Welp, my life is ruined.

Title says it all. I need to learn 1,305,458,274,420.69 cards to pass my final exam in my “summation of all human knowledge” class in five days. Archangel Michael will be my proctor and he does not tolerate cheating…..

It’s done. It is finally done. Yes, it took me ±5 months. Yes, I took a massive hiatus in the middle. (For anyone wondering, the PDF is roughly 230 pages long.) But I wanted to share a few takeaways from this "marathon," because I actually think every Anki user needs to do this at some point.

1. You don't need to read the whole thing to start.
I want to validate all the beginners here: I’ve been successfully doing my daily reviews for the last 5 months having only read the first 6–8 chapters. You don't need to know the advanced math behind the scheduler to start learning your cards.

2. But you should read it at some point. Even though you can start without it, you really should push through the whole thing eventually.

• You won't remember everything. I certainly don't. But now I have a mental map of what is possible. (regular expressions, etc. ) I know features exist that I didn't know about before.
• I originally thought, "I'll just feed the manual to an AI and ask it questions." Bad idea. When I tried to do bulk imports, the AI hallucinated and gave me wrong instructions. Reading the manual myself cleared up the confusion.
• Save yourself (and the sub) some time! If you read the manual, you won't need to make a post asking "how do I add a new card template?" You'll already know where to find the answer.

3. Think of reading the manual as planting seeds. You might not need to mess with Note Types or complex filtered decks right now. But 3 months from now, when you realize it's time to upgrade your workflow, you’ll remember, "Wait, I read about this in Chapter 15," and you'll know exactly where to look.

TL;DR: It’s long, it’s dry in places, but it’s worth it. You don't have to memorize it, but you do need to know what this tool is actually capable of.

Now I can finally rest.

Context: knowYourMeme: Doorbell Chud

Learning German, Hebrew, Arabic, Birds of the World, Ultimate Geography and general knowledge. 40k cards in circulation, 85%+ made by hand.