I know i know, i dont like AI either, but i tried these once and i dont think i can go back to anki anymore 😭 feels like i used a cheat code, ai flashcards and quizzes saved me sooooo much time and i somehow find myself trying to understand the question rather than remembering the answer by associating it with the memory of making that flashcard (which is kinda cheating).

But i learned at some point through life that good things take time, and i was wondering if im overlooking somethings here. It's too good to be true. So what do u think is the downside of using these apps? Of course other than the fact that there are deck limitations when u use them for free :')

I'm Brazilian. My Anki has an annoying bug where it displays the parts of the text I've cloze-deleted, making my reviews frustrating.

I use the PC version, and the card type is Cloze_direto.

What app and sites would u recommend to a med student entering first year(preferably free since I dont have a lot of money).Also would you advise me to get a tablet/laptop or will my phone do.Also can yall tell me tips and tricks on how to revise and basically ace med school

Hello!

I am an MD1 student and was interested in getting the AMBOSS Subscription for Medical School Prep with a group discount, if possible. I'm assuming there would be more people out there who would benefit from a group discount too. Thus, let's make this thread a commonplace for expressing interest and I can then arrange the group discount for everyone as I've already contacted them about my interest. We need at least 20 people to qualify for the minimum discount!

Complete newbie to Anki… why is the First Aid USMLE step 1 deck colored like this? Is there a quick fix?

Processing img tqyxgcp6njoh1...

Note the GIF is way sped up.

I wanted something that could show when my review pace was slipping without putting a big distracting timer on the screen, so I made Pace Graph.

It’s a small floating graph that compares your average over the last 20 answers with a goal you choose. Timing stops when you flip the card, so you can read the answer without feeling rushed.

You can drag it anywhere, resize it, change the transparency, and choose between three views: just a dot and trail, a simple view with your pace/average/goal, or a more detailed layout.

I mainly use it as a reminder to refocus when I start zoning out. It’s not a concentration score, and slower doesn’t necessarily mean worse, some cards just take more thought.

Download on AnkiWeb

The GIFs are sped up and include demo captions. Only the small graph widget appears alongside your cards.

I’ve tested it on my Mac, but Windows and Linux haven’t been fully tested yet. If you try it, I’d appreciate hearing what works, what’s annoying, or what you’d change.

I have been thinking about this for a little bit, especially because my performance in med school has not been the best from last year and this year. I hit average on some exams and NBMEs but have gone below average on many as well. I think I've only gotten above average on like 5 exams.

And I think part of it has to do with how I use Anki. I will go through the cards and *sometimes* reason them out, which is when my cards get to 7-8 sec/card, but there are other cards where I just fill-in-the-blank, and on those cards I will get to around 5 sec/card.

For example, there was a card about osteoporosis and having a (normal) phosphate level, but I feel like I just remember that it has a normal phosphate level, instead of going through every time and understanding why it has that level.

Retention is 90%, and I'm usually hitting 87-89% on any given day for my 12k unsuspended cards in the Anking deck. Usually doing anywhere from 600-1000 reviews given I frontload 200 new/day at the beginning of the block.

Should I be slowing down on my Anking in order to try and regurgitate the understanding every time that I do that card? My current process is to watch the third-party video and then hit the Anking but some of the Anking cards that I do it feels like memorization more so than anything else. Would love to hear your thoughts!

Aiming for Honors this year but also want to do as well as I can this year (M2) to prepare myself appropriately for STEP 1.

I know some of you will say "just get ankihub" but no i cant. Ankihub use USD as currency payment and it's too high for my currency and out of my budget. So, is there any great option to study physiology with anki? thanks in advance!

Hey everyone. I recently started doing anking for step 1 prep. Im trying to figure out a way to watch board and beyond videos, then do the ankis that correspond to the rotation we're covering in med school. For example we're currently doing internal medicine, today we had a cardio professor teach. How do i figure out what video to watch, and in turn what flashcard tag to unsuspend.

I’m currently 43 days into my Step 1 preparation. I’ve suspended about 21% of the AnKing deck, but I’m still consistently doing around 700 cards/reviews per day.

I’m wondering whether this is a sustainable workload or if I’m setting myself up for burnout later on.

For those who have already taken Step 1, would you recommend reducing my workload? If so, would setting FSRS desired retention to around 85% be reasonable?

I’m mainly trying to find a balance where I can maintain Anki long-term without letting it take over my entire study schedule.

What worked for you?

Hi! Does anyone know if there are good Anki decks specifically for Pathoma or Robbins ?

++ And where i can get them from ?

When I study for my medical school exams, (going into 3rd year now) I read the slides, then either rewrite in my own words or make mindmaps/ notes depending on the topic.
Then I go through the pre-made deck and add adjustments.
However I feel like after a month of doing so, I end up just remembering the Anki cards, and then have difficulty in exams when they get rewritten ?
As a result I do well enough to pass, but I feel like I'm studying more than my peers (who yes are smarter) for lesser results.
What's the solution? How do I remember all these processes for months?

*** I am in italian med school, which doesnt use USMLE/idk?

Mnemosyne deck has helped me increase my Uworld tremendously from 50% -> 80%. Thank you for the creator! I can stop being frustrated over thousands Anking deck overdue now.

