My Top 5 ANKI Add-Ons for Medical School

If you’re a medical student, you’ve probably heard of ANKI. In fact, you’re probably using it to study already. ANKI has been my most used app/resource throughout my first year of medical school and I would recommend it to everyone, whether they are studying medicine or not. One of the best things about this app is the huge number of free add-ons you can download to enhance and personalise your experience. In this post, I have listed my 5 favourite add-ons for ANKI and how I use them to make my studying more efficient and more fun.

NOTE: I have included links to the add-ons I have used, but these are not for the newest version of ANKI (i.e. ANKI 2.1). A quick Google search with bring up the newest versions.

1. Image Occlusion Enhanced
This is an absolute MUST have add-on for anyone studying a subject with many diagrams and/or tables. It allows you to cover the labels of a diagram or blank out individual cells of a table and convert them into individual flashcards. This makes it very easy to memorise detailed anatomical diagrams very quickly and was the main way that I learned anatomy this year.

2. Review Heatmap
This add-on has been a complete game changer for me in terms of keeping me motivated to do ANKI flashcards every day. Not only does it show you whether or not you have reviewed your cards on that day, but it gives you a visual representation of how many cards you have done per day over the last year. It can also be customised by changing the colour, which is always a fun way to make studying a little more interesting.

Usually I aim for around 100-200 reviews a day, but since its the summer holidays I’ve been giving myself a bit of a break!

3. Advanced Previewer
‘Advanced Previewer’ is an add-on that I didn’t realise I needed until I discovered it and started using it, but has changed my ANKI experience so much! It allows you to preview all of the cards in a given deck at a glance rather than just one at a time. Total game-changer for learning information from cards in addition to reviewing them.

4. Right Hand Reviews with ‘jkl’
Normally, ANKI allows you to use the keys ‘123’ to note down how well you know a particular card. However, for right handed people (including myself) this can be quite inconvenient. The ‘Right Hand Reviews’ add-on allows you to use the keys ‘jkl’ for the same purpose!

5. Popup Dictionary
This is another add-on that I didn’t realise I needed until I was introduced to it by one of my friends. It allows you to highlight a given word on a flashcard and see all the other cards that have the same word on them. This is a great way to form links between concepts and ideas to gain a stronger understanding of a topic.

If there are any ANKI add-ons you think I should try or that deserve to be in my top five, be sure to let me know in the comments or on Instagram.

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