Anki, done right
Anki with the right settings is the strongest free memory tool on earth, and most installs are quietly misconfigured. Here's the full setup, from a competitor with no reason to sugarcoat the hours it costs.
Let's get the awkward part out first: I sell a product that competes with a well-configured Anki. I'm writing this guide anyway, because most people who bounce off Anki bounce off a bad configuration, then conclude spaced repetition "doesn't work for them." That conclusion is wrong and it costs them the language.
So this is the real setup. If you follow it, you'll have the same scheduling science we run, for free, in exchange for your time. The guide is honest about how much time.
First, the one setting that matters: turn on FSRS
Anki ships two schedulers. The default (SM-2) dates to the 1980s and treats every memory the same. The modern one, FSRS, is a machine-learned model benchmarked on about 1.7 billion real reviews, and it's sitting behind a toggle: Preferences → Review, "FSRS". Turn it on. This single switch outweighs everything else in this guide combined.
Then set desired retention to 0.90. Higher (0.95) sounds better and roughly doubles your review load for a few points of recall. Lower (0.80) feels efficient and quietly erodes your deck. 0.90 is the sane middle for language learning.
After 3 or 4 weeks of reviews, run "Optimize" (deck options → FSRS) so the 21 parameters refit to your actual memory. Put a monthly reminder in your calendar, because nothing will prompt you.
Get the full setup: card format, daily caps, leeches, the weekly ritual
The rest of the guide appears right here: the three-part card format the research supports, the settings that stop week-3 collapse, what to do with leeches, and the honest hours-per-week bill. Plus a 5-day email course on the science underneath it all.
No spam, unsubscribe anytime.
The card format (this is where most decks go wrong)
A "word → translation" card teaches you to translate, slowly. The format that holds up in the research (and that Wyner's Fluent Forever built a method around) has three parts:
- A picture instead of an English word wherever possible. Google Images the target word (in the target language, so you get the culture's idea of it), pick one image, paste it on the front. Your memory is dramatically better with images than with word pairs.
- Native audio on every card. Forvo.com has free native recordings of nearly any word. The AwesomeTTS add-on automates some of this. A card without audio teaches your eyes a word your ears won't recognize.
- A cloze sentence as the main card type. "Nous ____ au parc avec le chien" beats "aller = to go", because you produce the word inside real grammar. Take the sentence from your own lesson when you can (see the debrief protocol for harvesting them).
Budget 2 to 3 minutes per card built this way. Yes, really. The people who tell you it's 30 seconds are making word-pair cards, and word-pair cards are why their speaking lags their reviews.
The settings that prevent week-3 collapse
- New cards/day: 10. The eager default of 20 feels great for a fortnight, then the compounding review debt arrives all at once and buries you. 10 new cards a day is ~300 words a month, which is genuinely fast progress.
- Maximum reviews/day: leave it uncapped. A cap silently postpones due cards, which corrupts the scheduling math. If the load is too heavy, cut new cards instead.
- One deck, not twelve. Subdecks by topic feel organized and fragment your daily queue. Use tags for topics; study from one pile.
- Leech threshold: 4, action: tag only. A card you've failed 4 times has a problem (bad image, ambiguous sentence, or a word you don't actually need). Rewrite it or delete it. Don't let Anki suspend it silently, and don't keep grinding it.
- Grade honestly, two buttons. Mostly you need Again and Good. If you peeked, it's Again. Optimistic grading feels kind and quietly rots the schedule's model of your memory.
The weekly ritual (15 minutes, non-negotiable)
Sunday, coffee, three chores: build cards from the week's lesson harvest, deal with the leech tag, and check that your due count for tomorrow looks survivable. Systems die of deferred maintenance, and they die on schedule: almost always week 3, when the first wave of intervals matures.
The honest bill
Per week, for a learner taking 2 tutor lessons and adding ~20 words:
- Building 20 proper cards (image, audio, cloze): 50 to 70 minutes
- The weekly ritual: 15 minutes
- Monthly FSRS optimize + deck pruning, amortized: 10 minutes
- Reviews themselves: 10 to 20 minutes a day (this part is study, so it doesn't count as overhead)
Roughly 1.5 to 2 hours a week of pure admin, indefinitely. If that sounds fine, you're the person Anki was made for, and I mean that with respect: you now have a world-class setup for free.
If that's the part you know you won't sustain, that's the exact gap Verbamor fills: same FSRS science (tuned to you automatically), cards with images and native audio built from your recorded lessons, zero Sunday ritual. One of us is right for you; both of us beat forgetting.
Sources
The scheduler
- Ye, J., et al. (2022). A stochastic shortest path algorithm for optimizing spaced repetition scheduling. KDD '22.
- The open SRS benchmark (FSRS vs. SM-2 and others, on real review logs).
The card format
- Wyner, G. (2014). Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It. Harmony.
- Karpicke, J. D., & Roediger, H. L. (2008). The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science, 319(5865), 966–968.
Same science, none of the Sunday ritual.
Verbamor runs FSRS tuned to your reviews and builds the cards from your recorded lessons, images and native audio included.
Download the app