Using Anki | Studying Effectively for GCSE's & A-level's

hey friends and welcome back to cyber series and something effectively for jesus these nail arlors in the previous video we learned about the basics of anki in 15 minutes and in the one before that we learned about how we can uh learn new content for the first time and made flashcards on that content in this video we will be adding the flashcards we made onto anki and discuss a few features of anki that are useful for gcse's nailers as always timestamps will be in the description down below so do check those out during the video so now we can start

adding the flashcards that we made in the previous video ontanki so the first thing we do is create a deck by pressing the create deck button and writing the deck name which is chemistry and we can create a deck inside this deck such as an organic deck by creating that and then dragging and dropping it into the chemistry deck so we can start adding flashcards to it by pressing add and then on the deck section we choose chemistry organic and for now we choose basic and we can just start copying and pasting these flashcards over into an keys so the front of the flashcard is uh how can female reactions be grouped and then paste this onto the back of the flashcards and i like to make this unbolt and now for the tags section what i do is i reference the specification so this part of the specification is 6. 1. 1 aromatic compounds so what i write in the tags section is 6. 1. 1 aromatic compounds and then i press add and you can see the tag stays the same here so i can start adding the laser flash cards as well and the nice thing about having the tag that you'll see later in the video is that we can create custom study decks based on these tags for any upcoming topic tests we may have so now if i just add the rest of these flashcards so now i finish adding these flashcards on tanki and you can see that in some cases i had to reformat the flashcart for example if i copy and paste these two bullet points in tanki and you can see that one of the bullet points ends up here and the one doesn't so i press the delete button on the end of this row and then press enter again and both of the bullet points end up together also if you want to copy and paste any maps or chemistry equations on tanki and have them come out nicely then i have a video on how to do that which is linked above right now and for other cases when there's a table or something which you can't exactly copy on tanki i usually just press windows shift ns to copy open up the snipping tool and then select some area i want and then pressing paste so whilst it's easy to copy this image uh it's quite difficult to copy your table um which we may have included in our flashcards so i just use

that now you're probably thinking to yourself okay so we made notes on google docs turn them into flashcards and now we have to spend time copying and pasting them into an key what's the point couldn't we have just written the flashcards directly into key to begin with and whilst we could have it in my experience it's much easier to make the notes all in one document using the various resources that we mentioned before and then turn them into flashcards in the same document that's because it's often the case that when we make a flashcard from a bullet point on google docs then we realize after making five more flashcards that we can combine two flashcards together or add some information onto an existing flashcard i find the process of combining flashcards together and adding any extra information as i'm making them from bullet points to be much easier to do on google docs than it is on anki that's because i prefer to easily see all the flashcards i have in one document when making them because on anki after you add a flashcard the only way to go back to it is to press the history button over here and then look through all the flashcards before and if i were to click on one now then it would show that flashcard in isolation and if i go back and then click on another one then they would show that as well now whilst i can go down and select the tag i just made which is as 6. 1. 1 aromatic compounds i can see all of them right now i can't see the contents of the flashcard and the images and everything side by side so whilst you can add them directly on tanki it just means that you may have to go back more often and maybe add something to a flashcard you've just made because you didn't realize at the time or combine flashcards together and whatnot now i must admit the process of copying flashcards over on tanki it does get quite repetitive so i often do it late at night before bed when my brain doesn't have to do any heavy thinking and i can play some music or listen to a podcast episode whilst doing it or something right so now that we've added our flashcards on tanki it's a good idea to set out some time to go free anki every day usually i went through anki every day on the commute to and from school which was about an hour in total on my phone but how long you spend really depends on how many flash cards you have to do that day some days you may have to do around 80 which may take 10 to 30 minutes depending on how confident you are with them and how content heavy they are and on other days you may have to do only 25. the variation between days will be especially noticeable for the first week or two after using anki but slowly the flashcards will balance themselves out as you get uh some writing offers wrong and whilst this may seem like a large time investment it really isn't doing 10 minutes in the morning when having your breakfast and maybe 10 more in the toilet on your phone or maybe and over five minutes or when you're waiting for dinner all these times can add up throughout the day and you can easily manage to do all your flashcards during the day it is

worth pointing out if we add a lot of flashcards in on one day then anki will only show up to at most 20 new flashcards per deck per day the idea they have is to not present you with too much information on one day because they think they may overwhelm you and there's only so much new information you can remember each day but if you find 20 to be too low then you can override this default setting by clicking on the cogs of any deck and then going to options and then choosing options group default and then where it says new cards per day you can set that to maybe like 30 or something and do

