How to use Anki for Language Learning: Getting Started as a Beginner

If you've spent any time looking for language learning advice on Reddit or YouTube, you've seen people recommending that you use a flashcard app to help you remember vocab words—and, specifically, that you use Anki.

There's good reason for that: Anki has long been the secret weapon of language learners, students in med school, and anyone who needs to memorize stuff.

It's also really confusing to set up, so in this article, we're going to walk through:

What is Anki? How does it work?

Anki is a flashcard app. What makes it special is that it uses a powerful spaced repetition algorithm to figure out when you should review each flashcard. (If this is the first time you've heard of spaced repetition, you can learn more about it here.)

Oh—and Anki is Japanese () for "memorization". Fitting, isn't it?

My Anki is in Japanese, but you can see how it works from this picture:

Why do people use Anki?

As simple as Anki sounds, it's actually really powerful.

1. Anki is a great way to memorize pretty much anything

The first and most obvious reason is that it works. We go through several academic articles to talk about why apps like Anki work in our article on spaced repetition (the algorithm Anki uses), but, for now, just look at this chart:

What you're seeing is this:

Basically, applying spaced repetition requires no additional effort but massively increases the value you get out of the time you spend studying. It's kinda beautiful.

2. Anki enables you to study anywhere

There's an Anki app for desktop, iOS, and Android. We'll talk about how to set up these apps in the next section, but the fact that Anki has apps means that you can fit all of your notes in your pocket and do your review while on the go.

3. All of your notes fit in your pocket and stay there forever

Two questions for you:

Whereas I needed a backpack to lug all my notes around growing up, I have something like 40,000 flashcards in my Anki app. Now, my "notes" in my pocket, don't require internet access to use, and come with me everywhere.

You also stop losing your notes when the "semester" ends: each time you get a card correct in Anki, the app waits a little longer before asking you to review that bit of information again. I have flashcards that I won't review for fifteen years.

So, if you enjoy learning or need to do so, Anki makes life incredibly convenient.

How to install Anki

Anki has applications available for several different platforms. We'll briefly cover them here.

Before we get too far along:

Note: You don't actually need to download Anki. You can review your flashcards via your internet browser by navigating to ankiweb.net/decks.

1. Make an account on Ankiweb

To synchronize your learning progress between devices, you'll need an account on Ankiweb. An Anki account is totally free. They don't spam you, either—in ten years, I've gotten like three emails from them... and those emails were to reset my password.

Click here to signup for Ankiweb.

2. Download your app of choice: Anki Desktop, AnkiMobile, or AnkiDroid

This should be pretty straightforward, but if you run into trouble, you can ask for help on the Anki forums.

Anki for Desktop

For Windows and Mac, setting up Anki Desktop is very straightforward:

If you use Linux, I trust/hope you can figure out how to download and install the app, because I can't help you 💪

Anki for iOS

You probably know how to download things from the App store, but just in case:

This last step is important: Anki is an open-source program. Several people have copied it and made applications that require subscriptions to use. The real Anki app requires a one-time purchase fee, and that's it.

Anki for Android

If you use an Android phone, then Anki's unofficial official app (it's complicated) is totally free:

As with the iOS app, there are several unofficial versions of Anki on the Google Play. Many of these unofficial versions will charge you a subscription to use Anki. The app that you want is AnkiDroid Flashcards, which has active community support and is completely free.

3. Find a shared deck to learn from...

That Ankiweb account you created gives you access to all of Anki's shared decks—decks that people in the community have made on their own and decided to share for free.

For example, here's the most popular Japanese flashcard decks available on Ankiweb:

Quality varies significantly from deck to deck, but if you look around, you can find some cool stuff that people have obviously put a lot of time and love into.

If you find a deck that looks useful to you:

4. ... or make your own flashcards

Ideally, you're studying flashcards that you've made by yourself, not flashcards that somebody else has made. We talk about why in this post on how to learn vocabulary in another language.

So, if you're up for making your own flashcards—great!

Unfortunately, this means that you're going to have to learn how to use Anki. This will take time. An explanation of how to make your own Anki cards could be entire blog post by itself, and I'm not going to make one because my cards kinda suck. I'm pretty lazy, have no sense of design, and never found out a way to manually create Anki flashcards that's easy enough that I would consistently do it.

Instead, here's a nice Anki tutorial from YouTube about how to make Anki flashcards for language learners. It's 30 minutes long, and this honestly just the beginning:

(As intimidating as this sounds, Anki is super powerful. If you like tinkering with stuff, spending a few hours to learn the basics of Anki will enable you to make some pretty cool stuff.)

