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>The decks are divided by subjects as is the exam.

This is suboptimal. Let me illustrate the problem by using made up numbers. You have eight decks and study 32 new cards a day. You've set it so that each deck gives four new cards day. (4*8 = 32.) Your repetitions will look like something like the following:

AAAABBBBCCCCDDDDEEEEFFFFGGGGHHHH

Anki goes one deck at a time before it advances to another. Each repetition has context that serves as a cue for you. This kind of a cue is bad: the only context you should be using is the front side of a card. Everything else should be as random as possible. Otherwise, what's the point of recall practice using flash cards? While your exam might be in themed sections, it's a solid idea to introduce desirable challenges into your studying as much as possible. If you can play a piece on the piano faster than required for performance, you're more likely to nail it by then. Similarly I've nailed multiple choice exams by practicing free recall Anki cards before hand. I will brag: I felt like the king of the world by doing the bare minimum and being the best exam taker.

Another problem is interference. Let's say that you were to learn vegetables in French. It has been shown by research that learning words in sets slows down learning considerably and may double or triple learning time. Why that is so? One reason is interference: learning very closely related words in a session makes you mix them up together, which means you end up learning them wrong. The same threat is present when learning or reviewing anatomy, terminology etc. as well. (Even the similarity of jargon can be a problem: avoid learning and reviewing the definitions of 'absorption' and 'adsorption' close to each other. This is a very wrong deck of flash cards and is an example of what you definitely shouldn't be doing.) This kind of challenge is not desirable and should be avoided. Don't confuse your brain for no gain!

Now consider the following order:

GBGAEADABFHFBAECCBDFHEGHGDEHDCFC

This is better! But Anki doesn't do this unless you merge all of the eight decks together into a single one. Btw, this links to the notion of varied practice I mentioned before. All I've said so far in this post can be thought of application of it.

>The exam is not completely random questions but themed mcqs and emqs.

What are themed mcqs and emqs? I no a jack shit about medicine tbh, not my field at all. If you mean that the exam consists of themed sections, this only influences your practice exams and not your Anki study. The cards itself should be simple. They should be really easy if you know the answer and very hard otherwise.

>Some subjects like say gastro are more important for this exam than say haematology. SO essentially I wish to cover all the gastro deck properly and am not as concerned about the haematology deck but I would want an overview.

Identify all important decks and tag each card in them with 'high'. Identify all the cards in the least important deck(s) and tag them with 'low'. Tag the rest of the cards with 'medium'. Also tag each card by subject. Then merge decks either by priority or all of them together. If you go the latter route you need to do a little bit of tinkering afaik, but in the best case you would have mastered the cards already, but the world ain't perfect.

>I will using anki as an adjunct to my revision to imbibe a lot of info in a certain amount of time.

I don't understand what you mean by that. Like at all. But I suspect it's not terrible relevant.

>The cards are good - and have been made with cloze and graphic cloze deletion.

That's good!

>When you say you practice several times a day - if you have a hundred new cards do you sit down and do all 100, then later in day have another session where you review, and do more? Or do you mean you keep the default settings and just do a couple of cards, take a break do some more, etc?

I'm not sure if I follow, but I suspect it's the latter one that is closer to my intention. But since long posts are what I excel at, what I mean is to

1. increase the daily limit of new cards to be learned to 180-200. (This and the following settings are to be found in deck settings.)
   
2. make daily reviews unlimited (or absurdly high, 10 000 reviews per day)
   
3. make daily review time unlimited (or absurdly high like 24 hours per day)
   
4. Set it up so that new cards and old card reviews are mixed
   
5. do everything Anki schedules to you everyday. By the time you go to bed, you shouldn't have any reviews or new cards left.
   
6. Study Anki cards throughout the day. Study them while brushing your teeth, while commuting, while resting from bench pressing a set five reps, while boiling rice, before and after hitting the books in the library or having lunch or dinner or showering and so on. If you watch your favorite TV show, pause every 15 minutes and practice. If this isn't enough, block 10 minute sessions into your calendar spread by at least an hour throughout the day. As long as you accomplish #5 of this list every day and have spread practice over multiple sessions, you'll be doing fine.
   
