Zanki (if you don’t already know) is a very popular flashcard deck option for students studying for USMLE Step 1. If you’re at the beginning of your dedicated study period and haven’t selected a flashcard resource yet, we strongly advise you to check out our flashcard resource reviews to help you weigh your options before reading this post. Suspending the 'uworld' tag on Zanki BG 2018 addon. Preclinical/Step I. Wouldn’t worry about it because doing these cards doesnt guarantee you get the uworld questions correct. The point of uworld is to teach you stuff- if your anki cards teach you things, i dont see the flaw in learning them and then.
Contents- 1. Language Support Add-ons
- 2. Frozen Fields
- 3. AwesomeTTS (text-to-speech playback / recording)
- 4. Button Colours (Good, Again)
- 5. Memrise Course Importer
- 6. Download from Quizlet image import supported
- 7. Expand and Collapse Decks
- 8. Search Google Images for selected words
- 9. Load Balancer
- 10. Toggle Full Screen
- 11. Power Format Pack: Markdown, code blocks, lists, tables, syntax highlight & more
- 12. Image Occlusion Enhanced
- 13. Ignore accents in browser search
- 14. AnkiStrategy
- 15. More Overview Stats
- 16. More Overview Stats 2
- 17. Force Custom Font
- 18. Night Mode
- 19. Image Resizer
- 20. Reset card(s) scheduling information / progress
- 21. “Must Have” an Anki Add-on Library
Anki supports community created add-ons which allow you to expand Anki and make it do more for you. You can download these from the following webpage, https://ankiweb.net/shared/addons/.
I have made use of Anki for over 3 years now.
There have been some brilliant plugins that I have used which I feel can make your SRSing a lot easier. So without further ado, here is my list of what I think are the best Anki plugins.
This list is in no particular order.
Disclaimer – As time goes on, support for these plugins may be lost and thus some of these may no longer work.
If you want more information on learning things more efficiently AND making them stick then I suggest taking a look at Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning.
Top 20 Anki Add-ons
1. Language Support Add-ons
A few languages have plugins to allow for extra functionality. I personally have only used the Japanese one (which is amazing by the way), but if you are studying any of the other available languages then it might be worth taking a look at them. It’s just a shame that there aren’t more language support plugins.
- Japanese
- Chinese
- Esperanto
- German
- AZERTY / French keys support
2. Frozen Fields
This plugin adds a little snowflake icon next to each of the fields when you add or edit a note. If you click the snowflake then it will “freeze” the content in that field, thus carrying it onto the next card you add. This is less useful for language learning but can be great for other forms of study.
3. AwesomeTTS (text-to-speech playback / recording)
This has been pretty helpful since I have started learning German. With the lack of subtitles for German shows, I have been unable to use Subs2SRS. This little add-on acts as a good replacement for audio flashcards.
To get it working just highlight the text and click the speaker symbol. This will then bring up a new window, click record and it will replace the highlighted text to audio.
Depending on the language you may wish to change what speech source you use. I tend to just use Google’s speech source as it is pretty accurate for English so I’m guessing it’s going to be okay for other languages. It supports a range of languages and If you like audio on your sentence flashcards then it’s a must have.
Note: Nothing replaces a real humans’ voice though, so if you can, try to get material which has text and audio, that matches up, and make use of the following guide to convert your material into flashcards: Get Thousands of Contextual Sentences for Language Learning (Sentence Banks)
4. Button Colours (Good, Again)
This is a very simple add-on that adds colour to the buttons at the bottom of the screen, just like they are in the mobile versions.
5. Memrise Course Importer
Uworld Anki Deck
Memrise is incredibly popular and I used it to learn hiragana and katakana in Japanese (along with Dr Moku).
I know that it has a wide range of courses, professional and community based, as well as the ability to make your own flashcards.
Now, a lot of people seem to discover Anki after Memrise and realise it is more efficient.
When you hear this you naturally want to switch, but you don’t want to throw away everything you’ve done.
