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How I use Anki to learn anything<br>25 June 2026
Anki is a spaced repetition tool I first learned about 9+ years ago while learning German. I was enrolled in daily language classes in Berlin where every day felt like full submersion under crashing waves of information. Everything was new, difficult to comprehend, and everything seemed equally important. I was struggling to grab hold of what was crucial to learn and remember. Crossing an ocean. Climbing an enormous mountain. This is how it feels at the start of learning anything complex, whether its memorizing German case endings, or grasping eBPF.<br>My own learning has always been driven by personal interest and hands-on trial and error, less by discipline. But it turns out that to learn some things enthusiasm is not enough. Spaced repetition led me to a way to begin digesting what felt insurmountable, to begin making my own progress. It turns out all you need is attention: a practice of directing your own focus in a regular, structured manner.<br>Anki was created by a programmer who needed to learn Japanese. It’s a simple desktop application for creating and reviewing flashcards. You can also buy a mobile version and put it on your phone. It’s highly adaptable to the level of desired complexity. It will hold whatever you throw at it: images, audio, text, html, code blocks etc. You can also adjust and change the spaced repetition algorithm to your whims. Despite this I never tinkered with it much and just stick mainly to defaults.<br>After many years of using it off and on, this is the workflow that works best for me, along with some basic rules I try to enforce and would generally recommend. I cannot promise you will learn a new language, but I am certain you could.<br>Here’s how it works at first: You create a deck of cards and Anki chooses a number you should review every day (you can adjust this). While working through a deck and viewing each card, you enter one of four options recording how well you remembered the answer. Anki tracks this and as you review over the days, weeks and months, it will regularly surface the cards you struggle to answer correctly. Cards you easily answered will still pop up once in a while to confirm that you retain the info.<br>Creating large numbers of Anki cards in the UI is faster than writing paper flashcards, but it is still cumbersome and creates an enormous upfront cost when starting—one that you must continue to pay every time you add new cards. What completely turbo-charged the process for me was fully removing the friction of the card creation UI. You can do this by adding the markdown note-taking app Obsidian.<br>Many internet dwellers claim to get enormous value from building knowledge graphs or Zettlekestchen in Obsidian. I am not one of them. I’ve tried, but it doesn’t stick. I just drop all my notes into the root folder and occasionally sort them into titled directories. I have tagged notes together in the past, but I’m lazy and I stopped. Obsidian is extensible and bends so easily to the mania of knowledge workers. Because of this, one always has the feeling that he or she could be using it better. This is just the nature of the tool. I do my best to ignore this impulse and simply bend it to my immediate needs. (For examples of what’s possible you can view this video or this one)<br>Anki and Obsidian support plugins and you can use this to link them. This is important for my use-case. In Anki you add AnkiConnect which allows network communication with the program. There are many Obsidian community plugins that use this connection and you can write your own, but I’m using Awesome Flashcards (please inform yourself of the permissions gained by community plugins in Obsidian before blindly installing).<br>YamlHeader: A fantastic Deck<br>deckName: My fantastic Deck
Which card is this? #flashcard
This is card one.
Which card is this? #flashcard
This is card two.<br>--- The workflow is simple. To create a new deck you simply open a new note, add a header, and then create all cards using a template made of dashes. You can add anything you want, including images or code blocks. Then you press the Awesome Flashcards toolbar icon and sync to Anki. This is a streamlined and satisfying way to make large numbers of flash cards. From editing cards, to searching, everything is better.<br>Moving the card creation entirely out of Anki is one half of my approach. The second half is made up of general rules I try follow. Here’s an attempt to summarize them into a rough list:<br>You must create your own cards, front and back. I’ve tried decks made by others. I’ve never learned from them in any meaningful way.<br>Do not use llm tools to bulk generate flashcards. I personally don’t think this works. You can’t offload your own learning.<br>All of the information digestion comes from taking a topic and creating a question that you wrote yourself.<br>The question being asked, is more important than the back of the card. It must be 100% authored by you.<br>Taking...