   You can review about ten cards per minute so you need about an hour to do 600 card reviews. But doing them all in one session is both suboptimal, it's also exhausting. Much better to break it up to 10 sessions or more.
   
   I really recommend reading the book Make It Stick. You'll be way better at applying the principles of distributed practice, varied practice and recall practice to your study after reading it and everything I've said should be utterly demystified. I've applied them to golf and piano practice with quite good results, learning French and Swedish vocabulary and try apply it to all of my school work as well. They are really widely applicable and results are noticeable from days to weeks, depending on the task.
   
   Also: this advice pertains to your particular situation. You don't need to chain yourself to Anki for the rest of your life, but going this far for a very important exam is perhaps necessary. You will suffer anyway so it makes sense to make it at least worthwhile. If you find your sanity compromised, you could make it your goal to finish all Anki reviews before 5 pm or 6 pm so that you have a couple of hours when you don't need to think about flash cards at all and can relax. Constant stress isn't good for either you or your learning, in any case.

Yes, like baking bread. How the hell do you make a card for "add 2 cups flour"???

Firstly, I try to avoid list cards if at all possible. But sometimes you just gotta learn how to make bread. Mnemonics, especially the method of Loci, I have found to be particularly helpful in memorizing lists. If you are interested, this is the book that got me started with mnemonics. Very interesting and easy read.

My favorite source for Anki related background, techniques and information on how to "Anki" is Gwern's science and evidence based recommendations on Anki techniques.

The 20 rules of effective learning have some good advice on how to learn, as recommended by u/rsanek below. This website is very popular on this sub for a reason, and they specifically recommend mnemonics as well (See #7, the card memorization trick they use as an example is a method of Loci technique, and it really is easy if you practice for a week or so!)

• Would you like to shift gears to answer? Reverse for again, Gear 1st for Hard...
  Logitech G Driving Force Shifter, 60$
  
  
• How about leg pedals? For super lazy people!
  CH Products Pro Pedals USB Flight Simulator Pedals, 121$ (too costly)
  
  
• Hey, how much do you mean by "good money"? Willing to buy a VR headset? Answer with your eyes? (There could be cheaper solutions for the same too. Lemme know if you want to explore this)
  
  
• Or you could use voice recognition (you can set easy to recognize words and syllables. Or taps)
  
  
• You could also use hand waving gestures.
  
  
• If you wanna go super duper lazy, you could use a EEG headset like Emotiv and answer with just your thoughts! (yep, it's not sci-fi and is actually not expensive!)
  
  At the end of the day, there are tons of options.
  
  However, you should NOT be lazy while doing Anki reviews. When you do reviews, your brain picks up subtle clues from the environment. If you do Anki reviews on your bed daily, your bed will become the place where you can recollect this info the easiest. Recollection on other places will be more difficult. and you don't want your bed to be your most productive area :)

> Overall, mentally challenging but I can tell that it's a VERY useful skill. I'm keen to improve on it :)

Me too, that's why recently I've bought It's Not All About "Me". Though I haven't put anything into Anki, I found it quite useful read. I've tried to implement one technique, however, to no avail.

Some good articles on it in this book: https://www.amazon.com/Successful-Remembering-Forgetting-Festschrift-Robert/dp/1848728913/

For example: https://imgur.com/a/QVNo7

Don't remember if there were any special studies on flashcards (pretty sure it was because most of the studies were flashcards). But from what I remember the benefit was from "making it more" difficult for the brain by jumping between unrelated topics and that this makes for better retention. Can highly recommend that book.

This ball is freaking huge. This would be a decent option (http://www.amazon.co.uk/2-4GHz-Handheld-Wireless-Optical-Trackball/dp/B008M4X6UW/ref=cm_cd_al_qh_dp_i) but sadly the buttons aren't mappable.

I guess my best option is to get a fancy mouse with plenty of mappable buttons. It won't be as good as Anki Stress ball (tm) would be, but I guess it will be better than regular keyboard.

