How to Get Started With Anki Using Decks and Reviews

Anki is a flashcard program built around one idea: spend more time on the material that challenges you and less on what you already know. Getting started requires only two things — a deck to hold your cards and a review session to study them. You create a deck, add flashcards, then rate how well you recalled each card; Anki uses those ratings to schedule the next review for when you're most likely to forget. Everything else, including add-ons and complex workflows, can wait until this loop feels comfortable.

Step 1: Install Anki on your device

Download the version that matches your platform. The current desktop version is 26.09.2, and the free computer version is available for all major platforms.

The desktop version is free. AnkiMobile is a paid official iOS app, while AnkiDroid for Android is free. If you're unsure which file to pick, the installation guide linked on the downloads page covers the details.

Step 2: Create a deck

A deck is a group of flashcards. Decks let you study a specific part of your collection instead of everything at once — so a language learner might keep separate decks for vocabulary and grammar, and study only one of them on a given day.

Create a new deck and give it a name that describes what it holds. You don't need a sophisticated structure at this point; one deck for one subject is enough to begin.

Step 3: Add flashcards

Add cards to the deck you just created. Anki supports audio, images, videos, and scientific markup in flashcards, so a card isn't limited to plain text — you can attach a pronunciation clip, a diagram, or a formula.

Start with a small number of cards. The goal of this first session is to learn the review loop, not to build a complete collection.

Step 4: Review and rate your recall

When you're ready, start reviewing. Anki shows you a card, you try to recall the answer, then you reveal it and rate your recall with the most suitable option. That rating determines when Anki schedules the next review — the program aims to show each card again right around the point where you're most likely to forget it.

The practical consequence: cards you find easy come back less often, and cards you struggle with come back sooner. This is the mechanism behind the claim that Anki helps you spend more time on challenging material and less on what you already know.

Step 5: Sync across devices (optional)

The free AnkiWeb synchronization service lets you sync your cards across devices. If you study on a computer at home and a phone while commuting, syncing keeps both in step. This step is optional for getting started but worth setting up early if you plan to use more than one device.

What you can safely ignore for now

Anki supports complex workflows, but none of them are prerequisites for the basic loop above. In particular:

• Customization — changing flashcard layouts and the timing of reviews is possible, but the defaults work fine while you're learning.
• Add-ons — these extend Anki with new features and functionality, and are best added once you know what's missing from your workflow.
• Large collections — Anki can handle decks of 100,000+ cards, so there's no need to worry about scale limits as your collection grows.

Common sticking points

• Rating too generously. If you rate a card as easy when you actually hesitated, it will come back later than it should. Rate the recall you actually had.
• Building too many cards before reviewing. The scheduling only starts working once you review, so a huge unreviewed backlog teaches you nothing.
• Treating decks as permanent. Decks are just groupings; you can reorganize them later without losing cards.

Where to go next

Once the create–add–review loop feels routine, the natural next steps are customizing card layouts and review timing, installing add-ons for features you want, and — if you'd rather not build cards from scratch — looking at shared decks, since Anki is a community project where users share decks to help others start learning the same material.