Flashcards at their most useful, are a personal asset. They are part of the cathedral of knowledge that you build as you learn, buttressing the structure.
Mnemonics are an amazing and powerful way to assist in recall. By personalizing the abstract, your emotions and creativity are engaged and the mundane can become filled with adventure. And it's hard to forget adventure ;)
So where to put these mnemonic scribbles?
The standard "Basic" Anki note has just two fields, Front and Back. You could put your mnem notes in Back. But....
Mnem is its own thing and deserves its own field.
Flipnem introduces its own Front/Back card called "Flipnem Basic". Its fields are:
- Front
- Back
- Mnemonic Text
- Mnemonic Rich
The ability to view your Mnem is exposed at the Card level (accessible from both Front and Back). Cards that have populated the mnemonics fields will allow you to flip the view and see them.
Putting ASCII Art into Mnemonic Rich
The Mnemonic Rich field (like other Anki fields) can support anything: html, images, plain text etc.
So really, the sky is the limit for what you put in here.
But I wanted something that Claude could take advantage of.
He can't produce images but one thing he can produce is ASCII art.
So, we built this into Flipnem. If you have an array of strings in your mnemonic_rich field then Flipnem will treat them as the frames of ASCII art animation. Flipnem exposes instructions via the MCP server on how to build the animations.
The animations are fairly crude and TBH are sometimes barely recognizable but they are fun. And I'm betting that aspect makes them more memorable.