Frequently Asked Questions

Yes, see this part of the manual.

You can save a lot of time by thinking or saying your answer without typing it. But if you don’t trust yourself to accurately judge if you were correct or not, you can ask Anki to provide a text box to type in the answer, by going to Edit>Card Layout while reviewing.

If you want to flip the cards only once, go to Edit>Card Layout while reviewing, and click the flip button. If you are planning to switch back and forth, please read on.

Anki chooses the optimum time to review cards based on their easiness. Changing the direction of cards can make them easier or harder, so if you don’t track the review intervals separately for the two directions, this will lead to sub-optimal scheduling times.

Therefore, Anki allows you to create two sets of cards: one set for reviews in one direction, and one set for reviews in the other direction. You can do this by clicking the card button at the top of add items.

If you already have cards, and want to create new cards with the question and answer flipped, please see the next question.

If you added some facts and forgot to enable certain card templates, or if you later want to add more cards (eg. adding a set of cards for reviewing in the reverse direction), select a bunch of cards in the card browser, and choose Actions>Generate Cards.

Adding a template will only affect the generation of future cards. If you want to generate cards for previously added facts, see the previous question.

You can turn templates on and off with the selective study area of the study options screen. Use the bottom section to disable card templates you don’t want to see.

Another approach is to change the priority on one card template so it always appears before/after the other. See CardDisplayOrderAndPriorities.

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. Hint fields should be used sparingly if at all.

If you do want to add a hint, the easiest way is to just create a new field in Edit>Card Layout, and not put it on the front or back of your card. When you want to check the hint, simply edit the card.

Alternatively you can add a show hint button. Create a new field like described in the previous paragraph, and then in the template section of the card layout screen, add the following to either the question or answer:

Replace Hint with the name of your hint field.

If the hint field is not empty, a new link will appear on your cards.

Please be careful to copy the above without splitting the text over multiple lines.

Anki is most effective if you follow the minimum information principal - keeping each question/response pair as small as possible. If you have a bunch of related information, instead of trying to reveal it piecemeal, it should be divided up into separate cards. Please see http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm for more information.

Please see the previous question if you’re looking for a way to give yourself a hint.

If you take a break from using Anki for a few days, it can be quite demotivating to be faced with a large number of cards to review upon your return. It is very natural to want to pause the scheduler, so that you come back to find Anki in the same state as you left it. However, a pause feature would actually do more harm than good, as while it’s easy to pause a computer program, it’s impossible to pause human memory.

Consider taking a week long break, pausing the scheduler just before you leave and un-pausing just after you come back. Since the progress of all cards has been "frozen" for a week, a delay is applied to every card in the deck. In order to avoid catching up on the work you would have otherwise done during that time, you’re increasing the chances of forgetting cards for every single card in the deck. Not a great tradeoff.

Anki schedules cards for review close to the time it thinks you will forget them. If you come back from a vacation and find there are 200 cards to review, Anki is telling you that those 200 cards need to be reviewed soon or you’ll forget them. There is no way around this - the cards need to be studied or you’ll forget. The best thing you can do is put on some good music and get stuck into the reviews, motivated by the knowledge that your hard work will pay off in the future.

Note there is a postpone plugin available that reschedules the due cards over a specified number of days. It allows you to divide a large number of cards up over a period of days to work through, but you can accomplish the same thing by simply setting a quota of cards to study each day and studying them.

Anki works best if you can use it for a short period of time every day. Taking breaks means that you will inevitably have to do extra work when you return. The following tips can help you use Anki effectively:

This issue has been talked about many times on the forums already. Please read those threads instead of starting yet another discussion on the issue.

When 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.

When 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.

This 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.

Resetting 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.

Now you may find 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:

(the factors will actually vary depending on your performance in the deck)

If 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.

So 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 Actions>Reschedule.

Edit>Card Layout while reviewing, and add the following to the question or answer area:

Anki has a learning mode. Press button 1 when you don’t know a card, and it will be shown again to you until you learn it. The default delay of 10 minutes / 20 failed cards is designed for learning efficiently. Cards you are able to remember after 10 minutes stand a good chance of being remembered again the next day. Cards you’re not able to remember after 10 minutes require you to put more effort into generating a strong memory: generating mnemonics, rephrasing the question, or even just thinking about the question for a while.

The alternative is Pimsleur-like intervals - showing again in 10 seconds, then 1 minute, then 5 minutes, etc. These are sometimes also called microintervals. They may reduce the stress of learning since you’re less likely to fail the difficult questions, but they result in a net increase in study time, and they are particularly wasteful for the questions you would have gotten correct on the first go.

And because they make it less necessary to make mnemonics or spend some time thinking about the questions, they also tend to encourage "learning without understanding" (see the first point of http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm). This can lead to more forgetting down the road.

So please give the default Anki system a go with the above in mind. But if you still find yourself wanting Pimsleur-like intervals, you can fetch a "learn mode" plugin from File>Download>Shared Plugins that provides a Pimsleur-like introduction to cards. But please note that at the time of writing, this has not been ported to Anki 1.2 yet.