Well this plugin doesn’t transfer your progress but it can import entire courses into Anki. This means that you will lose your progress, however you can still easily import the content from Memrise and then use Anki to study it more efficiently.
6. Download from Quizlet image import supported
This is the same as Memrise but will import decks from Quizlet. If you are a fan of Quizlet then this could be great if you are thinking of moving to Anki. It can also be super beneficial if you are using other people’s working from Quizlet.
7. Expand and Collapse Decks
Does exactly what it says in the title. All your decks can be put into one deck or opened up into separate decks with a click of a button and without the worry of cards being mixed into the wrong decks.
A really nice feature if you want to study all your decks at once, or if you want to do them individually.
8. Search Google Images for selected words
I use this sooo much. It’s incredibly useful! This pretty much does what it says on the tin. All you have to do is highlight a word, right-click and you can search it straight into google images.
Combine this with a fast screenshot program such as Gyazo and you can add images to flashcards super efficiently.
9. Load Balancer
This plugin makes Anki’s reschedule algorithms a bit more manageable. Very useful, especially in the beginning stage as some days you get loads of cards and others you get barely any.
This spreads the load, making it less intensive on certain days. The only issue is this can make Anki slightly less efficient as it does mess with its scheduling algorithms and thus Spaced Repetition.
I recommend uninstalling this after you get used to SRSing.
10. Toggle Full Screen
Press F11 and go full screen. This is great if you want to get rid of any distractions while studying. Press F11 and go full screen.
Simple, yet effective.
11. Power Format Pack: Markdown, code blocks, lists, tables, syntax highlight & more
If there is one thing Anki isn’t particularly good at its formatting. Well thanks to this add-on, we can now use code to change our card layouts.
It comes with certain pre-installed features such as tables, colour formatting, user defined key binds and much more. This adds a lot more functionality to Anki and can be a very useful plugin.
12. Image Occlusion Enhanced
Like cloze deletion?
Ever wanted to remove parts of images to create image based cloze deletion cards but find Microsoft Paint too much of a pain?
Then this add-on is for you.
Easily remove parts of images in Anki to make cloze deletion cards.
Very useful!
13. Ignore accents in browser search
This plugin ignores the special types of accent letters that are used in other languages, while searching in Anki‘s browser.
For example the flicked “é” in French would be recognised as just “e” in the browser search results.
This is a must have for those who are studying languages that have these special characters in them, as Anki doesn’t support them.
This works for a variety of languages so check to see if it is relevant with the language you are learning.
14. AnkiStrategy
Can’t get into Anki? Really struggle with doing your reviews everyday? Why not turn it into a game with AnkiStrategy? This plugin formed from AnkiEmperor and AnkiWarrior, two simple games where you had to conquer a country but the author of this plugin thought that they games where too simple, suggesting that they where merely two fancy progress bars.
So, they produced a more complex game with competition and strategy taking on a bigger role.
The main difference here is that instead of a simple number running from 0% to 100%, your progress is determined by cities, inhabitants and monuments.
You then have to compete with computer-controlled players to conquer cities, use strategical decisions on how to spend the energy you get from your work.
The most effective part though is the motivational part. If you don’t do your reviews then you will go backward and start losing.
It’s slightly more complex than just “work hard and win”.
The rules are relatively simple and it can be really fun if you get into it.
Games are addictive and if you know you are easily susceptible to gaming then definitely take advantage of yourself.
15. More Overview Stats
Adds some basic overall stats when you click on a deck in the main menu. It tells you how many cards are due today, how many reviews you have, how many new cards are available to learn and how many cards you have total.
Quite a nice little add-on, especially if you like seeing your stats grow as you progress. For me this is a must have, along with More Overview Stats 2.
16. More Overview Stats 2
Essentially the same as the plugin before but with even More Overview Stats! It adds more stats to the overview page and tells you how many mature and learning cards you have, as well as suspended cards.
I have used this for over a year now and it is very useful. It saves you having to look through all the graphs to find details about your deck as it’s all there in one easy to comprehend format.
17. Force Custom Font
If you are studying an Asian language then the chances of you struggling to read small font sizes are going to be high.
