how to make Anki cards?

Slow is fast.

Making cards with the methods above will take you much time, but it is worth it. It takes about 2 to 3 minutes to create a card. You can make about 30 cards per hour. If you insist making every day, you will get about 900 card per month, more than 10000 cards per year! That’s really a surprising number. You can deal with daily life easily in foreign countries(The average vocabulary of American children at age 8 is about 10000, seeing on this website).

Images

Images could give you a deeper impression, so we can use images to help us remember words.

You can find many interesting images on the Google Images. Then pick an image which matches your word best and paste it into your card.

Phrases

Don’t recite words, instead, recite phrases.

Phrases are more easily to remember than words.

Short sentences

When you make sentences for a word or phrase, please keep it short.

Long sentences will increase your cost to read and understand it. What’s worse, you couldn’t find the target word quickly in the amount of words.

Short sentences can save your time and make you focus on what you really need to focus.

Write the synonyms and antonyms of the target word. It’s also a part of “Related remembering”.

You can know words better by their synonyms and antonyms. You can also master a long or hard word by its short or easy synonyms and antonyms.

Synonyms and antonyms can make you comprehend words more easily.

Emphasize the fallible pronunciations

Mark it bold and red when you think a word could be pronounced wrong easily. Such as heavy / light pronunciation、i、o、e、a and so on.

Correct pronunciations are very important for memory.

The origin

If you find a word is difficult to remember, you can find its origin to help you to memorize.

For example, the work ‘unfathomable’ is hard for me to remember. But one day I found that it is from the word ‘fathomable’, then ‘fathomable’ is from ‘fathom’. I know the word ‘fathom’, so I can easily remember ‘fathomable’ and ‘unfathomable’.

The origin is the history and story of a word, it’s more interesting than a monotonous content and it can be remembered more easily.

You can use this website to find the origin of a word.