Quick Start

This page walks a brand-new user from install to finishing their first study session.

1. Create a deck and add some cards

When you open the app for the first time, it prompts you to create a new deck. Follow the prompt and give your deck a name. A deck is just a collection of cards on a related topic.

Once the deck is created, the app shows two main areas: the Deck Browser (the sidebar where decks, folders, tags, Unfiled, and Trash live) and the Playlist (the list of cards for whatever you’ve selected in the browser). With your new deck selected, the Playlist is what you’ll be adding cards to.

The bottom of the Playlist is laid out like a media player: plus on the left (add a card), play in the middle (start studying), stats on the right. Tap the plus button to open the card editor, fill in the front and the back of the card, and save. Add at least three or four before moving on, so your first study session has something to chew on.

2. Start your first study session

When you’ve saved a handful of cards, tap the play button at the bottom of the Playlist to start studying.

You’ll land on a new screen — the study session summary. This screen shows what you’re about to study and (later, as you go) what you’ve already studied in this session. A couple of things to notice before you tap anything else:

You’ll see a list of all the cards that are queued up for this session, with their content redacted (hidden behind blocks). The list is there so you know what’s coming, not for you to read.
At the bottom of the screen there’s a START button. Nothing happens until you tap it.

Tap START when you’re ready.

3. Go through a batch

Here’s the most important thing to understand about studying in this app:

The app studies cards in batches (5 cards at a time by default), not one giant run.

When you tap START, the app pulls the next batch from the queue. Inside a batch, here’s what happens:

Front side, all five cards. The app shows the front of card 1. You try to recall the back, then reveal it and mark whether you got it right or wrong. Then card 2’s front. Then card 3’s front. And so on for all five.
Back side, all five cards (if “test both sides” is enabled for your deck). Same idea, but in reverse: the app shows the back and you try to recall the front.

So one batch = side 1 of all cards in the batch, then side 2 of all cards in the batch. It’s not “one card all the way through, then the next card.”

New cards work differently. Cards you’ve never seen before can’t be tested directly — there’s nothing to recall yet. So when a new card appears in a batch, the app previews it: it shows the front with a FLIP button, tapping FLIP reveals the back, and a CONTINUE button moves you on. The new card reappears a few cards later in the same batch, this time as a real test, so the preview has a chance to stick.

What happens between batches

When a batch finishes, the app drops you back on the study session summary. This time the cards you just studied are revealed, each with a checkmark (you got it right) or an X (you got it wrong) next to it. From here you can tap START again for the next batch, or stop and come back later. That’s the loop.

If you marked any cards wrong, an “X wrong” label appears (where X is how many cards were marked wrong) above the START/NEXT button (the START button becomes NEXT once you’ve reviewed at least one card in the session). Next to that label is a refresh button — tap it to re-study just the wrong ones as their own batch. It’s optional: chase your misses immediately, save them for the end of the session, or skip them entirely. They aren’t silently tacked onto the next batch.

If you’d rather come back to your weak spots later (a different session, even a different day), the Playlist’s filter button has a Weakest option that surfaces cards you marked wrong recently along with cards you’re still learning. See Playlist › the filter button.

Batches give you natural stopping points. Five at a time is short enough that you can squeeze a batch into a coffee break and walk away feeling like you got something done. If five feels too small, tap the gear button on the study session summary to open the study session settings and adjust the batch size — up to a max of 25. The gear holds a handful of other toggles (covered in Studying), including Side Challenges — Text Input and Word Jumble — that you can enable for the current deck.

Shuffling

Normally the app studies cards in the order they appear in the playlist: batches are pulled N at a time, top to bottom, and presented in that same order. Two controls change that:

Shuffle within batch (in the study session settings screen, which you can reach in the study session by pressing the gear icon). When on, the cards inside each batch are shuffled before being presented. The order between batches still follows the playlist; only the order inside a batch is randomized.
Shuffle button (on the study session summary itself). This is broader — it shuffles everything in the session, mixing all cards in the playlist together, including cards already in Studied Today. So if you turn it on partway through, cards you already studied today can come back up in the next batch immediately. Worth keeping in mind.

Both are togglable at any time, so if you turn shuffle on and don’t like the result, just turn it back off.

4. What happens next

A few quiet things just happened in the background:

Your streak started. Studying today counts as day one. More on streaks and the calendar in Stats & Streaks.
The app scheduled your cards. The ones you got right won’t come back for a while; the ones you got wrong will come back sooner. This is the spaced-repetition algorithm doing its job — see Studying › the algorithm if you want the plain-English version.
Your work is being synced. If you’re signed into iCloud and you install the app on a second device, your decks and progress show up there too. The first sync to a new device can take a while — see Sync & Devices.

5. Where to go from here

A few good directions, depending on what you want to do next:

Get more out of the Playlist — the Study Queue, filters like Weakest, the daily cap, redaction, and per-deck stats. See Playlist.
Make your cards richer — images, audio, math notation, cloze deletions. See Cards.
Shape how you study — Study Queue, Cram, Weakest Cards, and the daily queue size. See Studying.
Bring in cards you already have — CSV import, or capture from other apps with the Share Extension and Shortcuts. (Anki .apkg import is temporarily disabled and coming back in a better form — see What’s New.) See Importing Cards and Capturing Cards from Other Apps.