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I started learning Korean during our age of perpetual quarantine, and the first thing I did when I sat down to start was ask myself, “How do I study?” I’m a decade or so out from my last bit of formal education, and I haven’t had to sit down and study since. If you research that question - “how to study?”- a bit, you will immediately be inundated with dozens of resources swearing by spaced repetition. Once you use it for a few weeks, it’s clear that the practice itself is helpful for retention. However, flashcards alone are simply not going to teach you a full language. You need reading exercises, speaking exercises, listening exercises, and writing exercises. These are rarely, if ever, all found in one place, and I quickly found myself following a few different programs, each teaching part of the full puzzle. People don’t want a tool. They want a silver bullet. Anki is very much just a tool, and like other tools, it requires you to do work with the tool to get a desired output. Making good cards is a time consuming nightmare if you want images and sounds, and getting those cards to sync across devices is non-trivial; you’re lucky when a mobile app supports importing all your media in your decks, or lets you study reversed cards in a sensible way. Proponents will say, “You can just import some great premade decks!” This might be useful for an intermediate, but as a beginner, having a deck full of vocabulary that deviates from the words I’m being taught in my other lessons is nearly useless. I can see how it’s tempting to tell the world - “You could learn so much faster with this one weird trick!” And the author knows that sale works; it’s easy to get someone to try Anki. Those users quickly realize that there are barriers to reaching the point where they have a net productivity increase, so why would they change what was working just fine for them already? |