage correct on a particular day should not be cause for concern. The remainder of the stats, which take longer periods of time into account, will give more useful information if you wish to try to change your study habits or scheduling settings based on your performance.
1971
1972The “today” statistics are unaffected by the time period selected at the bottom of the window.
1973
1974The Graphs
1975Forecast
1976This graph shows an estimated number of reviews that will be due on a given day in the future if you learn no new cards and fail no cards. The bars and the left axis show the number of cards due on each day if you study all cards each day, while the line and the right axis show the number of cards due on that day if you don’t study at all until then. Note that the forecast graph does not count reviews that are currently overdue, so if you have a large backlog, the overdue cards will not be displayed.
1977
1978Review Count
1979This graph counts the number of card reviews you have done. The bars may correspond to days, weeks, or months, depending on the time period you’ve selected at the bottom of the screen. The differently colored blocks show how many of the cards you answered on each day were mature, young, relearning, or learning cards. There is also a separate group for cards answered in a filtered/cram deck while they were not due. The line and the right axis shows the cumulative total for each type of review as time progresses across the graph (so at 0 days, it would display the number for the entire time period displayed on the graph).
1980
1981Review Time
1982This graph works exactly like Review Count, except that it deals with the amount of time you spent on each card rather than the number of cards answered.
1983
1984Intervals
1985This graph displays the number of cards that have a given interval (the delay between two reviews). The line and the right axis tell you what percentage of your cards have an interval of less than or equal to the time below that point. The time scope has a different effect on this graph than other graphs: rather than changing which cards or period of studying is included, it limits how far out the intervals are displayed to (so 14-month intervals are not displayed at all on a 1-year graph).
1986
1987Hourly Breakdown
1988This graph shows what percentage of total reviews you have passed (i.e., not pressed Again on) during given hours. The larger, darker bars and left axis show the success rate; the thinner, lighter bars and right axis show the number of reviews you’ve made at that hour (so you know how significant the results are).
1989
1990Answer Buttons
1991This graph shows how many times you’ve chosen the Again, Hard, Good, or Easy button while studying learning/new, young, and mature cards. Anki also displays the percentage of correct reviews for each type of card.
1992
1993Cards Types
1994This pie chart shows what percentage of your deck or collection consists of mature, unseen, young/learn, and suspended cards. If you wish to calculate a more precise percentage, the key shows the exact number of cards in each section, and the total number of cards is displayed to the side.
1995
1996Manual Analysis
1997If you’re interested in getting information from your statistics other than what Anki provides, it is possible to access the data directly. Because of the complexity involved, this is not something we can provide any support for.
1998
1999One option is to write an add-on that adds another graph or more details to the statistics window. There are several add-ons of this sort on AnkiWeb already, which you can look at to get an idea of how it works.
2000
2001A more powerful and more complex option is to extract the review log information directly from Anki’s database and analyze it in an external program. Anki uses a database format called SQLite. There are many tools available for working with SQLite databases; one of the easiest to start with is called SQLite Browser, which will allow you to look around the database as well as export a CSV version of tables for import into another program.
2002
2003The most important table for statistics is the revlog table, which stores an entry for each review that you conduct. The columns are as follows:
2004
2005id
2006The time at which the review was conducted, as the number of milliseconds that had passed since midnight UTC on January 1, 1970. (This is sometimes known as Unix epoch time, especially when in straight seconds instead of milliseconds.)
2007
2008cid
2009The ID of the card that was reviewed. You can look up this value in the id field of the cards table to get more information about the card, although note that the card could have changed between when the revlog entry was recorded and when you are looking it up. It is also the millisecond timestamp of the card’s creation time.
2010
2011usn
2012This column is used to keep track of the sync state of reviews and provides no useful information for analysis.
2013
2014ease
2015Which button you pressed at the end of the review (1 for Again, 4 for Easy).
2016
2017ivl
2018The new interval that the card was pushed to after the review. Positive values are in days; negative values are in seconds (for learning cards).
2019
2020lastIvl
2021The interval the card had before the review. Cards introduced for the first time have a last interval equal to the Again delay.
2022
2023factor
2024The new ease factor of the card in permille (parts per thousand). If the ease factor is 2500, the card’s interval will be multiplied by 2.5 the next time you press Good.
2025
2026time
2027The amount of time (in milliseconds) you spent on the question and answer sides of the card before selecting an ease button.
