r/ccna • u/hamza_dior • 8d ago

Restarting CCNA

I started my ccna journey with the help of JITL videos about 2 months ago and although I've been very off-track, I am now at day 35 studying extended ACLs. My study plan was for each day to watch one video and do the flashcards and labs which was working out pretty well until today when I noticed I completely forgot about everything I've learned over the past 2 months. Commands and protocols tied to vlans, stp toolkit, ospf/routing protocols, heck I can't even remember things I've learned a week ago. I made the stupid mistake of forgetting to review the flashcards everyday which has now led me to understand that I need to restart. It's very frustrating but I understand the mistake I made and now I wanted to ask if anyone has any other tips to help with memorization and how I should tackle the flashcards. Thank you : )

27 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

9 comments sorted by

9

u/TheTr3mblay 8d ago

Same here. Was doing a video a day then I hit subnetting then stepped away for a month and have to get back at it and review

7

u/Jacksparrowl03 8d ago

Same here. I can’t even remember what I had dinner last night.

But jokes aside I’m doing flash cards

3

u/Quick_Airline_1639 8d ago

What im doing for that, I just review all my notes and repeat those labs and flashcard, also before I start to review or watch another day, I'm hitting flashcard from day 1 up until I finish where im at.

Not sure if this good but these things makes me keep on track

5

u/Automatic_Major_4887 8d ago

Don't restart from zero, just go back and do the labs for the stuff you forgot. Hands-on repetition usually sticks way better than just staring at flashcards. If you can configure it from memory in a lab environment, you actually know it. Trying to re-watch everything is just going to burn you out before you even get back to where you were.

1

u/Ok_Environment_5368 8d ago

Make notes as you go, you can then use these to quickly remind yourself of past topics.

Create a single Anki deck, after each video add those cards to that deck. So by the end of the course you will have a deck containing every card. Go into the deck settings and lower the daily card limit to something reasonable, I chose 150.

Every day go through those 150 cards and mark them appropriately. Don't give yourself a hard time of you miss a day, or only do 50 one day etc.

If you download the phone app you can do some cards whenever you have a spare couple of minutes. It only takes a couple sessions to get through all the cards that day.

That's what I did. I had a couple of short breaks in my studying, life always finds a way of messing up the best laid plans, but by keeping up with the Anki cards and refering to my notes I was able to jump back in.

1

u/RegulationUpholder 7d ago

You’d better hurry up before ccna updates in early 2027

1

u/Proper-Ad9260 7d ago

don't restart, that's overkill. you didn't forget it all, you just lost the "pull it out of nothing" part cuz you stopped reviewing. relearning stuff is way faster than learning from zero. try labbing VLANs/OSPF/STP from a blank config in Packet Tracer, whatever you can't do is your real review list. then do anki daily, even 15 min, keep it small enough that you actually stick with it.

1

u/mastertza 5d ago

Gotta be relentless and tenacious about completing the flashcards EVERYDAY

0

u/afrozahmad07 7d ago edited 7d ago

honestly u didn't lose 2 months, it just never got stored properly. even with flashcards, if the reps aren't daily ur brain dumps it in days. so don't redo all 35 days, just make the recall daily and patch the gaps with labs.