(Recommendation: Watch the videos at 1.2-1.5x for better pacing.)

Thanks for making the great decision to join the course!

I’m Al, your instructor, and I’m thrilled to have you here at LeanAnki School.

What you’re going to learn in this course comes from hard experience as an Anki learner:

• Creating 4000+ flashcards to re-learn 5 years of Engineering in 5 months
• Landing a top spot in a national exam that has a 50% passing rate at its highest; and
• Helping hundreds of students, doctors, and professionals from different countries study effectively with Anki since 2020

The goal is to shortcut your process of “mastering how to use Anki for learning” — which you can do in just a few days or weeks. (Depends on you, really.)

First, let’s get clear on that.

What this course is all about

This course is about how to use Anki like a pro, which — contrary to popular belief — does NOT translate “learning all the features.”

The truth is that knowing more and more nice-to-have features won’t make you “a master Anki user”.

Michael Nielsen, a scientist who helped pioneer quantum computing and an Anki pro himself, pointed this out in his famous article on Anki, Augmenting Long-Term Memory: (emphasis mine)

I know many people who try Anki out, and then go down a rabbit hole learning as many features as possible so they can use it “efficiently”. Usually, they’re chasing 1% improvements. Often, those people ultimately give up Anki as “too difficult”, which is often a synonym for “I got nervous I wasn’t using it perfectly”. This is a pity. As discussed earlier, Anki offers something like a 20-fold improvement over (say) ordinary flashcards. And so they’re giving up a 2,000% improvement because they were worried they were missing a few final 5%, 1% and (in many cases) 0.1% improvements.

[…] 

Learn how to use Anki for basic question and answer, and concentrate on exploring new patterns within that paradigm. That’ll serve you far better than any number of hours spent fiddling around with the features. Then, if you build a regular habit of high-quality Anki use, you can experiment with more advanced features.

Even an ICU Physician reports the same idea:

I use Anki to study medicine. I’m an ICU physician. It’s serious, and seriously complex, information. You know how I make all my cards? They’re all just basic Q&As with one front and one back side that I edit in Excel, save as .txt files, and import directly, with the rare image or diagram pasted in place of a text answer.

In the spirit of LeanAnki, this course is about learning the MOST important, MOST necessary few of Anki’s features (the basics, actually) and using them for learning effectively.

By the end of this course, you will be able to remember anything you learn with Anki.

Or at least, have the skills to do so.

You still gotta do the work.

But don’t worry, we’ll go about it in a “layer-by-layer” approach, similar to how any high-level performer masters their skills:

Through a cycle of conscious effort and automaticity.

So, ready to get started?

Download Anki first if you haven’t already, then move on to the next lesson.

Download Anki before moving on to the next lesson

On your computer

To download Anki on your computer, head over to AnkiWeb and download Anki.

On your mobile

If you’re on Android, it’s available in Google Play Store, just search for “AnkiDroid” and look for this one:

Note: Look for “AnkiDroid,” and NOT AnkiApp.

iOS users are required to pay for the app because that’s where the app gets its funds.

Why it’s worth the investment: The mobile app allows you to turn your downtimes into extremely productive hours.

Already have Anki installed?

Click "Complete and Continue" to move on to the next lesson.