[Timpy]

I discovered Anki 12 years ago while living in Japan. I was trying my hardest and absolutely failing to remember any of the Japanese I was studying. Maybe I was due for a learning-style renaissance for myself and Anki was just the catalyst, but it really made a positive impact on my life. More than just memorizing kanji on AnkiDroid during my commute, I just started to believe I could learn anything. I was starting to take my coding hobby more seriously at the time and hacking on Anki was a big part of that too. Thanks for all the hard work Damien and David Allison. I'm so grateful for the software you've worked on.

[throwforfeds]

Agreed, Anki has really helped me with learning new languages. The creation of cards was always a slog though, so recently I've been playing with an Anki MCP server hooked up to Claude. I can dump my iTalki lessons in, or ask Claude to make cards based on a song I've been listening to, etc and get a bunch of relevant cards generated for me. It's honestly been kind of magic.

[jama211]

That’s… genius. This might get me using anki again, I gave up because of the friction of card creation. Thank you for this!

[throwforfeds]

You're welcome! Here's the one I've been using: https://github.com/ankimcp/anki-mcp-server

I've definitely hit walls with Anki over the years, and while the community decks help a lot, it's really nice to just tell Claude "can you take this assignment my tutor gave me, extract all the infinitive verbs, and then make cloze style cards for conjugations at an A1/A2 level?" and get it all done in a couple minutes.

[guiambros]

Ha, I love this!

In a way making the cards helps a ton to learn the content and decide what's really important to retain. On the other hand, it's such a slog that I usually end up relying on community cards, or skipping it altogether. The MCP idea may be a nice middle ground. Will give it a try for an upcoming exam.

[philipdavis]

The MCP approach is brilliant! I've been solving the same friction problem from a different angle. I mostly use Anki to improve my vocabulary, and ended up building a tiny browser-side tool for myself (now called Wordwise / Anki Dictionary) that lets me double click any word on a webpage, get a clean definition + the sentence it appears in, and export it straight into Anki with one click.

It’s been a surprisingly good middle ground between fully manual cards and fully LLM dumps. If anyone’s curious: https://wordwise.me

[FrinkleFrankle]

Yeah, llms change the game for card creation. I'm trying to learn Rust (programming language) and I have Codex ingesting books/articles and generating sensible cards from them. It's able to consistently get the HTML right for syntax highlighting in examples too.

[tetris11]

Same for me. I was doing my PhD in another country and was just overwhelmed and disoriented at the sheer scale of information I suddenly had to remember and digest. Anki was on again/off again for me at first, but once I learned to edit and update the cards and add my own, I really began to understand how to boil concepts down into something I could remember, i.e. I could structure it to my own personal chaotic mode of thinking, and I've flourished with it since then

[igleria]

I've been barely keeping my head above water (ok, much better than that honestly) for 35 years intellectually due to lack of more methodical learning. Your post might convince me of trying Anki...

[tetris11]

The real trick is not realising that its working until you stop using it :-)

[ncphillips]

I've just started using Anki and I'm almost grieving. If I had had this 15 years ago I probably would have done so much better in school. I've always struggled with memorizing, but Anki has made this much easier for me. I started learning Japanese 4 months ago and I'm baffled by how much I've retained in that period. Now I'm playing with using it to learn the rules for the OneRing TTPRG.

[scarrilho]

Same for me. I discovered spaced repetition through Anki. It helped me study Japanese, Agile, and countless other topics, and the Android and macOS apps work perfectly together. A friend used it so much that he ended up contributing to the Android app as OSS.

> with provisions in place to ensure that Anki remains open source and true to the principles I’ve run it by all these years.

I really hope this holds.

[romes]

I think Anki, originally, was for studying Japanese too.

And I recently wrote about making my own Anki Japanese cards in my blog[1]

[1] https://alt-romes.github.io/posts/2026-01-30-from-side-proje...

[mister_mort]

You're right about that, Anki is named after the Japanese word for memorisation. (暗記 - あんき "anki")

https://jisho.org/word/%E6%9A%97%E8%A8%98

[pvab3]

Is Anki that much better than, say, Quizlet?

[Aldipower]

Same for me, while I learned Danish, which is even harder then Japanese.

[nothrabannosir]

Sorry if I’m missing an implied /s :D

Ftr Danish is a category 1 language, while Japanese is category 4 ("https://2009-2017.state.gov/m/fsi/sls/orgoverview/languages")

[maratc]

... for the native speakers of English which not all the people in the world are.

[Aldipower]

> Sorry if I’m missing an implied /s :D

You caught me. ;-)

[nothrabannosir]

tbh I was perhaps also eager to reshare that website someone linked the other day :P I saw a chance and by golly I had to take it.