Thanks for your help!

I just started learning Mandarin with Anki, and here's what I'm doing.

Characters: I'm working through Heisig's Remembering Simplified Hanzi. His strategy (which Japanese kanji learners seem to be a big fan of) is to associate a unique English keyword with every character to serve as a prompt. He orders characters in a rational way, so that you learn radicals first that are used to build other characters later.

For each character, I look it up on Wiktionary to try and find a gif of stroke order (if Wiktionary fails, I use Google images). Then I create cards both from [character] —> [keyword] and from [keyword] —> [character gif]. The second one is where the money is at: I trace out the character on my phone's screen with my finger to answer keyword prompts, and to learn new ones I trace my finger along with the gif to practice.

For example, you can grab a gif for 九 here: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E4%B9%9D#Translingual

Pronunciation I'm still working this out. But I like using audio, so I've started making one-way cards from [character] —> [audio + pinyin] (ex. 九 —> audio + jiǔ). Wiktionary is also a great source of audio clips for individual characters.

​

Everything else: as usual for any other language. Personally, I make large numbers of audio cards for words, phrases, and practice sentence fragments using my own voice (right now Duolingo is my main source of vocab and example sentences—bonus that it has audio I can mimic carefully when recording my own voice). I write both the hanzi and pinyin on the cards in case I need to refer to them, but I rely on the audio most of the time (and I pretty much "think" in pinyin).

These are a few resources that you may find helpful:

http://www.productivity501.com/how-to-memorize-verbatim-text/294/

http://headinside.blogspot.com/2011/07/verbatim-2-free-web-app.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2YDkfgLtPA

as well as using techinques from Memory Champions:

http://www.amazon.com/You-Can-Have-Amazing-Memory/dp/1907486976/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1358441646&sr=8-2&keywords=you+can+have+an+amazing+memory

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tiea5ftMZVA

http://www.peakperformancetraining.org/sitefiles/index.htm


http://joshuafoer.com/moonwalking-with-einstein/

Much appreciated!

I actually plan to study medicine myself, and I've seen the flashcard flow chart. From your post, I take it you recommend beginning with zanki, and thus relying on Pathoma and Sketchy?

It'll be a few years until I'll start studying, but I've been thinking about—as a primer—doing Incremental Reading on these first.

• Anatomy. Atlas of Anatomy by Schuenke et al https://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Anatomy-Anne-M-Gilroy/dp/1604067454
  
• Physiology. Physiology by 5th Edition by Costanzo https://www.amazon.com/Physiology-STUDENT-CONSULT-Online-Costanzo/dp/145570847X
  
• Immunology. How the Immune System Works by Sompayrac (looks like it's written in Classic Prose) https://www.amazon.com/How-Immune-System-Works-Desktop/dp/0470657294
  
• Microbiology. Clinical Microbiology Made Ridiculously Simple by Gladwin, Trattler and Mahan https://www.amazon.com/Clinical-Microbiology-Made-Ridiculously-Simple/dp/1935660152
  
  Dunno what you think about that?

For those who are curious, this controller (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01NACKLKO/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01__o00_s01?ie=UTF8&psc=1) also works with a mac. You can remap keys using this free software (you need to allow the app accessibility features in settings after you install it; you also need to ensure the controller is set to game mode). https://yukkurigames.com/enjoyable/

Read Fluent Forever It has the best method in my view of how to use Anki for language learning.

The cheap versions of Amazon Fire tablets seem like the sweet spot to me e.g. https://www.amazon.com/All-New-Amazon-Fire-7-Tablet/dp/B01GEW27DA

I don't think you can realistically get anything cheaper without going for something used.

At the moment the latest version of AnkiDroid 2.8.4 seems to be in the Amazon appstore: https://www.amazon.com/Nicolas-Raoul-AnkiDroid-Flashcards/dp/B004L1G7T2

Since I wrote the post you linked to the authors apparently decided to update the amazon listing. I would try this. Maybe they restarted updating regularly. I would use this until it doesn't work anymore.

This one, but ordered through ebay cheaper

This one