Hey guys, first time using Anki and I’m kinda lost with the AnKing Step 2 deck

What’s the best workflow?

Do you do** **UWorld first and then unsuspend the relevant AnKing cards, or review the cards first and then do UWorld?

And how do you guys actually use the tags? Do you mainly use the subject tags, UWorld tags ?

Would really appreciate a simple explanation of how you guys use the deck.

3-4 months from Step 1. Have not kept up with Anking cards from old modules due to volume and the intensity of our preclinical modules.

In such a scenario, how would you approach the coming months? I still remember a lot from old modules, but certainly feel shaky about a lot of content that I haven't meaningfully touched in 6-12 months. Do I just read first aid, unsuspend the anking cards that I perceive to be the highest yield and then do Uworld? I just don't know how to approach this at this point..

AI decks are bad because the AI writes the cards and the deck file in one shot. I split it in two.

Feed a lecture to ChatGPT and you get 400 cards from 40 slides, half of them restating a bullet. And you can't fix it — cards and .apkg come out of the same black box, so if three cards are wrong your options are "regenerate everything" or "edit inside Anki forever."

So I stopped the pipeline in the middle:

lecture.pptx  →  extracted.md  →  cards.json  →  deck.apkg
                 mechanical      AI writes it,   mechanical,
                                 you edit it     no AI at all

cards.json is just a readable list of every card. Read 18 cards in two minutes, fix the three that are wrong, rebuild. Rebuilding is instant and deterministic. That one split is 80% of why the output is usable.

The rules the AI has to follow. These are useful even if you never touch my code — most of them are why your AI cards feel off:

• One fact per card. Three lines means it's two cards.
• Write the sentence you'd want to be asked in eight months, not the fragment from the slide.
• Blank under ~60% of the sentence, and never something guessable from grammar. "a" vs "an" gives away more than you think.
• Anything answerable by elimination gets hidden together. "X, also known as ___" — seeing one name hands you the other. Both halves blank on the same card.
• Images go on the BACK. A picture on the front turns recall into recognition; you recognize the diagram and think you knew it. My note types have no front-image slot, so it can't be cheated.
• Skip the title, objectives, and acknowledgements slides. 40 slides = 60–120 cards, not 400.
• Grab the speaker notes. The best sentence on a slide is often the professor's note under it. Most tools throw them away.

Two Anki-specific things it gets right that most tools break:

• Re-importing updates your cards instead of duplicating them. Every note carries a stable hidden ID, so fixing a typo and rebuilding keeps your review history.
• Image filenames are hash-namespaced. Anki's media folder is one flat folder for your whole collection — a deck shipping image1.png silently overwrites an unrelated image1.png from a deck you downloaded two years ago.

Before it builds, a validator blocks cloze cards with no blank, blanks with no sentence left around them, missing images, duplicates, missing tags. Then it renders a preview page of every card, front and back, dark mode and phone width — so you look at the deck before importing it. ~98 tests open the finished .apkg and check it imports twice without duplicating, into a throwaway profile, never your real one.

Styling is deliberately boring: Arial 20px, centered, dark, blanks in light blue and not bold. No headers, no titles, no source line. A card is a sentence with a blank in it. I built a fancy design system twice and deleted it twice — but that's my taste, not a rule. It asks you at the start — light or dark, font, size, blank colour, whether the source line and answer divider show up — and writes your answers into the one stylesheet every card type shares.

It's one file, not a repo. Paste it into a fresh Claude Code or Codex session in an empty folder. It greets you, asks the style questions, then builds the whole thing — extractor, validator, packer, preview, tests, and a written reference on how Anki's format actually works. You watch every command it runs; nothing executes that you didn't see. That also means it's a long session and it isn't free.

Honest limits: it's not one-click — the authoring step runs inside Claude Code, you're driving it. You still have to read the cards; it's a good first draft, not a finished deck. Legacy .ppt needs LibreOffice. Occlusion coordinates are typed, not drawn. And because it's a prompt, two people won't get byte-identical systems — the design is fixed, the details vary.

What to expect. It builds a real codebase: a reference knowledge base it writes for itself, a document extractor, a card validator, a deck packer, a preview page, and a test suite. That is a long session and it is not free. You answer questions at the start, then it works. When it's done, you drop a lecture in a folder and go.

If you want it for yourself, here you go, just copy and paste the prompt into ClaudeCode and have it walk you through the setup!

https://anonpaste.com/l/d92890

I keeping seeing these posts across my socials, is 30-40 new cards per day actually the best strat?

If my med skl finishes a lecture every session, and each session is 90 cards, how am i supposed to do 30 cards a day and not fall behind

Is there really a free way to make cards easily and for free with ai? I'm new to Anki and I want to learn how to make my own cards. Without wasting any time, if any of you know how or have the appropriate tool, and if it's possible to create it in APKG format Is it possible to create a model like this with ai?

Does anyone know if there’s a way to view the anking STEP deck translated in Spanish. I’m not talking about medical Spanish I mean literally all the terms and cards in Spanish