What’s the difference between “flash card” and “note card”?
The term flashcard refers to the old trusty technique of manually writing questions on the frontside of a piece of paper and the answers on the back.
Anki imitates this behaviour digitally, so it’s flashcard software.
What you’re really asking for is the difference between cards and notes.
Note
A note is the thing you’re editing in Anki (in the Add-dialog & Deck Browser). It is a single database entry. From a single note, you can generate multiple cards.
Card
The cards are the things you review in Anki, so they’re the analog to the oldschool paper flashcard. They always belong to a single note - the one that you create/change with Anki’s editor.
One note, multiple cards
Notes and cards have a parent-child relationship, where the note is the parent and the card the child. A mother can have as many children as she wants, but a child can have only one mother.
The Basic note type only has one card template, so it only creates one card when you add a new note. But take a look at the note type Basic (and reversed card), for example: It always creates two cards. That’s because that note type has two card templates.
If you add more card templates to your note type, you create more cards from a single note (=database entry).
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