fwiw, one of the biggest uses of anki is learning language vocabulary. for that, i think you can jump right into anki. obviously grammar, pitch accent -- if it applies, and other things surrounding the language will benefit from material outside anki but as someone who spends a lot of time learning languages; my first exposure to 90%+ of words is anki (i rely on pre-built decks).

what does it mean to have learnt a word if you can't recall it?

Ever have a word on 'the tip of your tongue'?

that's fair - but I consider it useless if I can't recall it when I need it for everyday words.

for really rare words that I'll use 5 times in my career, sure, I'll explain it to chat gpt and it'll get it in one go.

sorry, I wasn't clear.

Personally, I just went through word lists. When I had them memorised, I'd put them into Anki deck. Because I am going to forget them over time.

I haven't quite convinced myself either way, whether learning a big list and then anki them for recall is better, or having a big list on anki but only introduce two of them a day. personally I find it makes it much more enticing to learn two new phrases each day, rather than trying to remember same 50 phrases all week.

Understanding versus remembering.

You first understand and only afterwards encode your understanding in cards. It's in reviewing the cards that you put the understanding into your long-term memory (or possibly reveal gaps in your knowledge, in which case you revise your understanding).

Swedish: Vad har det med saken att göra?

direct translation: what has this with the matter to do?

meaning: what does this have to do with it?

Where does understanding come in? I can imagine what understanding mean for mathematics, science, etc. but for language, I'm having difficulty figuring it out.

The understanding comes from knowing when to use that phrase compared with other phrases that might mean similar things. Idiomatic usage to some extent. If learning a language was just remembering direct phrases then machine translation would be trivial

right so "med saken" was the new word, I understood the rest of the phrase. so it took like 4 seconds to understand. it'll take about 10-20 reviews to remember it for good.

so the understanding took far less time than remembering. I could read a whole grammar book 10 times, but if I don't remember any of the words, then I'll never be able to write/say something.

having all the words on the tip of my tongue is no good for communication.

I understand the English words you are using. I’m still not convinced I understand what you are saying. In this particular case recall doesn’t seem to be the problem.

I think it's possible we're not in disagreement at all, but I'm struggling to express the issue: to me, "recall" is the task that takes all the effort, "understanding" is pretty much instant. Therefore "recall" is the bottleneck between me now and me using the word in a conversation or piece of writing.

But it's possible that we have conflicting ideas of what recall/understanding means.