I’ve been ‘using’ Anki for at least 7-8 years now and I found it an amazing way to learn things, however a few things imo are not always spelled out clearly and make it harder to use than it has to be.
Here’s also an overview of spaced repetition and why its amazing!
A list of things I’ve encountered, and ways to help me to stick better to it (its mostly Emotional Management):
-
The default amount of ‘new’ cards every day is often waaaay too high for me. I remember it being 20 at some point. That’s an okay amount to start with (maybe), but definitely not new every day! If your deck is 1000 cards, then you will have all 1000 items after 50 days!! Definitely not a rate I can sustain. I would prefer if the app would ask you, “Hey, today we’re going to learn X new cards today!” and you can lower or raise the number as needed. Some days I definitely am not in the mood to learn new things, and prefer to just focus on retaining what I already have! It also gave me ever increasing anxiety, knowing that if I start the app today there will be NEW things to learn!
-
Try to not use decks that you did not make. The exceptions are those you’d have to make anyway. If you’re learning a new language you should definitely download a deck to learn the alphabet, but don’t get the ‘ALL BEGINNER VERBS’ deck just for the sake of it. The reason being that one learns a lot better if there is any kind of reason attached to it. Learning just for the sake of learning isn’t that fruitful. So if the lessons you are currently reading give you new words/phrases/rules definitely write them down/highlight them and then put them in your deck, and that way you get to use them when doing exercises/talking with your teacher. After all learning words/sentences that won’t be used just isn’t that useful.
Of course all of these apply mostly to me and my personal learning experience, mileage definitely varies.
Happy learning!