remember that learning is a gradual process it's not black and white in that one moment you don't know it and the next you do when you see a flashcard it may be difficult to recall the answer but don't give up too easily because if you manage to recall the answer then your brain will strengthen those synapse connections for that piece of information making it easier to recall the next time and the next time the following time and you'll get faster and faster recalling it in general the more we're using our brains when learning this information free flashcards the better it is in other words the more effort you put into recalling something the easier will be the next time so try not to give up and look at the answer too soon try making an active effort to recall the information and maybe if you can't recall it for about 30 minutes seconds to a minute then you should look onto the other side if you can't recall information and you make no effort to just keep looking on the answer after maybe five or ten seconds then you won't learn as much i also find it helpful to say the answer out loud or under my breath with my lips moving because it also helps you to avoid you tricking yourself then you go down to rights also as you gradually do more flashcards you will find yourself becoming more confident with the material and being able to recall the things to do with the topic quickly in class and in exam questions you may slowly find yourself building a mental model on the whole topic and how all the flashcards fit together and occasionally because the order is randomized you may have two flashcards shown close together and discover links between them also for flashcards involving proofs and maps or drawing chemical reactions or molecules i usually find it helpful to use a scrap piece of paper and a pen when i'm going through the flashcards on a computer or using the whiteboard feature on the anki app on your phone this helps me to sketch out the molecule or reaction or something and then compare with the actual flash card see how much i got right so here i

have all the actual flash cards which i used during my a levels you can see that i have a lot of cards due because i'm no longer doing a levels and don't need to go over these flashcards anymore although if you want to use them then there is a link to download them in the description down below so another thing we can do is create custom study decks by uh using the tags that we add onto flashcards early in the video so you can see all my uh physics flashcards are in a single deck so if i go to the physics deck and press custom study and then press study by called state or tag and then choose all review cards in a random order and press choose tags and now select require one or more of these tags so let's say i have a topic test coming up on capacitance and electric fields so if i scroll down and then select capacitance and hold the control button down and select electric fields then it selects both of them and i can press ok so now it's created a custom study session and if i go back to dex and you can see it appears over here so i can press study now and start going through these uh decks and once i finish going through the flashcards it says you finish a deck for now so i go back to dex and i can see that and nothing is true from this deck so i can then press uh the delete button and then the flashcards in that custom study deck will go back to the original physics deck and this process is known as cramming flashcards because you essentially repeat flashcards in the short term using specific tags and i did something quite similar before my actual exams so for my physics exam if i press custom study study again all cards in random order i know that um these topics uh these topics over here they all appear on a single paper so if i just select all these topics they all appear in paper one and then unselect these topics and press ok now i have a 180 flashcards study for my paper one exam and usually by this point i've studied the flashcards enough um such that when i actually go through the answers then i can go through them very quickly because i've studied them enough throughout the year this is just a chance for me to review the material once more and keep it fresh in my mind for the exam which may be happening tomorrow the day after so now and

everything to point out in an key i'll call each cards so when you're reviewing flashcards and getting them right then the interval between reviews slowly increases but for some cards you may get it right and then have it show up a day later only to then forget it and choose the gain option every time you choose a gain option after getting a flashcard and the flashcard is said to have elapsed this means that the spacing between reviews of the card has been sent back to zero now this isn't a bad thing this is what you want because it means that you're reviewing the material and you're getting wrong more often which makes revision more effective but it becomes concerning when you keep forgetting the same card over and over because it means a card ends up taking too much of your time so and key cards these cards leech cards and it helps you to identify the leech cards so by default if you press a gain button eight times for a card then it will be marked as a leech in other words if a card lapses eight times then it will be tagged as a leech and it will be suspended which means that it won't appear again during your review sessions anymore so if you want to see which of your cards of leach cards you can go to browse and then scroll down and on the left hand side you should see a tag which says leech and now you can see all these cards here are leach cards and then leech cards because i kept getting them wrong so often uh by pressing the gain button so since you're getting these cards wrong so often it means that either something is wrong with the card such as it's not well worded or you keep from getting it which means you may have to go back and re-understand the topic using your notes videos help from your teacher and whatnot and then edit the flash card to improve it and after you've done that for example if i've edited this then all i do is go over here and remove the leech tag and remember that the tags are separated by space so if i remove the leech tag then it only has one tag now and then if i just press enter reload this leech tag and you can see that card at the top has gone back to being normal and now if you don't want the card to be suspended and only wanted to be tagged as leech meaning it was still up in your decks but we'll have that tag or you want to change how many lapses it takes for the card to be marked as leech then you can do this by clicking on any of the cogs and then pressing options uh choosing the default options group and then going to lapses and then where it says leech threshold you can change this to say 10 lapses 12 lapses and you can choose a niche action to be either suspend card or tag only so i usually keep here 8 lapses and choose tag only and then press ok and now i would recommend checking every week for any new leech cards and do you know that ankit doesn't magically make the card a leech card without telling you if you're on your a flaps with a card then it will give you a warning that the card has been marked as a leech in the bottom corner and that you may not see it again until you do something about it which is by removing the leech tag by going to the leech tag here and then just removing any of these leech tags after making your improvements to god and do bear in mind that if you have changed your setting from suspend to tag only then you may have some niche cards which have been suspended from uh before when you didn't know about leach cards so if you scroll down then you should be able to see some codes in yellow which have been suspended so to unsuspend them you just select them all by holding shift and then right clicking and press toggle suspend and now you can see the yellow around it disappears and by the way the purple also means that it's mocked so then we can just go back to removing the leech tags for each of these and then reload the leech tag from here and they'll

