Anki

Anki is a flashcard program built around spaced repetition. Rather than showing every card the same number of times, it schedules each one close to the moment you are likely to forget it, so hard material returns often and easy material drops into the background. The desktop application keeps your collection in a local file, works completely offline, and is used most heavily by language learners, medical and science students, and anyone who has to retain a large body of detail.

What the program does

A deck holds notes, and each note produces one or more cards. A note can be a plain front-and-back pair, a reversed pair, or a cloze deletion in which parts of a sentence are blanked out. Cards can carry images, audio, LaTeX formulas and styled HTML, and shared decks can be imported from files. Reviews are graded with four buttons, Again, Hard, Good and Easy, and the scheduler converts those grades into the next interval. Recent versions ship a scheduler called FSRS that learns from your own review history and estimates when a card is about to slip away.

The review workflow

The daily routine is narrow on purpose. You open the deck, work through whatever is due, and close it. New cards are introduced up to a daily limit, learning cards come back within minutes, and mature cards return after days or months. Statistics show retention, review counts and answer time, which is how you tell whether your settings are too aggressive. Everything else, writing notes, importing lists, editing card templates, happens outside the review session.

Practical settings and limits

The settings worth understanding are the daily new-card and review limits, the learning steps, and, when FSRS is active, the desired retention figure and the optimisation of its parameters. Media makes collections large, and syncing across devices needs a free AnkiWeb account, since the desktop program alone has no cloud component. Add-ons extend the program but can break after a major update, and the official iPhone app is a paid product even though the Windows, macOS, Linux and Android versions are free.

Who should choose something else

Anki asks you to author or import your own material, so it suits people who already know what they need to memorise. Learners who want a guided syllabus with lessons and streaks will be happier with a structured course, and anyone who wants a ready-made trivia or quiz experience should look at a quiz app instead. If your goal is a single vocabulary list you will not maintain, a simple word list or a textbook glossary is enough.