See the dictionary example in the card layout documentation

You can customize card fonts and colours via Edit>Card Layout.

Other parts of the Anki interface use your system settings for colours and fonts. You can customize the colours and fonts for all programs, and Anki will inherit those settings.

If you want to force Anki to use different settings to other applications:

To change the system font:

To change the background to a light blue (including study options screen/etc):

The colours are standard HTML colours

To make the next interval area bigger:

Multiple 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.

Furthermore, good multiple choice questions have well chosen "distractors" - answers that are similar to the correct answer. A computer can look for similary spelt words, but it is not capable of chosing good distractors for more complicated topics.

If you are studying for a test and you have a sample test with a multiple choice question like the following:

Then that question should be rewritten in Anki as follows:

Or you can add your own choices:

Some of your reviews were probably delayed until tomorrow. Please see the sibling spacing section of the deck properties for more information.

See DeckErrors for information about recovering broken decks and deck backups.

By default, Anki shows a maximum of 20 new cards per day. If you have already studied that many cards, your reset cards will not be shown until the next day. You can cause them to be shown immediately by clicking learn more.

Separate decks work best for dividing your knowledge into broad categories. For example, you may have a deck for studying "Japanese", another for "German", and another for "Computers". Tags are more appropriate for finer-grained categorization: "food", "lesson10", etc. You can use the deck browser to switch between decks, and the selective study feature in the study options to change which tagged cards are shown.

Many people prefer to study one broad category at once - for example, only German, then only computers. Whether you choose to do this or keep everything in one deck is up to you, and is a matter of personal preference.

However, it’s recommended that you don’t try to study subcategories like "food" one by one. Switching between small groups of cards is fiddly and wastes time that you could be using to study. It also carries the risk of forgetting to activate certain categories. But most importantly, it leads to sub-optimal memories. If you know you are studying "food" or "lesson10", it’s much easier for your brain to guess the meaning of items, as you have context to work with. By making it easier on yourself, it makes it more likely you won’t be able to recall the words when the context is removed.

Use File>Import to import another deck into the current deck. Use File>Export to export your deck to a different file. You can use the limit to tags option to export only part of your deck to the other file.

Anki supports links between cards of a fact, 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.

In the above situation Anki can space reviews of those two sibling cards out so that they don’t appear one after the other (see "delayed cards" in the link at the top of this document).

Some 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.

For one, unlike the sibling card case above, you would have to define all the relations yourself. Entering new facts 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.

Secondly, 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.

The most effective way to use Anki is to make each fact you see independent from other facts. 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.

Continuing 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.

As 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. If for some reason you want to add material to your deck that is easier or more difficult than normal, you can either temporarily suspend the difficult material in the browser, or assign priorities to the cards, so that they appear earlier or later than usual. Priorities are covered in the deck properties documentation.

Facts 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, facts 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)

Because of their ability to tie related pieces of information together, some people try to use facts to tie less closely related information in their deck together. For example, if they come across two sentences with the word "completely":

Then they put those two sentences in the same fact, under the rationale that since they share a word, they are related. But what if the user comes across another example sentence?

That sentence shares the word "confused" with a previous sentence. So should it be in the fact for "confused"? Or the fact for "completely"? Or both?

Unlike 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, facts are not a good way to represent them.

There seem to be two main reasons people try to represent such relationships in facts:

(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.

Imagine you have a field that has two lines, and you want to put each line in a separate field. Provided your deck is formatted consistently, this is possible.

Ubuntu’s mplayer package has a buggy implementation of slave mode. Install the latest version of mplayer by following these instructions: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1081070

Anki uses mplayer to play audio files. The default mp3 player uses libmad, which has troubles with some audio files. To use a different encoder, edit ~/.mplayer/config and add a line:

ac=mp3,

If you’re on Windows, you’ll probably find the file in the \Program Files\Anki directory.

If you still have problems, consider installing a different version of mplayer. You can get it here: http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/dload.html

If you’re on Linux, make sure you have installed mplayer. On a Mac, audio requires OSX10.4+ or a special plugin.

Anki will stop the audio if you have moved to another card that has audio on it. If you don’t want the audio to continue when you switch cards:

To share a deck with everyone, use File>Export>Packaged Deck in the desktop client, then log in to AnkiWeb and click More>Share Decks and Plugins.

Syncing requires your clock to be set correctly - if it’s not, cards would be scheduled for the wrong time when moved online or to another computer. Not only must the time be correct, but also the date, timezone, and daylight savings settings.

Also, please note that when politicians decide to introduce or do away with daylight savings time, operating systems have to be updated to reflect the change. Please ensure you’re running the latest version of your OS, and if you continue to have troubles you may have to pick an alternative timezone with the same UTC offset, until your OS catches up.

If you’re using XP:

Please open each deck in turn, and then choose Sync from the File menu. After you explicitly enable syncing, the decks will be automatically synchronized in the future. This behaviour is confusing, so everything will be synced automatically in the next major release.