disappear and another useful thing to do is to edit or delete your flashcards whilst going through them you may occasionally spot a mistake or want to change your wording of something and on both your phone and your computer you can simply press the edit button which is in the bottom left on the computer and then just make the changes here so if i were to i don't know remove this airflow stop press close then you can see that that's now gone now the mean time i edited my flashcards was as i did uh practice exam questions and past papers on the side whenever i do an exam question and mark it now write down some of the keywords from the mock scheme on a separate piece of paper and then find out where my flashcard on that information is and by going to browse and then filtering through tags and stuff or by going to google doc which i mentioned before because that's easy to find there and then after finding the code i uh reword it and i make certain things bold and underline them to remind me that that's what i'm going to have to mention to mark the flash card as rights when i'm going over it and if i don't mention those keywords and i can't market as right for myself now it doesn't mean that you will get the existing question wrong the next time you review that material but it also means that you will be using the words the mock scheme likes to use and the examiner pretty much has to give you the mark in that case and do remember that often mock schemes are similar for similar questions year by year they may put a new spin on the question or put some new context on it but if the question is similar to one you've already done then you will know what keywords a mock steam is looking for because it still looks for the same keywords also if you do more and more past papers and exam questions you will begin to get a sense of what information is useful and what isn't when reviewing the flashcards then i would often realize that there's too much unnecessary information here and edit it to remove it and in some cases when i'm convinced that there's no way they'll have asked a question on that flash card and then i would just delete the flash card by going to more and then pressing delete note but in this case i've seen this question come up so i'm not going to delete this obviously it's quite difficult to describe but doing more exam questions and past papers gives you a feeling for what is useful and what isn't so like i said in an earlier video try not to get too worried about getting the level of detail just right you can always trim down on any excess information and for any information you may be missing as uh you will find out before you're doing practice questions uh you can just make a new flashcard on that piece of information this also means that you shouldn't use tons of resources when making your flashcards and worrying about getting every single small piece of information on them if that information is important then it will come up on a previous exam question or something and by doing enough questions then you will encounter that piece of information if it doesn't come up on any of them but it does on your real exam then most of the people won't get that question right either so it doesn't really make see much of a difference in grade boundaries and after editing and deleting flashcards you can always go back to google doc and edit and delete it here but i didn't really bother because i knew my anki flashcards the ones i had on here were going to be the latest version and this didn't really matter too much in there and now another nice feature

i'd like to use is marking flashcards the only time i tended to use this was when there was an issue with the flashcard for example if i think that the picture wasn't very good and i wanted to change it but didn't have time to do it now or was using my phone and then i would make that into a marked flashcard by going to more and then pressing mark note so now you can see the see a little star appears in top right and usually i find it helpful to also edit the card and write a note to myself such as mark colon check the equation is correct so if i don't have time to fully check the equation then i will go do that later and then press bury note and this means that you won't see it again for the rest of today and you'll see it again tomorrow and then go to browse and then if i go to the marked tag here then you can see all the cards that i've marked over here and if i go to one that i just mocked um wherever it is i think it was combustion and you can see it's over here and then i can just edit the card and check the equation it's all right and then remove the tag for marked so it's no longer marked so i also use this feature when reviewing a flashcard and noticing it was a very similar to another flashcard i had previously encountered and i wanted to combine the two flashcards together or even when i felt there was some tension between two flashcards because something in one flashcard would contradict it was something else i knew i would mark it write a sentence uh by editing it and then make some time to resolve the complex light in the day and that's just by going through uh going to browse and then pressing marked and these are the flashcards i've marked and probably need to go free at some points and make some changes too and then just removing the marked tag but yeah that's

basically for this video and i'll see you next one in the series