When it came to learning languages, I used to employ a very rudimentary method and stuck with it for quite a long time. It involved holding a vocabulary book or a grammar book, flipping from the first page to the last, reading it over and over, and memorizing it line by line.
To be honest, it wasn’t completely useless. The problem was that this learning method always gave me a lingering sense of anxiety: of what I memorize today, how much will still be there tomorrow?
Later, I increasingly felt that I was actually stuck in a loop: memorizing a little, forgetting a little, memorizing a little more, and forgetting a little more. It seemed like I was studying every day, but looking back, it felt like I hadn’t really retained much. The sense of progress was very weak, and it was easy to get discouraged.
It wasn’t until I started using Anki that this feeling slowly changed.
Why It Works
The core mechanism of Anki is called Spaced Repetition. The principle isn’t complicated: human memory decays over time, but if you can recall a piece of memory right when you are about to forget it, that memory will become a bit more stable and will last longer the next time.
What Anki does is try its best to schedule your reviews around that specific point in time. It won’t make you repeatedly review something you’ve just memorized a bunch of times, nor will it wait until you’ve completely forgotten it to come back to the rescue. Instead, it pushes the information back in front of you at a relatively optimal moment.
I haven’t spent much time studying the algorithmic details behind it, but in actual use, I found that its way of scheduling reviews is indeed much more reliable than relying on my own intuition.
Later I Realized, Memory Actually Has Two Problems
After using Anki for a while, I slowly realized that when many people say they “can’t remember,” they are actually mixing up two completely different problems.
The first problem is: how exactly are you memorizing it?
In the past, when I memorized things, it was mostly looking at them repeatedly, reading them repeatedly. Essentially, it was still passive input. You think you are learning, but often your eyes just scan over it, and your brain doesn’t truly extract the information.
Anki is different. It first gives you a question and forces you to recall the answer yourself. You have to first “fish” that thing out of your brain before checking if you were right. This process of active recall is inherently more useful than simply reading a book.
Moreover, the most attractive thing about Anki to me is that you can design the cards yourself. This sounds like a minor feature, but its impact is actually profound. Because you are not adapting to the structure of a ready-made textbook, but rather organizing memory according to your own understanding.
For example, I recently made a deck of Japanese grammar cards based on a grammar book. At first, my approach was very intuitive: one card for one grammar point. Later, I realized this didn’t feel quite right. Grammar points are important, of course, but what truly stays in your brain is often not the name of the rule, but a specific sentence.
So later, I changed my mindset. I stopped centering on grammar points and started centering on example sentences. Each card corresponds to a specific sentence, with the grammar explanation placed below as a supplement.
This change was very important to me. Because I increasingly feel that language learning is not about memorizing a set of rule tables, but slowly getting familiar with “how others would actually say it.” Example sentences are easier to remember not just because they are more specific, but also because they come with built-in context.
In addition to this, I try to attach high-quality audio to the cards as much as possible. I actually think this point is extremely crucial now. A language is often sound first, and then text. Sometimes you can remember a sentence not because you’ve analyzed it clearly, but because you’ve become used to hearing it. Audio with natural pronunciation and a comfortable rhythm is indeed easier to stick in your brain than dry text.
Here are some cards I made:
https://ankiweb.net/shared/by-author/1584745637
The second problem is: how do you ensure you won’t forget?
This problem is exactly where Anki is the most worry-free.
In the past, the task of “don’t forget to review” was almost entirely carried on my own shoulders. What content has become rusty, what is still solid, which batch should be reviewed today, which batch should be reviewed next week—all of these required my own judgment. Just managing these things was a burden in itself.
Anki essentially takes over this part of the work. Based on your performance on each card, it decides when to bring it out again. You don’t have to agonize every day over “what should I review today”; you just need to finish the cards due for that day.
For me, this change is huge. Because it turns “memory management” from an issue of willpower into an issue of process. You don’t need to make new decisions every day; you just follow the system forward.
Where It Truly Changed Me
Looking back now, what touched me the most about Anki wasn’t that it suddenly made me stronger one day, but that it made me distinctly feel, for the first time, that long-term accumulation was truly happening.
Language learning is inherently slow, and there are no shortcuts around that. You just have to spend the time, you have to repeat, and you have to fish things back from oblivion over and over again. The only difference is that some methods make this process extremely painful, while others make it sustainable.
For me, Anki’s greatest value is not letting me memorize more in a day, but letting me still remember it months later. This difference might not sound huge, but the actual experience is completely different.
One day, you will suddenly find that things you could never memorize no matter how hard you tried before can now be naturally recalled. It’s not a particularly dramatic moment of epiphany, but rather you flip to a card and the answer just comes out on its own. Especially when the card itself is well-made, with context, audio, and a sense of reality, that feeling of “recalling” becomes more complete. You didn’t just remember an explanation; you truly remembered a sentence.
So I basically can’t go back now.
Not because Anki is some kind of miracle, but because for the first time, it made me feel that memory is no longer a matter of brute force. For language learning, this point is more important than any “efficiency hack.”