I’ve sunk countless hours into Anki and I don’t feel like I have a lot to show for it.
If I could do it over I would use Anki less and read more out loud, and write notes on paper as if trees didn’t matter.
I feel like we are often met with the biggest success stories on the web with regards to tools and it can feel very discouraging when things don’t work as well for yourself. So my point is just to chime in and say “some of us also fail using these tools”
I also think there is a real skill to formulating good flash cards when using SRS that I for one don't think I've yet mastered.
The underlying "atoms" you embody in the cards matter, and possibly matters a lot.
A lot of vocabulary decks based on textbooks used in class, e.g.:
人 -> person
I also did a large premade deck of example sentences from a grammar book, which I actually found to be very helpful for general language understanding.
I've also failed trying to complete Heisig's Remembering the Kanji, using Anki.
So I might put in: ハンバーガーを食べる
Then there's two good ways to practice this. One is just reading/recognition. Can you understand the sentence?
The other way is to make it into a card to practise output: ハンバーガーを_____ (eat)
The part in brackets is a hint to help you get the correct word. Your hints at the start will often be direct translations of words, but you can also use images, emoji, dictionary definitions in the L2. Anything is ok, or combinations.
I often make my output cards very easy:
ハンバーガーをた____ (eat)
While it may look too easy, I still have to remember the word I'm studying.
In general words taken from real books, TV shows, youtube videos tend to stick in my mind a lot better than words from textbooks, wordlists and grammar books. Those tools have their place but they're not the be all and end all.
Good luck! And remember it's a long road. I've made 6000 flashcards over 10 years to learn a second language and I'm still far from "done".
disclaimer: not affiliated, and WK is not a perfect product (they have some weird quirks), but I've found it to be rather effective. You can also the first three levels for free.
Personally, after 10+ years of consistent SRS, I focus only on vocabulary/terminology and fundamentals. Trivia is never worth it.
There are some way to get things into long lasting memory that may be less documented academicaly but do work : learning by doing for instance. No one learns Java by putting all the elements of the language into Anki and learning them with Anki. One learns Java by writing Java programs.
I have tried many times using SRS and that's not something for me. I need context and enjoyment. Flashcards are too articial a learning environment for me.
The catch is that, in my experience, SRS won't help you learn material you've never seen or used before. For programming, I make Anki cards for a given language/library/algorithm during or after the process of actually implementing something with it; then I can add my own code snippets into the card. For natural languages, I make a card only after I've seen or had to look up a particular grammatical construction or vocab word; then I can add my own example sentence, or the context where I first saw the term, into the card. So long as I'm regularly reviewing, then even for rare idioms or vocab, I can remember things I last saw years ago.
SRS is not as effective if you're studying prebuilt material by rote without any other interaction with the content. Rather it should be one part of a broad portfolio of activities you do to learn. For coding it should complement things like implementing projects, learning new libraries, reading open source code, reading technical books on the subject and so on. For languages it should complement things like talking to native speakers, reading news articles in the target language, listening to podcasts etc. where you use content from your other things and turn them into Anki cards.
Spaced Repetition
Spaced repetition is an evidence-based learning technique that is usually performed with flashcards. Newly introduced and more difficult flashcards are shown more frequently, while older and less difficult flashcards are shown less frequently in order to exploit the psychological spacing effect. The use of spaced repetition has been proven to increase rate of learning
Have you been able to do this ?
I’ve used Anki for language learning for several years, and I’m consistently surprised by what I can recall, and how that directly translates to reading content in that language.
For books, I’ve been using Readwise for at least a year as well — it will surface highlights to you in an SRS-like manner each day in a more lightweight way.
I agree with some of the other comments I’ve seen that we don’t need to remember everything. The author says they tried Anki, but dropped it because of the sheer amount of review it would require. But this is the point, in some sense. Studying with spaced-repetition is effective because it is tedious. So I’d only recommend it for information you really want to internalize, or languages.