My experience with the same thing (learning Japanese) has been less than stellar. My rote memory has always been fairly poor, to the extent that I believe my relative academic success compared to my peers has come from being forced to attain a deeper understanding of topics just so I can derive test answers from base principles. I find going through the Anki decks to be seriously draining, especially when encountering the same words I've seen a dozen times and still can't readily recall what the hell they mean. However I've yet to discover a better method for me, since I am not enthusiastic about the idea of immersing myself in Japanese media for large amounts of my free time.

Immersing is incredibly frustrating / challenging when your comprehension is < 90%. It's a real chore.

For me, I've found that having audio for every card is invaluable. Preferably audio from the source where you first encountered the word (for me that's mostly Youtube or Netflix). I'm working on a chrome extension to make this easier. Not only does it make it much easier to remember the word (by a pretty significant margin), but it has done wonders for my pronunciation as well.

I've written a little bit about my process here[0], but it's changed a little since I wrote that.

[0] https://mochi.cards/blog/using-spaced-repetition-to-learn-a-...

If you need a suggestion, Anki is for retaining what you have already learned, not learning, which is what you are supposed to do yourself. In other words, learn to learn. For example,

I heavily rely on mnemonics and I have a field for them, thus for the German word "vertrauen", which stands for "to trust", I have the following mnemonic: ”I trust Ver to heal my wounds”. Ver is a friend doctor of mine.

For Japanese it helps me to have also mnemonics for kanji sounds(ka - cat, ho - hole), then make stories based on them.

This looks amazing! I recently (5 days ago) started learning Japanese using Duolingo and have been taking hand written notes. I'm also thinking of creating a digital version using Zettlr[0] which I use daily. I'll also try out your app. If I may ask. What is the tech stack you used for building clients other than mobile as well as for mobile? Thanks.

[0] https://www.zettlr.com/

Interesting to hear your approach to spaced repetition. I kind of went the other way with Traverse.link, where all 'cards' are interlinked markdown notes, but you have a switch to turn them into flashcards, ie add them to your spaced repetition schedule, and add active recall questions