Setting up Anki

Anki is a Spaced repetition system (SRS), a program which allows you to create, manage and review flashcards.

Many language learners find Anki useful to quickly memorize (front-load) core vocabulary of their target language (TL), as well as help them remember new material later.

One of the downsides of Anki is that it can be a little difficult to learn how to use. Depending on how you use it, you can either greatly decrease your time spent studying or make using Anki a living hell for yourself. If you find yourself confused about how Anki works, it is recommended that you read the Anki manual. However, because it's highly detailed and technical, the bulk of this article will focus on explaining the most useful Anki settings to help you get things up and running as quickly as possible.

Installation

There are two main ways to install Anki.

• Using your distribution's package manager (pacman, apt, dnf, etc.).
• Using pip, a software installer for Python programs.

The first method guarantees that you'll have the right dependencies installed, but you may get an old version of Anki. Distro maintainers are not very good at keeping Anki up-to-date. The second method guarantees that you get the latest version, but you need to make sure you have all the dependencies installed.

Please don't install Anki via FlatPak, Snap packages or other non-native package managers. People have been reporting various problems connected to these installation methods.

If you are running Wayland, please revert to Xorg to avoid possible issues.

Using your package manager

• On Arch Linux the official binary from GitHub can be obtained by installing anki-official-binary-bundle.
• If you're not an Arch Linux user, I'm sure you'll find Anki in repositories of your distribution as well.
• Debian users and users of other stable distros should note that outdated versions of Anki work poorly with most add-ons, especially new ones. Use a version released at least 6 months ago or newer.

Using pip

The latest version can be installed with the aqt package.

$ pip install --upgrade aqt

The default toolkit is Qt5. If you want Anki to use Qt6 instead:

$ pip install --upgrade 'aqt[qt6]'

On my computer Fcitx refuses to work with the Qt6 version, I use Qt5 for now.

pip3 install --upgrade --pre "aqt==2.1.49"

Troubleshooting

• If you're still unable to install or run Anki, refer to Anki Manual and Anki Betas guide.
• Some people report that they see a black screen on startup, and that you should run Anki with the no sandbox parameter: anki --no-sandbox to avoid it.

Sync your mobile device

By signing up for AnkiWeb you can keep your cards synchronized across multiple machines. You can also sync between devices. Install AnkiDroid on your Android device and sync your collection. This will allow you to review your flashcards when you're outside and don't have access to your computer. I prefer downloading the latest alpha from GitHub because AnkiDroid's releases are slow.

To sync your collection on desktop, press Y or click "Sync" on the toolbar.

I must warn you in advance though. Don't sync your collection with AnkiWeb if you are a heavy user of subs2srs. subs2srs decks take a lot of disk space. Use a different Anki profile to store them.

To make multiple profiles, press File > Switch profile.

Import an example mining deck

After you install Anki, you need to set up a Note Type to keep your flashcards formatted as you like. Anki comes with a few basic Note Types, but they aren't suited for learning Japanese.

Because making your own Note Type is a tedious process consisting of essentially adding the fields you need and copy-pasting html and css, I recommend you to import a pre-made mining deck.

A sample mining deck can be found here:

• AnkiWeb: https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1557722832
• Mirror: https://t.me/ajatt_tools/16

Japanese language support

Press "Tools" > "Add-ons" > "Get Add-ons" to download and install the AJT Furigana add-on. Then restart. The add-on is bundled with mecab, so you don't need to install any additional dependencies.

Anki settings

In Anki you can learn languages, biology, math, physics, etc., and Anki isn't optimized for any of them in particular.

To optimize Anki for language learning I recommend the following settings.

Preferences

You can access preferences by going to Tools > Preferences… on Anki’s main window.

• Learn ahead limit. I recommend keeping the value close to the default of 20 minutes. Mine is 35 minutes. When you finish your daily reviews and new cards, Anki will start ignoring intervals of cards in the learning queue less than this value and showing the cards to you right away. This is good for cards with small intervals because it lets you finish your reps without breaking the flow and waiting for your cards to become ready to be reviewed. But if you set the Learn ahead limit too high cards with longer learning steps will be shown to you too early. Keeping the value on the lower side enforces the wait time of your steps. If you set this to 0, Anki will always wait the full delay, so it's not optimal either.

• Show new cards after reviews. You always want to finish your reviews first, and you don't want new cards to slow you down. You can choose Show new cards before reviews if you are consistent and feel confident that you will never have a backlog of Anki reviews. Mixing is probably the worst way and will confuse you when a new card pops up after a streak of mature cards.

• Anki 2021 scheduler. This is a new scheduler that comes with Anki 2.1.45+. If your version of Anki doesn't show this option, it has been already enabled by default. Otherwise, make sure to enable it. The old V1 scheduler was buggy and clunky. The new one fixes its issues.

