if you are reading abstract stuff or more novel stuff that people are still understanding, then your own breakdown and understanding used to make cards is incredibly more helpful. If i was learning differential calculus, someone's analogies and metaphors of cards would not be understandable to me at all.
i have to admit i added my own bias here so thank you for expanding.
Same here, thank you. I don't know much about other topics. I use Anki for med school and language learning, both of which have great premade decks. But I think I can see now why creating your own decks can be more useful for abstract stuff. Kind of like that memorization method where you create stories related to things you are trying to memorize. It only works when you are the one who created the story.
Most premade decks are nowhere near as good as the medical school ones.
I don’t think any other subject at all has a shared deck that’s of similar quality to what AnKing provides for the medical community. Geography/maps have some good shared decks as well.
I will admit, reasoning through options is very much harder when you're under a lot of stress.
You definitely can, just not in a single day which is not something you should do. Anki takes commitment.
One thing with Anki or any other SRS is that it only works if you do it on time. Doing a few cards for a short amount of time and claiming "Anki doesn't work" is just nonsense.
>Anki might be useful for a few light cards every day but it's useless for the long study sessions demanded by med school.
This could be one of the most controversial statements for med students. Every classmate I talk to either uses Anki or a local commercial SRS specifically made for my country's med school curriculum/exams. And it's not just my friends or my country either, r/medicalschool shows the same tendencies.
> Once I complete the day and still have energy left, I'd move on the the next day and continue until I'm tired.
How can you finish a day without finishing its material? That's what ultimately frustrated my wife. Anki prevented her from getting through all of the material in the med school decks she got from a classmate. She stoped trying it after a few days because her time was better spent studying directly.
> Every classmate I talk to either uses Anki or a local commercial SRS specifically made for my country's med school curriculum/exams.
My experience with a US med school was some students used Anki. Most didn't.
Well, I don't think anyone can actually finish a day's worth of material in just one day. What Anki does is it helps you plan out how to spread your material so you use your time efficiently. A day's material is spread to multiple days, but you "learn" (the terminology for the card being due in more than a day) all of them the same day, to repeat it the next day and so on, with delays depending on your recall performance. If you make a mistake, your delay for that card is reduced.
>Anki prevented her from getting through all of the material in the med school decks she got from a classmate.
Ah, that might be a problem. If those decks were poorly made, and they probably were if they aren't something like Anking or copied straight from a source like Pathoma, they might even make one want to quit medical school. Ask me how I know.
The only use case I can think of where making cards yourself would be better is sentence mining while learning a language, because these cards depend on context and creation doesn't take more than a few seconds even when adding images.