2028
2029type
2030This is 0 for learning cards, 1 for review cards, 2 for relearn cards, and 3 for "cram" cards (cards being studied in a filtered deck when they are not due).
2031
2032Media
2033Anki stores the sounds and images used in your notes in a folder next to the collection. For more on the folder location, please see the file locations section. When you add media within Anki, either by using the paperclip icon in the editor or by pasting it into a field, Anki will copy it from its original location into the media folder. This makes it easy to back up your collection’s media or move it to another computer.
2034
2035You can use the Tools>Check Media menu option to scan your notes and media folder. It will generate a report of files in the media folder that are not used by any notes, and media referenced in notes but missing from your media folder. It does not scan question or answer templates, which is why you can’t place media references to fields in the template. If you need a static image or sound on every card, name it with a leading _ (e.g., _dog.jpg) to tell Anki to ignore it when checking for media. If you delete media using the unused media check, Anki will move it into your operating system’s trash folder, so you can recover if you accidentally delete media that shouldn’t have been deleted.
2036
2037Anki uses a program called mplayer in order to support sounds and videos. A wide variety of file formats are supported, but not all of these formats will work on AnkiWeb and the mobile clients. MP3 audio and MP4 video seems to be the most universally supported.
2038
2039LaTeX support
2040LaTeX is a powerful typesetting system, which is ideal for entering mathematical formulas, chemical formulas, musical notation and so on. Anki provides some support for LaTeX, allowing you to enter LaTeX code in your notes. When you review a card, Anki will call LaTeX and display the generated image instead.
2041
2042Installing and Assumed Knowledge
2043Anki’s LaTeX support is not turn-key: it is assumed that you know how to use LaTeX already, and that you have it installed. If you have no experience with LaTeX, please consult one of the many guides available on the internet. If you are having trouble with markup, please ask on a LaTeX forum.
2044
2045To install LaTeX, on Windows use MiKTeX; on OSX use MacTex, and on Linux use your distro’s package manager. Dvipng must also be installed.
2046
2047Note
2048On Windows, go to Settings in MikTek’s maintenance window, and make sure "Install missing packages on the fly" is set to "No", not to "Ask me first". If you continue to have difficulties, one user reported that running Anki as an administrator until all the packages were fetched helped.
2049Note
2050On OSX, LaTeX has only been tested with MacTex and BasicTex. If you use BasicTex, you need to install dvipng separately, with the following command:
2051sudo tlmgr update --self; sudo tlmgr install dvipng
2052The command may not be on the path, so you may need to provide the full path, eg /usr/local/texlive/2014basic/bin/x86_64-darwin/tlmgr.
2053
2054Note
2055If you are not using the above LaTeX packages, you will need to use the "edit LaTeX" add-on to specify the full path to latex and dvipng.
2056LaTeX on Web/Mobile
2057When you review a card with LaTeX on it, Anki will generate an image for that LaTeX and place the image in your collection’s media folder for future use. The web & mobile clients will display these images if they already exist, but can not generate the images on their own.
2058
2059To avoid having to review all your cards at least once before you can study on the other clients, Anki can generate the images in bulk for you. To generate all the images, please go to Tools>Check Media. After that, syncing should upload the generated media to AnkiWeb and the other clients.
2060
2061Example
2062The most general way to input LaTeX content is to surround it with [latex][/latex] tags. There’s a shortcut button for this documented in the editor section.
2063
2064Warning
2065[latex] tags must be used inside a field - placing them in the card template will cause problems.
2066For example, entering the following on the front of an Anki flashcard:
2067
2068Does [latex]\begin{math}\sum_{k = 1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k}\end{math}[/latex] converge?
2069will produce this when the flashcard is viewed:
2070
2071 img/convergence_question.png
2072
2073The formula in the example above is called a text formula, because it is displayed right within the non-mathematical text. In contrast, the following example shows a displayed formula:
2074
2075Does the sum below converge?
2076
2077[latex]\begin{displaymath}\sum_{k = 1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k}\end{displaymath}[/latex]
2078 img/convergence_question_2.png
2079
2080Text formulas and display formulas are the most common type of LaTeX expressions, so Anki provides abbreviated versions of them. Expressions of the form:
2081
2082[latex]\begin{math}...\end{math}[/latex]
2083can be shortened to
2084
2085[$]...[/$]
2086and expressions of the form
2087
2088[latex]\begin{displaymath}...\end{displaymath}[/latex]
2089can be shortened to
2090
2091[$$]...[/$$]
2092For example, the two LaTeX snippets shown before are equivalent to
2093
2094Does [$]\sum_{k = 1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k}[/$] converge?
