Anki, honestly

Anki is not slow.
Making the cards is.

A review takes a few seconds. Building the card that review runs on takes a minute or more, and nobody counts that minute when they say Anki is too time consuming. Three things cause almost all of it, and all three have fixes.

01 · Where the time goes

Count the card building, not the reviewing

Grading a mature card is a few seconds. That part is fine. What nobody counts is the minute or two spent making it: copy the word, open Anki, choose a deck, choose a note type, paste it, write a definition, dig back for the line it came from, paste that as well.

Thirty words is most of an hour, and it is an hour that feels like admin rather than learning, which is why it is the first thing to get skipped.

The deck does not die because reviewing is hard. It dies because the cards stop being made.

02 · Fix one

Make the card at the moment you meet the word

The reason card building is slow is that it happens later, in a separate session, from a list. By then you have the word but not the sentence, not the sense, and not the reason you cared.

If the word and its line get captured while you are still reading, the deck becomes a byproduct instead of a task. That is the single biggest change available, and it is worth more than any tweak to the scheduler.

03 · Fix two

Your new card limit is the real dial

Reviews settle at roughly ten times your daily new count. Ten new a day lands you near a hundred reviews. Twenty new lands you near two hundred. Fifty new a day is not ambition, it is a decision to quit in six weeks.

Set the number by how many minutes you will genuinely sit there on a bad day. The limit you can keep during a busy week is the only one that counts.

04 · Fix three

Smaller cards are faster cards

A card with a full dictionary entry on the back takes ages to grade, because you have to decide how much of it you remembered. One fact per card removes that decision.

For vocabulary, what works best is the original line with the target word blanked out. You recall it in context and grade yourself in a second.

05 · The unglamorous one

Throw cards away

A small number of cards you keep failing will take a disproportionate share of every session. Anki flags them as leeches for exactly this reason. Suspend them or delete them.

The same goes for words you mined because they sounded interesting. If you will not meet it again this year, it does not deserve a slot for the next ten months.

06 · Where Leafy fits

It handles the making, not the scheduling

Press ⌥A over any word on screen, inside a PDF, a paper, a subtitle or a web page, and it is filed with the line it turned up in. When you want a deck, select the batch, pick a card layout, check the preview and export it for Anki.

Anki is a very good scheduler and there is no reason to replace it. Leafy is aimed at the step before, which is the one that actually eats your evening. Your library stays on your Mac, and the privacy page says what is sent where.