This plugin helps by allowing you to change the font for the menus in Anki. Not only does Anki use a stupid font when you change the display to Japanese but the text is also incredibly small. This add-on allows you to change this to any font you like.
If you look in the comments of the add-on page, someone also explains how to change the font size as well, which is also incredibly useful if you struggle to read small text. This is a plugin I still use today as the default Japanese font really annoys me.
18. Night Mode
Night mode for the PC version. If you don’t know what night mode is, it basically just helps reduce eye strain by using darker colours for Anki‘s background and in other areas.
This is great for anybody working in a low lit area or who likes studying at night as it will prevent that annoying screen glare that comes with applications that use bright white colours as their background.
19. Image Resizer
Another simple but effective plugin. This will save you a tonne of time.
You don’t want too much information on your cards anyway, so having massive images in them is not good.
This plugin solves that by allowing you to easily resize images within Anki.
20. Reset card(s) scheduling information / progress
This shouldn’t be used that often.
Very useful if you are importing someone else’s deck that still has scheduling information in it or if you want to start a fresh, although this defeats the point of Spaced Repetition.
Personally, I don’t ever recommend resetting your own stats.
If you have a lot of backlog, just plod through it one at a time. Resetting your stats is essentially the same thing anyway, so you might as well try to remember what you can from your reviews instead of starting from word-go.
21. “Must Have” an Anki Add-on Library
This isn’t really an add-on in itself, more of a library of the top used add-ons.
If you want to save time then you can try downloading this.
Do be careful though, I have never tried it and I feel like downloading 50 add-ons at a time could be a bit overwhelming, not to mention very taxing on Anki.
Could be useful though 🙂
I hope you found this list helpful. Some of these plugins are way more useful than others but I have found that most of them have enhanced my SRS experience.
I definitely suggest taking a look at the plugins page. There may be some little gems there that could make the process a lot smoother for you.
As always, thanks for reading!
マット
2017/02/14
By Matthew Hawkins
Follow me on Twitter
We all know med school is tough and the amount of information required to memorize is tremendous. So obviously the question begs why not make it easy on yourself and use some powerful tools?
Anki is an open source flashcard software. If you’re here, you likely know how popular it is among med school students. Since it’s open source, anyone can build on top of it. So we decided to compile a list of most popular add-ons we heard from our users!
You can find the free add-ons on the Anki website to improve your Anki experience.
There are hundreds of add-ons by other Anki users. With every Anki update, more functionality is added, especially through support of more add-ons.
We have categorized these Anki add-ons to make it easy to find what you are looking for. While these Anki add-ons are great for med students, they can be used by other students or casual learners as well.
To install an Anki add-on, go to the tools menu and then Add-ons, then click on Browse & Install and paste in the code. Here's also a video that explains this process.
With that, let’s get started.
Gamification
These add-ons will bring some fun to your learning habits.
Pokemanki
Updates: Regular
Popularity: Very popular (73 upvotes)
Description: The Pokemanki add-on will keep you motivated to use Anki by letting you catch and train Pokemons inside your deck. It gives you a hatchable Pokemon egg for each lowest-level deck that you start learning. Your Pokemon will keep on leveling up as you review and learn the cards in the deck. They might even evolve.
You can access your Pokemons under your Stats screen. They will be above all your figures and charts. You will be able to see Pokemons for specific decks and their origin. Just review the deck to keep on training them.
Anki code: 633922407
Kitten Rewards
Updates: Infrequent
Popularity: Somewhat popular (15 upvotes)
Description: Kittens rule the internet, and they have taken over Anki decks as well. Kitten Rewards is an Anki add-on which acts as an excellent learning motivator. This add-on has a simple concept: it adds a 'cute kitten' on the congrats screen after a deck is finished. So if you lack motivation to study, use this add-on to get back on track.
