Anki review: is it worth it?

Anki is a flashcard program that decides, card by card, when you are about to forget something and shows it to you just before you do. It looks like software from 2006 because it is software from 2006. Kungfucius's verdict is short: as a free app it is absolutely worth it, provided you use it correctly.

"Correctly" carries most of the weight in that sentence. The learners who give up on Anki rarely fail because of the program. They fail because of bad decks, silent cards and a daily review pile that grew into a second job. This page is about avoiding all three.

Is Anki free?

On a computer, yes, completely. Here is the situation in November 2026, checked against the official download page and the app stores:

• Desktop (Windows, macOS, Linux): free and open source. This is the full version, and the one you should build your decks on.
• AnkiWeb: free. It syncs your cards between devices and lets you review in a browser.
• AnkiDroid (Android): free and open source, built by volunteers, funded by donations.
• AnkiMobile (iPhone and iPad): paid. It costs US$24.99 once on the US App Store, with no subscription and no sync fee. Prices in other countries differ slightly. The official site says these purchases help fund Anki's development.

So the only money Anki ever asks for is a single payment from iPhone users, and even they can study free on a laptop or in the browser. Be careful in the app stores: unrelated flashcard apps use "Anki" in their names and charge subscriptions. The real iPhone app is AnkiMobile Flashcards, sold by Anki Software, LLC.

Who runs Anki now

For nearly two decades Anki was mostly the work of one developer, Damien Elmes. On 2 February 2026 he announced that he was stepping back, though not leaving, and that business operations and stewardship of the open-source project would gradually move to AnkiHub, a company previously known for collaborative decks used by medical students.

The announcement states that Anki's core code will remain open source, that no outside investors are involved, and that AnkiDroid stays an independent, self-governed project. Nothing has changed about the prices above. Exporting a backup of your collection now and then was good advice before 2026 and still is.

Is Anki worth it for language learning?

Yes, for one job: making sure that words, characters and sentences you have already met do not quietly leave again. For Chinese, Japanese and Korean, where you need thousands of items that look nothing like English, that job is large. The method behind it is explained in spaced repetition.

Kungfucius adds three conditions from experience.

Not more than 20 minutes a day. Anki grows if you let it. Twenty minutes is enough to keep a serious vocabulary alive, and it leaves time for the things Anki exists to support. In practice that means roughly ten new cards a day, not fifty. If your reviews regularly run past 20 minutes, cut the new cards before you cut anything else.

Use sound. A silent deck teaches you to recognise ink. More on this below, because it is the single most common thing learners leave out.

Remember it is one part. Anki is an important part of language learning, and it is still only a part. It does not teach you to follow a conversation, read a page at speed or open your mouth. Listening, reading, speaking and writing do that.

Kungfucius says: the man who reviews two hours a day speaks fluent Anki.

Put audio on your cards and record yourself

Kungfucius's strongest recommendation for Asian languages is to make every card speak. Tones in Mandarin, pitch and vowel length in Japanese, and the sound changes of Korean are all invisible in text. There are three kinds of audio, and you want all of them.

1. Native audio. Choose shared decks that include recordings by native speakers, or add clips from the material you are studying. Set the card to play the audio on the answer side.
2. Your own recordings. In the card editor, the record button stores a clip on the card. Ask a tutor or language partner to say your sentences. Synthetic voices are a fallback, not a first choice.
3. Recording yourself to compare. During a review, Anki can record your voice and play it back: on desktop it is "Record Own Voice" in the More menu, and both mobile apps have an equivalent. Say the card aloud, listen to yourself, then listen to the native audio. The difference is usually obvious, and occasionally humbling.

If your tone or pitch was wrong, mark the card as failed, even if you knew the meaning.

Choosing and building the right decks

A deck decides whether the 20 minutes are well spent. This is where most of the care should go.

When a shared deck is fine

Thousands of free shared decks are listed on AnkiWeb. A shared deck is a sensible choice when the content is the same for everybody:

• the first 1,000 to 2,000 most frequent words of a language
• kana, Hangul, radicals and other fixed sets
• an exam word list, such as the HSK, JLPT or TOPIK lists

Check a shared deck before you commit to it. It should have native audio, an example sentence for each word, a sensible order (frequent words first) and signs of recent maintenance. For Japanese, Kaishi 1.5k is a widely used starter deck that meets those criteria. For Chinese, note that the HSK changed its syllabus in 2025, so most shared HSK decks still follow the old word lists; look for the syllabus year in the description.

When to build your own

Once you are past the beginner stage, build your own. The words you need are now the ones in your own textbook, your tutor's corrections, the drama you are watching and the menu you could not read. Cards you made from a context you remember stick far better than a stranger's list. Gabriel Wyner built a whole method on that observation.

The most efficient way to do it is sentence mining: collecting sentences that contain exactly one thing you do not know. Keep it small. Five good cards a day from real material beat thirty you typed out of duty.

What a good card looks like

The general rule: one unknown per card, a real sentence, audio, and nothing on the front that gives the answer away.

Language	Front	Back	Avoid
Chinese	Word or short sentence in characters only, for example 我想喝咖啡	Pinyin with tone marks (wǒ xiǎng hē kāfēi), meaning, native audio	Pinyin on the front; your eyes will read it and skip the characters
Japanese	Sentence with the target word in kanji, for example 駅はどこですか	Reading in kana (eki wa doko desu ka), meaning, native audio	Single kanji with a list of every reading; learn readings through words
Korean	Sentence in Hangul only, for example 같이 가요	Meaning, native audio, a note on pronunciation where spelling and sound differ (같이 is pronounced gachi)	Romanisation anywhere on the card

Two further points for Chinese. Decide on Traditional or Simplified characters for the front of your cards and stay with it; the other set can sit on the back. And if you want to write by hand, make separate cards for that, sparingly, because they are the slowest cards in any deck.

Common deck mistakes

• Too many new cards. Every new card creates reviews for weeks. The pile you meet next month is decided today.
• Isolated words with a one-word English answer. You will learn to match two labels and still not recognise the word in a sentence.
• Cards with five facts on them. If you can fail a card in three different ways, it is three cards.
• Downloading ten decks. One core deck and one deck of your own is plenty.
• Keeping cards you hate. A card you fail every time is a "leech". Suspend it or rewrite it. Nobody is checking.
• Treating the deck as the syllabus. A finished deck is not a learned language.

Anki's weaknesses and the alternatives

The interface is plain, the settings are many, and nothing stops you from configuring for a weekend and learning nothing. Anki also has no content of its own: it is an empty box until you fill it.

If that sounds like a chore, a few tools do the scheduling for you within a narrower field. Pleco has a flashcard module tied to its Chinese dictionary, WaniKani runs a fixed kanji course, and Migaku creates cards from videos and web pages. They cost money and offer less freedom. Anki costs nothing and offers too much. Choose your problem.

What to do this week

1. Install the desktop version, create a free AnkiWeb account and add the mobile app for your phone.
2. Pick one shared starter deck with native audio, or make ten cards from your current lesson.
3. Set new cards to ten a day and a timer to 20 minutes.
4. Say every card aloud, and record yourself on at least five cards per session.
5. After a week, delete or rewrite every card that annoyed you, and spend the time you saved on listening or reading.