Roam Research, Anki or RemNote? Which App to use for Studying
At the end of May 2021, I booked onto a course to study for the AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner exam, to be taken a few weeks later in June.
Weirdly, what excited me most about this, was that I could try out Roam Research, Anki and RemNote in the context of studying for an exam. Up until now, I’ve been using these applications mainly to support my note-taking at work. As you can imagine, this has a very different focus compared to studying for an exam. So I was curious to see which application, or combination of them, would stand up to the test.
In this post I want to talk about how I approached using these apps for studying, what I learnt from the experience and a discussion of which app I think is the best app for studying.
Note-Taking During The Course
I decided for note-taking during the course, I would use Roam Research. My reasons for choosing Roam were simply that I had only recently discovered Roam, and so I wanted to try it out in earnest (whereas for RemNote, I was already very familiar having used it for just under a year).
Screenshot of my Roam Research notes for the AWS course
I found the app was beautiful. There was no lag in loading content, everything worked seamlessly and I quickly got used to using [[backlinks]] , uploading screenshots to support my notes and opening multiple panes to take notes on specific bits of information.
The true power of using Roam Research in the context of studying was in the networking of ideas. I would often find myself learning about one concept, for example Edge Locations, and then later on in the course, another concept such as Amazon CloudFront or Transfer Acceleration, would be related to the concept of Edge Locations. And so a quick backlink to [[Edge Locations]] and instantly my note for Edge Locations would be expanded and linked to these new concepts. It is so powerful at improving your holistic understanding of systems and ideas that are connected.
The power of backlinks and networked note-taking quickly shows
Revision for the Exam
The exam was heavily geared towards understanding and memorisation. There were a lot of lists of features, or lists of advantages and disadvantages. There were also a lot of definitions of concepts and products.
As a result, anyone who is familiar with making flashcards, will know that this type of information is perfectly suited for them.
In total 439 cards for my AWS Anki Deck
I decided to use Anki to build my deck of flashcards. In total I made 439 cards for the exam. I also used 2 powerful Anki Add-ons to help me create them. I used the Image Occlusion add-on to help me memorise visual concepts and tables of facts. And I also used the Cloze Overlapper add-on for memorisation of ordered lists of information (such as lists of features, or advantages and disadvantages).
The creation of these notes in itself, acted as quality revision in itself, as I was reviewing my notes, thinking about how to structure them as flashcards, and then typing the information out again.
Then throughout the week, in my breaks and lunchtimes, I would spend 10-15 minutes here and there reviewing this deck. It does not take long before I have a really good memory of a lot of the content.
Practice Exams
In the final week before my exam, I started taking practice exams to see how well I would perform, and also to find gaps in my knowledge or where my memory of the content was insufficient.
Inevitably, I found such areas of weakness, and I would note down what these areas were. Such as “Billing and Pricing” and “Cloud Concepts”.
I would review questions I got incorrect in the exam, and often it would be due to 2 reasons:
Poor Understanding - My notes on the topic were insufficiently formed. I had either misunderstood a concept, or I hadn’t added sufficient detail. To solve this I simply performed additional reading about the topic, and updated my notes in Roam Research
Poor Memorisation - I hadn’t performed enough reviews of the content and so I couldn’t remember the answers. To solve this, I would need to perform extra reviews in my spaced repetition system, Anki.
This is where using Roam Research and Anki created difficulties, and where I believe RemNote stood out and resolved these problems.
The Roam-Anki Disconnect
The first issue with using Roam Research and Anki is the disconnect between applications. This issue was made apparent to me when I was reviewing the questions I got wrong due to Poor Understanding.
As I noted, if I got a question wrong due to Poor Understanding, the solution is to learn more, and update my notes on the topic accordingly. This is perfectly reasonable, and normal in life. Knowledge evolves, and so our notes will evolve too.
If you update your notes, which flashcards need updating in line?
However, in the process of updating our notes, this now means our flashcards, sat in Anki, are now incorrect and also need changing. This is not only a duplication of effort, but it is also incredibly difficult to find which flashcards were related to the updated notes, and so this disconnect between the 2 applications meant it is really hard to keep the two inline with each other.
Compare this situation to if we had taken our notes in RemNote. The beauty of RemNote is that the flashcard system is integrated into note-taking. Notes are also flashcards (if you want them to be).
As a result, when you go to update your notes on a topic in RemNote, you simply edit the note, and any related flashcards will be updated instantly. There is no disconnect between your notes and your flashcards, because they are one and the same. This integration removes duplication of effort, and avoids any disconnect between notes and flashcards. Wow.
The Difficult of Focused Study in Anki
The second issue I found with using Roam and Anki is the difficulty with focusing your studying and reviews to a specific set of notes. This issue relates to my point about Poor Memorisation and surfaced when I was reviewing my practice exam results.
After taking the practice exams, and discovering I had areas of weakness, where I had Poor Memorisation, I new the best solution was to focus on these areas, and do extra flashcard reviews on the relevant topics.
The problem is, in Anki, unless you have gone through the gruelling effort of adding tags to every note you create, it is very difficult to focus your reviews to specific units, topics or sections of knowledge.
Using RemNote to review the weak areas in my knowledge
However, with RemNote, you can isolate your flashcard reviews to specific pages, folders or Rem. And so if I discovered I needed to focus my flashcard reviews to the topic of “AWS Security”, I could just zoom into that Rem and all the flashcards beneath it, and start reviewing only those flashcards. This feature is a game-changer.
Final Reflection
I had a lot of fun using these apps for my first exam in 4 years, and honestly, I really wish these were around when I was at university.
Based on this first attempt at using these apps to study, I believe RemNote, is the best app to take your notes and memorise your content, all in one place. It is essentially, a hybrid of Roam and Anki. And as you can hopefully see from my experience documented in this post, the integration of the two concepts - networked note-taking & spaced repetition based flashcards - yields great benefits. You can update your notes and flashcards in one place, you can narrow your studying into specific topics and sections of knowledge.
So for now, for studying, RemNote is on top. But these applications are constantly being developed and iterated upon. I am excited for the future of note-taking.
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