Anki

I was speaking to a few friends and they recommended anki as a revision tool. Is it easy to use in your opinion and are there other, better alternatives?

People recommend Anki because it's smarter than other alternatives like Quizlet or making your flashcards by hand.

Firstly, having paperless flashcards is cheaper than buying flashcards and is also quicker than making your flashcards by hand. Anki also lets you rank your confidence on each flashcard as you do them (e.g. Easy, Good or Again (you couldn't do it)) and will show you that card again according to your confidence. For example, if you found a card easy then the next time you see that flashcard again will be in 4 days vs if you found a card hard and you click again it will show you it again in 1 minute. This is amazing because one of the best ways to memorise something is using active recall (like flashcards) and spaced repetition (you delay when you next revise the flashcard every time you get it right) which Anki does for you. Apps like Quizlet don't do this for you, unless you pay for the premium version whereas Anki is completely free on your computer. It's also open-source which means that other people have made add-ons for it that you can use for free as well if you need that. Anki also lets you add superscripts and subscripts, add formulas and equations and entire images to your flashcards which I don't believe Quizlet lets you do so I think it's great because it means it has a wide application for many subjects.

Some people dislike Anki because of its user interface in that it looks a bit ugly and they find it difficult to use but that's only because Anki is very customisable. However, if you don't need that then an app like Quizlet might be better suited to you. Depending on the reason you need a flashcard app, I would also suggest Reji as it's a free app that has a very simple interface and is useful when you want to learn vocabulary if you're learning a new language.