What's more? You can upload your own kitten pictures as well :)
Anki code: 1627107763
Anki Fanfare
Updates: Infrequent
Popularity: Somewhat popular (14 upvotes)
Description: Anki fanfare is another cool add-on if you want to add a particular theme to your flashcard review. For example, there’s a trout theme and a Bruce Lee theme. The trout theme shows pictures of trout, and the Bruce Lee theme shows you sayings from the Master. Be like water?
It has so many themes that you can use with your cards. Simply download a particular theme and unzip it to 'fanfare/user_files'.
Users have reviewed this add-on writing that they get a 'dopamine hit' every time they finish a card.
Anki code: 2073603704
Anki Habitat
Updates: Regular
Popularity: Somewhat popular (14 upvotes)
Description: A little RPG magic always does the trick. No, we are not talking about Skyrim — you might never do any learning around Skyrim. But this little RPG integrated into the Anki software can take you a long way when it comes to finding a little motivation while reviewing those cards.
Anki Habitat is supported across platforms. It works by adding points to your Habitica stats as you progress through your cards. With these points added to your Habitica character, you can battle your friends and slay monsters.
It's a really cool add-on if you already use Habitica. If not, give it a try and motivate yourself to achieve your goals. Over 2,000,000 people are having fun through Habitica while achieving their goals.
Anki code: 1758045507
Productivity
Some Anki plugins to boost your productivity and ace your card review.
Polar Connect - PDF and Incremental Reading with Anki Sync
Uworld Anki Addons Reddit Download
Updates: Regular
Popularity: Very popular (45 upvotes)
Description: Polar is a document manager, reader, and learning tool all in one. Have you ever had to study from a book or a website and then create flashcards based on what you’re reading? Well, Polar is your tool. With Polar, you can auto-convert any annotation, highlight, or comment in one click into a flashcard.
The Polar add-on for Anki establishes a communication channel between Polar and Anki to easily sync flashcards from Polar to Anki.
Finally, Polar simplifies managing a reading list with tags, groups, reading progress tracking, and more
Anki code: 734898866
More Overview Stats
Updates: Infrequent
Popularity: Popular (38 upvotes)
Description: As the name indicates, this Anki plugin adds more stats to your overview page. This way you can keep track of your learning progress. It even adds colors to the labels for a different touch to the Anki stats page. When you hover over the colors, they show you the cards in the following order: new, learn, review, buried, and suspended.
Anki code: 2116130837
Batch Editing
Updates: Regular
Popularity: Popular (66 upvotes)
Description: The Batch Editing add-on for Anki adds a new menu item to the card browser, which allows you to do two things: Batch-add information/media to a specific field, batch-replace the contents of any particular field.
The changes that you make are applied to all selected notes that are featured in the field.
Here's an instructional video on how to use this add-on.
Anki code: 291119185
Visual upgrades
Visual upgrades to Anki enhance the way it looks, giving it room for more memory cues and helping you learn faster.
Night Mode
Updates: Regular
Popularity: Very popular (383 upvotes - I mean, seriously, who doesn’t love night mode?)
Description: The history of night modes can be traced back to Windows Phone 7. The feature was added to the now-dead OS to reduce battery consumption as entirely black pixels didn't emit any light on OLED screens. Since then, night mode as a feature in apps and software has come a long way.
It's one the best Anki add-ons for medical students as they can recharge their deck review (even at night) by modifying Anki to having an all-black background. The add-on gives you the option to automatically (timer) or manually turn on the night mode. You can even invert colors of images or latex formulas and define custom color substitution rules.
Anki code: 1496166067
Button Colors
Updates: Infrequent
Popularity: Very popular (111 upvotes)
Description: If you need some rigorous learning done through Anki, then you might as well use some colors. You must know that the Anki's deck page has buttons defined as 'Good', 'Easy', and 'Again' to update the time between iterations on a card.
This add-on only imitates the impact of colors on humans: red is known to pose a bit of danger, and you are good to go when things are green. This add-on makes the 'Good' button green and the 'Again' button red.
'I'm a simple man. I see colours, I click like.' — add-on review.