  Main killer features:

  • You can have subdecks and review all of them at once, the cards will be properly mixed when reviewing.
  • You can learn new cards in filtered decks. Filtered decks no longer reset learning steps when rebuilt or emptied.

Options Groups

Each deck has an Options Group attached to it. The sub-deck options will override the parent deck options. Click Deck > Options to access Options Groups settings. You can hit Manage to create additional options groups.

Warning: If you're running Anki 2.1.45+, you will be presented with a new "Options Groups" settings dialog. As usual, Anki developers are making the app worse with each release. The new layout won't match with the screenshots shown on this page. If you want to bring up the old version of the dialog, click "Deck Options" while holding Shift.

Consider creating separate Options Groups for each type of material you learn. You can assign each Options group to multiple decks. This is useful for making small adjustments to individual decks based on the cards the decks store.

Below are the options I recommended using.

New cards

• Learning steps: This is the number of times you have to answer good on the card before it graduates. I recommend beginners to stick to the default learning steps of 1 10. When you get more familiar with Anki you can add your custom steps and experiment with them. But don't overdo it: too many steps will make you spend too much time in Anki for no substantial gain in retention. The learn ahead option set in the previous section will make sure that you won't be shown cards with large steps too early.

  You can experiment with so-called micro steps if you see that remembering new cards is more difficult than you thought. This means specifying an interval in seconds instead of minutes. For the new settings menu you just type 30s for 30 seconds. For the old menu you need to specify a decimal like this: 0.5.

• New cards/day: The default value of 20 cards is very reasonable and manageable for most users. However, if you feel overwhelmed by the amount of reviews you have to do, lower it to about 10 new cards a day. Doing more cards is also possible if you can keep up with the review load, but generally in the AJATT community it is advised to learn no more than 30 new cards a day.

  As you've noticed, I keep my setting at 0. That's simply because I use Learn Now Button to manually pick and learn cards from my Sentence Bank.

• Starting Ease: Every card has a property called Ease factor. Over time the Ease factor can change and cause negative side effects. Set the Starting Ease to 131% to avoid the side effects. More about it later.

Reviews

• Maximum reviews/day: This value sets an arbitrary cap on the amount of reviews you can do each day. If the cap is low, your due cards won't magically disappear after you've done with the reviews. Instead, they will form a backlog of likely forgotten cards. Because you want to review all your due cards every day, set this at a high value.

• Interval modifier: Now here is where it gets interesting. When you answer Good on a card, its interval is recalculated:

  New interval = current interval * Card's ease * Interval Modifier
  

  By default, new interval is 2.5 * last interval. At its default value of 100%, Interval Modifier does nothing. However, this is not what you want because you've just lowered Starting Ease to 131% in the previous section. To restore the balance bump Interval Modifier up to 192%. 1.92 * 1.31 is roughly equal to 2.5.

  Later after you've used Anki for a couple of months and have had high retention rate, you can increase the value further and do fewer reviews. If you forget too many cards, it is recommended to lower it a bit.

• Easy bonus and Hard interval: Ignore these settings as you should never use the "Hard" and "Easy" buttons.

  

  The "Hard" and "Easy" buttons have counter-intuitive effects on Anki's algorithm, which causes long-term problems with Ease of your cards.

  AJT Flexible Grading can hide unwanted buttons. It is covered in greater detail later.

  An alternative way to make "Hard", "Good" and "Easy" buttons behave the same would be using the V3 scheduler's custom scheduling mechanism.

• Maximum interval: Intervals of your cards can never increase beyond this limit. I advise setting it as big as possible. The default is 36500 days, which is equal to 100 years. However, you can decrease this to a smaller number if you want to ensure long-term retention.

Lapses

• Steps (in minutes): Works similar to the setting in the New Cards tab, except it’s for cards you've pressed “Again” on. It affects how well you will relearn your lapsed cards. Beginners should set one learning step and observe their experience. The default of 10 minutes is okay, but I prefer a slightly bigger one. Later you can experiment with more learning steps.

• New interval: You often still somewhat remember a word in Japanese even if you fail it. A different context or another word, or studying it on a different day may jog your memory. Thus, we don't need to fully penalize a fail here.

  For example, if you use a new interval of 50%, when you lapse a card and relearn it, the interval won't be reset back to 1 day, it will be half of the previous interval. The recommended range in the AJATT community is between 50 and 75%.

  For a word cards deck you may set it to about 30-40% because word cards are noticeably harder than sentence cards. I explain differences between card templates later.

• Leech threshold and Leech action: Leeches are cards that you keep on forgetting and relearning over and over. Keep the leech threshold low (4-6 lapses) and suspend the cards when they become leeches. You have to properly deal with leeches instead of letting them rotate in your deck and slow you down.

