Anki shared decks: how to choose one and make it your own

An Anki shared deck can save you hours of writing cards, but only if it covers what you will be tested on and its answers are correct. Before you import it, compare its topics with your course outline, check a sample of cards and decide which parts you will use. Then adapt it as a draft, not a finished product.

You can find decks in the shared decks section of AnkiWeb, where you can search by topic and download them. A popular deck is not necessarily a match for your course, your country or your edition of the textbook. An anatomy deck built for another curriculum may go into far more, or far less, detail than you need.

Pick about twenty cards at random from different parts of the deck and compare them with your notes or textbook. Look for three things: whether the answer is correct, whether the question is clear and whether the content is on your syllabus. This check takes half an hour and tells you more than any description.

If the sample turns up several content errors, questions with more than one valid answer, or topics outside your course, consider whether fixing the deck is worth it or whether you should start your own. A deck with mistakes does more than waste time: you can memorize wrong facts with great confidence.

A deck with thousands of cards can be useful over several years but overwhelming if your exam is a month away. Notice how it is organized: if it uses subdecks or tags by topic, it will be easier to turn on only the parts you need.

Also check where the content comes from. Some decks copy images or text from copyrighted textbooks. Use them for your personal study and do not redistribute them. If the deck cites its sources, even better: you can go back to the original when a card is unclear.

Also check whether the cards depend on images or audio. A radiology or language deck can lose much of its value if the images do not display well on your device or the audio does not match the accent you need. Open a few cards with media before you decide.

The downloaded file is an .apkg that you open with Anki to import it. The Anki manual explains importing and deck options. What matters afterward is not studying everything at once: if the deck has 3,000 cards and you take 100 new ones a day, within a month you would face hundreds of reviews daily.

Here is our own example: for an exam in eight weeks, you decide to use only the 600 cards on tested topics. At 15 new cards a day, you finish introducing them in 40 days and have a little over two weeks left to consolidate. Adjust the number to what you can review every day without giving up.

Someone else's deck was written for someone else. Rewriting some cards in your own words helps you understand them and remember them better. Make small changes as you review rather than spending a whole week editing before you start.

Sometimes fixing costs more than creating. If your course takes an unusual approach, if the deck is in a language you are not fluent in, or if the answers use different terminology from your instructor's, your own deck may be more efficient from the start.

There is also value in writing cards: deciding what to ask forces you to understand the topic. A middle path is to use the shared deck as a checklist so you do not miss concepts, while writing your own cards from your notes.

Lumia AI can import Anki decks in .apkg format and shows a preview before you confirm. Afterward, check a sample of cards to see what content came across, edit the ones that need it and organize them in books, with blocks or neurons for each topic.

During review you rate each card Again, Hard, Good or Easy, and Lumia works out the next date. The same rules apply here: import only what you will study and check answers against your source, because importing carries the content over as it is, mistakes included.