Anki code: 2494384865
Full Screen Toggle
Updates: Infrequent
Popularity: Somewhat popular (14 upvotes)
Description: Medical studies require a high amount of focus. There are so many new terms coming in, and you wouldn't want to entertain any distractions as you try to get through them.
Best Anki Addons
This add-on does what it says — it adds F11 key binding so that you can toggle full screen on Anki. You can also find this feature in the Tools menu. With this add-on at hand, you can cast all the distractions aside.
Anki code: 1612375712
Customize Keyboard Shortcuts
Updates: Frequent
Popularity: Popular (44 upvotes)
Description: The Keyboards Shortcuts add-on is designed to increase your efficiency on the Anki app. It allows you to change the shortcuts on the main page, the editor window, the review window, and the deck browser window.
You can head over to Tools > Add-ons> Custom Shortcuts and click Config to change each shortcut inside Anki.
Anki code: 24411424
Usability
The add-ons under this category add extra features to the way you use Anki. With these add-ons in action, you can do much more than just reviewing your deck.
ImageResizer
Updates: Infrequent
Popularity: Popular (67 upvotes)
Anki 2.1 Addon
Description: The whole point of Anki is to make memorization more efficient. Now imagine this: you plan out your cards, add images, and at the review time, you realize that the pictures are too small or big.
With the ImageResizer add-on, you can resize all the images to the desired format and make sure that the image size is not a problem anymore. To change the shortcut and the size of the photos you are using, click on Tools, and then go to ImageResizer. The add-on page has a great tutorial to figure out exactly how to use this add-on to your advantage.
Anki code: 1214357311
Image Occlusion Enhanced
Updates: Frequent
Popularity: Very popular (159 upvotes)
Description: Have you ever had to remember body parts from an image? Probably… :) A quick and effective way to remember these names is by hiding parts of an image in your card and then testing your knowledge of that hidden information.
The Occlusion Enhanced Addon is designed to do just that. You can use it to memorize things better by hiding labels in a diagram, and then revealing them. The cards generated under this add-on are described as 'mage-based cloze-deletions'.
There's even a series of video tutorials on how to use the add-on.
Anki code: 1374772155
AwesomeTTS
Updates: Infrequent
Popularity: Popular (74 upvotes)
Description: The AwesomeTTS add-on makes it easier for medical students to learn new terms by adding speed to their card decks. It has the option to store MP3 or speech to the collection. And yes, you can generate MP3 files on the go.
Click here to find their documentation, including their usage, service, and configuration.
Anki code: 427598962
Batch Download Pictures From Google Images
Updates: Frequent
Popularity: Somewhat popular (10 upvotes)
Description: Wouldn’t it be great if you can batch download pictures to Anki through an add-on so that you can later use them in your cards? This add-on for Anki downloads pictures from Google Images into a destination field. You also get to select how many pictures to download and choose the maximum height and width for them.
The add-on is fast and takes about 3 seconds to download a picture.
Anki code: 561924305
Web Browser - Search terms, Import texts and images automatically
Updates: Regular
Popularity: Somewhat popular (24 upvotes)
Description: Web browsers can be a distraction. You sit with Anki open on your computer, and next thing you know, you are browsing memes on Reddit ;)
This add-on prevents you from opening your computer's web browser by installing a native browser to Anki. It has a simple browser that lets you search words on the internet and then later import the information to your card.
Anki code: 864545277
Review Heatmap
Updates: Regular
Popularity: Popular (50 upvotes)
Description: While studying, it's always great to track your progress. Anki does come with some stats that you can look at, but the Review Heatmap add-on gives you an advanced tracking functionality. It's a great Anki plugin for med students as it shows you your daily review averages, days learned, current streak, and longest streak.
The newest release for Anki 2.1 is still in Beta, and you can download it from here. This Anki plugin also integrates well with the Night Mode add-on.
Anki code: Suggested download from the beta page on GitHub.
Summary
Here you have it folks. These Anki add-ons for medical students can save you valuable time and totally redefine the way you use Anki to learn and retain new information. Most of these plugins come with great support and documentation to make their usage as easy as possible.
If you have other add-ons you think med students should use, do let us know.