2095and
2096
2097Does the sum below converge?
2098
2099[$$]\sum_{k = 1}^{\infty}\frac{1}{k}[/$$]
2100respectively.
2101
2102LaTeX packages
2103Anki allows you to customize the LaTeX preamble so you can import custom packages for chemistry, music and so on. For example, imagine you find an example file for chemtex on the internet:
2104
2105\documentclass[a4paper,12pt]{report}
2106\usepackage{chemtex}
2107\begin{document}
2108
2109\initial
2110\begin{figure}[h]\centering
2111\parbox{.3\textwidth}{\ethene{H}{H$_3$C}{CH$_3$}{Br}}
2112\hfil
2113\parbox{.3\textwidth}{\cbranch{H}{S}{H}{S}{C}{S}{}{S}{H}
2114  \xi=-200 \cright{}{Q}{C}{D}{O}{S}{OH}}
2115\hfil
2116\parbox{.3\textwidth}{\hetisix{Q}{Q}{Q}{Q}{Q}{Q}{O}{Q}{O}
2117  \xi=-171 \fuseup{Q}{Q}{Q}{Q}{D}{Q}{D}{Q}{D}}
2118\caption{Chemie mit {\tt CHEMTEX}\label{a1}}
2119\end{figure}
2120
2121\end{document}
2122Firstly, follow the documentation of the package and MiKTeX/MacTex in order to install the package. To check the package is working, you’ll want to put code like the above into a .latex file and test you can compile it from the command line. Once you’ve confirmed that the package is available and working, we can integrate it with Anki.
2123
2124To use the package with Anki, click "Add" in the main window, then click the note type selection button. Click the "Manage" button, then select the note type you plan to use and click "Options". The LaTeX header and footer are shown. The header will look something like:
2125
2126\documentclass[12pt]{article}
2127\special{papersize=3in,5in}
2128\usepackage{amssymb,amsmath}
2129\pagestyle{empty}
2130\setlength{\parindent}{0in}
2131\begin{document}
2132To use chemtex, you’d add the usepackage line in the earlier example, so it looks like:
2133
2134\documentclass[12pt]{article}
2135\special{papersize=3in,5in}
2136\usepackage{amssymb,amsmath}
2137\usepackage{chemtex}
2138\pagestyle{empty}
2139\setlength{\parindent}{0in}
2140\begin{document}
2141After that, you should be able to include lines like the following in your Anki cards:
2142
2143[latex]\ethene{H}{H$_3$C}{CH$_3$}{Br}[/latex]
2144LaTeX Conflicts
2145It’s not uncommon for {{ and }} to pop up in LaTeX code when writing mathematical equations. To ensure that your LaTeX equations don’t conflict with Anki’s field replacements, it’s possible to change the separator to something else.
2146
2147For example, if you have a template:
2148
2149{{latex field}}
2150Changing it to the following will make it unlikely that the LaTeX will conflict:
2151
2152{{=<% %>=}}
2153<%latex field%>
2154While this most commonly occurs with LaTeX, the solution presented here will work in any situation where you need to include {{ }} on cards, regardless of whether LaTeX is used or not.
2155
2156When using cloze deletions, you cannot change the double braces used to mark cloze deletions; instead, you can put a space between any double closing braces that do not indicate the end of the cloze, so
2157
2158{{c1::[$]\frac{foo}{\frac{bar}{baz}}[/$] blah blah blah.}}
2159will not work, but
2160
2161{{c1::[$]\frac{foo}{\frac{bar}{baz} }[/$] blah blah blah.}}
2162will (and LaTeX ignores spaces in math mode, so your equation will render the same).
2163
2164Unsafe commands
2165Anki prohibits certain commands like \input or \def from being used on cards or in templates, because allowing them could allow malicious shared decks to damage your system. (To be on the safe side, these commands are prohibited even in comments, so if you’re getting this error but don’t think you’ve used one, please double-check any comments you have in your headers, templates, and cards.) If you need to use these commands, please add them to a system package and import that package as described in the previous section.
2166
2167Miscellanea
2168Menu Shortcuts
2169On Windows/Linux you can hold down the alt key and press a highlighted letter to activate a particular menu.
