I hope not. Anki did not work for me at all. I genuinely got worse at remembering things trying that spaced repetition stuff. Definitely not the way I learn things.
Maybe. I created cards, and regularly reviewed them in the app, whilst creating more as I was learning new things. Is there a different way of using it?
All it did was stress me out because I wasn't recalling anything and all my cards were repeated basically all the time.
Is there a guide you can recommend that shows me how to use it properly?
But it honestly depends on the purpose, and the person. There are tunables about how often you see cards in the learning phase, how many new cards are released daily, and how impactful forgetting is on future reviews. Language learning cards focused on vocabulary, may need a longer "learning" stage than math or science topics. So a lot of this comes down to looking at your recall percent, and tuning / reducing new cards added cards to the review set until you are hitting 80-90 percent recall for a week straight. I don't even recall the defaults but especially if you are downloading other people's decks its easy to drown in new cards.
My other suggestion is to use Cloze deletion cards where feasible. It's much easier to learn the US Bill of rights as a set of clauses than trying to recall the seventh amendment on demand in its entirety, and Cloze makes it simple to produce these.
This is not the TLDR and the Anki worshipping is silly. You can’t use Anki to learn physics, or math. There’s only so much you need to memorize in those subjects, the rest you have to work through problems.
Some other comments had me doing some research on Bloom's taxonomy and I really think the principles apply in mathematics and physics.
Problem solving is great practice for learning, and covers the 3rd and 4th domain levels (application and analysis, respectively). However, what Bloom believed is that learning is hierarchal, and to apply and analyze you must complete the first two domain levels (memorization and understanding).
Anki in the terms of math and physics is great for that (and I will also rarely create a flashcard out of a exercise, but that is mostly because I think something similar will be tested on later).
Yes you can, check Michael Nielsen or "A mind for numbers". Anki is two highest highest utility learning techniques combined, so by pareto principle it is tldr.