  Possible ways to deal with leeches:

  • Delete them: For those small minority of cards that just won’t stick, it’s best to just get rid of them. Instead of wasting a bunch of time on a single leech, it’s more productive to learn 5 normal cards in its place.

  • Keep them for later: If you can't remember a word after 4-5 lapses, it means that your brain hasn't been primed yet to acquire it. Wait a month or two and try again. Often you'll find that cards that would not stick before had become very easy.

  • Make a new card for the same target word: If a word is of high value to you, you can try to memorize a different representation of it. Find a different example sentence in your Sentence Bank or online. For example, on weblio.

Ease Hell

Ease Hell is when Anki gradually lowers Ease factors of your flashcards, assuming they are more difficult than they actually are. A card with a low Ease factor has to be reviewed more often. As a result, you are forced to review too many cards each day.

Anki decreases the Ease factor of a card every time you fail it or answer "Hard". This leads to intervals growing slower, and eventually most of your cards end up having a low Ease factor. This is when you are in Ease Hell.

Similarly, pressing "Easy" causes the Ease to increase. The intervals of such cards grow faster than normal, which leads to forgetting in the future.

Side effects of each answer button:

• Again - Ease decreases by 20%.
• Hard - Ease decreases by 15%.
• Good - No side effect.
• Easy - Ease increases by 15%.

The reason I recommend never pressing "Hard" and "Easy" is to avoid the side effects. But this still leaves the problem with the "Again" button unsolved. The lowest possible Starting Ease in Anki is 131%. By setting Starting Ease to the lowest possible value while simultaneously increasing Interval Modifier you make sure Ease factors of your cards can't decrease anymore, essentially fixing the issue.

There's a legitimate possibility that some cards in your collection are more difficult than the others. To account for that fact I recommend having a low Leech threshold. The hard cards are going to be suspended sooner. Once a card becomes a leech, you should investigate why it happened.

Open the Anki Browser and type tag:leech to display your leeches.

If you've been using Anki for a while before reading this page then you'll need to update your collection to reset the Ease factor of the older cards. To update older cards, use the RefoldEase add-on.

More about the Ease Hell:

• Guide to Anki Intervals and Learning Steps
• The Ease Factor Problem
• Ease Hell in Anki

GTK theme

Anki uses the Qt toolkit. If you're not running Plasma (or possibly another Qt-based desktop environment) Qt applications won't be styled according to the GTK theme you may have selected.

There are multiple ways to tell Anki to use your GTK theme.

qt5-styleplugins

1. If your version of Anki uses Qt5, install qt5-styleplugins. If your version of Anki uses Qt6, install qt6gtk2.
2. Set the following environment variable:

export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2

Then re-login or reboot.

kvantum

Install the requirements: kvantum, qt5ct, qt6ct.

$ sudo pacman -S kvantum qt5ct qt6ct

1. Launch kvantummanager, select "Change/Delete Theme" and select your theme from the combo box.

2. Press "Use this theme", then "Quit".

3. Open qt5ct, then qt6ct. Select kvantum as theme engine. Apply changes.

4. Set the following environment variable.

   • If your version of Anki uses Qt6: export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt6ct
   • If your version of Anki uses Qt5: export QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct

Then re-login or reboot.

This method consistently works if Anki uses Qt5. Currently, there are problems with Qt6. To work around it, install the Qt5 version of Anki (and/or uninstall PyQt6-* packages with pip if they were installed) and instead of setting the environment variable system-wide, set it locally. It can be achieved by launching Anki like this:

QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct anki

To make the setting persist, in the .desktop file (see pip install notes) change Exec= to:

Exec=env QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=qt5ct anki %f

Trying different versions

If you want to install and test multiple versions of Anki at the same time, use the following functions. Add them to your ~/.bashrc or ~/.zshrc.

Install a specific version. For example, run anki_test_install 45 to install Anki 2.1.45.

anki_test_install() {
    local -r version=${1:?No version provided.}
    local -r dir=~/.local/share/anki_builds/"anki_$version"
    (
        mkdir -p -- "$dir" && cd -- "$dir" || exit
        python -m venv --system-site-packages pyenv
        ./pyenv/bin/pip3 install --upgrade pip
        ./pyenv/bin/pip3 install --upgrade --pre "aqt==2.1.$version"
    )
}

Run a specific version. This script uses dmenu to ask what version you want to run.

anki_test_run() {
    local -r dir=~/.local/share/anki_builds
    if [[ $* ]]; then
        local -r choice=$*
    else
        local -r choice=$(ls -1 "$dir" | dmenu)
    fi
    if [[ -n $choice ]]; then
        (cd -- "$dir/$choice" && ./pyenv/bin/anki)
    fi
}

These functions are available on my GitHub.

Tags: anki