2170
2171OS X doesn’t support this feature, but it does allow you to assign shortcuts to specific menu items instead. Please see http://lifehacker.com/343328/create-a-keyboard-shortcut-for-any-menu-action-in-any-program for more information.
2172
2173Debug Console
2174Sometimes you may be asked to use the debug console to change a setting or check something. Unless asked to enter text in the "debug console", you will probably not need this. Advanced users may like to read more about it in the add-ons page, linked below.
2175
2176When asked to enter text into the "debug console", please start Anki, and in the main window, press
2177
2178Ctrl+Shift+;
2179
2180(the control key, shift key, and semi-colon key at the same time)
2181
2182On a Mac, press
2183
2184Command+Shift+;
2185
2186(the command key, shift key, and semi-colon key at the same time)
2187
2188On some non-English keyboards, you may need to press ":" or "+" instead of ";".
2189
2190In the window that has popped up, please paste the text you were asked to paste in the top section. When you’ve done so, please press Ctrl+Return (Command+Return on a Mac), and some text should appear in the bottom section. If you’ve been asked to paste the resulting output, please copy it from the bottom area, and paste it back to the support person.
2191
2192If you press Ctrl+Shift+Return instead of just Ctrl+Return, Anki will try to print the result rather than doing what you asked it to. If you are getting unexpected errors, please make sure you’re not holding down the Shift key.
2193
2194Add-ons
2195Anki’s capabilities can be extended with add-ons. Add-ons can provide features like extra support for specific languages, extra control over scheduling, and so on.
2196
2197To browse the list of available add-ons, select the Tools>Add-ons>Browse & Install menu item. You can also use Tools>Add-ons to check which add-ons are installed.
2198
2199Some add-ons have options or customizations that are only accessible by editing them. To edit an add-on, go to Tools>Add-ons>[add-on name]>Edit. Please be careful when editing - special characters and whitespace is important, so if you see something like:
2200
2201    line1
2202    line2
2203    line3
2204…and you accidentally change it to the following, Anki will throw an error when it is restarted:
2205
2206    line1
2207   line2
2208    line3
2209Many add-on authors include their email address in the add-on, so if you need to get in touch with the author, editing the add-on and looking at the top of the file may help.
2210
2211If you have downloaded an add-on that is not working properly, or if you accidentally made a mistake when editing an add-on, you can use the "Delete" option in the menu to remove it.
2212
2213To learn how to write your own add-ons, please see the add-on writing guide.
2214
2215Contributing
2216Sharing Decks Publicly
2217To share decks with the general public, synchronize them with AnkiWeb, then log into AnkiWeb and click on "Share" from the menu next to the deck you wish to share.
2218
2219If you shared a deck previously (including with previous versions of Anki), you can update it by clicking "Share" as above. Please ensure the name of the deck in your account exactly matches the name shown in the shared deck listing, or you’ll end up creating a new shared deck rather than updating the old one. Updating a shared deck will not reset the download counts or ratings. You can delete a shared deck that you have uploaded using the Delete button on the shared deck’s page.
2220
2221When you update a shared deck, users who downloaded the deck previously will not automatically receive updates. If they download the deck again and re-import it, newly added material will be imported without altering their existing study progress, provided neither you nor the user has altered the note type since the first import.
2222
2223Note
2224When updating a deck, AnkiWeb expects the deck to be at the same location as before. If you shared a deck when it was called "Korean Verbs" for example, and then renamed it to "Korean::Korean Verbs", resharing will not be able to update the existing copy.
2225Sharing Decks Privately
2226If you’d like to share decks with a limited group of people (such as a study group or class) rather than the general public, you can do so by sharing them outside of AnkiWeb.
2227
2228To share a deck privately, go to the File menu and choose Export. Select a single deck (not "All Decks"), and turn off "include scheduling information". This will produce an .apkg file which you can share with others.
2229
2230You can share the .apkg file by emailing it to people, placing it on a website or shared folder, or using a free file sharing service like Dropbox or Google Drive and sending people a link.
2231
2232Both the computer version and mobile clients make it easy to import from an apkg file simply by clicking or tapping on it. AnkiWeb does not have the ability to import apkg files however, so the recipients of your deck will need to have the computer version or Anki on their mobile device.
