I concur with all of these points. I've also written a bit about Anki and updating some of the default settings for better retention. [0] Making a good template

I concur with all of these points. I've also written a bit about Anki and updating some of the default settings for better retention. [0] Making a good template for cards changes everything, particularly with adding context / usage sentences on the back of the card. Also, switching to using the native definitions once you can instead of the english translations helps immensely. For me, I -hated- how long it took to input words into Anki, so for ~7 months I used Evita's Korean Deck which has about 5.5k words. I eventually burned out and got tired of the lack of context in the cards, but that helped me learn a lot of day-to-day vocabulary. I tried this a bit with a Japanese 2k deck but I think with logographic language it doesn't really work as well as slowly inputting words that you know the context/definition for. Nowadays I write down words from books/movies/etc that I don't know in my journal, and every once in a while I collect those into a personal anki deck. I actually am working on a CLI program that helps automate the process of searching a word's definitions and creating a card. It outputs all of the selected definitions into a csv, which I can then bulk import into Anki. [0] It's important to do it every day. Anki by default allots 20 new words per day, but this is quite a lot unless one plans to spend a while every day on anki. I find 5-10 words is more tenable, and simply 1/day is better than 0/day if one burns out. [0]: https://andrewzah.com/posts/2019/better-anki-usage-guide/ https://andrewzah.com/posts/2019/better-anki-usage-guide/ [1]: https://github.com/andrewzah/carajillo https://github.com/andrewzah/carajillo