[shard]

Something like Anki becomes useful when you've gotten to the point where the new vocabulary you are encountering are so rare that you only see them once every few months. I've read somewhere that it takes about 10 exposures to learn a new word. I was seeing certain words once a year (I track how often I look up vocabulary), it would have taken me a decade to learn those words naturally, and those obscure words are likely to be the most important words in the sentence, which means that if you don't know it, you miss the point of the sentence entirely. Anki exposure isn't like real in-context exposure, so it might take more than 10 passes to learn the word, but it should take less than a decade.