Top 10 Best Anki Decks of 2019

Want to up your memorization game? Get the top 10 best Anki decks of 2020.

Anki, a next generation memory app, has taken the world by storm. Literally meaning “memorization” in Japanese, the Anki algorithm spaces out flashcard presentations at incredibly precise intervals that maximize memory consolidation and storage.

It’s called spaced repetition learning, and people are using it for everything from studying for medical school to learning new cooking recipes. And with the mobile nature of apps like AnkiDroid and AnkiMobile, it takes as little as 10 minutes a day to learn vastly more information than everyone else.

The opportunities for expanding your knowledge base with flashcards are practically unlimited — information, whether in the form of pictures, definitions, dates, or quotes — is still information. In this article, I’m going to show you the top 10 most useful and best Anki decks currently available, so you can start upgrading your life today. Click any of the titles to go directly to the shared deck page.

Happy learning!

Want to impress all your friends? Prepare for art school, perhaps? How about impersonate the bourgeousie? This Anki deck goes through the lions share of the most influential art pieces of the last 2,500 years, and helps you do just that. You’ll learn artists, periods, movements, and titles, and it’s all presented in a logical, step-by-step way!

This Anki deck changed my life. Over the course of around a month, I learned the flags, capitals, and physical locations of every country on the planet. This significantly enhanced my geopolitical knowledge, and it can enhance yours too (in as little as 15 minutes per day!). Plus, Ultimate Geography is constantly updated, year by year, so you stay up-to-date on changing border lines.

If you live in the US or a country near to it, this Anki deck is a godsend. I can’t tell you how many times knowing the names, dates, and orders of American Presidents has come in handy — from discussing history and politics to pure trivia, this is one of the most useful Anki decks you’ll find on this list.

Parlez-vous francais? I’ve always wanted to learn French, but the sheer amount of vocab I had to grind through always stood in the way. This French Anki deck makes vocab a breeze; since starting last month, I’ve already memorized close to 1000 new words.

To be “conversational” in any language is usually considered knowing ~2,000 words, so it’s actually really easy to spam-learn languages with Anki (minus conjugations, of course). Get the ball rolling today!

Is your new years resolution to learn a new instrument? Then this Anki deck is perfect for you. Learn the chromatic scale of C major with audio, notation, keyboard illustrations, and mnemonics — all in this information-dense deck of only 108 cards! Created by our friends at computerart.club.

For those of you unaware, “memory pegs” are a mnemonic system used to significantly increase memory capacity. It’s kind of like a memory hack, and works by associating unique characteristics to items in a one-by-one fashion. This makes it easier to recall later.

This Anki deck takes advantage of memory pegs to teach you the periodic table of elements, in an incredibly quick and intuitive way.

Want to sound cool and learn an incredibly useful communications system at the same time? Then this Anki deck is for you. If you’ve ever played a first-person shooter or watched a modern war movie, chances are you’ve heard soldiers pass around words like “tango”, “romeo”, or “juliet”. These words represent letters — t, r, and j respectively — and are used to increase the understanding of radio transmissions in military communication. Instead of trying (and failing) to spell out your last name next time you’re on the phone with your bank, use the NATO phonetic alphabet to spell everything out clearly.

Can you tell auburn from burgundy? Tan from taupe? Ochre from umber? If not, check out 100 Colors, a visual list of one hundred color-word pair associations. This list gives you a great edge if you’re a designer, or you work with colors every day.

Considering that you carry around the subject matter of this Anki deck (your muscles & bones) every day, why not take a few minutes right now and learn what you’re made of? This is useful stuff — how many times have you tried to explain to a doctor or friend exactly where something hurts, but you were unable to pinpoint the exact location? With this Anki anatomy deck, that’ll never happen again.

Programming is easily one of the most useful skills to know in the 21st century. With technology permeating every facet of our lives, there’s never been a more perfect economic opportunity to learn how to code. The skills you learn in this Anki deck (which teaches you Python, a popular programming language) can be applied anytime, anywhere, to improve your quality of life — whether it’s automating your garden sprinkler system to optimizing processes at the workplace.

In 2020, almost everybody has the equivalent of the world’s biggest encyclopedia in their pocket. We each have access to pretty much whatever we want, whenever we want. But if we’re being honest with ourselves… most of us don’t use our phones as well as we should.

With Anki, we’ve been given an opportunity to put that repository of knowledge to good use. Society is getting closer and closer to being able to “download” information into your brain a la The Matrix, and it’s not long now until we can. Until then, though, our memory is the closest thing we’ve got. So congratulations — by reading this article, you’ve taken the first big step towards improving it!

Note: after this went trending on Google, I started creating hour-long, in-depth masterclasses on little-known productivity hacks and intelligence-boosting techniques. These classes now have tens of thousands of students, and are some of the top-rated courses on Skillshare. Watch them for free with this link.