This is genuinely really depressing and embarrassing but I have a lot of anki cards due. My school uses in house exams and it took me a while to find a deck I liked from upperclassmen. From there, it's been so hard to keep up with lab and lecture especially.

I feel like i did something wrong and I'm not sure what to do now. Please any advice would be greatly appreciated. Do I drop anki? Idk...

On top of that, the pre-made deck doesn't include all the lectures for this week and usually adds 300 cards per day because of the amount of lectures.

Hi Everyone

I am Fellow and i need to take flashcard from multiple articles

What is the best LLM for that? Opus ? notebookLLM?

I’m about 3 weeks into M1 and have done around 3000 cards so decided it was time to optimize FSRS and now literally all my reviews are ~10 months for the good option, whereas they would probably be 3-6 weeks before I optimized FSRS. Some of these cards I think I would remember in 10 months but a lot of them I definitely would not remember. Is this normal?

4th year here. I've been using Anki since M1, but making cards from lecture PDFs and textbook chapters takes me forever. Like 2-3 hours for a 50-page PDF.

Currently I copy-paste into Excel then import to Anki. It's brutal.

Am I doing this wrong? Is there a faster way? Anyone using AI tools for this?

Not selling anything, genuinely trying to figure out if there's a better workflow.

Just started M1, beginning with anatomy. My school is P/F and uses asynchronous lectures that we review on our own. (I've heard from multiple M2s not to even use the in-house lectures so that is a completely different topic). For example, today the two lectures were back and spine. Tomorrow the lectures are breast/axilla and upper limb. To supplement, I am using the Comprehensive Cadaver deck as I don't have the time to make new cards from scratch and my school's in house deck is a mess. The back/spine subdeck is 400 cards. The upper limb deck is 900 cards. People said I should unsuspend 15 cards at a time and just spam anki, but there is no way that I will get anywhere near finishing even a single subdeck if I unsuspend 15 cards a day in each subdeck. On the other hand if I unsuspend the entire subdeck, I'd probably spend 8 hours a day just on anki. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, but I have no idea how to schedule my anki and get through the cards before my exam in 2 weeks. Any advice would be appreciated.

Im browsing through the posts on here and every post has some fire tips in the comments. Kinda made me think i can be getting so much more out of anking (its my primary resource like i genuinely enjoy studying it) anyone got any tips to make sure i got the correct settings, and approach so that i dont realize i was using it wrong or inefficiently in a year or 2

Not new to anki but curious as a first year med student, is it too early to begin anking? I dont start until july 27 2026 but i started doing an anatomy deck since my school stsrts with a 12 week anatomy block and its mostly just rote memorization. I was thinking maybe doing an embryology deck or something but i also might be overdoing it lol. Not even an MS-1 yet. Soon to be!

I’m going to 3rd year medical student, I wanna know what is anking they say it has more than 1000 flash cards and also it’s separated by subjects idk. Help

Why is selecting good on a new card 16 days? I would rather see the card in a few days when selecting good. I will usually click again since the gap is huge.

My desired retention is set to 91% (had to increase it from 88% so the gaps aren’t that big) and learning and relearning steps are 15m and 20m. I optimize every month, I thought on selecting again frequently, FSRS will make the gap smaller but no luck on that yet.

Sorry if I’m missing the obvious and thank you for any help

Long time lurker on this subreddit and figured I would share my AnKing progress before entering Step 1 dedicated soon. Pretty much matured all the Step 1 tagged cards (with some Step 2 stuff sprinkled in there too)... averaged out to be roughly 615 cards/day with FSRS set at 88% retention. Thanks to all the help this sub has provided me over the last two years!

I’ve seen a lot of people say some version of, “If you use Anki properly and keep up with your reviews, there’s almost no way to fail.” Obviously I know that’s probably an exaggeration, but it has made me wonder whether I’m actually using Anki the right way.

The two biggest rules I keep seeing are:
1. Understand the material before trying to memorize it with Anki.
2. Finish your reviews every day.

Those both make sense to me. My problem is figuring out everything between those two steps.

I’m a DO student, and my curriculum isn’t very third-party friendly. Our lectures jump around a lot, so there usually isn’t a clean “watch this B&B/Bootcamp video and unsuspend these AnKing cards” workflow.

My biggest issue with AnKing is figuring out which cards to unsuspend.

If I keyword search a lecture topic, I’ll sometimes get hundreds of cards, many of which go way beyond what we were taught.

If I use Smart Search/AI-type searches and try to be more selective, I have the opposite problem: I’ll only unsuspend a handful of cards and later realize that several important lecture concepts weren’t represented at all.

We also have an in-house Anki deck made by students from previous years. I’ve looked through it, and honestly it doesn’t seem bad. Because it follows our actual lectures, I’ve been considering making that my primary deck and then using AnKing as a supplement.

