Quizlet is that tool you use to efficiently cram in flashcards just before your french test, no? From very early on in school I had teachers recommend Quizlet for french and recommended us to study 15 minutes every day. Me, knowing I can compensate my french grade with math obviously didn't bother. To nobody's surprise I was and still am bad at french. But what I took from all that was that flashcard apps are pointless. Who even studies with flashcards?

Fast forward three years and I'm 150 days deep, tapping through my digital flashcards, 10 minutes on average per day. Must have lost my mind somewhere in those three years it seems. Maybe ETH has something to do with that.

My first years in bachelor I just continued my old habits of cramming in all the information before the exam. Only difference to matura being, here it was a few weeks before instead of hours or days. Third year comes around and while talking about some inner workings of the good ol' computer during a lunch in the better mensa, I realize I've forgotten so many of the cool terms I learned in my first year systems course. Detrimental. I study for half my 20's and in the end I forget all the cool things I crammed in for the exams? I needed a solution.

Over the years I've often overheard people using Anki and simply thought of it another flashcard app for nerds. Especially with the amount my Anki addicted friends hustled through it, it looked like so much pain and was confused why anyone would ever hurt themselves like that. After settling with the fact that I'm also a nerd and having an upcoming exam that required a lot of learning by heart, I gave Anki a chance. Oh boy did that spark a new world.

First thing you see when using Anki, apart from the trashy looking Qt UI, is the system with how cards are evaluated. Coming from only knowing Quizlet, which has a basic "Right" or "Wrong" for flashcards [1] , I was quickly immersed in Anki's system.

Anki in its basic form is just a simple flashcard app. Your cards have two sides. You are shown the first side and upon tapping you see the other side of the card. You are then given four buttons: "Again", "Hard", "Good", "Easy". It's up to you to determine how well you knew the card. Everyone has their own special system they follow, but the "standard" way is that you tap "Again" if you didn't know the answer, "Hard" if you knew the answer but it took some time, "Good" if you knew the answer well, and "Easy" if the answer was so obvious you're wondering why you even made this card.

It all bases on the concept of spaced repetition. Basically, you learn the most effectively for the long term if you see a card just before you forget it. And the duration between seeing the same card again almost doubles every time. First time you see the card in maybe 2 days, then in 4, and before you know it the card is spaced months away. Can really recommend reading more into how spaced repetition works. It's basically magic.

My first deck was one I got from somebody else, but I quickly learned that making your own decks is where the main power of Anki comes to light. Usually all I do for lectures is read through the slides or script and anything I deem important to know I clap into Anki. Simply shortcuts like Ctrl+N for choosing the card type and Ctrl+Enter for adding the card really help here. A key ingredient I always go with is to make my cards very small and bite-sized. I rather go through 20 small cards each taking 5 seconds than 20 each making me think and write down something for a minute straight. I got places to be. My toilet breaks already take long enough because of Anki, no need to make them so long I won't be able to walk for days.

Very early on I noticed that Anki is like cheating. You want to remember something with as little effort as possible? Just make a small Anki card out of it and eventually you'll know it by heart. I knew that anything I put into Anki, no matter how small, Anki will eventually get me to know the card by heart.

It was also in these early days, when I started adding random things to Anki that had nothing to do with ETH. I felt like learning countries and flags, so I just downloaded an Anki deck and went through those. I had terminal commands I wanted to remember and clapped those in. When I saw a word I didn't know I threw it in. Random language I wanted to learn? -> Anki. Everything I wanted to know long-term landed in Anki. It was so low effort, but so effective which was so golden for my lazy ass. I could quickly throw in cards and in my morning train ride I quickly studied everything I wanted for 10 minutes.

The magic of Anki is that anything you put in, you will eventually learn. It is very ineffective for learning things short-term, but for learning things across months it is the most effective system I have stumbled upon in all my wise years of traversing the web.

There are quite a few things I've added and used that I feel make the Anki experience just so much better. The number in the parentheses is the add-on ID if you want to try it.

• FSRS (Free Spaced Repetition Scheduler) (759844606): For new Anki users it won't make much sense, but for Anki veterans this is a must-have. It uses your history to make a scheduler which is suited just for you. It will reduce the amount of cards you review and instead show you the cards you need to look at. New cards on which you instantly did "Good" twice will show up a lot further down the line than cards you struggled to remember and had to press "Hard" a few times.
• Cloze overlapper plugin (1784155610): Clozes on a line basis and extremely customizable. Lists are the enemy of Anki, but sometimes you just have to learn them. This is perfect for that.
• Image Occlusion (1374772155): This is an add-on I often use to cheat and be lazy. I sometimes take pictures of some slides and just draw boxes around everything I feel like I should learn.
• Clozes: Allows you to make cloze (Lückentext) cards. Helps break down big cards where the context might be helpful.

You are a nerd, embrace it, download Anki.

[1] I haven't looked at Quizlet in years. So no shade at them, maybe they have a better system now.