FAQs / How to succeed with Anki

Randomly taking a peek at Google, here's my response to some of the most common "People also ask..." questions. If you've got a question that isn't answered here, jump into our Discord channel and ask away 🙂

Anyway, in no particular order:

Make Anki a part of your daily life with a trigger-action plan

Anki isn't just an app; it's a way of life.

I'm joking—kind of—but, really: Anki is intended to be used every day.

When you review a flashcard on Anki, Anki's algorithm schedules a date for you to review that flashcard again in the future, juuuuust before it thinks you will forget the information on the flashcard. This means that the "difficulty" of Anki is pretty manageable if you keep up with it daily, but you'll get frustrated trying to keep up if you only do your reviews a few times per week.

If you're not very good at creating new habits:

Study for a few minutes here and there, not in one massive session

Kind of following up on the above—there's this thing called the serial-position effect. It basically means that we better remember the first and last things in a study session better than the things we encounter in the middle of a study session. (This is part of the reason why cramming is terrible for you.)

When you do Anki for a minute or two here and there throughout the day, this gives you many starts and ends. This is a really simple study hack, but it delivers results.

Don't learn too many daily new cards, for now

There are, essentially, two kinds of cards on Anki:

By default, Anki will assign you five new cards per day per deck. This means that:

You're going to want to do more than that, but don't. In fact, if you're new to language learning, I recommend opening the deck options and changing your daily new card count from five to three.

The reason for this is that Anki schedules each flashcard you learn today for review at some point in the future. As you review dozens, hundreds, and thousands of flashcard, this can become overwhelming. As a rule of thumb, for every one daily new flashcard you learn, you're also going to end up reviewing 10 flashcards.

With that in mind:

Watch this video to learn what sort of things you should make flashcards out of

The fact that you can make a flashcard does not mean that you should create a flashcard.

You see, some words are much, much, much more common than other words.

While a college-educated native speaker knows roughly 30,000 words:

In other words, this is very much a situation where you want to work smarter, not harder. A bit of planning ahead will save you a ludicrous amount of time.

Watch this video to learn about why vocab frequency matters and what words are/aren't worth making flashcards out of:

When grading yourself, only press "Again" or "Good"

I'm going to skim over this because it's a pretty complex topic, but Anki's scheduler is very complex. When you press easy or hard after studying a flashcard, it adds a kind of permanent multiplier to the algorithm. Over time, this leads the algorithm to think that a particular card is much easier or harder than it actually is. This causes you to see the card much more or less frequently than you should, and that's bad.

You can see why here, but unless you really know what you're doing, approach your Anki reviews in a black-and-white fashion:

Why I stopped using Anki after over 10 years

So, I've used Anki for about 10 years.

Above you can see my stats since 2020: I've used Anki 9 days out of 10 for the last like 5 years.

My data only goes back to 2020 because I actually deleted the app in 2019, shortly after coming to Taiwan. You see, I'd gotten a bit too into Anki:

I came back to Anki a year later after setting a bunch of restrictions to control my usage and ensure that my flashcards would complement my interaction with target languages, not replace it. That worked alright.

Then, last year, I started using Migaku.

Migaku is an app like Anki, but it's been built specifically for language learners. To be super quick about this, it makes text in foreign languages interactive—on text-based websites and also places like YouTube and Netflix, you can simply click/tap on foreign words to see what they mean:

If you decide the word is useful, then you can create a high-quality flashcard out of it with just one more click: I'm talking dictionary definitions, built-in TTS audio support for sentences, AI grammar breakdowns, and all sorts of cool stuff. You can do that with Anki, too, but it takes a lot of manual work, CSS customization, and technical stuff. I'm not super good with technology, so I never wanted to bother with it, personally.

Migaku's flashcard review system is also more streamlined—cards are all "pass" or "fail", and you don't see how long Migaku will make you wait when you click either button. It sounds kind of dumb, but this has actually been great. It reduces the fatigue involved with making decisions about grading cards and eliminates the stress I felt when failing cards I "should" know.

In 2024, I "soft" quit Anki for a second time: I still have old Anki decks I want to finish, but from now on, I am only creating new cards in Migaku.

TL;DR

If you're reading this post because you're thinking about picking up Anki—I won't stop you. Anki has been a huge part of my life and I will always support it.

...At the same time, I think you'll find that Migaku gives you better results for less effort.

So, I'd like to ask you to try Migaku for 10 days.

Wrapping up 

If you're thinking about learning a language, Anki is basically a super power.

It's an indispensable part of any language learner's toolbox... but it wasn't made by or for language learners. If you use it for a long time, you'll notice this.

At Migaku, we set out to build the app we thought Anki could be.

Whichever app you go with, good luck with your learning journey! 💪