2233
2234When a user imports an .apkg file, cards that already exist in their collection will be ignored and any new cards will be added. As long as they use the same note type, modified cards will also be updated. To prevent data loss, cards that have been deleted in the new apkg file will not be deleted in the user’s collection, so if you need to delete cards from users' decks for whatever reason, you will need to contact them about it.
2235
2236Sharing Add-ons
2237Please see the add-on documentation above.
2238
2239App Translations
2240Translations can be done directly from the translation website.
2241
2242Launchpad will guess which languages you can translate based on the country you’re connecting from. If the language you want to translate to doesn’t appear, sign up for a launchpad account, and in your profile, click the ! next to preferred languages to the language you want to translate.
2243
2244There are some special markers in text that you need to be aware of, and careful when translating:
2245
2246A string like Cards: %d or Error: %s means that the %d/%s part will be replaced with some other value. The characters must remain the same in the translation, so a translation may look like カード: %d.
2247
2248The same applies to text like %(a)d of %(b)d - it would be translated like %(a)d von %(b)d. If you need to reverse A and B in your language, that’s fine as long as the text remains the same.
2249
2250Menu items have an & to indicate which character is the shortcut key, such as &File. In languages that use roman text, you can place the & over a different character such as &Datei; in other languages there may be a different convention. Japanese for example includes the roman character afterwards instead, like ファイル (&F)
2251
2252Some strings have plural support, so that "0 cards", "1 card", "5 cards" can be represented properly in your language. In these instances you’ll need to enter the 2 or 3 different forms.
2253
2254Sometimes it will not be clear what a string refers to, and you may want to see the context. Below every string to be translated, you’ll see a line like this:
2255
2256Located in ../dtop/aqt/deckbrowser.py:299
2257If you strip off the first "../dtop" section, you’re left with something like "aqt/deckbrowser.py:299". You can then visit https://github.com/dae/anki/, locate the same filename, and click on it. The file will be displayed with line numbers on the left, and by matching up the line numbers (they may differ by a few lines sometimes), you may be able to get a better understanding of what the string refers to.
2258
2259If you see forms in the string like the above example, the strings will generally be obvious. If you do need to understand the context however, things are a little more complicated, as those files are automatically generated from an interface description instead. Please go to https://github.com/dae/anki/tree/master/designer and locate the same filename and click on it. We can’t rely on line numbers in this case, so please use the browser’s find option to find the string in the file. The lines immediately surrounding the found text may give a clue as to its meaning.
2260
2261If you find a string that you’re unsure how to translate, or would like to start a discussion with fellow native speakers on the best way to translate something, please feel free to start a thread in the Anki forums.
2262
2263If the language already appears in Anki’s preferences screen, updates you make will automatically be included in future Anki releases.
2264
2265If the language is not currently visible in Anki’s preferences screen, please post on our support site and request that the language you’ve translated be added to the list.
2266
2267Any translations that were made at least a few hours before a new Anki release are automatically included in the next release. Entirely new languages need to be added manually, so please contact us if that applies to your translation. If you’d like to see your name in the About screen as a contributor, please drop Damien a line.
2268
2269If you’d like to try out your translations without waiting for a new release, you can export a .mo file from the translation website. If you then move that .mo file into Anki’s installation folder, overwriting an existing .mo file with the same language code (in the locale folder), Anki will display the new translations when it is next started.
2270
2271Translating the Manual
2272If you’re a fairly technical user, you may want to translate the source file of the manual, and compile it yourself with asciidoc. You can also use that github repo to keep track of changes to the manual in the future.
2273
2274If that sounds complicated, an easier way is to visit this page and use File>Save As to save the manual to disk. You can then import it into Microsoft Word or similar software, and translate it that way.
2275
2276When you’re happy with the translation, you can either put it up on your website and I can link to it, or I can host the translated file on Anki’s website (but if you’re planning to make frequent updates, the former is a better choice). If you’d like, you can post it before you’re done and we can link to it in the list of in-progress translations below.
2277
2278Another option is to put your translation on a wiki, so that other users can contribute to it. There are many sites such as Wikia that will allow you to easily create your own wiki for free. (The English version once used a wiki; we found that we got too many unhelpful contributions and had to spend too much time correcting them, but your mileage may vary.)
2279
2280The following translations are currently in progress:
2281
2282Hungarian
2283
2284Portuguese
2285
2286If you would like to help with one of these translations, please contact us on TenderApp and we will put you in touch with the user(s) currently working on it.
