Anki

Anki flashcard decks

Anki is a nice program for creating and studying flashcards on a mobile phone. The Android and desktop versions are free, the iPhone version costs $.

Strategy

Anki is useful for learning small, short concepts - not large, sprawling concepts.

If you have a large, complicated concept, split it into parts.

For example, instead of "What is the factory design pattern?", instead ask, "When is a factory design pattern useful?" or "What are the 3 things a singleton implementation requires?"

In addition to making the facts small and consumable, make them imminently practical and driven by experience. (Example: if you're studying a language, don't dump a big word list into flashcards.)

Resetting a Deck

Because Anki thinks it is so great at taking care of your study needs, it thinks no user could possibly ever need to reset a deck. (Why is so much software designed to act like a militant pedant insisting you do it their way or not at all?)

If you get sick of stupid timers and schedules, if you screw things up, or if you can't figure out the system and need to get your flashcards into another more reasonable study program, you can export your deck to an anki file, and uncheck the box about including scheduling info. This strips all the scheduling, due date, times reviewed, and other scheduling crap from the flashcards.

Why Anki Is Not So Great

One of things I least like about Anki is that it uses an overly-complicated, mysterious system to decide what cards to show you and when - but what makes it obnoxious is, you are FORCED To use this illogical and confusing system. The documentation makes an attempt to explain the details of the system, but the system is overly-complicated and the explanation is lacking in detail.

When you go to modify a deck, most of the right-click functionality is disabled. That means it is impossible to remove unused tags, impossible to mass edit cards, and impossible to find whatever task or option it is you're trying to do. Additionally, there are all kinds of special terms and different modes (learning, new, due, review, etc.), none of which have clear names from which their functions can be deduced. (Like - the whole point of doing flashcards is to review. Every flashcard I look at, I am reviewing. Why would you have a "review" category for some cards? In what context? What the hell does review mean?)

After spending a LOT of time getting flashcards into Anki, I started to study them, and after about 20 cards, Anki said, "Okay, thanks, that was fun, see you tomorrow." There is no way to go back and revisit those cards, until some magic reset counter resets (and who knows when that will be, because there are four or five different "intervals" specified in the program's preference and it is unclear which interval corresponds to reviewing card again).

Or, you can just export your entire deck, strip scheduling information, then re-import it. What a fantastic design.

This program is a great idea. Its implementation is...... ummm.... WTF?