How Can You Make Anki Cards 10x Faster?

Making Anki flashcards is the most effective study method backed by research — and the most tedious. The average medical student spends 5-10 hours per week creating cards. Here is how to cut that to under an hour.

Why does making Anki cards take so long?

The bottleneck is not Anki itself. It is the manual process of extracting information from lectures, textbooks, and notes, then formatting it into question-answer or cloze deletion format. A 50-card deck for one lecture takes 30-60 minutes when done properly.

The irony: students spend more time making cards than reviewing them. Spaced repetition only works if you actually have cards to review — and if creating them takes longer than the lecture itself, most students quit.

What are the fastest methods for making Anki cards?

Method 1: Manual creation (baseline — 20-60 minutes per deck)

Open Anki, type each card, format cloze deletions, add tags. This produces the highest-quality cards because you are processing the information as you write. The downside: it does not scale beyond 2-3 subjects.

Method 2: AnkiConnect plugins (10-15 minutes per deck)

Plugins like AwesomeTTS (text-to-speech), Image Occlusion Enhanced (for diagrams), and various batch importers speed up creation. You still write the content, but the formatting and media are automated.

Method 3: AI generation (30 seconds per deck)

Tools like Coachingle generate complete Anki decks from any topic in 30 seconds. You type "Krebs Cycle" and download a .apkg file with Basic and Cloze cards ready to import. The AI handles extraction, formatting, and cloze deletion placement.

How does AI card generation compare to manual?

| Aspect | Manual | AI-generated | |--------|--------|-------------| | Time per deck | 20-60 minutes | 30 seconds | | Card quality | High (you wrote it) | Good (AI-optimized cloze) | | Encoding benefit | Yes (writing = learning) | Lower (but reviewing makes up for it) | | Consistency | Varies by energy level | Same quality every time | | Scalability | 2-3 subjects max | Unlimited |

The research on the "generation effect" (writing cards helps you learn) is real — but it has diminishing returns after the first review cycle. Most of the retention benefit comes from spaced repetition review, not card creation.

What is the optimal workflow for med students?

The fastest workflow that preserves learning quality:

1. During lecture: take brief notes on key concepts (not transcription)
2. After lecture: generate an Anki deck from the topic using Coachingle (30 seconds)
3. Review the generated cards: edit any that need correction (5 minutes)
4. Review in Anki: daily reviews using spaced repetition (15-20 minutes)

This takes 20-25 minutes total instead of 60-90 minutes. You review 3x more cards in the same time because you are not stuck creating them.

Which AI tool generates the best Anki cards?

The key differentiators are card format support and export quality. Coachingle generates real .apkg files with proper SQLite schema — not CSV exports or text files. The cloze deletions use standard Anki {{c1::...}} syntax. Import into Anki Desktop, AnkiDroid, or AnkiMobile works cleanly.

Other tools like AnkiGPT and Ankify also generate Anki cards, but Coachingle additionally produces a cheatsheet, mind map, audio summary, and practice quiz from the same topic — so you get the full study kit, not just flashcards.

Generate your first Anki deck in 30 seconds — free, no signup required.