2287
2288Contributing Code
2289Anki’s source code is available at https://github.com/dae/anki
2290
2291Before contributing, please see the README.contributing file in that repo.
2292
2293Frequently Asked Questions
2294I haven’t studied for a while, and now the next due times are too big!
2295When you use Anki every day, each time a card is answered correctly, it gets a bigger interval. Let’s assume that good about doubles the interval. Thus you have a 5 day wait, then a 10 day wait, 20 days, 40 days, and so on.
2296
2297When people return to their deck after weeks or months of no study, they’re often surprised by the length intervals have grown to. This is because Anki considers the actual time the card was unseen, not just the time it was scheduled for. Thus if the card was scheduled for 5 days but you didn’t study for a month, the next interval will be closer to 60 days than 10 days.
2298
2299This is a good thing. If you have successfully remembered a card after a one month wait, chances are you’ll remember it again after a longer wait, too. The same principles which make SRS effective in normal use apply when you’re studying after a delay, too. It also makes little sense to schedule a card for 10 days in the future if you were able to easily answer it after a whole month’s wait - you’d be going backwards.
2300
2301Resetting the deck is an even worse solution. When returning to a deck after a long absence, you may have forgotten many of your cards, but chances are you haven’t forgotten them all. Resetting the entire deck means you have to waste time studying material you already know.
2302
2303Now you may find overdue cards that you were able to recall, but not comfortably, since they were not reviewed when they should have been. To counter this, Anki treats the delay differently depending on your answer. If you find a card easy, the last interval plus the full delay are added together, and then used to calculate the next interval. When you answer good, only half the delay is used. And when you answer hard, only a quarter of the delay is used. So if a card was due in 5 days, and it’s answered 20 days late, the next times you’d end up with are approximately:
2304
2305Hard: (5 + 20/4) * 1.2 = 12 days
2306
2307Good: (5 + 20/2) * 2.5 = 37.5 days
2308
2309Easy: (5 + 20) * 3.25 = 81.25 days
2310
2311(the factors will actually vary depending on your performance in the deck)
2312
2313If you find a card hard, the next interval is quite conservative and is less than the last wait (25 days). If you find it good, the next interval is only about 50% higher. And easy increases the interval aggressively as usual.
2314
2315So it is recommended that you study as normal when you return to Anki after a period of absence. But if you absolutely must reset the deck, you can select the cards to reset in the browser, and use Edit>Reschedule.
2316
2317Can I do multiple-choice questions?
2318Multiple choice questions are a poor review tool for a number of reasons. The reason they are commonly used in an academic setting is because they are easy to mark, and they allow the person studying to demonstrate their ability to recognize the correct answer even if they can’t produce it themselves.
2319
2320Furthermore, good multiple choice questions have well chosen "distractors" - answers that are similar to the correct answer. A computer can look for similarly spelt words, but it is not capable of choosing good distractors for more complicated topics.
2321
2322If you are studying for a test and you have a sample test with a multiple choice question like the following:
2323
2324Q: What animal has a really long neck?
2325
2326A: 1. A monkey. 2. A giraffe. 3. A donkey. 4. A snail.
2327Then that question should be rewritten in Anki as follows:
2328
2329Q: What animal has a really long neck?
2330
2331A: A giraffe.
2332Or you can add your own choices:
2333
2334Q: What animal has a really long neck? (dog/cat/giraffe/penguin)
2335
2336A: A giraffe.
2337Can I link cards together? Add dependencies? How should I handle synonyms?
2338Anki supports links between cards of a note, but not between unrelated cards. Imagine are you studying Japanese and aiming to be able to both recognize and reproduce the Japanese. You may enter the word "ookii", which means "big", and tell Anki to generate two cards - ookii→big and big→ookii.
2339
2340In the above situation Anki can space reviews of those two sibling cards out so that they don’t appear one after the other (see sibling spacing in the link at the top of this document).
2341
2342Some people want to extend this link between arbitrary cards. They want to be able to tell Anki "after showing me this card, show me that card", or "don’t show me that card until I know this card well enough". This might sound like a nice idea in theory, but in practice it is not practical.
2343
2344For one, unlike the sibling card case above, you would have to define all the relations yourself. Entering new notes into Anki would become a complicated process, as you’d have to search through the rest of the deck and assign relationships between the old and new material.