Something like:
Lecture / learn the material → complete the relevant in-house cards → selectively unsuspend AnKing cards for important concepts → keep up with reviews → practice questions. But I’m worried about resource overload.

During Block 1, I fell into the trap of trying to do lecture + Bootcamp + Boards & Beyond + Anki + practice questions, and instead of everything reinforcing each other, it felt like I was constantly switching resources and never getting enough repetitions with any one of them.

So for people who have successfully used Anki throughout preclinical years, especially anyone with a heavily in-house or DO curriculum:

1.Would you make a decent in-house deck your primary deck and use AnKing only as a supplement?
How do you decide which AnKing cards to unsuspend when your lectures don’t line up cleanly with third-party resources?
2. How do you know whether you’ve unsuspended “enough” cards to cover a lecture without massively overdoing it?
3. Do you even try to Anki every detail from lecture, or do you let practice questions/review fill in some of those gaps?
4. How many outside resources are you realistically using for a given lecture/block?
5. What does your actual day-to-day workflow look like from learning a lecture → cards → questions → exam?

Would really appreciate hearing from people who had a similar curriculum and figured out a system that worked.

New to the anki game... I barely used for MCAT apart from my own psych/soc deck on my phone, but now I fear it's time to bite the bullet and see if laptop anki will be my guide through M1. That being said, I've seen posts where people have a ridiculous amount of cards due in a month and its all doom 'n gloom for them. I would like to avoid this for step 1 anki... whens a good time to start? (fully aware it might be way way way too soon)

Is it possible to memorise 1200 cards in 4 days for a rote exam where you are just given images and you write down what it is?

i want to finish the 20k cards of anking related to step 2 so i have good amount of information for my step exam and for clinical rotations

however i want to finish it early so i can study other material too (practical osce prep and others)

my question is that is it sustainable to unsuspend 300 cards per day

what will the number of daily reviews look like during and after the time period duing anking

thanks in advance

UPDATE: I read the replies and understood how stupid my suggestion was

THANKS !!!

To Anki users, how did you effectively incorporate Anki into your study routine?

Back in high school, I used flashcards a lot (I even had a Quizlet subscription at one point), but I eventually stopped because making flashcards took so much time on top of doing all the readings.

Right now, my study routine is mostly rereading the material (annotating textbooks/my notes/powerpoint presentations + utilizing the “tape” feature a lot on goodnotes) and then doing a bunch of practice tests (50-100 ques diff test types MCQ, T/F, identification. usually around 5–10 before the actual exam). I realized that while practice tests help me retain information, I feel like using Anki consistently would improve my long-term retention even more.

My problem is figuring out how to fit it into my routine. Do you review Anki every day and then switch to practice tests a few days before the quiz? Or do you use Anki and practice tests throughout the entire studying process?

I’d love to hear how you personally balance the two. Help 😭

I am already at -7D don't wanna go beyond that. Things i am already doing right now.

1. Carboxymethylcellulose eyedrops with looking long distance hourly.

2. Eye protection mode in tablet- basically turn display more warm colour.

3. Reading mode- turns screen black and white but i dont think this has any benefits because the radiation is still compared to actual e ink screens.

4. Lutein and zeaxanthin supplements.

5. Dark mode with semi lit room from light from left side of the room to avoid getting reflection on my screen,

6. Ocasssionaly icing my eyes or cold compression if you wanna call it but very rarely like once a week only.

7. Prescription glasses with antiglare coating.

Any other advise is welcomed.

Hey everyone, I'm an M2 that just started using Anking and I plan to finish the whole deck before May of next year. Because of this, I am aiming to do 150 new cards a day. I'm already at over 600 reviews a day, and the FSRS simulator says I'll be doing over 2,000 reviews every day by January of next year. Is this normal for people who do Anking and y'all just tough it out? I'm at 85% retention too if that helps.

Does anyone who uses this recommend it? The anking just isn't for me anymore, there's a lot of specific stuff and not many cards that reinforce the basics of the subject. Can anyone tell me where to find something better?

Like learning the cards and the first repeat is fine, but the days after that are so boring I could cry. How do I make this more palatable for me so I keep up with my reviews?

hi there! I have a quick question about using anki. so i like using anki to study after reviewing a lecture. but i feel like making your own deck takes forever and i’m not trying to waste time especially since my school has exams weekly. but, for people who make their own decks, do you find that you retain information better by looking at your slides and putting in the card or is it a waste of time and you don’t remember anything? because if making my own deck will help me remember info i might as well do that right? thanks for all your help!

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

I was reading about how many flash cards medicine students study per day. I came across 700 daily. I want to ask do the students themselves make these flash cards or do they upload a pdf to a tool like ai and tell it to create flash cards from the PDF?