Anki is a free flashcard app that many serious language learners swear by. You make cards, you review them, and the app decides when each card should come back. Cards you know well return in weeks or months. Cards you struggle with come back tomorrow.
Many learners also try Anki for a month, end up with three thousand cards and a long list of overdue reviews, and quietly stop. They knew a lot of words on a screen, and still froze in a real conversation.
Both experiences are common, and the difference is usually not willpower. It is what goes on the cards and how you review them. This note explains why spaced flashcards work, how to make cards that help you speak instead of only recognize, and how to start in a few minutes with a deck built from the lessons on this site.
Why spaced flashcards work
Two well-studied effects make Anki useful.
The first is retrieval practice. Pulling an answer out of your memory strengthens it more than reading the answer again. In a well-known 2006 study, Roediger and Karpicke found that students who practiced recalling a text remembered more of it a week later than students who spent the same time rereading it. Rereading feels productive because everything looks familiar. Recall feels harder, and that effort is what builds the memory.
The second is spacing. Reviewing something in several short sessions spread over days works better than reviewing it many times in one sitting. A large 2006 review of spacing research by Cepeda and colleagues found this pattern across hundreds of studies. Each review comes just as you are starting to forget, which is when remembering takes a little work.
Anki combines both. Every card asks you to recall something, and the schedule spaces the reviews for you. You do not have to plan what to study. You open the app, and it shows you what is due.
What Anki does not decide is what you put on the cards. That part is up to you, and it matters more than anything else.
Learn sentences, not single words
The most common Anki deck for English is a long list of single words with a translation on the back: achieve on the front, lograr or conseguir on the back. It feels efficient. It is also the reason many learners can recognize thousands of words and still struggle to build a sentence.
Words in a real sentence come with partners. You make a decision, but you do your homework. You are interested in something, not interested on it. You say I’ve been working here since May, not I work here since May. These chunks are what you actually need when you speak, and a single word with a translation teaches none of them.
So put a full sentence on each card, with one gap for the part you are learning:
- Front: I’ve been ___ here since May. (work)
- Back: I’ve been working here since May. Plus a short reason: An activity that started in the past and is still going on.
Now every review practices the word, its form, and its place in a sentence. When you need that sentence in a conversation, you have already produced it dozens of times.
This is also how the lessons on this site work. Each grammar point is practiced in complete, natural sentences, and the cards our deck builder makes follow the same idea.
Make cards from your own mistakes
The best cards come from sentences you got wrong. If you said I have 30 years in a lesson and your tutor corrected it to I’m 30, that correction is worth more than a hundred words from a frequency list. It is a real gap in your English, and it will keep coming back until it is replaced by the correct form.
Make the card the same day:
- Front: How old are you? I ___ 30.
- Back: I’m 30. In English, age uses be, not have.
Many of these mistakes come from your first language. Spanish and Portuguese speakers often say I have 30 years because their languages use have for age. Speakers of Slavic languages often leave out the and a, because their languages do not have articles. Our first-language guides list the most common patterns for eleven languages, with the natural English version of each, and they are a good source of cards.
Keep these cards in their own deck, or tag them, so you can see your personal list of fixes grow.
Build a deck from our lessons in two minutes
If you are studying with the lessons here, you do not have to type cards by hand. The Anki deck builder turns the lesson questions into a ready deck:
- Choose your level.
- Pick the lessons you have studied. From any lesson, the Make a deck from this lesson card opens the builder with that lesson already selected.
- Choose card types: grammar sentences with a gap, sentences with a mistake to find and fix, word clues, word order, and the Word Lab words and phrasal verbs for your level.
- Press Download deck. In Anki on your computer, choose File → Import and pick the file. The deck, card design, and tags are already set.
The deck is built in your browser, and nothing is sent to a server. If you build another deck later from the same lessons, Anki skips the cards you already have, so you can add lessons as you go.
Anki is free on computers (Windows, Mac, and Linux) and on Android. On an iPhone or iPad, the official app, AnkiMobile, is a one-time purchase, about US$25 in the United States. You can also review for free in any phone browser at AnkiWeb, which syncs your progress between devices.
A ten-minute daily routine
Anki rewards consistency far more than long sessions. Ten minutes every day beats an hour on Sunday.
Do your reviews first. Reviews are the cards Anki says you are about to forget. Clearing them keeps the schedule healthy.
Add only a few new cards. Five to ten new cards a day is plenty. Every new card creates reviews for weeks to come. Twenty new cards a day can turn into more than a hundred reviews a day within a month, and that is when people quit.
Say every answer out loud. This is the habit that turns flashcards into speaking practice. Before you turn the card, say the full sentence aloud, at a natural speed. Then check it. Your mouth needs practice as much as your memory does.
Be honest with the buttons. If you hesitated, or got it right only after a long pause, press Hard, or Again. Pressing Good on a card you almost missed makes it come back too late, and you will miss it again.
If you also use our Daily Practice, the two work well together. Daily Practice mixes questions from all your lessons and brings back the ones you miss. Anki holds the specific sentences you want to own for years.
Common mistakes that make people quit
- Too many new cards. The review pile grows faster than your free time. Keep new cards low and steady.
- Cards with no context. A single word with a translation is hard to use and easy to forget. Use a sentence.
- Recognition only. If the front is English and the back is your language, you practice understanding, not producing. Make most cards ask you to produce the English.
- Huge downloaded decks. A shared deck of five thousand words feels like progress, but most of those words are not the ones you need yet. Start with what you are studying now.
- Skipping days, then catching up. Missed days create a backlog that feels overwhelming. If you fall behind, do your reviews for a few days without adding new cards until the pile is manageable.
- Never speaking the answers. Silent review builds a library of English you can recognize but not say.
What Anki cannot do
Anki is excellent at one job: making sure you do not forget what you have learned. It cannot hear you, and it cannot hold a conversation.
You still need to listen to real English, to speak in real time when you cannot plan your next sentence, and to get feedback on how you sound. In each lesson here, the say-it-aloud drills and the timed reflex rounds train speed. The final speaking task asks you to use the language for a real purpose. Start with a lesson such as Present simple or browse the full curriculum map.
For feedback on your actual speaking, there is no substitute for a person. That is what one-on-one lessons are for. Your tutor hears the patterns you repeat, corrects them on the spot, and you take the corrections home as new Anki cards. Over a few months, that loop is one of the fastest ways to turn what you know into what you can say.
For tutors: make the loop part of every lesson
If you teach one-on-one, the simplest way to use Anki is to end each lesson with three to five sentences the learner got wrong, corrected. The learner turns them into cards the same day. At the start of the next lesson, check a few of them out loud. Learners improve faster when the cards come from their own speech, and the start-of-lesson check turns review into conversation.
Start today
- Install Anki from apps.ankiweb.net, or log in at AnkiWeb to review in your browser.
- Open the deck builder, choose your level, and download a deck from the lessons you have done.
- Import it, set new cards to five a day, and review for ten minutes.
- Say every answer out loud.
- After your next lesson, add your own mistakes as cards.
A small deck you review every day will do more for your English than a huge one you open once a week.