2345
2346Secondly, remember that Anki is using an algorithm to determine when the optimum time to show you material again is. Adding constraints to card display that cause cards to display earlier or later than they were supposed to will make the spaced repetition system less effective, leading to more work than necessary, or forgotten cards.
2347
2348The most effective way to use Anki is to make each note you see independent from other notes. Instead of trying to join similar words together, you’ll be better off if you can determine the differences between them. Synonyms are rarely completely interchangeable - they tend to have nuances attached, and it’s not unusual for a sentence to become strange if one synonym is replaced with another.
2349
2350Continuing with the Japanese example earlier, imagine you want to learn the word "dekai", which also roughly translates to "big", but is a more colloquial expression. If you still want to review in both directions, you might make the English prompt of this word "big (more casual)". The further you progress in your language studies though, the more of a burden it becomes to define the differences between similar words, which is why cards asking you to produce a particular word are best left to the early stage of your studies. With a strong base vocabulary, moving towards recognition-based study makes more sense, as we all have a much larger passive vocabulary than our active vocabulary.
2351
2352As for ensuring that difficult material is introduced after easier material, a number of existing tools are available. New cards are by default introduced in the order they are added to the deck, so as long as the learning materials or sources of information you are using are adequately graded for your level, material should appear in order of easiness.
2353
2354Can I give my notes an arbitrary number of fields?
2355Notes are designed to represent closely related information, and to make it easy to reorganize where that information appears on a card. In the context of language learning, notes are useful for representing things like a phrase-translation pair, a phrase-translation-reading triplet, and so on. All of these relationships are 1:1 - a given phrase has only one reading, and one translation. (1)
2356
2357Because of their ability to tie related pieces of information together, some people try to use notes to tie less closely related information in their deck together. For example, if they come across two sentences with the word "completely":
2358
2359He was completely confused.
2360
2361That was completely uncalled for.
2362
2363Then they put those two sentences in the same note, under the rationale that since they share a word, they are related. But what if the user comes across another example sentence?
2364
2365The book confused her.
2366
2367That sentence shares the word "confused" with a previous sentence. So should it be in the note for "confused"? Or the note for "completely"? Or both?
2368
2369Unlike the phrase-translation pairs mentioned above, if you say sentences are related if they share a word, then sentences have a many:many relationship. That is, sentence A may be related to sentence B and C, sentence B may be related to A and D, and so on. Because the relationships are complex and overlapping, notes are not a good way to represent them.
2370
2371There seem to be two main reasons people try to represent such relationships in notes:
2372
2373"Because it’s neater to keep all the information in one place". This may seem to be the case, but in reality you really don’t save much. If you want to see all example sentences that contain the word "completely" and each sentence is in a different note, all you have to do is search for "completely".
2374
2375"Because I want Anki to separate reviews of cards that share the same word". This is related to the previous FAQ question. Defining the links between cards is time consuming, and if it were done automatically and every card that shared a word were separated from other cards that shared a word, it would be both computationally prohibitive, and would likely lead to a situation where nothing could be shown because it was all related to something else. Yes, it’s not ideal for two sentences containing the same word to be shown right after each other, but if you add new cards in a random order such a situation is unlikely, and the downsides of trying to prevent such a situation aren’t worth it. And even if such a solution were introduced, it wouldn’t stop you from encountering the words in the real world.
2376
2377(1) It is possible for different people to translate the same phrase in different ways, and different dialects may read the same word differently, but that is not relevant to the discussion.
2378
2379Can I host my own AnkiWeb?
2380Sorry, AnkiWeb is only available as a hosted service.
2381
2382Why is the Android version free when the iPhone version isn’t?
2383Working on Anki desktop, AnkiWeb and AnkiMobile is my full time job, and I need some way of paying the bills. Since I make the desktop & web versions available for free, I rely on sales of the iPhone app in order to finance development.
2384
2385AnkiDroid is written by a separate group of volunteers. Since they based it on the free desktop version I make available (and rely on AnkiWeb in order to synchronize decks), they decided to make it freely available as well.
2386
2387What spaced repetition algorithm does Anki use?