Settings>Preferences>Network

Decks can only be synced in one direction. If you change a deck on two different computers or devices and then try to sync, Anki will identify a conflict, and ask you which side you want to keep. To ensure you don’t lose changes, please make sure to sync your decks before you start a study/add session, and again when you’ve finished using Anki.

More intelligent handling of conflicts is on the todo list, but as it requires major changes to the deck and breaking backwards compatibility, improved handling won’t come until the Anki 2.0 is released, hopefully before the end of the year.

Syncing only looks at changes made since the last sync, so if your counts fall out of sync, subsequent syncs will not fix the problem. If the version of your deck you wish to keep is the desktop version, run Tools>Advanced>Check DB, then sync again. This will upload the entire deck, and other clients will grab the full deck and the counts will return to normal.

If you’re using AnkiMobile and the version you wish to keep is on your Apple device, export the deck via iTunes (see the link for info), replace your desktop version with the exported file, and do a DB check. After that, you can import the deck back into AnkiMobile.

If you receive errors while syncing or downloading shared decks/plugins, chances are you have antivirus, antispyware, adblocking, firewall or proxy software installed which is not correctly filtering your network connections. Disable the software, or add an exception for Anki. Alternatively, your internet provider is having problems and your connections are being terminated abruptly.

Another possible cause is incorrect proxy configuration. On Windows, check your proxy settings in Internet Explorer (not Chrome/Firefox). On OSX you can configure proxies in your system network settings.

The app called "iAnki" in the app store was written by a Japanese developer and has no relation to the Anki project. There is also a web-based offline client for Anki called iAnki, which was released before the iAnki app was released, so the iAnki app authors either didn’t do their homework or chose to reuse the name anyway.

If you want to use Anki on your iPhone, you have a choice of the official AnkiMobile client, or the offline web-based iAnki available on the shared plugins area.

AnkiWeb was originally designed to be a supplement to the desktop client, not a complete replacement. To do things like rename a deck, change study settings or do any complex editing, you currently need to use the desktop client. Anki’s synchronization features allow you to keep the desktop and AnkiWeb in sync, so if you make edits or change settings in the desktop, those changes will be reflected in the online version of your deck.

In the longer term I am planning to increase AnkiWeb’s feature set so it can be used as a standalone system. But until I find time to do that, what you can do with it will be limited if you do not use it in conjunction with the desktop client.

Most of the functionality in AnkiWeb is in the freely available libanki library. AnkiWeb itself is not made publicly available, as it will be used in the future to fund the further development of Anki. There is no package for sale currently, but if you’re interested in using AnkiWeb in a business or academic setting, please feel free to contact the author and register your interest.

Sure. Do it like this:

Starting Anki via batch file might cause problems using the LaTeX compilation subroutines. If you experience problems compiling new or changed cards, consider launching the Anki executable "e:\Anki\Anki.exe" directly.

If you’re using Japanese support, you’ll need to copy tho reading support too. See the JapaneseSupport page.

If your on a mac then you can follow these instructions

Note: when you download shared decks they will still be downloaded in the default documents folder, in Windows XP "C:\My Documents\anki", so unless you move them, they will not be "ported". When you move the downloaded decks to USB remember to open them in anki after the move so Anki can memorize their new position.

Yes. If you sync your deck to AnkiWeb, it can be accessed by any phone with a browser. On devices with simple web browsers, you may not be able to log in to the site. Instead, visit from a computer, click more, and go to the simple web interface. You can copy the link to it or email it to your phone.

Please see the main page of the Anki website.

In order to work on Anki full time, I need some way of paying the bills. The iPhone version was written entirely by me, and thus I have the option of charging for it. The Android version is the work of a separate group of volunteers, who have decided to make it freely available like the Anki desktop program.

Please see JapaneseSupport.

If you have followed the instructions in the previous link, and are using the Japanese model, it should work automatically. The standard model sets the following:

If you have created your deck without using the standard Japanese model, you will need to modify your model so that it matches the above. Your model doesn’t have to be exactly "Japanese", but it needs to have "Japanese" somewhere in the name, separated by a space.

Please note that automatic reading generation will not work on PowerPC Macs.

This should go away if you choose an appropriate Japanese font. Go to Edit>Card Layout while reviewing, and change the font of the fields with Japanese in them.

File>Download>Shared Plugin and install either Basic Chinese Support and/or the Mandarin toolkit.

Some Linux distros ship an IME that does not talk to Qt4 apps by default. You can try:

Please see Translating.

See the Anki website.

For information on the current alphas, please see the users forum.

The alphas will hopefully reach beta status in the first half of March. During beta testing a beta version of AnkiWeb will be available, and alpha builds of AnkiDroid have recently been made available too. The iPhone client will be a private beta, because Apple do not allow posting of beta software to the app store. A stable release is expected some time in Q2.

Please see http://ankisrs.net/docs/dev/changes.html

Anki 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:

The 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.

Furthermore, 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.

After 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).

Anki’s algorithm is based on SM2, but differs from it in some respects.

For a description of the SM2 algorithm, please see http://www.supermemo.com/english/ol/sm2.htm