Anki Tips: What I Learned Making 10,000 Flashcards · rs.io

This month, I created my ten thousandth virtual flashcard. When I started using Anki, I worried that I’d do the wrong thing, but decided that the only way to acquire Anki expertise was to make a lot of mistakes.

Cards that answer the question “Why?” are more valuable than factual cards. (See also this post.) It’s easy to memorize that QuickSort has a lower bound of O(n lg n), but better to know why it has such a lower bound, and even better still to understand why comparison-based sorts can’t be faster than O(n lg n).

My emerging perspective here is that it’s important to understand all the context of an idea to really know it. How it emerged, how to invent it, what it’s for, and so on.

My original Anki decks were all words. Now, I lean on images as heavily as possible. I find, at least for my sort of mind, that most of understanding something is learning to visualize and manipulate it mentally. Google image search is one of my first stops. In a pinch, I also make crude drawings of my own. As long as it captures the main idea, it’ll do:

As an unintended consequence, my thought itself has shifted towards more imagery. The repetition makes an image representation of a concept more available mentally than its equivalent in words.

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