2388Anki was originally based on the SuperMemo SM5 algorithm. However, Anki’s default behaviour of revealing the next interval before answering a card revealed some fundamental problems with the SM5 algorithm. The key difference between SM2 and later revisions of the algorithm is this:
2389
2390SM2 uses your performance on a card to determine the next time to schedule that card
2391
2392SM3+ use your performance on a card to determine the next time to schedule that card, and similar cards
2393
2394The latter approach promises to choose more accurate intervals by factoring in not just a single card’s performance, but the performance as a group. If you are very consistent in your studies and all cards are of a very similar difficulty, this approach can work quite well. However, once inconsistencies are introduced into the equation (cards of varying difficulty, not studying at the same time every day), SM3+ is more prone to incorrect guesses at the next interval - resulting in cards being scheduled too often or too far in the future.
2395
2396Furthermore, as SM3+ dynamically adjusts the "optimum factors" table, a situation can often arise where answering "hard" on a card can result in a longer interval than answering "easy" would give. The next times are hidden from you in SuperMemo so the user is never aware of this.
2397
2398After evaluating the alternatives, the Anki author decided that near-optimum intervals yielded by an SM2 derivative are better than trying to obtain optimum intervals at the risk of incorrect guesses. An SM2 approach is predictable and intuitive to end users, whereas an SM3+ approach hides the details from the user and requires users to trust the system (even when the system may make mistakes in the scheduling).
2399
2400Anki’s algorithm is based on SM2, but differs from it in some respects.
2401
2402SM2 defines an initial interval of 1 day then 6 days. With Anki, you have full control over the length of the initial learning steps. Anki understands that it can be necessary to see a new card a number of times before you’re able to memorize it, and those initial "failures" don’t mean you need to be punished by being shown the failed card many times over the course of a few days. Performance during the learning stage does not reflect performance in the retaining stage.
2403
2404Anki uses 4 choices for answering review cards, not 6. There is only one fail choice, not 3. The reason for this is that failure comprises a small amount of total reviews, and thus adjusting a card’s ease can be sufficiently done by simply varying the positive answers.
2405
2406Answering cards later than scheduled will be factored into the next interval calculation, so you receive a boost to cards that you were late in answering but still remembered.
2407
2408Like SM2, Anki’s failure button resets the card interval by default. But the user can choose to make the card take some steps back rather than being reset completely. Also, you can elect to review failed mature cards on a different day, instead of the same day.
2409
2410Remembered easily not only increments the ease factor, but adds an extra bonus to the current interval calculation. Thus, answering remembered easily is a little more aggressive than the standard SM2 algorithm.
2411
2412Successive failures while cards are in learning do not result in further decreases to the card’s ease. A common complaint with the standard SM algorithms is that repeated failings of a card cause the card to get stuck in "low interval hell". In Anki, the initial acquisition process does not influence a card’s ease.
2413
2414For a description of the SM2 algorithm, please see http://www.supermemo.com/english/ol/sm2.htm
2415
2416You can also check out sched.py in Anki’s source code for the scheduling code. Here is a summary (see the deck options section for the options that are mentioned in italics).
2417
2418If you press…
2419
2420Again
2421The card is placed into relearning mode, the ease is decreased by 20 percentage points (that is, 20 is subtracted from the ease value, which is in units of percentage points), and the current interval is multiplied by the value of new interval (this interval will be used when the card exits relearning mode).
2422
2423Hard
2424The card’s ease is decreased by 15 percentage points and the current interval is multiplied by 1.2.
2425
2426Good
2427The current interval is multiplied by the current ease. The ease is unchanged.
2428
2429Easy
2430The current interval is multiplied by the current ease times the easy bonus and the ease is increased by 15 percentage points.
2431
2432For Hard, Good, and Easy, the next interval is additionally multiplied by the interval modifier. If the card is being reviewed late, additional days will be added to the current interval, as described here.
2433
2434There are a few limitations on the scheduling values that cards can take. Eases will never be decreased below 130%; SuperMemo’s research has shown that eases below 130% tend to result in cards becoming due more often than is useful and annoying users. Intervals will never be increased beyond the value of maximum interval. Finally, all new intervals (except Again) will always be at least one day longer than the previous interval.
2435
2436Note
2437After you select an ease button, Anki also applies a small amount of random “fuzz” to prevent cards that were introduced at the same time and given the same ratings from sticking together and always coming up for review on the same day. This fuzz does not appear on the interval buttons, so if you’re noticing a slight discrepancy between what you select and the intervals your cards actually get, this is probably the cause.
2438Resources
2439SuperMemo
2440The SuperMemo site has a lot of good information about spaced repetition and memory: http://www.supermemo.com/
2441
2442Damien Elmes