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Anki helps the best when you are at the beginning of the language journey.
With a vocabulary of 0 words you won't be able to read anything at all, and there's nothing to talk to an LLM about yet. Those 'useless' static cards are extremely efficient for learning the 1st 2000-3000 words, which is key to start reading.
After about 4000 there's little sense in using SRS anymore, and then I'd rather spend more time with an actual book, but getting there with anki felt like using a cheat code compared to how I learnt my first foreign language.
It's not exciting, it's pure toil, but it does work. And when it comes to the next stage, I can't imagine how random llm-generated texts are better than, say, graded readers or real books.
Most people would likely find it more interesting to spend an hour or two a day following an exciting story and characters they care about, and it's (based on a sample of one) way easier to memorise all of those new words when there's an emotional connection for each one (just how we form associations between words and experiences while growing up). As for the app itself- I have tried it with my native language, and at the advanced level it produced a sterile and slightly unnatural text with a complexity of a typical fiction. If someone could read this, then I don't see why they would bother.
At the beginner level the app generated a couple of news stories which, though simple grammatically, had a vocab that I would never have recommended to a novice. Local news of a "a firefighter saved a kitten stuck on a tree" variety are much more useful for that kind of learning, and you get this from any free newspaper. LLMs are extremely useful for learning foreign languages, but I feel like this isn't the way to go |