Getting Started

Installing & Upgrading

Videos
Key Concepts
Cards
Types of Cards:
Decks
Notes & Fields
Card Types
Note Types
Collection
Shared Decks

Installing & Upgrading

Please see the instructions for your computer:

Windows
Mac
Linux

Videos
For a quick way to dive into Anki, please have a look at these intro videos. Some were
made with a previous Anki version, but the concepts are the same.

Shared Decks and Review Basics

Syncing

Switching Card Order

Styling Cards
 Typing in the Answer

If YouTube is unavailable in your country, you can download the videos instead.

Key Concepts

Cards

A question and answer pair is called a 'card'. This is based on a paper ashcard with a
question on one side and the answer on the back. In Anki a card doesn’t actually look like
a physical card, and when you show the answer the question remains visible by default.
For example, if you’re studying basic chemistry, you might see a question like:

Q: Chemical symbol for oxygen?

After thinking about it, and deciding the answer is O, you click the show answer button, and
Anki shows you:

Q: Chemical symbol for oxygen?

A: O

After conrming that you are correct, you can tell Anki how well you remembered, and Anki
will choose a next time to show you again.

Types of Cards:

New: A new card is one that you have downloaded or entered in, but have never
studied before.

Learning: Cards that were seen for the rst time recently, and are still being learnt.

Review: Cards that were previously learnt, and now need to be reviewed so you
don’t forget them. There are two types of review cards:

Young: A young card is one that has an interval of less than 21 days, but is not
 in learning.
Mature: A mature card is one that has an interval of 21 days or greater.

Relearn: A relearning card is a card that you have failed in review mode, thus
returning it to learning mode to be relearned.

Decks

A 'deck' is a group of cards. You can place cards in different decks to study parts of your
card collection instead of studying everything at once. Each deck can have different
settings, such as how many new cards to show each day, or how long to wait until cards
are shown again.

Decks can contain other decks, which allows you to organize decks into a tree. Anki uses
“::” to show different levels. A deck called “Chinese::Hanzi” refers to a “Hanzi” deck, which
is part of a “Chinese” deck. If you select “Hanzi” then only the Hanzi cards will be shown; if
you select “Chinese” then all Chinese cards, including Hanzi cards, will be shown.

To place decks into a tree, you can either name them with “::” between each level, or drag
and drop them from the deck list. Decks that have been nested under another deck (that is,
that have at least one “::” in their names) are often called 'subdecks', and top-level decks
are sometimes called 'superdecks' or 'parent decks'.

Anki starts with a deck called “default”; any cards which have somehow become separated
from other decks will go here. Anki will hide the default deck if it contains no cards and you
have added other decks. Alternatively, you may rename this deck and use it for other
cards.

Decks are best used to hold broad categories of cards, rather than specic topics such as
“food verbs” or “lesson 1”. For more info on this, please see the using decks appropriately
section.

For information on how decks affect the order cards are displayed in, please see the
display order section.

Notes & Fields